borne by a servant using a loft-pole, who strode toward them with measured pace, intoning like a doorwarden, 'Behold! Velduke Aumon Bloodhunt, Velduke Melander Brorsavar, and Arduke Tethgar Teltusk are come among you.'
'Behold, indeed,' Duthcrown grunted. 'We all stagger under the weight of titles, I daresay.'
'Yet let us cling to this small measure of courtliness,' Velduke Bloodhunt snapped, eyes blue and sharp, but his old face gone as gray from the pain the long ride had brought him as the hue of his thinning hair. 'It is so very nearly the last vestige left to us.' He nodded across the ring of lords in the brighter lighting, and murmured politely, 'Lionhelm. Snowlance.'
'My lord,' the hawk-eyed arduke replied with a nod, and lifted a hand to indicate another archway. 'More of us arrive, I think.'
Nyghtshield turned to look where Lionhelm was pointing, and saw two tall, muscular men striding out of the darkness. They looked like warriors, and increasingly familiar as they approached, but the baron turned to the servant. 'Well?'
The man with the pole-lantern acquired an expression of uncomfortable uncertainty, and looked to Velduke Bloodhunt, who was evidently his master.
'Introduce them,' Bloodhunt said shortly.
The servant cleared his throat and announced, 'Arduke Laskrar Stormserpent and Arduke Yars Windtalon.'
'It seems likely this is all of us, leaving aside the border knights,' the other velduke growled. 'We should go in.'
The servant looked at his master again, who gestured silently in the direction of the throne hall. The servant straightened his shoulders, lifted his lantern, and started to pace in that direction, and the great lords of Galath drifted after him, their chatter dying away.
Arduke Lionhelm, with his lantern, brought up the rear, and Nyghtshield peered through the darkened archways they passed and saw more than one pair of gleaming eyes staring back at him. Oh, yes, Galathgard still had its beasts. He was suddenly glad that his handful of knights was standing in the same stables as the far larger bodyguards of the vuldukes and ardukes.
Until he remembered that the new royal decree that armed underlings remain out in the stables meant their swords were no deterrent to monsters prowling here, in the main chambers of state.
In grim silence the lords of Galath paced through the vaulted halls, boots nigh-silent on the dusty marble, ignoring stains and bones and the rubble of crumbling adornments fallen from on high since their last visit.
When they stepped into the vast throne hall, the pole-lantern's light showed them a little of its high, arched ceiling, and below that the two tiers of dark and deserted high galleries, their archways like so many empty eyesockets in rows of watching skulls. Below the galleries were the rows of little round, shell-like stone balconies stretching down both sides of the hall, supported on their impressive clusters of pillars.
The servant strode to the stone stand that had held pole-lanterns and braziers since his grandsire's great- grandsire's day, and rajsed his pole to slide it down into one of the waiting sockets there.
Whereupon the stone spoke, in a cold and crisp voice that so startled the servant that he nearly dropped the pole. 'Depart this place right speedily, and take your light with you.'
Lantern swaying wildly, the servant cast one fearful glance at his master, and fled.
The lords looked at Lionhelm, who took his usual place on the tiles. He stood facing the throne, swung open his lantern, and looked back at all of them, a silent look of command riding his handsome, hawk-eyed face. The other lords hurried to their preferred places; the moment they reached them, the arduke extinguished his lantern, plunging them all into near-darkness.
'And who was that, who spoke to your man?' a lord's voice muttered. 'Sounded like a woman, not the king. No voice I know, anyway.'
The darkness hid old Velduke Bloodhunt's shrug, but he'd barely finished making the gesture when a distant, startled shriek arose from the direction the lantern-bearer had taken-and ended, as abruptly as it had begun.
'Doomblast!' Bloodhunt snapped, blue eyes blazing with anger. 'I liked that lantern.'
Someone chuckled in the darkness, and Bloodhunt growled wordless anger in that direction.
'Nice to know we're as well behaved as young lads at play,' someone with a reedy voice observed.
'Speak for yourself, Klarl Broryn Snowlance.'
Snowlance snorted. 'Such candor, Mountblade. Pity you showed none of it last summer, when the king wanted to know who'd raided the Hammerfell granaries.'
'Baseless-'
'Not at all,' came the sour tones of Marquel Oedlam Duthcrown, who had plucked forth a comb from some hidden place about his grand garments. 'You were seen by many, Ondurs. His Majesty knew the truth when he asked.' He began tidying his prematurely white hair. 'Enjoy your leash; it grows shorter.'
Marquel Mountblade busied himself with polishing his monocle, and did not reply.
'Shall I end it, master? The darkclaws hasn't eaten much more than the head of Bloodhunt's servant, yet; it's still hungry.'
'Not yet, Amalrys. Let them savage each other awhile longer. I'm enjoying this.'
Pethmur might be one of the poorest barons, a sheepfarming warrior whose face was customarily as hard, gray, and expressionless as stone, but when his temper rose, his normally closed mouth erupted.
It was erupting now. 'And who stole the Sunder jewels, before the king's agents could get to them? Baron Glusk Chainamund, that's who.'
Chainamund was a fat, florid man who seemed to swell up when he was angry, his large straw-yellow mustache quivering like the barbels of a monstrous catfish. He was swelling up now. 'That's a lie! I was never near that tower!'
Pethmur's stony face seemed almost to crack as it creased into an unaccustomed sneer. 'Ah, but 'tis amusing, isn't it, to stand in the presence of a belted baron of the realm so stupid that he condemns himself out of his own mouth? And just how did you know, Chainamund, the Sunder women kept their jewels in the tower? When their rooms were all in the new wing, which was terraces and low halls, with nary a tower in sight?'
'You shut your mouth, Lothondos!' the fat baron bellowed, his face a deep crimson. 'You lie like a dragon- shitting rug!'
'Now, now, Chainamund!' a burly klarl interrupted sharply. 'Baron Pethmur may indulge in falsehoods, or may not lie like a dragon-shitting rug-such a colorful phrase; I thank you for the entertainment! — but he does raise a telling point. The whereabouts of those jewels was a deep Sunder secret, not something all Galath knew; yet you were seen to ride right to the tower doors, and have your men force them, paying not the slightest attention to the inviting windows and easily opened doors of that new wing we'd all exclaimed over and strolled through, before the Sunders… fell out of favor.'
That overlarge, straw-yellow mustache curled. 'Oh? How would you know, Dunshar?'
'I know many things, Baron Chainamund; I make it my business to know things. For the good of Galath, of course. In this particular case, His Majesty had ordered two lords of the realm to watch over the seat of the Sunders, to guard against unauthorized visits. And, of course, to watch each other. One of those lords was myself, and the other was Baron Mrantos Murlstag. Murlstag?'
'I confirm,' Murlstag said heavily, his yellow eyes flat as he looked up at the fat baron. 'I and Klarl Annusk Dunshar did watch over Sundertowers, and you, Chainamund, rode right up to the old tower and forced entrance, just as Dunshar says. We reported as much to His Majesty. Ask him if you believe us not.'
'Oh?' The red-faced baron threw wide his arms. 'All that will prove is the lies you told him! And did he not remind us all, at our last conclave, that lying to the crown is treason? Was not Marquel Larren Blackraven, who stands not three paces from you now, charged by the king to enact justice on the knight Harlbrace, of Harl Keep, for that very crime? And did so, bearing the traitor's head back here? By the way, where is it, Blackraven?'
The hook-nosed marquel broke off his quiet humming to smile easily. 'It was yonder, on the spire atop yonder balcony, but something has eaten it,' he said, pointing with one hand as he stroked his neat mustache with the other. 'I see the jawbone on the floor there. A little gnawed, but still recognizable.'
'So something is dining well at court,' a lord commented sarcastically. 'Behold, all is not lost in Galath yet.'
'Well,' broad-shouldered Velduke Brorsavar said gruffly, 'that's a comfort. Of which I have all too few to
