The Rose of the World (30 page)

‘I promise you they can curse like troopers in the Old Tongue. And some of them would break you in two.’ He paused. ‘And enjoy it.’

Varyx grinned. ‘Lovely. Can’t wait.’

‘Whatever you have will need to be special indeed to warrant such a prize.’

‘Oh, it is.’ He rubbed his hands together, as if warming them before applying them to an expanse of the pale skin he could see in his mind’s eye. ‘My pick, you promise?’

With a sigh, the Lord of Forent nodded. ‘Out with it, then.’

Exhibiting considerably more energy than was his wont, the Lord of Ixta leapt to his feet and bounded to the door. ‘Bring in the visitor, Plano.’

The door guard, sword drawn and looking thoroughly mistrustful, ushered in a hooded figure. A large black bird perched on its shoulder.

‘Oh, do put the sword away, man,’ Varyx said testily. ‘If he was an assassin, he’d have spitted me by now.’

Plano looked to his master. Rui Finco waved him away, though Varyx’s logic irked him. What professional assassin would risk death to kill the rather stupid and ineffectual Lord of Ixta when the far more powerful and dangerous Lord of Forent was close at hand? He braced himself, hands on hips, ready to draw both concealed daggers if need be, and watched the hooded man with hooded eyes. The bird stared back at him, unblinking.

‘Who are you?’

With a flourish the figure threw back his cowl and the raven danced neatly sideways, then readjusted its position. Rui Finco frowned. The newcomer was a man with a fineboned face and dark chestnut hair. His grey eyes and pale skin made him a northerner, and this was confirmed when he spoke. ‘Welcome beg I, lord mine,’ he said in execrable Istrian.

‘Use the Old Tongue, man!’ Rui snapped.

The man bowed. ‘I thank you for your indulgence, my lord. I have come to offer you my services.’

‘Another one,’ Rui Finco groaned. ‘I’ve had them all here, seeking money and advancement – chancers, opportunists and double-dealers. Which are you?’

‘A goodly mixture of all three,’ the Eyran returned without missing a beat. ‘Allow me to introduce myself before you dismiss me out of hand. My name is Erol Bardson, Earl of Broadfell, and . . . cousin to King Ravn Asharson.’ He paused then winked conspiratorially in a manner which caused the Lord of Forent to wince. ‘Though it’s possible that our relationship may be somewhat closer. The Grey Wolf spread his seed liberally, they say.’

An inward tremor of dismay roiled in Rui’s belly. Another one, indeed. Was the man aware of his own unsavoury connection with the tainted royal line? Likely not, he decided. No change of expression marred his handsome face. Instead, he said smoothly, ‘A defector, then, with information to offer?’

Bardson inclined his head.

‘And in exchange for this . . . information you want – what? Money? Men?’ He fixed the self-proclaimed earl with a gimlet stare. ‘Or our support in taking the northern throne for you?’

The Earl of Broadfell looked taken aback. Then he shrugged. ‘Actually, the King’s mother has her beady eyes set on that. However, if she were to be swept up in the horror which descends when her capital is sacked – mayhem, fire, sword, terror, panic and flight, friend turning against friend in the heat of battle, you know the chaos that is likely to ensue in such a situation – then, although it would be a terrible tragedy to lose both figureheads of the Eyran state in a single day, it would of course be my solemn duty to step forward to take the crown, as the nearest blood-relative.’

At this, the raven bobbed its head mightily and let out a raucous cry. Both men frowned.

‘I take your point,’ Rui Finco said tersely, after a moment’s pause. ‘But the northern throne is a considerable prize. What “service” are you offering that I can’t lay hands on elsewhere?’

‘I can help you to get one ship, maybe two, past the Sentinel Towers and into Halbo’s inner harbour, and lead a small number of men thence by secret ways into the castle.’

Now he had all of the Lord of Forent’s attention. ‘You can? And how might that be accomplished?’

Erol Bardson laughed. ‘I am not such a fool as you take me for. If I were to tell you that now, I doubt I’d be needing any other quarters for the night than a hole in the ground or a sack in the sea!’

Rui Finco’s lips quirked. ‘True enough. But why should I believe you to be who you say you are and not some scurvy trickster?’

The man bent his head for a moment and rummaged in a leather pouch hanging from his belt. ‘I brought you this,’ he said, offering a small linen-wrapped object. ‘The Lady Auda retrieved it. She thought you might like to take it back.’

Rui Finco peeled back the linen. Inside, just as he had expected, was a small marquetry box. With knowing fingers he triggered the secret mechanism and watched as the concealed drawer shot out. Within lay a large ring sized to fit a man and worked in the form of a wolf biting its own tail. The Grey Wolf’s own ring. The last time he had seen it was in his booth at the Allfair the previous year when he had shown it to Ravn Asharson as a sign of his own secret knowledge. The Stallion had swiped it and run for his ship; to have laid hands on it, this man or his accomplice must surely have had close access to the King.

He took out the piece and held it in his palm. It was cold and weighty, solid silver. As if the connection of the metal with his skin released some kind of spell, he was suddenly thrown back twenty-odd years, to the day when they had brought his mother back from her abduction to the North. It was only the second time he had seen her face, for in Eyra she had abandoned the traditional sabatka, along with her religion, her family and all her morals. For a long time, all he had been able to do was stare once more upon that peculiarly naked visage, with its huge black eyes and proud nose, feeling at once repulsed and fascinated, and more abandoned than when she had first been stolen away. For there, on a chain around her neck, she had openly worn this very ring, marked out like the concubine she was as the chattel of the barbarian king. She was no longer big with child by then, for like a cuckoo in the nest, the baby Ravn had been installed in the nursery at Halbo and claimed as the royal pair’s own. Rui felt his heart contract. Now, he could remember the stench of the fires in which his father had burned his mother for her adultery: a spectacle which the old man had made him watch. It was not a sight – or a smell – he could ever forget.

He replaced the ring inside the box, closed the drawer again and examined the other man’s face. Guileless blue eyes met his gaze: either Erol Bardson was a consummate actor, or he did not know the significance of the artefact the box contained. In which case this was perhaps more of a message from the old woman herself. It must have been bitter indeed, after all those barren years of marriage, to be forced to adopt another woman’s offspring as her own, and that of a foreign woman to boot. And Bardson had mentioned that the Lady Auda wanted the throne for herself. Two vipers in the northern court, each puffed up with their own venomous ambitions, could prove a very useful aid to their cause.

‘Excellent!’ he proclaimed, shaking off the old horrors. ‘Plano, take our visitor down to the steward and tell him he is to give the Earl of Broadfell the Safflower Room and to send up hot food and good wine, the Jetran stuff, not the cheap rubbish. And something for his bird.’ He watched Bardson bow and smile and retreat with the guard, then he turned to the Lord of Ixta and there was a gleam in his eye. ‘Well now, Varyx, this is becoming very interesting indeed. Shall we go and find you a girl, then?’

Forent Castle was one of the oldest fortresses in Istria. Its foundations had been laid in the time of Emperor Seram and the fabric of the castle had sprung up thereafter in a remarkably piecemeal fashion, depending on whether its lord had won or lost funds in the many civil commotions and full-scale wars which had followed. Rui maintained his private quarters in the oldest part of the castle – the foursquare granite keep hewn into the bones of the cliff above the city and the sea. Here the walls were so thick that not a sound permeated from one room to the next, which was just how he liked it. Despite the famed decadence and frivolities of Forent Town, its lord preferred to keep himself to himself; although others were rarely accorded the same privilege. For Rui Finco’s licentious grandfather, Taghi Finco, had seen to the construction of a number of secret exits from the chambers he had occupied, and a maze of concealed tunnels excavated within the thickness of the walls at great expense and the cost of no few lives. From his quarters, therefore, Rui could traverse, unseen, many levels of his castle, appearing and disappearing at will. And where Taghi Finco had made use of these hidden ways purely to indulge his hedonistic vices – visiting dozens of illicit courtesans while publicly maintaining a stable, fruitful and exemplary marriage – his grandson had other uses for them.

The current Lord of Forent had gained for himself a reputation for shrewdness bordering on the supernatural, an uncanny knack of knowing others’ business and second-guessing their moves, and a particularly unpleasant intuition about the darker corners of their lives. He had, at one time or another, invited every significant lord, politician and merchant in the empire to enjoy the hospitality for which Forent was rightly famed; and while they made free with his liberal servings of rich food and fine wines, with the unparalleled collection of beauties and experts in his seraglio – and his rather less well-known collection of very pretty boys for those with a taste for the truly forbidden – he had watched and made more than mental note of all they said and did while within the bounds of his castle. Thus he knew the sexual proclivities of all his potential rivals, their financial standing, the state of their marriages, friendships and political alliances, and their dearest ambitions. It was amazing what a man would tell a whore in the deep of the night.

Rui had learned the art of cat-napping early in life (and much else besides): after discovering the secret passages he had made himself a child’s fortune extorting pouches of cantari from his father’s many visitors. He was never too overt in his knowledge, never ostentatious or obvious: soon he became the master of the subtle hint, the double-edged word and the penetrating stare. Even the most thick-skinned of his marks found themselves donating to his funds rather than endure that knowing gaze, and the implication that he might let slip an indiscretion to his father or their peers.

What none knew was how, as a boy of ten and nearly a man by the standards of the day, Rui Finco had been a witness to one of the great acts of treason ever enacted in modern times, or how, instead of raising the guard and calling down death and destruction on the bold intruder, he had watched in a state of rising perturbation as the man who looked remarkably similar to his own father – supposedly miles away up the coast engaged in desperate battle with Eyra’s invading force – had entered his mother’s private chambers and there cast off the glamour which held the imprimatur of the Lord of Forent to reveal himself as the Grey Wolf, King Ashar Stenson, Lord of the Northern Isles: Istria’s worst and bloodiest enemy. Instead of shrieking for help – or casting herself through the open window onto the jagged rocks two hundred feet below in order to preserve her honour, if not her life, as one predecessor had done under similar, if less sorcerous circumstances – the Lady of Forent had gasped in shock and dropped her whisper-soft sabatka in a crimson pool around her ankles so that she stood naked before the intruder, naked that is except for her delicate body jewellery – the glinting silver chain which encircled her waist and looped down from the ring at her navel; the tiny rings in each rosy nipple – which marked out her nomad origins, about which none but her husband had known. Galvanised by this unexpected welcome, Ashar Stenson had thrown off the great grey wolfskin by which he was so famously known, and unbuckled his armour piece by piece with swiftly deft fingers so that the metal-studded leather fell to the floor in a heap until he was down to no more than a woollen undershirt and linen breeches: revealing himself to be a huge man, wild with hair and muscle. Only then had she flown at him, fingers like talons; but instead of clawing at his eyes, she had dragged those last garments from him, a ravening creature; and at last they had fallen upon one another like starving dogs.

He had not been able to tear his gaze from their extravagant coupling, had not been able to make a sound for fear of drawing their attention to his presence; he had stood there for an hour or more with his legs trembling and his eye pressed so hard against the rocky spyhole that its corrugations had left a bruise, until their sweaty appetites were finally slaked. Then the great northern lord had called in the sorcerer who had made this foray possible, wrapped the Lady of Forent tenderly in his wolfskin and laid her across his shoulder while the nomad muttered over his crystals and transformed the pair into a travelling man and his baggage so that they might leave the castle unrecognised. And then Rui had known he was forever lost, for he was fatally implicated in his mother’s fall from grace, complicit in her treacherous lust, knowing himself tainted by her blood. He had never spoken of what he had seen: but he remained forever haunted by the ghost of that passion. It had made spying from these secret passages an addiction he had never been able to overcome.

So, sometimes he merely played voyeur as others panted and writhed; sometimes he pleasured himself silently, then slipped into the chamber when the guest was gone to complete his enjoyment with the nicely warmed-up houri left tangled in the sheets. And sometimes he just liked to watch the women when they did not know they were being watched.

Lately, he had spent many enjoyable hours spying on his newest visitors – the ladies from Eyra. He knew all their names now; knew, too, their voices, their forms and to some extent their natures; though as yet he had bedded none of them. In the flesh, they had been something of a disappointment, for their paleness held less allure for him than he had expected. Dark women, women who looked like his mother – olive-skinned and supple – were what he preferred rather than women who were as tall and pale and stringy as most of these newcomers. He supposed he should try one or two of them just to get used to the idea of it before finding himself surrounded by them in Eyra’s capital, but the concept did not greatly appeal. Last night he had had the women in the slave quarters brought up to the chambers occupied by his better houris and watched the reunion of the nine women Bastido’s men had captured from Rockfall. It had been a most touching event: there had been tears and embraces, and a lot of jabbering in their guttural northern tongue. Then, just as they were rejoicing at being together again, he had had them separated once more. They had been a lot quieter and more pensive since then, especially the fiery redhead he had set Peta the task of grooming for him. In truth, he found little appeal in her scrawny limbs and boyish frame, though she was the most interesting in other ways. No: he was bored with Peta and her overbearing methods, so setting her an impossible task would prove to be an entertaining way of removing her from the harem. She’d fetch a decent enough price on the slave-blocks alongside the rest: an experienced whoremistress was quite a rare commodity. Agia would make an eminently acceptable replacement.