Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) (15 page)

Already the gleam of the thing was attracting attention. A man watched intently from the bar, a man with short iron-grey hair save for a peculiar broad strip, darker than a raven’s wing, across the top, as though the years had missed that part. I hid the locket away sharpish and he smiled, but kept on looking as if I’d been the object of his interest all along. For a moment I felt a shudder of recognition, though I’d swear I never met the man. The déjà vu passed as my fingers left the locket, and I busied myself with my ale.

 • • • 

S
norri spent the last of his money on a bigger bowl of slop, more ale, and a few square yards of space on the floor of the tavern’s communal sleeping hall. The hall seemed to serve as a method to prevent loss of drunks who might otherwise wander off in search of a spot to sleep and wake closer to some competing tavern. By the time we were ready to retire, the remaining locals were busy roaring out songs in Old Rhonish.

“Alley wetter, Jonty’s alley’s wetter!” boomed Snorri, rising from his seat.

“A fine singing voice you have, to be sure.” This from a man close by, nursing a pewter cup that brimmed with dark liquor. I looked up to find it was the fellow with the blue-black strip amidst his greying hair. “Edris Dean I am. Traveller myself. Will you be heading north in the morning?” He stepped from the bar and leaned in to be heard above the song.

“South,” Snorri said, the humour gone from him.

“South. Do you say so?” Edris nodded and sipped his drink. He had a hard look about him under the smile. A smile that not only reached his eyes but filled them with good humour—which is a difficult trick to pull if you don’t mean it. Even so, something in the thin-seamed scars along his arms, pale through the dirt, made me nervous. That and the quick but solid build of the body wrapped by the worn leather jerkin, and the knives at each hip—and not the kind for eating, more the kind for opening a bear from gut to growl. He had a thick ridge of scar on his cheek too, an old one, running along the bone. That one drew my eye and made me hate him, though I couldn’t say why.

Edris smacked his lips and called across to two men he’d been with at the bar. “South, he says!”

Both men joined us. “My associates. Darab Voir and Meegan.” Darab looked to have a touch of Afrique in his mix, swarthy and a bruiser, overtopping me by an inch or so, with the blackest eyes and ritual scar patterns on his neck vanishing down into his tunic. Meegan scared me the most, though, smallest of the three but with long ropey arms and pale staring eyes that put me in mind of Cutter John. Beneath a pretence of casual interest, all of them studied me with an intensity that set my teeth on edge. They marked Snorri too, and I found myself wishing he hadn’t stowed his axe with the horses.

“Stay. Have another ale. This lot are only getting warmed up.” Edris waved at the tables, where the singing had reached a whole new level.

“No.” Snorri didn’t smile. Snorri had smiled at the bear; now he looked grim. “We’ll sleep well enough, song or no song.” And with that turned his broad back on the trio and walked off. I managed an apologetic grin, spread my hands, and backed away after him, instinct not allowing me to present the space between my shoulder blades to them.

In the gloom of the next hall it was easy enough to find Snorri—he made the largest lump.

“What was that about?” I hissed at him.

“Trouble,” he said. “Mercenaries. They’ve been watching us half the night.”

“Is this about the locket?” I asked.

“I hope so.”

He was right; any alternatives I could imagine were worse than robbery. “Why would they tip their hand? Why be so obvious?” It made no sense to me.

“Because they don’t mean to act now. They might hope to spook us into unprepared action, but failing that it’s just to give us a night or two without sleep—to wear at our nerves.”

I settled down close by, kicking aside the outstretched arm of a rather pungent human-shaped lump and the legs of another. Tomorrow I’d sell that diamond and put an end to this nightly misery of choosing between stench and lice, or cold and rain. I made a pillow of my cloak and set my head on it. “Well,” I said. “If they meant to spook us, it’s working.” I kept my eyes on the arch into the barroom and the shapes in silhouette that passed back and forth. “Damned if I’m sleeping. I wo—”

A familiar rumbling snore cut across me.

“Snorri? Snorri?”

Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect
of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name—Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.

F
rom the moment I jerked into the waking world that morning, suddenly terrified that I’d fallen asleep with Edris and his murderers waiting close by, to the moment we left town under a brightening sky, I had been looking over my shoulder.

“You won’t miss them,” Snorri said.

“No?” There was no part of Rhone I would miss. Though perhaps now with my purse fat and jingling once more, the nation might open her arms to me and deign to show a visiting prince a good time.

“There’ll be too many to hide.” Snorri’s voice wobbled with the gait of his steed, jolting up and down when the mare picked up the pace.

“How do you know that?” Annoyance coloured my question. I didn’t like the open reminder of our troubles. With Snorri troubles were always put front and centre and dealt with. My style was more to shove them under the rug until the floor got too uneven to navigate, and then to move house.

“He was too confident, that Edris. There’ll be a dozen of them at least.”

“Shit.” A dozen! I squeezed my nag along that little bit faster. I’d named the gelding Ron, after the Amazing Ronaldo whose ill-advised bet with Snorri had financed the early part of our trip.

We rattled along up the valley at a decent pace, fast enough to startle the sheep in successive fields into waves of woolly panic. It had to be said that, as uninspiring as Chamy-Nix was, the surroundings viewed with the morning coming up red and rosy behind them were quite stunning. Rhone gets hilly as you work your way north. Hills become mountains, mountains become peaks, and from Chamy-Nix you can see the white heights of the Aups, mountains so tall and so legion that they divide the empire more surely than a blade. In many senses the empire had always been broken and the Aups were the sword that divided it.

An hour later, gaining height and with our path back to Chamy-Nix laid out behind us, I spotted the pursuit. “Hell, that looks like a lot more than a dozen!” And a dozen was a lot more than we could handle. In fact, if it had been only Edris, Darab, and Meegan, that would have been too many. My stomach folded around itself in a cold knot. I remembered the Aral Pass. There’s no way any sensible person could view the prospect of someone else attempting to open them with a sharp edge as anything but terrifying. I found myself eyeing up the larger rocks in the hope I might hide beneath one of them.

“Twenty. Near enough.” Snorri looked back up the track and nudged Sleipnir on. He’d told me the original bearer of the name in his heathen tales had sported eight legs. It’s possible that on such an overendowed beast even Snorri stood a chance of outpacing the band on our trail. On any regular mount, though, it was never going to happen.

“Maybe if we just left the locket here . . .” It took about three seconds for my resolve to fail. I could abandon Snorri and set Edris’s band a stiffer test. By rights I would win clear, but Ron was far from the best of horses and in such mountainous terrain it’s easy to lame an animal if you push too hard. That would leave me meeting the band alone—if, of course, I managed to survive Snorri’s death given the magics binding us. Abandoning the locket to them seemed the easiest of paths.

Snorri just laughed as if I’d made a joke. “We should keep one of them alive,” he said. “I want to know who set them on us.”

“Oh, right.” A madman, I was riding with a madman. “I’ll try to keep a small one for later.” Snorri, it seemed, was as capable of deluding himself about upcoming battles as I was about the value of my locket. Perhaps that was all bravery was—a form of delusion. It certainly made it much easier to understand if that were the case.

“We need a good place to make a stand.” Snorri cast about as if this might be such a place. I could have told him with some confidence that no such place existed, anywhere. Instead I tried a different tactic.

“We need to get higher up.” I pointed to the barren slopes above us where the mean grass lost its footing and bare rock cut a path towards the heavens. “We’ll have to abandon our horses, but so will they, and then the fact you can’t ride for shit won’t matter any more.” And if I had my way we’d lose Edris’s party amongst the confusion of ridge and gorge, then win free to buy better horses somewhere else.

Snorri rubbed his short beard, pursed his lips, looked back at the distant band, and nodded. “Better if everyone is on two feet.”

I led the way, urging Ron off the track and up towards the ridges impossibly far above us. Beyond those ridges peaks rose, white with snow and brilliant in the sunshine. A fresh breeze followed us up the side of the valley, offering a helpful push, and for a while I felt hope sinking its cruel hooks into me.

Tough mountain grass gave way to boulder fields and scree; Sleipnir’s hooves skittered out from under her and she fell, legs flailing, looking for a moment as if she might actually have eight of them. Snorri grunted as he hit the ground, pulling clear while Sleipnir struggled to right herself.

“That hurt.” He brushed his thigh where the horse’s weight had pressed, then used his fingers to pry loose the small stones bedded into his flesh. “I’ll walk from here.”

I stayed in the saddle for another five or ten minutes, while Snorri hobbled along without complaint. At last, though, even with my expert guidance, the going became too steep for Ron. Rather than wait for the inevitable tumble, which would probably see us both rolling down the slopes to where Snorri had had his own fall, I dismounted.

“Off you go, Ronaldo.” The climb ahead of us would test a mountain goat. I gave his flank a sound slap and moved on, burdened once more beneath my few possessions. The sword that Snorri had given me was the heaviest of my loads and kept trying to trip me. I held on to it mainly to please the Norseman, though my ultimate plan was to throw it away and beg for mercy if cornered.

The wind became less friendly as we gained height, colder and capricious, seeming to press us to the rocks one moment, then in the next try to yank us clear so that we might tumble back the way we’d come. I paused frequently to check the progress of our pursuit. They had ridden harder than us and abandoned their horses later. A bad sign. These were driven men. Ahead of me, Snorri crested the ridge we’d been aiming for during the long climb. He still hobbled, but his injury seemed no worse than it had been at the start.

“Crap.” The Aral Pass ran between two huge mountains in the Auger range on the Scorron borderlands. I had always felt that mountains could come no larger—the rocks at the bottom would surely be unable to support the weight. I had been wrong. The Aups above Chamy-Nix deceive the eye. It’s not until you get amongst them that you understand just how ridiculously big they are. A whole city would be little more than a stain on the flanks of the tallest. Beyond the ridge we now clung to, defying a murderous wind, rose a second ridge and a third and a fourth, each separated by deep-cut gorges, the slopes between variously lethal with scree or unclimbably steep. And all the ways open to us lay divided by smaller gorges and littered with boulders the size of buildings, each poised to fall.

Snorri set off down, grunting once as his foot tried to slip out from under him. I knew if he started to slow me I would leave him behind. I wouldn’t want to, and I would dislike myself for doing so, but nothing would compel me to stand against twenty mercenaries. It sounded better like that. More reasonable. Twenty mercenaries. The truth was that nothing would compel me to stand against one mercenary, but twenty sounded like a better excuse to leave a friend in the lurch. A friend? I pondered that one on the way down.
An acquaintance
sounded better.

By the time we needed to start heading up again, there were few parts of me that didn’t hurt. I’ve developed a good degree of resilience when it comes to riding. Walking, not so much. Climbing, none at all. “W-wait a minute,” I panted, trying to snatch a breath from the wind—less fierce in the valley but still insistent. The air seemed thinner, unwilling to replenish my lungs. Snorri didn’t appear to notice, his breathing scarcely harder now than when we started the climb.

“Come.” He said it with a grin, though he had grown more sombre as we went on. “It’s good to make a stand in a high place. Good for the battle. Good for the soul. We’ll make an end of this.” He looked back at the ridge we descended from. “I had dark dreams last night. Of late all my dreaming has been dark. But there’s nothing of darkness in warriors met for battle on a mountainside beneath a wide sky. That, my friend, is the stuff of legend. Valhalla awaits!” He thumped my shoulder and turned to the climb. “My children will forgive their father if he dies fighting to be with them.”

Rubbing at my shoulder and at the stitch in my side, I followed. His “warriors met beneath a wide sky” nonsense was full of darkness as far as I was concerned, but as long as we were still doing our best not to meet the mercenaries anywhere at all, then we were in accord.

We had to scramble in places, leaning so far forwards we practically kissed the mountain, reaching for crevices in the folded bedrock to haul ourselves up. My breath came ragged, the cold air filling my lungs like knives. I watched Snorri path-finding, sure, measured, no fatigue, but favouring his uninjured leg. He had spoken of his dreams, but he didn’t have to. I’d slept alongside him, heard his muttering, as if he argued the night away with some visitor and when he woke that morning on the tavern floor his eyes, usually a Nordic blue, sky pale, were black as coals. By the time he rose to break fast, no trace of the change remained and I could pretend it a trick of shadows in a hall lit only by borrowed light. But I had not imagined it.

I sighted the first of the pursuit cresting the ridge behind us while we closed the last hundred yards to the ridge above us. Losing sight of them as we descended the next gorge gave me some comfort. Troubles are troublesome enough without having to look at them all the time. I hoped they’d find the going as tough as I had and that at least a few of the bastards would take the last tumble of their lives.

The shadows started to reach, striating the slopes. My body told me we’d been climbing for a month at the least, but my mind was surprised to discover the day almost over. Night would at least offer a chance to stop—to snatch some rest. Nobody could navigate slopes like these in the dark.

Mountains are pretty at a distance, but my advice is to never let them get to be more than scenery. If you have to crane your neck to look at something, you’re too close. By the time we were approaching the top of the third ridge I was practically crawling. Any disloyal thoughts about abandoning Snorri with his injured leg were cast aside far below us. I had promoted him to best friend and to man most likely to carry me. In places it wasn’t the steepness that had me crawling but sheer exhaustion, my raw lungs unable to draw sufficient breath to work my limbs. We threaded our way along a series of broad ledges littered with boulders from man-size to ones that dwarfed elephants, hunting along each ledge for climbable access to the next.

“Come. It’s easy.” Snorri looked down at me from the level above, holding out a hand. I’d come to a halt about two-thirds of the way up, caught on a steep field of loose, frost-shattered stone resting on solid rock beneath. I took a step towards him, reaching for the offered hand.

“F—” I started to say “Fuck” but as my boot continued to slide the word drew out into a wail that turned into a scream and ended with an “Ooffff!” and me on my arse.

“Try again.” Snorri. Ever helpful.

“I can’t.” I said it through gritted teeth. My ankle had filled with a hot, liquid pain. I’d felt the joint flex past the angle any ankle should make. There might have been a snapping under my scream, or perhaps just a tearing, but either way the idea of putting weight on it was not one I could entertain.

“Get up!” Snorri roared it at me as if I were a common soldier on parade. He would have made a good drill sergeant because I was on my feet before better judgment could stop me. I toppled forwards and collapsed screaming, hiking my breath in to vent in successively louder outbursts.

When I fell silent I could hear a slithering of stones, and a second later Snorri loomed above me, blocking out the day.

“I don’t abandon comrades,” he said. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

Now, I’m not a man who takes his pleasure in other men, but in that moment Snorri’s overmuscled and sweaty embrace was a thousand times more welcome than any I might get from Cherri or Lisa. He hefted me over one shoulder and started walking. The proximity caused that strange crackling energy to begin building between us, but I was prepared to risk it being less fatal than Edris and his murderers.

“Thank you,” I burbled, half-delirious with the pain. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me. I knew—” Snorri stopped and set me with my back to a boulder, propped up on one foot. “What?”

“It’s fine.” Snorri cast about, studying the layout of the boulders, the width of the ledge. “This will do, here. I’m not leaving.”

“I
want
you to leave!” I hissed the words past gritted teeth. “Keep going, you big lummox.”
Just take me with you!
I kept that last part behind my teeth. Not because Snorri might think badly of me, but just because I didn’t think it would change his mind. Of course, if he actually made to leave I would be immediately addressing the issue of being hauled along too. For the now, me play-acting the bluff hero would at least keep him happy and more likely to put some effort into defending me in my incapacitated state.

Snorri unlimbered his axe. He would have been more content with the broad crescent of a Norse axe suited to the shearing off of limbs. The weapon he carried sported a heavy wedge of a blade designed to punch a hole in armour. If the mercenaries had any significant armour and yet had managed to climb to where we were, then we might as well give up since they’d have to be supermen.