The Iron Wars

as the grave-cold air came whispering out of a lightless hole in the wall. A glimpse of steps leading down, and then nothing but the blackness.

She shivered, her toes growing numb with the wintry blast. It looked an awful place to go in the dark hour of the night.

She padded quickly back up the corridor and took a lamp down from its cresset. Then she put her slippers over her frigid feet and, shielding the flame from the cold draught, she entered the passageway.

A metal lever here, on the inside. She pulled it down and the door shut behind her, almost panicking her for a second. But she cursed herself for a fool and went on, angry with herself, hating the composure of the plain woman who had been with Golophin, hating them both for being privy to the secrets of the palace, for being so close to the hub of power. Hating everyone and everything indiscriminately because she, Jemilla, must lurk and creep in cold passages like a thief though she bore the King’s heir. By the blood of the martyred saints, they would pay for making her do this. One day she would serve them all out. Before she died, she would call this palace her own.

Doors and levers like the one she had entered by on both sides. She itched to try every one, but knew somehow that they would not take her where she wanted to go. The door to the King’s chambers would be marked, she felt. It would be different.

And it was. The passage wound for hundreds of yards in the bowels of the palace, but at its end there was a door taller than the rest, and set in the door was an eye.

She almost dropped the lamp. It blinked at her, meeting her own horrified gaze. A human eye set in a wooden door, watching her.

“Sweet lord of heaven!” she gasped. It was an abomination, set here by that bastard wizard. She was discovered. She almost turned tail and ran, but the harder Jemilla, the one who had aborted Hawkwood’s first child, who had coldly set out to seduce the youthful King, made her stand still, and think. She had come this far. She would not turn back.

It made her insides squirm even to approach the thing. How it stared! She shut her own eyes, and jabbed it as hard as she could with her thumb.

Again, harder. It gave like a ripe plum, and burst. Her thumb went in to the first joint, and she was spattered with warm liquid. When she opened her eyes there was a smeared, bloody hole in the door and her mantle was streaked with clear and crimson gore. She turned away, bent and vomited on the stone floor, dappling her slippers.

“Lord God.” She wiped her mouth, straightened and pushed at the door.

It gave easily, and she was in the King’s bedroom, a place she knew well.

She paused, wondering if the alarm would be raised quickly, if Golophin the demon was even now raging towards her with terrible spells on his lips to blast her out of existence. Well, she was where she had wanted to be.

She approached the great ornate bed in which she and Abeleyn had cavorted in the humid nights of late summer, the balcony screens flung wide to let in a breath of air off the sea. Candles burning now, as there had been then, and Abeleyn’s head on the pillows.

She stood over the prostrate King like a dark, bloody angel come to fetch his soul away. And realized why they hid him here, why there was nothing but rumour about his condition.

She touched the dark curls, for a moment feeling something akin to pity; and then wrenched away the covers with one violent tug.

A tattered fragment of a man below them, naked to her gaze, his stumps muzzled in linen wraps. His chest moved as he breathed, but the pallor of death was about him, his lips blue in the candlelight, the eyes sunken in their sockets. He could not be long for this world, the King of Hebrion.

“Abeleyn,” she whispered. And then louder, more confidently: “Abeleyn!”

“He cannot hear you,” a voice said.

She spun around, the lamp-flame guttering wildly. Golophin was standing behind her as silently as an apparition. She could not speak: the terror closed her throat on a scream.

The old mage looked like something unholy made incarnate by night shadow and candle-flame. His eyes glittered with an inhuman light, and one of them was weeping tears of black blood down his cheek.

“My lady Jemilla,” he said, and glided forward across the stone with never the sound of a footfall. “It is late for you to be up. In your condition.”

She was more afraid than she had ever been in her life, but she fought a swift, soundless battle with her terror, mastered herself, composed her face.

“I wanted to see him,” she said hoarsely.

“Now you have seen him. Are you happy?”

“He’s dead, Golophin. He is not a man any more.” Her voice grew calmer by the second, though she was calculating furiously, wondering if a scream would be heard if uttered here. Wondering if anyone would come to investigate it. The old mage looked like some night-dark prowling fiend with his bright eyes and skull-like countenance.

“I bear the King’s heir,” she said as he approached her.

“I know.” He was only pulling the covers back up over the King’s exposed body. She could almost smell the fury in him, but his actions were gentle, his voice controlled.

“You cannot touch me, Golophin.”

“I know.”

“You had no right to keep me from him.”

“Do not talk to me of rights, lady,” the wizard said, and his voice made her hair stand on end. “I serve the King, and I will do so to the last breath in my body or his. If you do anything to injure him, I will kill you.”

Said so quietly, so calmly. It was not a threat, it was a statement of fact.

“You cannot touch me. I bear the King’s heir,” she said, her voice a squeak.

“Get out.” Venom dripped from the words. Hatred hung heavy in the air of the room between them. She felt that violence was not far off. She retreated from the bed, one shaking hand still holding the lamp, the other cradling her abdomen.

“I will be treated according to my station,” she insisted. “I will not be shut away, or be forgotten. You will not muzzle me, Golophin. I will tell the world what I bear. You cannot stop me.”

The old mage merely stared at her.

“I will have my due,” she hissed at him suddenly, venom for venom.

She could not bear his eyes any longer. She turned and left the room without looking back, aware that he watched her all the way, never blinking.

SIX

“H ERE he comes,” Andruw said. “Full of piss and vinegar.”

They watched as the knot of horsemen drew near, pennons billowing in a breeze off the grey sea. And behind them nearly three thousand men in full battle array waited in formation, the field guns out to their front, cavalry in reserve at the rear. Classic Torunnan battle formation. Classic, and unimaginative.

“Do you know this Colonel Aras?” Corfe asked his adjutant.

“Only by reputation. He’s young for the job, a favourite of the King’s. Thinks he’s John Mogen come again, and is too easy on his men. He’s had a few skirmishes with the tribes, but hasn’t seen any real fighting.”

Real fighting. Corfe was still amazed at how much of the Torunnan army had not seen any real fighting. Torunnan military reputation had been built up by the men of the Aekir garrison, once considered the best troops in the world outside Fimbria. But the Aekir garrison were all dead, or slaves in Ostrabar. What was left were second-line troops, except for Martellus’s tercios at the dyke. And now it was these second-line troops that would have to take on the Merduk invasion, and beat the armies which had taken Aekir. It was a chilling prospect.

The rest of his own men, the Cathedrallers, were drawn up behind him in two ranks. Scarcely three hundred of them able to mount a horse out of the five hundred he had started south with. His command was being