Surrender to the Will of the Night (50 page)

Iron Eyes observed, “These characters make you look like a callow boy.”

“And they make good beer.”

They did. And had been brewing for the Were for ages. It was not hard for them to adapt production to the needs of a horde of dwarves — assisted by Aelen Kofer brewing magic.

Iron Eyes had told his grumblers they would stay as long as it took to collect the Bastard. Or till the ingredients for making beer ran out.

The grousing did not end. One of the great joys of dwarfish life was the creative complaint. That died down some. The Aelen Kofer had something to look forward to, for a while.

Jarneyn prowled the castle night and day, muttering, like some symbolic ghost in a passion play. The unheard conscience listened to only the ever-present but now stubbornly silent crows. The rest of the Aelen Kofer enjoyed themselves, knowing circumstance would, in time, drive them back to their world or the Realm of the Gods.

Iron Eyes grumbled, “Right here in this place, sorcerer, you see why the Aelen Kofer don’t rule the Nine Worlds. The instant adversity steps aside we lose our focus. We suffer from a cultural absence of ambition. We can weave a bridge out of rainbows if somebody orders one up but we won’t raise a silver hammer to do ourselves any good. We’ll throw up a Great Sky Fortress with fanatic attention to the tiniest details but we won’t build decent homes for ourselves.”

“A little down tonight, eh?” Februaren asked.

Jarneyn sat down facing him. “Enjoying an all-night loving session with despair. Thinking my folk are too much like our new friends, Harbin and Ernst. Automatons. Totally limited …”

The iron eyes shut. Korban began to snore.

The Ninth Unknown’s adventures had revealed a truth unmentioned in myth and legend. Dwarves snored. Always. Regardless. Relentlessly.

Februaren thought the dwarf had demonstrated initiative and inspiration. He ambled off to the chamber he had claimed, dove into a featherbed he suspected must belong to the Bastard himself. He drifted off wondering if they would ever get their man. Or if there was a point to continued pursuit, since the Windwalker still lay on the Andorayan shingle and showed no sign of recovering.

***

“Get your dead ass out of bed, Double Great. Something is about to happen.”

Heris had returned moments earlier, armed with routine news and luxury comestibles. The crows had begun going crazy. Now the wolves started up.

The castle filled with imminence — and the rattle of Aelen Kofer hastily unlimbering their mystic tools.

Noise and panic had nothing to do with her arrival. She came and went regularly without causing a stir.

“It’s time,” said the Ninth Unknown. He got out of bed and forced himself upright. He smoothed his hair and clothing while observing, “He doesn’t get in a hurry, does he?”

“His way isn’t ours, obviously.” Heris turned sideways, moved only far enough to place herself in a shadowed corner behind a glob of shimmer that was the source of waxing imminence.

A shape formed, as a dark, flat ghost that became humanoid, then gathered color and three-dimensionality. It took nearly a minute for the man to arrive, staggering. The shimmer vanished. The newcomer bent over, hands on knees, gasping. He panted for several seconds before he realized that he had an audience.

Both later wondered if what they heard as soft curses might not have been the muted screams of crows and howls of wolves from outside.

Still gasping, the Bastard forced himself upright. “You? You! But … How did …?”

“Ah, Brother Lester. Welcome. There have been changes. And your assistance is required. Allow me to explain.”

At which point Heris smacked the Bastard in the back of the head because of what he was doing with a hand hidden behind him.

Khor-ben Jarneyn arrived.

The Ninth Unknown announced, “We have him.”

“That fellow?”

“That’s him.”

“He doesn’t look like his mother at all.”

“Maybe he takes after his dad.”

“I never met Gedanke. I don’t know. Tuck him under your arm and take him back.”

“Uh …”

“The stranger his surroundings when he wakes up the more likely he is to listen when you explain. He’ll want information so he can figure out what’s really happening.”

Februaren eyed his captive. He hoped Iron Eyes was right. “Heris? Shall we?”

29. Alten Weinberg: Spring

Titus Consent tapped on the frame of the open doorway. Hecht said, “Come ahead.” He set Redfearn Bechter’s memory chest aside. “What?”

“Algres Drear is here. He wants to see you. He seems distracted.”

“He say why?”

“Not straight up. Not to me.”

“Bring him in. And feel free to eavesdrop.”

Hecht expected that to happen with or without his approval. His people got more protective every day. There were times when he missed Madouc’s easygoing ways.

He resented the increasing isolation. He went back to contemplating Bechter’s bequest.

He did that when he was feeling low. Wondering if there was a deeper message. Was it part of a pattern? Was it proof that the world was essentially random? Was his own passage through life part of a divine plan or just a stream of events with no real meaning?

He could argue both ways. Were he in an epic it would, for sure, lack a traditional plot, everything connecting to everything else and coming together in the end. His epic consisted of a lot of little plots entangled.

Titus Consent coughed, held the door for Algres Drear, then disappeared. Drear peered around. “No armed guards in the inner sanctum?”

“Don’t give them ideas.” Drear was back in Braunsknecht livery, with an extra band of black silk around his wrists.

“It might already be easier to get to Serenity than it is to reach you.”

“I find it tedious, too. Then I have a shooting pain in my shoulder that reminds me why. I try to tolerate the overreaction of the people who want to keep me among the living.”

“Not to be critical. But if you let them isolate you, pretty soon you won’t have any idea what’s going on.”

Which echoed Hecht’s fears.

“You aren’t here to warn me about that.”

“No. I have a different warning in hand.”

“If it’s time-sensitive you’d better spit it up.”

Drear decided not to take offense. “There’s a new plot afoot against you. It appears to include some serious players.”

Hecht considered. “You did go back to work for the Princess Apparent, didn’t you?” He knew the answer, of course.

“I did. In part thanks to you. I owe you for that. Plus, I want to shelter the Princess from the ambitions of her supposed friends.”

“Ah. Do go on.”

Drear told his story. He named no names because he had most of his information second-and third-hand. But there was a cabal, embracing some of the Electors, the Council Advisory, and senior court functionaries. They planned a palace revolution. The Commander of the Righteous would be arrested before all else. And killed, if he resisted. Katrin would be replaced with the more tractable Helspeth.

Hecht observed, “Those kinds of rumors have been around since Lothar went belly-up.”

“And the plotters never have the balls to take the plunge. I know. But Katrin’s recent behavior has given them fresh courage. And I don’t want my benefactor hurt by power squabbles amongst the Empire’s most spoiled nobles.”

“And you especially don’t want your principal to become a pawn in a game not of her own devising.” Hecht suspected that Drear harbored deep, well-hidden feelings for the Princess Apparent. Possibly more realistically founded than those of an itinerant war fighter who was not at all sure of who he was or where his true loyalties lay. He suspected, as well, that Algres Drear was perfectly aware of the weakness of the Commander of the Righteous where the Princess Apparent was concerned.

Captain Drear, married man, was offering to found a conspiracy of would-be lovers who dared not touch.

“I especially don’t,” Drear agreed. “With the Empress getting more erratic, more unpredictable, and more harsh, I don’t. She could have Helspeth executed this time. She’d be sorry and penitent afterward but it would be done.”

“If somebody does something really stupid and says he acted on her behalf.”

“That’s what I’m trying to stop. If we can make it to summer, and the diplomats find a court interested in a marital alliance, Katrin wouldn’t feel so threatened. Although Helspeth getting married won’t change the succession. Katrin has to produce an heir to do that.”

Hecht feared Katrin’s enemies would feel pressed to act before Helspeth could be dealt on the marriage market. “A lot of old men would be thrilled if they could just get Helspeth out of the country. If Katrin died they might have years to run the Empire if they could keep Helspeth away. If they could get her to abdicate. I understand that Anies is senile but healthy as a horse.”

Anies, Johannes’s sister, followed Helspeth in the succession. She was old but likely had a decade left. Hecht had not met her, though she shared Winterhall with the Empress and Princess Apparent. Indeed, she was the grande dame of that establishment.

Drear grunted unhappily.

“Dynastic troubles. There must be a better way,” Hecht mused. “How could we get Jaime of Castauriga back here for a while? He could solve all our problems with a five-minute effort.”

“That would be ideal. But we’d have to kidnap him. Witnesses agree, Jaime developed an abiding, irrational loathing for Katrin while he was here. As potent as her obsession with him. Who knows why? Nobody knows what happened in private. But it’s there, and Jaime’s feelings are so strong he’s even lost interest in gaining the Empire through his descendants.”

Titus Consent held the same opinion. But would that continue to be the case? The opportunity had to be gnawing at Jaime. When he fell asleep at night. In that twilight state when he was wakening. And every time one of his family reminded him what he was putting aside.

He could be the father of an Imperial dynasty.

Hecht said, “Maybe Helspeth should marry. She’d be safer. Her husband would have a vested interest in protecting her.”

Sourly, Drear agreed. “It would make her safer. But because Katrin has no issue there’ll always be knives with Helspeth’s name on. The temptation to meddle might even increase if it looked like a foreign line might come in. Especially if a match with Regard of Arnhand turned up.”

There had been resistance to that from all factions before. But that had begun to change when Katrin created her own lifeguard legion while steadfastly refusing to wilt like a woman.

Hecht said, “It could happen. The flaw, though, is that Arnhand is so supportive of the Brothen Patriarchs. That’s where Anne of Menand doesn’t restructure her values when a change might be convenient. And she’s definitely not somebody anyone here wants playing the wicked mother-in-law. Katrin would be the best match for Regard.”

The moment he said that he started to worry. He saw the identical fear take root in Algres Drear.

Katrin Ege was close to Serenity. Jaime of Castauriga was not. Jaime remained an adamant supporter of Peter of Navaya, who made no secret of what Serenity could do with his Connecten ambitions. There would be armed confrontation this summer. Anne of Menand had to scramble to hang on to allies who were not inclined to face the victor of Los Naves de los Fantas and the hardened troops of the Direcian Reconquest.

The Empress could not divorce Jaime. But no especially clever Church lawyer would be needed to develop an annulment action. Katrin’s pregnancy problems could be laid off on Jaime’s whoring and consorting with the Night.

Drear nearly moaned. “If Katrin’s crowd think of that, they’ll be at her day and night. Her loving Jaime will become irrelevant. They’ll argue the good of the Empire. No Ege can resist that.”

“You’re right. The religious angle could make her spite her emotional attachment, too. She really does believe the souls of her subjects are her responsibility.”

“Just keep her fixated on the Holy Lands. Feed that obsession and starve the rest.”

“Of course. Don’t mention any of this to anybody. Those people have proven that they can get up to plenty of mischief on their own.”

Drear nodded.

Hecht continued, “I know you don’t want to accuse anybody. But how about suggesting a few people that I should keep an eye on?”

Captain Drear’s conscience proved more flexible than he pretended. He produced a generously annotated list. “Some of these won’t be deeply involved. Others you’d expect. And some might surprise us if it came time to take a stand.”

Hecht read. Drear’s penmanship was obsessively precise. And his rating of suspects definitely did include surprises.

Drear said, “I should get back. I don’t like leaving her unguarded.”

The Princess Apparent was not, of course, unguarded. She just was not guarded by Algres Drear.

“All right. Thank you. Real food for thought, this. One thing. Don’t take it all on yourself. The weight could break you. Then what good will you be? If you can’t trust anybody else, holler at me.”

The men locked gazes. Drear nodded. “I will.” He left.

Titus knocked.

“Come. You heard?”

“Not all, but enough.”

“Here’s his list. You’ll find some surprises. Maybe with personal meaning to our Braunsknecht friend. Watch as many as you can. Carefully. If Drear isn’t making it up, go ahead and make it obvious that we’re watching. That’ll start them complaining. But it should make the weaker ones run scared. I want to see Sedlakova, Rhuk, and Prosek as soon as they can come in together.”

***

After three tries the Commander of the Righteous caught the Empress feeling well enough to attend a demonstration in support of an idea he had presented and she had given a supportive nod but not final approval. “The actual show will take only a few minutes, Your Grace. But it does have to be seen to be understood.”

So the Empress, her sister, and a handful of functionaries joined him on a cavalry training field two miles north of the city wall. Katrin was not in a good mood. Captain Ephrian, commanding her guards, insisted her disposition was its sunniest since the funeral.