chamber, ashamed of how my body had betrayed me, and my mind was still spinning.
What I did was take the note from Quettil's servant.
'That is the property of my mistress!' I hissed, and stepped forward, a look of fury on my face. I grabbed the note from the fellow's fingers. He looked blankly at me, then at the note, which I stuffed quickly into my shirt. He opened his mouth to speak. I turned, still quivering with rage, to the two guards who had been sent with me. 'Escort this person from these apartments immediately!' I said.
This was, of course, a gamble on my part. In all the excitement, it had been quite unclear whether the Doctor and I were still technically prisoners or not, and therefore the two guards might rightly have concluded that they were my jailers, not my bodyguards, which was the way I was treating them. I would modestly claim that they were able to recognise something transparently honest and true about my righteous indignation and so decided to do as I commanded.
The Duke's man looked terrified, but did as he was told.
I buttoned up my jacket to further secure the note, found the Doctor's bag and hurried to the King's chamber with my escorts.
The Doctor had turned the King on to his side. She knelt by his bed, stroking his head in a distracted way, fending off questions from Doctor Skelim. (A reaction to something in his food, probably, she told him. Extreme, but not poison.)
You stood, master, arms crossed, near the Doctor. Duke Quettil lurked in a corner, glaring at her.
She took a small stoppered glass vial from the bag, holding it up to the light and shaking it. 'Oelph, this is the salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. Do you know it?'
I thought. 'Yes, mistress.'
'We'll need more, dried, within the next two bells. Can you remember how to prepare it?'
'Yes, I think so, mistress. I may need to refer to our notes.'
'Just so. I'm sure your two guards will help you. Off you go, then.'
I turned to go, then stopped and handed her the note which I had taken from the Duke's man. 'Here is that paper, mistress,' I said then quickly turned and left before she had time to ask me what it was.
I missed the uproar when the Doctor pinched the King's nose and clamped a hand over his mouth until he turned nearly blue. You, master, held back the protestations of the others, but then grew concerned yourself, and were about to order her away at sword point when she let the King's nose go and thrust the powder which the vial had contained under his nostrils. The ruddy powder looked like dried blood, but was not. It whistled into the King as he took a huge, deep in-drawing breath.
Most of the people in the room took their own first breath for some time. For a while, nothing happened. Then, I am told, the King's eyes flickered and opened. He saw the Doctor and smiled, then coughed and wheezed and had to be helped to sit up.
He cleared his throat, fixed the Doctor with an outraged stare and said, 'Vosill, what in the skies of hell have you done to your hair?'
I think the Doctor knew she would not need any more of salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. It was her way of trying to make sure that she and I were not brought to the King, made to cure him of whatever had befallen him and then promptly led away again back to the torture chamber. She wanted people to think that the course of treatment required would be longer than what amounted to little more than a quick pinch of snuff.
Nevertheless, I returned to the Doctor's apartments, with my two guards in escort, and set up the equipment necessary to produce the powder. Even with the help of the two guards — and it was a refreshing experience to be able to do the ordering around, rather than to be subject to it myself — it would be a close-run thing to produce a small amount of the substance in less than two bells. At least it would give me something to do.
I only heard later and at second hand about the outburst of Duke Quettil, in the King's chamber. The sergeant of the guards who had released us from the cell in the torture chamber spoke quietly with you, master, shortly after the King was brought back to the land of the living. I am told you looked a little shaken for a moment, but then went, grim-faced, to inform Duke Quettil of the fate of his chief questioner and his two assistants.
'Dead!
The Doctor, meanwhile, was looking at the piece of paper I had given her.
It was the note that purported to be from you and which had lured her to the trap that had killed Duke Ormin and was supposed to dispose of her. The King had already heard from the Doctor that Ormin was dead, and that she had been meant to appear to be the killer. He was still sitting up in bed, staring ahead and trying to digest this news. The Doctor had not yet given him the details of what had supposedly happened in the questioning chamber, but merely said that she had been released before being put to the question.
She showed him the note. He called you over and you confirmed that it was not your writing, though it might be said to be a decent attempt at it.
Duke Quettil took the opportunity to demand that somebody be brought to justice for the murder of his men, which may have been a little hasty, as it raised the question concerning what they had been doing there in the first place. The King's expression darkened as he gradually took in all that was revealed, and several times he had to tell people trying to interrupt others to stop, so that he could get clear in his still slightly befuddled head what had actually happened. Duke Quettil, reportedly breathing heavily and with staring eyes and spittle on his lips, at one point attempted to grab the Doctor's wrist and pull her away from the King, who put his arm round her shoulders and ordered you to keep the Duke distant.
I was absent for all that passed over the next half bell. What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others. Even so, without having been there, I believe there was some quick thinking done in that chamber, principally by yourself, though Duke Quettil must, at the least, have calmed down sufficiently to consider things in a more rational manner again and accept the path you were mapping out, even if he could contribute little of the cartography himself.
The brief of it was that Duke Ulresile was to be blamed. The writing on the note was his. The palace guards swore that Ulresile had commanded them on your authority. Later that night one of Ulresile's men was brought before the King, sobbing, to confess that he had stolen the scalpel from the Doctor's apartments earlier that day and that he had killed Duke Ormin, then run away and out of a back door of the Suitor's Wing shortly before the Doctor entered by the front door. I was able to play my part, averring that the fellow could well have been the man who had rushed towards me in the dim corridor in the Suitor's Wing.
The fellow lied about the scalpel, of course. Only one of the instruments had ever gone missing and that was the one I had stolen two seasons earlier, the day we had visited the Poor Hospital. Of course, I delivered it into your hands, master, though not in the literal sense in which it was later delivered into the body of Duke Ormin.
Duke Ulresile, in the meantime, had been prevailed upon to remove himself from the palace. I think a more mature mind might have thought this through and realised that to fly so was to appear to confirm any accusations that might be levelled at him, but perhaps he did not think to compare his predicament or possible actions with one so base as poor, dead Unoure. In any event, he was funnel-fed some story about the King's displeasure being great but brief and largely a matter of a misunderstanding which Quettil and yourself, master, would need a short period to sort out, but a short period which absolutely required the young Duke's absence.
The King made it very clear that he would take any further attempt to traduce the Doctor's good name very ill indeed. You promised that everything would be done to clear up the remaining points of confusion in the matter.
Two of the King's own guards were stationed outside our apartments that night. I slept soundly in my cell until woken by a nightmare. I think the Doctor slept well. In the morning she looked well enough. She completed shaving her head, making a neater job of it than Master Ralinge.
I assisted her in this, in her bedroom while she sat on a chair with a towel round her shoulders and a basin on her knees in which warm suds and a sponge floated. We were due to attend another meeting in the King's chamber that morning, the better to give our side of the events of the previous night.
