‘What are you saying?’
‘Merely that putting the enemy off-balance, doing what they do not or cannot expect, is half of the duel.’ He was watching a figure flanked by Palace Guards draw closer. Lesarl stepped into the path to intercept the person - a woman, or maybe a short man, Vesna guessed. The person was wearing a thick winter cloak with the hood pulled up to shadow the face.
‘You expect him to embrace his own death?’ Vesna asked. ‘What possible preparation can there be for that? Or do you expect Isak to be able to cheat Death himself?’ He sensed rather than saw Mihn tense beside him. For a moment he thought he’d taken offence at Vesna’s words - until he saw the diamond-patterned clothes of the new arrival: a Harlequin, no doubt here to entertain the assembled dignitaries.
‘I make no such suggestion,’ Mihn said in a carefully calm voice, ‘only that such a thing might free him from the tangled web of his destiny. It had been said of Death’s throne room that no obligation or contract can follow you through those doors. What if he is tempted by such an offer? What if that is the only way to free him from those bindings?’
‘That’s not much in the way of freedom, is it? There’s no coming back from the grave, so let’s push him in the other direction, right?’
Mihn ignored Vesna’s attempt to lighten the tone of the conversation. ‘Will we get the choice? You know as well as I do that he is going to announce a march south so he can create a buffer-state to encompass Tor Milist, Helrect and Scree; there is little else he can do if the alternative is inviting chaos and bloodshed on his own border. The Menin have taken Thotel and conquered the Chetse.’ He cocked his head towards Vesna as the Harlequin passed Lesarl and started up the staircase. ‘If you were Lord Styrax and intent on conquest, would you look west to the relatively minor states there, or north to Tor Salan and the Circle City?’
‘Gods,’ breathed Vesna with sudden realisation. He pictured the map of the Land painted on Lesarl’s office wall. ‘They’re being drawn together?’
The Harlequin ascended the stair with a light, fluid step that Vesna recognised as very similar to Mihn’s. The notion sent a slight childish thrill down his spine. He knew Mihn had been trained as a Harlequin, that greatness had been expected of him, but the air of mystery around those masked performers reached out from his childhood to enthral him once again.
The Harlequin stopped dead when it saw them and stared at Mihn for a few moments. ‘I will not perform while that pollutes my presence,’ it said in a neutral tone.
The Harlequins’ sex was a closely guarded secret. Vesna recalled a story he’d heard once, of a drunkard who’d been determined to find out if the Harlequin entertaining his lord was female. It was probably nothing more than a tale spread to warn people off, but the story had described the loss of the drunk’s head and limbs in what the young Vesna had thought deliciously gory detail.
‘I will leave,’ Mihn replied after a long pause. ‘I would not shame my lord by driving off the entertainment.’
The comment brought a slight intake of breath from behind the Harlequin’s mask, but before it could reply Vesna stepped between them.
‘Come on then. Both our moods need improving.’
Mihn gave him a wary look, his nostrils twitching slightly, and Vesna realised the man was quivering with restrained energy. He didn’t want to find out how long either could hold it before they went for their weapons.
‘Some friends of mine are spending the evening in a tavern. Come on; let’s join them.’
Vesna directed Mihn down the other side of the staircase, away from the watching Harlequin, carefully not touching him. He’d seen Mihn fight; his reactions were almost preternaturally swift and destructive.
It was only at the bottom of the stair that Mihn breathed again. He turned his back on the watching Harlequin. ‘When you say tavern-?’ he began.
Vesna chuckled and dared to clap the man on the shoulder. ‘Yes, I mean brothel, but they serve damn fine wine, and the other’d probably do you good anyway.’
He dragged Mihn towards the barbican and away from the motionless Harlequin.
‘Come on, my friend,’ Vesna continued cheerfully, ‘one of the girls is rumoured to be as much of an athlete as you; it should be quite a meeting.’
CHAPTER 12
Mihn and Count Vesna looked a strange pair as they rode eastwards through the near-deserted streets of Tirah. The temperature had plummeted since nightfall and the cold glitter of starlight illuminated the frost on every stone and roof-tile. It didn’t take them long to reach Hamble Lanes, where many of Tirah’s smaller merchants lived and worked. It was a far cry from the mansions of the truly wealthy, bustling during the day and pleasantly peaceful in the evening, except during the depths of winter, when, like the rest of the city, it took on a ghostly mien. It might have lacked the grandeur of the Old District south of the palace, but the shops and small workshops occupying every yard did good trade, so the buildings were large and the stone gargoyles plentiful.
Through the chimney-smoke Vesna could see the coloured lights of the College of Magic shining from its five slender towers - the college eschewed the shutters and heavy curtains most used to keep the cold at bay. The chill night air had driven most people indoors already, and those few still out had hurried on by, not wanting to attract the attention of anyone on horseback.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a question? A personal one, I mean?’ Vesna’s voice sounded unusually loud, but it elicited only a considered nod from Mihn. ‘I mean this out of curiosity rather than condemnation, but why stick to your vow when you’re trying to find a way to serve Isak’s needs? You’re exceptional with that staff, but it’s not the best weapon for your skills. You’ve served a long penance already, isn’t that enough? You shouldn’t suffer for the rest of your life.’
‘I feel it is the right thing to do.’
‘You say you failed your people,’ Vesna persisted, ‘and I won’t presume to argue the point because I don’t know your customs, but I would say the punishment is done.’ He reached for his tobacco pouch and began to stuff the bowl of his pipe. ‘I’m right in thinking you’d be able to take me if you had a sword ?’
Mihn pushed back the hood of his cloak and turned to face his companion. His face looked otherworldly in the pale moonlight, his dark eyes unreadable. ‘It would be closer than you think; you underestimate your own skills.’
‘But you’d expect to win, if we fought?’
‘Barring luck, yes. You are a soldier first and foremost, while I trained as a classical duellist. If it were a formal duel my chances would be better.’
‘And with Eolis?’
Mihn turned back and looked down the empty street ahead of them. ‘Are you asking if I could kill Lord Styrax and deny Isak’s dreams that way?’
‘Could you?’
‘Could anyone?’ Mihn countered. ‘There is no way of knowing that until it’s too late. In a duel I suspect he is unbeatable, for that is how the Gods intended him to be. I would have a better chance using an assassin’s weapon, and even then, would I ever get close enough?’
‘I suppose not.’ Vesna could hear the disappointment in his own voice and realised he had been hoping that Mihn’s prodigious skills would provide the answer.
‘Whatever the chances,’ Mihn said in a firm voice, ‘I will not use an edged weapon again. The more I think on it, the more I believe my duty lies with Isak himself. My failure was one of the mind or soul, not the body, and it is not my body that shall secure my atonement.’
Vesna struck a sulphurous alchemist’s match and put it to the filled bowl of his pipe. The shadows seemed to deepen around them in the sputtering light. They continued in silence for a while. The houses of Hamble Lanes slowly thinned as they neared the city wall.
‘Did I ever tell you how my father died?’ Vesna said suddenly.
‘You did not.’
The count drew on his pipe and exhaled. A small cloud of smoke obscured his face for a moment. ‘He died in a duel when I was a young man, fighting a knight twenty years younger than he over the honour of a cousin.’
‘That sounds a waste of life to me.’
‘Honour’s a funny thing. Sometimes it makes demands you’d prefer it didn’t.’
‘How sorely was the cousin’s honour offended?’
‘Oh, not badly, but nonetheless my father felt the boy didn’t deserve a kicking for so trifling a reason.’ He grimaced. ‘A telling-off would have sufficed, so I was told.’
‘There was no magistrate to intervene? I was led to believe this civilised nation of yours has a tradition of law.’
Vesna turned to look at Mihn. In the near-darkness he couldn’t tell if Mihn’s words had been gentle mocking rather than condemnation.
‘Unfortunately,’ he continued at last, ‘magistrates have sons too, sons they are loyal to, whatever the faults. Less a flaw of civilisation I think, than one of humanity.’
‘So it was an excess of pride all round that led to your father’s death,’ Mihn said solemnly. ‘A great shame.’
‘The odd thing is that my father knew the likely outcome of a duel; he was past fifty, and he’d never been anything more than a decent swordsman.’
‘Yet he offered battle all the same? Because of honour.’
‘The boy was family; that was all that mattered to him. He used to say “there are those you are related to who’ll never be your family, and those of a different tribe you’ll gladly call ‘brother’. Never stand aside when those you consider family are assailed.” ’
‘So the insult could not be ignored? Bruises heal in a few weeks, death rarely so.’
‘Someone had to stand up for those who could not, that was how my father saw it,’ Vesna said sadly.
‘I think I can guess the rest of the story,’ Mihn said, still looking straight ahead.
‘Who says there’s more to tell?’
‘There’s more.’
‘How do you know?’ Vesna heard the wariness in his own voice. Mihn had a way of encouraging those with guilty thoughts to hear an unspoken reproach when he spoke.
‘I know because I know you, and I know stories. Tales are not told without a reason. But first, I have the conclusion of the tale. Your father died, you discovered this when you returned home from whatever trip you had been on. Had the old man waited, he would have been alive perhaps even today. A bully does not kill the father of one destined to be a hero without finding himself taken to account, and you are here to tell me the story.’
Vesna found himself nodding at Mihn’s words. ‘He was the first man I killed.’
‘You were away being schooled in arms? He probably only saw the child you’d once been. How many strokes did it take?’
‘Three.’
Mihn was silent for a while. Eventually he spoke again. ‘And your reason for telling me?’
Vesna sighed. ‘Honour can get you killed. It will if you seek to protect it often enough.’
‘Yet sometimes there is more to life than that - sometimes a stand must be taken in full acknowledgement of the price. Your father realised that. He wanted those he considered family to realise he valued them above his own life.’
‘In defence of those you consider family,’ Vesna continued, eyes fixed in the distance.
‘I hear a question hanging in the air.’
‘Yes. Who do you consider family?’
In a voice so quiet that Vesna wasn’t sure he heard it exactly, Mihn said, ‘Those I would make sacrifices for - those I would follow into the Dark Place, if need be.’
The two men fell silent. Only the clatter of hooves on the cobbled street and Vesna’s long puffs disturbed the quiet. Minutes passed and Vesna’s thoughts had not left the conversation, but all of a sudden he heard a noise, somewhere off to the right - the scrape of a roof tile, perhaps. Both men turned immediately. Vesna slid a hand behind him to grip the crossbow hanging from his saddle.
He’d wound and cocked the weapon before leaving; night had few witnesses and some of the things lurking in the streets wouldn’t be looking merely to rob him. There were gargoyles and colprys both willing to attack a human, though such attacks were rare, and bands of enraged penitents roaming the streets.
‘Can you see anything?’ Vesna said softly, loading a quarrel into the bow.
‘No, but I doubt it’ll be anything that requires that,’ Mihn said, cocking his head, trying to hear better. ‘No man would be up on the roofs tonight, not in this cold, and I can’t believe any creature would attack two men on horses.’
Vesna continued to stare at the silent houses, but there was no sound beyond the sound of hooves. ‘If you say so.’ He turned back to check their route, but kept the bow in his lap all the same.
The brothel they were heading for was a large fortified building set against the wall itself. It had been secured on a peacetime lease from the City Council, and most likely was unaffected by the recent unrest. It was easily defended, and it catered to noble tastes, so there was money to spend on guards, quite aside from the fact that most of the patrons would have come armed.
‘Are we close to Death’s Gardens?’ Mihn asked suddenly, pointing off to their right.
‘Yes, I think so.’ Vesna frowned for a moment and turned in his saddle to inspect the streets running south. ‘Yes, they’re that way, past the Poacher’s Moon shrine.’ He pointed down one street.
Death’s Gardens was the name given to a small public park owned by the cult of Death. It was less than two hundred yards long on any of its three sides. Much of it was given over to ancient cultivated yews, and in the centre was a miniature lake which, for no good reason Vesna had ever been able to fathom, contained a pair of pike that the priests of Death fed. Ehla, the witch of Llehden, and the Demi-God Fernal had scandalised the people of the city by building themselves a camp in the gardens, having both found themselves uncomfortable in the bustling confines of Tirah Palace, but the clerics of the city had thus made only a token protest at their presence. Witchcraft was no more frowned upon than magery, and the priests were more concerned about the mages, being traditional competitors, richer and not accompanied by a terrifying Demi-God.