The Warlord's Domain (11 page)

“More
tulathin
! Friends of yours?”

“Just more assassins. They don’t want the first squad to kill me—that’s the only good thing about them. As for what
they
want, I think it’s me again. Alive, this time.”

“No encouragement to stay.”

“All right, you win.” Aldric laughed, a harsh bark of sound with something of a tremor in it even now. “Let’s
go
!”

They rode out of the stable and the blizzard closed around them in an icy, impenetrable curtain of white, whirling around black horse and gray, roan packpony and bay. It struck their faces like chilled feathers, enfolded them, sifted across their tracks and bleached the vagueness of their outlines until not even the trained eyes of a
taulath
could have told which mass of white was horse and which was rider, and which was merely drifting snow.

And by the time one or other of the
tulathin
had both time and safety enough to look those looked for were gone.

There was confusion in Cerdor. To those who had lived there during the past thirteen days, it felt as if there had never been anything except confusion in the city, ever since the king had died and all his lords save two had fled back to their own lands. It had little to do with that death anymore, regardless of what the rumors said, but had a far more sinister source that even rumor was reluctant to touch upon: the uncertainty of powerful men.

Granted that King Rynert’s death had been the first cause of all the trouble, still it had stemmed less from his passing than the manner of it. That had been interpreted not merely by uninformed second- and third-hand sources but by men who had been there in person as the action of an overly-ambitious and haughty clan-lord--Hanar Santon--slighted over some matter by the dead king. That the truth of the matter was very different had no significance now, for the error had gathered its own momentum and was impossible either to disprove or to stop for all that its consequences were already spreading across Alba like plague-marks covering the face of a once beautiful woman.

There had been no meeting of the Alban Crown Council since that night, not even to vote on their establishment of a regency to rule the country—Rynert having failed to leave an heir. Most of the lords present at that last fateful meeting were now watching each other from the dubious safety of their respective citadels, setting to rights the fortifications which long years of peace had allowed to fall into disrepair and mustering enfeoffed lesser lords to their defense. None would listen to reason; not since they had seen what they thought was reason conversing with a hired assassin and moments later slashed open and slain on the steps of his own throne…

“At least there are no declarations of faction yet.” Hanar Santon patted the sheets of dispatch reports together, aligning their edges with punctilious neatness for the tenth time since their delivery half an hour before.

“Yet.” His companion’s voice was without inflection, neither echoing nor squashing Hanar’s optimism. “That doesn’t mean anything, either way.” If there was cynicism in the statement, it was not the studied art practiced by younger men. Aymar Dacurre had had many years of experience in which to get his practice right. The old clan-lord had as much faith as anyone else in his fellow men; he simply didn’t anticipate it without proof.

“But you heard the names, didn’t you? Powerful high-clan-lords, all of them.”

Aymar sighed.
These children
, he thought.
They learn history, but they never learn from it
. As if the mere fact of being high-clan-lords was enough to absolve them of blame for anything… It was all written down in
Ylver Vlethanek
, and the Book of Years was being echoed far too closely for Aymar Dacurre’s comfort. The same postures of pugnacious defense had been adopted five hundred years before, and by the ancestors
pi
the same men who were adopting them today. Those disagreements had become the Clan Wars, and so far as Dacurre could see it would require very little force to push the present situation over into a repetition of the conflict which had left such a bloody stain on Alban history. But now there was another factor to take into account, a factor which the old lords had not needed to worry over and which their descendants either failed or refused to consider. The source of the push: the Drusalan Empire.

If what Aldric Talvalin had said was true—and Dacurre had seen no reason to disbelieve the young man’s words whether they were heard at first hand or related through his foster-father Gemmel—the Empire had been casting speculative glances toward its neighbor for some time. What galled most was the reason behind it all; not expansion by conquest, or even simple acquisitiveness, but simply so that a bureaucrat could continue to justify his function.

The military dictator who styled himself Grand Warlord had lost most of his influence in the Western Empire when the new Emperor Ioen had belied his youth and revealed that he possessed a mind of his own, rather than the collection of thoughts and opinions borrowed from the Warlord like so many of his predecessors. The Emperor had negotiated peace—or at least pacts of mutual nonaggression—with all the countries on his borders by revoking the unpopular provincial annexations that were the source of so much unrest. He and his advisers had taken what at first seemed considerable loss of face until it became clear that they had lost nothing. More, they had gained the respect of many on all sides who had grown weary of the constant brutal round of rebellion and suppression in provinces seized for no better reason than that their and the Empire’s frontiers ran together for longer than a given minimum distance. But without war, the position of
Woydach
became superfluous, and Warlord Etzel faced redundancy, loss of rank and power and privilege—and the long-leashed vengeance of all those who had survived the trampling of his rise to power.

The danger had become clear almost five years ago, during an insignificant incident which had exploded into scandal and slaughter with the resurrection of a long-dead sorcerer and the butchery of all save one of Alba’s foremost high-clan families, the Talvalins. The idea behind that had been for the Imperial legions to intervene, as they had done before in other places, to restore “equilibrium and peace” as the then-Emperor interpreted the term; an intervention whose payment was invariably the province or country which it liberated. That had been the first indication of what was to be a constant threat just beyond the horizon, and one which had lately grown still more significant.

During the course of the past year, after acrimonious exchanges at all levels of the Imperial Senate, the Grand Warlord had split away from the Emperor’s “pacifist” faction and had retired to the old capital of Drakkesborg. There he had set up an Eastern Empire,
Woydek-Hlautan
—the Warlord’s Domain in the guttural Drusalan language—whose political aims were those of the old emperors of the Sherban dynasty rather than those of their milksop descendant: bring unity by the swiftest means. Swiftest of all those means was force of arms and of course, while the “Empire” was at war, it required a supreme military commander, a Grand Warlord, once more.

Alban foreign policy had never been particularly subtle or ingratiating where the Empire was concerned. Lord Dacurre knew that much even before he had begun working his way through the archive records of past Council meetings. He could remember several occasions when his had been the sole dissenting voice against the condoning of acts of piracy against Imperial shipping—and to his shame, the two meetings where he had agreed that arms and financial support should be tendered to insurrections in the Imperial provinces now freed by Emperor Ioen’s policy of conciliation. At least he’d been able to prevent the issue of letters of marque, which would have been equivalent to a secret declaration of war on the Ocean-Sea; Cernuan and Elherran privateers were not the most controllable of auxiliary troops, and he had said as much, to the great offense of Lord Diskan of Kerys in Cerenau.

And then other things had started coming to light, like drowned corpses during a spring thaw and smelling about as sweet. Aymar Dacurre had discovered things in the Archive which had never been mentioned by the late King Rynert, for all that they had been written down by assiduous
hanan-vlethan’r
—the court recorders who noted everything of significance for all that their writings were often edited later. These records were not edited, and it galled Dacurre to realize that had his fellow councillors seen what had been written there, they would not now be peering at each other and the rest of the country over ramparts. What he had seen, and what he had read, had been the truth behind Rynert’s version of what Aldric Talvalin had been doing in the Empire, and in Seghar and—most significantly of all—in Egisburg where Dewan ar Korentin had died. Considering such things, he was astonished that the Imperial threat had not materialized already in the form of warships off the Alban coast, and that nonappearance had given him cause to wonder what Aldric was doing in the Eastern Empire—or
to
it—that might keep its ambitious Grand Warlord so busy.

“Hanar,” said Aymar Dacurre, “you are my grandson.”

Hanar Santon started very slightly at that. He had known it all his life, but had never heard it spoken aloud except by his mother, Dacurre’s second daughter: The explanation for the silence had involved such words as “favoritism” and “respect” and, most of all, “honor,” so he had never pursued the matter. To hear it now from the old man himself was something of a shock, for they had moved to first-name terms only in the past ten days or so.

“My grandson indeed,” the old man continued, “by an excellent and honorable father. And despite the difference in our ages, my friend. But, Hanar, you are also sometimes such an innocent that I despair of your ever seeing sense.”

Santon blinked and licked his lips. He didn’t know where this might be leading, but in the company of a fire-eater notorious through three generations of Alban nobility he was ready for the worst. “Sir?” he ventured finally and braced himself for whatever blast he might have provoked. There was none.

“All this talk about high-clan-lords. When you have some free time again”—and Aymar laughed both at the thought of free time and at the expression on young Santon’s face, since free time for either of them was less likely than honesty in Imperial politics—”you should go back to your histories and read for yourself how much grief those who style themselves
ilauem-arlethen
have caused down the years. Enough, and more than enough. But first, and now, read this.”

The Court Archive skidded down the table and came to a stop almost exactly where Aymar had intended that it should, in front of the younger man. That its passage upset Hanar’s painstakingly sorted sheaf of notes and reports bothered him not a whit; there would be plenty more of those before the day’s work was done and locked away from prying eyes.

“Read it?” The archive was a good handspan thick, for all that its leaves were thin and the writing on them small. “You mean, now?”

“Not all of it, boy. Just look at the pages I marked; you should find them of interest.” Aymar drew across another bundle of papers and inked his writing-brush with care, then glanced at Hanar from beneath his fierce white eyebrows. “But read them carefully. You may well learn more than your tutors ever taught you…”

“Feeling better now?”

Chin-deep in the hot bath-water, Aldric stirred a little but made no reply other than a faint sigh of contentment. Eyes closed, with a pillow of rolled toweling behind his head, he both looked and sounded asleep.

Kyrin wrapped a warmed towel around herself—there were plenty more draped over a rack in front of the fire—and padded across the room to look down at him, telling herself that she was only making sure whether he was indeed asleep or just very relaxed, and that he was in no danger of slipping so far down into the tub that he might inhale some of the water. For all that, the making sure took several minutes of close study rather than the cursory glance it might otherwise have required. “You’ve lost too much weight with worrying about things that you can’t help, my love,” she said quietly in her own language, and then smiled. “But you’re still good to look at. Very good indeed.”

Whatever opinion Aldric might have expressed, the loss of weight was true enough and beyond argument. His face was leaner than it should have been, and the body which in her memory was broad-shouldered, square and strong was now an incomplete sketch of that remembered image, with all the big muscles defined like a surgical anatomy and ribs and pelvis stark under skin which lay too close to the bone.

“You need to stop all this errand-running,” Kyrin said. She spoke in Alban now, still reluctant to disturb him and yet half-hoping he was awake enough to listen.

“You need to stop concerning yourself with all the troubles of the world and find yourself some peace instead.” She turned away and shook her head sadly. “I just wish the world’s troubles would leave you alone to do it.”

“Do what?” Aldric’s voice was lazy, an effect of the vast heat of the water, but lacked the dullness of someone recently asleep.

Kyrin looked at him and raised one eyebrow. “Oh— so you weren’t asleep at all.”

“I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it sleep.” He raised one hand to rake back damp hair from his eyes, very slowly and carefully since in water so deep and hot a sudden movement might cause a spill and would certainly cause discomfort. “But I wasn’t much awake either. What were you saying?”

“Nothing much.”

Aldric gave her back the raised eyebrow—now his own were visible—and added a little to the delivery. “You never let me get away with a response like that, so why should I let you? Tell me about nothing much.”

Kyrin exchanged her damp, cool towel for a fresh one, warm and dry, and told him just how very much the nothing much involved. “And neither of us knows,” she finished, with anger starting to edge her words, “who those assassins were, or why they came looking, or who sent them. But they tried to kill you all the same!”