his sleeve twice before he realized: the pounding came from the doorway, echoing the throb inside his skull.
‘Let them in,’ he said through his palms. ‘The damned sorcerers can raise a commotion all they like. Our edict is signed into law, and their prince will be in irons by afternoon.’
A hagridden secretary scurried to unbar the door. He was all but knocked down as the panels burst inward, and a flood of agitated barristers barged through.
The newcomers started shouting all at once.
From the governor’s chair on the dais, Morfett screamed for order. By the time he made himself heard, his head was splitting. The councilmen around him were sweating or vainly covering their ears to ease their hangovers. Not a few looked ready to be sick.
When the men could be made to speak in more orderly fashion, their complaints added up to disaster.
The sorcerers and their prince had spent an industrious morning, beginning with a review of Etarra’s condemned. By the tenets of Rathain’s royal charter, it transpired that two thirds of the city’s prisoners were wrongfully tried and sentenced.
‘Pardons and reprieves from execution!’ Morfett howled.
‘Worse,’ a clerk interrupted. ‘The prince has also vouched treasury funds for reimbursement of unfair fines.’
‘His mother-accursed royal Grace can’t do that!’ Morfett jumped to his feet. ‘A Teir’s’Ffalenn has no
‘No,’ corrected Etarra’s seneschal sadly. He looked and sounded like a kicked hound. ‘But he could, and did, post documents that name the prisoners to be acquitted on the day he’s invested as high king.’
‘Along with which laws will be repealed, which taxes, eliminated and how many public servants shall be relieved from their posts without pay!’ This inveigling was worse than the feud ongoing between the ironmongers and the furniture-joiners, who captured and tortured each other’s apprentices to blackmail concessions for trade secrets. Morfett slammed his fists on the high table, spattering ink and official wax over mother of pearl inlay. ‘Is this what you’ve come here to tell me?’
Amid cringing rows of officials, not one met their Lord Governor’s furious outburst.
‘Dharkaron take you for a pack of piddling puppies!’ Morfett stuck out his hand toward his commander of the guard. ‘Give me our new writ! Then go at once and tell Gnudsog to muster a squad of enforcers. I’ll see that s’Ffalenn bastard in chains and flogged for fomenting insurrection. Fiends and Ath’s fury, no meddling Fellowship sorcerer’s going to raise a hand to stop me!’
‘No sorcerer will, but your people might,’ a voice volunteered from the entry. Sethvir stepped inside, bemused as a philosopher given new audience for his theories. ‘Have you been listening?’ He pushed the outer door panels open.
A wave of sound reverberated into the council hall. The mob in the streets beyond the antechamber were not outraged, but cheering, and against any law of nature, Sethvir’s mild tone carried clearly over the din. ‘Rumours spread that your ministers met to outlaw the royal charter. To keep an irate mob of farmers from storming your doors and tearing your councilmen limb from limb, the First City Alderman suggested the contrary; that the documents being drawn were in fact an abdication of the guilds from ruling power and an affirmation of s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty. Craftsmen and labourers took to the streets in celebration. The North Gate belltowers play carillons and the shanty-district whores are throwing posies. If you end this session without a writ for a royal coronation, your people of Etarra are going to riot.’
‘Let them!’ Diegan’s rebuttal rang like a whipcrack over the noise. ‘I’d rather find myself lynched than bend my knee to any high king.’
He made as if to push past, but the dignitaries beside him caught his wrists. There were others of the council not so staunch. Should the mobs turn lawless in the streets, the city guard could not stay them. Looting would be followed by bloodshed and the damage to trade would be incalculable. Pressured to give in by a mournful flock of peers, the Lord Governor of the city waved for Diegan to subside. Then he sat down abruptly with his knuckles jammed against his teeth. Today the sorcerers’ timing had them beaten. But the Fellowship could hardly shepherd the stew of Etarra’s politics indefinitely. Best to accept this defeat and save resources to upset s’Ffalenn rule another day. On the floor, trodden under the milling feet of the pedigreed elect of Etarra, the morning’s brave warrant to arrest the prince came to an ignominious end.
Diegan tugged free of the dignitaries, unpacified. ‘It won’t be that easy,’ he lashed at Sethvir. ‘The rabble might love the idea of a high king today. But when unrest drives them to turn, no blandishments your prince can offer will appease them.’
‘Blandishments?’ Sethvir looked thrilled as a madcap apothecary prepared to make gold from plain clay. ‘I rather thought his Grace would give them back their chartered freedom.’
Diegan’s lip curled in a snarl. Blithe as the Warden of Althain could appear, as much as he seemed a doddering elder of a stripe to knot strings around his wrists to nudge a senile memory, he was no such vague old fool.
He had Etarra’s council at bay and he knew it.
But his position was dangerously precarious. Moment to moment, any of a thousand missed details could erupt into bloody uprising as upheaval gave rise to panic. The citizens outside the council hall were far from tranquil, nowhere near under control. Only the poor and the disaffected roamed the streets. Sensible citizens of stature had barricaded their families inside their houses in dread. The Fellowship’s straits were not invisible. They could not be everywhere. Even as the governor’s council drafted their formal abdication, Diegan continued to collect reports.
Guilds were seizing the disruption as cover to wage less covert rivalries; five men of good families lay dead from unmarked knives. Asandir was busy protecting the moneylender who funded the treasury’s bottomless capacity to dispense bribes from a stone-throwing mob, who protested paying taxes for usury. Traithe, at the south ward armoury, barred Gnudsog’s deputies from the spare weapons stores while, impervious to attempts by all three fraternities of assassins, Arithon was being fitted for dress-boots by Etarra’s most fashionable cobbler.
The discorporate mages Kharadmon and Luhaine assuredly were behind the royal luck.
Before the wax on the writs that confirmed s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty grew cool, and despite the frustrated opposition of a governor’s council hazed like smoke-driven wasps, his Grace emerged in princely splendour to read
