Inversions (3 page)

‘The Emperor got his wish then, dying within the great palatial mausoleum he had built. Whether he succeeded in cheating death or not we cannot know, but it is unlikely, as the Empire fell apart very soon after his death and the vast monument he caused to be constructed at such crippling expense to his empire was looted utterly within the year and fell quickly into disrepair, so that now it is used only as a ready source of dressed stone for the city of Haspide, which was founded a few centuries later on the same island, in what is now called Crater Lake, in the Kingdom of Haspidus.’

‘What a sad tale! But what happened to the family of Munnosh?’ asked the lady Perrund. The lady Perrund had once been the first concubine of the Protector. She remained a prized partner of the General’s household and one whom he was still known to visit on occasion.

The bodyguard DeWar shrugged. ‘We don’t know,’ he told her. ‘The Empire fell, the Kings fought amongst themselves, the barbarians invaded from all sides, fire fell from the sky and a dark age resulted that lasted many hundreds of years. Little historical detail survived the fall of the lesser kingdoms.’

‘But we may hope that the assassins heard their Emperor was dead and so did not carry out their mission, may we not? Or that they were caught up in the chaos of the Empire’s collapse and had to look to their own safety. Would that not be likely?’

DeWar looked into the eyes of the lady Perrund and smiled. ‘Perfectly possible, my lady.’

‘Good,’ she said, crossing one arm across the other and settling back to lean over the game board again. ‘That is what I shall choose to believe, then. Now we can restart our game. It was my move, I believe.’

DeWar smiled as he watched Perrund put one clenched fist to her mouth. Her gaze, beneath long fair lashes, flicked this way and that across the game board, coming to rest on pieces for a few moments, then sweeping away again.

She wore the long, plain red day-gown of the senior ladies of the court, one of the few fashions the Protectorate had inherited from the earlier Kingdom, which the Protector and his fellow generals had overthrown in the war of succession. It was a given within the court that Perrund’s seniority was founded more upon the intensity of her earlier service to the Protector UrLeyn than on her physical age, a reputation that of most favoured concubine to a man who had not yet chosen a wife she was still fiercely proud of.

There .was another reason for her promotion to such seniority, and the mark of that was the second badge she wore, the sling also red that supported her withered left arm.

Perrund, anybody in the court would tell you, had given more of herself in the service of her beloved General than any other of his women, sacrificing the use of a limb to protect him from an assassin’s blade and indeed very nearly losing her life altogether, for the same cut that had severed muscles and tendons and broken bone had opened an artery as well, and she had come close to bleeding to death even as UrLeyn had been hurried away from the melee by his guards and the assassin had been overpowered and disarmed.

The withered arm was her only blemish, even if it was a terrible one. Otherwise she was as tall and fair as any fairy-tale princess, and the younger women of the harem, who saw her naked in the baths, inspected her golden-brown skin in vain for the more obvious signs of encroaching age. Her face was broad too broad, she thought, and so framed it carefully in her long blonde hair to make it look slimmer when she did not wear a head-dress, and chose head-dresses which performed the same function when she was to be seen in public. Her nose was slim and her mouth at first plain until she smiled, which she often did.

Her pupils were gold flecked with blue and her eyes were large and open and somehow innocent. They could quickly look hurt at insults and when she was told tales of cruelty and pain, but such expressions were like summer storms over quickly and immediately replaced by a prevailing, temperate brightness. She seemed to take an almost childish delight in life in general which was never far from being embodied in the sparkle of those eyes, and people who thought they knew about such things said they believed she was the only person in the court whose force of gaze could match that of the Protector himself.

‘There,’ she said composedly, moving a piece across the board into DeWar’s territory and then sitting back. Her good hand massaged the withered one, which lay in the red sling, motionless and unresponding. DeWar thought it looked like the hand of a sickly child, it was so pale and thin and the skin so nearly translucent. He knew that she still experienced pain from the disabled limb, three years after the initial injury, and that she did not always realise when her good hand stroked and kneaded the sick one, as it did now. He saw this without looking at it, his gaze held by hers as she leaned further back into the couch’s cushions, which were as plump, red and numerous as berries on a winter bush.

They sat in the visiting chamber of the outer harem, where on special occasions close relatives of the concubines were sometimes allowed to visit them. DeWar, once again waiting on UrLeyn while the General spent a while with the harem’s most recent young recruits, had for some time been granted the singular dispensation of being allowed to enter the visiting chamber whenever the Protector was in the harem. This meant that DeWar was a little closer to UrLeyn than the General would ideally have preferred his chief bodyguard to be during such interludes, and much further away than DeWar felt comfortable with.

DeWar knew the sort of jokes that circulated the Court about him. It was said that his dream was to be so close to his master at all times that he could wipe the General’s backside in the toilet and his prick in the harem-alcove. Another was that he secretly desired to be a woman, so that when the General wanted sex he need look no further than his faithful bodyguard, and no other bodily contact need be risked.

Whether Stike, the harem’s chief eunuch, had heard that particular rumour was moot. Certainly he watched the bodyguard with what appeared to be great and professional suspicion. The chief eunuch sat massively in his pulpit at one end of the long chamber, which was lit from above by three porcelain light-domes. The chamber’s walls were entirely covered with thickly pendulous swathes of ornately woven brocade, while further loops and bowls of fabric hung suspended from the roof spaces between the domes, ruffling in the breeze from the ceiling louvres. The chief eunuch Stike was dressed in great folds of white and his vast waist was girdled with the gold and silver key-chains of his office. He occasionally spared a glance for the few other veiled girls who had chosen the visiting chamber for their giggled conversations and petulant games of card and board, but he concentrated on the only man in the room and his game with the damaged concubine Perrund.

DeWar studied the board. ‘Ah-ha,’ he said. His Emperor piece was threatened, or certainly would be in another move or two. Perrund gave a dainty snort, and DeWar looked up to see his opponent’s good hand held up flat against her mouth, painted finger-nails golden against her lips and an expression of innocence in her wide eyes.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You know what,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re after my Emperor.’

‘DeWar,’ she said, tutting. ‘You mean I’m after your Protector.’

‘Hmm,’ he said, putting his elbows on his knees and his chin on his bunched fists. Officially the Emperor was called the Protector piece now, after the dissolution of the old Empire and fall of the last King of Tassasen. New sets of the game of ‘Monarch’s Dispute’ sold in Tassasen these days came in boxes which, to those who could read, proclaimed the game they contained to be ‘Leader’s Dispute’, and held revised pieces: a Protector instead of an Emperor, Generals in place of Kings, Colonels instead of Dukes, and Captains where before there had been Barons. Many people, either fearful of the new regime or simply wishing to show their allegiance to it, had thrown out their old sets of the game along with their portraits of the King. It seemed that only in the Palace of Vorifyr itself were people more relaxed.

DeWar lost himself studying the position of the pieces for a few moments. Then he heard Perrund make another noise, and looked up again to see her shaking her head at him, eyes glittering.

Now it was his turn to say, ‘What?’

‘Oh, DeWar,’ she said. ‘I have heard people in the Court say you are the most cunning person they know in it, and thank Providence that you are so devoted to the General, because if you were a man of independent ambition they would fear you.’

DeWar shrugged. ‘Really? I suppose I ought to feel flattered, but ‘

‘And yet you are so easy to play at Dispute,’ Perrund said, laughing.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes, and for the most obvious reason. You do too much to protect your Protector piece. You sacrifice everything to keep it free from threat.’ She nodded at the board. ‘Look. You are thinking about blocking my Mounted piece with your eastern General, leaving it open to my Tower after we’ve exchanged Caravels on the left flank. Well, aren’t you?’

DeWar frowned deeply, staring at the board. He felt his face flush. He looked up again at those golden, mocking eyes. ‘Yes. So I am transparent, is that it?’

‘You are predictable,’ Perrund told him softly. ‘Your obsession with the Emperor with the Protector is a weakness. Lose the Protector and one of the Generals takes its place. You treat it as though its loss would be the end of the game. I was wondering . . . Did you ever play “A Kingdom Unjustly Divided” before you learned “Monarch’s Dispute”?’ she asked. ‘Do you know of it?’ she added, surprised, when he looked blank. ‘In that game the loss of either King does indeed signify the end of the game.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ DeWar said defensively, picking up his Protector piece and turning it over in his hands. ‘I confess I haven’t played it properly, but ‘

Perrund clapped her good hand on her thigh, attracting the frowning stare of the watchful eunuch. ‘I knew it!’ she said, laughing and rocking forward on the couch. ‘You protect the Protector because you can’t help it. You know it’s not really the game but it would hurt you to do otherwise because you are so much the bodyguard!’

DeWar put the Protector piece back down on the board and drew himself up on the small stool he sat upon, uncrossing his legs and adjusting the positions of his sword and his dagger. ‘It’s not that,’ he said, pausing to study the board again briefly. ‘It’s not that. It’s just . . . my style. The way I choose to play the game.’

‘Oh, DeWar,” Perrund said with an unladylike snort. ‘What nonsense! That is not style, it’s fault! If you play like that it’s like fighting with one hand tied behind your back . . .’ She looked down ruefully at the arm in the red sling. ‘Or one hand wasted,’ she added, then held up her good hand to him as he went to protest. ‘Now just you never mind that. Attend to my point. You cannot stop being a bodyguard even when playing a silly game to pass the time with an old concubine while your master dallies with a younger one. You must admit it and be proud secretly or not, it’s equal to me or I shall be quite thoroughly upset. Now, speak and tell me I’m right.’

DeWar sat back, holding both hands out wide in a gesture of defeat. ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘it is just as you say.’

Perrund laughed. ‘Don’t give in so easily. Argue.’

‘I can’t. You’re right. I am only glad that you think my obsession might be commendable. But it is just as you say. My job is my life, and I am never off-duty. And I never will be until I am dismissed, I fail in my job, or Providence consign such an eventuality to the distant future the Protector dies a natural death.’

Perrund looked down at the board. ‘In a ripe old age, as you say,’ she agreed before looking up at him again. ‘And do you still feel you’re missing something which might prevent such a natural end?’

DeWar looked awkward. He picked up the Protector piece again and, as though addressing it, in a low voice said, ‘His life is in more danger than anybody here seems to think. Certainly it is in more danger than he appears to believe.’ He looked up at the lady Perrund, a small, hesitant smile on his face. ‘Or am I being too obsessive again?’

‘I don’t know,’ Perrund said, sitting closer and dropping her voice too, ‘why you seem so sure that people want him dead.’

‘Of course people want him dead,’ DeWar said. ‘He had the courage to commit regicide, the temerity to create a new way of governing. The Kings and Dukes who opposed the Protector from the start found him a more skilled politician and far better field commander than they’d expected. With great skill and a little luck he prevailed, and the acclamation of the newly enfranchised in Tassasen has made it difficult for anybody else in the old Kingdom or indeed anywhere in the old Empire to oppose him directly.’

‘There must be a “but” or a “however” about to make its appearance here,’ Perrund said. ‘I can tell it.’

‘Indeed. But there are those who have greeted UrLeyn’s coming to power with every possible expression of enthusiasm and who have gone out of their way to support him in most public ways, yet who secretly know that their own existence or at the very least their own supremacy is threatened by his continued rule. They are the ones I’m worried about, and they must have made their plans for our Protector. The first few attempts at assassination failed, but not by much. And only your bravery stopped the most determined of them, lady,’ DeWar said.

Perrund looked away, and her good hand went to touch the withered one. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did tell your predecessor that as I had stepped in to perform his job he ought to do the decent thing and attempt to fulfil mine one day, but he just laughed.’

DeWar smiled. ‘Commander ZeSpiole tells that story himself, still.’

‘Hmm. Well, perhaps as Commander of the Palace Guard, ZeSpiole does such a good job keeping would-be assassins away from the palace that none ever achieve the sort of proximity that might call for your services.’

‘Perhaps, but either way they will be back,’ DeWar said quietly. ‘I almost wish they had been back by now. The absence of conventional assassins makes me all the more convinced there is some very special assassin here, just waiting for the right time to strike.’