Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (35 page)

It was all very quiet, the silence shattered only by applause from the nobles.

There should have been an alarm. There had been no announcement of rifle practice, and the guard held rifle practice outside the keep, anyway. The alarm bell should have been ringing madly, and the Home Guard, every man of them, should now be running frantically to their posts, armoring themselves as they ran.

But it was all very quiet as Thomen finished wiping his face, then slowly turned, and rode off, back toward the road from the outer gates to the inner ones. The whole guard had known that there was going to be an unscheduled shot fired.

Beralyn looked around, trying to see where the shot had come from. It couldn’t have been from any of the guards on the outer ramparts — she would have seen it. And the shot had been distant enough — she could have sworn it had come from behind her — that it couldn’t have been from any of the guard stations on the inner ramparts, either.

The only indication was a puff of smoke, carried across the inner courtyard.

The rifle shot had come from the donjon itself.

Beralyn didn’t know much about this whole riflery thing, but she knew enough to know that even a good marksman, even the best marksmen in the Empire, would have found putting a shot into something even as large as a head to be difficult at that distance. The gourd was much smaller. The shot could easily have gone wide and low, and hit Thomen in the chest or even the head, and all the healing draughts in all the world could not bring back the dead.

Thomen was an idiot, to risk his life just to make such a point with the margrave.

Although the point had been made, granted.

The margrave shook his head. “Amazing.” He was visibly shaken. “I’ve heard about how accurate the Empire’s soldiers are, but I hadn’t realized …”

Beralyn nodded slowly. “I hope that you never see how good they can be in the field,” she said.

She left the obvious unsaid: that if the Empire and Nyphien ever went to war, it would not simply be a matter of noble officers sitting on a hill, out of the range of the nearest Empire bowmen, directing the carnage below. Even a man should be smart enough to worry about a rifleman, hiding behind a tree, able to put a bullet in a head from an almost unbelievably great distance.

Her son was still an idiot to have so risked himself, but he had made his point.

Beralyn would have some very strong words for him. Perhaps this time he would even listen. This sort of idiotic heroics was what had gotten that horrible Karl Cullinane killed. That didn’t bother her for a moment — she would rather that his mother, if he had even had a mother, had drowned him at birth — but Thomen idolized that terrible man, and maybe he would see …

No. She would try, but he wouldn’t listen to a useless old woman.

But that was for later, and would be private, and for now all she could do in public was to smile and nod, and pretend that it was all a typical sort of thing in the Empire.

15

T
HE
A
SSASSIN

T
HERE
ARE
THINGS
you never notice until they’re gone, the assassin thought.

Like breath, say. He could breathe, at least. Or the freedom to move your arms and legs, which he couldn’t do.

There wasn’t much else to do except breathe and think, as he crouched motionless in the darkness of the castle garden, waiting for the guards to pass by again.

You can go tendays without even thinking about breathing, but the moment you duck your head under the water in the cut-off barrel you’re bathing in, or take in a lungful of smoke from a campfire, you’re reminded of how much you miss it.

Stretching and moving around were like that, now. He hadn’t thought much about how good it was to be able to move, even a little, since the last time he’d been on an ambush. The body, it seemed, needed to move, and he simply couldn’t, not until he was sure that the guard had passed by.

The baron was not cooperating; he was going to have to do this the hard way.

The cool night was cloudy, only a few stars peeking through breaks in the dark masses, while off in the distance faerie lights quickly pulsed from a bright red to a muted orange and an almost actinic blue, then back again.

He could have done without the faerie lights, but they were far enough off that they couldn’t reveal his position, as long as he didn’t move.

And he didn’t move. He had been crouching long enough that his thigh muscles were complaining and his back muscles were doing worse than that, but he had long since learned to accept — and, if possible, give — far worse pain as simply a fact of life.

It was all just a matter of space and timing, after all. He had memorized the map of the castle grounds and the keep’s floor plan long before, of course, and had, of course, immediately destroyed it as soon as he had. A mercenary soldier in the pay of the Empire would have no reason to have such a thing on his person, and once he had committed it to memory, there was no need for the map.

The gold had been a different matter. He couldn’t leave it in his footlocker, as it was not at all uncommon for a signature knot to be learned by a thieving supposed comrade or a momentarily empty barracks taken advantage of by one less clever who would simply use a knife — what would Dereken, a private soldier, be doing with so much gold?

Some questions were best not asked, and if they were not asked, it would be easy not to have to have an answer. It had been much easier to keep the gold coins on his person until he could arrange a stint in the barracks saddlery, and stitch most of the coins inside his saddle, with a few substituted for the lead weights at the hem of his cloak, just in case he had to abandon the horse and saddle.

If everything went right — and he was determined to make it go right — he would ride away on his pay this night.

He smiled to himself. Yes, of course, only half the money had been paid in advance, but that half would have to do. The merchant who had hired him had sworn that the rest of his payment would be made when Forinel was dead, and he had dutifully agreed on a meeting time and place, several days hence.

He would, of course, be long gone well before that.

A hired killer was a loose end, and whoever it was who wanted the baron dead would have an easy opportunity to tightly tie up said loose end with sharp steel across Dereken’s throat rather than tie it up much more loosely, with gold in Dereken’s pocket.

Leaving him dead might solve the problem more neatly than that — Dereken’s company, after all, was in the pay of Governor Treseen, and his dead body would point toward Treseen.

Which probably meant that Treseen had no involvement.

Who was his real employer?

Lord Miron was the obvious suspect — killing Forinel would as much as give the barony to him — and Miron was said to be spending his time in Baron Tyrnael’s court these days, five or six baronies away, across into Bieme proper.

But who was supplying the gold didn’t matter. What did matter was the gold in his saddle, and the geas that made it literally impossible for him to try to ride away from Keranahan until he knew that Forinel was dead. He had tried, of course, but he had found himself unable to take the eastern road; his fingers and feet wouldn’t give his horse the commands, and he couldn’t even try. He couldn’t even find himself able to believe that he could leave without killing Forinel.

Well, that was part of the bargain, and while he would have broken his side of the bargain without remorse or hesitation, he had been unsurprised when his employer had left the room, and sent in a masked wizard to lay on hands and murmur words that could not be remembered. Actually, he was relieved about the implications of that mask, how it suggested that they wouldn’t kill him when the job was done — it had actually made him consider, just for a moment, risking collecting his pay.

As, no doubt, it had been intended to.

He smiled to himself. You’d think that —

He froze in place, forcing himself not to breathe, not to move, not to look up at the ramparts. He had once avoided a night ambush when a flash of starlight on the eyeball of a hidden killer had alerted him, and he didn’t intend to pass the favor along.

But there was no hesitation as the even footsteps sounded above; the two guards didn’t even pause in their muttered conversation, and he more felt than saw that their attention was directed outward.

The man who called himself Dereken — shit, that was his name; his name was whatever he called himself at the moment, and never mind what they called him in other places — moved closer to the northern portico.

Peace had made them all lazy. There were square indentations in the ground where the barding would have been installed, turning the opening into a solid oak wall, and making the portico entrance even less accessible than the massive oak door on the front end of the keep. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if there were murder holes in the room above this entrance, as there surely were in the keep’s foyer, giving defenders one last, probably pointless chance to hold off an enemy that had breached the outer walls.

But that wouldn’t give the baron and his wife-to-be — and damn the geas for preventing him from taking the obvious opportunity after he killed the baron; the closest he had ever come to mounting a noblewoman had been that fat town warden’s young wife in Enkiar during the cross-border raid two years ago — the opportunity to walk out of the great hall on a cool evening and smell the roses.

It would have been nice if the baron had done that himself this evening.

One quick looping of that spiked Therranji garrote over the baron’s head, a sharp tug that would have probably broken the baron’s neck and surely would have crushed his windpipe …

… and the man who called himself Dereken could have been on his way up the stairs to the ramparts, and down the outer walls, sliding down the rope much more quickly than he had climbed up.

But, of course, life never was easy, and a mercenary soldier should be used to that.

The keep itself was relatively quiet, but not completely. That was to be expected, even out here in the hinterlands. Dereken had served in Biemestren, and liked the constant noise and bustle of the capital. Standing guard as part of the Keranahan contingent, even at the outer ramparts of the castle, had been less boring than such things usually were, what with servitors from the castle kitchens bringing meals and tea — iced or hot, depending on the season. And some of those servitors had been young and female.

As he made his way into the great hall, the only sounds he could hear came from the kitchens. He kept near the walls — his employer had told him that there were more than a few squeaky floorboards between the old long table and the archway that led to the stairways up into the Residence proper.

He would have said this was too easy, but as a matter of policy and temperament he had never really accepted the notion of something actually being too easy, and this didn’t seem like a time to start.

The Residence had originally been a three-story, fairly slim tower — built during one of the pre-Holtish dynasties; Euar’den, perhaps — but it had been expanded by a series of attached structures that included the great hall and the kitchen on one side and a combination servants’ residence and officers’ barracks on the other, and nowadays it was just a staircase, a widdershins spiral of stone blocks set into the wall of the castle itself, that opened on the second and third floors.

Every ten steps or so, a steel spike had been driven in between the immense blocks that made up the structure, but oil lamps were hanging from only about half of them, and of those, only two were lit, hissing and sputtering as they shed a wan, weak light that Dereken would just as soon have lived without, despite its weakness.

Light was not his friend tonight.

He blew out each of these as he passed. Darkness was his friend and ally, and while it was difficult to admit it to himself, it was good to have a friend and ally, for once.

He passed through the archway and into the hall, keeping close to the edge of the archway more out of superstition than reasoning. After all, if there was anybody awake to see him framed in the doorway, he was a dead man.

But there wasn’t. No guard stood or even slept on watch outside the half-open door at the end of the hall. Dereken stood next to the doorway, and listened, silently, to the quiet sounds inside. It took him a moment to be sure that there were two in there — one barely snoring, the other simply breathing slowly, in sleep — before he walked in.

Under a rumpled pile of light sheets that were more than were needed on such a warm night, two forms lay, intertwined.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried to imagine strangling the baron, then — after gagging her, of course — quickly mounting the woman sleeping with him. It would be a stupid thing to do, but …

But he couldn’t even get excited at the prospect; the geas bound his mind too tightly. He couldn’t even produce a distant relish at the notion of slitting her throat quietly, which is what he would rationally have preferred to do, all things being equal. A quick poke would be available for a few coppers in the nearest town, after all, and if he found that inconvenient, there was always a peasant’s shack.

Unless, of course, it wasn’t Lady Leria.

The thought of that made him smile above and stiffen below. Hmmm … well, of course it wasn’t the Lady Leria; it simply couldn’t be a noble lady. Naturally, unless there had been a marriage, a noble lady would be keeping her noble hymen intact for her wedding, and as long as Dereken could make himself believe that, he could mount her, kill her, and be gone, and no matter that his supposed employer had made it clear that she was not to be touched.

Rumor had it that before Baron Keranahan’s reappearance, there had been serious talk in Biemestren that she might even marry the Emperor himself. Her bloodline was certainly adequate — she was, by some accounts, rightfully the Euar’den heir to what had centuries before been conquered by the first Prince Holt and renamed Holtun. And the drawing Dereken had seen and the rumors he had heard about her face and form were intriguing enough. It would be interesting to poke a noble lady and see if they actually were any different.