Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (12 page)

Kaylan set the orc head atop a broken spear and turned it with a sculptor’s care to face down the dirt road towards Woldtag.  Then he limped across to the next grim marker and twisted a second orc head a fraction to the left.

“Are you done yet?” Elise demanded.  She glanced around at the retreating column of soldiers. Dwarves and men walking in easy harmony away from the smoking pyre of headless bodies.

“Nearly,” Kaylan said, his eyes fixed on the direction that another dead orc was looking in.

“We should go. You need the prior to look at that leg of yours.”

“It’s a scratch,” the thief insisted.

“You don’t get scratched with an orc halberd.   It’s not a toothpick.”

Kaylan looked down at the rag bandage tied around his thigh.  A dark stain stretched a path from the dirty grey cloth binding down beyond his knee.  With each flex of his leg a fresh trickle of blood seeped through the dressing, rich red gleaming in the light of the morning sun. He gave a dry humourless chuckle. “I’ve had worse; this might even me up a bit, my other leg was the bad one before.”

“Well come on.  The smoke from that bonfire will be seen for miles around.  We need to be away from here.”

Kaylan shook his head.  “This is the third warband we’ve destroyed.  They’ve seen our work.  They aren’t going to be in a hurry to come here until they can muster enough force to feel safe.  I reckon it’ll take them a pretty while to scrape together two thousand orcs and nomads.”

“So you’re just going to stand here bleeding to death so you can welcome them?”

He shook his head, and tweaked another head on a high pole. “No. I just want to make sure that when those bastards march up that hill the first thing they see is a hundred dead eyes looking at them.” He tapped the last skull to settle it firmly on its grounded spear. “That should do it.”

A sigh of relief escaped the sorceress. She led the two horses over to the thief, hovering with indecision while he clambered painfully but unaided into his saddle.  He gave a last look at his handiwork, careful to lead his mount upwind of the stench of burning orc.  Another pyre to taunt the enemy, another warband lured into a trap and utterly annihilated. 

Elise swung up into her own saddle as the thief spat with expert aim at head of the orc leader, the one who had wielded the halberd.  As the phlegm dripped down the creature’s bloodied chin, the sorceress remarked, “there is a purity to your hatred, Kaylan.  It’s almost beautiful.”

He hauled on the reigns.  “This is my country, my mother’s country. Those bastards should never have come here, but I’m buggered if I’ll let any of them leave alive.  I’ll see them all turned into mulch for our fields first.”

Niarmit rubbed at her temple and tried to blink away the band of pressure that gripped her forehead. 

“Are you all right, your Majesty?” the elf lieutenant’s words were muffled by their passage through the gate.

Niarmit shook her head.  “I’m fine, Elyas,” she assured him.  The edge of Sorenson’s window through the planes had lost none of its sharp precision in the two weeks since it had been conjured.  The portal’s persistence had made communication with the council chamber in Laviserve infinitely easier.  It was far more secure and speedy than relying on heralds crossing the occupied borderlands of Morsalve.  However, it was still imperfect, like trying to join in a discussion from the other side of a half-open window.

So it was that Niarmit stood barely two feet from the wafer thin surface, taking care not to dislodge the bishop’s crescent symbol which still anchored the gate in place.  Elyas stood no further from the other side, making the experience like looking in a mirror.  Except that she saw not her own likeness but the image of Tordil’s lieutenant, taller and darker than she.  The disconcerting effect of seeing a reflection which neither moved nor looked like her deepened the nausea that assailed her. Or maybe it was the elf’s news that made her sick.

“You are sure you have had no word from him, or from the Silverwood direct?”

“There are no secret ways of elves, your Majesty.” Elyas said apologetically. “I have no better means of following Tordil’s thoughts and movements than Prince Rugan.  I had expected to meet him here myself.” He shook his head slowly.  “I cannot say why we have heard nothing.”

Niarmit grimaced.  “Could he have come by some mischance on the road to the Silverwood? His task was to resurrect an alliance that Quintala went to great lengths to destroy. Could she have struck out at him?”

“You forget the precautions we have taken, Your Majesty,” Giseanne appeared at Elyas’s shoulder.  “Quintala can have no means of spying on our discussions here.  She would have had no knowledge of his mission.”

“And even if she did, your Majesty, I am sure Tordil is more than equal to any threat she might make.”  Elyas weighed in with his own reassurance. 

Niarmit bit her lip, trying to unravel the skein of thoughts that twisted in her head. From Undersalve to Nordsalve, from Medyrsalve to Oostsalve there was an endless supply of unanswered questions.

“What of Lord Leniot, Lady Giseanne?” She flung another question at the distant council chamber.  “Has he had any success in moving his father to action?”

Elyas stepped to one side. Giseanne frowned.   “It seems the good prince of Oostsalve can neither bend nor bind the merchant ships to his will.  A fleet sufficient to bring the Salicia garrison home is a considerable body of vessels.  Every time the prince comes close to assembling sufficient tonnage, there is a shift in the wind and the offer of a tempting cargo that has the masters put to sea on more immediately profitable ventures.”

“He is paying them a retainer, is he not?”

“So he tells us, your Majesty” Rugan added a low growl to the discussion. Niarmit had to strain to hear the prince’s voice for he was seated on his throne several feet from the planar portal. There was a breach of protocol in his sitting while the queen stood, despite the hundreds of leagues which separated monarch and her audience. “But I would suspect payment is by means of written bills, tickets to be redeemed against the prince’s honour at some point in the future.  However, sailors are more readily moved by hard currency than paper promises.”  Rugan glared at Tybert as he ground out his disdain through gritted teeth.  The Lord of Oostsalve stood to one side fiddling with a gold chain with scarcely the decency to blush at Rugan’s pointed rebuke.

Niarmit frowned, running a finger through her hair and teasing out one long auburn lock.  “You’ll have to go to Oostport, Rugan.”

“Me, your Majesty?” Shock raised the register of the half-elf’s voice to a squeak and Niarmit thought his face paler than she had seen it before, though maybe it had been pale before her command.

“Your Majesty.” A look of panic flitted across Giseanne’s face.  “He cannot go.”

“I need someone there to speak with my authority, Lady Giseanne.  I am sorry to part you from your husband, but the exigencies of war demand it.”

“Your Majesty, he is not well enough.”

“What ails him?”

“I will go,” Rugan grudgingly insisted.  He rose a little unsteadily from his seat and then sat back abruptly as his legs gave way.

“What is it Rugan? Are you sick?” Niarmit called through the gate.

“Never better, your Majesty,” Rugan waved aside her concern.   “I have just been refreshing the wards about my private quarters.  It has left me a little out of breath that is all.”

It was Giseanne who answered the puzzled frown on Niarmit’s face. “My husband has found a new enchantment, a ward he thinks is proof against Quintala.”

“Thinks?” Rugan snorted.  “Be assured there is no doubt it is effective.  The witch will not pass.”

“But it has drained him somewhat.”

The prince chuckled at that.  “Well, I could hardly leave my family unprotected.  My bitch of a sister could have opened a portal to Andros’ nursery, or Giseanne’s day room.  At least now I can sleep in peace, though in truth I seem unable to do much other than sleep.”

“We need that garrison brought back from Salicia,” Niarmit said.

“I will go,” Rugan repeated.

“It may take two days maybe a little more, before my husband is fit to travel,” Giseanne said. “Then you shall have your emissary.”

Niarmit frowned.  “I shouldn’t need to send you, Rugan.  It is only that Leniot seems unable to move his father.  Tell me what news of our other son of Oostsalve.  How goes it with Prior Abroath in Undersalve?”

“Prior Abroath was well when Thom and I left him,” Elyas said.  “He and Kaylan were full of great plans for the soldiers we had brought him from Sir Ambrose.”

Niarmit’s thoughts spun. She hoped that the ambition of the thief and the prior would not exceed their strength.  She wondered if Sir Ambrose had force enough still to hold the Gap of Tandar.  She needed Rugan to bring back the veteran garrison from the last colony of the Salved in the Eastern Lands. 

But Tordil’s silence nagged at her memory.  Could his mission have been compromised, could some artifice of Quintala’s have plucked him into danger?  But how could the half-elf have known?  For sure the failure of the heralds to safely cross Morsalve was easily laid at the traitor’s door.  Quintala had known of their routes and methods and had allowed them to proceed in safety only so long as it served her and her master’s purpose.  Once she was exposed, the pathway had been ruthlessly shut off.  So many concerns and then there was …

“What news of the seneschal, your Majesty?” Giseanne asked.

“Still searching,” Niarmit hurried her way through another account that troubled her.  “I haven’t seen him in two weeks now, but he has sent word. He and Pietrsen have ridden the length and breadth of Nordsalve, but Torsden has gone to ground.  He still has friends, friends loyal enough to hide him and the boy prince, no matter that it is treason.”

“And the boy’s mother?”  Giseanne asked, her voice softening in empathy for Lady Isobel’s plight.

Niarmit shrugged. “She does not take it well.  She fears for her boy.  Even though there is no body, nor any hint that Torsden has harmed him, she is convinced that Yannuck is dead in some icy ditch.  She sees Zoirzi’s body in her dreams, but wearing her son’s face.   She remembers Torsden’s laughter as he struck the tutor down, and with it she hears her son screaming.”

Giseanne folded her arms tightly.  “This must be torture for her.”

“Kimbolt promised her that he would bring the boy home; she clings to that.”

“A bold promise,” Rugan sniffed an interjection.  “Better to have waited until at least first finding out where the boy was kept.”

“I trust the seneschal, Prince Rugan, just as much as I trust you.”  The accolade was one which Rugan struggled to interpret, let alone accept.  His nod was curter, his smile flatter than before.  Niarmit went on, “his promise is the only comfort Isobel has.  She can think of nothing else.”

“So who is governing Nordsalve, while Isobel is so distracted?”

Niarmit shrugged.  “I am. The Helm’s authority with the assistance of Constable Johanssen and Bishop Sorenson has ensured my commands are met. The royal progress we made on the lower river has stiffened the loyalty of the garrisons there.”

“What about rest, your Majesty?” Giseanne said.  “You must guard your own health, do not exert yourself beyond your strength.”

Niarmit gave a faint smile. “I have stared into the blazing maw of a dragon, Lady Giseanne.  All other problems seem smaller scale by comparison.”

Giseanne frowned, dissatisfied by the answer, but any further response from either of them was cut short by a hail from beyond Sorenson’s austere chambers.   The bishop’s rooms were in the outer wall of Karlbad fortress, the winding path to the gates snaked below his high window and it was through this narrow opening that Niarmit caught snatches of a bellowed conversation.

“Who goes there?”

“Master of Horse Pietrsen,” A northern voice replied and then, even as her heart quickened in anticipation of the sound, a familiar accent of Morwencairn shouted, “Seneschal Kimbolt.”

Niarmit barely registered the order to lower the drawbridge.  She mumbled some expediency at the watchers through the gate and fled from the room.  As she quick stepped her way down the stairway she tried to tuck a few recalcitrant strands of hair behind her ears.  She smoothed down the front of another borrowed dress, wishing she had given more thought to its selection that morning.  Was it fine enough? Or was it too fine?

The sudden doubt made her slow her pace, just as she came down the steps into the central hallway.  She tried to calm her racing pulse.  She was the queen going to greet her servant in chief in the courtyard of a great fortress, not some flighty girl running to meet her beau on a village green.  She was not Hepdida.

She mustered some sense of majesty as the Nordsalve guard opened the door for her.  The chill winter sun made her squint at first.  They were there just sliding off the horses.  The dark bearded Master of Horse saw her first and gave her a smile and a rakish bow.  Kimbolt had his back to her, engaged in some unsatisfactory conversation with Margrave.  The chancellor wobbled and waved in some dismay.  Kimbolt jabbed and gestured with far greater insistence until Margrave slid away, all resistance to Kimbolt’s demands melting like fat in a frying pan.

Niarmit waited. She stopped herself from running, or even walking towards him. He should come to her.  At last he turned and saw her.  Did she imagine a lightening to the weary set of his shoulders?  He crossed the courtyard quickly, while the stable hands led his and Pietrsen’s steeds away.

Her seneschal, her Kimbolt.  He was smiling, though his face was a little grey.  His chin was thick with an unsoldierly stubble and there were shadows beneath his eyes.  His walk had the stiff unsteadiness of one unused to the solidity of the ground after rolling days spent in the saddle.

As he came near he knelt.  She stretched out her arm and he pulled off a gauntlet in order to take her hand in his. His lips touched the back of her hand, a soft touch amidst the scratching of his bristles.

“Seneschal Kimbolt,” she said.  “It has been an age since we heard from you, still less saw you.”

He frowned and looked across quickly at Pietrsen.  “We sent word three days ago. Did the message not reach you, your Majesty?”

“It did.”  With the slightest gesture she bid him stand.  “But it has just felt like longer.  I had thought to see more of you at my side, Seneschal.” 

“I made a promise,” he said apologetically.  “To Lady Isobel and I mean to keep it.”

“You have yet seen no sign of Torsden or the boy?”

He shrugged, “we have heard rumours that he has gone north again back to his great uncle’s county. Pietrsen, remembered that there is a former servant from Torsden’s household who serves in the Karlbad kitchens now.  He reckoned the man may have information to give us the edge in tracking down this elusive kidnapper.”

“If you will forgive me your Majesty,” the Master of Horse interjected.  “I will seek out this cook forthwith.”

Niarmit demurred with a nod.  “Tell me, Kimbolt,” she began as Pietrsen hurried away.  “What was your argument with Margrave?”

“He would not give me fresh horses as I asked, not at first, though he gave in with a little persuasion.”

“From where I stood it looked a swift surrender.”

“The man is so wet you could use him to dilute water, your Majesty.”

Niarmit’s imperfectly stifled laugh turned into a coughing splutter.  Kimbolt gave her a look of concern.  “Are you well, your Majesty?”

“Quite well,” she assured him, “and better than I have been.  You must dine with me this evening.”

His face grew greyer.  “I cannot your Majesty.  We are here only for as long as it takes to change horses and for Pietrsen to interrogate Torsden’s former servant.  An hour at most.  The rest of the company are waiting down in the village.”

“An hour.” Her voice cracked with the disappointment. “I have barely seen you in a fortnight.  Sorenson and Johanssen worthy though they are, are not the most exhilarating of company.”