“So what do we do now?”
“Back to the cathedral. No, wait.” He veered away, towards the front wall of the Royal Apartments. “This way.”
They stopped halfway along.
“No doors.”
“No windows.”
“What now?”
“Gentlemen.” Scorbus had remained quiet during the pursuit. Now, with the crowd closing in, he stepped back from the wall and indicated a balcony several feet above them, jutting out over the square. “The Royal Box, I imagine.”
Marius joined him. “Yes,” he replied, quickly glancing over his shoulder at the crowd. “But can we…?”
Scorbus tilted his head down towards him, and Marius imagined he saw a feral grin flitting across the empty skull. The King backed up a few steps, ran forward and leaped, swinging himself over the railings and onto the balcony with ease. Marius and Gerd stared at each other.
“Right,” Marius said. “Just like that, then.”
Together, they backed up. The crowd surged towards them. Someone threw a metal pipe. It clanged off the stones no more than a foot from the dead pair. The lynch mob roared. Marius and Gerd swapped glances.
‘Ready?”
“No.”
“Good. Go!”
Together they ran, and leaped. And missed.
“Oh my Gods.” Marius swung towards the wall, crashed against it, then swayed back out, to hang gently in the grip of a massive, bone hand. He glanced down at the cobblestones several feet below, then across at Gerd, dangling from the King’s other hand. Something ricocheted off the wall behind them, then something else. Marius peeked upwards. The King’s skull poked out between the railings, where he had lain down to effect his capture.
“Would you be so kind, Your Majesty?” Marius asked in his most polite voice.
“Of course.” The skull retreated. Marius and Gerd rose gracefully as the King pulled them up through the hail of missiles flung by the crowd below. Within moments they were gripping the edges of the railing and pulling themselves over.
“Agh, damn it!” Something pierced Marius’ calf, and sent him tumbling to the floor. He rolled to the base of the wall, and stared down at the shaft of a dart sticking out of his flesh. Blood ran from the hole. “Gods damn it, that hurts!” He pulled the dart out and flicked it over the edge of the balcony. He looked at the blood trickling along his pink flesh, then at Gerd’s equally pink and flushed face.
“Never felt so alive, huh?” he asked. Gerd grinned in reply. From below them a command for ladders rang out. Missiles continued to rain down. A brick smashed through the glass door at their backs, and shards tinkled down upon them.
“Time to leave, I think.” Scorbus said. Marius nodded in reply.
“I couldn’t agree more.” He sat with his back against the middle of the wide double doors, and reached through the hole left by the brick. “I can’t reach the handle.”
“Allow me.” Scorbus stood up, ignoring the renewed efforts from below that his appearance engendered. He raised one foot and kicked the door. It smashed open, and Scorbus indicated the room beyond. “As you please, gentlemen.”
Gerd and Marius bundled themselves into the room beyond. A stray brick followed them, smashing a vase by Gerd’s head and showering him with china. Marius viewed him from the shelter of a 12th Dynasty armoire.
“That’s a genuine Bentel III,” he sighed, mentally calculating the selling price he could have commanded if he’d rescued it. “You could have bought your entire village a hundred times over if you’d caught that brick.”
Gerd shook slivers out of his hair. “Because escaping would be so much easier if I was carrying a big pot around.”
“Big pot? You bloody ingrate, do you have any idea…”
“Gentleman,” Scorbus stood above them both and helped them to their feet. “We have more important considerations.”
“Yes, but… it was a Bentel III.”
“Never heard of the man.” Scorbus matched Marius’ stare for several seconds, before the smaller man turned away.
“Yes, well, no. I don’t suppose you have.”
A door stood opposite. Marius crossed to it, and laid an ear against the wood panelling.
“I can’t hear anything,” he said eventually. “You’d have thought that ruckus would have bought people running if there was anyone here, wouldn’t you?”
The others didn’t answer. He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
He grasped the handle, and swung the door open. An empty corridor stretched fifteen feet away to a blank wall. A single oil painting stared back at them from the far end.
“Processional corridor,” Marius guessed. “Changing rooms on either side, probably, opening out onto a cross corridor, one for men and one for women.”
“How do you know?”
Marius thought back to the sight of Nandus upon the balcony, commanding his assembled armies to go forth and conquer the invading crab armies of the Sea Kings. His adult logic filled in the gaps his childhood images presented. “The balcony is only used by the Royal family, for official occasions, when they’re all kitted up in their regalia. That stuff is heavy. You don’t think they wear it around the house, do you?” He snickered. “Last time I saw a princess up close, she wasn’t wearing thirty pounds of ermine cape, I can tell you that.” The last time he’d seen a princess she’d been wearing nothing more than a velvet mask and a pair of thigh-high sealskin boots, but that was a memory he’d dwell on when he had time to savour the image. He inhaled, then nodded down the corridor.
“Let’s get a wriggle on, eh?”
As one they scurried down the hallway. At the junction, Marius stopped against the wall and ducked his head around the corner.
“Nothing either way,” he announced. “I say we move towards the front of the building, see if we can find a side entrance or something we can get out of without attracting attention.”
“Sounds good to me,” Gerd replied.
“Right.” They moved left down the cross hall. They’d gone a dozen steps before they realised they were missing something. Marius turned around. Scorbus stood in front of the portrait, staring up at it.
“Your Majesty?” Marius and Gerd exchanged glances. “Scorbus?”
The King made no move to acknowledge him. Marius edged back towards him and coughed gently.
“Your Majesty? We really do need to…” He glanced up at the portrait, then stopped, and looked at it properly.
“You?”
“That is me,” Scorbus replied, his voice low and heavy. Black eyes stared fiercely down at them from beneath heavy brows. Marius swallowed, taking in the long mane of grey hair, the heavy jaw half-hidden underneath a beard of truly impressive dimensions. Robes of bear fur sat heavy upon wide shoulder and the matching hat looked as if it had been completed from an entire cub. The picture was dark, completed in heavy swipes of black and russet: threatening, imposing; an image of a thunderous old monster. Scorbus reached one hand slowly up and laid his bones open upon the face.
“Scorbus,” Marius’ voice was gentle, awed.
“This is how they saw me,” Scorbus said to nobody in particular. “This is how you remember me?”
“I…” Marius thought back to his tutor’s lessons, to the bloodthirsty stories his parents didn’t know he was being told. Scorbus and the conquest of the coastal lands, the establishment of Scorby: a creation myth baked in blood and mayhem. He glanced at the portrait, and the empty skeleton reaching mournfully towards it.
“Look where they hung it,” he said, placing a hand upon the King’s shoulder and turning him so that they gazed back down the way they had came. “The last image any King sees before going out to greet his people. A
