The Warlord's Domain Read online

  The taulath was gazing equably at him when his thoughts came back to the here-and-now. As equably as the blank-masked face permitted, anyway, and with an air of smug satisfaction that neither the mask nor the featureless dark clothing could conceal. "And don't tell me that you've come here without the money, my Lord King; you've never done so before." He slid soundlessly from the table, all business now. "Talvalin. Where can I find him?"

  "I… don't know."

  The taulath stared at him, not believing his ears. "If I had known what you were going to say, Lord King, the price would have been far higher still." Then, gathering himself together somewhat: "But you must have some intimation of his last whereabouts, surely?"

  "The Drusalan Empire… probably," Rynert smiled faintly, "as far from the city of Egisburg as he can get."

  "He was involved in that?"

  "He was directly responsible for it."

  "Then small wonder you want him out of the way. If he'll do that to his enemies, who knows what he might do to an ex-friend…"

  "I told you before—"

  "—And I decided not to listen. Oh, I and my people can find him for you, King Rynert—and kill him for you, too—all for the price I asked before I found out how much work was involved. But I'll expect some small favors afterward. Nothing costly; just immunities and pardons. As many as needed, and as often as needed."

  "Feel free to leave now."

  "Haven't you forgotten something?"

  Rynert looked at the dark silhouette, thinking how utterly inhuman it looked, and reached inside his tunic. The taulath tensed, relaxing only when Rynert's hand came out holding nothing more aggressive than a roll of treasury scrip. He looked at the sheets of paper as if they were poisonous, then peeled off ten and flipped them disdainfully toward the assassin, with exactly the same gesture as a man might make when flicking something foul off his fingertips.

  "These are good?" the taulath said, looking at where the scrip-sheets lay at his feet and as yet making no move to pick them up. "You know I prefer coin."

  "And I prefer what I prefer. Take them or leave them."

  The assassin took them; but lifted each sheet from the floor with such elegance that whatever loss of dignity Rynert had intended was quite absent. "They had best be good, Lord King; I'm not beyond going to work on my own account."

  "Get out," said Rynert. The taulath watched him for a moment, not moving, then began slowly backing toward whichever window or unguarded door he had used to get in. When the man paused, evidently on the point of yet another dry little observation, Rynert's patience snapped, "Get away from me!" he screamed, springing from his chair and drawing his sword with a rage-born speed and energy he hadn't known that he still possessed.

  And on the instant of his scream, the doors burst open and Rynert's guards came running in. Hard on their heels were the noblemen of the Alban Crown Council, all now armed with their newly-recovered swords. Still crouched in a fighting posture that was made foolish by his wide eyes and shock-gaping mouth, Rynert stared at them only to find that none of them were staring back at him but rather at the place behind him where he had last seen the taulath. There was a soft laugh from the mercenary, still in plain view for just that instant too many, then silence as he took his leave as quickly and quietly as he had arrived.

  "Rynert." Hanar Santon spoke it: just the name and nothing else. He was looking now at the roll of treasury scrip still resting on the arm of Rynert's chair, and had plainly drawn his own conclusions from all that he had seen.

  The king colored and his hands clenched into fists. "I have a title, my lord," he said.

  "No, not now." Santon shook his head; it was less a negatory gesture than that of a man trying to clear his mind of confusion. "My father took his own life because he felt that he had failed you, yet you repay his memory with this. You have no title, Rynert; you've forfeited that. And duty, and respect, and honor. I defy you, man. I offer you defiance and I challenge you to change my views."

  In the dreadful stillness they could all hear how harsh and rapid Rynert's breathing had become. The quick flush of rage had drained out of his face and left it white as bone. "What about the rest of you?" he asked at last.

  Heads turned imperceptibly toward the man whose seniority of age, rank and respect made him their chosen spokesman. Lord Dacurre looked at them all, then walked to the King's Chair and leafed through the roll of scrip-sheets. They fell through his fingers to the floor like leaves in autumn. "Lord Santon speaks for us all," the old man said. "You must give an explanation, or—" Dacurre drew the sheathed tsepan from his belt and looked at it for a moment before setting it down on the chair's cushion, "—do as Endwar Santon did. The choice is yours, Rynert an-Kerochan."

  Rynert the Crooked. No one had called him that in twenty years, and right now it was a name which referred to more than just his twisted body. The king began to tremble; his heart was kicking inside the cage of his ribs like something frantic to be free. Black and crimson spots dancing across his vision all but hid his treacherous, self-seeking councillors from sight, and a stabbing pain was running like hot lead down his left arm. Rynert swayed, then caught his balance with an effort.

  "I choose death," he said, steadily and with all the dignity that he could summon. He took a single step forward and the hall reeled about him as agony exploded in his chest. Rynert's sword clattered on the tiles as he dropped it to clutch at the left wrist of an arm that felt on fire. Sweat filmed his pallid skin as he clenched his teeth to hold back a cry that was more shock and outrage than pain. His physicians had first warned him of this long ago, and many times since then; a warning he had ignored, like so much else over the years. A warning he had no more cause to heed… not now.

  The pain faded, not vanishing but gathering for a fresh assault, and all of Rynert's world narrowed to a single point of focus: Lord Santon's face. It wasn't smiling, or gloating, or satisfied; that he could have accepted and understood. Instead its expression was one of pity and regret, that the illusion of what Hanar Santon had thought his king had been, the lord to whom he had given his duty and respect, should prove to be frail flesh prone to failings after all.

  Rynert did not want pity and suddenly hated Santon for daring to consider it. Releasing his throbbing arm, the king bent low and grabbed for his fallen sword, gripped its hilt and cut savagely at the young lord's face. Cut at the expression of pity, to cleave it off.

  Santon reacted to the attack as he would to any such, instantly and without conscious thought. He drew his own taiken from its scabbard and straight into a simple parry that deflected Rynert's blow—and continued through to a cut of his own…

  Rynert's sword-point lowered, relaxing; then his fingers slackened their grip and the blade fell chiming to the floor again as both hands pressed against his belly and the long straight slash now crossing it from one hip to the other. Everything was suddenly so still that it seemed the very night noises had paused to listen. "That was stupid," he said after a moment, although no one could be sure if he meant his own or Santon's thoughtless actions. Blood ran through his fingers and made a glistening puddle on the floor.

  Rynert stared at it and then sat down, heavily and uncoordinated, on the steps of his throne, looking at each of his councillors in turn through eyes that were already glazing. "Who will stop the taulath now, my lords?" Rynert said, and smiled a horrid smile that let blood dribble from his mouth to make a dark red beard across his chin. "If anybody even wants to. There are the Talvalin lands, after all; among the richest holdings in all Alba…" He laughed, a sound like a wet cough. "Protest what you will to each other, gentlemen, but don't trouble me, I pray you. Unless I misread you all most gravely, I leave this land the gift of such war as it has not known for half a thousand years. Make me a liar… if you can." Again he smiled and again blood leaked between his teeth. "Now leave. I'm dying and I'd as soon do it in private."

  Nobody moved. They stood in silence, watching him.

  Rynert watched t
hem in his turn for a few moments with a faint look of amusement on his bloodied face. "I did what I did because I was afraid to die," he said finally. "I'm not afraid anymore. You can only fear what you have a chance to escape. My choice…" The mocking humor drained from his face as the last blood and the last remnant of life drained from his body, and King Rynert of Alba fell sideways and was dead

  There was a funereal stillness in the shadowy hall as the lords of Alba's Crown Council stared furtively at one another and at the corpse huddled on the floor, and then there were footsteps as someone at the back of the group turned and walked swiftly away. None of the others looked to see who it was; that would have meant admitting too much, both to themselves and to their erstwhile colleagues: that each man among them also wanted to leave and be about his own suddenly urgent affairs, and that each among them wished that he had been first out of this room with its abattoir smell and its cloud of unspoken accusations.

  One by one they left, treading softly for respect or caution, or with the slapping footfalls of those who didn't care what the others thought. At last there was only young Lord Santon and old Lord Dacurre, standing on either side of the blood and the body, one with a sword in his hand and the other with something close to regret on his face.

  Dacurre looked at the blade with its smeared stain and shook his head. "He was dying before you hit him," the old man said.

  "What do you mean? How do you know?" Santon blurted out the questions, not wanting some sort of worthless comfort just because Dacurre had been his father's friend.

  "Rynert was never a strong man. Some illness in his childhood… His heart tore in his chest, from rage, or fear, or shock, or a score of other things, I knew it when I saw it in his face. I've seen it happen before; it might well happen to me, now that I'm old. But that," he indicated Santon's taiken, "didn't kill him. It just made matters quicker."

  "And harder to prove."

  "To the others, maybe. Not to me." Dacurre looked up and down the hall, found it empty even of guards and muttered something savage under his breath. "Gone to grab what they can. Bastards!" Then he cleared his throat in irritation at himself. "I'm sorry, boy. Forget I said that. It's their prerogative, when the king dies… unexpectedly. Whoever follows might not care to employ them again, so they have to make the best of it… Tradition."

  Santon looked at him blankly, not really understanding.

  "Clean your sword and sheathe it," Dacurre told him, suddenly brisk. "We've got things to do."

  "What?" Then understanding dawned. "Oh. Him. Why?"

  "Because… Because he was the king once, and because he's dead now, and because there's nobody else. Just us. No matter what he was or did, he's entitled to the decencies at least. So straighten his limbs and close his eyes, and find something to clean his face."

  The old man bent over the body of his king and tugged at the dead weight with both hands, then swore disgustedly as the corpse made a sound that was half-belch and half-groan; a smell that was a mingling of blood and wine pricked at the air and Hanar Santon jerked two steps backward, whimpering and jamming his knuckles against his teeth. "Come along, help me here!" Dacurre snapped, and then saw how the color had leached from the younger man's face. "Oh, he's dead all right. I just moved him wrongly—squashed out whatever air was left inside him… which I wouldn't have done if you'd given me some help…"

  Santon shivered, finding himself still unaccustomed to sudden death and the aftermath of slaughter. He had not witnessed his father's formal suicide, and the other two people whose deaths he had attended had taken their leave of life peacefully and in bed. "Will there… will there be a war?" he asked, trying to concentrate on something—anything—the.

  "Eh?" Dacurre rubbed his hands together in a useless attempt to get the blood off them. "I don't know; I truly don't. And to be honest with you, my young Lord San-tori, I don't much care. Though I suspect we'll find out. Lift him. Carefully now—I said carefully! You opened him up, don't finish it by spilling him all over the floor."

  Santon's mouth quirked with nausea at the prospect and he looked away from the gaping wound. Nobody had ever warned him that the culmination of his taiken training would result in this. A decorous smear of red, perhaps, but not… He shuddered. "What—what about Aldric Talvalin then? And the taulath? I mean, with the king dead…"

  "I don't know how to contact assassins or call them off. Or where to find Talvalin."

  "So what will happen?"

  Dacurre shrugged as best he could and gestured with a jerk of his chin at the body they both carried. "Something like this, I fancy. Except that I can't guess who it will be. Come on, boy, hurry it up. Dammit, these were my best formal robes once and it feels as if he's leaking again…"

  Chapter Two

  The angled shafts of sunlight were golden with suspended dust, but he couldn't see…

  The warm air was heavy with the scent of mint and roses, but he couldn't breathe…

  He was trying to break free, but something far, far stronger than himself was holding him down so that he couldn't move…

  "Aldric… Aldric … !"

  And there was waking, and sanity; awareness that he was no longer alone, no longer helpless. Awareness that…

  "It was only a dream, dear heart. Only a dream."

  Aldric stared at the fluttering, new-lit candle flame and watched his own limbs as a shudder racked through him. The flame's reflection gleamed back at him from skin entirely sheathed in clammy sweat. The sweat that comes with fear. "A dream… ?" he echoed, ashamed of the tremor in his voice, and took three slow, deep breaths to calm himself, making them last so that he wouldn't have to think of anything else for a while.

  "I didn't think it was the kind of dream you'd want to continue. By the look of you I was right." There was concern in Kyrin's voice and in her eyes. Concern for more than just her lover scared awake in the night by a bad dream; because both of them knew that Aldric's dreams had an ugly habit of coming true. She had lived through the last part of one nightmare already and had no wish to see another.

  Aldric looked at her and recognized the source of her worries. He dragged an uneven smile from somewhere and plastered it across a mouth which didn't want to wear it just now. "You were right. Oh, how very right…"

  Kyrin was watching him, waiting for whatever he was going to tell her—if he was going to tell her anything at all. There was a cup of watered wine in her hand, and Aldric reached out for it with a hand far steadier than it had any right to be.

  "I must have been tangled in the bedclothes," he said and took a long drink, staring over the rim of the cup at the sheets twisted like ropes around his legs. "They were holding me down…"

  This most private nightmare Kyrin knew already. She alone. He had told her of it a long time ago because he had known, somehow, that she would listen and more, that she would understand. Only someone he loved and who loved him in their turn could understand.

  When he had been aypan-kailin, a teenaged warrior cadet, sex to Aldric and the others of his age was an occasional experiment between the very closest friends, another facet of a complex adolescence in the near-monastic environment of training barracks. Like the other small and private pleasures of which the training and the tutors had no part, it was one with sharing secrets, sharing a purloined bottle and sharing the same miseries as the rough wine wreaked its revenge… Until one hot afternoon in the deserted tack-room of Dunrath's old stables when all of that had changed. That was when Aldric, aged sixteen and cleaning harness during a solitary punishment detention, learned the meaning and the pain of rape from the prefect who was supposedly supervising him.

  From that time forward there had been no real friends, only "acquaintances" distanced by distrust. There had never been anything approaching love for other than family, who saw nothing more than a quiet, introspective younger son growing even more withdrawn and silent, and sometimes there had been no love even for himself. Not long after the rape he had gone out quietly into a
cloudless night and made an oath to the watching stars— and to the One who watched beyond them—that he would never hurt anyone as he had been hurt.

  And four years afterward, it no longer mattered any-way. That was when Duergar Vathach's murderous plotting on behalf of the Drusalan Empire had turned his whole world upside down, and his family were gone, and he was first a landless wanderer and then a wizard's fosterling, and the vengeful nature he had fought so hard to keep in check became instead something to encourage. Not merely a spasm of ferocity that was an attempt to make himself feel clean and regain a little of his self-respect, but something to be nurtured as an honorable obligation in a killing matter. They were all of them, all killing matters nowadays…

  "What have you to say for yourself, Hautheisart Voord?"

  Etzel, Grand Warlord of the Drusalan Empire, erstwhile paramount commander of half her armies and— until Emperor Ioen had shown himself capable of independent thought—power behind the throne, spoke softly, but his eyes and his face betrayed the anger that his words did not.

  "Woydach, I did all that you asked of me. I did my best."

  "In the past, hautheisart, your best has been a deal better than it was this time. Indulge me. Explain in your own words exactly what went wrong."

  "The long version, Woydach, or the short?"

  "Try the short. Save the long for later… when I decide if you have a later."

  Voord's head jerked up sharply at that, and he stared first at Etzel and then at the two armored guardsmen who flanked the Grand Warlord's chair. It was a high-backed, wide-armed seat, that chair, not a throne for the only reason that no one had yet applied the word to it, and it was set on a raised dais of four steps so that Etzel could look down on whoever was standing in the main body of his audience chamber—or .sitting round-shouldered on an uncushioned, uncomfortable wooden stool with his hands clasped between his knees as Voord was doing. There was enough room behind and to either side of the chair for maybe ten guards; that there were only two now was more an expression of Etzel's contempt for the man on the stool than for any more practical reason, even though the pair who remained were among the dozen or so in the Bodyguard who had been invariably seen in Etzel's presence for the past three years. They were his sword and his shield, one to protect him and the other to ensure that those he commanded to die did so without delay.