Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (67 page)

'Does the King not support his own armies, then?' Marron demanded, stooping before a fireplace vast enough to roast an ox unbutchered and ladling two bowls of a boiling porridge of grains from where it hung in a cauldron above a bank of smoking turves. He drew a dipper of molten mutton-fat from a copper pan beside the fire and added a glistening aromatic stream to each bowl - there were herbs in the pot there with the fat, though he could not identify them - while Coren used the same time to fill two beakers with beer from a keg. 'Or his own priests?'

'They are the God's priests, not the King's.'

'They fight for the Kingdom. The Ransomers do.'

'They do — but few of the Ransomers are priests, and those who are were mosdy soldiers first. I can't answer your questions, Marron, I'm not a djinni. The King gives his support where he deems that it is needed or desirable, or so I assume. He does not explain himself, to me or any man.'

'No, but you speak for him. I thought it was your job to explain him to other men,'
to
me
...

A soft laugh, and, 'Would you ask me to explain what I do not myself understand? Well, yes, you might; but the King is kinder, or simply not so young. No, no, Marron. My task is to speak for him the way your mouth and tongue speak for you, no more than that. Without thought, without argument. I am more of a servant than you have ever tried to be. And a better one, I think, at least I've never run away from my master; but that's beside the point. The King is the King, Marron, and this is his Kingdom; you have simply to accept that, and not to question.'

Another day, Marron might have choked on his porridge. Without thought, without argument? This man, of all men? This morning, even a smile eluded him. Nor would he be eluded. 'You have not run from your master, but you deal with his enemies.'

'Do I?' It sounded like a genuine question, which was unfair. Marron took a breath, and spelled out his confusions.

'You are known and welcome here in Surayon, which has sealed itself off from Outremer in rebellion; and I met you in

Rhabat, where the Sharai were planning war against the Kingdom
...'

'And where I was arguing as best I could against it. All of Outremer deals with the Sharai, Marron. And the Sharai deal with Outremer, for exactly the same reason. Trade with the left hand and battle with the right, its an old pattern; its old because it works. I know men who will tell you that warfare is just another form of trade. In fact, I know two girls who will tell you the same thing: one because I taught her so, the other because she's always known, by instinct, except that she believes that it's better expressed the other way around, that trade is just another form of warfare. And as for Surayon, it has never rebelled against the King; neither has he ever turned his face against it. He has always tolerated squabbles between the states.'

'This is more than a squabble, sir!'

'Is it? It's the prime of all squabbles, rather - a family of children, all with knives in their belts to snatch at in their heat. Brothers and cousins, and the land too small to satisfy—small wonder if their tempers will not hold. That's how Outremer was made; that's how we raised an army in the homelands forty years ago, from quarrelsome sons who would otherwise have been killing each other over their fathers' fiefs. The Church Fathers would say otherwise, but they stayed safe in their libraries and chapels and never marched with us, they never saw the army in the field. It's the same here. A
little
sunlight and a priest's blessing don't change a man
’
s nature. He may say he does this for the glory of the God, but actually he does it for land, for territory, for borders: for somewhere he can stand and say,
this is mine, and all that is within it comes to me; strangers hold your ground, beyond my fences'

'The Sharai don't—'

'Marron, do you lack eyes, or is it simply common wit that's missing in you? The Sharai do, exactly. The Sharai don't farm, and they don't build walls and gated roads and guardposts; but you've travelled in the Sands, you've seen how the tribes claim and defend their territories. It's just the same. Neither is Hasan any different. He's a visionary, but all of his vision laid out only amounts to more land for the tribes to fight over. He wants a Sharai kingship, extended over the Sands and the Sanctuary Land both, but he doesn't want to rule.'

'Like the King, then?'

'Mm? Oh - not really, no. Or only a little like the King. The King rules, he just doesn't govern. And see him or not, everyone knows that he's there. Hasan doesn't want to live in Outremer, nor do any of his people. They'd be quite happy to leave it to other Catari, or to us if we were peaceable and paid our tribute duly. Then each tribe could raid the others' tribute-wagons, and they'd be entirely content.'

Marron opened his mouth to murmur that perhaps that would be better than the current dispensation, an unseen King and a cruel, frightened people. Before he could say it, though, another voice cried other news, 'Ghul! Ghul!'

The cry was away, above, but not far. Every eye was drawn to the doorway, to the skidding broken sounds that came ahead of the feet that made them, a man plunging recklessly, helplessly down the stairs and with no one to hold him at the foot.

And so he fell, hard on naked flags, and seemed barely to notice it; his hands like claws had hauled him up the nearest pillar before any man could reach him, so that he stood on his feet again to point, wildly behind him.

'Ghuls! In the yard, in the stables
...'

In the stairwell too, to judge by the sounds he pointed at: hard clopping and hard, huge breathing, as though there were pack-mules coming down the steps.

The hand he pointed with should surely have had a sword in it, and did not. Marron might have offered him Dard and — almost — meant it, except that this man didn't look anything like a fighter. Like a victim rather, visibly terrified and too old to care how visible his terror was. Sparse white hair fell to his shoulders, there were spots on the skin of his face and on his trembling hand where he was still poin
tl
essly pointing he wore the workaday tunic of a palace servant but that it showed no signs of any work, today or any day. One of the Princip's pensioners, past use - except to make porridge, perhaps, and tend these few wounded men for a day?

'Where are the guards?' Marron murmured, standing shoulder to shoulder with Coren and stepping forward even as he registered that none of the wounded men was armed, that they were scrambling to arm themselves with kitchen-knives and cleavers.

'The guards are gone to war, Marron. The servants are gone to the mountains, those few who were left, the Princip sent them last night and he's not a man to leave an empty house protected. These few came in late and exhausted, too much hurt to travel further, or he'd have sent them too. He gave them what healing he could, but he daren't spend all his strength, or all his daughter's either. They're probably still too much hurt to fight.'

They looked it, certainly; it showed in the struggle they had to look strong, to look ready for
battle
against the truth of what they were and what they held, a pitiful collection of cutlery and cooking irons. Perhaps they truly believed that courage could overmaster weakness, pain, inadequate weapons and all. Marron didn't think so, though. He thought that they only wanted to die in the show of it, because die they surely would if there were ghuls on the stairs, and they surely knew it. Too weary, too hurt or too stubborn to flee further after they had fled this far, they would die here in the Princip's kitchen unless someone else could aid them. And who was there? There was Coren, who had powers as the King's Shadow that Marron couldn't guess at, but seemed rarely willing to use them. As a man he had a sword, the strength to wield it and a long lifetime's experience of battle, but the length of that lifetime must tell against him now; he was old and tired, and was no more fit to stand alone against ghuls than those other men were fit to stand beside him.

And then there was Marron. Numbed, exhausted in his turn - but young and fleet and swift to recover when there was food in his belly, with a fine sword apt for his hand and that hand well-trained for fighting. What did it matter if an oath was broken casually, for little reasons like the lives of strangers, so long as it was kept where every
little
thing mattered hugely? The gods or luck or bloody fate must care for Jemel and Sieur Anton, because he could not; perhaps the djinni would care for the girls, as it had taken them where he could not; Coren could surely care for himself, either with his sword or with a swift departure. That left these men, who held their lives too cheap to run. These Marron could perhaps care for, because he didn't even know their names.

Perhaps.

The more noise there was in the stairwell, the more quiet and still they were in the kitchen. If terror was a weapon, then sound was its keenest edge. A clear, brisk rattle like hooves in a stableyard was half smothered by the wet rasping weight of oxen's breath, the muted rub of hide on stone; Marron had met ghuls before, but still found his mind leaping from shape to dreadful shape as it struggled to make sense of what it heard.

Then, at last, there was darkness moving in the shadows. Huge, ponderous figures bent below the stairs' low ceiling, squeezing through the doorway, straightening slowly in so far as ever they could stand straight.

Three, just three of them came into the kitchens. Split and shredded rags that had once made robes were clinging to rough hair and skin, to show where they had dressed and shaped themselves as women in their approach to the palace; from a distance they must have seemed like belated refugees.

The palace was a maze to Marron still; he wondered how they'd known where to come. Perhaps they could smell out living men. Or if they were slaved to the 'ifrit - as surely they must be, this attack was too bold for random ghuls — then perhaps they were guided by the stones in their tongues, driven by their masters' will.
Go there, turn here and here, go down: you will find men gathered, kill them there
..
.

Perhaps.
Kill them or die
might have been implicit, the extent of 'ifrit sight; like the djinn, they couldn't see past death's possibility.
Kill them or dir.
it would do for both parties, perhaps, men and ghuls alike. Marron could see another path, though, and meant to try it.

He stepped forward, and monstrous heads turned to eye him. Whether this was the ghuls' true shape, he wasn't certain; did they, could they truly have one, who could shift their shape by will alone, or at least by will and pain? But he had seen one thus before, when it abandoned the disguise of a woman: still roughly human, though no human was ever so crudely modelled, with its gross body bowed and its brutal arms swinging below its knees, its head stretched and distorted, more horse than man if horses ever did have lions' teeth
...

Roughly human, inhumanly rough: they carried no weapons, and needed none beyond the strength of those long, long arms and the claws that tipped them, the bite of their heavy jaws, their weight and reach and simple savagery. Marron felt more than small against them. He felt delicate as parchment, fine-drawn as an inkline, Dard like a slender nib to write their story. And he felt also that he could have written it as he chose if he had only been another man, the man he should have been, loyal to his raising and his skills. Ghuls were deadly but clumsy with it, awkward in their own bodies and slow of thought, however swift of arm. Left to themselves they would always prefer disguise and ambush to direct assault, the strike from behind and in darkness to face-to-face battle in the light. Here, Marron could have called a dance of steel and blood that would have proclaimed the triumph of man above beasts and demons, the cold and killing touch where civilisation meets barbarity. There were only three and he could kill them all, if he could only choose to do it.

Lacking that choice, lacking any, he raised the sword that he had sworn not to use again and he walked clear-sighted into a fight, crying back over his shoulder as he went.

'Lead the men away from here, Coren. You can do that, while I delay the ghuls.' The King's Shadow could walk through walls and take men and women with him, through solid rock and distance. Marron couldn't even walk between the worlds any more, and missed it badly.

He could still step from one Marron to another, though, from the confused and stubborn boy to the swordsman raised and trained. Even without the Daughter's strength and speed, he had his own share of both and the wit to use them.

'Marron, remember, kill with a single stroke; a second will only heal the harm of the first.'

'I have not forgotten.' Nor had he, any more than he had forgotten his oaths, his many oaths; any more than he had forgotten Jemel, or Sieur Anton, or himself.

He knew a hundred ways to wound a man, to drain blood and strength and yet leave him living. Few were sure in a single stroke; he couldn't afford needlework, a prick here and a prick there, when each prick undid the one before. And he didn't know the ghulish body, how it differed from a mans, what blow might be fatal and what not. But this much he did know, that ghuls were rougher-made than men, more brutal, spirit wrapped in something closer to original clay than mortal flesh. They did bleed like men, but likely not to death, he thought. He could hew and hope, at least, where he could not hew to kill.
And if one looks to be dying well, I can hew it again until it heals. And then again, to hurt it.
..