Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) (20 page)

The Roma Road bore us swifter than a river and we came in sight of Crath City as the sun plunged behind its towers, making a black architecture of spires and spans. I’d heard Olidan’s capital rivalled Vermillion for the grandness of its buildings and the wealth spent there in bricks and mortar. Martus visited on an embassy two years previously and described the Ancrath palace as the stump of some Builder-tower, but my brother was ever full of lies and I’d be able to make my own judgment on that soon enough.

“We should skirt around.” Snorri had fallen behind and when I turned all his face lay in shadow, only the ridges of his brow and cheekbones catching the redness of the sunset.

“Nonsense. I’m a prince of the March. We have agreements with the Ancraths and it’s my duty to call in on the king.” Duty had nothing to do with it. Crath City was my last best chance to break the Silent Sister’s curse. With luck King Olidan could be persuaded to help. He would have magicians in his service. And even without his help there were always spell-smiths of one kind or another tucked away in such an ancient city. I’d never set much store by such things before. Smoke, mirrors, and old bones, I’d called it. But even a prince of Red March may have to revise his opinion on occasion.

“No,” Snorri said. I couldn’t see his eyes in the half-light, and as the shadows stretched out across the road I remembered that this would be the time she spoke to him. Aslaug, his dark spirit, would be whispering her poison while the sun fell from the world.

“Rushing in unprepared didn’t work so well for you the first time, did it? You want to save Freya? Little Egil? Cut Sven Broke-Oar into several pieces? It’s time to use your head, to understand what we’re up against and formulate a plan.” I had to move him somehow, even if it risked provoking the Viking in him and daring the consequences. “This is Crath City. How much of the world’s lore came from this very spot? Dig down far enough into anything the wise say and there’s a document from the vaults of the Loove at the bottom of it.” I paused for breath, having exhausted everything I could remember my tutors saying about Crath City. “Wouldn’t time here be well spent? Advice on the nature of your foe? Maybe an antidote to ghoul poison. Or even a cure for the curse on us. You’re risking the Roma Road, rushing north at full tilt, hoping to make it before the dark seduces you . . . and the solution might be just behind those walls. The Silent Sister’s not the only witch in the Broken Empire, not by a long shot. Let’s find one who can help us.”

We faced each other now, horses nose to nose, me waiting for some reply.

The silence stretched. “You’re right,” Snorri said at last, and nudged Sleipnir into motion towards the city. The sense of relief that washed over me as he passed by proved short-lived. It occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure who he was talking to. Me or his demon? I waited a minute, then shrugged and rode on after. Who really cared? I got what I wanted. A chance. After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.

“Aslaug speaks of you,” Snorri said as I drew level on the road. “Says the light will turn you—set you in my path.” He sounded weary. “I doubt Loki’s daughter can utter anything that’s not half a lie, but she has a silver tongue and even a half-lie is half true. So listen when I say it would be . . . poor advice . . . that led you to try to stop me.”

“Ha.” I slapped him on the shoulder and wished I hadn’t, my hand crackling with painful magics. “Can you think of anyone less likely than me to listen to an angel, Snorri?”

 • • • 

C
rath City opened her arms and invited us in. We drifted along the riverbank, enjoying the warmth of the night. Everywhere along the dusty path, inns lit the way from the right, barges from the left, moored and decked with lanterns. The city folk drank at tables, at barrel tops, standing in groups, lying on the sod, or on the decks of the barges. They drank from clay cups, pewter mugs, wooden trenchers, from jugs, bottles, kegs, and ewers, the method of delivery as varied as the brews poured down so many throats.

“A jolly lot, these Crathians.” Already the place had started to feel like home. Any wanderlust had wandered off the moment I smelled cheap wine and cheaper perfume.

A ruddy-cheeked peasant reeled backwards across our path, somehow maintaining his pint mug at an angle that spilled no ale, though he stumbled as if at sea on a stormy night. Snorri shot me a grin, the black mood Aslaug had left him with now lifting.

A crowd of men on the nearest beer-barge broke out into the chorus of the “Farmer’s Lament,” a bawdy ballad detailing in seventeen verses what amusement one can and can’t get up to with livestock. I knew it well, though in Red March it’s a Rhonish man who’ll have no peace till he grabs a fleece, not a Highlander.

“Must be a festival day.” Snorri breathed in deeply; the air came laden with the smell of meat a-roasting. That’s a scent that will set your belly growling after a long day’s travel. Snorri’s stomach practically roared. “It can’t be like this every night.”

“The lost prince is back. Didn’t you know?” A woman in her cups, passing by and reaching up to paw at Snorri’s thigh. “Everyone knows that!” She reversed direction and walked alongside Sleipnir, hand still exploring Snorri’s leg. “Oh my! There’s a lot of meat down here!”

A husband or suitor managed to snag the woman’s hand and pull her away, frowning all the while but hardly in a position to blame Snorri. Which was probably for the best, all things considered. I watched her go. Tempting as the roast in her own way, well fed, fat some might say, but jolly with it, a twinkle in her eye. She even had most of her teeth. I sighed. I had been entirely too long on the road.

“Lost prince?” Hadn’t Baraqel said something about a prince?

Snorri shrugged. “You’re a lost prince. They always seem to turn up again. Some prodigal son has returned. If it puts the locals in a good mood, then that makes life easier. We get in, take what we need, leave.”

“Sounds good.” Of course, we weren’t talking about entirely the same things—but it did sound good.

We crossed the Sane by the Royal Bridge, a fine broad construction sitting on great piles that must have survived the Thousand Suns. Crath City rose from the docks on the opposite bank, sprawling over gentle hills and reaching up to the walls of the Old City where the money lived, looking out over what it owned. The Tall Castle waited in the middle of it all, high above us. I let the gradient guide the way. It took us into an ill-lit quarter where the sewers ran rank and drunks staggered narrow paths along the middle of the alleyways, not trusting the shadows.

“We’ll find a place down here tonight,” I said. “Somewhere unsavoury.” Tomorrow I’d be a prince again, knocking on Olidan’s doors. Tonight I wanted to take full advantage of my anonymity and enjoy the benefits of civilization to the full. The benefits of a decadent civilization. If Baraqel was going to wake me up at cockcrow for a lecture on morality, I might as well make it worth his while. Besides, if I found a low enough dive and woke amidst as much sinning as I hoped to, he might just decide not to show.

“There?” Snorri pointed down a thoroughfare broad enough to host taverns, the houses stacked three storeys high, each stage heavy-beamed and overstepping the one below so they crowded out into the street as they rose. Snorri’s thick finger directed me towards one of several hanging signs.

“The Falling Angel. Sounds about right.” I wondered what Baraqel would make of that.

With the horses given over to an ostler and stabled, I followed Snorri into the bar. He had to duck low to avoid the lanterns over the street door, and when he stepped aside the place lay revealed to me. A dive indeed, and populated by a collection of the most dangerous-looking men I’d laid eyes on outside a fighting pit . . . and quite possibly inside one too. My instinct was to execute a rapid reversal of direction on one heel and find a less intimidating venue, but Snorri had already secured a table, and having seen him demolish Edris’s crew in the mountains I felt it might be safer to stick close to him than try my luck alone outside.

The Angel had that reek to it: sweat, horses, stale beer, and fresh sex. The serving girls looked harried, the three barkeeps nervous; even the whores were keeping to the stairs, peering down between the railings as if no longer sure of their chosen profession. It seemed as though the bulk of the customers crowding the place from front wall to back weren’t regulars. In fact, as I slid along the bench to sit beside my Viking I noticed that the night’s clientele looked every bit as far-flung as a Norseman and a native of Red March. The Nuban close by the hearth had perhaps travelled farthest. A powerfully built man with tribal scars and a watchful gravitas about him. He caught me staring and flashed a grin.

“Mercenaries,” Snorri said.

I noticed as he said it that almost every man in the place carried a weapon, most of them several weapons, and not the civilized man’s poniard or rapier but bloody great swords, axes, cleavers, knives for gutting bears, and the biggest crossbow I’ve ever seen occupied most of the table before the Nuban. Several of the men wore breastplates, grimy and battered as if from hard service; others old chain-mail shirts or quilted armour stitched with the occasional bronze plate.

“We could try that place down the street, the Red Dragon,” I suggested as Snorri raised his arm for ale. “Somewhere a bit less crowded and”—I raised my voice to compete with a cheer from the next table—“noisy.”

“I like this place.” Snorri raised his arm higher. “Beer, woman, beer! For the love of Odin!”

“Hmmm.” I saw cards and dice aplenty, but something told me that winning money off any of these men might be a short-lived pleasure. Beside Snorri an old and toothless man supped his ale from a saucer, still managing to spill most of it over the grey stubble of his chin. A young fellow sat next to the elder, this one not quite old enough to shave, slim, slight, unremarkable save for a fine quality to his features that might make him handsome in the right light. He shot me a shy smile, but the truth of it was I didn’t trust either of them to be what they seemed. Keep the company of brigands such as filled the Angel and you had to have some iron in you, probably a whole parcel of wickedness too.

Our ale arrived, smacked down in earthenware cups and frothing over the sides. They were poorly fashioned, made in a hurry for the lowest cost, the sort of cups that expected to get broken. I sipped from mine—bitter stuff—and wiped away the white moustache. Across the room, through smoke and past the to-and-fro of bodies, a huge man was giving me the evil eye. He had the kind of blunt weapon of a face you could imagine breaking through a door, and he sat head and shoulders above the men beside him. To the giant’s left a man who seemed too fat to be dangerous but somehow managed to look scary anyway, with a patchy beard straggling down over multiple chins, piggy eyes assessing the crowd whilst he chomped the meat off a bone. To the right was the only normal-sized man of the trio, looking somehow ridiculous in their shadow, and yet I’d be giving him the widest of berths. Everything about him said
warrior
. He ate and drank with an intensity that unnerved me, and if a man can unnerve you across a crowded room just by cutting his beef, then you probably don’t want to see him draw steel.

“You know, I really think we’d be better off at the Red Dragon down the street,” I said, putting down my cup half-empty. “This is obviously a private party . . . I don’t think it’s safe here.”

“Of course it isn’t.” Snorri gave me that same worrying grin he had offered on the mountain. “That’s why I like it.” He raised his cup, coming dangerously near to splattering another of the band with foam, this one a moustachioed fellow with an unlikely number of knives bound about his person. “Meat! Bread! And more ale!” I could imagine him now in the mead-hall of his jarl at a gathering of the clans, grasping a drinking horn. He looked more relaxed than I’d seen him since the blood pits in Vermillion.

I caught sight of the ugly giant throwing me another dirty look. “I’ll be back.” I struggled up between bench and table and went out the front to relieve myself. If my admirer across the tavern had stood and come over to make trouble I probably would have wet myself, so getting out of his eyeline to answer nature’s call seemed a good move.

The Falling Angel turned out not to be entirely without class. They had a decent purpose-built wall to piss against and a little gutter running down into the street gutter to carry away the used beer. Although the fact that someone was lying facedown in the street gutter and leaking blood into it did detract somewhat from the otherwise pleasant scene of life flowing through the less salubrious arteries of Crath City. Beyond him, bravos and labourers, goodwives with their goodhusbands, vendors of food on sticks, all came and went, glimpsed in the light of one lantern, lost, then seen again in the light of another, passing by the purveyors of affection on the street corner and lost again never to return.

I finished up and went back in.

“—think that but you’d be wrong.”

I’d been outside for two minutes, three at the most, and returned to find Snorri flanked by mercenaries and swapping stories like old friends. “No,” Snorri continued, back half-turned to me. “I’m telling you he’s not. I mean, you might think it to look at him, granted. But I hauled him out of this place, they had him tied to a table, wanted some information and the knives were out. And we’re not talking a gentle jabbing here—they were about to cut off the kind of bits you’d miss.” Snorri drained off the last of his ale. “Know what he said to them? Roared at them he did. I heard it out in the corridor. ‘I won’t ever tell!’ Shouted it in their faces. ‘Get the pincers out if you like. Heat them in the coals. I ain’t talking.’ Now that’s the kind of man who’s got fire in his belly. Might look like there’s nothing behind the bluster, but you can’t trust your gut with this one. Brave man. Charged an unborn all by himself. Thing must have been twelve foot of grave-horror, had me disarmed, and in came Jal swinging a sword—” Snorri glanced my way. “Jal! I was just talking about you.” He gestured across the table. “Make a hole!” And they did, two mean-eyed thugs sliding apart so I could wedge in. “These fine fellows are Brother Sim”—he pointed out the slight lad—“Brother Elban, Brother Gains . . .” He indicated the old man and a tow-haired bully. “Well, they’re all brothers. It’s like a holy order of the road, only without any ‘holy.’” He waved his half-gnawed bone down the line. “Brothers Grumlow, Emmer, Roddat, Jobe . . .” The knife-man, a stern close-shaved fellow, and two younger men, both sallow, one scar-cheeked, the other pockmarked. “More beer!” And he thumped the table hard enough to make everything on it jump.