RAYMOND E. FEIST & JOEL ROSENBERG
Murder in LaMut

Book Two of Legends of the Riftwar

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpervoyagerbooks.com

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2002

Copyright © Raymond E. Feist & Joel Rosenberg 2002

Raymond E. Feist & Joel Rosenberg assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006483892

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007383207

Version: 2014–07–15

For Fritz Lieber & Donald E. Westlake

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter One: Night

Chapter Two: Concerns

Chapter Three: Mondegreen

Chapter Four: Cold

Chapter Five: Storm

Chapter Six: Aftermath

Chapter Seven: Promotions

Chapter Eight: Confrontation

Chapter Nine: Plotting

Chapter Ten: Rumours

Chapter Eleven: Suspicion

Chapter Twelve: Morning

Chapter Thirteen: Investigation

Chapter Fourteen: Plans

Chapter Fifteen: Answers

Chapter Sixteen: Truth

Keep Reading

Continue The Adventure …

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Map

• Chapter One •
Night

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.

That was fine with Durine.

Not that the goddess Killian, whose province was the weather, was asking his opinion. Nor were any of the other gods – or any mortals – for that matter.

In more than twenty years of a soldier’s life, both fealty-bound and mercenary – as well as during the dimly-remembered time before he took blade and bow in hand – few of those in charge of anything had asked Durine’s opinions before making their decisions.

And that was fine with him, too. The good thing about a soldier’s life was that you could concentrate on the small but important decisions, like where to put the point of your sword next, and leave the big decisions to others.

Anyway, there was no point in objecting: complaining didn’t make it any warmer, griping didn’t stop the sleet from pelting down, bitching didn’t stop the ice from clinging to his increasingly heavy sailcloth overcoat as he made his way, half-blinded, down the muddy street.

Mud.

Mud seemed to go with LaMut the way salt seemed to go with fish.

But that was just fine with Durine, too. Wading through this half-frozen mud was just part of the trade, and at least here and now it was just this vile slush, not the hideous sort of mud made from soil mixing with dying men’s blood and shit. Now, the sight and particularly the smell of that kind of mud could make even Durine gag, and he had seen more than enough of it in his time.

What wasn’t fine with him was the cold. It was still too damn cold. His toes had ceased to feel the cold and the pain, which wasn’t good.

Locals were talking about the ‘thaw’, something they apparently expected any day now that Midwinter was behind them. Durine glanced up at the sleet smacking him in the face, and decided that this was an odd sort of thaw. To his way of thinking, there was far too damn much of this half-frozen stuff falling from the sky for a reasonable thaw, or even an unreasonable one. Yes, before the current storm they had had three days of clear skies, but there was no change in the air; it was still too damn wet, and too damn cold.

Too cold to fight, perhaps?

Well, yes, maybe, in the view of the Bugs and the Tsurani, and that was a good thing. They had fought Tsurani and goblins and Bugs in the north, and now, it seemed, they had run out of Tsurani and goblins and Bugs to kill – at least around here – and as soon as things thawed out enough, it was time for him and the other two to be paid and to be going.

A few months of garrison duty until then was just fine. Actually, as long as they were stuck here, Durine preferred the idea of garrison duty to being paid off today and having to spend his own coin to eat and lodge. Durine’s perfect situation would have been to have the Earl pay for everything except drink and women until this hypothetical thaw – and he included that limitation only because he didn’t think that even Pirojil could conceive of a way to cadge ale and whores from the paymaster – then pay them their wages the day they rode south for Ylith and a ship heading somewhere warmer.

Which made this, despite the mud and the cold, pretty close to perfect.

The heavy action was supposedly at Crydee these days, which meant that the one place they could be sure the three of them were not going was Crydee. Come spring, the privateer Melanie was due in Ylith. Captain Thorn could be counted on for a swift conveyance and be relied upon not to try to murder them in their sleep. That would be bad for one’s health, as Thorn’s predecessor had barely realized in the instant before Pirojil had stuck a knife in his right kidney while the late captain was standing, sword in hand, over what he had thought was Durine’s sleeping form. Given that Thorn owed his captaincy to Durine and his companions’ suspicious natures, he should be willing to transport them for free, Durine thought.

Away where, though?

Still, that wasn’t Durine’s worry. Let Kethol and Pirojil worry about that. Kethol would be able to find them somebody who needed three men who knew which part of the sword you used to cut with and which part you used to butter your bread; and Pirojil would be able to negotiate a price that was at least half again what the employer thought he was ready to pay. All Durine would have to do was to kill people.

Which was fine with him.

But until the ice broke the only way they would be leaving Yabon would be by foot, horse, or cart, overland to Krondor. Their only other choice would be heading back up north for more fighting, and right now they had earned enough – when they actually got paid, of course – that their cloaks would be so heavily laden with gold coin and their purses with silver coin that more fighting wouldn’t appeal to any of them.

Enough.

This stint had left him with a new set to add to his already burgeoning collection of scars; a missing digit on his left hand from the time when he hadn’t pulled back quite quickly enough while dispatching a Bug with his pikestaff. He now judged he would never play the lute. Not that he had ever tried, but he always had it in mind that he might like to learn, some day. That wound, and a long red weal on the inside of his thigh, reminded him with every step that he wasn’t as young and nimble as he used to be.

Then again, Durine had been born old. But at least he was strong. He would just wait. Let the days drift past doing little chores, and it wouldn’t be long before the thaw started and the ship was in port, and he and the others would be out of here. Somewhere warm – Salador maybe, where the women and breezes were warm and soft, and the cool beer was good and cheap and flowed freely as a running sore. About the time they ran out of gold, they could ship to the Eastern Kingdoms. Nice, friendly little wars. The locals there always appreciated good craftsmen who knew how to efficiently dispatch the neighbours, and they paid well, if not quite as well as the Earl of LaMut. And, from Durine’s point of view, the best thing about fighting in the Eastern Kingdoms was there were no Bugs, which was even better than the absence of this horrible cold.

Or if they really wanted warmth, the three of them could head back down to the Vale of Dreams and make some good coin fighting Keshian Dog Soldiers and renegades for Lord Sutherland.

No, Durine decided after a moment, the Vale of Dreams wasn’t really any better than frozen, muddy LaMut, no matter how it seemed on this cold and miserable night; last time they were down there he was almost as miserable with the heat as he was today with the cold.

Why couldn’t someone start a war on a nice balmy beach somewhere?

Ahead, bars of light coming through the outer door to the Broken Tooth Tavern were his marker and guide, promising something approaching warmth, something resembling hot food, and something as close to friends as a mercenary soldier could possibly have.

That was good enough for Durine.

For now.

He staggered up from the muddy street to the wooden porch outside the entrance to the inn.

There were two men huddled in their cloaks under the overhang just outside the door.

‘The Swordmaster wants to see you.’

One pulled his cloak back, as though in the dark Durine would be able to see the wolf’s head emblazoned on his tabard, that Durine knew must be there.

They had been found out.

Looting the dead was, like most crimes, punishable by death (either outright hanging if the Earl was in a bad mood, or from exhaustion and bad food as you tried to get through your twenty years of hard labour in the mountain quarries) although Durine had never seen any harm in looting, himself. It wasn’t as though the dead soldiers had had any use for the few pitiful coins in their purses, any more than they had for their cloaks. Durine and his two friends had more than a few coins of their own secreted about their persons – sewn into hidden pockets in the lining of their tunics, or the hems of their cloaks, in purses worn under their clothes, bound in shrunken rawhide, so that they wouldn’t clink. A nobleman could put his wealth into a vault or strongroom, and hire armed men to watch it; a merchant could put his wealth into trade items that couldn’t be easily walked off with; a wizard could leave his wealth in plain sight and trust that where sanity and self-interest wouldn’t protect it from thieves, the spells on it could and would – Durine had seen a man who had tried, once, to burgle a sleeping magician’s retreat.

Or, at least, what had been a man …

But a mercenary soldier could either carry his wealth with him or spend it, and Durine didn’t have a good explanation for what a detailed search would reveal in his possession right now.

A nobleman would have just brushed past the two men – for they wouldn’t have dared to stand in his way – but Durine was no nobleman. Besides, the number of people Durine would willingly allow within easy stabbing range of his broad back were very few, and two grey shapes in the dark were hardly likely candidates.

One on two? That wasn’t the way he had planned to die, but so be it, if that was necessary, although he had taken on two men at a time many times before, without getting killed.

Yet.

It was getting to be too cold and wet and miserable a day to live, anyway.

He pretended to stagger on the rough wood while his right hand reached inside his cloak to his nearest knife. They would hardly give him time to draw his sword, after all.

At the movement, each man took a step back.

‘Wait–’ one started.

‘Easy, man,’ the other said, his hands outstretched, palms out in an unmistakable sign of peace. ‘The Swordmaster says he just wants to talk to you,’ he said. ‘It’s too cold and mean a night to die, and that goes as much for me as it does for you.’

‘And big as he is, it would probably take both of us to put him down, if we had to,’ the first man muttered.

Durine grunted, but kept his thoughts to himself, as usual. It would probably take more than the two of them. It would also, at the very least, take the two others who had come out of the darkness behind Durine, the ones he wasn’t supposed to have noticed.

But bragging was something he left to others.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It isn’t getting any warmer out here.’

He straightened. But he kept a hand near a knife. Just in case.

It was a dark and stormy night, but that was, thankfully, outside.

Here, inside, it was warm and smoky beneath the overhead lanterns, so that it was both too hot and too cold at the same time.

A mercenary soldier’s life, Kethol often thought, was always either too lively or too dull. Either he was bored out of his skin, trying to stay awake while waiting on watch for something to happen, or he was wading through rivers of Tsurani troops, hoping that he was cutting down the bastards quickly enough that none of them would get past him to Pirojil or Durine. Either he was parched with thirst, or he was drowning in a driving rain. He was either crowded too close to other unbathed men, smelling their stink, or he was all by himself, holding down some watchpost in the middle of the night, hoping that the quiet rustle he heard out in the forest was just another deer, and not some Tsurani sneaking up on him, and wishing for a dozen friendly swords clustered around him.

Even here, in the relative comfort of the Broken Tooth Tavern, it was all or nothing.

In any tavern, on any cold night, there was no such thing as just right – he was always either too close to the main fireplace, or too far away. Given the choice, Kethol preferred too close, his back to the hearth, for it was hard to think of himself as being too warm in winter, even though he would regret it later, when he went out into the cold night to make his way back to the barracks at the south end of the city, with the wind cutting through his sweat-dampened clothes like a knife.

And there were better ways to work up a sweat.

Some of the other mercenaries were doing that at the moment – spending their hard-earned blood money in the sleeping rooms above, and the incessant creaking of the floorboards gave witness as to how they were spending their hard-earned money, but while Kethol didn’t mind dropping the odd copper or two on a quick roll with one of the local whores, the cold shrivelled his passions as much as it did the relevant portions of his anatomy, and he couldn’t see the point of spending good money on a soft itchy bed when there was an equally-itchy rope bedframe waiting at the barracks, for free.

Kethol watched closely as the placards fell. This game of pakir, or whatever they called it, wasn’t something that he was familiar with, but a game was a game, and gambling was gambling, and all it would take would be enough familiarity with it to avoid the traps that drunken men would fall into, and then he could play.

Men took up the sword for any number of stupid reasons. Honour, family, country, hearth and home. Kethol did it for the money, but he didn’t insist on earning all of his money with the edge of his sword, or even the point.

In the meantime, a few coppers spent on the particularly thin, sour beer of LaMut were coppers well spent. With an abundant supply of good dwarven ale nearby – Kethol was never sure if there was some magic involved, but it was consistently better than any humans brewed – it was clear that the local human brewers had only one mandate: make the beer as cheaply as possible, treating such things as good barley, unrotted hops, and washing out the vats in between batches as unnecessary fripperies. So when someone else bought, Kethol ordered dwarven ale; when he paid for it himself, he took the cheap stuff. It wasn’t as if he was going to drink a lot of it, after all. He was only going to look as if he was drinking a lot of it.

It was an investment, as Pirojil would say. A small investment to make his opponent think him slightly in his cups, perhaps not as attentive to the game as he might be. A sip now and again, spilling most of the vile brew on the floor from time to time, and when he sat down to gamble, several empty ale jacks would testify to his being ready to be taken in a game. Then he could indulge in some serious gambling. Yes, it was an investment.

As much of an investment as their three swords. Blades that would chop through leather and flesh and into bone rather than chip and bend had proven their worth more than once. Saving money was a good thing, but just about the worst place Kethol could think of for economies was in the tools of the trade.

In his mind’s eye, he could still see the widened eyes of the Tsurani whose blade had shattered on his shield, moments before he had slid his own sharp point under the enemy’s arm, and into the soft juncture under the armpit that was protected on the sides by the pauldrons. He didn’t have anything personal against the Tsurani, but then he had never had a personal grudge against any but a small percentage of the men he had killed. Besides, he had a lot in common with the Tsurani – they had invaded Midkemia for metal, so the strange story went, and a man who made his living killing with steel to earn gold and silver could understand that. If Kethol had a choice of metals, he would choose steel ten times out of ten – steel, in his experience, could get you gold more reliably than gold could get you steel.

Besides, his skills were useful here.

Blending into the scenery was a skill that a man who had started life as a forester’s son could use on other grounds, as well.

The trick was not to overdo it, not to try to be too local, and be spotted as a phoney, arousing suspicion. Just add a little of the thick accent, throw in an occasional use of the local flick of the fingers that meant never-mind-it’s-not-important, taking care to be friendly and smiling but not trying to be too comradely, and they wouldn’t even notice that they barely noticed him.

It had worked when he was fist-boxing in that small village outside of Rodez – before Pirojil had killed that annoying little sergeant, and the three of them had to take to their heels, again – and it worked when he was learning how to roll dice in Northwarden.

Just learn the game, learn how to blend in, and be sober while seeming less than sober, and they would only notice that he had beaten them after it was accomplished and he was gone.

Somebody had to win, after all.

Why not Kethol?

Three beefy Muts, one with a fresh set of corporal’s stripes on his sleeve, leaned over the rough-hewn table, examining the placards in front of them, while four others looked on. All wore the greyish livery of regular Mut soldiers, and all talked amongst themselves in the thick LaMut accent that Kethol could imitate without thinking about it.

‘Nice play, Osic,’ one said, as another scooped the pile of coppers toward him. ‘I was sure I had you beat.’

‘It can happen,’ Osic said. He turned to Kethol. ‘Kehol,’ he said, mispronouncing the name in a way a prouder man would have taken offence at, ‘you want to get in on the next hand? Only a couple of coppers to see some placards, but it can get expensive after that, truth to tell.’

Kethol had watched long enough, he thought, to have some idea about the ranking of combinations. More to the point, the Muts had been drinking long enough that a sober man wouldn’t have any difficulty working out who thought, albeit in a drunken stupor, that he had a good combination, and that should be good enough.

In the country of the drunk, a sober man was at least a landed baron, and on a good day, an earl.

‘I may as well,’ Kethol said, emptying a judiciously small heap of patinaed copper coins out of his pouch and onto the table. He had considerably more on him, of course, but it was best not to seem rich.

‘Your money’s as green as the next fellow’s,’ one of the Muts said, and the others chuckled along with the jest that had been ancient when the Kingdom was new.

It was probably a risky idea to get into a game with regulars, but there were times for taking a risk.

Over in a far corner, near where the smell of roasting mutton oozed out of the kitchen, a game of two-thumb was going on between two Keshian mercenaries: the mad dwarf, Mackin, and a skinny, balding, puffy-faced fellow who called himself Milo, but who Kethol was certain had a price on his head under another name, and probably a local price, at that. – why else would he make himself so scarce whenever the constable appeared? – and that’s where Kethol should have been playing.

If one of them took offence at Kethol’s winning, the odds were small that another would want to interfere. You could win a lot in a night when most of the time you appeared to be taking a deep draught of your beer you barely swallowed.

Here there was more risk, but there was also more profit to be had. It was just another field of battle, as far as Kethol was concerned. All he had to do was obey the same set of rules: protect himself and his friends; be sure not to draw too much attention to himself; and be sure to be one of the men standing when it was all over. And just as the best time to attack was before dawn, when the enemy would all be sleeping, the best time to gamble was late at night, when the others’ minds would be clouded with too much drink and too little sleep.

And if that seemed ungentle and unsporting, well then, that was just fine with Kethol. He was, after all, a mercenary, serving his betters for pay, and like the whores upstairs he tried to be as well paid for as little service as he could manage.

So he nodded, sat down, and threw a couple of coppers in the middle of the table, and received his placards from the dealer’s heavy hands.

He was just about to make his first play when the fight broke out at the table behind him.

You would think that men who made their living fighting would have better things to do in their time off than recreational brawling.

What was the point of it, after all? If it was practice, it was stupid practice. Neither the Tsurani nor the Bugs nor anybody else Kethol had taken up sword and pike against would have gone at it with bare fists if there was something sharp or blunt or big to hit the other with. And if it was really worth fighting over, it was worth killing over, and if that made you an outlaw, well, Midkemia was roomy enough that you could be declared an outlaw in more than a few places and still be able to earn a living, something that Kethol knew from personal experience.

Usually it was about one of three things: money, a woman, or I-just-feel-like-acting-like-an-idiot. Often it was all three.

Kethol had no idea what this fight was about, but grunts quickly turned into shouts and shouts were followed by the meaty thunk of blows landing.

He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and ducked quickly enough to avoid the flying chair, but the motion brought him into full contact with the burly regular on his right, and instinctively the Mut responded with a backhanded fist that caught Kethol high on the right cheekbone.

Lights went off in Kethol’s right eye, but reflexes worked where vision couldn’t; he lowered his head and lunged, catching the Mut around the waist in a tackle that brought both of them to the hard wooden floor. Kethol landed on top, hoping he had knocked the wind out of the other. He bashed his fist into the soldier’s midsection, just below the ribcage, for a bit of insurance. Hope was a fine thing, but certainty was better. He had nothing personal against the man he was fighting, but he was used to killing people he had nothing against, so just roughing up one didn’t count. Then he slammed his knee into the other man’s groin and rolled away. This brawl was a matter of self-protection, not anger.

That was the thing about other people that Kethol never had understood: other people – even Pirojil and Durine – often got angry during a fight, letting their anger fuel them. For Kethol, it was all a matter of doing what you needed to. You got angry over other things – cruelty, or cheating, or incompetence or waste – not combat.

A few miscellaneous blows landed on his back and legs as he rose to a crouch – the wildly flailing feet of two other combatants as they rolled about the ground – but they didn’t slow him down, and at least no knives or swords had come out, not yet. It was just a tavern fight, after all, and it was unlikely that, even drunk, the soldiers would escalate it into something more.

Off in the distance, somebody was ringing an alarm bell frantically. Most likely the tavernkeeper, calling for the Watch, for the alarm bell was quickly echoed by the Watch whistles. Clearly the Watch had been nearby, supplemented by a squad of regulars assigned from the garrison for the purpose of keeping order in the city. The Earl of LaMut might be young and new to his position, but it would be no surprise to him or his captains that garrisoned soldiers tended to fight with each other when they couldn’t find anything else to do, and the best of the Kingdom nobility were used to accepting and dealing with the inevitable.

Neither was it a surprise to Kethol; he was always half-expecting a fight to break out, and while he hadn’t been counting on it, he had been hoping for it.

He made his move.

In a fight, a man being knocked down was nothing to be surprised about, so as he grunted and fell to the floor, nobody would take particular notice that his fall hadn’t been preceded by a blow. The fact that he fell to the floor where under a table several dozen of the coins had scattered was simply a matter of convenience.

He quickly scooped up a handful of coins – not worrying about the sound of clinking metal carrying over the shouts and grunts; everybody else would be too busy to notice a small thing like that – and made certain to pick out the silver reals first, before bothering with the coppers. All of the coins went into a hidden pocket sewn into the inside of his tunic, and he stuffed a rag in on top of them before pulling the pocket’s drawstring tight.

Then he was on his hands and knees, making for the door as quickly as he could: he had already taken his pay for this fight, and it was time to be going.

A tavern fight had a dynamic of its own: after a few moments of free-for-all, some men would be down, hurting; others would have paired off, working off new or old grievances of their own with their fists.

Yet others would soon be doing what Kethol was busy doing: not hanging around for the fight to turn bloody, and particularly not waiting for the arrival of the Watch, but making themselves scarce. Unsurprisingly, that Milo fellow had been the first man through the door and out into the night, and others had followed. Kethol wouldn’t be the first, or the last, and that was just fine.

Kethol launched himself through into the mud-room and through the mud-room to the entryway, brushing aside the thick sheets of canvas hung up to keep the chill air out of the tavern.

And stopped in his tracks.

They were waiting for him outside: a squad of regulars, led by a mounted corporal whose massive dark horse pranced nervously on the hard-packed snow, pawing at it with the strange clawed horseshoes that Kethol hadn’t seen anywhere except in LaMut.

A lance pointed in his direction.

‘You’d be Kethol, the mercenary,’ came a voice out of the darkness.

There was a sharp point on the lance, and no point in denying it. If there was a problem, he would have to talk his way out of it now – or, more likely, think, talk, or fight his way out of it later.

‘Yes,’ he said, his hands spread in a question. ‘Is there some problem?’

‘Not for me. The Swordmaster wants to see you.’

‘Me?’

‘You. All three of you.’

He didn’t have to ask what the corporal meant by ‘all three of you’.

‘So let’s be on our way,’ the corporal said.

Kethol shrugged.

With the stolen coins warm in his hidden pocket, he had nothing else that he needed to be doing, including dying in the street.

At the moment.

It was a dark and stormy night, and if there was such a thing as a barn that wasn’t draughty, Pirojil had never seen one, so he wasn’t surprised at the bitter cold ripping through the place as he rolled another bale of hay down from the loft, letting it fall onto the hard-packed earth below.

The horses were used to the thunk made by the bale hitting the floor, although the big bay gelding that was reserved for the use of the Horsemaster himself nickered and clomped in his stall.

Pirojil didn’t have any particular objection to doing his share of tending the horses – all of the stableboys had been pressed into service as message runners during the last-but-one battle, and all of them had been cut down either by Tsurani or Bugs – but he didn’t particularly care to be doing it in a barn that was so cold and draughty that the sweat on his nose kept freezing.

It was a trade-off, as most things in life were. The less you complained about having to muck out a few stalls, the more likely it was that your name was not going to come to the top of the captain’s mental list when he needed to send a patrol out to see if there really were Tsurani lying in ambush in the forest ahead. And if you could improve the job with more than a few swigs from a bottle of cheap Tyr-Sog wine that the late sergeant – may Tith-Onaka, god of soldiers, clasp him to his hairy, hoary breast! – didn’t have any use for any more, well, then what was the harm?

It was lousy work, but it was easy.

You just slid a hackamore on the horse, led it to an empty stall, being sure to close the animal in properly, and then forked out the old, shit-and-piss-laden straw, then spread out some of the fresh. The old straw went into the wheelbarrow, and the wheelbarrow went up the ramp and through two sets of heavy swinging doors, to be dumped onto the back of the midden wagon, after which it was no longer Pirojil’s problem. Somebody else would have to haul it out of town, and dump it. It was said that the dung of LaMut horses was why the local potatoes grew as big as horseflops, but growing vegetables was something that Pirojil didn’t know much about.

Or care.

Pirojil knew that he was capable of being as complex a man as there was, which was why at times very simple things appealed to him. As did not thinking about things that didn’t concern him. There was no point in employing his mental capacity without a good reason, after all. He had another swig of wine, gargled with it to clear the accumulated phlegm from his throat, and carefully re-stoppered the bottle before setting it down on the floor next to the ladder. The ladder could be used for getting down to the floor, but there was also the rope. And, just a short step away from the loft, a well-varnished pole stood invitingly.

Pirojil slid down the pole easily, his thick leather gloves warming only a trifle from the friction, and landed lightly. That was the trick of it, he had decided. You wanted to stop just at the floor, by your own friction, not drive your boots into the hard earthen floor.

It was a silly thing to be concentrating on, but there were worse.

Like the way women looked at him. Even the whores.

He shrugged. An ugly man was an ugly man, but an ugly rich man was a rich man, and some day he would be at least a moderately rich man, if he wasn’t a dead man first. You had to keep building up your stake, and waiting for the right moment, and in the meantime –

In the meantime, you could amuse yourself with daydreams about wealth, while you waited for the predestined spear to run you through the belly, the fated sword to find your heart, or the inevitable arrow to seek your eye.

Willem, the last of the stableboys, had gone to war with his father’s shield, and come back upon it. In his memory, the shield had been hung on the wall of the stable with the rest, and polished to a ridiculously high gloss by somebody who should have found something better to do with his time.

Thankfully, though, even as highly polished as the shield was, he couldn’t see his reflection in it. He had no particular need to see the misshapen forehead hung heavy with bushy eyebrows, over sunken, tired eyes, and a nose that had been broken enough times to flatten it against the face, and turn him into a mouth-breather.

Pirojil fingered the scraggly beard that covered his jaw. It never did fill in, and he never would permit it to grow long enough for an enemy to grasp.

You couldn’t always tell about people by looking at them. There were ugly people in this world, but many of them were good and kind. Pirojil had long ago decided that his own face was a mirror to his soul. It took something other than a gentle soul to decide to make most of your living sliding a sword into another man’s guts, and the rest of it waiting to slide a sword into another man’s, or any of the hundred other different ways of killing Pirojil had used to earn his pay.

A skritching sound sent his hand to his belt as he spun about.

He forced himself to relax. Just a rat, off in a corner up against the oat bin.

An ongoing problem, and one you’d think that the magicians would take time out of their busy schedule to handle. Couldn’t they … wiggle their fingers or mutter their spells or whatever they did and keep the rats out of the horses’ oats and carrots and corn? Well, it was none of his business. He wasn’t sleeping in the cold stable, and, besides, nobody was paying him to kill rats.

Something whipped past his ear and thunked into the wood of the oat bin, accompanied by a short squeal.

‘Got it.’ A tall, rangy man stepped out of the shadows, tucking a second knife into a sheath on his right hip. A basket-hilted rapier hung from his belt – the narrow, precise weapon of a duel-list, not the broader, longer sword that a line soldier would carry into battle. Tom Garnett chose his weapons with care.

It didn’t much matter that Pirojil’s own sword was a good six paces away, hung on a hook while he worked. Captain Tom Garnett, the oldest of the captains fealty-bound to his excellency the Earl of LaMut, was, even in his late forties, a far better swordsman than Pirojil could ever hope to be. Whether it was the result of innate talent or more than thirty years of spending half his waking hours with a sword in his hand – or, most likely, both – in a swordfight, Garnett could easily have carved Pirojil into little pieces.

And, apparently, he had a way with throwing knives, too, although Pirojil would have thought better of him, for Pirojil had never heard of a thrown knife actually killing anybody, and it was absolutely silly to spend the gold to acquire a properly balanced throwing knife.

Pointless, really.

So Pirojil kept his hands from straying near where his own throwing knife was concealed under the hem of his tunic. Yet although he had never heard of a thrown knife actually killing anyone, he had seen one distract a man long enough for him to be killed some other way, and besides, there was always a first time; he just refused to pay enough gold for a good one, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have risked it dispatching vermin. Letting his thoughts run, Pirojil stood silently as Tom Garnett walked over and retrieved the knife, displaying the rat that he had neatly skewered.

It was already limp and unmoving in death; Tom Garnett flicked its body off his knife and into the wheelbarrow with the straw and shit, then stooped to pick up a handful of fresh straw to clean his knife with before replacing it in his sheath.

He stood a head taller than Pirojil, who himself was of more than average height, but while Pirojil was built almost as thickly and solidly as Durine, Tom Garnett was even more rangy and gaunt than Kethol. His hair was coal-black, sprinkled with silver highlights, and except for a thin moustache and tiny, pointed goatee, his face was clean-shaven, revealing a wealth of scars about his cheeks and forehead. You would expect such a tall and gangly man to seem awkward in motion, but he moved like a dancer, seemingly always in balance.

‘I seem to have taken you by surprise,’ the Captain said, making a tsking sound with his teeth. ‘I would have thought better of you, Pirojil.’

Pirojil ducked his head. ‘The Captain is kind to remember me,’ he said.

‘And unkind to criticize? Ah. That could be.’ Garnett gestured at the rat. ‘You object to me killing a rat?’

Pirojil shook his head. ‘Not at all, Captain,’ he said. ‘I might have done it myself.’ He shrugged.

‘If you’d cared to.’ The Captain’s tone was ever-so-slightly mocking.

‘If I’d cared to.’

‘And why didn’t you care to, Pirojil?’ Garnett asked, perhaps too gently.

Pirojil shrugged again. ‘I didn’t see any point. You kill one rat, there’s another score of them where it came from. It wasn’t bothering me, and I don’t remember being ordered – or paid – to hunt rats.’ He leaned on his pitchfork. ‘Do you want to pay me to hunt rats, Captain?’

Tom Garnett shook his head, slowly. ‘Not me, Pirojil. The Swordmaster, on the other hand, may have some rats for you to hunt, or at least to watch out for. I’ve sent for your companions; they should be at the Aerie by now. Would you very much mind coming with me?’ he asked, politely, as though it was simply a request.

Pirojil shook his head. ‘Not at all,’ he lied. He didn’t really have a choice.

Tom Garnett smiled. ‘Relaxing to the inevitable is always wise, Pirojil.’

‘That wasn’t what you said when we were almost overrun by the Bugs, Captain,’ Pirojil said. ‘I seem to recall you shouting something about how we were going to die, but die like soldiers. Is my memory mistaken?’

Tom Garnett grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, being reminiscent of a wolf baring its teeth. ‘Since we weren’t overrun, it wasn’t inevitable, now was it?’

The Captain turned, not waiting for a reply, expecting Pirojil to follow.

Pirojil elected to accommodate the Captain’s expectations and silently trailed him out of the barn.

Glancing through the open gate on the other side of the marshalling yard, Pirojil caught a brief glimpse of lights from the buildings lining the road down the hill into the city proper, and considered the wisdom of building the castle on the bluff overlooking the original city. It was a fine defensive position, as long as you didn’t have to run up and down the hill in this miserable weather. Then again, he considered, those who design castles are not usually the ones sent up and down the road in the middle of a storm. That was just the sort of task set aside for people like Pirojil, Durine and Kethol.

Damn. Now he wished he hadn’t said anything about that Bug attack. Putting aside his own musing, he trudged after the Captain.

• Chapter Two •
Concerns

VANDROS NOTICED SOMETHING.

A hint of Lady Mondegreen’s scent of patchouli and myrrh still hung in the air of the Aerie, although probably nobody else would have been able to detect it over the sulphuric stink of the breath of Fantus, the green firedrake, who had just belched with satisfaction after arriving from his evening meal in the kitchen below.

The Earl of LaMut and his swordmaster exchanged glances as the creature settled in before the fire. The Swordmaster hadn’t been amused by the firedrake’s presence, and even less so by the fact that Fantus had selected the Aerie as his residence-of-choice, probably for its ease of access through the old Falconer’s roost.

Vandros was still uncertain how the creature contrived to get the door open between the Swordmaster’s quarters and the loft above where previous rulers of LaMut had housed their hunting birds for decades. It now held what Steven Argent thought was a thoroughly inadequate assortment of messenger pigeons, under the care of Haskell, the pigeon breeder, to whom Steven Argent sarcastically referred as ‘the Birdmaster’ – although not in Vandros’s direct hearing.

Haskell was supposed to keep the firedrake up in the loft, but the only doors he was careful about locking were the doors to his charges’ cages, each one labelled ‘Mondegreen Keep’ or ‘Yabon’ or ‘Crydee’ or wherever the occupant bird’s raising and instinct would cause it to return to when released; Haskell was much less reliable when it came to the door to the loft.

Even when Swordmaster Steven Argent himself bolted the door, the drake managed to get down the narrow stone steps and gain entrance to the Swordmaster’s bedchamber. But in the last few days Argent had apparently resigned himself to the creature being his lodger until the Duke of Crydee returned from his council up in the City of Yabon and collected the drake in the spring.

Fantus sighed in obvious satisfaction, extending its long, serpentlike neck, and let its chin rest on the warm stones before the hearth. Large wings folded gracefully across its back, the reflecting flames gave crimson and gold accents to the green scales of its body.

The firedrake had arrived a week earlier with Lord Borric’s court magician, Kulgan, and when the Duke of Crydee and his entourage had departed two days before for the general staff meeting at Duke Brucal’s castle in Yabon City, Fantus had stayed behind.

No one was quite sure what to do about it; most of the staff and household were too frightened by the small dragonlike creature to do more than get out of its way on its daily forays to the kitchen for food; though a few, like the Earl, were amused by it.

If Vandros was put off by the smell, he was discreet enough not to say a word about it, and neither did the habitually glum servitor who placed a tray down on the table and then poured each of them a glass of wine before setting the bottle back on the tray.

‘Is there anything else required, Swordmaster?’ Ereven asked Steven Argent instead of Vandros – and quite properly so, for while Vandros outranked the Swordmaster, and the entire castle was his residence, as the Earl of LaMut, the Aerie was the Swordmaster’s quarters, and the housecarl was officially helping Steven Argent, as host, entertain the young Earl, it being the host’s duty to see to the comfort of his guest.

Steven Argent smiled his appreciation to the servitor; the Swordmaster appreciated the fine points of hospitality, as well as of any other craft.

‘Nothing at all, thank you, Ereven,’ he said, after a quick nod from Vandros. ‘Consider your service over for the evening, and do give my best to Becka and to your daughter.’

Ereven’s already-gloomy face darkened slightly, although he forced a smile. ‘I’ll do that, Swordmaster, and bid you and his lordship a goodnight.’

Vandros didn’t quite raise an eyebrow at that; he held his peace until Ereven had closed the door behind him. Not that he would have commented anyway. The Swordmaster’s dalliances were legendary, but to take note of them at the moment would be impolitic, whether or not the rumoured dalliance was with the housecarl’s very pretty young daughter (not true) or with Lady Mondegreen (true). Steven Argent was both a soldier and a lady’s man, and his success in both fields of endeavour had propagated envy and enmity from many important men in the region. Several times in the last two decades the fact that Argent had merely exchanged polite conversation with a minor noble or rich merchant’s wife had resulted in confrontation, and once in a duel. That duel had been the primary reason he had abandoned a fastrising career in the King’s army in Rillanon to come to the west twelve years ago, first as a captain in Vandros’s father’s garrison, then as Swordmaster. Although Vandros usually came across as a straightforward, uncomplicated warrior, he had spent most of his twenty-eight years studying to become the Earl of LaMut, and he could be as subtle as he needed to be: he knew when not to make a comment.

When the door closed, he said, ‘I still find it hard to believe that there is a traitor among us. But …’

‘… but there have been too many accidents of late,’ Steven Argent finished. ‘And I find myself uncomfortable assuming that all is well. Things have been too quiet in the north – and one of the things I learned when you were still in swaddling clothes was that when things seem to be going too well it’s time to look for a trap.’

‘But how could the Tsurani even identify and locate a traitor? It’s not as if one could put on Kingdom clothing and wander into Ylith pretending to be a merchant from Sarth. Do they even have the capacity for that kind of plotting?’

Steven Argent shook his head. That was, it seemed, the part he didn’t understand, either.‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I am concerned. Of course, if there is a traitor, he isn’t necessarily employed by the Tsurani. If they were trying to kill someone, it would hardly be a baron, albeit an important one. They would be hunting earls and dukes, I’d wager. No, when it comes to sponsors for murder, we’ve too many other likely candidates to ignore. I’ve little fondness for Baron Morray – the feud between his and Baron Verheyen’s families should probably have been settled by duel a generation ago, and he’s made more than enough other enemies as well – but I think it would be best to make sure that he is not killed while in our city. It would tend to irritate the Duke.’

Vandros smiled at that. ‘Nor, I can say with some greater authority, would it please the Earl.’

‘To be struck down in battle? We could live with that; that’s a risk we all take. But …’

Vandros sighed. ‘I find it hard to believe that Lord Verheyen would countenance such a thing. He’s hot-blooded and hot-headed, of a certainty. But suborning murder? That doesn’t sound like him.’ He shook his head.

Vandros’s father had appointed Morray as the LaMutian Military Bursar at the beginning of the war, and Vandros had ratified his father’s choice when he inherited the title two years earlier, since the man was good at the job. And as Earl, Vandros knew better than most that both an earldom – particularly during wartime – and an army, lived on gold and silver as much as on meat and grain.

If Steven Argent had had his way, the Earl would have sealed Baron Morray up in the Tower with his books and accounts and moneybags until every last Tsurani was driven from Midkemia, but that wasn’t politically possible, and even keeping him resident in the City of LaMut was starting to look like a bad idea.

Time to get him out of town, at least for a while.

‘It could be a coincidence. But there’s an old saying, my lord,’ the Swordmaster said. ‘“The first time is happenstance; the second time is remarkable coincidence; the third time is a conspiracy.”’

Vandros grinned. ‘I think my father should have chosen a good LaMutian as Swordmaster rather than some effete Easterner. Rillanon may be a good place to learn the fine points of swordsmanship, but I think that there is something about the Court that breeds not only conspiracy, but the suspicion of conspiracy, whether one exists or not.’

‘There are always conspiracies, my lord, somewhere.’

Vandros’s face darkened for a moment, and even though it remained unspoken, Argent knew what had passed through his mind. The rift between the King and the Prince of Krondor probably threatened the Kingdom in the long run every bit as much as the Rift through which the Tsurani had invaded. Rumours were running rampant: that the King had ordered his uncle the Prince imprisoned; that Guy du Bas-Tyra’s viceroyalty of the city was simply a pretext to install Guy as the next Prince of Krondor; and lately, that Prince Erland was in fact dead at Guy’s hand.

All official communication between the Armies of the West and Krondor passed through Brucal and Borric’s hands, and Vandros knew only what he was told, and as a matter of policy didn’t believe the half of it.

At least that is what he had told his swordmaster. Steven Argent didn’t know whether or not to entirely accept the Earl’s scepticism, although he knew better than to voice any doubts. After all, rumours were often the first harbinger of uncomfortable truth. But that was not something that the young Earl would want to admit, openly or otherwise. Bad blood was the way of the nobility, particularly in such unsettled times, when an heir apparent – to a barony or a duchy – might well die in battle, leaving the succession unclear. Steven Argent had seen it when hunting wolves: when you killed the leader of the pack, the lesser males would spend the next few weeks fighting over dominance while you hunted them down. But that was not a comparison that would have much appeal to Earl Vandros, despite the wolf’s head on his family’s crest. And bringing up matters of succession even in a general way would probably irritate the Earl, given that he was unaccountably touchy on matters concerning his own likely future as Duke of Yabon, once he finally married Duke Brucal’s daughter, Felina.

So Steven Argent changed the subject. ‘I think those of you in the West –’

‘You have served my father – and now me – for more than a dozen years, and to you still it’s “those of you in the West”?’ Vandros interrupted with a laugh.

‘– those of you in the West tend to underrate Easterners. We have our share of able soldiers and more than a few exceptional fighters, as well, for that matter.’

‘Perhaps.’ Vandros appeared unpersuaded. He was playfully taunting the Swordmaster. There had always been a rivalry between the Eastern and Western Realms of the Kingdom. The Earl knew that historically the constant border struggles with the Eastern Kingdoms had produced some of the best and most able commanders in the East, and some exceptional fighters, as well. It was the route to fast promotion and political opportunity, which is why ambitious soldiers often went east. For they would be fighting neighbouring armies under the gaze of barons, dukes, and kings, while most of the Western garrisons spent their time putting down bands of goblins and chasing outlaws under the supervision of swearing sergeants or the occasional officer. But seven years of constant warfare with the Tsurani had given the Armies of the West a hard core of blooded veterans, and new recruits every spring were quickly educated in warcraft or they were killed.

Or, often, both.

The Tsurani were harsh teachers in combat – tough enough that Vandros had been forced to hire mercenary companies to bolster his levies for the first time in the war – he just didn’t have enough able-bodied men to meet his commitment to the Duke of Yabon without hired swords to replace the dead and wounded. No, the Tsurani were harsh teachers in warfare, but LaMut’s soldiers had learned their lessons well; Earl Vandros would match his best company against the best from any Eastern garrison.

With a sly grin, Vandros said, ‘We both know our own worth on the battlefield.’

Steven Argent raised an eyebrow. ‘After you return from this next patrol, would you care to discuss this further on the training floor?’

There was an art to acceptably threatening a member of the nobility, one that somebody could either be born with or learn from study, and Steven Argent had spent much of his adult life studying it, so he was not at all surprised when Vandros’s smile broadened.

‘I think not!’ Vandros laughed. ‘I’ve got bruises enough from you, Swordmaster.’ He sobered. ‘But back to the business at hand: Morray. You don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s come so close to being killed?’

The Swordmaster shook his head. ‘A pot falling from a building, possibly – although there were none home in those flats at the time, as I understand it …’

‘Which argues that it might just have been the wind.’

Steven Argent nodded. ‘And the ice on Baron Morray’s step could have been from a spilled pitcher, and his horse’s saddle-strap might merely have been worn through from neglect, although I’d not care to suggest that to the Horsemaster.’

He walked to his desk and fingered the end of the strap that he had, himself, taken from the saddle for a close and careful examination. Yes, it had appeared to have been worn through, rather than cut, but he had been able to duplicate that effect himself by rubbing the strap against a sharp piece of stone.

‘It’s entirely possible that it’s just a coincidence. But it’s unlikely,’ Argent said.

‘But Verheyen? I know that there’s bad blood between the two, but assassination …?’

‘I’d doubt it, but I wouldn’t say it was impossible.’ Steven Argent shook his head. ‘I’d think that treason, somewhere, was more likely. I just have no idea as to who, or how, or why.’

‘I want this kept quiet,’ Vandros said. ‘We’re still at war, and that’s not a time for accusations to be wildly flailed about, not with the Council of Barons meeting here as soon as they can be gathered. I think it would be a good time to clear the air on these matters, among others.’

Steven Argent nodded. ‘That thought had occurred to me, as well. I think Baron Morray should be dispatched with a company of good men for the daily patrol, while I ask some discreet questions and see what I can find out.’

Morray had not particularly distinguished himself in the war, but he was not an embarrassment either, and it was a good idea to keep common soldiers under the eye, if not technically under the command, of a member of the nobility.

Vandros frowned. ‘Should we send him off to Mondegreen with the lady, and to help escort Baron Mondegreen back for the Baronial Council, perhaps? We’re about due to rotate baronial troops from both Mondegreen and Morray into LaMut – so sending him out to supervise that sounds to me like an even better idea.’

‘My lord is most wise. I’d venture a suggestion that it would be even better to keep him out of LaMut during the council as well, but –’

‘No. That would make me appear to take sides against him in his feud with Verheyen.’

Steven Argent nodded. ‘True enough, my lord.’ He knelt to scratch at Fantus’s chin. The skin of all dragonkind was tougher than good leather – he had to dig in with the massive ring he wore on his middle finger before the firedrake arched its back and preened itself.

Vandros nodded to himself. ‘Baron Mondegreen’s presence might well act to keep things calmer.’

‘Yes, indeed – he’s a sickly old man, but a gentle one,’ Steven Argent said. ‘Although there’s some steel under the surface, I’d say.’ He scratched at the firedrake’s neck again. ‘Nice, Fantus. Good boy.’

‘You have good men?’ Vandros asked.

‘All those who wear the tabard emblazoned with the crest of the Earl of LaMut are good men, of course.’

Vandros shook his head in irritation. ‘I mean, particularly good men? For this?’

‘I figured on Tom Garnett’s company,’ the Swordmaster said. ‘With three of the mercenaries along, as bodyguard for Morray.’ He bowed his head perfunctorily. ‘Assuming, of course, the Earl finds my suggestion suitable. It would be better, I think, if the orders came from you.’ Steven Argent was a soldier, and used to taking orders, but giving orders that involved the nobility was something he avoided, when possible.

Vandros nodded. ‘I will, and then I’ll have to leave this matter and all of LaMut in your hands; I’ve got to join Duke Brucal for the general staff meeting in Yabon next week, so I must leave today.’

‘You’ll bring back messenger pigeons?’

Vandros laughed. It was an ongoing by-play between them. Every time the Earl went somewhere, Argent would remind him to bring back messenger pigeons, as though he would have forgotten without the nagging. The Earl thought that Steven Argent was overly worried that there wouldn’t be the ability to get the word out quickly enough, should something of importance happen in LaMut, and the Earl had just dispatched what Steven Argent was sure were the last of the pigeons, confirming his imminent departure for Yabon.

‘Yes, I’ll bring back pigeons. And a few good bottles of wine for your legendary thirst, as well. You can play host to the fractious barons in my absence. Putting Mondegreen in charge of the meeting in my place might be a wise move. Both Morray and Verheyen respect the old man – as does every noble I can think of, except perhaps for that prancing fool, Viztria – and that should put them on their good behaviour. As for the possible assassin, I can trust you with this matter?’ the Earl asked.

Steven Argent nodded. ‘Of course, my lord,’ he said.

With the patrol sitting motionless in the middle of the road, it occurred to Kethol that he would have objected to Lady Mondegreen accompanying them, if he’d thought anybody would have listened to him.

But she and her two maids were due in Mondegreen, to minister to the ailing baron and accompany him back to LaMut for the Baronial Council – or, at least, she was due to stay out of noble beds in LaMut for the time being – and Baron Morray had insisted that the patrol might as well swing north to guard her on her way home. Which made sense, perhaps. A company of cavalry was due within a day or two from Mondegreen, and this way they could be pressed into service around the city itself, relieving the Earl’s troops.

The trouble with what Pirojil called ‘a creeping mission’ was just that: it crept, and grew, and crept and grew, until it was increasingly unmanageable.

What had at first been a routine patrol which was to swing north and west and then back to LaMut had become an escort for those bound both for Mondegreen, as well as those to be escorted back from both Mondegreen and Morray. Sandwiched between the front and the back of the column were easily two dozen civilians: Father Finty and the young boy that he called his altar boy but whom Pirojil suspected to be his catamite; three of those rare tame Tsurani – former slaves who surrendered meekly after their masters were killed – who had been hired as tenant farmers in some Mondegreen franklins’ holdings; Lady Mondegreen and her claque of ugly maids. An assortment of servants, porters, and lackeys rounded out the company.

Not that Kethol would have minded the lady’s company, under other circumstances: she was companionable and more than a little pleasant on the eye. Some women seemed to bloom in their late teens and early twenties, but were clearly past their prime, jowls and breasts already beginning to sag, hair going limp, by their thirtieth year. Not so for Lady Mondegreen. Except for one white streak that only added character to her long, coal-black hair, she could have passed for her late teens. Perhaps that had something to do with her childlessness, or her relationship to the conDoin family – they tended to age well.

Those who didn’t die in battle, that is.

Her face was heart-shaped, with a strong if pointed chin that would have seemed almost masculine if it weren’t for the full, ripe lips above. And even in her riding outfit, with layers of clothes underneath the short jacket, her breasts seemed perky enough to make the palms of his hands itch. Long, aristocratic fingers, nails bitten short in a lower-class touch that Kethol found utterly charming, gripped the reins with practised ease, while her slim thighs, encased in tight leather riding breeches, gripped her saddle tightly when her huge red mare pranced nervously while they waited. Ladies usually rode in a coach for long journeys, and she likely would have preferred that, but the most direct route from LaMut to Mondegreen went through some rough country, and she had taken to horseback with good grace, riding like a man, astride her mare rather than sidesaddle.

Behind her, on what appeared to be a matched pair of remarkably spavined and mottled geldings, her two maids huddled nervously into their cloaks, clinging tightly to the cantle, clutching their reins without actually communicating to the horses. They seemed content to follow along behind the mounts in front, which Kethol decided was probably the reason the Horsemaster had picked out these two hayburners for this journey. Occasionally, those behind would have to flick the rumps of the two geldings, moving them along when they stopped to crop at the side of the road. Perhaps, thought Kethol, they might even have some sense of how to ride by the time they reached Mondegreen.

It was hard for Kethol to tell Elga from Olga – was Elga the one with the slight moustache and large potbelly, or the heavy moustache and slight potbelly? He thought it important to correctly identify which was which. Women as poorly favoured as those two needed any consideration available; somebody who partnered with Pirojil should understand that, and Kethol did.

‘Easy, girl, easy,’ Tom Garnett murmured to his big black mare. Kethol never understood why somebody would want an animal that edgy – ‘high-spirited’, to use the accepted term – when perfectly decent, placid mounts were available. It seemed foolish. And Garnett’s mare appeared to be as hot-blooded as any horse Kethol had seen; the Captain had picked her for beauty and speed, he assumed, which was as stupid a choice as a mounted soldier could ever make. Now, a trained warhorse, that he could easily understand. He had seen more than one such trample infantry underfoot in battle, and while they were fractious, they were worth the effort; it gave the rider an extra weapon – four, if you counted each hoof separately, five if the horse was a biter. But a horse that was just plain nervous made no sense to Kethol under any circumstance. Well, at least the Captain had the good sense not to pick an uncut stallion as his mount, unlike that idiot they had served under in Bas-Tyra. That would be the last thing that anybody ever needed – a stallion going crazy because one of the maids was in her monthlies or a mare was in heat.

Tom Garnett had not liked the look of the stand of elms that guarded the far side of the clearing, and had sent a trio of horsemen ahead to scout for a possible ambush. The Tsurani were expected to be behind their lines for the winter, at least some twenty miles to the west of here, but Kethol had seen more than one corpse with a surprised expression on its face because things hadn’t turned out quite as had been expected.

The scouts were a sensible precaution. The Tsurani were no match in forest craft for the likes of the Natalese Rangers or for Kethol himself, granted, but they were learning quickly. Too quickly.

That was the trouble with making war on people without eliminating them to the last man: you killed the weak, stupid, and unlucky, leaving the strong, smart, and fortunate to face later on. If it was up to Kethol, the war would end with the Tsurani pursued to whatever vile pit they’d emerged from, and slaughtered right down to the last infant – despite the obviously preposterous stories about how many of them there were on Kelewan – but, at least for now, that issue wasn’t even on the table.

All told, it was more than a good argument for Kethol, Pirojil and Durine getting their pay and getting themselves out of here, just as soon as this council of barons was over, and the ice had cleared in the south.

Warm winds and soft hands …

Soon, perhaps. Although … He sniffed the air. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but there was a storm coming. Not soon, not right away. The sky to the west was clear and blue-grey, only the puffiest and most distant of clouds scudding across its surface. But there was a storm coming, and of that Kethol was sure.

Kethol glanced over to where Baron Morray waited, motionless, on his equally motionless mottled bay gelding. He was a big man, who would’ve seemed more pretty than handsome, if it wasn’t for a certain calculated ruggedness in his plain-cut greatcoat and the utilitarian dragonhide grip of the great sword that hung from his saddle in counterpoint to the short rapier that hung from his hip. His features were just too regular, too even, his clean-shaven face too smooth, his movements too fine and precise, when he moved at all.

His look at Kethol was filled with disdain.

‘As you can see, there was no reason for you to fear,’ he said, his voice pitched low enough to carry only as far as Lady Mondegreen and Captain Tom Garnett.

Kethol didn’t rise to the bait. What the Baron thought of him as he sat still while LaMutian regulars rode forward to scout was of no concern to him. He could more feel than hear Durine stirring behind him, while Pirojil’s face held that studiously neutral expression that spoke volumes about his opinion of people who criticized professional men in their work.

Tom Garnett came to their rescue, his nervous horse taking a few prancing steps that Garnett managed with just the bare twitch of his fingers on the reins, and a tightening of his knees against the saddle. ‘I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say, Baron Morray, that you misunderstand Kethol’s reluctance to ride ahead.’

‘Oh?’

Kethol shook his head minutely. Tom Garnett, too, eh?

As usual, it was for some reason incorrectly understood by people who really didn’t know the three of them that he, Kethol, was the leader of the three. Durine was too large and too quiet, and Pirojil was grotesquely ugly; for some reason, that tended to make people think that Kethol was somehow in charge of the other two.

‘I was with the Swordmaster when he assigned the three of them to protect you, Baron Morray,’ Tom Garnett went on. ‘I don’t remember him telling them that they were in your service.’

Unspoken was the fact that the Swordmaster hadn’t put Tom Garnett’s company under Baron Morray’s command, either; a distinction that seemed to escape Baron Morray more than occasionally.

Which was not surprising. Nobility tended to be punctilious about such things around other nobility, but less so around commoners, no matter what their military rank. That was one thing Kethol liked about working in the Western Realm of the Kingdom; while soldiers everywhere understood that nobility was no substitute for judgment and experience, out here you found the armies refreshingly free of ambitious office-seekers. Had Tom Garnett been back in the Eastern Realm, angling for a squire’s rank or marriage to a minor noble’s daughter, he’d have been kissing Morray’s backside and asking politely which cheek he preferred smooched first.

The forest loomed ahead, all grey and stark. It would be spring, soon, bringing green life back to the woods. That was the nice thing about the woods: you could count on a forest to regenerate itself, both from the ravages of winter and those of invaders.

People were different.

Tom Garnett signalled for the column to proceed, and Kethol kicked his horse into a quick canter that put him ahead of Baron Morray, while Durine and Pirojil took up their places beside the Baron.

After years of working together, he could almost read the minds of his companions without the need for any word being spoken between them. Kethol would take the lead, not because he was any more expendable than the other two – any more than he was the leader of the three – but because he had been raised in forested land, and his early years had tuned his senses to the smells and sounds and the silences of the forest in a way that could only be learned from birth.

Off in the distance, a woodpecker hammered away, almost loud enough to hurt his ears. Apparently the clopping of horses’ hooves on the hard, frozen ground wasn’t threatening enough to cause the bird to go silent.

Raising his hand for attention, Kethol gave out a forester’s shout, and the hammering desisted for a moment, only to take up again. Good. The bird was sufficiently wild to go silent in the presence of men, but sufficiently used to men to resume his work quickly; and that helped to verify that they were still alone in the forest.

He smiled as he rode. You could develop quite a legendary ability for being able to hear things in the woods if only you let the woodland creatures help you.

A cold wind picked up from the west, bringing a chill and a distant scent of woodsmoke, probably from some nearby franklin’s croft. Birch mixed with the tang of pine, if Kethol was any judge of woodsmoke, which he was.

Morray kept up a steady stream of complaints about his franklins, which Kethol listened to with only half an ear, and then only because the Baron griped better than most grizzled cavalry sergeants.

By edict of the Earl, and probably the Duke himself, the borders of a franklin’s croft were inviolable by the barons – who were always looking to increase their own holdings, and settle bondsmen on any vacant land – but the actual house itself was, in law and in practice, the property of the Baron, and while franklins were forbidden from expanding their wattle-and-daub buildings, the barons were required to make necessary repairs to ‘their’ property.

If you believed Baron Morray’s complaints, not only had Tsurani troops put the red flower to every thatched roof in his barony last autumn, forcing the Baron now to spend sizeable sums for the hire of carpenters, daubers, and thatchers, but the mud and straw of LaMut invariably crumbled if a harsh thought was sent in its direction.

Arrangements would have to be made with Baron Mondegreen, the earldom’s Hereditary Bursar, for some loans of Crown money, no doubt, and Baron Mondegreen was as famous for being stingy with Crown money as he was for his own personal generosity, and it was likely that there was some other conflict between the two, given that Morray was serving as the Earl’s wartime Bursar, if only because he was more mobile and healthy than Mondegreen was. His position would enable – and require – Morray to pay soldiers, fealty-bound or mercenary, as well as provisioning troops and suchlike; it would not permit him to dip into the Crown purse for repairs to his own barony.

For Morray to be tupping the Baron’s wife while trying to get him to authorize a loan was probably not the wisest of ways to proceed, but Kethol had long since decided that wisdom and nobility seemed to go together only by coincidence.

The farming road they were using to make their way through the North Woods wound down into a draw, and then up and out through a shallow saddle between two low hills. The Earl’s Road cut across the top of the hills, but it wasn’t the fastest way to Morray, or from there to Mondegreen.

Lady Mondegreen left her maids behind as she rode up beside him. He nodded a greeting, and idly touched a hand to his forehead.

‘I want to thank you for escorting me,’ she said. Her voice was surprisingly low and pleasantly melodic, like a baritone wind-flute.

‘You are, of course, welcome, my lady,’ Kethol said.

And never mind that it was none of his idea, and he would have been perfectly comfortable leaving her to wait for the next company of Mondegreen cavalry to be cycled back to the barony. The larger the party, the better, sure – but that was only when you were counting fighting men, not when you added on baggage like noble women, no matter how pleasing to the eye they might be.

‘There’s something … frightening about a late-winter forest,’ she said. ‘When you look at the branches out of the corner of your eye, they sometimes look like skeletal fingers, reaching out for you. Add a few black robes, and you might think you had the Dark Brotherhood on every side.’

She rode almost knee-to-knee with him, letting the others lag behind.

‘I guess that is so.’ Kethol nodded. ‘But I’ve always liked the forest. All forests.’

‘Even when it looks so bare and desolate?’ she asked, lightly.

‘Looks can be deceiving, Lady.’ His knife came to his hand without him having to have thought about drawing it; Kethol reached up and cut a twig from an overhanging branch. A blunt thumbnail cut through a grey bud on the twig, revealing the green hidden inside. ‘No matter how dead it looks, there’s always life hidden here,’ he said.

Ahead, ashy corpses of burned trees told of where a raging fire had scarred the forest. Kethol remembered that specific fire, which had been started by fleeing Tsurani troops, and his jaw clenched at the memory.

‘The winter trees are merely … sleeping,’ he said. ‘But, in fewer days than you care to think, if you’ll probe with your fingers or a stick at the base of that burned oak, you’ll see sprouts reaching out to the sky.’

‘I see.’

‘You will.’ He smiled. ‘Ten years from now, you won’t be able to tell that there was a Tsurani bastard who lit a fire here like a dog puking over food he can’t steal in order to prevent somebody else from eating it.’

He gestured with his twig at the top of the hill that rose up beside them. ‘And right over there, maybe twenty or thirty years from now, there will be a little stand of oaks – short ones, granted, but real trees, and not merely saplings – drawing their sustenance from the ground below.’

She laughed, the sound of distant silver bells. Kethol normally didn’t like being laughed at, but her laughter was in no way insulting.

‘Why, Kethol,’ she said, as though more in shock than surprise, ‘one would think you were a poetic philosopher, not a soldier. Oaks, you say? Why oaks, rather than elms or pines or beeches? And how could you know that they’ll grow there, and not somewhere else?’

‘I could –’ No. He caught himself, and forced a shrug. ‘I guess there is no way that I really could know,’ he said. ‘But I believe it will happen. Tell you what, Lady: come back in twenty years and think kindly of me if you find a stand of oaks here.’

‘I just might do that, Kethol,’ she said. ‘In fact, you may have my promise on it, and if you’re still serving the Earl, I’ll bet my silver real against your one copper that it will be elms or pines or something other than a stand of oaks, if you’d care to wager.’

He smiled. ‘Well, I doubt that I’ll still be in LaMut even come spring, but if I’m in the earldom twenty years from this day, I’ll knock on your castle gate, and ask to collect that bet.’

‘Or pay it.’ She raised an eyebrow, and smiled. ‘Unless you’d flee the earldom to avoid losing a copper?’

‘No, I wouldn’t do that, Lady.’

There was no point in mentioning that it was a safe bet, as the top of the hill was where he and Pirojil and Durine had buried the Tsurani Force Leader who had ordered the fire lit, scattering dozens of acorns over his bare chest before they had filled in the hole. The Tsurani’s eyes had gone wide as they started to shovel in the earth. But gagged with a leather thong that held his acorn-filled mouth half-open, he hadn’t said much beyond a few grunts, and hamstrung as he was at elbows, ankles, and thighs, he wasn’t going anywhere. They had not packed down the earth very hard after they buried him; he probably had at least a few minutes to think over the wisdom of having burned down that which he could not conquer.

Kethol didn’t mind the Tsurani having tried to kill him – that was business – but he took damage to a forest personally, and neither Durine nor Pirojil had raised a word of objection; they had just helped him shovel in the soil. He had no regrets, but burying a man alive wasn’t the sort of thing that he really wanted to mention to a pretty woman, much less a pretty noblewoman, not when she was flirting with him.

Which she clearly was.

That was probably just to make Baron Morray jealous, but that was fine with Kethol. His sleep would be warmed by thoughts of her this night, and if she slept under Baron Morray that did Kethol no harm.

Still…

They broke at midday for a skimpy meal of cold bread and sausage, washed down with water and a gillful of cheap wine for the soldiers, while the nobles shared a glass bottle of something finer.

Pirojil would have had the Tsurani ex-slaves water and feed the horses – they seemed well-tamed, after all, and didn’t quite get the notion that they were now free – but Tom Garnett had a different idea: as usual, one man from each squad was detailed to see to the animals of that squad, while the others ate and rested. There was little enough time to take your ease when you were on patrol, and it made sense to get what rest you could.

Pirojil didn’t argue. He just let Kethol take his turn seeing to their three horses, while Pirojil ate his bread and sausage quickly enough to avoid tasting it, then drank his wine even more quickly. It warmed him a little, as he huddled in his cloak against the cold.

Even so…

‘I’d best go see about watering something that needs watering,’ he said to Durine, as he slung his swordbelt over his left shoulder, then stalked off over the crest of the hill to relieve himself.

Below, one of the regulars, a lanky man with a bald patch on his scalp where a Bug had nicked him, took out a set of pipes, and another a small drum, and soon off-key renditions of old martial songs filled the air.

‘We are marching on Bosonia, Bosonia, Bosonia,

‘We are marching on Bosonia, Bosonia, today …’

The Tsurani, as usual, seemed confused. Presumably, in the Empire, soldiers didn’t sing or drum unless ordered to do so. They probably didn’t fart unless explicitly instructed. These former slaves would find things much looser in service to the local nobles and franklins.

Pirojil’s lips tightened. The Tsurani were even worse than were the Kingdom regulars when it came to showing individuality. What was there about a regular soldier’s life that robbed him of any initiative?

He relieved himself quickly behind the broad bole of an ancient oak, while above a squirrel chittered at him. As he buttoned up his trousers, it was only a matter of reflex to check that the hilt of his sword was near his hand.

A twig snapped behind him, and his sword was no longer simply near his hand, but in his hand as he spun about to face –

Durine, a smile playing across his broad face, both hands up, palms out. ‘Stand easy, Pirojil,’ he said. ‘I guess I should have cleared my throat instead of stepping on a twig.’

Pirojil had to laugh. Snapped twigs as warnings of impending attack were a staple of late-night, campfire stories. For the most part, twigs bent and didn’t make any noise, except in the driest times of the year. Besides, in real life, an enemy was rarely considerate enough to give a warning before an assault: it kind of ruined the whole idea of a surprise attack.

Pirojil replaced his sword. They might be friends and longtime companions, but Durine’s hand never strayed far from the hilt of his own sword until Pirojil finished resheathing. Some habits were hard enough to break that they probably weren’t worth breaking.

‘Excuse me,’ Durine said, politely turning his back as he unbuttoned his own trousers.

A stream of piss steamed and smoked in the chilly air for an improbably long time.

‘With all the places to relieve yourself,’ Pirojil said, ‘did you really need me to be a witness?’

Durine buttoned his fly. ‘Well, truth be told, I always do prefer to have you or Kethol at my back when I’m occupied handling something this large and delicate, but no, I figured we ought to talk.’

‘So, talk.’

Durine shook his head. ‘I don’t like any of this. Playing bodyguard to an officer is one thing – you don’t have to worry about your own soldiers trying to knock him off –’

Pirojil’s eyebrows rose and he gave Durine a fish-eye.

‘All right, you usually don’t have to worry about your own soldiers trying to knock him off, just about enemy troops bothering him while he’s busy running a battle. I like doing bodyguard stuff.’ He patted his waist.

Pirojil nodded, though he did not meet the other’s gaze. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to. It was just a reflex for him, after all this time, with both Kethol and Durine: they automatically divided the world into fields of fire; it had saved their lives more than several times.

‘I know,’ Pirojil said. Bodyguard duty usually meant some extra coins, and the meals tended to be better, and while you were near enough the front not to get bored, you were also not so close that you had to worry about somebody leaping out at you while you were harvesting a bit of loot. ‘Not the sort of thing I would have volunteered for, but I don’t remember being asked to volunteer, do you?’

‘So why us?’

‘I don’t know, although I have some ideas. For whatever they’re worth.’ Pirojil shrugged. ‘I don’t think it’s because the Swordmaster thinks we’re better than his own troops.’

‘We are.’

Pirojil couldn’t help but grin. ‘Well, I think that, and you think that, and Kethol thinks that we’re better than they are – but I’m willing to bet that the locals don’t think we are.’

‘Their problem.’

‘No. Our problem. What we are is uninvolved, which is good.’

‘Good?’

‘Good for us. We’re not expected to take sides in local rivalries, which means that we can expect not to have our throats cut for making the wrong move at the wrong time.’

‘So you like this?’

‘I didn’t say that. The bad part is that we’re uninvolved –’

‘You said that was the good part.’ Sometimes Durine was just too slow. Not that Pirojil would complain; Kethol was worse.

‘It’s good and bad,’ Pirojil said slowly, patiently. ‘Most things are. The bad has two parts: someone might try to cut our throats for just being in the way.’

‘Nothing new in that.’

‘And we’re expendable.’

‘Nothing new in that, either.’

‘More so than usual.’

‘Ah!’ Durine nodded, finally understanding. ‘Politics.’ He said it as if it was a curse.

‘Politics.’ Pirojil nodded. ‘Look at it from the political angle. If Baron Morray, say, falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck, the Earl can either treat it as an accident, or as our fault. If it’s an accident, well then, there’s no political problem, and Luke Verheyen isn’t to blame – nobody is.’

And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

‘Sure. But if it’s not an accident – if, say, the Baron was murdered – then whose fault is it?’

‘The murderer’s?’

Pirojil wasn’t sure whether to groan or laugh. ‘Sure: the murderer. And who is the murderer? Verheyen, the hereditary enemy, who is eyeing the earldom every bit as much as Morray is? Or the three freebooters who, upon a careful search, will of a certainty seem to have too much money on them?’

‘So what do we do?’

‘The obvious: we try to keep Baron Morray from falling off his horse and breaking his neck while we’re on patrol, or falling down the stairs and breaking his neck when we’re at Morray and Mondegreen. We get him back to LaMut intact and breathing, and hope to be relieved of this duty there. If somebody tries to kill him, we stop them; if we can’t, we be sure to capture at least one assassin alive, and make sure he is able to tell who paid him, which won’t have been us.’

‘And if we can’t?’

Pirojil just frowned at him. That was obvious. ‘We kill everybody within reach, grab their horses and anything of value they have on them, and then we see if we can outrace the price on our heads.’

‘And what do you think are our chances of that?’

‘Sixty-sixty –’

‘Optimist.’

‘– on a good day.’ Pirojil arched an eyebrow. ‘If you have a better alternative, don’t sit on it – trot it out and let’s talk about it.’

Durine shook his head. ‘No. I’ve no better idea, and that’s a fact.’

‘Then we go with –’

‘Mount up,’ sounded from below. Tom Garnett’s voice carried well. ‘We’re wasting daylight.’

‘We’d better get down before they leave without us,’ Pirojil said.

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Durine nodded, and his massive brow wrinkled. ‘But I see what you mean. Very clever of the Swordmaster, eh?’

‘Eh?’

‘I mean, if somebody does manage to kill Baron Morray out here, or if he does have a fatal accident, wouldn’t the Swordmaster know that we’d be blamed and would have to run for it?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘So he wins either way.’

Pirojil had to nod. The Swordmaster would win, either way, at that. A dead baron wasn’t an insuperable problem – the war had been almost as lethal for the nobility as it had been for the common soldier – but feuding barons getting the idea that assassination was acceptable was another thing altogether. Much better to blame the three freebooters, who had had no connection with any nobility faction. Someone would make it obvious they had just decided to kill and rob the Baron themselves – and whether Pirojil, Kethol and Durine were killed, captured, or escaped was immaterial; that’s what the official story would be.

Maybe Durine wasn’t really so stupid after all.

The Swordmaster surely wasn’t.

Shit.

They were only an hour south of Mondegreen when the Tsurani attacked.

There was no warning, at least none that Durine noticed, not even in retrospect. Neither Kethol nor Pirojil had any, or they would have given a signal.

One moment the company was riding, in two ragged columns, down a farming road, a frozen, fallow field of hay on each side, and the next moment, dozens of black-and-orange-armoured soldiers were swarming out of the ditch where they had lain, hidden beneath a layer of hay.

Durine spurred his horse into the soldier who, broadsword in his hands, was making for Morray. The horse ploughed into the Tsurani, knocking him down, while Durine leapt to the ground on the far side.

That was the trouble with being mounted. You were too dependent on the movements of the horse, and with anything but a superbly trained warhorse under you that was hopeless. Durine needed solid ground beneath his boots if he was going to stay and fight, and he was going to stay and fight.

He leapt back to avoid a wild swing from another Tsurani swordsman, then lunged forwards, kicking at his deceptively fragile-looking breastplate while hacking down at another opponent.

There were shouts and screams of pain all around him, but Baron Morray was still on his horse, and Durine slapped the flank of the mare with the flat of his blade, sending the animal galloping down the road with the Baron clinging desperately, towards where Kethol and Pirojil were still mounted.

It was always tempting to underrate the locals – a professional mercenary, if he lived, survived far more fighting than all but the most seasoned Eastern soldiers, and far more than Westerners – but Tom Garnett was no green captain, eager to fall into a Tsurani trap: he was already leading the front of the column out onto the field, attempting to outflank the attackers quickly, and not simply galloping into the secondary ambush that almost certainly waited for the company down the road.

Durine found himself awash in a sea of orange-trimmed black armour. He lashed out with feet, sword, and his free fist, hoping to clear enough space to make his own escape before he was drowned in Tsurani.

He more felt than saw or heard Pirojil at his back, and moments later, Pirojil was joined by half a dozen lancers, who had apparently circled around to strike at the Tsurani from the rear.

One horseman impaled a screaming Tsurani on his lance, lifting him up and off the ground for a moment, until his lance snapped with a loud crack. Flailing wildly with the broken haft of his lance, the Mut managed to club several of them away before one leapt upon him from behind and bore him down to the ground.

Durine would have tried to go to his aid, but he was busy with two of the Tsurani himself. He kicked one towards where Pirojil had dismounted – Pirojil had just dispatched his latest opponent, and could handle an off-balance soldier easily – then he ducked under the wild swing of another Tsurani’s two-handed black sword, and slashed in and up, into and through the smaller man’s throat.

Blood fountained, as though he had pulled the bung out of a hogshead of crimson wine.

The look in the eyes of a man you were killing was always the same. This can’t be happening to me, it said, in any language. Not me. Durine had often seen that expression on the face of a man who was facing the imminence of becoming a thing, and he didn’t need to see it again; he kicked the dying man away.

Three Tsurani hacked at the legs of a big grey horse, sending horse and rider tumbling to the ground as the animal screamed in that strange, high-pitched horsy shriek that you never could get used to. But one of them miscalculated: as the horse fell, it fell on the Tsurani, crushing him in his black armour with a sodden series of snapping sounds.

It was all Durine could do not to laugh.

The Tsurani were, as always, determined and capable warriors, but they were outnumbered, and lying for hours in ambush in the bitter cold had slowed them down: it was only a matter of a few minutes until most of them lay on the ground, dead and dying.

The screams were horrible to hear.

Durine half-squatted, panting for breath. No matter how long you had been doing this, it still always took something out of you.

One of the Tsurani on the ground near Durine was still shrieking loudly. A wound to his groin that still oozed fresh, steaming blood onto the frozen ground. Durine straightened himself and walked over, then hacked down, once, at the back of the Tsurani’s neck. The man twitched once, and was still, save for the flatulent sound as he fouled himself in his death.

Sudden death was rarely dignified.

‘Wait.’ Tom Garnett dismounted from his horse and braced Durine. ‘We take prisoners when we can. That man could have been one of the slaves that the Tsurani keep, and be of no danger to us at all.’

Durine didn’t answer.

‘Well, man, did you hear me?’

‘Excuse me.’ Pirojil stepped between them. ‘I think you might want to see something, Captain,’ he said, kneeling over the dead man and turning him on his back. The Tsurani’s head flopped loosely where it was still attached to the body.

Pirojil stood, toeing away a dagger from the Tsurani’s hand. He waved at the dead Tsurani and said, ‘Perhaps, Captain, you would not have wanted to have your last thought to be that your mercy had been misplaced.’

Durine hadn’t seen any dagger, and it wouldn’t have mattered. The Tsurani was dying, anyway, and it hardly made any difference whether he went on his way now, or in a few minutes. At least this way his screams wouldn’t aggravate Durine’s headache.

They would be bad enough to face in his dreams.

The regulars had two sullen Tsurani prisoners, their hands tightly bound and then leashed by the neck, under the care of a pair of lancers, although that was hardly necessary, as they weren’t struggling. Captured Tsurani were either utterly intractable, and you eventually had to kill them, no matter how many times you beat them bloody, or how well you treated them while they were chained heavily enough to control them – or utterly tame. One of the locals had tried to explain to Durine that this was something to do with Tsurani honour: if captured, they assumed the gods cursed them or some nonsense like that; but Durine knew that once they gave up, they seemed resigned to spend the rest of their lives as slaves. Durine didn’t understand, and he didn’t particularly want to; where to put a sword in one was about all he needed to know. Though he did recall one of the Muts telling him the black-and-orange ones were called Minwanabi, and they were a particularly tough and evil bunch of bastards. Durine shrugged and walked away. He didn’t plan on staying in the north long enough to discover what the other tribes were named or how evil they were. All Tsurani seemed tough enough.

The two tame ones were the only survivors among the Tsurani, though. Easily two dozen of the enemy lay dead on the ground, accompanied in death by four Muts and two horses. One soldier wept as he knelt over his horse, feeling at its neck to be sure that its heart had stopped beating.

Silly man. Getting so attached to something made of meat. Meat died and spoiled.

Lady Mondegreen and Baron Morray sat on their horses, overlooking the scene. Baron Morray’s handsome face was impassive, if a little pale, but the lady’s complexion was almost green, and she was distracted enough to wipe a trickle of vomit from the corner of her mouth with her sleeve instead of her handkerchief.

‘I’ve … I’ve never seen a battle before,’ she said, quietly.

‘Battie?’ Baron Morray shook his head. ‘This was barely a skirmish.’

‘What are they going to do with them?’ she asked.

‘Leave it to the landholder,’ he said. ‘It will be his responsibility.’

Durine nodded. Just as well it wasn’t Durine’s job to break the frozen soil and bury the bodies; that would be long and hard work, but it was somebody else’s problem – disposing of the corpses would be for the local landholder or franklins to do, depending on whose field this was. The Mut soldiers would be wrapped in blankets and carried along to be given a proper cremation at Mondegreen. The Tsurani would probably end up fertilizing the fields.

It was all dirty work, certainly, but if the locals got to the scene quickly enough – and they would – there would be a couple of hundredweight of fresh horsemeat as payment for their work. An ignominious thing, perhaps, for a trusty mount to end up in a peasant stew, but that was the way of it.

Tom Garnett remounted his horse. ‘I’ve got half the company chasing after the archers who lay in ambush, and I’m going to have to take the rest out after those who ran away here. We’ve got to run these dastards to ground before dark, or they’ll be breaking into cottages and killing bondsmen. They’re no military threat, not now, but …’

Durine nodded. ‘But you still don’t want them killing your people.’

That was the problem when dealing with an enemy so far behind his own lines. Retreat wasn’t a practical option.

Durine didn’t know much about what was and wasn’t a military threat, but a scared man with a black blade almost as long as he was tall was the sort of thing he wouldn’t have wanted to encounter unawares.

It apparently took Kethol a moment before he realized that the Captain had been talking to him.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said at last.

Tom Garnett indicated the two nobles and their coteries, huddling together further down the road. ‘You three and a squad under Sergeant Henders will bring the civilians on to Mondegreen, and the rest of us shall meet you there.’

Kethol made a sketchy salute with his blade.

• Chapter Three •
Mondegreen

PIROJIL HALTED HIS HORSE. He paused to let the column catch up to him before kicking it into a walk next to the grizzled lancer sergeant.

‘There’s no need for outriders, Sergeant,’ Pirojil said. ‘I’d just as soon we keep everybody together.’

‘That’s very interesting, freebooter,’ Sergeant Henders replied, his frown and tone in sarcastic counterpoint to his even words. ‘I’ll tell you again, I am always so very glad to have another opinion as to how I should run my squad.’ He raised himself in the saddle. ‘Hey, you!’ he shouted. ‘Yes, Sanderson, I mean you, you poxy son of a misbegotten cur. You and Scrupple take the point!’ Then he turned to shout at another pair of riders. ‘Williams! Bellows! You two are up as flankers – smartly now, or we’ll see if you can run ahead faster without your horses. I said move it!’ He turned back to Pirojil. ‘Always happy to have advice, Pirojil, and particularly from a man as well-favoured as your good self,’ he said, the sneer only at the edges of his mouth and voice. ‘But I’d just as soon know if we’re facing another ambush.’

‘We’re not going to see another ambush between here and Mondegreen,’ Pirojil said. ‘Maybe a straggler or two, but more likely they’ll be too busy running away.’

‘If you say so,’ the sergeant said, making no motion to recall the outriders.

Pirojil bit his lip, then decided to try again. ‘Look, Sergeant, if there were more Tsurani within tens of miles of here, their commander would surely have used all of them for the ambush. The Tsurani commanders aren’t stupid; they’re just greedy. As it was, he split his forces too small, hoping the attack would drive the column into a killing zone for his archers.’

‘I thank you much for that opinion, Pirojil,’ the sergeant said. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a squad to run. Shouldn’t you be off counting your high pay or wiping Baron Morray’s backside or something useful?’

Pirojil shook his head. There was no point in trying. It was impossible to convince somebody who wouldn’t be convinced, and while the three of them were in charge of the nobles, they hadn’t been explicitly left in charge of the party, or even of the sergeant’s squad. Now instead of having one rider away from the column, they had four, just because a sergeant got irritated at getting some good advice.

Tom Garnett should have been more direct and simply put the party under Kethol’s command. The three mercenaries had understood that he had meant for them to be in charge, but the sergeant didn’t, or affected not to. Pirojil could either live with that, or fight it out, with him, Kethol and Durine against the entire squad; and then they would have to make their escape rather than explain to Tom Garnett why they had killed all of his men – assuming that they could, of course.

Pirojil relaxed. So be it. For now.

It would probably be necessary to have Durine take the sergeant aside at some point and work this out, privately. He didn’t particularly like asking Durine to do that, but he was used to doing things he didn’t like. He’d had to do it a time or two before. That was the nice thing about having Durine beat somebody up: they didn’t lose their comrades’ respect by having Durine mess up their face just a little. Few men could stand up to Durine and no one – so far – could emerge unscathed from a fight with the big man.

He tried to be philosophical about it.

Relationships between regulars and mercenaries were always uncomfortable. Forget, for just a moment, that regular soldiers thought of freebooters as little more than land pirates, mostly because during peacetime, and around the fringes of war, they spent more time hunting them down than working with them.

Even when mercenaries were employed by the Crown, there were conflicts built into the relationship. The freebooters tended to report directly to an officer, who was expected to take a long view of things and understand that too many unnecessary fatalities among the mercenaries inevitably meant widespread mercenary desertion or revolt. It usually didn’t work out when mercenaries had to answer to a sergeant, who would be much quicker to expend a mercenary than one of his own men, and while few mercenaries died in bed, even fewer wanted to spend their whole, short lives on point, or worse. The second or third time a mercenary company was ordered to be first over the wall, they started considering the wisdom of their employment choice.

Relations between the mercenaries and the regulars were unlikely to get any better in Mondegreen. The regular soldiers would be housed in the barracks at Mondegreen Castle. But Baron Morray would be housed in the Residence, and therefore Kethol, Durine and Pirojil would be as well, with the three of them sleeping in soft featherbeds, their every need being tended to by beautiful maidservants. At least that’s what the regulars would think.

It wouldn’t actually be that way, of course, but that was the way the story would be told around the barracks. Never mind that they would probably be bedded down on damp reeds in the kitchen, except for whichever of them drew the short straw and spent the night sleeping on the stone floor across the threshold of the Baron’s bedchamber. And the maids were almost certain to be old, fat, ugly, or all three. But, the regulars would complain that the mercenaries were getting a soft assignment.

Pirojil slowed his horse to allow Baron Morray and Kethol to catch up with him, while behind, Durine trailed Lady Mondegreen and her maids.

Kethol arched an eyebrow; Pirojil shook his head. Kethol shrugged.

The Baron eyed them curiously. After a few moments, when neither of them answered the unvoiced question, he cleared his throat for attention. ‘What was that all about?’ he asked imperiously.

‘Nothing for you to bother yourself with, my lord,’ Kethol said, when Pirojil didn’t immediately answer. ‘Just a minor disagreement between Pirojil and the sergeant.’

‘All that from a shake of the head?’ Morray was visibly sceptical.

‘Yes,’ Pirojil said. But that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the Baron. ‘Kethol and I’ve been working together for years; Durine’s been with us only a little less. After so much time together, my lord, each of us knows how the others think.’

The Baron raised an eyebrow as if questioning the remark.

‘You don’t mask your thoughts to the man at your back, my lord. If a man insists on keeping his thoughts to himself all the time, well, you find somebody else to watch your back.’

The Baron scowled. ‘I’m not overly impressed with the three of you,’ he said. ‘You distinguished yourself with bravery during the ambush, certainly more than one would expect from a bunch of freebooters, but your swordwork was clumsy – at least what I saw of it – and if Lady Mondegreen hadn’t spurred her horse so quickly, she would have been brought down by the Tsurani without much trouble at all.’

Kethol started to open his mouth, but desisted at Pirojil’s head-shake.

‘We’ll try to do better, next time, my lord,’ Pirojil said. He had already had enough of arguing with somebody who would not be persuaded for one afternoon.

But you couldn’t trust Kethol to keep his mouth shut about such a thing. Kethol would have to explain himself – it was one of his few weaknesses – and that would do nobody any good at all.

Pirojil pointed a finger toward the front of the column, tapped the finger against his own chest, jerked his thumb toward the rear of the column, and spurred his horse.

Lady Mondegreen’s eyes held steady on Kethol as he dropped back beside her, replacing Durine. ‘How soon do we arrive, Kethol?’ she asked.

If he remembered right, and he did, the outer wall of Mondegreen Town was just beyond the next bend, across a stream, and then over a ridge. ‘I believe we should be there within the hour, Lady.’ Why the Lady of Castle Mondegreen wouldn’t know the area around the keep better than a soldier who had only been through here once, during the war, he didn’t know. ‘We’ll have you safe in your own bed this night, and may it be a comfort to you.’

‘I’ve some comfort in my own bed, that’s true,’ she said. ‘Though my husband is a good man, a gentle man, but a very sick man, and has been, for the past few years.’

Oh, he didn’t say. And is that why you spend your time warming other men’s beds? ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he did say. It seemed like the appropriate response.

She pursed her lips momentarily. ‘Others suffer far worse than do I.’

‘Is the Baron much older than you?’

She frowned. ‘Yes, he is. And is there something wrong with that?’

‘Not at all.’ Kethol shook his head. ‘But it must be difficult –’

‘Yes, it’s difficult.’ She patted at her belly. ‘It’s difficult when you marry an older man, and are expected to produce an heir, and don’t.’ She started to say something more, then stopped herself.

‘There’s no need to watch your words around me, Lady,’ Kethol said. ‘I’m not loose of tongue, and I’ve got no stake in local matters.’

She didn’t look at him. ‘How fortunate for you,’ she said, through tight lips.

They rode in silence for a few minutes.

‘I seem to have something of a widespread reputation,’ she said at last.

‘Perhaps.’ Kethol shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. The only gossip I get to hear is usually about how one sergeant is a glory-hound, or another officer will never send his men out in front of him if he doesn’t have to – the private lives of our betters isn’t a topic for barracks conversation.’

Which wasn’t entirely true. It might not have been a topic for Kethol’s barracks conversation, but some of the Mut soldiers gossiped like fishwives, and Lady Mondegreen was often a subject of their chatter. If you believed the gossip – and Kethol never either believed all or none of it – she flitted from bed to bed with wild abandon, looking for the satisfaction that her ancient husband couldn’t have given her.

She looked at him, long and hard, as though trying to decide something.

A crow fluttered down and took a perch on an overhanging tree limb, and cawed down at them.

Well, as long as it didn’t shit on him, he didn’t mind.

Pirojil shook his head. Unless you knew how and where to look, the castle didn’t look like the weapon that it actually was.

Castle Mondegreen rose, huge and solid and dark on its hill, looming above the town below. On top of its six towers watchmen stood, probably bored out of their minds, but even more probably happy to be bored. It didn’t take much experience with battle to teach you that combat was far less romantic in real life than in all the tales, ballads and legends.

Of course, it wouldn’t take long before the sights and sounds and particularly the smells of war would fade in the memory, and it wouldn’t be long before young soldiers would be puffing their chests and strutting about, bragging of the great deeds they would do the next time the alarm horns sounded. Some of them would do very well. Some of them would die, and all of them would be changed, in ways many of them would not recognize until years later, if ever. A soldier’s life gave you plenty of time for introspection, but many just pissed that time away.

Pirojil himself had pissed away many an hour that could have been spent just thinking about things. On the other hand, he had not wasted all his hours, and he had long ago worked out that it was dangerous to keep weapons too near you. Necessary, yes, but dangerous – weapons changed people, and not just enchanted weapons.

Like the castle itself.

Originally, Castle Mondegreen had been built by some cousin of the conDoin family, as a way to establish a permanent foothold in Yabon. While invited in to help drive out the Brotherhood of the Dark Path and their allies, many of the Yabonese had not expected the Kingdom to stay in Yabon once the enemy had been dislodged. Like neighbouring Bosonia, Yabon had been a far-flung colony of the Empire of Great Kesh.

Unlike Bosonia, which had many Keshian colonists living there, Yabon had been an administrated district with a few Keshian nobles and many Yabonese tribal chieftains and lords. The Kingdom’s position was that once the Dark Brothers and their ilk were driven away, the natives were unable to protect themselves and therefore Yabon required a permanent Kingdom garrison. A rescue had turned into a conquest.

Some lords and chieftains had welcomed the Kingdom, and were rewarded with titles and lands. Other locals had, as locals did, resented their conquerors, and were primed for revolt in the early years. During that time, the remnants of the old regime would eye the new rulers, usually waiting and sometimes probing for weaknesses, ready to throw off the yoke of the newly-appointed Kingdom earl and his lickspittle barons.

And that was what the castle was for. Let the old regime raise an army in the countryside, let them gather together horses and men, bows and breastplates and swords, and let them rant and rave and fume as they would – so long as the new rulers controlled the castle.

Sometimes, the revolt could be put down by the Baron’s troops riding out and dispersing the rebels. More often, the trouble could be stopped at the much smaller wall around the town, protecting not just the nobility in the castle, but those loyal to the new regime who were, during the early years, the only ones permitted to live in the town, directly under the protection of the Baron.

But sometimes, the occupying troops would have to retreat into the castle, and wait to be relieved by the Earl’s troops. Stockpiled food and water were as much a part of the castle’s armoury as stockpiled arrows and bolts. As conquests go, Yabon’s was a relatively mild one, and by the third generation after the Kingdom annexed the former Keshian colony – which just happened to be Pirojil’s generation – Yabonese and Kingdom were interchangeable, except maybe for a bit of a funny accent in Yabon.

And so, the castle stood: a monument to persistence, just as the tumble down wall of the town was a monument to mutability, to how things never lasted.

Pirojil couldn’t tell how much of the town’s wall had been destroyed in the war – the Tsurani had broken through into Mondegreen Town on their way to the castle – and how much had been cannibalized before the Tsurani invasion by locals seeking building materials. After a generation or so of peace, the wall around the town was more of an inconvenience than a benefit, and it took a wise ruler to remember that walls were important.

The wall around the keep itself, though, was intact, although as battle-scarred as the rest of the landscape. Ashes were all that remained of the siege towers the Tsurani had built against the western wall, and while the southern wall still stood firm, it was scarred by a patched breach in the stonework, above where Tsurani sappers had failed in their attempt to undermine its integrity. The slump in the ground at the foundation told Pirojil all he needed to know about the failed attempt. Nasty way to die, he thought, with tons of rock and earth suddenly falling upon you, crushing you in the darkness like a bug. The trick was to make the tunnel as large as you safely could, with just enough timber to hold everything above you in place until you were ready to fire the supports, collapse the tunnel – hopefully while you were a respectable distance away – and thereby collapse the wall above, forming a lovely breach through which your comrades could attack.

Pirojil had been in a mining party, down in the Vale, and the whole damn thing had failed to hold. He remembered the earthy smell as dust had been forced up his nose when the ceiling of the tunnel had come crashing down – on the heads of a few of his companions – leaving him and the rest of the sappers trapped with no way out but up out of the ground, emerging through the fire and rubble of a collapsed wall. They were half-blind, sneezing and coughing from dust and smoke, knowing full well that they had to kill all the defenders, who would fight – and die – like cornered rats.

As they had.

Once in a while, some captain or duke or prince got the wonderful notion that you should tunnel further so that you emerged inside the walls. Nice theory, if you weren’t the idiots picked to be the first ones popping up out of the ground …

‘I said,’ Baron Morray reiterated, ‘that you may take my horse to the stables, when I alight.’

Pirojil nodded, coming out of his momentary reverie. ‘Of course, Baron.’

‘I’ll speak to the housecarl about your billets. Perhaps they can find room for you three in the barracks, rather than the stables.’

Well, they might as well have that out now as later.

‘No, my lord,’ Pirojil said, ‘we’re not staying in the stables. We’ll all be staying in the Residence while one of us stands watch before your door.’

Baron Morray wasn’t used to being contradicted. The reins twitched in his fingers. ‘I hardly see the need. The barracks or perhaps the stables will be perfectly adequate for the likes of – for the three of you. If I find I need you in the middle of the night, I’ll send a servant.’

Pirojil shrugged ‘Very well, my lord. If you’d be kind enough to put that in writing, I’ll have a messenger send it to the Earl. If there’s a fast enough horse available, it might reach Yabon before –’

‘What?’

Well, at least the Baron was smart enough not to raise his voice.

‘We’ve been assigned to protect you, night and day, by the Earl, my lord. If some accident or misdeed were to happen to you while we were neglecting our duty, it would be our heads into the noose. If I’m not to follow Earl Vandros’s orders, I think he’ll want to know why.’

The Baron started to say something, but Pirojil took the chance of speaking first. ‘Please. We’re assigned to protect you, my lord,’ he said, quietly. ‘Not just your body. We have been known to tell stories around the fire late at night, just like everybody else, but we don’t gossip about what our betters are doing.’

If you’re fool enough to have your dalliances with Lady Mondegreen under the very nose of her husband, then so be it, he didn’t quite say.

The Baron was silent for a moment. ‘I’m not quite the fool you take me for, freebooter,’ he said. ‘I take your full meaning, but I’d not dishonour even a churl under his own roof, much less a good man like Baron Mondegreen, no matter what you seem to think.’

‘It isn’t my job to think,’ Pirojil said. ‘Except about protecting you.’

‘Then so be it. Protect me if you must, but don’t bother me about it.’ The Baron clucked at his horse, which responded by picking up a posting trot.

Pirojil sighed. It was going to be a long tour. He urged his own horse forward and followed the Baron.

A tall, slender and almost preposterously buxom serving maid brought a tray holding an enormous joint of mutton and an only slightly smaller pile of flatbread, still steaming from the oven. She was prettier than most, with nice, even features, her impressive breasts straining the ties of her blouse, her brown hair up in a simple knot that left her long, elegant neck bare. Tendrils of hair teased at the back of her neck as she walked, and Kethol envied them.

She didn’t say anything, but looked from one to the next, barely avoiding sniffing in distaste, then set the tray down on the table without comment, leaving the three of them alone in the hall as she headed down the winding staircase, walking unselfconsciously, indifferent to the three pairs of eyes on her.

Kethol watched her go. You got used to being treated like garbage after a while, or so you told yourself. A soldier’s life was full of lies.

‘Hmm. I think I need a bath,’ Pirojil said. Or maybe, better, a new face.’

‘Bath sounds good.’ Durine nodded.

‘You take the first one, then me?’

‘I can wait,’ Durine said. ‘Rather take my time. Looks like a good bathhouse outside the barracks. You can sluice off some of the road dust before you turn in, but as for me, soaking in some hot water sounds good about now. Just be careful to wipe your boots coming back in, eh?’

Pirojil looked at his boots, which were mud-free; the three of them had already received a thorough talking-to from the housecarl.

The west wing of the keep’s second floor was dedicated to the use of guests. Of the dozen doors up and down the hall, all but two stood open, presumably waiting for their next occupants. The family residence was in the east wing, and on the floor below. Judging from the grumbling and dirty looks that the three of them had received from the soldiers on watch downstairs, the Baron’s captain of the guard was less than pleased to have his master’s care put in the hands of outsiders, and had placed soldiers on station on the floor below to drive home the point.

Pirojil’s gaze followed where the serving maid had disappeared down the staircase, as though looking beyond to where Mondegreen troops were posted at the entrance to the family quarters. ‘It’s a sad day when people don’t trust a trio of cutthroats like us.’

Durine laughed. Kethol shrugged.

While Kethol stayed outside, watching the entrance to the Barons rooms, Durine and Pirojil had gone through the chambers, emerging to report nothing out of the ordinary: no Tsurani assassin waiting in the bureaus; no covey of Dark Brotherhood killers hiding in an armoire, which wasn’t particularly surprising.

You spent most of your time on this sort of job taking precautions that would turn out to have been unnecessary, but as certain as flies in summer, the one time you didn’t check under a bed, that would be where the killers would be waiting.

Looking silly was the least of a soldier’s worries, after all.

Behind the heavy oaken door, Baron Morray was probably already sleeping in the big bed, warmed by the fire in the small hearth and the metal trays placed under the mattress. If the bed was warmed by anything else – if, say, Lady Mondegreen had sneaked in through one of the secret passages with which all castles were rife – there was nothing that Kethol could do about it, and probably nothing he should do about it, so he decided not to worry about it.

Kethol hacked off a piece of mutton with his belt knife and chewed it. Old, tough and overcooked, but it was hot food, and probably better than whatever they were having in the barracks. On the other hand, there would probably be a dice game going on in the barracks, and it would be a shame to miss that, after such a hard day of travel. Bouncing on the back of a horse could tire the mind almost as well as strong drink.

‘Hmm … you two mind if I take the first watch tonight?’ he asked.

Both of the others shrugged.

‘Sure,’ Durine said. He rubbed at his lower back with one massive hand as he rose.

‘Fine with me,’ Pirojil said, rising.

For a moment, Pirojil looked as if he was going to say something more, but they each hacked off a huge chunk of mutton and carried it away on a bed of flatbread. Pirojil and Durine walked down the hall to the room where the three of them were billeted, Pirojil reappearing momentarily with his rucksack before disappearing down the winding stairs, presumably heading for the bathhouse as he popped the last bit of mutton and bread into his mouth.

Kethol was by himself, which was fine with him, although it felt a bit funny to have the first watch. You got into a pattern if you worked together long enough. The usual thing would be for Pirojil to take the first watch, then Durine and Kethol. Stolid Durine could will himself to sleep almost instantly, no matter what had been going on, and once Pirojil was down for the night, nothing short of an attack could easily get him out of bed.

Besides, Kethol liked watching the dawn, and the eastern window at the end of the corridor would have given him a nice view of the sun rising beyond the far wall.

But he just didn’t feel like it, not tonight. Too busy wool-gathering, he supposed.

He walked over to the heavy oak door and carefully, gently, slowly, tried the knob, pushing the door open a scant inch, just enough to assure himself that it wasn’t locked from the inside.

Any attack was unlikely, and one that could reach the Residence itself quickly even more so, but you had to take every precaution you could think of, and pray to a soldier’s god that it would be unnecessary this time.

He sat down in the big leather chair next to the end table and nibbled at the mutton. Not enough garlic, and too much salt, but that was to be expected. Probably a little off, too, but the rabble could hardly expect to get the best cuts.

He was still nibbling away at what remained of the joint when Durine finally reappeared up the stairs, his hair damp and slicked back from the bath. After a quick nod, the big man disappeared into their room.

Kethol would have preferred that Durine stay up for a while to chat, but he wouldn’t ask that of the big man. Sleeping time when you were taking a one-in-three was scant enough.

The trick when standing watch by yourself was always to stay awake and alert. Too much food would be a bad idea, and only an idiot would drink wine on watch. Kethol had known an old, moustachioed sergeant from Rodez who claimed that he was a bit sharper, a bit brighter on watch with a couple of skinfuls of wine in him, and if there was any justice in the world – always a bad bet – somebody had run a spear through his guts soon after Kethol, Pirojil and Durine had lit out, as they had not at that time been desperate enough to be serving under an idiot.

That was the good thing about being an independent: you could be a bit choosy, if you weren’t too choosy. Kethol wouldn’t much care what a sergeant’s personal habits were – he could prefer that his bedmates be large-breasted blonde women, or slender brown-haired boys, or flaming goats, for all Kethol cared – but you stood enough chance of getting killed as it was without having to rely on somebody who made it easy for the enemy.

The distant sound of Durine’s snoring came to his ears, a regular snorp-bleep, snorp-bleep that announced that the big man was resting for the night. Good. Kethol didn’t know why Durine didn’t do that when they were out in the open, when something as innocent as snoring could tell somebody where you were, but he didn’t much care.

The trick was to not close your eyes on watch. Not ever; not for a moment.

Once, as a young man, he had decided to rest his eyes for just a moment on watch, and the next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his eyes in bright reproval. That he had got away with it, that nobody had known of his shame, then or ever, made it worse than if the sergeant had found him asleep and kicked him bloody.

The problem was –

He jerked upright in the chair. He’d heard something.

Damn! There were groans coming from Baron Morray’s room.

‘Pirojil! Durine!’ he shouted, but Kethol didn’t wait for them; he kicked through the door, careless of any damage to the jamb, and rushed in, sword in hand.

The room was dark, lit only by a flickering fire in the hearth up against the wall.

Two bodies were struggling on the massive bed up against the far wall. The simple thing to do would have been to stick a sword-point into the writhing mass, but –

‘Stop.’ Baron Morray, his torso bathed in sweat, was sitting up in his bed. His fingers clawed for the knife on the bedstand, but he had Kethol transfixed with a glare.

Durine and Pirojil were close behind Kethol; he more than saw them, knowing that Durine would move to his right, while Pirojil would guard him on his left.

But not from this.

A pair of eyes peeked out from under the blankets, accompanied by giggling.

‘I’d ask what the meaning of this is,’ the Baron said, ‘but it’s all far too clear, I’m afraid.’ He ignored the giggling, and the way that his bed companion’s struggles to hide herself under the blanket momentarily revealed a flash of a particularly shapely rump.

The Baron patted her on it and snorted. ‘I don’t see much point in hiding, young Kate,’ he said.

She shrugged, and let the blankets drop below her shoulders, brazenly revealing the high young breasts that were every bit as firm as Kethol had imagined they would be.

Just as Kethol had suspected – too late it seemed – it was the serving maid who had delivered the food to the three of them. Easy for a young wench to turn up her nose at a trio of soldiers when she had what no doubt were more rewarding arrangements already made.

Beyond and to the right of the bed, a wooden panel in the inlaid wall had been swung wide open, revealing a dark passage behind it, through which the Baron’s bedmate had apparently arrived.

‘I apologize,’ Kethol said, ‘but –’

‘Get out,’ the Baron said. ‘Just get out of this room. Now.’

It was a bad time to argue with him, but since the Baron wasn’t raising his voice, and probably didn’t want to raise a ruction now, maybe it wasn’t the worst time.

‘No.’ Pirojil’s voice was quiet, but insistent. ‘No, my lord. Not until the door to the hidden passageway is secured.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s no concern of ours who comes and goes into your rooms with your permission, but it’s every concern of ours that nobody can gain access to your rooms without getting by us.’

Durine had taken a lantern down from the wall and was examining a piece of wainscoting on the far wall. ‘There’s another one here,’ he said, grumbling.

And you didn’t see it before? Kethol didn’t ask. It was the sort of thing that they should have thought through, but this sort of bodyguarding was a new thing to the three of them, and they were bound to make mistakes, and Kethol didn’t much like it. He knew enough to act as though the walls had ears, but the walls having doors that could swing open and shut more often than a whore’s crib?

Bloody hell!

‘Well, what do you propose to do?’

There was nothing vaguely unusual or remotely dangerous about a baron inviting a serving girl into his bed, but it was clearly not the sort of thing that Morray would want bruited about, particularly not around Lady Mondegreen.

Kethol walked to the open panel to the hidden passageway and closed it. There was some trick bit of lockwork hidden in the bric-a-brac, but he didn’t trust it, so he slid a dressing chair in front of it, and balanced a clean chamberpot on top of the chair, leaning it against the panelling.

Somebody might still be able to get into the room, but not without making a lot of noise.

Durine had rigged a similar improvised alarm on the other hidden panel, while Pirojil leaned back against the door, his arms crossed in front of him.

‘You’ve done what’s needed. Now get out,’ the Baron said. ‘I can assure you that there will be some discussion of this in the morning.’

Kethol wasn’t at all sure about that. He hoped the Baron would just let the matter drop, but he followed Pirojil’s lead, and bowed his way out of the room.

Durine just shook his head.

Morning broke with Baron Morray off to the east wing of the keep to visit with the ailing Baron Mondegreen and Pirojil, along with Durine and Kethol, barred from the Mondegreen Keep’s private quarters.

Which was about to be expected. Tom Garnett might have made it clear that Morray wasn’t to take a dump without one of the three of them watching to see if some assassin would leap up out of the garderobe and spear his noble arse, but the Captain wasn’t in charge in Mondegreen, and their warrant signed by the Earl of LaMut wasn’t quite that specific; waving it in front of the face of Mondegreen’s guard captain would do nothing more than cause a breeze.

Besides, most of the time, the law is what the most senior noble present says it is, and commoners were used to that.

So the three of them grabbed a skimpy breakfast of bread, onion and sausage in the barracks, and huddled in their cloaks against the cold as they headed across the outer courtyard to where the lackeys and stablemen were trying to prepare the Baron’s carriage, despite the constant interference from the ragged bunch of castle boys in their endless games of tag and kick-the-ball.

It was far too cold for anybody sensible to be running around outdoors if they didn’t have to. As they ran about, the young boys’ breath puffed visibly in the cold air, and one or another would occasionally slip on an icy spot on the courtyard that hadn’t been properly sanded over.

But perhaps the exercise kept them warm, and besides, it was at least something different from their daily chores.

‘Sixthday,’ one of the stablemen explained, as he beckoned at Pirojil to hold onto the reins while he fastened one of the big white geldings into its place in front of the carriage, then beckoned to his assistant to bring out another.

Pirojil didn’t mind helping, although he couldn’t help the way his eyes wandered to the large window in the east wing, across the courtyard, where he assumed that Baron Morray was explaining to Baron Mondegreen, over their own late breakfast, about how three ill-mannered freebooters had interfered with his sleep.

‘Sixthday?’

‘In the old days, they’d have only Sixthday afternoon to waste their time frolicking about like a bunch of ninnies, but things have got sloppy during the war, and the good Baron’s been … occupied with other matters,’ he said. ‘What was the Sixthday afternoon seems to begin earlier every Sixthday morning.’

Other matters. Like dying of some wasting disease that neither clerics nor wizards could touch, apparently – although that was none of Pirojil’s concern.

The lackey fastened a loop to a fitting, and pulled it into place with a loud grunt. ‘A few more blows with a cudgel,’ he said, ‘would do the stableboys a lot more good than additional time to run about like a bunch of squirrels, if you ask me, but the Horsemaster seems to be far more interested in old Cedric’s opinion of which animals are ready for the knacker than he is in my thoughts about which of the boys would learn better with more than a few clouts and a little less time to do whatever they take it in their heads to do.’

Pirojil wasn’t terribly interested in the problems of the stable-man, or in the beating up of young boys, but it didn’t hurt to listen politely, at least for a while.

It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do at the moment, unfortunately.

They should already have left. If Pirojil had been running things, the return trip to LaMut would have left the castle during what they called the ‘wolf’s tail’ down in the Vale – the grey light well before dawn, which hid all colours if not shapes.

On the other hand, the delay had given their betters a good enough opportunity to get their poles greased, apparently, and got Kethol and the other two a good two-thirds of a night’s sleep. Not bad, all things considered, he thought, yawning against the back of his hand. He wondered if there might be a mug full of hot tea in the battered iron pot simmering on the stove in the barracks, and whether it would be tannic enough actually to fry his tongue; of a certainty, it would be hot enough to warm his belly.

Kethol and Durine had set their weapons down under the care of a claque of the castle girls who were busy chatting among themselves while pretending to ignore their young male counterparts.

The two mercenaries had actually joined in the boys’ game.

There were times when Pirojil was more than vaguely suspicious that the two of them had been dropped on their heads as children.

A pair of young ruffians, no more than half Durine’s size, actually tried to tackle the big man, and he fell to the ground, releasing the leather ragbag with what probably looked to the others like an honestly-come-by slip.

Pirojil took a quick glance beyond the carriage into the stables. He reckoned it would be at least another hour before the Mondegreen detachment was ready to ride, and who knew how long they would be waiting for the nobility to –

‘You are Kethol?’ A soldier in Mondegreen livery had come up behind him without his noticing. Pirojil stopped himself from reaching for his sword. That was Pirojil’s fault, and he tried not to let his irritation at himself show on his face. He was getting old.

‘No. I’m Pirojil. Kethol’s the one under that wriggling pile of boys over there.’

‘The Baron will see him now. Will you pull him out of the pile, or shall I?’

‘Baron Mondegreen?’

‘Yes, Baron Mondegreen.’ The soldier frowned in disgust. ‘And in these walls, who else would the Baron be? Now, are you going to get him?’

‘I’d better do it.’ There were some risks involved in interrupting Kethol when he was distracted. The Mut would probably just grab Kethol by the collar or the foot, and the touch of a hand stronger than a boy’s might set Kethol off.

‘Then be quick about it.’ The soldier spun on the ball of his foot and set off toward the keep.

Pirojil shook his head as he walked toward where Kethol was rolling around on the ground.

Lady Mondegreen was attending her husband as he lay propped up with pillows on the massive, brass-railed bed. She smiled a greeting to Kethol, and beckoned him toward the chair next to the bed.

Kethol stood and waited. He hadn’t been told to sit, after all, and you could never tell when some noble would decide that you were being presumptuous.

The room smelled like old death, or maybe it was just the Baron himself. Mondegreen had, so legend had it, been a big and physically powerful man in his youth, but the wasting disease had turned him into a shrivelled relic of what he had been. Before Kethol lay a barely-living object trying not to pant with the exertion of sitting up.

‘Please – remove your cloak,’ the Baron said, ‘or I fear you’ll find yourself sweating furiously.’ His voice was weak, but he was forcing himself not to pause for breath until he completed each sentence. Death would claim Baron Mondegreen sooner rather than later, and it would come as more of a blessing than a curse, but he would not go down without fighting it.

Kethol removed his cloak, and after looking around, folded it over the back of a chair.

Even without his thick cloak, the room was too hot. Castles were famous for being draughty, but somebody seemed to have taken great care in the mortaring of the cracks in these walls, and the huge, floor-to-ceiling tapestries blocked any flow of air that remained.

The hearth, on the opposite side of the chamber to the bed, held a fire with a nice glow to it, and it warmed the room enough that Kethol couldn’t understand how the Baron could stand being under his thick pile of blankets.

‘Please sit by me, Sergeant Kethol,’ the Baron said, indicating the chair beside the bed. ‘I trust that you have breakfasted?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Kethol said, seating himself. It happened to be true, but the smell in the room would have taken away his appetite, anyway.

‘I understand that I have you and your two companions to thank for my wife’s safe arrival here,’ the Baron said. ‘I thought that it was only right that I thank you in person.’

Kethol didn’t quite know what to say. Lady Mondegreen seemed nice, was pretty, and was far more pleasant with the hired warriors than she had any need to be, but if he’d had to watch her spitted on a Tsurani sword while he protected Morray from a scratch, he would have done just that, and would have let it bother him later.

‘You’re welcome, of course, my lord,’ he finally said. ‘But I don’t think we actually did very much.’ That, at least, was true.

The Baron smiled knowingly. Kethol didn’t like the way the old eyes watched him. It reminded him too much of the eyes he’d seen in a mottled mirror.

‘Yes,’ the Baron said, ‘and a thousand tons of thanks will buy you a pint of ale, as long as it comes with a bent green copper, eh?’

‘Well, yes.’ Kethol nodded. ‘But the thanks are welcome, nonetheless, my lord.’

‘Yes. I’m sure that they are, Sergeant Kethol.’ Baron Mondegreen broke into a fit of coughing, and stifled it only with an effort, then turned to his wife. ‘My dear, would you be so very kind as to get me a half cup of that wonderful tea that Menicia has been brewing? I’d have the servant do it, but you always seem to add just the right amount of sugar.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.