Quirion repaired to the table on which sat a host of decanters. He poured himself a dribble of wine and drank it off, grimacing. He did not imbibe as a rule, but he felt the need of the warming liquid; there was a chill in the room.
“Get word to your co-conspirator, Freiss,” he said. “Tell him to prepare his men for action. And start gathering your own followers together, Lord Carrera. We must work on a combined plan.”
“Will there then be a messenger sent to Charibon with your recommendations?” Sastro asked.
“There will. I will . . . advise my archivists to look into the genealogy of your house.”
“A wise decision, Presbyter. You are obviously a man of sagacity.”
“Perhaps. Now that the bargaining is done, can we attend to the more mundane details? I want rosters, equipment lists.”
The man had no style, Sastro thought. No sense of the moment. But that was by-the-by. He had secured the kingship for himself; that was the main thing. He had negotiated a path to power. But he had not arrived at its threshold, not yet. There remained much to be done.
“I will have everything ready for you to peruse this afternoon,” he said smoothly. “And I will have couriers sent to my estates and those of my vassals. The men will begin assembling directly.”
“Good. This thing must be done quickly. If we cannot storm the Lower City before Abeleyn arrives, it will be the work of several campaigns to secure Abrusio, with all the destruction that entails.”
“Indeed. I have no wish to rule over a hill of ashes.”
Quirion stared at his aristocratic companion. “The new king will rule in conjunction with the Church. I have no doubt that the Pontiff will wish to maintain a garrison of the Knights here, even after the rebels are extinguished.”
“They will be an inestimable help, a valued adjunct to Royal authority.”
Quirion nodded. “Just so we understand each other. Now if you will excuse me, my Lord Carrera, I must prepare to address my brethren. And there are wounded to visit.”
“By all means. Will you give me your blessing before I go, excellency?”
Sastro rose, then knelt before the Presbyter with his head bowed. Quirion’s face spasmed. He grated out the words of the blessing as though they were a curse. The nobleman regained his feet, made the Sign of the Saint with mocking flamboyance and left the room.
O VER five hundred leagues away, the Thurian Mountains were thick and white with midwinter snows. The last of the passes had been closed and the sultanate of Ostrabar was sealed off to the west and the south by the mountain barrier, itself merely an outlying range of the fearsome Jafrar Mountains farther east.
The tower had once been part of the upland castle of a Ramusian noble, one of the hundreds which had dotted the rich vales of Ostiber in the days when it had been a Ramusian kingdom. But it was different now. For sixty years the Merduk overlords had possessed the rich eastern region. Its ruler was Aurungzeb the Golden, the Stormer of Aekir, and the people he ruled had come to accept the Merduk yoke, as it was called in the west. They tilled their fields as they had always done and by and large they were no worse off under their Merduk lords than they had been under the Ramusian ones.
True, their sons must serve a stint in the Sultan’s armies, but for the most talented of them there was no bar to ambition. If a man had ability, he might rise very high in the service of the Sultan no matter how low his birth. It was one of the cunning ways in which the Merduks had reconciled the people to their rule, and it brought continual new blood into the army and the administration. The grandfathers of the men who had fought under the banners of Ahrimuz the Prophet at Aekir and Ormann Dyke had struggled against those same banners two generations before. For the peasantry it was a pragmatic choice. They were tied to their land and when it changed owners they would change masters as a matter of course.
Most of the upland castle was in ruins, but one wing with its tall tower remained intact and it gave a fine view of the valleys below. On a clear day it was even possible to see Orkhan, the capital of the Sultan, glittering with minarets in the distance. But the castle was isolated. Built too high in the Thurian foothills, it had been deserted even before the Merduks came, its occupants forced out by the severity of the upland winters.
Sometimes the local inhabitants lower in the valley would remark upon the dark tower standing alone on the wintry heights above. It was rumoured that strange lights could be seen flashing in its windows after dark, and there were tales of inhuman beasts which roamed the fells around it in nights of moon. Sheep had gone missing, and a boy herder had disappeared. No one dared to approach the old ruin, though, and it was left to its malignant contemplation of the dales below.
T HE beast turned from the window and its monochrome world of white snow and black trees and distant lights. It shuffled across the circular tower chamber and sank into a padded chair before the fire with a sigh. The endless wind was moaning about the gaps in the roof and occasional confettis of snow would flutter in the glassless window.
A beast was dressed in human robes, and its head was like some grotesque marriage of humanity and reptile. The body was awkward and bent, and talons scraped the flagged floor in place of toes. Only the hands remained recognizably human, though they were treble-jointed and slightly scaled, reflecting back the firelight with a green tint.
Other things reflected back the firelight also. Arranged around the walls on shelves were great glass carboys full of liquid, the light of the flames kindling answering shines from their depths. In some floated the small grey corpses of newborn babies, eyes shut as though they were still dreaming in the womb. In others were the coiled bodies of large snakes, their sides flattened against the glass. And in three of the fat-bellied jars, dark bipedal shapes stood gazing down into the room with eyes that were the merest gleeds of bright incarnadine. They moved restlessly in the surrounding liquid, as though impatient at their confinement.
The room was full of a sour smell, like clothes left lying out in the rain. On a small table in front of the hearth was a silver salver upon which smoked the dying ashes of a tiny fire. There were small bones in the ashes, the miniature egg-sized remnant of a fanged skull.
The thing in the chair leaned forward and poked at the ashes with one long forefinger. Its eyes glittered. With a furious gesture it sent ashes, salver and all flying into the fire. Then it leaned back in the chair, hissing.
From a niche near the ceiling the winged shape of a homonculus fluttered down like a gargoyle in miniature. It settled on the beast’s shoulder and nuzzled the wattled neck.
“Easy, Olov. It is no matter,” the beast said, patting the distressed little creature. And then: “Batak!”
A door opened at the rear of the chamber and a man dressed in travelling clothes of fur-lined cape and high boots entered. He was young, his eyes coal-black, earlobes heavy with gold rings. His face was as pale as plaster and he was sweating despite the season.
“Master?”
“It failed again—as you can see. I merely destroyed another homonculus.”
The young man came forward. “I am sorry.”
“Yes, you are. Pour me some wine, will you, Batak?”
The young man did so silently. His hand was shaking and he mopped spilt liquid with one corner of his sleeve, darting frightened glances at the thing in the chair as he did so.
The beast took the proffered wine and threw it back, tilting its head like a chicken to drink. The crystal of the goblet cracked within its digits. The beast regarded the object with a weary irritation, then threw the flawed thing to shatter in the fire.
“The whole world is new to me,” it muttered.
“What will you do now, master? Are you going to undertake the journey?”
The beast looked at him with bright, fulvid eyes. The air around it seemed to shimmer for a second and the homonculus took off for the rafters with a squeak. When the air steadied once more there was a man sitting there in place of the beast, a lean, dark-skinned man with a face as fine-boned as that of a woman. Only the eyes remained of the former monster, lemon-bright and astonishing in the handsome visage.
“Does this make you less nervous, Batak?”
“It is good to see your face again, master.”
“I can only hold this form for a few hours at a time, and the eyes resist any change. Perhaps because they are the windows of the soul, it is said.” The man smiled without the slightest trace of humour. “But in answer to your question: yes, I will undertake the journey. The Sultan’s agents are already in Alcaras hiring ships—big, ocean- going ships, not the galleys of the Levangore. I have an escort and a carriage billeted down in the village; the
