The lower floor of the keep matched its austere exterior, the flagstones wide and sunken, the walls solid blocks of dark, battered rock. Pennants and tapestries hung between dim sconces, displaying what Chel took to be Rose-approved imagery. The sign of the rose and its forms bloomed prominently. Fires crackled from wide, deep hearths, but their heat seemed swallowed by the oppressive, implacable cold of the mass of dark stone. At every corner steel-and-crimson-draped guards watched the royal party with hostile eyes.
Torht, steered by Mendel at his elbow, halted them at the base of a giant, carved staircase, great grey slabs piled up one on top of the other, climbing in a wide, slow spiral out of sight.
‘And here we split once more. Prince Tarfel, it is time to attend to your father. Once he is secured, Vassad will have no hold over you, even should he somehow elude us today. Surprise will be your biggest asset. You understand?’
Palo nodded. ‘We will see to King Lubel.’
‘Prince Mendel and I will begin the climb. Vassad sits snug in his lair, by now expecting an audience with the crown prince.’
Mendel nodded and patted the sword at his belt. ‘I shall cleave my enemy’s head from his shoulders.’
Torht smiled indulgently, then continued. ‘Once Vassad is subdued or slain, we will give our signal. You will know what to do.’
‘I will. Shepherd guide your hand.’
‘And yours, Ayla.’ Torht was already scaling the lower steps, Mendel at his elbow, his progress laboured.
Palo looked at the rest of them. ‘Prince Tarfel, you had best lead the way.’
***
Thick furs, bear and wolf, covered the flagstones of the royal wing. Statues and engravings stood in contrast to the staid weavings of the main keep, none of whom Chel recognized. One particular statue showed a giant of a man, one foot on a bear’s head, a huge stone axe hefted over one shoulder.
Tarfel noticed his glance. ‘Akko Merimonsun, the first of our line,’ he said. ‘My grandfather.’
They looked up at the huge stone man, who would have towered over them even without his chunky plinth.
‘Is he to scale?’
Palo hissed through her teeth at them, and they hurried on.
Four confessors stood at the fine-wrought door to the audience chamber, clearly wearing mail beneath their rust-coloured robes. All had swords, full-length and well-made, strapped at their waists, and long spears resting against their shoulders.
‘What happened to the Church’s Articles on bearing arms?’ Chel muttered to Rennic.
‘Perhaps they were amended.’
Palo urged Tarfel forward. One of the confessors looked up in surly surprise, then blocked his path with a meaty arm.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
Tarfel summoned all of his regal bluster. ‘Unhand me! I am Tarfel Merimonsun, Prince of Vistirlar, and I am here to see my father.’
The confessors exchanged a look.
‘You what?’ one said. ‘Prince Tarfel’s dead.’
‘I am anything but, I assure you. I am, uh, hale and hearty. Bend your knee.’ With that Tarfel flung his ringed hand at the guards.
‘But … the king’s not receiving visitors.’
‘Do you hear me, wh— whelp? I am a prince!’
The confessors exchanged another look. ‘We need to check. No one’s allowed in without a prelate. Wait here, your, uh, highness.’
Palo leaned in close to Tarfel’s ear. ‘Please take a step back, highness.’
Tarfel did so.
The movement was a blur. Palo, Spider and Dalim stepped forward as a trio, knives in their hands from nowhere. The three confessors at the door had no time to grapple their spears around or draw their swords, their arms flailing as quick blades dug into their throats and bore them to the ground in jingling, gurgling heaps.
The last confessor was three paces further on. Rennic’s knife had slipped from his grasp and clattered on the flagstones. The confessor’s eyes were wide, and he turned to run.
Rennic was flailing in the gloom for his knife. ‘Little man! Get him!’
Chel ran.
He pounded after the confessor, blood thumping in his ears, as the bigger man sprinted away. The royal wing had been deserted, but the main keep was thick with traffic. He would be there in moments. Chel forced his legs faster, teeth clenched, breath coming in hard gasps, every pace bringing him inches closer to his armoured quarry.
As they hared around the last corner, he was almost close enough to reach out and touch the man’s fleeing back or catch a pumping elbow, their feet slapping down half a second apart. It dawned on him that he had no idea what he was going to do if he caught him. He hesitated, breath catching, and the confessor turned his head.
A door opened in front of them, directly in the confessor’s path. The man crashed into it at full tilt, slamming it back and out again, whereupon it struck him a second time as he reeled. He staggered back, hood flattened. A deep line in his forehead was placid for a moment, then a steady trickle of blood began to flow. He sat down, breath harsh and halting, then his eyes rolled closed and he leaned slowly against the wall.
A robed head appeared around the battered door. ‘What in God’s name was that?’
Chel stood over the stricken confessor, gasping fresh air back into his burning lungs, one hand up as a plea for indulgence. His brain worked as hard as he could force it. ‘We were … racing … Wager.’ He swallowed, then corrected himself. ‘No … coin … of course.’
‘You bloody fools! I should have you stripped. Look at my door!’ He heard a sniff of disgust. ‘Your friend looks unwell. I suggest, perhaps, a visit to the chapel of healing?’
Chel nodded, still bent double. ‘Yes, absolutely.’
‘Yes, absolutely, what?’
He raised his gaze. There was something familiar about the voice. The robes covering the feet before him were not rust-coloured but plain white, edged with delicate vermilion stitching. He’d seem that shade before.
‘Wait,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Who are you? Why are you dressed like that?’
‘Better get to the chapel,’ he said, trying to hide the burning of his cheeks and neck as exertion. He reached under the confessor’s armpits and began to drag him away, ignoring the groan from his weak shoulder.
‘Where are you going?’ the woman called after him. ‘The chapel is that way.’
Chel ignored her, picking up the pace of his drag. The confessor’s leaking head lolled as Chel scuttled backward at top speed. As he reached the corner, he risked a quick look up.
Sister Vashenda was looking straight at him. Her eyes widened in recognition. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘The sand-crab! Hey! Hey, come back!’
She began to trot after him. She was not yet running.
Rennic was waiting around the corner. Without acknowledgement, he grabbed one of the confessor’s limp arms and dragged beside Chel, and they tore down the hallway, Vashenda’s footsteps and cries echoing after them.
‘Who the fuck’s that?’ Rennic said as they cleared the next corner. They were leaving a splattered trail in their wake.
‘The fucking executive prelate of Denirnas.’
‘What’s she doing here?’
‘No idea. Maybe she’s being punished for something.’
‘And why does she know you?’
Over his shoulder Chel saw the royal chamber’s gilded door approaching.
‘Oh, I’m quite the popular fellow.’
***
‘Bar the door. Our sand-crab has attracted some unwanted attention.’
‘Hey, I’m not the one who dropped my fucking knife!’
‘And where was your knife back there? I didn’t give it to you for—’
‘Quiet!’ Palo’s eyes blazed in the gloom as the door swung closed behind them. Three former confessors lay piled beside the ornate arch, swiftly joined by their fellow. Spider delivered a perfunctory coup de grâce, but Chel suspected that Vashenda’s door had done the heavy lifting. Dalim had liberated one of the spears and draped it across his shoulders in familiar fashion. Swords were distributed. There were not enough for Chel to get one.
Tarfel stood alone before the heavy curtain that stretched across the chamber, dividing the rows of banked wooden benches on their side from what lay beyond. The room was cold and dark: a few low candles flickered in alcoves along the walls, but the hearths were empty, and the slit windows, high on the wall, offered only narrow slices of grizzly light, far overhead.
‘My father’s rooms should be beyond the curtain, through the audience chamber. There … there may be more guards.’
Palo put a hand on Chel’s shoulder and nodded at the prince. ‘Keep him out of the way.’
She approached the curtain and pulled it slowly aside, revealing a wood and woven-rush screen behind. Chel stuck close to Tarfel as the prince edged closer. Through the screen a few candles glimmered, their light feeble in the tall chamber’s pressing gloom. No fire burned on either side of the screen, and their breath misted before them. Chel felt the sharp cold against his skin, despite the acerbic heat in his muscles and the thumping of his blood in his ears.
A shape loomed beyond the screen, more obscured than visible through the woven slats. A mound or pyramid, something altogether more massive above it. Before it, the vague outline of an intercessor’s lectern. Nothing moved but Palo, taking one careful step after another as she crept along the wooden barrier, pulling the curtain as she went. The room was very quiet, and an odd smell tickled at Chel’s nostrils. The alchemical taint that Torht had mentioned, no doubt.
Palo found a door to one side of the screen. It opened with the merest creak, and she slipped through and into the darkness beyond. Tarfel made to go after her, but Chel stepped in front. ‘Highness, wait here a moment.’
‘My father’s chambers are through there, Vedren. Let me through!’ His voice echoed around the cold stone.
‘Just— Just let me go first.’
If anything, the air beyond the screen was colder than before. At the room’s centre, posed directly before the screen upon a dais, stood a huge, elevated bed, inclined to allow any occupant a view through the screen. Behind and over it stood another great stone statue: a crowned giant in hunter’s garb, a greatsword hefted in a two-handed grip, towering and muscular. If that was supposed to be Lubel Merimonsun, it seemed a little insensitive to have his invalid daybed directly beneath it. To one side, a stout door led elsewhere into the keep, presumably to the king’s private chambers. Palo tried it. It was locked. She made to draw her weapon on it, then stopped, looking back at the elevated bed at the chamber’s heart.
The bed was occupied.
Its covers and furs were rucked and tented over a figure, dwarfed by the grand scale of its furnishings. Colourless hair spilled out from the darkness of the pillows, flat and sallow. Palo, Chel and the prince advanced on it, none speaking. The alchemical smell was stronger here, far stronger, and Chel felt his eyes beginning to water.
Palo had reached the dais and was climbing up beside the bed. Something glittered in her hand in the stumbling candlelight. Chel’s heart beat faster, his stomach lurching, his head light from more than the room’s unsettling smell. Tarfel was only a couple of paces behind him.
He rounded the intercessor’s lectern and leapt up beside Palo, feeling a jolt of complaint from his shoulder as he gripped the side of the dais. If Palo noticed him, she gave no sign. The knife was in her hand, gripped ready to plunge, and as he reached her she whispered.
‘Death to tyrants.’
‘Nine rancid, sheep-fucking hells,’ came Rennic’s voice from across the dais. His head appeared at the bed’s headboard, level with the mounded pillows.
Chel couldn’t yet reach Palo’s knife hand, but she was holding where she was.
‘What?’
‘Princeling. Uh, bad news, I’m afraid.’
Tarfel had reached the foot of the dais.
‘What? What is it? Father! Father!’
‘I’m sorry, but your dad, he, uh, ain’t breathing.’
‘What? What?’
‘He’s dead. Look, no breath.’ Rennic swept a hand toward the pile at the bed’s head. No telltale plume rose in the frigid air.
‘And from the look of it,’ Rennic continued, reaching out and drawing back the covering furs, ‘he’s been that way for quite a long time.’
The mummified face of Lubel Merimonsun stared sightlessly at them from silken pillows, white-gold tresses splayed around him like a classical halo. The body was hopelessly shrunken, shrivelled back to taut grey skin over the bones beneath.
‘That’s what that smell is.’ Rennic shook his head, more baffled than angry. ‘Not herbal manipulation. He’s been fucking embalmed.’
‘Father! No, no!’ Tarfel began to sob. Rennic gave Chel a look that strongly suggested he look after the grieving prince, but Chel felt no pressing inclination.
‘The king is dead, and we shall all of us burn.’
Beside him, Palo stirred.
‘What? What did you say?’
‘Nothing. Just … something I heard once.’
Below the dais, Tarfel was raging. ‘That bastard, that shit-pig-bastard! He killed Father. He killed his king. And he covered it up. My own father is dead … and I didn’t know. I didn’t know!’ He began to kick the side of the intercessor’s lectern, knocking over a candlestick.
Rennic cleared his throat and nodded in the prince’s direction again for Chel’s benefit. Still, Chel didn’t move. Something had caught his eye as the candlestick rolled, a glimmering line through the air, rising up from the back of the bed and up toward the statue.
‘What’s that?’
The door to the chamber rattled, then rattled again. Everyone froze, even Tarfel mid-kick.
‘Who’s in there? Sand-flower, is that you?’ Vashenda’s voice came muffled and alarmed through the thick wood. ‘Open this door! Where are the guards!’
The door bucked against the bundled spears barring it shut, twice, three times. ‘Open this fucking door in the name of the Primarch!’
Rennic gave Palo a sharp and hungry glance.
‘We need to leave. Now, before she gathers more.’
Palo shook her head. Her face remained as expressionless as ever.
‘Our mission ends within this chamber.’
Vashenda’s voice shrieked from outside. ‘Alarm! Sound the alarm! Guards, guards!’ Her cries receded as she disappeared back into the keep. Back toward legions of mail-clad red confessors.
‘Don’t give up on me, Palo. We can fight our way out if we move fast. Even Prince Ding-dong there.’
Tarfel gave them a look of tear-streaked defiance.
‘Absolutely. I’m absolutely ready to kill something. Just give me a sword.’
Palo was unmoved.
‘Our job is done. Done for us, in fact,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper. Louder, she said, ‘We must keep them from the tower, to give Raeden the best chance of reaching Vassad. We must draw them here and delay them as long as possible.’
‘You mean dying valiantly, yes?’ Rennic said. ‘Fuck. That. Little man, get the prince and get to the door to the king’s chambers. We’ll bust it open.’
Tarfel shook his head. ‘The private chambers are a dead end. There’s only one connecting door from this wing to the main keep.’
‘What about elsewhere? Other doors to the outside?’
The prince shrugged, sniffing angry tears. ‘We’re halfway up a hill, built into the rock. Where would they go?’
‘Fuck. Fuck!’
Chel had followed the line of light, fingers tracing the slender thread. It passed through a loop at the edge of the wooden headboard, then travelled straight up the body of the statue into the darkness above. He gave the thread a gentle tug.
Beneath the covers, the dead king’s hand twitched.
‘So that’s how they manage the audiences,’ he said, tugging the thread again. He scanned the headboard and spotted four more tiny rings, barely perceptible threads running through each. ‘A strong smell, no voice, only gestures and twitches,’ he recited as he clambered onto the statue’s plinth, eyes fixed on the path of the tiny threads up and over the stonework.
‘Little man, what the fuck are you doing?’
‘There’s something here. They were controlling the king like a puppet.’ He paused. ‘Apologies, your highness.’
Tarfel waved a hand, past caring. Rennic was less serene.
‘Fascinating. And that helps us because …’
Chel followed the threads through a single ring, barely visible, hammered into the statue’s shoulder, then out and across the far side. Very thin slits were visible between the stone blocks in the wall behind the statue.
‘I think there’s—’
Something crashed against the chamber door, rocking it inward. The spears creaked.
‘Sand-flower! Open the door and receive the Shepherd’s mercy!’
Rennic was beside him. ‘What? What is there? Hurry now!’
Chel grabbed one of the feeble candles and held it toward the wall. ‘There’s something here. They made the king move with threads from behind here. Made it look like he was moving.’
‘Who did?’
‘Fuck knows, Vassad, his minions, who cares now? Someone had to be back here, though.’
‘And you think there’s a way out?’
‘I think it’s possible.’
The door crashed again, then again a moment later. The thumps against it picked up a sickening rhythm. The bundled spears began to splinter. All the while, Vashenda called through what she no doubt considered to be reassurance.
‘Open the door, sand-flower. We care only for the health of the king. Surrender now and receive only the Shepherd’s mercy!’
Chel cocked an eyebrow. ‘Doesn’t she know about the king?’
Rennic grunted, indifferent. ‘If she does, would she tell?’
Palo and Dalim were back at the screen door, watching. Waiting. Spider was closer to Chel and Rennic than to them.
‘What’s rat-boy found?’
‘Fuck off, Spider, let him work.’
‘There!’
A concealed hinge lay in the wooden panelling that lined the far wall. Chel dug at it with his good knife, tracing the outline of a small door. He snagged the catch as the spears began to split.
‘Here! Everyone! Here!’
Spider was inside before he could get the thing all the way open. Rennic ran back to grab the prince and drag him through. Only when Dalim bolted and it seemed she’d be left completely alone did Palo follow.
Chel pulled the door closed and jammed his knife through its latch as darkness swallowed them. Slivers of wan yellow light from the chamber lent precious little illumination to their new surroundings.
‘What now?’ Dalim whispered and was immediately shushed. Chel crept along the cold stone and pressed his eye to one of the slits.
The royal chamber’s door slammed open, ripping apart the spears that had barred it in a burst of splintering wood. Vashenda strode into the room, as furious and haughty as the day he’d first seen her in Denirnas, even as a mashed blur of colour through the screen. ‘Sand-flower!’ she roared as she entered the chamber, flanked by a dozen or more red-robed shapes. They fanned out, spreading across the chamber, but came to a halt when they reached the screen. They seemed unwilling to go any further.
‘Sand-flower? Come out now, surrender yourself and end this farce. Stop being a thrice-damned fool.’ Vashenda waited, angry breath steaming in the pallid light, then she snarled. ‘Very well. You lot, get in there. Now!’
The confessors’ reluctance broke against her fury, and they were through the screen a moment later, fanning out into the audience chamber. Vashenda’s pace and confidence slowed as they did, her certainty replaced by confusion. ‘Sand-flower,’ she said again, but this time her rage was undercut by suspicion. ‘Where are you hiding?’
Tarfel tugged Chel’s elbow.
‘What if she knows about the little door?’ he said as quiet as he could.
Cold panic bloomed in Chel’s guts. He swung his gaze around the darkness of the puppeteer’s enclosure, but his eyes were not yet adjusted. A gentle creaking from the corner drew his attention. Spider had found a ladder.
The others quickly followed, movements furtive, but Chel risked another look through the wall-slit. Vashenda had made no move toward the hidden door. She stood, hesitant, in the shadow of the raised bed and its giant statue. Her confessors milled around, poking at the room’s periphery. One confirmed that the door to the royal chambers was locked.
‘She doesn’t know,’ he whispered.
Another confessor called from the corner, having stumbled over the stacked corpses of his former colleagues. Vashenda scowled. ‘He had company. Who did he come in with? Where did they go? Who has the keys to the royal chambers? We must attend to the king.’
‘She doesn’t know.’
A soft twang by his head drew his glance. Rennic had cut the threads. They floated gently into the darkness behind the statue, and the last clue to their location removed.
‘Uh, the king is here, Sister,’ one of the confessors said, nodding to the bed.
Vashenda swivelled, mortified. ‘Your majesty! My apologies – are you hurt?’
A confessor climbed aboard the bed.
‘He’s … He’s dead.’
Vashenda’s jaw clacked shut in rage, her knuckles tight. ‘I knew it. Shepherd damn that Andriz bastard.’
‘Uh, he’s been dead a while, Sister.’
She paused. ‘How long is a while?’
‘I’m not sure, Sister. He’s been embalmed.’
Rennic put a hand on Chel’s arm and pulled him away with gentle insistence. Vashenda’s disbelieving roars covered the sound of their climb.