Warrior (44 page)

There was no need to draw undue attention to Damin’s identity when they were simply out on the town having a bit of fun.

Adham nodded in agreement. “They line up outside Madam Leska’s waiting for her customers.

No doubt the litter bearers think anyone who can afford one of her
court’esa
can afford a ride home afterwards.”

“I heard they lined up outside Madam Leska’s because after her
court’esa
are done with you, a man isn’t
capable
of walking anywhere,” Damin laughed. He put an arm around his cousin and the other around his stepbrother and steered them in the direction of Moss Street. “Still, I would like to be a fly on the wall when Xanda tries to explain to Luciena why he arrived home in a litter hired from Madam Leska’s.”

Weaving down the street drunkenly, Xanda frowned at his cousin. “You really are an evil little bastard, aren’t you, Damin Wolfblade? The gods help us all when you’re ruling the whole damned country.”

“Well, I am planning complete world domination, you know,” Damin informed them cheerily. “I thought I’d invade Fardohnya the first week and then wipe out Medalon on my way north to obliterate the Kariens a couple of weeks after that. Then we might take a short break while we plan our conquest of nations across the southern oceans.”

“Could be fun,” Adham agreed. “Do we
have
to rape and pillage all the way, though?”

“I suspect we do. I don’t think I can really call myself an evil tyrant if I don’t at least make the effort. Why?” he asked his stepbrother curiously. “Do you particularly
want
to rape and pillage?”

“Well, I’m sure it’d be fun the first few villages we passed through, but it must get rather tiring after a while. I’m not sure I’d have the stamina to see me all the way to Karien. And Xanda would have to ask Luciena first, before he could rape and pillage anybody.”

“You’re assuming I even want to have anything to do with your diabolical scheme,” Xanda said, sounding a little miffed that Adham thought he might have to ask his wife’s permission.

“Don’t you
want
to be my evil minion?” Damin asked, wounded that his cousin might even consider refusing. “It’ll be great fun! I’ll even promise not to kill you out of hand unless I’m really feeling out of sorts.”

“A minion can’t ask for much more than that,” Adham declared with a loud hiccough.

Xanda thought about it for a moment and then nodded unsteadily. “Promise to stop promising my wife you’ll have me home before dawn and we might be able to do business, your royal evil-tyrant-ship.”

Damin agreed with a laugh and, with Goren leading the way and the second bodyguard, Clem, following behind them, the drunken young men turned into Fisherman’s Lane, which would take them through to Moss Street.

“Of course, if you let Xanda be a minion, you’ll have to make Travin one, too,” Adham warned Damin as they traversed the dark lane. “And probably Kalan, ’cause she’s such a bossy little thing, she’ll never let you rule the world unless you cut her in for a piece of the action. Rorin might come in handy, too, being a sorcerer and all.”

“And Rodja can be your bookkeeper,” Xanda suggested. “All evil empires need someone to keep the books. I mean, how do you know what spoils you’ve collected if you haven’t got someone like Rodja to count it all for you?”

“And don’t forget Starros,” Damin reminded them, getting right into the spirit of things. “He’ll have to be my chamberlain. Do you think he’ll get upset if I tell him I want a eunuch for the job?”

They reached the end of Fisherman’s Lane. Across the street, a line of litter bearers waited patiently for the patrons of Madam Leska’s to conclude their business. He turned at the sound of someone falling. Behind them, the drunken Denikan had followed them but had slipped and lay facedown in the lane. Dismissing the foreigner as inconsequential, he turned his attention back to Madam Leska’s, which seemed to have the total attention of his stepbrother and his cousin. A line of flaming torches lit the path leading to the rather grand foyer some thirty feet from the edge of the road and they could hear the music and laughter from across the street.

“Maybe,” Adham suggested thoughtfully, “we should take a quick look inside?”

“Or maybe not, my lords,” Goren informed them, glancing back over his shoulder at his three charges.

Adham glared at the big man impatiently. “When Princess Marla hired you, Goren, did she advertise for a bodyguard or a killjoy?”

“A babysitter,” Goren replied bluntly. “Stay here. I’ll organise some litters.”

“We only need one for Xanda,” Damin pointed out.

“The others are for you and Master Tirstone, my lord. It’s time you were getting home, too.”

“Ha!” Xanda barked triumphantly. “I might have a wife waiting to kill me when I get home, but at least I’m not still answerable to my
mother
.”

Adham burst out laughing at that. Damin wasn’t nearly so amused. Even drunk, he was painfully aware of the truth in Xanda’s words.

“I’ll have you know—,” he began, but he didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. The drunken Denikan had picked himself up and staggered into their midst.

“Whoa there!” Clem said, grabbing the sailor before he could lay a hand on the prince. “Go sleep it off somewhere else, eh?” He shoved the man clear, but the Denikan seemed oddly determined to approach them.

“You prince?” he asked in broken Hythrun, refusing to be put off.

He sounded desperate, rather than drunk, Damin thought.

“You prince? You help?”

“I told you already,” Clem insisted, “there’s nobody here for you, my lad. Back to your ship now.

Move along.”

“You prince?” the Denikan insisted, pushing past Clem desperately as he tried to approach Damin. He coughed painfully, his spittle flecked with blood. “You help! They say you help!”

“He knows who you are,” Xanda remarked in a voice that suddenly sounded remarkably sober.

Adham nodded his agreement. “He followed us from the Lurching Sailor.”

“You Prince Damin!” the Denikan cried, loud enough to attract the attention of the litter bearers outside Madam Leska’s. “You help!”

“Shut him up, Clem,” Xanda ordered, looking around in concern, but the bodyguard didn’t need to be told. He already had his hand over the sailor’s mouth to keep him quiet. The Denikan struggled weakly against Clem’s hold, but either he lacked the strength to fight off the big bodyguard or he wasn’t very serious about it.

Damin stepped a little closer and studied the young man curiously. He was, like every Denikan Damin had ever seen, handsome, dark-skinned and muscular, his long dark hair arranged in an intricate series of thin braids threaded with beads. He wore an open vest and his skin appeared bruised beneath it, as if he’d been beaten, quite savagely. Damin indicated that Clem should let him speak. “What do you want with me?”

“You prince? You help?”

He took an involuntary step backward. The man’s breath was foul, but it was the stench of sickness, not sour ale.

“He keeps saying that,” Adham remarked. “It’s like they’re the only Hythrun words he knows.”

“Do you speak Denikan?”

The young trader shook his head. “Not even a little bit. What about you, Xanda?”

“I know the words for
how much
and
get your hands off my wife
,” Xanda joked. Then his smile faded. “Some sailor knowing a few words of Hythrun doesn’t explain how he knows who you are, Damin.”

The Denikan said something in his own language; a rush of words that meant nothing to them.

The outburst appeared to exhaust the young man and he sagged, semi-conscious, in Clem’s grasp.

“He’s burning up,” the bodyguard remarked with a frown.

Damin looked at the sailor with concern, reaching out to check his fever just as Goren arrived back with the litters he’d arranged to take them home.

“No!” he shouted, slapping Damin’s hand away. “Don’t touch him!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Look at him,” Goren ordered.

“He’s covered in bruises,” Adham pointed out, a little puzzled.

“They’re not bruises,” Goren warned. “He’s bleeding into his skin. Did he touch you at all, my lord? Any of you?”

Damin shook his head, wishing it was clearer. “He was asking for me, but Clem stopped him before he got too close. Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“Not for certain,” the big man replied. “But I can make a pretty good guess.” He turned his attention to Clem, who was still holding the young Denikan sailor. He had a grim, almost resigned look on his face. The two bodyguards stared at each other for a moment before Clem lowered the Denikan to the ground. Goren turned to face Damin and the others. “I want you to get in those litters and go home, my lords,” he ordered. “Now. No argument. No complaints.” There was something in the voice of the big, normally taciturn man that warned them this was no longer a laughing matter.

“You’ll take care of the Denikan?” Damin asked, brushing aside Adham’s puzzled demand for an explanation.

“For all the good it will do,” Clem warned, looking up at the prince. He was squatting over the sailor, who appeared to have lapsed into unconsciousness. “He’ll be dead soon.”

“And what about you, Clem?” Damin asked, acutely aware that he was the one who had put himself between his prince and the danger this foreigner represented.

“I’ll take care of Clem,” Goren promised. “But he can’t go back to the palace.”

“Damin? What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Adham. Take the litter and go home. You too, Xanda.”

There was no trace of frivolity in the young prince’s voice. The others looked at him strangely, unused to seeing him so grave, and then did as he bid, turning for the litters with no further argument.

As soon as they were on their way, Damin turned back to Goren.

“You need to get out of here, too, your highness.”

“I know,” Damin agreed. Then he asked the question he’d been too afraid to voice while his stepbrother and cousin were nearby. “It’s plague, isn’t it?”

Goren nodded, glancing down at Clem with a frown. Clem knew it, too, and that he was probably going to be its next victim. Across the street, the music and the laughter coming from Madam Leska’s continued unabated, oblivious to the danger on its very doorstep.

“Do you think he’s been in contact with many people?”

“Hard to say,” Goren shrugged. “He’s almost dead. He could have been wandering around the city infecting people for days.”

“He was asking for me by name.”

“Which means someone else in Greenharbour knew what was wrong with him and probably cut him loose,” Goren suggested. “And then sent him after you.”

Damin shook his head. “Nobody could want me dead so badly they’d risk infecting the whole city with plague, surely?”

Goren shrugged. “It’s my job to keep you alive, your highness, not second-guess your assassins.

Now get in that litter, go home, wake your mother and tell her what’s happened. And then start packing.”

“Packing?”

“If the city is struck down by plague,” Goren warned, “you’ll be on the first coach back to Krakandar. You mark my words.”

Damin stared down at the half-dead sailor for a moment, feeling the weight of his position as Hythria’s heir pressing on his shoulders. It simply wasn’t fair that such pain and devastation should be let loose, all for the simple purpose of killing one man.

“This is going to get bad, isn’t it, Goren?”

“Yes,” the big man agreed heavily. “It’s going to get very bad, your highness. Very bad, indeed.”

The King of Fardohnya had much to be grateful for, he knew, but it didn’t really help much to count his blessings. Eleven legitimate children and that many again born of his numerous
court’esa
was proof, surely, that Jelanna, the Goddess of Fertility, was smiling on him.

By the gods, I’ve spent enough money on her damn temples
, Hablet reminded himself, as he stepped into the harem garden.
I ought to be her favourite
.

But if he was Jelanna’s favourite, the goddess had a strange way of showing it—she had blessed him with eleven legitimate children. And not one of them was a son.

Sometimes, on the rare occasions he was feeling reflective, Hablet wondered if this was punishment for killing Riika Ravenspear all those years ago. Although her death was patently Lecter Turon’s fault, Hablet’s cursed ability to produce nothing but legitimate daughters (in another cruel twist of fate, he had no trouble producing bastard sons) could be easily traced back to that fateful day, almost a quarter of a century ago. He had stood in the hall of his Winter Palace at Qorinipor in southern Fardohnya, in the shadow of the Sunrise Mountains, and let Laran Krakenshield extort three and a half million gold rivets from him, just because Hablet was feeling bad after his chamberlain had inadvertently killed the Warlord of Krakandar’s sister.

That entire regrettable episode was, in Hablet’s mind, a disaster from start to finish. Lecter’s plan to kidnap the newlywed Marla Wolfblade was a fiasco. First, they’d kidnapped the wrong girl. Then they’d killed her before realising she was the sister of the richest and, arguably, most powerful man in Hythria. And then, like a fool, he’d listened to Lecter again and agreed to take Princess Shanita of Lanipoor as his wife, distracted by the notion of all that money (and his brand-new coach) being carried across the border into Hythria.

Hablet’s first official marriage had proved almost as calamitous as his dealings with the Warlord of Krakandar. When the Prince of Lanipoor was bribing Lecter Turon and listing his daughter’s numerous virtues, he’d neglected to mention that along with her excellent childbearing hips and outstanding beauty she was a spiteful, vindictive and murderously jealous little bitch. A shrieking harpy in the flesh.

Even the praise of her much-vaunted hips had been misleading. After six years and a series of disappointing miscarriages, Princess Shanita had finally given birth to the first of his many daughters within days of Hablet’s Hythrun
court’esa
, Welenara, producing his firstborn—albeit illegitimate—son.

Furious her achievement had been overshadowed by a slave—and a foreign slave at that—when the child was only days old, Shanita arranged to have both the
court’esa
and her newborn poisoned.