to his inability to keep order in his own city.
“The masses ever find ways to test the will of their masters, I find,” he said smoothly. “I think they will remember soon enough how unwise it is to so taunt the mighty, no?”
“Three nights of trouble, we’ve had,” Gryvan mused, his hands clutching the edges of his lurid cloak ever more tightly. “Fires. Riot. Murders.”
“They will keep to their houses once it snows, or rains,” Alem said. He found it difficult to maintain a buoyant strand of levity in his voice, particularly as he had the strong impression Gryvan did not care what he said. Was, in fact, barely even listening. And the Chancellor still had not raised his head. Mordyn looked thinner than Alem remembered, his shoulders a little narrower.
“There is such a fervour in the people,” Gryvan said, “one cannot help but wonder about its source. We are no strangers to discontent and dispute here, yet never-not in my lifetime, nor my father’s-has it found such… shameful expression. Why is that, do you suppose? What has changed, Ambassador?”
Alem’s hopes of a successful audience had been slender from the start. Now they withered like a blighted vine. Gryvan’s soft-spoken words were laced with threat, with malice. Alem wondered whether the Shadowhand’s studied disengagement was a silent message: a warning that he could expect no succour from that quarter. He cleared his throat.
“A man would have to be rich in presumption, I think, to advise a High Thane upon the rule of his own city. No? The one who stands before you now, sire, is not such a man. Not at all. The matters I hoped to discuss are entirely — ”
“See how he seeks to slither out from under your boot,” hissed Abeh venomously.
Alem blinked in surprise at her outburst.
“My lady, I intend no slithering. I mean only that it is not my place to make comment on these unfortunate disturbances. In knowing that, I show only respect.”
“Unfortunate?” Abeh sneered. “Do you pretend you don’t rejoice in this ruining of Vaymouth? Do you claim your spirits aren’t lifted by the sight of everything we have built here being torn down?”
Alem smiled. A stupid gesture, he knew, as likely to antagonise as to assuage the High Thane’s tempestuous wife. It was born of bemusement. He smothered it as quickly as he could beneath a bland mask of-hopefully-foolish puzzlement.
“This was the fairest of cities,” Abeh snarled at him. “Now it’s being fouled. All this discord, all this damage. Ugly!”
Alem began to wonder if the woman had finally lapsed into the frothing, idiot decline that had always seemed her most likely fate, but he was saved from having to find a coherent response to her rantings by Gryvan himself.
“Hush,” the Thane of Thanes said, with a glance at his wife. “Hush. We’ll have no answers from him like that.”
“Answers?” Alem echoed. “I came in expectation of… not such questions, at least. I am too slow, perhaps. It might be so. Yet I admit, I do not understand.” It was cold in this cursed hall, he thought. They could not even keep the winter chill from their own palaces, these fools.
“Be quiet,” said Gryvan. “Mordyn?”
The Chancellor now at last lifted his head and took a step forward. There was not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as he regarded Alem; not a hint at the years of careful sparring that lay between them, the grudging respect the Ambassador thought had grown. It was a stranger who now looked down upon him from the dais, and an unfriendly one at that.
“I have seen,” Mordyn intoned, “in Kolkyre and Anduran, evidence of conspiracy between Lannis and Kilkry, the Crafts and this man’s Kingship. I was given letters that the Gyre Bloods found. I have uncovered more since my return.”
“This is absurd,” Alem protested.
“Silence!” Kale came striding forward as he shouted, halting halfway down the steps at the front of the dais. The lean warrior glared at Alem with contempt.
“The High Thane has been shown proofs,” Mordyn Jerain was saying levelly. “The patterns, the tracks left by those who seek to undermine the rule of Haig, have been revealed to him. He sees clearly now, and all your lies and your pretences will not serve to cloud his sight again.”
“I tell no lies,” said Alem. “If you accuse me of this, you are much in error. And giving great offence to me and my master.” His unease was transforming itself incrementally into fear. This discourse might wear a cloak of eloquence and be housed in a grand hall, but its substance was that of the alleyway, the knife fight.
“Do you deny, Ambassador,” Mordyn said, “that your Kingship has conspired with the Goldsmiths to foment disorder? That you covet the lands of the Free Coast, and of the Dargannan Blood, and even up to the gates of Vaymouth itself? Do you deny that even now your armies assemble along your northern borders, at your ports, imagining us weak? Do you pretend that Dornach coin is not lining the pockets of the mobs tormenting Vaymouth’s slumber every night?”
“All that, I deny,” Alem said. “And if you have more, that I deny too, but will not tarry to hear it. You invite these imagined dangers of yours into reality by your insults, and I will give no aid to you in that. Therefore, I remove myself from your presence, sires and lady.”
He bowed, feeling the weight of his pounding heart in his chest, and backed away. He turned and saw Gryvan’s men spread across the distant doorway, blocking it; others advancing down the echoing length of the hall.
“I must have the truth in this, Ambassador,” Gryvan said, almost sorrowfully, behind him. “You will understand that. You understand power. Its necessities. The requirement-absolute, unwavering-to defend it, and preserve it. I cannot stand idly by when all that I have inherited, all that I will pass on to my son, is threatened.”
Alem turned back to face the throne. The servants and scribes who had accompanied him into this trap were clustering tightly together, looking nervously about as the Haig warriors drew slowly closer.
“I must act,” said Gryvan. “I must. If the dangers that crowd about me prove illusory, so be it. Whatever harm is done can be undone in time. I will regret it, and endure that regret. But if I fail to act, and those dangers prove real, I will have wilfully squandered the labour of generations. You can understand, surely, that when I see signs of sickness in my body, however faint, however uncertain, it is better to examine them, to excise them even, than to pay them no heed?”
“Gryvan, I implore you — ” Alem reached out his hands, unashamed by the supplicatory gesture and by the pleading in his voice, knowing in his mounting despair that nothing mattered save somehow reaching the High Thane, making him understand “-give thought to the consequences of this. Where has your sense gone? Whatever lies have been dripped into your ear, you…”
Alem could hear jostling behind him, cries of outrage. The High Thane’s shieldmen were seizing his attendants or pushing them aside. Kale, the rangy leader of this pack of hounds, was stepping down from the Throne Dais, coming towards him with an air of malicious, eager intent.
“Thane, there is no sense in this,” Alem shouted, his voice climbing a shrill ladder of alarm. “You must see that! You cannot truly believe we would play such crude games against you. You invite disaster!”
Kale had hold of his shoulders. He could feel the warrior’s iron-hard fingers grinding into his muscles through the cloth. Beyond, Alem saw that Gryvan was no longer looking at him. The High Thane gazed up into the vaulted roof of the hall, detached, as if his presence were merely accidental.
“Disaster,” Gryvan muttered, so softly that Alem barely heard it, “as I have been recently reminded, comes to those who allow events to precede them. I, Ambassador — ” he said this into the great cavern of the hall’s roof “-I choose to walk ahead of events. I choose to shape them, not be shaped by them. I am Thane of Thanes, and I am fierce enough still to hold my throne.”
They took the Ambassador from the Great Hall and bore him into the bowels of the Moon Palace. They followed seldom-used passages, and bundled him down dark and tight spiralling stairways. There was no glory or elegance there. No marble, no carvings, no fine and graceful tapestries. Only bare rock and rough-hewn steps; torches giving out tarry smoke and walls streaked with grime.
They took him as deep as it was possible to go, to places few ever visited, and fewer wished to visit. There they showed him cruel instruments. They showed him branding irons and hammers; water-filled barrels big enough
