The Fell Sword (3 page)

This morning, however, the Logothete’s precautions showed some sense, as Derkensun had enough experience of the palace to know that the party riding towards him was led by the Emperor. He drew his sword, and held it before his shield.

The Emperor reined in his horse. Just past him, Garald Gurnnison, the most dangerous man in the Guard, met his eye and gave a very slight nod.

The Emperor knew him immediately, of course. He knew all his guard. His fingers moved. He said, ‘Good that you are on guard here. Be wary.’ Then the Emperor returned Derkensun’s salute. ‘Guardsman Derkensun! Are you being punished for some transgression?’

Behind the Emperor, Derkensun saw the Logothete. The slim man raised an eyebrow. Derkensun allowed himself to look embarrassed. If the Emperor hadn’t been told about the heightened security, it was not Guardsman Derkensun’s job to inform him.

The Emperor laughed. ‘Poor Nordikans. Too much discipline.’ He raised his riding whip in token of farewell, and rode through the gate.

Ser Raoul was still scratching – mooning the Duke – when he passed the Emperor riding well out of the city without an escort. Out of habit he stopped scratching and bowed in the saddle. The Emperor gave him a little wave.

Behind them, the Despot turned to his father. ‘Where are the Vardariotes?’

The pride of the household cavalry, the Vardariotes were Easterners from across the ocean, and further yet. They were a remnant of a bygone time, when the Empire ran from the steppes of Dacia across the sea all the way to the mountains of Alba and beyond. No Emperor had ridden the steppes in twenty generations, but young men and women still left their clans and came to the Emperor as their kin had done half a thousand years before. Like the Nordikans, they were loyal.

The Duke watched the Emperor approach. ‘The Vardariotes were not interested in my muster,’ he said mildly. ‘So I ordered them to stay in their barracks.’

The Despot turned to his father. ‘What are you doing?’

The Duke shrugged. ‘Something that should have been done a long time ago.’

‘Pater!’

The Duke whirled on his son as a tiger turns on wounded prey. ‘It is
now
, you little fool. Comport yourself like my son, or die here with anyone who will not support me.’

The Despot looked for his bodyguard, and saw them fifty horse lengths away, surrounded by his father’s household knights.

Father and son glared at each other.

‘I’m doing this for
you
,’ the Duke said softly.

The young despot met his father’s eye and held it. His own eyes narrowed. He loosed a long sigh – and grinned.

‘Then I want the Lady Irene. As my wife.’ The Despot looked at the Emperor.

‘Done,’ said his father. That would have complications, but he was happy – truly happy – to have his son beside him.

The Despot shook his head. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

The Duke raised his hand. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. That’s how you keep a secret.’

The magister watched them carefully as they rode up to the Duke. His men were well arrayed in ranks, their armour polished, and their pennons flapping in the late spring breeze.

Duke Andronicus’s eyes met the magister’s.

The magister rose in his stirrups, extended his wand, and blew the heads off two of the Emperor’s guard. They continued to sit on their horses, headless, as he turned, pointed his wand at the two junior Nordikans and struck them – one with a massive
kinetikos
blow to the chest that shattered the man’s ribs through his breastplate, and the other with a neat cut that opened his neck. He was showing off for his new master, and wanted the man to remember exactly what he could do.

The skill he couldn’t display in the real was that every attack had to overcome the complex, layered, and in some cases quite brilliant artefactual defences that the Nordikans carried. The lead Spatharios, for example, had tattoos that should have defended him – which would have, against a lesser caster.

As far as Aeskepiles knew, no practitioner had ever succeeded in killing a member of the Guard by the art – much less four in ten heartbeats.

He allowed himself a moment of triumph, and took a dagger in the side as a result.

The Logothete.

The magister had never imagined him a man of blood. He produced a sword – quite a long one – from the air, and rode to the Emperor’s side.

Aeskepiles raised a series of shining shields – too late, as the dagger’s bite was deep and his side was growing cold. He could feel the poison on the blade.

It was like getting a test back in Academy and finding that he’d forgotten one small thing and, as a result, all his answers were invalid.

He knew counter-spells for poison. He just had to stop panicking for long enough to think of one . . .

The Despot saw the Logothete bury a slim dagger in the magister’s side and draw a sword from the air. In the same breath, the Duke’s household knights made for the Emperor’s reins, and an unarmoured man sitting on a fine Eastern horse behind his father raised a light crossbow. He took a shot – and it went right past the Emperor.

The Logothete seemed to
flow
under the crossbow bolt. It should have been impossible.

His slim sword cut through a knight’s vambrace – right through his wrist, so that the man’s reaching hand dropped into the grass. The Logothete’s back-cut took out another knight’s eyes. He screamed.

The Emperor backed his horse – obviously uncertain what to do.

The Guardsman whose chest had been shattered by the showy sorcery was
not dead.
Somehow, he got his axe up – one-handed. His blow cleaved the helmet of another of the Duke’s knights, spattering every man present with his brains.

The Logothete got his hand on the Emperor’s bridle. He made a parry with his sword, turned the Emperor’s horse—

—and the Despot’s sword beheaded him. He had leaned out, horse already at a canter, and swung as hard as he could, afraid that the man had
phantasmal
protections. But the sword struck as it should have, and the Logothete’s head, containing every scrap of every secret that the Emperor had, rolled away in the grass.

The Guardsman, drowning in his own blood, pitched from the saddle.

The Duke took the Emperor’s reins.

The Emperor was looking at his Logothete’s headless body. Tears welled in his eyes.

‘Majesty, you are my prisoner,’ said the Duke.

The Emperor’s eyes met his. The contempt there was absolute.

‘You have just killed the Empire,’ he said.

Ser Raoul watched the taking of the Emperor from the edge of the Field of Ares, where rowan and quince grew wild. He’d seen the violence in the magister and in the Duke.

He shook his head. ‘Son of God,’ he said, and turned his cart horse towards the city gates.

He wanted to think it all through. He owed the fucking Emperor nothing – the catamite never paid him.

But he’d made a decision. He couldn’t have said why, although a hankering to be more than a hedge knight with a placid cart horse might have played a role. By slamming his spurs into his mount he got it to something that might have been called a canter, and he rode for the gates.

At his back, he heard the Despot calling for his Easterners.

He turned to look back. Six of the little men on piebald horses had separated themselves from the mass and were coming after him. Their horses were no more than ponies, and they rode like centaurs.

He threw himself as low on his horse’s neck as he could manage; he was halfway to the gate when his pursuers began to shoot.

The third arrow struck him squarely in the back. It hurt like hell but the mail must have taken some of the power off it, because he wasn’t dead. The head had penetrated his back – he could feel it in every pace of his miserable horse.

A lifetime of tavern brawls had prepared him to bear pain, and he was an Iberian, and Iberians were famous for their ability to accept pain.

‘Mother of God!’ he spat.

Sometime in the next fifty paces, he was hit again.

Ser Raoul had not lived a good life. In fact, it was absolutely typical of his performance as a soldier and as a knight to appear at a routine muster without his horse or arms. He didn’t pray, he didn’t do penance, he scarcely ever practised at a pell or in a tiltyard. He was overweight, he drank too much, and he had an endless predilection for attractive young men that guaranteed that he could never hold on to a single copper coin.

Despite all this – or, just possibly, because of it – Raoul refused to fall off his horse despite being struck by a third arrow. It would be hard for anyone to explain how, exactly, he continued to ride for the gate, cursing all the way.

The Despot was laughing, watching his favourites track the man and hit him repeatedly. It was a lesson to every slovenly soldier, he hoped.

The tall, unarmoured man with the crossbow raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought we planned to surprise the gates?’ he said quietly. ‘And capture the Logothete?’

The bad knight and his six pursuers were riding flat out along a quiet, morning road raising dust. His pursuers were still shooting at him.

The Duke reined in his mount, speechless with rage. His fist shot out and caught his son, who reeled away and almost fell from his horse.

The Duke spat. ‘Idiot,’ he said. ‘Right. Attack.’

The unarmoured man shook his head. ‘Too soon. None of our people are in place for another half an hour.’

The Duke whirled on him. ‘You want to keep your place, spy?’

The unarmoured man met his master’s eyes. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘But if we make a premature attack, we expose our agents and we will
fail.
’

‘We will not,’ said the Duke.

His spurs were drawing blood from the cart horse, which continued to rumble towards the gate.

The six Easterners were twenty horse lengths behind him and gaining. They were all shooting.

And laughing.

The outer walls of Liviapolis were as ancient as the palaces and the stoa – and just as well built. They towered three storeys high, smooth yellow fire-baked brick with decorations in red brick marking every storey; magnificent mosaics rose over every gate, and each tower – there was one every fifty paces – was capped with a red tile roof. The walls appeared impregnable. There were, in fact, two complete lines of walls.

Of course the gates were open. Wide open.

Which was more than Ser Raoul could say for his eyes, which were closing. It was as if he was looking at the gate, and it was drawing away, further and further down a long tunnel—

When he hit the ground he was already dead, and his horse shuffled to a halt, just a few paces short of the great gate.

The Easterners whooped with delight.

Derkensun was watching a pretty woman walk past while waiting for a Yahadut scholar in his little cap to cough up a passport. Derkensun did not, himself, care one way or another – the man didn’t look dangerous – but while he was on the gate, rules were rules.

‘My daughter warned me that this would happen,’ said the scholar. He opened his leather bag and went through it. Again. ‘Please, lord. It is a day’s walk back to my village.’

Derkensun shook his head. ‘I uphold the law,’ he said.

The Yahadut nodded wearily. ‘As do I.’

Derkensun saw a man riding for the gate from the Field of Ares. He was on a bad horse and riding hard.

There were men behind him.

As a Guardsman, Derkensun had participated in his share of stupid soldier pranks, and he knew one when he saw one. His attention went back to the scholar.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, with a little warmth, ‘it is in your bedroll?’

The Yahadut were fanatics for cleanliness, and the scholar had a mattress stuffed with sheep’s wool, and two thick wool blankets rolled on his back.

His face went through one of those engaging transformations that let Derkensun know he’d scored a hit.

‘The blessings of the Lord be on your head!’ The man put his blanket roll on the table and unlaced the thongs.

Something was very wrong at the edge of Derkensun’s peripheral vision. He turned his head and took in the whole thing in one glance.

The man who fell from the horse was Ser Raoul Cadhut, an Iberian mercenary. They’d chewed on each other a few times in fights, but right now the Iberian knight had arrows in him, and half a dozen whooping Easterners were circling the corpse with arrows on the strings of their bows.

Knowing Raoul caused Derkensun to hesitate for one fleeting heartbeat, wondering if it was possible that the Iberian had got what was coming to him.

But even as he thought, he stepped back into his cupola and rang the alarm bell there. The shrill sound carried over the morning air.

He didn’t draw his sword. He didn’t reach for the great axe that leaned against the wall of his guard house inside the gate. Instead, he grabbed the scholar by the back of his gown and threw him into the city.

The Easterners were hesitating. One put an arrow into Ser Raoul’s corpse. Another drew and aimed at Derkensun. He grinned.

Derkensun took another step, back inside his guard box, and pulled the big handle that held the iron catch on the huge gears that held the portcullis even as the arrow
thunked
home in the oak of his box. The chains holding the drum shrieked and the portcullis crashed down onto the granite lintel. The falling iron teeth powered a second drum that moved across the gatehouse from left to right while rotating rapidly against a powerful spring, and the great iron-studded oak doors began to move from their recessed silos. Less than ten heartbeats after he slapped the handle, the two huge oak doors crashed together and the bar fell into place across them.

The Yahadut’s bedroll, and indeed the entire inspection table, were caught in the closing doors and crushed against the iron portcullis.

The pretty woman with the geese was frozen in shock and the scholar began to pick himself up.

Derkensun took his axe from the rack. He left his sentry box, noting half a dozen men – hard men – sitting under the olive tree in the Plataea, all staring at the gate.