Inversions (22 page)

DeWar took a half-step closer to the machine. Lattens did not seem to notice. He grunted again as he hoisted the rock up to his neck level and shuffled closer to the tensed arm of the waiting machine.

DeWar seemed to slide rather than step another stride closer to the catapult, almost to within grabbing distance of the boy, while his gaze concentrated both on the firing latch and on Lattens’ feet and legs as they edged nearer to it.

The boy teetered as he leant over the catapult’s cup. He was breathing hard, the sweat running down his brow.

‘Steady, lad,’ Perrund heard the Protector whisper. His hands clutched at the arms of his chair, the knuckles pale with their own loaded tension.

DeWar was closer now, within reach of the boy.

Lattens grunted and rolled the rock into the cup. It crunched on top of the two already occupying the scoop. The whole catapult seemed to quiver, and DeWar tensed, as though about to pounce on the child and tear him away, but then the boy took a step back, wiped his sweating face and turned to smile at his father, who nodded and sat back in his seat, sighing with relief. He looked at RuLeuin and the others. ‘There now,’ he said, and swallowed.

‘Mr Bombardier,’ Lattens said, with a flourish towards the catapult. The servant nodded and took up his position by the machine.

DeWar had drifted back towards his own catapult.

‘Wait!’ Lattens called, and ran up the library step-ladder again. His nurse resumed her place beneath. Lattens took out his sword, raised it and then dropped it. ‘Now!’

The catapult made a terrific snapping noise, the one large rock and the two smaller ones sailed into the air in significantly different directions and everybody sat or leant forward to see where they would land.

The big rock missed its target, splashing into the shallows near one of DeWar’s coastal cities and showering it with mud but otherwise doing little damage. One of the smaller stones hit some of DeWar’s farmland and the other demolished one of Lattens’ own towns.

‘Oh.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Bad luck, young master.’

‘For shame!’

Lattens said nothing. He stood, looking utterly crestfallen, at the top of the ladder, his little wooden sword hanging loosely in his hand. He looked back at his father with sad, dejected eyes.

His father frowned, then winked at him. The boy’s expression did not change. Silence hung under the platform’s awning.

DeWar jumped up on the balustrade and crouched there, knuckles dragging on the stonework. ‘Ha!’ he said, then jumped down. ‘Missed!’ He had already tensioned his own catapult, the arm bowed back to about the two-thirds position. ‘Victory is mine! Hee-hee!’ He chose the biggest stone from his own supply, wound some more tension into the machine and put the rock in the scoop. He looked up at Lattens with a fierce, mischievous grin, which faltered only momentarily when he saw the look on the child’s face. He rubbed his hands and wagged one finger at the boy. ‘Now we see who’s boss, my young pretender-general!’

He adjusted the catapult slightly and then pulled the lanyard. The catapult juddered and the great rock whooshed up into the sky. DeWar leapt back on to the stone railing again.

The giant stone was a sailing black shape against the sky and clouds for a long moment, then it rushed back to earth and dropped with a titanic splash into the sea.

The water threw itself up into the air in a great explosive tower of white foam, then slumped back down and rushed out in all directions in a mighty circular wave.

‘What?’ DeWar screeched from the balustrade, putting his hands to the sides of his head and grabbing two handfuls of hair. ‘No! No! Nooooo!’

‘Ha ha!’ Lattens yelled, pulled his general’s hat off his head and threw it in the air. ‘Ha ha ha!’

The rock had fallen not into the lobe of the sea which was rimmed mostly by Lattens’ towns and cities but that which held almost all DeWar’s intact settlements. The great wave rushed out from where it had landed, a good couple of strides or so from the straits separating the two lobes of the sea. One by one it swamped the cities and towns by the water, flooding one or two of Lattens’ but destroying a great deal more of DeWar’s.

‘Hurrah!’ RuLeuin yelled, and threw his own hat into the air. Perrund smiled broadly at DeWar from behind the veil. UrLeyn nodded and grinned and clapped. Lattens gave a deep bow and made a rude, tongue-wagging gesture at DeWar, who had rolled off the stone railing and was curled up on the tiles by the side of the balustrade, thumping one clenched fist weakly off the tiled surface.

‘No more!’ he moaned. ‘I give in! He’s too good for me! Providence defends the Protector and all his generals! I am an unworthy wretch ever to have set myself against them! Take pity on me and let me surrender like the abject cur that I am!’

‘I win!’ Lattens said, and with a grin at his nurse he twirled on the platform and let himself fall backwards into the woman’s arms. She grunted with the impact, but caught the boy and held him.

‘Here, lad! Here!’ His father stood and went to the front of the platform, holding out his arms. ‘Bring that brave young warrior to me!’

The nurse duly delivered Lattens into his father’s embrace while the others gathered round, applauding and laughing and clapping backs and offering congratulations.

‘A fine campaign, young man!’

‘Quite splendid!’

‘Providence in your pocket!’

‘Well, well done!’

‘ and then we could play the game at night, Father, when it’s a dark night and make flame-balls and light them and set the cities on fire! Couldn’t we?’

DeWar stood and brushed himself down. Perrund looked at him over her veil and he grinned and even blushed a little.

‘Well?’ the King asked.

The Doctor leaned closer and peered at the wound. Duke Walen’s body lay on a long table in the withdrawing room where he had been murdered. The small feast that had occupied the table when we had brought the body in had been set on the floor to one side. The table cloth had been wrapped over the Duke’s body so that his legs and belly and his head had been covered, leaving only his chest exposed. He had been pronounced dead by the Doctor, though not until after she had done the most extraordinary thing.

The Doctor had seemed to kiss the old man while he lay bleeding and shaking on the balcony. She had knelt by his side and blown her own breath into him, puffing out first her cheeks and then his, so that his chest rose and fell. She was at the same time attempting to staunch the flow of blood that had issued from the wound in his chest, using a piece of material torn from her own dress. This then became my duty, using a clean kerchief while she concentrated on blowing into Duke Walen’s mouth.

After a while, when she had been unable to feel any pulse for some long time, she had shaken her head and sat back, exhausted, on the floor.

A ring of servants, all with swords or long knives, had been established round the scene. When the Doctor and I looked up it was to see Duke Quettil, the two Guard Commanders, Adlain and Polchiek, and the King looking down at us. Behind us, in the darkened room, a girl was weeping quietly.

‘Bring him inside. Light all the candles,’ Duke Quettil told the armed servants. He looked at the King, who nodded.

‘Well, Doctor?’ the King said again.

‘A dagger wound, I think,’ the Doctor said. ‘A very thin, sharp blade. Steeply angled. It must have penetrated the heart. Much of the bleeding was internal, which is why it’s still seeping out. If I’m to be sure of all this, I will need to open the corpse.’

‘I think we know the main thing, which is that he is dead,’ Adlain said. From beyond a line of servants by the windows, a woman’s screams could be heard. I imagined it was the Duke’s wife.

‘Who was in the room?’ Quettil asked his Guard Commander.

‘These two,’ Polchiek said, nodding at a young man and woman, both hardly any older than myself, both quite handsome and with their dress in some disarray. Each was held from behind by two of the armed servants. It was only now starting to occur to me that there had been a particular explanation for the great numbers of servants at the ball, and for the fact that many of them looked somewhat coarser than one expected of servants. They were really guards. That was why they had all suddenly produced weapons at the first hint of mischief.

The young woman’s face was red and swollen with crying, and held a look of blank terror. A wail from beyond the windows drew her attention and she stared in that direction. The face of the young man at her side looked almost as bloodless as the body of Duke Walen.

‘And who are you?’ Adlain asked the young couple.

‘Uo-Uo-Uoljeval, sir,’ the young man said, swallowing heavily. ‘A squire in the em-employ of Duke Walen, sir.’

Adlain looked at the young woman, who was staring straight ahead. ‘And you, madam?’

The young woman shivered and looked not at Adlain but at the Doctor. Still she did not say anything.

Eventually the young man said, ‘Droythir, sir. Her name is Droythir. Of Mizui. A chambermaid to Lady Gilseon. My betrothed.’

‘Sir, can’t we let the Duchess in now?’ the Doctor asked the King. He shook his head and held up one hand.

Guard Commander Adlain jerked his head back as though pointing at the girl with his chin and demanded, ‘And what were you doing in here, madam?’

The young woman stared at him as though he’d spoken in some utterly unknown language. It crossed my mind that she was indeed a foreigner. Then the young man started to weep and said, ‘It was only for his pleasure, sirs, please!’

Through his tears he looked in turn at each of the faces watching him. ‘Sirs, he said he liked such sport, and would reward us. We knew nothing, nothing until we heard him cry out. He was there. There, behind there, watching us from behind the screen there. He knocked it over when he when he’ The young man looked round as best he could at a screen lying on the floor near one corner of the room, by a door, and started to breathe very quickly.

‘Calm down,’ Adlain snapped. The young man closed his eyes and slumped in the grip of the two guards. They looked at each other, then at Adlain and Polchiek, who was also, I thought, distinctly pale and haggard.

‘And there was a dark bird,’ the young woman said suddenly, in a strange, hollow voice. Her eyes stared straight ahead out of her pale, sweat-sheened face.

‘What?’ Polchiek said.

‘A dark bird,’ she said, looking straight at the Doctor. ‘It was very dark because the gentleman wished only for one candle to light us, but I saw it. A dark bird, or a nightwing.’

The Doctor looked puzzled. ‘A dark bird?’ she said, frowning.

‘I think we have learned all we can from you, madam,’ Quettil said to the Doctor. ‘You may go.’

‘No,’ the King said to her. ‘Stay, Doctor.’

Quettil’s jaw worked.

‘Were you doing what I think you were doing?’ the King asked the young woman. He glanced at the Doctor. The orchestra faltered in the ballroom.

The young woman turned her empty-looking face slowly towards the King. ‘Sir,’ she said, and I knew she did not realise who she was talking to. ‘Yes, sir. On the couch there.’ She pointed to a couch in the centre of the room. A candelabrum holding one extinguished candle lay knocked over nearby.

‘And Duke Walen was watching from behind the screen,’ Adlain said.

‘It was his pleasure, sir.’ The young woman looked down at the man kneeling weeping by her side. ‘We saw no harm in it.’

‘Well, there was harm, madam,’ Quettil said quietly, his voice hardly more than a breath.

‘We’d been doing it a while, sirs,’ the young woman said, her empty, staring eyes directed towards the Doctor. ‘There was a noise. I thought it was somebody trying the window doors again, sir, but then the old gentleman cried out and the screen came tumbling down and I saw the nightwing.’

‘You saw the Duke?’ Polchiek asked her.

She swivelled her head towards him. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You saw nobody else?’

‘Just the gentleman, sir,’ she said, looking back to the Doctor. ‘In his shirt. He had his hand up here.’ She shrugged on one side only, and looked down to her left at the top of her chest near her shoulder. ‘He was crying out that he’d been murdered.’

‘The door behind him,’ Adlain said. ‘There, behind where the screen was. Was the door open?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You are sure.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Quettil leaned towards the King. ‘My man Ralinge will make sure this is the truth,’ he murmured. The Doctor heard this and glared at the Duke. The King only frowned.

‘Is the door locked?’ Adlain asked Polchiek.

Polchiek frowned. ‘It should be,’ he said, ‘and the key should be in the lock.’ He crossed the room to the door, found that there was no key, looked to the floor for a few moments, then pulled and pushed at the door.. He felt inside a fat pouch at his waist, pulled out a ring bristling with long keys and eventually found one which he tried in the door’s lock. The lock clicked, the door opened inwards and a couple of armed guards dressed as servants looked quizzically in, straightening when they saw their Commander, who spoke briefly to them and closed and locked the door again. He returned to the group round the table. ‘The guards have been there since a little after the alarm was raised,’ he told Adlain. His big, clumsy-looking fingers fumbled with the ring of keys, trying to fit it back into the pouch at his waist.

‘How many keys to that door are there?’ Adlain asked.

‘This one, one for the palace seneschal and the one which ought to be in the door, on this side,’ Polchiek told him.

‘Droythir, where was this dark bird you saw?’ the Doctor asked.

‘Where the gentleman was, ma’am.’ Suddenly her face seemed to collapse and a look of uncertainty and sadness wrote itself across her features. ‘Perhaps it was just a shadow, ma’am. The candle, and the screen falling.’ She looked down. ‘A shadow,’ she murmured to herself.

‘Let the Duchess in,’ the King said, as one of the guards dressed as a servant approached Quettil and muttered into his ear.

‘The Duchess has fainted and been taken to her room, sir,’ Quettil told the King. ‘However, I am told there is a young page who may have something to tell us.’

‘Well then, bring him in,’ the King said, sounding annoyed. Droythir and Uoljeval were pulled back towards the centre of the room by those holding them. The young man staggered to his feet, still weeping quietly. The girl stared ahead, silent.

Feulecharo approached from the doors, looking smaller than I had ever seen him look, his face almost translucent, his eyes bulging.

‘Feulecharo?’ Adlain said. He looked round the others. ‘Page to the late Duke,’ he said by way of explanation to those who needed it.

Feulecharo cleared his throat. He looked nervously round us all, then saw the Doctor and gave me a small smile. ‘Your majesty,’ he said, bowing to the King. ‘Duke Quettil, sirs, madam. I know something very little, but something of what happened here.’

‘You do?’ Quettil said, his eyes narrowing. The King shifted from one leg to the other, winced, then nodded in appreciation as the Doctor brought up a chair for him to sit in.

Feulecharo nodded towards the far corner of the room. ‘I was in the corridor, behind that door, sirs, earlier.’

‘Doing what, might one ask?’ Quettil said.

Feulecharo swallowed. He glanced at Droythir and Uoljeval, who had been brought forward again to the side of the table, their arms still held behind them. ‘I had been asked by the Duchess to . . .’ Feulecharo licked his lips. ‘To follow the Duke and see what he was doing.’

‘And you followed him here?’ Adlain said. He knew Feulecharo a little, and sounded purposeful but not unkind.

‘Yes, sir. With the two young people.’ Feulecharo glanced at Droythir and Uoljeval, neither of whom responded. ‘The Duchess thought perhaps there was some arrangement between the young lady and the Duke. I watched them enter this withdrawing room, and found my way to the corridor outside. I thought I might hear something, or see something through the keyhole, but it was blocked.’

‘By a key?’ Adlain asked.

‘I think not, sir. Rather by the little shutter on the far side. However,’ Feulecharo said, ‘I had with me a small metal mirror and thought to see something under the bottom of the door.’

‘And did you?’ Quettil asked.

‘Only a single light, like a candle flame, Duke Quettil. I could hear the young man and woman making the sounds of love, and sense some movement, but that was all.’

‘And when the Duke was stabbed?’ Polchiek asked.

Feulecharo took a deep breath. ‘Just before that, sir, I think, I was hit on the back of the head, and rendered unconscious. I imagine for just a few minutes.’ He turned and held his hair up at the back, exposing a scab of glistening, half-dried blood and a large lump.

The King looked at the Doctor, who went forward and looked at the wound. ‘Oelph,’ she said. ‘Some water, please. And a napkin or something similar. Is that a bottle of spirit wine there on the floor? That, too.’

Feulecharo sat in a seat while his wound was cleaned and inspected. Adlain looked closely at the injury. ‘That certainly looks to me like it might knock a fellow out for a moment or two,’ he said. ‘You would agree, Doctor?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And when you woke up, what was there to be seen then?’ Polchiek asked Feulecharo.

‘Sir, I could hear the commotion in the room and people crying out. There was nobody else in the corridor where I was. I was very dizzy and went to the privy to be sick, then I went to find the Duchess, and that was when I heard that the Duke had been murdered.’

Adlain and Polchiek exchanged looks. ‘You did not sense anybody behind you when you were hit?’ Adlain asked.

‘No, sir,’ Feulecharo said, wincing as the Doctor dabbed some spirit wine on his wound. ‘I was concentrating too sorely on the mirror.’

‘This mirror . . .’ Polchiek began.

‘It is here, sir. I had the presence of mind to retrieve it before I made my way to the privy.’ Feulecharo dug into a pocket and pulled out a coin-sized piece of highly polished metal. He handed it to Polchiek, who passed it round the other men.

‘Is the Duchess Walen a particularly jealous woman, would you say, Feulecharo?’ Adlain asked, turning the small mirror over in his fingers.

‘Not especially so, sir,’ Feulecharo said. He sounded awkward, though that may just have been because the Doctor was holding his head forward while she completed the cleaning of his wound.

‘You have told us everything of the truth, have you not, Feulecharo?’ the King asked gravely.

Feulecharo looked at him as best he could with his head still bent forward by the Doctor. ‘Oh, yes, your majesty.’

‘When you were hit, Feulecharo,’ the Doctor said, letting go of his head, ‘did you fall against the door, or to the floor?’

Quettil made a tutting noise. Feulecharo thought for a moment. ‘I woke up resting against the door, ma’am,’ he said, then looked at Adlain and, the others.

‘So if somebody had opened the door into the room,’ the Doctor said, ‘you would have fallen in too.’

‘I suppose I would have, ma’am. I would have required being put back into the same position after it had been closed again.’

‘You are hiding nothing from us, young man?’ Quettil asked.

Feulecharo seemed to be about to speak, but then hesitated. I had thought him more intelligent than that, but perhaps the blow to his head had addled his brains.

‘What?’ the King said sternly.

‘Your majesty, sirs,’ Feulecharo said in a dry, strained-sounding voice. ‘The Duchess thought the Duke might be seeing the young lady here. That was what exercised her jealousy. She would not have minded so much, perhaps not have minded at all if she had known it was only to . . . to watch others.’ Feulecharo looked round the men in the room, avoiding my eyes and the Doctor’s. ‘Why, she would have laughed to have known what was going on in here, sirs. No more. And there is nobody she would trust more than me. I know her, sirs. She would not cause such a thing to be done.’ He licked his lips and swallowed hard again, then looked despondently at the mound of table cloth covering the body of the Duke.