Gold Throne in Shadow (44 page)

“It was not our first choice. We would prefer to keep its existence a well-forgotten secret and to preserve it against exhaustion. But when Lala could not seduce you, we had to find another way.”

The thought of Lalania striving to sleep with one of those
things
made his stomach clench. With an act of will he stopped himself from throwing up. The wine was first class. It was too expensive to waste.

“Why did you want her to do that?”

“We are certain the creature's control over its stolen body is insufficient to perform such intimacy. When you resisted Lala's every lure, and turned down the woman she connived into your bed, I became convinced that your chastity was merely a cover.”

So he had Lalania to thank for his unexpected visitor in the night rather than his innate charm and good looks. The troubadour had been exerting an unknown amount of influence over his every interaction with the people of the realm. He had no idea how much of his fame or trouble was her fault instead of his.

“I watched you on many occasions, but you never let your mask slip. I realized that you must either be innocent, or a fiend of diabolic proportion and discipline.”

He almost asked her how she had spied on him, until he glanced down at the crystal ball.

“Next we set you to a test, Christopher. One under our control, instead of deep in the Wild. A band of thugs had seized an inn on the border. We learned of it too late to save the innkeeper's family, but nonetheless resolved to punish the murderers. Our College has few resources: our strength in numbers is little more than what you saw today. Attacking Too Tall Tan and his Bloody Mummers was not a task undertaken lightly. And then you agreed to come to the College, alone, without your screening cloud of boys.”

“Friea, did you consider that if I had lost that fight, I would be dead?”

“We did consider it. Our company waited but a short distance away, and I had your own men close at hand as well, led to your rescue by Carala. If you had died, you would have lived again. We would have succored your body and your Saint would have succored your soul. But with the threat posed to you, we assumed you would be forced to reveal your true nature to defeat them. I was watching. I was waiting to see the monster reveal itself.”

He was having trouble keeping the wine down. Again.

“You were watching what they were going to do to Lala?”

“Yes.” She glared at him. “I have seen worse, and not been in a position to do anything about it. But Lala played her part well. By becoming a victim instead of a threat, she made them toy with her, giving us time to act.”

“Did she know you were ready to save her?” He wondered how much of her fear had been acting.

“No,” Friea admitted. “She surely must have known we were watching, but she could not know we were close enough to intervene. You must forgive her: she knew only that we wanted her at that inn, that night. If she had known more, you might have plucked it from her mind by spell or craft. And you must forgive us: we were not aware of the assassin's involvement. We did not expect her poison, or that all-consuming fire.”

The old witch had played fast and loose with other people's lives. She saw his accusation in his eyes.

“We needed only to save a fingernail, Christopher. Your Saint would have revived you, like he did before. And we would have paid for Lala, too.”

“Just a Darkling moment. If I was such a monster, why would the Saint bring me back the first time? Wasn't the fact that he was on my side proof that I wasn't a brain-eating octopus from Hell?”

Friea stared at him earnestly. “Where there can be one
hjerne-spica
, there can be two.”

“You can't be serious.”

“I can, and I am. My entire life I have been mocked as a superstitious old fool, even when I was young. I saw shadows at noon, they said. A silly girl who could not tell nightmares from nightsoil. And yet, I have watched my College side-lined and reduced, while the reach of the Shadow grows steadily. It falls over the Gold Throne, of course; but that is only to be expected. A truly diabolical plan would corrupt the White Church at the same time. And the
hjerne-spica
are nothing if not the very definition of diabolical.”

“Can I take it I passed your tests? And by extension, the Saint as well?”

She bowed her head. “Yes. The null-stone has not only proven you human, but also free of mind-altering enchantment. You are neither the monster we seek nor its servant. We were wrong;
I
was wrong. My only excuse is that my reasons seemed persuasive to me. We will not doubt you or yours again.”

A lame surrender, for all the trouble she had caused him.

“It's going to take more than that. I don't want you off my back; I want you on my side. And I won't set any ambushes on you to get it, or ask you to sleep with monsters. All I want is Lala. No, damn it, not her body. Her service. Full-time, as an advisor. You'll keep me out of trouble with the nobles while I teach the peasants how to make trouble. You'll help me find my assassin. You'll tell me things, without making me explain why I need to know them. And you'll send Uma to the Saint get her face fixed.”

Friea smiled graciously. “Accepted, my Lord Vicar.” Of course she was smiling. He'd just taken her viper to his bosom and buttoned his shirt over it. He'd never have another secret from the conniving old biddy. “Can I render you any other service this day?”

For once, he was out of questions. He'd learned more than he wanted to in the last hour, and this hardly seemed like the time or place to start asking about inter-planar travel, since it would undoubtedly set the Skald on the path to figuring out the one secret he was trying to keep. Then he thought of a tiny detail that had been niggling him for a while. Surely a question this innocent could not lead to a mind-numbing lecture on unspeakable horrors.

“One more thing. How old is the Kingdom?”

Friea stared at him, the whites of her eyes suddenly wide, and her mouth drawn tight like a wire.

“What? What did I say?” Damn, but she was touchy.

“Why would you ask that, Christopher? In all my years as the Skald, in all my years as a Troubadour and Minstrel roaming the land, singing in the courts of lords and spying on them, in all my life I have never heard anyone ask such a curious, pointless, irrelevant question.”

“Does that mean you don't know the answer?” That would probably explain why she'd gotten so riled up.

“I know the answer. But before I tell you, understand that if I had not just sworn to never doubt you, I would think you a
hjerne-spica
all over again. No one has ever asked that question, because no one has ever cared. What possible difference could it make to anyone? Anyone, that is, but a
hjerne-spica
, calculating whether our Kingdom is due for the harvest. Only the farmer asks how long the wheat has been in the field.”

He wanted to know why there weren't stone fences in the old farmlands. He wanted to know why they hadn't made any technological progress. He wanted to know how long ago they had come over from Earth. But he didn't want to tell her all that.

“Remember the part of the deal where you tell me stuff without making me explain why I asked?”

“Of course, my Lord Vicar. Though it is not widely known, indeed may not be known outside of this building, the Kingdom is precisely two hundred and fifty-seven years old. It was a Sevenday, in the third week of summer, when Varelous the Arch-Mage stepped through a Gate at the foot of the spire of stone that would become Kingsrock. Behind him came his trusted companions, Palence and Byrnia, and a hundred and eighty-seven men, women, and children. They were refugees, fleeing a Kingdom called Attica. That Kingdom had been their home, and it was a place worthy of such heroes as they. Vast numbers of people had lived there, under a wise and just Council, in wealth and plenty, with such a surfeit of strength of arms and magic that monsters were hunted for sport or study, not from fear. Attica had been supreme; Attica was now rubble. Varelous and his pilgrims were the sole survivors, the last out of
millions
. The Black Harvest had come to Attica, and in a day her pride was thrown down, her spine broken, her people devoured.”

She paused for breath. Christopher sat open-mouthed, stunned into silence.

“I know all of this, because I have Varelous's diary. At least, the handful of pages he wrote before life in this new land demanded all of his attention. In the last passage, he hints at his greatest fear: that the
hjerne-spica
purposely allowed their tiny band to escape the slaughter. The term he used was ‘seed-corn.' Then he set down his pen, wrote no more of his thoughts, and spent the rest of his life struggling to rebuild. We have only legends from that time, adventure stories fit only for children. The people chose to forget the truth. The past was buried; the future birthed in ignorance and hope. But we cannot blame the people. Even Varelous the Arch-Mage could not long bear the burden of this knowledge. It was left to the Skald, one woman in every generation, old and wise and sad, to remember.”

“And now,” Christopher said sourly, “one man.”

“You asked.”

Of course he had. Pretty much every lump on his head was there because he'd stuck his noggin in front of somebody's club and asked for it.

“How much time do we have?” If his task was to save this society from the Black Harvest, he was going to need a lot more rifles.

“Varelous wrote of millions of people. Our realm is a fraction of that. We always assumed the harvest would wait until the crop is ripe. And yet, now the enemy moves against us deliberately. The shadow grows over the Gold Throne only as a stepping stone; its goal is the entire realm. Just as we prepare for the resistance, so does the enemy prepare for the onslaught.”

The wine bottle was empty. Christopher felt sick, but not from alcohol. He wanted out of here, out of this underground lair of misery and despair. On cue, a knock came from the door. The guard captain spoke from the other side.

“My lady, the Vicar's soldiers are here, and they ask to see him. They are quite insistent.”

Christopher stood, ready to leave. At the last instant he remembered his manners.

“Begging your pardon, Lady.”

“You no longer need beg my pardon, Christopher. I serve your cause now. Our only hope lies with you and the god Marcius. To that hope, and that alone, I bend the knee that has defied kings for three generations.”

He should play the question game more often. If he had done so a year ago, he might have realized that Marcius was seriously underselling the size of his task. He should remember that though all his battles had been with monsters outside the Kingdom, the true war was against monsters within.

He should go and see to his men, because if they were kept waiting any longer they were likely to blow something up.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hanks for the encouragement of the Loyal Crew who have been with this series since the beginning: nephews David, Alex, Dylan, and honorary nephew Fletcher, and compadre Josh, half a brother half a world away; to my agent Kristin for her inexhaustible patience; to my copyeditor Julia, for her usual magic; to Rene, for believing in the series; to Sophie, for finally starting kindergarten so Mommy and Daddy can have writing time; and always, to Sara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M.C.
Planck is the author of
Sword of the Bright Lady
(World of Prime: Book 1) and
The Kassa Gambit
. After a nearly-transient childhood, he hitchhiked across the country and ran out of money in Arizona. So he stayed there for thirty years, raising dogs, getting a degree in philosophy, and found­­ing a scientific instrument company. Having read virtually everything by the old Masters of SF&F, he decided he was ready to write. A decade later, with a little help from the Critters online critique group, he was actually ready. He was relieved to find that writing novels is easier than writing software, as a single punctuation error won't cause your audience to explode and die. When he ran out of dogs, he moved to Australia to raise his daughter with kangaroos.

Author photo by Dennis Creasy