To Ride Hell’s Chasm

‘In the hands, or the tongue?’ Mykkael finished his rounds, reached the stool, parked his leg. ‘No shame in him, sadly. Only self-righteous contempt.’ Since his fingers were trembling too severely to light the oil lamp, he was forced to waste, and leave the last candle burning.

‘You should rest,’ Vensic suggested in tentative quiet.

‘Not just yet.’ Mykkael clamped both hands on the trestle to stay upright as a cramp wracked his leg and shot fire through his lower back. The paroxysm subsided. He flipped through his papers, restoring their order, then paused. His fingertip traced down the list sent by Taskin, detailing the names of who had passed Highgate from the precinct of the palace. Prince Kailen’s name appeared near the top. The entry beneath had been altered.

Mykkael’s questing touch sensed the rough patch where someone had lifted the script. The name of a servant had been scribed in the blank, the ink on that line just barely fuzzed by the telltale hatch of torn fibre. The captain ran a testing thumb over the trestle, and encountered the trace grit of blotting sand.

That detail niggled. Here in the garrison, an erasure was more likely to be scraped with a knife, with the ink of an overstrike left to dry without any civilized niceties.

‘Something wrong?’ Vensic asked.

‘Perhaps.’ Mykkael resettled the whetstone on top of the list. Then he grasped his leg, hauled, and endured the flash of white pain as he propped the limb straight on the trestle. ‘Send for Jedrey. If he’s home, fetch him back.’

After a moment of expansive surprise, Vensic left on the errand.

Mykkael undid the bone buttons at his calf, jerked open his cuff, then ploughed his thumbs over the traumatized tissue knotted above his scarred joint. Given no better remedy, he reached for the tinned salve. Damn all to the fact he would hear from Jussoud, he had little choice but to keep himself upright and functional.

The night duty sergeant arrived at the threshold sooner than he expected. Born above Highgate, Jedrey was not wont to knock for the sake of a desert-bred’s dignity. Still dressed, but not armed, the lordly man had not shed his grimed surcoat, a sure indication he had been in the wardroom, and not at home with his wife.

A stickler for propriety, he never addressed his ranking captain outright, but waited in surly silence.

Mykkael did not look up from his knee, which appeared to consume his attention. ‘From the Middlegate sentry’s report, by your memory, at what hour did Devall’s party pass through? Say how many rode in that company?’

Jedrey scrubbed his chin with the back of one hand, to a grating scrape of blond stubble. He detested such tests. Yet he had learned along with the rest to handle the nuisance in his stride. ‘The man serves as crown advocate for Devall’s heir apparent. He passed the Middlegate with six servants in tow, just after his Highness, our Prince Kailen.’

Mykkael smothered his first impulse to look up. He said, through a grimace as the salve seared his skin, ‘They went together? Be precise, Sergeant.’

‘Perhaps.’ Jedrey shuffled his feet, barely able to rein back impertinence. ‘Devall’s advocate could have stepped back to allow his Highness due precedence for royal rank. If so, your common-born sentry might not have recognized the finesse of a well-bred man showing good manners.’

The predictable note of admonition was there, for the late, callous handling of the lowlanders who were the captain’s evident betters.

Mykkael stifled laughter, his face kept deadpan. Adept at keeping snob sergeants in line, he turned a drilling glance sideways. ‘Tell me, how many of that party just left?’

Jedrey flushed, a patched red that made his blue eyes flash like gem-stone. ‘I did not count their individual backsides. They were angry.’

‘Better worry quick on your own behalf, soldier,’ Mykkael said with edged quiet. ‘I am angry. Inside this keep, off duty or not, I expect a man to keep his eyes open.’

A pointless exercise, to argue that Sessalie was not at war; that such vigilance was unnecessary for patrolling town streets; Jedrey choked back outrage, then found himself off-balanced again by Mykkael’s next clipped question. ‘Why are you still here, Sergeant?’

Jedrey succumbed to the prodding at last, rage couched in his upper-crust accent. ‘You should be in bed. You’re not. That’s no man’s business but yours, don’t you think?’

Mykkael mopped the salve off his competent fingers, one mahogany knuckle at a time. ‘I don’t have a wife left fretting at home. That means you had business and purpose, for staying. Under this roof, soldier, you answer to me.’

No man in the keep contradicted that tone. Jedrey unburdened, his delivery professional. ‘Your seeress was found. In the moat, stone-dead, no mark on her, no foul play’ He curled his lip, his insolent regard sweeping over his captain’s stained surcoat. ‘But you knew that fact already, did you not?’

Mykkael shifted his lamed leg to the floor. ‘My swim happened outside the walls,’ he said, quite suddenly dangerous.

That gleam, in his eyes, shot chills over Jedrey. His overbred arrogance withered. ‘The news just came in, this minute. You sent for me. And I’ve told you.’

‘So you did.’ Mykkael’s tone was cut glass. ‘Since, for self-importance, you delayed the delivery, you can stay on duty and execute my orders. I want the old woman’s body brought here. Get Beyjall, the apothecary, also the physician who lives at the north corner of Fane Street. Let them see if the victim was poisoned or drowned.’

‘She was piss drunk,’ Jedrey stated, stiff under that peeling reprimand. ‘Her heart probably stopped.’

Mykkael shook his head, saddened. ‘The old besom hated and feared open water. Her family knows this. She never went near the moat, drunk or sober.’

‘Foul play?’ Jedrey said, his quick temper dissolved, as it must, to this captain’s deft handling.

‘I think so.’ Mykkael’s desert features were shadowed with pity, and an odd flash of recrimination. ‘Powers deliver her sad, crazy spirit, I think she died very badly’

‘You act as though you killed the old fool,’ Jedrey snapped.

He found himself summarily dismissed, and departed, brooding upon his captain’s fiercely kept silence.

V. Daybreak (#udd66e510-c82c-5fc4-9823-260cbcf5eacc)

SPRING SUNRISE BROKE OVER THE KINGDOM OF SESSALIE, THE PEAKED O ROOF OF THE PALACE A DIMMED GREY OUTLINE, MASKED OVER IN FOG. Inside the walled town, the streets lay choked also. The carved eaves of the houses plinked silvered droplets on to wet cobbles where the slop takers made rounds with their carts and their singsong chants for collection. If the seasonal mist shrouding the morning was normal, the spreading word of Princess Anja’s disappearance cast unease like a spreading blight. The lamplighters had snuffed their wicks and gone home, bearing rumour to garrulous wives. The taverns that should have been shuttered and closed showed activity behind steamy casements.

Talk moved apace. Disbelief became shock, churned to wild speculation as the craftsmen unlocked their shops. Women veiled in the damp fringe of their shawls clustered in the Falls Gate market, while the vendors commiserated and shook puzzled heads. There were no eye witnesses. Even first-hand accounts from the feast yielded no shred of hard fact. No one could imagine a reason to upset the match between Devall’s heir apparent and Princess Anja.

Least of all his Highness, Prince Kailen, who reeled in drunken, vociferous bliss up the switched back streets towards the Highgate. Ribald echoes caromed off the mansions as he was led homewards astride a palace guardsman’s borrowed mount.

The pair, immaculate man-at-arms and dishevelled prince, passed up the broad avenue, shattering the quiet and driving the ladies’ lapdogs into frenzied yapping on the cushions of their bowfront windowseats. The procession clopped past the palace entry. It crossed the bordered gardens of the royal courtyard, where the seneschal awaited, a wasp-thin silhouette in sober grey, arms folded and slender foot tapping.

‘Powers that be!’ the prince slurred from his precarious perch on the horse. ‘Why does it always have to be you?’

‘Importunate offspring!’ the seneschal huffed under his breath. He steadied the bridle, while Taskin’s guardsman helped the prince down and supported his weaving stance.

The next moment became awkward, as, knocking elbows, court official and palace man-at-arms exchanged burdens; the one reclaimed his loaned horse, while the other assumed the jelly-legged burden of Sessalie’s inebriated prince.

Too tall and thin to manage the load gracefully, the seneschal wrinkled his mournful nose. ‘Sorrows upon us, your Highness. Each day, I thank every power above that your mother never lived to see this.’

‘She’s in a better position than you to make herself heard on that score.’ Kailen laughed. His handsome, fair features tipped up towards the sky, which, to judge by his rollicking sway, appeared to be wildly spinning. ‘At least dead, with her list of queenly virtues, she’d be more likely to claim the ear of omnipotent divinity.’

But the Seneschal of Sessalie was too old and lizard-skinned to shock; and Kailen, that moment, was a young man too dissolute to shame.

The guardsman stayed professionally deadpan throughout. Bound to deliver the messages he carried from Captain Mykkael of the garrison, he remounted the moment he received his dismissal and rode off to make his report.

The seneschal turned Kailen around, then began the last leg of the journey to haul his charge to the royal apartments. He puffed, grunting manfully, taxed far beyond his frail build and aged strength. All his fastidious senses were revolted by the reek of the prince’s clothes—below town smells of urine and stale pipe smoke; boiled onions, trout stew and dark beer.

‘Why oh why do you do this, your Highness? Now, more than ever, we need your subjects to see you as your father’s trustworthy son.’

‘Need me?’ Prince Kailen snorted. ‘Need me? Nobody needs me! Only Anja.’ He flung out an arm muscled fit from the tourney, too sodden to notice the woes of the courtier who sweated and struggled to brace him. ‘Find my sister, get her wed.’ He tripped, gasped a curse, then maundered into the seneschal’s longsuffering ear. ‘You’ll have your coveted sea trade from Devall. My sister reigns as a wealthy queen over us, and I, her poor relative, steward no more than Sessalie’s dirt-licking farmers.’

‘You’ll marry one day,’ the seneschal chided, wrestling the prince’s incompetent bulk up the first flight of marble steps. ‘Who knows what alliance your betrothed might bring?’

Proceeding in comedic jerks and sharp stops, the mismatched pair passed the fountain at the arch, and missed falling in by a hairsbreadth.

‘Oh, my intended will wed for a bride gift of turnips,’ said Prince Kailen, morose. ‘Who sends the princess of anything here, to marry a king who counts out his year’s tithes in cattle?’