Wrath Of The Medusa (Book 2) (54 page)

They had to double r
ound the ruined masonry through a side passage to enter the antechamber and when they reached it, all they saw hanging in the air was a tall oval window into a dark black hall.  Kimbolt and Tordil had both been intent on running through it, but a terrible sense of foreboding turned their legs to lead, long before the Queen’s voice called them back. “Don’t! You do not know where it leads,” and then as they stood staring into an evil place, the window shrank to a dot and disappeared.

“That was how she moved around,” Kimbolt said, shaking his head.  “No secret passages at all.”

“No need for that, when the Master of the Planes has taught you his best tricks,” Tordil agreed. 

“There is no sign of her, your Majesty,” Kimbolt said.  “Wherever it was she went, it was a long way away.”

Niarmit was standing on
the balcony of a fresh suite of rooms on the far side of the palace hugging herself.  She had washed the stains of travel away and her red hair tumbled loose across her shoulders. The functional riding garb had been exchanged for a borrowed gown and a fur lined cloak guarded against the cold.  The crescent and the Ankh both hung around her neck, the Ankh’s gem again a glowing coral colour.

“She went quickly,
” Niarmit said.  “She could come back as fast.”

“The half-breed witch would not dare.”

“Maybe not her, but he would.  Her Master would send Quintala back here in a trice.  These gates can be opened wherever the caster has been before.  A skilled sorcerer can open a small window to spy through, and then enlarge it to strike through.  That is how she kept a watch on Hepdida’s sick room when Jolander thought she was scouting around the Lancers’ camp.  That is how she found out she had to silence Hepdida and Elise both. ”

“There a
re guards on the doors and with Hepdida too. She is safe and sleeping now.”

“I did not tell Hepdida
this, I would not want to slow her recovery, but we are not safe in any place Quintala has seen.”

“My parents kept a summer house by the sea in Oostsalve,” he said, trying to offer humour if not comfort to the Queen.  “I’m pretty sure they didn’t entertain any half-elves there, they were a little snobbish like that. We would be safe from Quintala there.”

She smiled and his heart quickened to have wrought this slight easing of her mood. “I’d like to see that Captain, someday.”

“You have earned some respite your Majesty, earned it many times over.  If Prince Rugan can forgive the insult of my accusations, perhaps you could leave the cares of the realm with him for a while at least.”

“Come, Kimbolt, the Goddess would prefer I had a realm to come back to.  Rugan would not be anyone’s first choice as my deputy,” again that smile.  “In the meantime the good Prince has his own forgiveness to beg and thanks to offer.  There were a lot of people fooled by his half-sister besides you, myself included.”

“But he was the only one who never trusted her.”

“He was blinded by his dislike, by the blame he laid at her door for his Mother and grandfather leaving this world.  In all that antipathy he let himself underestimate her, and that sin of omission cost him dear.  It cost him his grand-mother.”

“It nearly cost him his wife
as well, if you had not stepped in the way of Quintala’s spell.” 

Niarmit shook her head.  Kimbolt thought her troubled by the memory of the acrid council chamber, the air heavy with the sulph
urous scent of discharged magic. “I’ve not seen you in a gown before, your Majesty,” he said anxious to distract her from painful thoughts.

She looked down at herself, with a smile.  “Captai
n, I don’t think I’ve worn one, besides a priestess’s robes, in over five years.  It is just that in my itinerant life style I have left meagre stashes of clothing in so many different places, that my stock in Rugan’s palace is quite exhausted.  This is one of Lady Giseanne’s dresses, we are of a similar size and it is all she had to loan.”

She twirl
ed around and gave a mock curtsy. 

“It is very becoming your M
ajesty, it makes you look more…” He stopped himself.

“More Queenly, Captain?” she prompted.

He flushed red and nodded a hasty acceptance of her substitution for the word ‘womanly’ which had been in his mind.  “It is most comely,” he hurried in search of a suitable compliment.  “The colour, it quite matches your..”

She laughed. “C
ome captain, you mistake me for Hepdida, if you think that the idleness of fashion interests me at all.”  She looked down at herself again and lifted up the Ankh with its pink gem.  “This tracks her life now,” she said simply. “I haven’t told her yet that her father is dead, or what he did.”

And suddenly she was crying, the laughter and the smiles were gone, and great tears rolled silently down her cheeks and her shoulders shook in supresse
d sobs.  He couldn’t do nothing. No man could do nothing in the face of such sorrow.  He reached out his arms to her and she fell into them, clinging to him like a shipwrecked sailor to a rock.

His arms wavered uncertainly behind her, seeking out some place where the hands of a humble soldier could safely rest on the body of a Queen.  In the end
his left hand settled on the small of her back and his right rested on her head, combing soothing strokes through her auburn hair.  She pressed her cheek against his chest, squeezing the breath from him with her arms.

“There, your M
ajesty,” he mumbled platitudes of comfort.  “There, there.”  His shirt was wet with her tears.  “There is no weakness in crying, your Majesty.”

“My name is Niarmit,” she sniffed.  “Hardly anyone calls me that anymore.”

“No.. er.. yes,” he floundered.  “Yes Niarmit.”  It must have been the right answer for she squeezed a little harder at his use of her name.

“There are things I have done,
Kimbolt,” she told his sodden shirt in a halting broken voice.  “Things I have experienced, things I have survived, and when I look back at what I have endured and how, my legs just turn to jelly at the sheer shock of it.”

“I know,” he said thickly.  “I know, Niarmit.”

She looked up at him, no heavy sobs, or red eyed blubbing, just two steady green eyes, awash to the point of overflowing.  “I know you do, Kimbolt.”

He held her closer. His left hand slid up her back, pressing against her shoulder blades, his
right hand drifted down to stroke her cheek, a fruitless bid to wipe away her tears with his finger.

She said something he couldn’t hear.

“I’m sorry, your… I’m sorry Niarmit.”

“I don’t want
to sleep alone tonight,” she repeated.

His finger cease
d its brushing for a heartbeat, a long heartbeat.  “There will be guards posted.” He tried to hear a meaning he knew she had not intended.  “Quintala will not return.  You will be quite safe, Niarmit.”

She looked up at him from within the circle of his arms and tapped his chest with her finger.  “I don’t want to sleep alone tonight, Kimbolt.”

“I’d be happy to be your sentry, to stand the watch against the traitor,” he blustered.

She shook her head.  He shook his.  “Your Majesty, Niarmit,” he looked anywhere but in those eyes.  “You know
my past, what would people say? Please, think of what you are, of who you are.”

“I don’t care,
” she said.  “I don’t fucking care. Just for once, just for one night, I don’t want to have to care and I don’t want to sleep alone and I don’t want to be alone.”

A dozen thoughts chased a score of emotions around his head, but no words came from his mouth.  He bent his back and scooped her up in his arms. He marvelled at how she seemed even lighter than that last time when he had carried her sleeping form to a cot in Hepdida’s chamber. But she was not sleeping this time.  Her arm was around his neck, her head rested on his shoulder, watching his face.  As he concentrated on negotiating the door, balancing on one foot to turn the handle with his boot,
she reached up to caress his cheek, brushing her thumb across his lower lip.

He stumbled through the door and pushed it shut with his back.  What would people say?  He didn’t fucking care, and he didn’t want to be alone either.

Giseanne watched her husband seated on the nursing chair, the little lording Andros in his arms.  The nurse maid had come twice to take the baby away and Rugan had both times, with the slightest shake of his head, sent her away.

“Husband,” Giseanne said.

Again he shook his head, more emphatic, bidding her silent.

“You cannot blame yourself,” she urged.  “She deceived everyone.  I trusted her.  I thought I understood her.”

“I thought I was cleverer than she,” he said thick voiced.  “I thought I had the measure of her, her rage, her immaturity.  I thought her
a child, I could outwit, even at the end, even at the very end.”  He held the baby tight, running a hand smoothly over its pale head, while it stared up at him with unblinking admiration.

“Rugan?”

“I felt her holding spell loosen.  I thought she had cast it imperfectly and I would work free before she could realise it.  But that was just what she intended, for me to appear to escape and for her to strike me down, while Kimbolt’s accusations were still ringing in everyone’s ears.”

“That would have been murder, cold blooded murder.”

“She is a veteran of that, my dear,” Rugan looked up at last at his wife.  “The list begins with poor Elise’s father and her sister.  She was party to young Eadran’s death.  Tonight she meant to number you amongst her victims.”

Giseanne tried to shrug that awful truth away.  She mumbled something of the heat of the moment, of covering an escape, but she did not believe it.
  She sat numbly in the chair opposite Rugan, shaking her head.  “What hate could drive her so, to seek to injure me, who never did her any harm?”

The Prince looked up at her while the baby Andros suckled at his knuckle. “She wanted to hurt me, my dear, and but for the Queen she would have succeeded.”  He shook his head.  “I have wronged her Majesty and her kin so grievously and for so long. If you had not found your ways to circumvent my foolish wishes, who knows what harm I could have done.”

“And you still have time and opportunity to make amends, my dear Rugan.”   She reached across and clasped his hand.

It had been a long time since she had last stood in this hall.  The secret passageway by which she and the others had entered had been over to the right, but it was gone now, or covered up by fresh stone blocks.  The ends of the hallway which had been sealed by heavy rock falls were now entirely clear.  All the broken rubble had been carted away, and the mosaics had been scrubbed and refreshed.  Beneath her feet was the picture of the harpies at work, in a murderous sequence of siren calls, lofty ascents, and terminal falls for the victims.

She su
pressed a shiver and walked towards the raised dais and its great stone throne.  He sat there waiting for her.  He had not changed in seventeen years, still the same blackened skeletal corpse dressed in rotted finery.    But then again, if he hadn’t changed much in two thousand years, a couple of decades was hardly likely to wring some transformation in him.

Two
orcs had risen from before the Master’s throne and turned to lurch away.  They paused as they saw Quintala. Her silver hair, dark skin and cusped ears drew a hissing hostility from the green hided humanoids. She met their gaze with a level stare of her own as she walked on by.  One of the creatures had the sense to immediately look away, the other tried a final guttural growl of contempt.  Quintala barely broke stride as she drew her dirk, drove it up through the orc’s chin deep into its misshapen cranium and then moved on, wiping the blade on her sleeve as behind her the orc fell into a twitching misshapen heap.  The other orc hesitated for just a fraction of a second and then decided it wanted no part in this uneven debate and loped away.

On the throne
Maelgrum said nothing, but the tall redbearded figure at his side exploded into indignation.  “How dare you! That was a servant of the Master, acting on his orders.  How dare you interfere with the Master’s business?” 

Quintala shrugged.  “He shouldn’t have looked at me oddly then, not
if he wanted to carry out the Master’s orders.”

The ruddy faced man, scowled in some disarray.  Quintala had never met him, but s
he guessed this must be Rondol, the sorcerer.  “Are you looking at me oddly, Mr Redbeard?” she said with a tone of mild curiosity.

“Er.. that is,” h
e frowned in blustering confusion, before seizing the comfort of a hard fact.  “My name is Rondol, Rondol the sorcerer.  I stand at the Master’s right hand.”

“Really,” she said oozing disbelief.  “I’d rather expected to see the old fraud Haselrig in that position.  Still, thanks for keeping the place warm for me.”

At last Maelgrum spoke and Rondol gratefully deferred to the Master.  “Greetingsss Ssseneschal Quintala, I assssume your appearancsse in thessse hallsss meansss that your ssseventeen year missssion hasss finally come to an end?”

“It would seem so,” Quintala agreed, pulling a black medallion from deep within her tunic.  “I expect I won’t be
needing this anymore.  I can receive my orders in person.”

“It isss a ssshame,” Maelgrum hissed.  “An agent in the heart of the enemy camp wasss sssuch a ussseful asssset.  You brought usss ssso much advantage.”

The disappointment was tangible as the temperature around the Dark Lord dropped a couple of degrees and the ever present vapour thickened around his arms.  Quintala shivered, “but I am not just any spy coming into the cold.”

“You have squande
red a priceless benefit to the Master,” Rondol upbraided her, trying to ride the tide of Maelgrum’s displeasure.

Quintala looked at him and then at Maelgrum.  “Is this oaf really useful to you, because I am
sure he is looking at me oddly?”

“Master, how can you let this half-bree
d witch speak to me like that, speak to you like that?”

Maelgrum raised his arm lazily, one finger pointed at Rondol’s mouth and the sorcerer suddenly found his lips would not part.  A frantic hum of panic issued from his sealed mouth, as Maelgrum admonished, “do not ssseek to inssstruct me Rondol on what courtesssy I ssshould or ssshould not exsspect from my ssservantss.  That isss mossst dissscourteousss.”

Quintala feigned an indifference to the sorcerer’s fate, scanning the length and breadth of the Dark Lord’s subterranean hall.  “I like what you’ve done down here,” she said.  “It has really opened it out, but still kept that dark foreboding atmosphere.”  She gave a firm nod in agreement with her own opinion.

Rondol was clearly nonplussed not just by the half-elf’s behaviour, but by the
Dark Lord’s indulgence of it.  However, words failed him, or at least his ability to vocalise them did.  Maelgrum flung back his head, emitting a creaking laugh.  “You have ssspirit Sssenessschal, jussst like your mother did.”

“Yes,” Quintala said with a frown.  “Tell me again about my mother.”