The King of the Crags Read online

  Jehal almost laughed. The lord chamberlain was supposed to be the eyes and ears and voice of the king. Strictly, even Jehal had to defer to the chamberlain’s orders, although the last chamberlain to try that had retired from his office in something of a hurry some years back. “What a fine suggestion. I sometimes wonder if we should give them a hatchling. Or an egg or two. Let them live with the consequences.”

  “My Prince! As you have so pointedly observed, I am your eyrie-master, and that is the worst treason to escape even your lips for a good long time. I should be fleeing as fast as I could to send word to the speaker and the grand master of the alchemists.” He shook his head. “That you should even speak it. Jeiros would shriek for your head at the mere whiff of such a thing.”

  “Oh pish-tosh! I wasn’t advocating we should give them any potions. Only a hatchling.” Meteroa was still glowering. Jehal sighed. “Well I thought the idea of one of their ships drifting back into port with nothing left alive except an awake and very hungry dragon was rather amusing.”

  Meteroa’s look was acidic. “A veritable earthquake of hilarity, I’m sure. But no, Your Highness. It is not the Taiytakei. This is news that concerns your bride and it will not wait.”

  “Oh well, now I am suddenly quite convinced that I shall not like whatever you’re so eager to say. I should warn you that I have been considering breathing new life into certain ancient traditions regarding the bearers of bad news.”

  “Then I shall dress it up otherwise. Wondrous news, Your Highness. The speaker has called a council of kings and queens. Oh joyous, joyous times.”

  Meteroa’s voice was so dry it could have swallowed the sea. Whatever good humor Jehal had been nursing left him right then. “She’s putting Queen Shezira on trial, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. And King Valgar too.”

  “Oh screw Valgar. Inconsequential king with an inconsequential voice.”

  “But with a not inconsequential queen, Your Highness.”

  “Yes, yes, married to Lystra’s big sister. You didn’t suppose such a thing would slip my mind, did you? But still inconsequential beside Shezira.” He clasped his hands tightly together. “Zafir will demand Shezira’s head and she’ll probably get it. Jaslyn will take Shezira’s throne and Almiri already speaks for Valgar’s realm. Put the two of them together and they’re as strong as the King of the Crags. Put Sirion with them and they’ll split the realms clean in two. War, fire, death, destruction. Everything burns.”

  “Perhaps.” The eyrie-master raised an eyebrow. “However, I cannot help but observe that it will likely all happen very far away from Furymouth.”

  “Furymouth may be far enough removed, Eyrie-Master, but I am not. I am precisely in the middle.”

  “And very adroitly done, Your Highness. I bow to your talent for blending strategy and mischief. A lover on one side and a bride on the other. You may jump to one or the other as it pleases you. As the tides of their fortune wax and wane and they quietly rip each other to pieces.”

  Jehal could have slapped him. “You are naive and shortsighted sometimes, uncle. If they rip each other to pieces, it may be of little consequence to us, but it will not be quiet. It may be a surprise to you, but I would prefer not to see the realms torn to shreds, and that is most certainly what such a war would do. You might as well give the Taiytakei that hatchling and the potions to go with it. That might be all that’s left.” He paced. “Since I intend to follow Zafir to the speaker’s throne, I would prefer to rule more than a desert of ash. No, I shall stand between them.”

  “Not choose between them, My Lord?” Meteroa raised an eyebrow.

  “I have made one speaker, Eyrie-Master. When I make another, it will be me. No.” Jehal pursed his lips. “No choosing. Not yet. I shall answer the speaker’s summons and attend her council. I shall argue with passion and conviction that the realms will be safer if Queen Shezira lives. And then we shall see.”

  “I’m afraid to say, Your Highness, that you are quite pointedly not invited to the council. Your father may attend and his voice will be heard. Not that anyone, even if he is able to speak on that particular day, will understand a word of what comes out. You, however, are courteously advised to stay home and keep feeding the starlings. Whatever that is supposed to mean.”

  Jehal hissed. “Oh! Believe me, Eyrie-Master, the speaker could not have made her meaning more clear. Nevertheless.” He looked at Meteroa long and hard. “Zafir can do what she likes with King Valgar, but if she executes Shezira, both of Lystra’s sisters will go to war. That must be stopped.”

  Meteroa raised an eyebrow. “I trust that Princess Lystra and I will no longer be hearing complaints of boredom?”

  Jehal suddenly grinned. “That depends on how long it takes me to change Zafir’s mind. You may go, Eyrie-Master.”

  Alone, Jehal’s grin fell away. He stared blankly into space. He’d put Zafir on the throne. He’d always known he might not control her but he’d never given it much thought.

  And now it’s time that I did. He turned and walked briskly toward his father’s apartments. Something else was long overdue, something to which he’d given a great deal more thought over the years. Something best done quickly while he had the will to do it. When he reached his father’s rooms, he sent all the servants away with orders to find Lord Meteroa and bring him. He waited until they were all gone and then stepped inside, through the antechambers and into his father’s sickroom. A long dark room, lit only by the embers of the hearth and thin curtains of sunlight that squeezed through the cracks in the shuttered window. A room he’d come to less and less over the years. I used to come here every day, in the beginning. I’d hold your hand and look for any signs that you were getting better, filled with a strange melange of fear and hope in case there would be a miracle. But you weren’t and there wasn’t. You were always getting worse and miracles, it turns out, are for fools.

  Prince Jehal sat by his father’s bed and took his father’s hand. He leaned toward the old man’s ear.

  “I know you can hear me,” he whispered, soft as silk. “I know your mind is still alive in there, even while your body wastes away. Even though you can’t speak, can’t feed yourself, can’t do anything much but lie there and stare, I know you can hear me. If there’s anything you have to say, this is your last chance to say it. Spare me the complaints that I never come to see you though. I know I’ve not been a good son, but then a better son might have come from a better father, eh. I have to go away again now. Queen Zafir is waiting for me. I made her want me, Father, and now I might have to destroy her. I did the same to her mother, Aliphera. Does that make you sad, Father? I know you liked Aliphera. I think you’d like Zafir better though. She squeals like a pig. Oh, I’m sorry.” Jehal gently wiped his father’s brow. “I suppose I shouldn’t speak of such things. Do the women I send to your bed still give you any pleasure? I hope so. I picked them myself.”

  He paused and squeezed his father’s hand, stretching his senses for any response. He thought he felt a twitch, but that could simply have been his father’s condition. It could have been anything. Most likely it was nothing.

  He whispered again. “I don’t know if you’ve been keeping track of things in there, but if you have, you must know that Speaker Hyram’s time as master of the Adamantine Palace has been and gone. He’s dead now. Did anyone tell you that? He went mad with grief and despair, with the help of a little cocktail of poisons that I made for him, and then he threw himself off a balcony. You were my key to him, Father. You and Zafir. I couldn’t have done it without you. Pathetic, drooling, shaking, empty shell of a man that you are. You let him see what time had in store for him, until the dread of it gnawed at his bones. Until the terror of age and impotence and helplessness ate his heart. Well he’s gone now, your old enemy. You survived him and you had a good part in killing him. I thought you’d want to know that. I thought you deserved to know why I let you linger like this for so long.”

  Jehal rose. He had tears in
his eyes. “I’ve killed one queen and one speaker and made another of each. Because of me yet another king and queen are marked to die. I’m sorry, Father, I really am, but I had to. I know you understand. But I am not sorry for this, for what I’m about to do. I should have done it a long time ago. I should never have let you suffer so.”

  He looked into his father’s blank eyes, searching for something, for any little spark. They were dull and dead. The only sign of life was the slow rise and fall of his chest. With deliberate slowness Jehal picked up a pillow and pressed it hard into his father’s face, until the breathing stopped. He held it there for a very long time. There was no struggle. A mercy. For both of us.

  Finally, Jehal lifted the pillow away. He looked at his father’s dead face for one last time. “I do wish you could have told me, just once, that you were proud of what I’ve done. That I’m not a monster like Calzarin.” He stroked his father’s cheek, cold as glass even when he’d been alive. “But you didn’t and now you can’t anymore. Go and be with your ancestors. Maybe now you’re dead you can watch over me as you never did while you were alive.”

  Jehal took a deep breath, and when that wasn’t enough to stop his head spinning he took another. He put the pillow carefully back on the bed and laid his father’s hands across his chest. As an afterthought, as something to do while he waited for his heart to stop racing, he threw open the shutters and let daylight flood the room. In the sunlight his father’s skin was so pale that it seemed to glow.

  “Sent away, summoned back, sent away, summoned back. I do wish you’d make up your mind, Your Highness . . . Oh.”

  Jehal spun around. Meteroa was in the doorway. He had the audacity to disturb him here instead of waiting outside. Jehal put a trembling finger to his lips. “Not a word, Eyrie-Master, not another word. In this moment and this place, you’re a sneer away from losing your head to the sharpness of your own tongue.”

  Meteroa’s face was a mask hidden under a mask. For a long time he stood stock still, staring at the dead king. Then he bowed. “You’re going north?”

  Jehal nodded. “Lystra stays here, under your protection. Whatever happens to her happens to you. As before.”

  “He was my brother, Your Holiness.” Meteroa’s face was still blank. Jehal barely heard him.

  “I’m leaving right now. From this room I will get my white horse. I will ride to Clifftop as fast as it will carry me and I will fly tonight, in the dark, whether Wraithwing agrees with me or not.”

  “And what shall I tell your queen?”

  “Tell her what she needs to know. Tell her that I am sorry, but that sometimes a prince has to do what a prince has to do. Now get out! When I’m gone, see to my father.”

  Meteroa backed away, vanishing into the shadows outside the door. Jehal spared his father one last look, and then followed as fast as he could. All the way to the palace, and I will not look back, for now I am a king and my voice will be heard.

  15

  THE DUTY OF KINGS

  Jeiros, acting grand master alchemist, cracked open his door, peered into the empty passageway beyond and slipped out like a schoolboy. A little voice in his head mocked him for his stupidity. This wasn’t going to achieve anything. Someone was going to see him sneaking around in the dark like this and get suspicious. If he’d just gone where he was going in broad daylight, no one would bat an eyelid.

  The little voice didn’t stop him though. It only made him even more careful. You forget, he told himself, that I’ve done things like this before.

  When you were ten years old, snapped the voice. When you were a little boy and it was what all little boys did.

  He reached the end of the passage where it opened out into a stairwell. The Gatehouse was actually two towers, one on either side of a pair of wooden doors called the Dragon Gates. The gates themselves were bigger than some castles. They were close to fifty feet high, which made them twice as tall as the walls around most of the palace. They were bound with iron, and when closed and locked it took a hundred men about an hour to open them. When they were fully open, they were large enough for any dragon in the realms to walk through.

  He chided himself. That’s an exaggeration. He peered into the blackness of the stairs and opened his ears, listening for any footsteps. When he didn’t hear any, he tiptoed down. The alchemists lived on the upper levels of the east stair. Where he wanted to be required that he go all the way down to the bottom, across the gates, and then all the way up the west stair. And all of it without being seen.

  Back to the gates. The gates gave him something else to think about. They were, in their own quiet way, a miracle. They weren’t hinged because no one had ever made a hinge remotely big enough or strong enough. Instead, they pivoted on a bearing, with huge iron and lead counterweights balancing the mass of the doors. Except even that wasn’t enough, because no one could make a bearing that would take such a weight without collapsing, so most of the weight of the doors and the counterweights was held up by a series of steel ropes that then rested on a pair of massive stone pilings on either side of the pivot. It was said that when the palace was built, some three hundred years ago, the gates took as long to build as the rest of it put together. The Gatehouse towers were as large as they were because they had to be to support the gates. Sometimes the alchemists joked that the maze of rooms and passages and staircases the towers contained were just something to fill all the spare space.

  There. He was at the bottom of the stairs and no one had seen him. So far. He unlocked the door into the Gateyard, opened it, locked it again and slipped into the warm night air. No one was watching, but still, this was where one of those mythical potions of invisibility would have come in handy.

  He hurried across from the east tower to the west. There was no avoiding the guards who stood by the gates—the gates within the gates that allowed people and horses and even carts and wagons to come and go without ever having to open the Dragon Gates themselves. But in the darkness, with his hood pulled up, they wouldn’t know who he was. He steered a wide course around them and no one challenged him. Pitiful, sneered the little voice. As if any of this mattered.

  Except it did matter. It mattered a lot. He opened the door to the west stair. That was one door that was never locked, for it led into the quarters of the officers and senior staff of the Adamantine Men, and no one would be daft enough to go into a place like that unless they had a very good reason to be there. Jeiros ran up the stairs as fast as he could, almost to the top, and banged on a door. He was afraid that he might have to bang several times, given the hour, but the door swung open of its own volition. It wasn’t even shut.

  “Grand Master.” The Night Watchman was sitting in a hard-backed chair, tilting back with two bare feet up on a little table, squinting at a book that he was holding at arm’s length from his face.

  “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  “We never sleep, remember?” Vale Tassan slowly leaned forward, took his feet off the table and replaced them with the book. Jeiros wasn’t sure whether he meant it as a joke or whether he was serious.

  “You need a Taiytakei eyepiece,” he said, to change the subject.

  “No, I don’t.” A slight smile played across Vale’s face. “I need books to be scribed with bigger letters. The Night Watchman cannot wear an eyepiece.”

  “He can in the privacy of his own chambers.” Jeiros stepped in and closed the door behind him. When he turned back, Vale was giving him a very pointed look.

  “And what, exactly, is this privacy to which you refer, Grand Master? As you see, my door is always open to my men and my friends.”

  “Well it’s shut now.” Jeiros looked for a bolt or a lock but there wasn’t one. “I require a moment or two of your attention, Night Watchman.” His scowl softened and he bit absently on a knuckle. “I need an ear, perhaps.”

  “Then go and see Aruch.” Vale shook his head and made to settle back down with his book.

  “No. I need your ear, Night Watch
man. Who do you serve?”

  “What an odd question.” Vale cocked his head and then rose slowly to his feet. “I serve the speaker, Grand Master. I am her sword and her shield. I execute her will and her enemies. That is my whole and only purpose. Would you like a drink? I don’t myself, but I sometimes have visitors who do. I have a collection of fruit wines that I’m told is very good, and it seems a shame for them to go to waste.”

  “No!” Jeiros took a few quick steps into the room and looked around for a place to sit down. All he could see was a chair by a table covered in maps. He took another step toward it and felt a hand on his arm, turning him, pulling him away.

  “That table is for Adamantine Men,” said Vale quietly. “Have my chair. I will squat on the floor. I’m quite used to it.”

  “Do they teach you history when they make you a soldier? I don’t suppose they do.”

  “They teach you how to fight and how to die for your comrades,” said Vale mildly. Then he looked up at his walls, covered in bookshelves, books and scrolls, and made a gesture with his arm. “However, I have undertaken extra study over the years.”

  “Do you know how the Order of the Scales came to be?”

  Now Vale smiled. “No. I know at least half a dozen different stories which claim to be of how the Order of the Scales came to be. All of which disagree, and all of which are provably false, at least in part. Do you know, Grand Master? Which story have you come to sell me tonight? Is it the one where the alchemists are nothing more or less than blood-mages with a different name? Is it the one where you slew them or the one where you chased them away? What are you today? Are you noble heroes or dark villains?”

  Jeiros clenched his fists. “Let me tell you who we are. We are the ones who keep the dragons at bay. Not you, not the speaker, not the kings and queens of the nine realms. Us. Without us, none of the rest of you matter a whit. You’d all be dead in a flash. Yes, we are descended from blood-mages. Our power has its root in theirs. We are descended from those who sided with the men who became the kings and queens of the realms when the blood-mages were broken.”