The Prince of Lies: Night's Masque - Book 3 (51 page)

“Come on,” she called to them. “All of you, out of here, quickly!”

When they did not move, she added, “The King commands it!”

At that they began to stir, and she ushered them up the stairs in ones and twos. They were all dusty and bedraggled, with puffy features as if they had been asleep too long. When she was sure that the last of them was out of there, she closed the door and ran up the stairs, leaving the barrels of gunpowder in peace.

Mal knelt, dragging the boy-king down with him.

“Undo my spirit-guard,” he told Kiiren, “and put it on our prisoner.”

“What have you done with her?” Jathekkil growled as Kiiren came round to stand in front of him, the metal necklace between his hands. “What have you done with my
amayi
?”

“No worse than you would have done to mine,” Kiiren replied. He looped the necklace round the struggling boy’s head and fastened the clasp. “She’s not dead, not yet.”

Mal tied Henry’s hands behind his back and secured him to one of the bedposts, then took his son aside.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Kiiren replied, his dark eyes sorrowful. “She brought it upon herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“The people in the cellar were afraid.
Hrrith
came… so Ilianwe had to flee. I thought she would go back to her body, but she flew up into the sky and disappeared north. I think she’s gone to find Shawe.”

Mal’s innards twisted in fear. “Come on, we have to find her body before it’s too late.”

Mal ran down through the keep, Kiiren in his arms, and found his wife waiting at the bottom of the entrance stairs. Outside, courtiers milled around in confusion. Over the hubbub came the low thud of a battering ram.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re trying to break into the Jewel House.” Coby pointed to the long building at the foot of the stairs.

“No matter. We have more important things to worry about than a bit of gold.”

“You really are a skrayling at heart, aren’t you?” she said with a grin as she ran after him.

They pushed their way out through the throng.

“We need to find Ilianwe. Olivia.”

“Her chamber is in the Queen’s apartments,” Coby said. “In the little tower room in the corner.”

“I know the place.” Mal put Kiiren down. “Look after him. I’ll see you soon.”

Ignoring his wife’s protests he raced through the castle grounds, pushing past startled guardsmen. At last he found himself in the outer ward, at the foot of the stairs up to the old royal apartments in St Thomas’s Tower.

“Hold! Who goes there?” a guard shouted down at him.

“Sir Maliverny Catlyn. Please, let me through. The Queen is in danger.”

“And why should I believe you?” The guard advanced down the stair, pointing his partizan at Mal. “I heard you were a traitor.”

Mal raised his hands as if surrendering. The guard relaxed, and Mal leapt up the next three steps and seized the partisan by its decorative side-blades. Twisting out of the way he hauled on the weapon, sending its bearer tumbling down the stairs to land in a heap on the cobbles below.

“Sorry,” he muttered, bounding up the rest of the stairs and pulling open the door.

The dining parlour was just as he remembered it, though it lay empty at this time of night. He ran over to the door in the corner and tried the latch. Locked, dammit! On the other hand, anything in there would take a while to get out. He went through into the other half of the main apartments, to the bedchamber where he and Coby had spent the night all those years ago.

“Ladies?”

One of the bed’s occupants sat up and screamed, waking her companions. Mal belatedly remembered he was soaked in blood from the waist down.

“Please, ladies, I’m not here to harm you, I swear. My name is Sir Maliverny Catlyn; my wife served the Queen–”

“We know who you are, sirrah,” one of them said, gathering a robe around her shoulders. “A traitor and a renegade.”

“Please, whatever you think of me, rouse the Queen mother and get yourselves out of here this instant. You are all in great danger.”

“What kind of–”

Her answer was a loud thud from the room behind Mal.

“Go!” he said, taking the nearest woman’s arm and pushing her towards the door. “Get out through the Wakefield Tower and flee this place entirely if you can.”

The women scattered, and Mal stalked back into the dining chamber, ready to face whatever came through the tower door.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Coby stood at the top of the steps, wondering how she was to get all these people out of the Tower. Fortunately the problem was solved for her by the arrival of a squad of militiamen. Coby pulled Kit back into the shadow of the great doors. The last thing she wanted was to be herded out of the castle with the rest of the courtiers.

“Come on, let’s go and check on our prisoner,” she said. “We don’t want some well-meaning warder letting him loose, not after all the trouble we’ve been to.”

She was half out of breath by the time they reached the little tower room, and half-expected Jathekkil to have vanished into thin air. But there he was, tied to the bedpost with the dark metal of a spirit-guard glinting dully at his throat.

“Come back to finish me off, have you?” he rasped.

“I could never kill a child,” Coby replied softly. She looked from one boy to the other. “But I suppose neither of you are children, are you?”

The usurper’s eyes widened in fear.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re quite safe with us.”

She went over to the door and unlocked it. After a moment’s consideration she slipped the heavy iron key into her pocket and returned to the bed, where she tore a strip from one of the sheets and gagged the young king and bound his ankles before untying him from the bedpost. He bucked in her arms as she scooped him up and threw him on the bed.

“One boy sounds much like another,” she said. “And my son looks a good deal like you. Everyone comments on it. If the yeomen warders come, I’m sure we can persuade them nothing is amiss.”

She closed the bed-curtains and opened a large cupboard. As she suspected, it was full of fine clothing, made for a boy of eight or nine years.

“Kit, why don’t you change out of those dirty things into something a bit nicer?”

As Mal watched, the door to Olivia’s chamber melted like wax into a tarry puddle on the floor. A young man of eighteen or so stood on the other side, tall and thin with skin pale as a shoot forced in darkness. Another of Shawe’s young sorcerers, no doubt. He seemed to look straight through Mal as if he wasn’t there. Beyond him, Mal could see someone lying on the floor, an arm clad in green silk flung wide, graceful hand limp as a flower. Olivia.

Mal drew his sword, and the youth finally appeared to notice him.

“Don’t like this, do you?” Mal said, pointing the steel blade towards him.

The youth raised his hands, and a chair thudded into the back of Mal’s knees. Mal stumbled and dropped the sword, and the youth pounced, turning into a great cat in mid-air. Mal rolled and retrieved his weapon. Sweet Christ! He had expected an attack on his mind, not his body. Still, if that’s what they wanted, he was more than happy to oblige.

He scrambled to his feet, sweeping the blade in an ever-changing series of arcs that wove a shield of steel between them. Let the creature get its magic through that! But he could not keep it up forever, and the sorcerer seemed to guess as much. He changed back into a human youth and withdrew, arms crossed, waiting. His enemy was no fencer, however; moments later he gave himself away by glancing over Mal’s shoulder. Mal edged round to see another boy, slightly younger, framed in the doorway. How many of them were there? Two dozen at least, or so Kiiren had said. He needed reinforcements.

Without taking his eyes off the two youths, he reached out with his mind and called to his brother. Green light flared behind him, and a moment later Sandy stepped through.

“Good work,” he murmured, stepping round Mal.

The light did not fade however, but shimmered between the pair of them, binding them together. Sandy moved sideways and the light stretched with him, becoming a wall that cut off the sorcerers’ escape route. After a moment the two youths retreated into the corner tower and the stone walls closed in as if a door had never been there. Mal released a breath he didn’t know he had been holding, and the green light died.

“How in God’s name are they doing that?” he said, to no one in particular.

“You mean shaping the fabric of the world as if it were the dreamlands?” his brother replied. “It appears to be a human talent, one we never suspected.”

Mal shook his head. “We can philosophise about this later. Since we’re too late to stop them coming through, all we can do now is–”

The magically sealed wall began to crumble into sand, and as it fell away Mal could make out not two but half a dozen young sorcerers behind it. He reached behind him and wrenched open the outer door of the Queen’s apartments, pulling Sandy after him.

Gabriel finally caught up with Ned at the edge of Tower Hill, after chasing his lover all the way from the Strand through the darkened streets of London’s northern suburbs.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he panted, grasping at Ned’s sleeve.

“We can’t let Kit go in there. Mal will kill me.”

“How do you know he went to the Tower? Lady Frances just said he was missing.”

“Where else would he go, eh? Besides, Mal needs us.”

“No, he doesn’t. He needs… I don’t know, an army. Or the skraylings. An army of skraylings, perhaps.”

“And where is he going to find one of those, eh? They’re gone. Forever. The guisers made sure of that.”

“So you’re going in their place?”

Ned shrugged helplessly. “I can’t just sit around and wait for my friends to die.”

Gabriel slipped his arm around his lover’s waist. “And I don’t want to see you die. It was bad enough the last time. Don’t put me through that again.”

Ned said nothing, only buried his head in the crook of Gabriel’s neck. They stood there for several minutes, Gabriel resting his cheek against Ned’s hair. Faint sounds drifted westwards on the night air: a dull thudding, and voices raised in panic. Gabriel watched the fortress over Ned’s shoulder, feeling the tension in his lover’s muscles and knowing he too was listening to the noises issuing from within. As Gabriel watched, the gates of the Byward Tower opened and a bedraggled column of people began making their way across the causeway to the landward gatehouse.

“What’s going on?” he said softly. “Are the guisers fleeing after all?”

Ned twisted in his arms.

“Something’s afoot. Come on!”

Before Gabriel could stop him Ned raced off down the hill towards the Tower. With a groan of resignation Gabriel set off after him.

Mal vaulted down the stairs outside the Queen’s apartments only to find his way blocked by the stream of courtiers being guided towards the Byward Tower by anxious-faced warders.

“Get them out of here, as fast as you can!” he yelled. “You! Fetch a squad of militiamen to guard Saint Thomas’s Tower.”

The warder he had addressed glared back at him.

“On whose authority?”

“The Duke of Suffolk’s.”

“Well I answer to the King, sirrah. The duke can mind his own business.” He went back to shepherding the dazed-looking nobles towards the gates.

“Mal!”

He turned to see Ned pushing through the throng towards him.

“What in God’s name are you two doing here? I told you to stay at Suffolk House.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s Kit–”

“Yes, he’s here, I know.” Mal sighed. “If you want to make yourself useful, go and fetch any militiamen you can round up. I need that building cordoned off, now.”

Ned grinned his acknowledgement and ran off.

“Can I help?” Gabriel asked.

“Get up into the Bloody Tower and prepare to lower the portcullis as soon as Ned gets back. We need to lure Shawe’s apprentices further into the castle and trap them there, so they can’t attack the rest of the city.”

Gabriel nodded in acknowledgement.

“They’ll walk straight through the portcullis, you do realise that?” Sandy said as they hurried through the gateway.

“Don’t be too sure,” Mal replied. “It’s bound and shod with iron; it might at least give them pause.”

They jogged up the slope to the green and turned right towards the low bulk of the keep’s gatehouse.

“Wait here for Ned to come through,” he told Sandy. “I’m going to check on the next line of defences.”

Without waiting for a reply he clapped his brother on the shoulder and set about exploring the coldharbour gate. A door at the foot of one of the two gatehouse towers opened onto a stair that led up to a guard room. No portcullis, but a double line of holes along the floor marked the passageway below, allowing defenders to drop stones or boiling water on attackers. Or, more promisingly in this instance, the steel-headed pikes and crossbow bolts stacked along one side of the guardroom. He picked up a couple of crossbows and quivers and raced back down to the innermost ward to bark orders at a group of militiamen who were half-heartedly restraining a couple of their colleagues.

“You can arrest these men for looting if they survive,” Mal told them. “Right now I want all of you manning the murder-holes in the gatehouse.”

He left them to it and returned to his brother just as Ned came panting up the slope. Mal thrust the crossbows and quivers at him, and Ned began cranking one of them with his good hand.

“Any sign of them yet?”

As if in answer, a scream came from the outer ward. Mal caught Sandy by the arm.

“Come on, we’re going to have to lure them in here.”

They ran down to the gate under the Bloody Tower. A dozen youths in the livery of Anglesey Priory stood along the wall-walk, staring down at them.

“Here we are,” Mal yelled up at them. “We’re the ones you seek.”

As one the sorcerers jumped, floating down to the ground as gently as autumn leaves. Mal recalled moving like that in the dreamlands; Sandy was right, they were shaping reality around them as easily as a dream.