Christopher G. Nuttall's Blog, page 22

Her Majesty’s Warlord 23-24

Chapter Twenty-Three

“You did well,” Princess Helen said.  “But you still don’t know who sent the raiders?”

I shook my head.  The interrogations had been inconclusive.  I hadn’t been gentle – I’d used truth potions and spells, as well as threats of torture – but the prisoners simply hadn’t known anything useful.  They were mercenaries, passing through their kingdom; their commander, a greedy and ruthless bastard, hadn’t told them anything more than what they needed to know.  They didn’t know who was paying their wages, let alone their paymaster’s long-term plans.  I supposed their commander had made the right call.  What a prisoner didn’t know they couldn’t tell.

“I suspect they were backed by a warlord,” I said.  Warlord Cuthbert was the most likely suspect, but he wasn’t the only one.  “They wouldn’t go burning villages at random unless someone was paying the bills.”

Princess Helen made a face.  “And why bother?”

I shrugged.  The attacks seemed nothing more than senseless brutality.  They had upset the king and his councillors, and discomforted the city, but little else.  I wasn’t sure if they’d been intended to wear us down, in which case they’d failed, or simply test our military improvements before the paymaster committed his troops to the fight.  I hoped it was the latter.  If they’d set out to spread terror, as Islamic State had done when it metastasised across the Middle East, they’d done that all too well.

“We gave them a bloody nose,” I said.  I’d made that clear, in the reports I’d written and sent back to the city.  “And as word spreads, they’ll be fewer mercenaries willing to put their lives on the line for their paymaster.”

I smiled, although it wasn’t really amusing.  Mercenaries wanted to live to spend their pay, not die in futile battles or find themselves taken prisoner by locals who wanted to torture them to death.  Sure, they were meant to be loyal to their paymaster – the mercenary guild had rules that forbade mercenaries from simply switching sides when they were offered a better deal – but no one really believed it.  I made a mental note to spread stories suggesting the prisoners had talked, after a large infusion of cash.  It wasn’t as if they’d be around to dispute it.  I’d hung them both, after they’d told me what little they could.

And no one will make a fuss about two dead mercenaries, I thought.  The rules of war don’t apply to them.

“Let us hope so,” Princess Helen said.  Her gaze sharpened.  “There have been complaints about what you said to Sir Essex.”

I kept my face under tight control.  The slimy bastard had whined to the city … I had no idea how he’d gotten word back to his backers first, unless he had a disguised magician amongst his troops.  Even if he’d driven a horse at impossible speeds, he shouldn’t have been able to get a messenger home before my messages arrived.  And then … I was lucky, I reflected, that I’d won the battle.  It would be hard to press for my removal, or even my censure, in the wake of a glorious victory.  My newspapers were hard at work, making our tiny skirmish look like Saratoga or Yorktown.  Really, it had been more like Little Big Horn.

“He disobeyed orders,” I said, curtly.  “He’s a brave man, no doubt about it, but he doesn’t have the wit to follow orders on the battlefield.”

“He’s also got powerful backers,” Princess Helen pointed out, sharply.  “The moment you make a mistake, they’ll pounce.”

“Then I’d better not make a mistake,” I said.  It wasn’t me they’d pounce on, but the princess herself.  Her father grew older by the day.  She needed to be married by the time her father passed away, yet … I felt a twinge of pity.  No matter what choice she made, she was going to alienate a lot of factions.   They probably already had contingency plans to move against her if she married the wrong person.  “We could assign him to patrol the borders, couldn’t we?”

The princess’s lips quirked.  “I’m afraid his backers would see it as a plot to get rid of him,” she said.  “And they’d be right.”

“Probably,” I agreed.  “I’ll give it some thought.”

“Good,” Princess Helen said.  “Now, what are you going to do for the parade?”

I blinked.  “The parade?”

“My father has decreed there will be a formal ceremony of thanks for your victory, followed by a parade and entertainments,” Princess Helen informed me.  “The aristocracy is already planning to put on a show, to remind the people of their wealth and power.  You need to do the same.”

“Oh.”  I hadn’t thought about it, but in hindsight she was right.  It wasn’t enough to be wealthy and powerful, not here.  One had to show off one’s wealth and power in a manner so tasteless it would revolt anyone who had to count the pennies as they grew up.  They probably expected me to stride around in gold armour, studded with so many jewels I was a walking challenge to any passing mugger.  “What should I do?”

“Whatever you want, as long as it impresses people,” Princess Helen said.  “The majority of the aristocrats are hiring gladiators.”

Poor bastards, I thought.  I’d seen a gladiatorial fight once.  Never again.  And I bet they won’t be paying pensions to the cripples either.

“Maybe I’ll just provide free food and drink for the day,” I said.  It would certainly be remembered longer, and with more gratitude, than a bunch of fighters killing each other on the sands.  “Or something along those lines.”

“As long as it looks good,” the princess told me.  “You need to make a show.”

I sighed as I stood, bowed, and took my leave.  There were too many other things to do for me to give the concept of a parade, let alone literal bread and circuses, any real thought.  I’d won a victory, no thanks to Sir Essex, and yet it wasn’t really enough.  The mercenaries had been little more than a probing attack, a test of our strength.  I feared whoever had backed them would strike – and strike soon.  The longer they waited, the stronger we’d grow.

And past a certain point, we’ll be able to crush the warlords like bugs, I thought.  They have to fear the worst, now they know what we can do.

The thought nagged me as I made my way back to the mansion.  The broadsheet criers were hovering around the great houses, calling out the headlines and inviting the aristos – more likely, their servants – to buy the latest editions.  They seemed to be doing a roaring trade, despite a series of arguments over who had the latest piece of news that constantly threatened to turn into real fights.  I smiled as a young woman offered me a broadsheet proclaiming the death of millions of mercenaries, all of whom I’d apparently crushed with my bare hands.  She didn’t recognise me … I thanked her gravely, slipped her a coin and walked on, ignoring her gasp of surprise.  It just wasn’t common for people to tip without taking a broadsheet.

I kept smiling, even as I walked up to my office and eyed the pile of letters waiting for me.  I would have killed for a computer and a working email system, although I knew from grim experience it would probably produce more paperwork in the long run.  And the less said about the use of PowerPoint the better … I pushed the thought aside as I accepted a drink from a maid, then settled down to read the reports.  Some of them were updates – it was good to hear the troops on the estates were finally getting into shape, armed with weapons I’d slipped out of the factories – and others were either requests for patronage or demands for compensation for this or that.  I put the latter aside for the princess’s attention – it was astonishing how many pettifogging details needed to be smoothed out, to keep the aristocracy happy – and concentrated on the updates from my surveyors.  We’d located deposits of ore that, given time, could be mined and turned into all sorts of useful things.  The coal alone would jumpstart an industrial revolution.

My head was aching by the time I bathed, then went to bed.  There were just too many details and too few people I trusted to handle them.  It would take time to build a culture of honesty and integrity in national service, particularly in a world where everyone was expected to share the wealth and look out for their families.  I understood the impulse – one had to look after one’s own – but it would be detrimental in the long run.  And corruption had weakened – even ruined – more countries than bad rulers or foreign invasions.

It’s the only way they have to survive, I told myself.  I’d grown up in a country where the public servants were largely honest, and there were legal procedures for dealing with ones who weren’t.  The locals I’d dealt with, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Damansara, hadn’t been anything like so lucky.  Given time, it will change.

I sighed, inwardly, at the sheer scale of the task in front of me.  It wasn’t easy to change an entire culture overnight.  The corruption was so prevalent it made it impossible to live without being mildly corrupt, at least by American standards.  Years ago, I’d read a story about Chinese students and their parents rioting after the local government had brought in new anticheating measures.  The hell of it was that they’d had a point.  If everyone else had an unfair advantage, in exams that were so important failure was pretty much the end of the line, they had every incentive to cheat.  Perhaps it would have worked better if the measures had been rolled out right across the entire country …

The thought nagged at my mind as the days wore on.  I spent the mornings with the army, drilling my officers – and prospective officers and NCOs – until we’d gone through the entire battle and drawn every lesson, good or bad, we could from the engagement. The afternoons were a blur.  I spent some with the craftsmen, inspecting their latest work, and some just wandering the streets.  The city was preparing for the parade, the people anticipating one hell of a show.  I tried not to roll my eyes, every time I heard someone chattering about how wonderful it was going to be.  The promises grew so wild I found it hard to imagine anyone actually believing them.  Did the locals really think the aristos were going to bring a dragon to the city, just so they could watch the gladiators get roasted and eaten?  It was just absurd.

Although a dragon isn’t entirely impossible here, I thought, as I made my way through the streets.  They really do exist.

I had to smile.  It was hard to tell, sometimes, which stories were real and which were just made up of whole cloth, but everyone seemed to agree dragons – and a whole bunch of other supernatural creatures – really did exist.  And they were just very dangerous.  Jasmine had told me – it seemed such a long time ago, now – that the travellers would sooner go hundreds of miles out of their way than risk confronting a dragon.

Dragons or not, the aristos really were putting on a show.  I watched hundreds of gladiators, dressed in armour that made chainmail bikinis look practical, waving to the crowds as they marched through the streets to the arena.  They didn’t look very impressive to me – they ambled along like celebrities, rather than men who were going to do or die – but the crowd lapped it up and came back for more.  Some of them seemed to be remarkably famous, the cheers growing louder every time they made their appearance.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it, although the nastier part of my mind insisted celebrity culture back home would be a lot more tolerable if the stars put their lives on the line rather than just pretending to be in danger. 

 I tried not to feel sick as a line of cages were driven past, each one holding a lion, a tiger, or one of a handful of creatures I didn’t recognise.  They were going to fight for the entertainment of the crowd too, then … I felt a twinge of sympathy for both the animals and their pray.  Some of the gladiators would be fighting the lions with their bare hands … I hoped they had some trick up their sleeves, although I couldn’t imagine what.  They were likely to be torn apart and eaten, then … who knew?  I didn’t want to think about it.

Sigmund met me as I returned to the mansion.  “My Lord, may I have a word?”

“If you wish,” I said, tiredly.  It wasn’t a good time, but when was it ever?  Sigmund had a stick up his backside, forcing him to question every decision I made.  “What would you like to say?”

“My Lord,” Sigmund said, when we were in his office.  “My Lord, are you not going to hire gladiators yourself, to put on a show?”

I shook my head.  I’d seen the bidding wars over certain gladiators and they were just insane.  It was bad enough watching NFL teams bickering over who’d hire – or reject – certain football players, but this was worse.  What sort of lunatic would shell out thousands of gold coins, worth well over a million dollars, to hire a gladiator?  I wouldn’t have wasted the cash even if I’d been guaranteed a lifetime supply of gold and silver.

“My Lord,” Sigmund said.  “You have to put on a show!”

I met his eyes, evenly.  “I don’t have to do anything.”

Sigmund hesitated, torn between the urge to disagree with me and the grim awareness he might have pushed things a little too far.  I honestly didn’t understand it.  The man’s position didn’t depend on me putting on a show, did it?  He was my servant.  No one could blame him for anything I did, or for following orders I gave him.  Could they?

“Spit it out,” I said.  If there was a point to it, I had to know.  “Please.”

“My Lord, you have to impress the people,” Sigmund told me.  He sounded as if he was pleading.  “And your … debt relief plan isn’t going to impress anyone.”

“Yes, it will,” I said, fighting down a hot flash of anger.  I was quite proud of the plan.  It would make my name remembered long after I died.  “It will be remembered far longer than a pair of over-muscled idiots killing each other on the sands.”

Sigmund looked, just for a moment, if I’d called his daughter ugly.  I hid my amusement with an effort.  I’d spent the last week, with Violet’s help, picking out loan sharks, buying them out and then simply handing over the title deeds to their former victims, forgiving all the debts.  It wouldn’t help all of them – I knew from my childhood that some people just got into bad habits and couldn’t get out – but it would give them a chance.  Who knew?  They might even climb the ladder and join  the middle class.

“My Lord,” Sigmund said.  His tone hadn’t changed.  “It won’t impress anyone.”

“It won’t impress the aristocrats,” I agreed.  There was no disputing that.  “And no, it won’t impress anyone who wants to watch a show.  But it will be far more helpful, in the long run, than anything else I could do for them.”

I turned away, shaking my head.  Sigmund didn’t get it.  I doubted many people would, at least at first.  Debt was a trap, if one couldn’t even pay the interest.  The poor debtors had been caught in a swamp, forced to work their fingers to the bone and sell their daughters into slavery to keep themselves afloat.  It was bad enough when they’d taken out the loans themselves, but some of them were still trying to pay off loans their fathers and grandfathers had taken out.  The whole system was rotten to the core.  I’d given the loan sharks an offer they couldn’t refuse, then written off the money.  It wasn’t as if I needed it.

And most of the original amounts were terrifyingly small, I thought.  I had found it hard to wrap my head around the nightmare, even though I’d taken and inspected the record books as part of the deal.  It was the interest that was the killer.

The thought bothered me, more than I cared to admit.  Sigmund wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t get it, as the news spread.  The aristos wouldn’t understand why so many people had trouble putting together a handful of bronze coins.  They just couldn’t understand the grinding poverty threatening the lower classes, or how it would push them into increasingly desperate measures just to stay alive.  It was easy to make fun of communists when you had enough to eat and drink, to insist the average communist was just a useful idiot who would be first against the wall when the revolution came.  It was harder to understand that, when one was dirt poor with no hope of bettering oneself, communism started looking very attractive indeed.

I paused, senses tingling, as I reached my office.  The door was ajar.  I paused, listening carefully, then drew my pistol and inched the door open.  Fallon was sitting in a chair, her face oddly blank.  Her posture was unnatural.  Alarm washed down my spine.  Something was very wrong.   She didn’t look like herself.  There was something damned and suffering in her eyes.

Her hand jerked up.  I started to raise my pistol, too late.  There was a brilliant flash of green light …

… And then I plunged into darkness.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Awareness returned slowly, in fits and starts.

I felt sick, sick in the head.  My eyesight blurred, my vision spinning helplessly until I fell back down into darkness, my head feeling as if I were sick … no, as if I were imagining being sick.  Everything felt wrong, so badly wrong I feared I was drugged or enchanted or … or something.  Hot flushes ran through my body, followed by cold sweats that left me feeling as if I was hanging on the verge of death.  My memories were a jumbled mess.  The moment I tried to understand what had happened to me, my thoughts fragmented and I felt sick again, as if I was going to throw up inside my own head.  And someone was laughing …

It was hard to tell if I was imagining the laughter or not.  I felt as if I was caught in a waking nightmare, trapped on the brink between wakefulness and sleep … what was real and what was the dream?  I wondered, suddenly, if I was about to wake up in a hospital bed.  Perhaps I’d been in a car accident and knocked out, perhaps it had all been a dream … a flash of panic ran through me, a fear that I might have let myself believe in a lie, a fear that yanked me all the way back to the waking world.  My eyes snapped open.  A giant was looking down at me.

I recoiled in shock, my head – for a moment – simply refusing to accept what I was seeing.  It was … once, years ago, I’d stood under a skyscraper and looked up and up and up until the sight had nearly sent me to the ground.  Now … the giant was real, an ugly man with white hair, a straggly beard, a wrinkled face and a nose so long the absurd part of my mind wondered if he’d been cursed.  He towered over me, eyes shining with an unholy glee as they met mine.  I’d met plenty of unpleasant people in my life, but this one … I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was a sadist.  And probably not quite sane.

“Well,” he said.  His voice boomed against my ears.  “You are finally awake, are you?”

I looked past him and saw Fallon.  She was naked, kneeling on the ground like a Gorean slave girl.  Someone had forced me to read a couple of them, a cruel and unusual punishment.  I shuddered at the blank look on her face.  She was helplessly enchanted, enslaved by the nutter in front of me … I felt sick, yet helpless myself.  My entire body felt wrong, so wrong I honestly didn’t know how to put it into words.  Our captor laughed, snapping his fingers loudly.  Blue sparks darted at me.  I jumped backwards instinctively and crashed hard into something wooden, my head spinning as I realised I’d jumped too high.  It shouldn’t have been possible.  It really shouldn’t …

A horrible thought ran through my head.  I looked down at myself … my thoughts stopped, as if I’d walked straight into a brick wall, as I took in my body.  It was my body and yet … I felt a surge of pure panic.  It was impossible and yet … no, it was impossible.  It really was impossible.  It really was …

I was a frog.

The panic became terror.  I had never felt so unmanned in my life, not when the DIs had taught me I wasn’t anything like as tough as I’d thought, not when a bullet had zipped so close to my head I’d felt it pass through my hair, not even when we’d been running out of ammunition in the middle of a firefight and we’d been uncomfortably aware that being taken prisoner would lead to a slow and lingering execution.  I’d lost fights before, and been threatened with everything from a beating to death, but this … he could reach out and squash me and …

You got complacent, my thoughts mocked.  And you forgot your opponents could hire magicians far more powerful than yours.

My captor’s smile grew wider.  I saw rotting teeth in his maw.  “Feeling a little green?”

I tried to speak, to say something defiant, but all that came out was a croaking noise.  Frogs couldn’t talk.   Of course not.  I’d known wounded men who’d struggled to regain what they’d lost, even after proper treatment, and it had often taken weeks to make any progress at all.  Me?  I’d effectively been mutilated, my body warped and twisted until … it defied logic and reason.  I was a frog, barely larger than my own fist.  What had happened to the rest of me? 

You might be stuck this way, permanently, my thoughts pointed out.  And what’ll happen to you then?

I felt sick, again.  There were people who ate frogs.  Here … I’d never seen anyone eat a frog, but that proved nothing.  I’d seen people so poor they ate insects and all sorts of other things I would normally have scorned, that I wouldn’t have touched with a bargepole if there were any other options.  If I hopped out, would I be eaten?  Or simply squashed beneath a cart?  Or … I didn’t want to think about it.  I was trapped in a prison of my own flesh, then locked inside a birdcage for good measure.  I’d never been brought so low in all my life. 

“I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get inside your home,” my captor said.  He snickered as he kicked Fallon, not too gently.  “This silly girl thought she could keep me out.  Me!  A fully qualified sorcerer!”

He chuckled and turned his attention back to me.  “They wanted you dead,” he said.  “They paid me through the nose to take you out of the picture.  But you know, you’re a pretty strange person.  Aren’t you?  Very weird, really.”

I tried not to flinch under his gaze.  Right now, I was trapped and helpless and … the moment he enchanted me, as he’d enchanted Fallon, I was dead.  I’d be enslaved as surely as my ancestors … perhaps worse.  My eyes wandered past him, exploring the chamber.  A workbench littered with tools, a wall covered with bookshelves and devices I didn’t recognise, a pair of doors leading into darkness … it was impossible to see any way out of the trap.   I was in deep – deep – trouble. 

“We’re going to spend a long time together,” he said.  “And you’ll be telling me everything by the time we’re done.”

It was all I could do, again, not to panic.  I’d faced stronger opponents before, from bigger boys when I was a child to martial arts experts who’d been much better than me, but this … it was like Batman, facing Superman.  Bats might be the best of the best, the very peak of human achievement, yet he was hopelessly outclassed by a super-strong flying brick with heat vision and a bunch of other powers.  Even with kryptonite, Batman would be dead within microseconds if Superman wanted him dead.  The gulf between them was so wide the fight would be little more than a grown adult pulling the wings off flies …

Don’t panic, I told myself.  Let him talk, while you think.

I forced myself to listen to his ranting as I inspected the cage.  It was a birdcage, placed on a table … a thought crossed my mind as he went on and on about his great achievement.  Perhaps I could get out and find something to disrupt the spell, perhaps … I recalled hearing something about a potion that dampened magic, the only thing that could keep a magician prisoner long enough to face trial.  If I could find it, or something like it, perhaps I could get out.  Or perhaps … I’d read a book where a boy, transformed into a mouse by an evil witch, was still able to stop the witch’s plan before it went too far.  If I could do the same …

“Come,” my captor said, grandly.  “Follow me.”

He strode away, Fallon walking after him like a puppet dangling on strings.  The whole scene was so unnatural, so wrong, it revolted me.  I didn’t hesitate.  The moment he was out of sight, I jumped forward and pressed all my weight against the edge of the cage.  It shifted, slightly.  I gritted my teeth – it crossed my mind to wonder if frogs had teeth – and pushed again, as hard as I could.  I might be strong, for a frog, but I didn’t have anything like my normal strength.  It was hard to keep going as a wave of self-pity washed over me.  Back home, I’d known a boy so weak he’d been beaten up by everyone, including the boys who got beaten up by everyone else.  I knew, now, how that poor bastard must have felt.  If I didn’t get out now, I was going to suffer a fate worse than death.

The cage slipped over the edge of the table.  I slipped and fell, plunging to the ground.  It felt as if I was plummeting hundreds of metres, but the froggy body twisted in midair and somehow managed to land without breaking anything.  I heard something crash and looked up, just in time to see the sorcerer hurrying back into the room.  I jumped, the leap carrying me right across the chamber and into the other door, revealing a flight of stairs leading down into the darkness.  A flash of light darted over my head and exploded against the wall.  The shockwave picked me up and hurled me down the stairs.   I bounced from stair to stair, crashing off the walls like a demented football.  Behind me, I could hear the sorcerer coming after me.

I hit the bottom and darted forward, into a darkened chamber.  The only source of light was a pair of glowing eyes, hanging in the air in front of me.  My heart almost stopped.  The eyes were cold and hard and so very cruel, burning with a hatred that chilled me to the bone.  My skin seemed to turn to ice.  It was all I could do to keep moving as I heard running footsteps behind me.  The sorcerer was right on my heels.  I had to keep moving.

The eyes seemed to beckon me.  I felt caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a sorcerer who intended to enslave me and … something I didn’t understand, but feared on a very primal level.  I didn’t know what to do, yet … I knew what the sorcerer would do, if he caught me again.  I jumped forward,  narrowly escaping a fireball that struck the ground where I’d been standing.  I heard chanting behind me as I crashed into … something, the world spinning so violently I thought, for a moment, that I might have broken the spell only to be hit by another.  The ground shook underneath me.  I heard a scream and a voice …

“FREE …”

Sheer terror ran through me as light flared.  I’d crossed a circle.  I’d seen … my mind refused to accept what I’d seen, let alone to remember it.  There’d been eyes and … the ground heaved again, the sorcerer stumbling to a halt as he saw … something … gliding towards him.  I darted past him as the laughter grew stronger, somehow aware – at a level that could not be denied – that looking back now would leave me turned into salt, or something far worse.  I was almost glad I was a frog, as I jumped up the stairs.  The ceiling was starting to collapse.  If I’d been human, I might not have been able to dodge falling masonry or get out in time.  Behind me, I heard a scream, a whimper, a scream … and then a sudden terrible silence.  The sorcerer was dead, consumed by whatever he’d kept trapped under the building. 

There was no sign of Fallon in the workroom, so I darted through the second door and down a corridor.  She was kneeling in a stone room, her face blank even though her eyes were damned and suffering.  I hoped the sorcerer had suffered before his death, before he was dragged down into hell or whatever happened to sorcerers when they died.  He could have blanked her mind, if he’d wished, but instead he’d let her be very aware of what her body was doing on his behest.  I came to a halt, staring up at her.  If she was still bound by the spell, unable to move … I couldn’t even tell her what to do.  I couldn’t speak!

Get up, I tried to say.  All I could do was croak.  The entire building was starting to collapse.  I jumped as a heard a crash from the workroom, followed by an explosion.  Another followed, a moment later.  The sorcerer’s collection of potions was starting to catch fire and explode.  Move, you stupid …

I tried to think.  I couldn’t leave her to die, and yet … I remembered something she’d told me and put it into action before I could think better of it, hopping up and pressing my lips against hers.  She’d been the one who’d cast the spell, even if she’d done it under the sorcerer’s command.  If she’d used the one she’d told me about, back when we’d been touring the estates, I might be able to break it … my body twisted, as if it was trying to bend in impossible directions, the moment our lips touched.  I hit the ground, the impact knocking the breath from my body.  I was human … and naked, as naked as the day I was born.  I guessed the spell hadn’t bothered to bring my clothes along for the ride,

There was no time to think about it.  Fallon didn’t resist as I scooped her up and threw her over my shoulder.  She hung limply, like a bag of potatoes, her breasts pressing against my back.  I tried to ignore the sensation as I hurried through the door, searching for the exit.  The building was twisting and shuddering now, the corridors warping until they broken, the rooms collapsing in on themselves.  I kept running, feeling as if death herself was at my heels, even as the corridors twisted still further.  Were we going in circles?  It was hard to escape the sense we were caught in a sinkhole, one that led all the way down to hell.

The door appeared in front of me, revealing a garden and – beyond – a low wall.  We weren’t in the city, I noted numbly, although we couldn’t be that far away.  Or could we?  Sorcerers were supposed to be able to teleport, as well as everything else … for all I knew, we were on the opposite side of the world.  I told myself it was unlikely.  The sorcerer had been hired to kidnap and kill me.  My enemies wouldn’t have hired someone who didn’t live that far away.  Why would they have bothered?

I ran forward, my bare feet kicking up sand and earth as I hurried to the wall.  The ground was still shaking, the dirt shifting as it started to slip backwards.  I risked a look backwards and saw a three-story building, something akin to a tiny mansion, crumble into a pile of debris.  The shaking kept growing worse, forcing me to keep running.  I hoped – desperately – I hadn’t somehow triggered a cataclysm that would swallow the entire country.  The wall was too low to be taken seriously.  I felt a tingle as I hopped over the wall and kept moving, glancing back to make sure the effect wasn’t coming after us.  It seemed to have stopped at the wall …

The building exploded.  It went up like a nuke … I swore I saw a mushroom cloud, saw a pair of eyes glinting within the flames, before it vanished into nothingness.  There was no shockwave, no torrent of heat … just a smoking crater where the mansion had once stood.  I heard a gasp as I lowered Fallon to the ground, her body shaking as the spell finally let go of her.  She was crying … I held her gently, trying to convince her it hadn’t been her fault.  I’d been overconfident and we’d both paid the price for it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, again and again.  Tears dripped down her face.  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or herself or both.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” I said, although it wasn’t true.  We were both naked, without the slightest idea of where the hell we were.  The landscape was utterly unfamiliar.  We had no money, no maps, no weapons … I hadn’t seen my pistol, if the sorcerer had taken it with him, and if he had it was lost now.  I tried not to think of the possibility I’d been wrong, that we might have been taken a very long way from the city after all.  “We survived.”

She pressed against me, hugging me tightly.  I could feel her heartbeat, pounding like a drum; I was suddenly very aware of her nakedness, of my body reminding me – again – just how long it had been.  Her lips rose and we kissed.  I was unsure, then or ever, which of us made the first move.  It crossed my mind, as our kisses grew more and more passionate, that I should pull away, that she might wind up in real trouble if she lost her virginity outside wedlock, but I couldn’t.  We were alive and we wanted to celebrate and we could deal with the consequences later. 

We can worry about the rest of the world when we’re finished, I told myself.  And figure out how we’re going to get back home after that.

And then, the only thing that mattered was her.

Out NOW – The Prince’s Gambit (The Empire’s Corps XX)

New Doncaster should have been a success.  It wasn’t.  A deeply-corrupt and embedded ruling class, disenfranchised settlers and embittered indentured workers – slaves in all but name – have poisoned the planet, unleashing the fires of class war and threatening – in the wake of Earthfall – to turn the beautiful planet into hell.  And sinister forces are stirring the pot.  Roland – once Crown Prince of Earth, now a Marine Auxiliary – was charged with building an army to stabilise New Doncaster.  But it was too late.  The rebels struck and the planet fell into civil war.

Roland scored one victory, keeping the rebels from winning in a single blow, but the war is far from over.  Rebel forces have swept over the outlying islands, destroying plantations, capturing infrastructure, liberating slaves while forcing their former owners to flee or die on the remains of their lands.  Now, with both sides preparing for the coming contest, Roland – cut off from the Marine Corps – finds himself charged with leading the government troops, to launch a desperate military gambit to win a war against a rebel force that might have right on its side. And if his gambit fails …

… The entire planet may collapse into chaos.

Download a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase from the links here (Amazon, Books2Read), or read the AFTERWORD here. Also, you can can also download a copy of You Pay, We Slay, which includes a short story written by me.

Brief Updates

Hi, everyone

COVID sucks, II (I wrote COVID sucks I in my newsletter).

Two weeks ago, pretty much my entire family caught COVID or something related to it.  My kids had a couple of bad days, then recovered very rapidly; my wife and I found it a lot harder to get better.  COVID left me feeling like I had gone back to the bad old days of chemobrain, without actually having more chemo.  To cut a long story short, I missed a week of work and the following week I only did four days – everything just caught up with me again on Friday morning (which happened when I had chemo too.)  All things considered, I don’t recommend COVID to anyone. 

(Pity you can’t write reviews for diseases – “terrible disease, will not catch again.”  )

Anyway, I’m hoping to finish the first draft of Endeavour this week and then move to publication ASAP.  Until then, The Prince’s Gambit has been published – I’ll get the formal link and free sample up later – and you can see it here (Amazon, Books2Read).  You can also download a copy of We Pay, You Slay, which includes a short story written by me.  Beyond that … well, we will see ..

I’m still putting together a list of smaller projects for my decade of writing anthology.  No promises, but can you let me know what you would like to see?

Thanks

Chris

OUT NOW – The Family Secret (The Zero Enigma XI)

Kirkhaven Hall has been home to Isabella Rubén ever since she was sent into exile for treason.  It has always been a strange place; isolated, wrapped in dark clouds and ancient magics.  No one really knows what’s hidden there, from eerie ghosts and warlocks to secrets House Rubén not only has kept from the rest of the world, but has itself forgotten.  They thought those secrets would remain buried for eternity.

But now, as Isabella and her fiancé return from their holiday in Shallot, those secrets are starting to slip into the light.  Strange lights have been seen on the mire, ghosts have been walking the halls, ancient artefacts have been discovered and the ground itself, tainted by dark magics, is threatening to give up its dead  And, as Isabella finds herself caught in an ever-growing nightmare, it becomes clear that the disaster is not limited to Kirkhaven …

… And the magic crisis has only just begun.

Download a FREE SAMPLE, then purchase from Amazon or Books2Read NOW! And follow me HERE.

Snippet – Endeavor (Ark 18)

Prologue: The Sphere, Virus Prime

Racism, Doctor Athena Gaurs told herself, is a mental illness.

It didn’t help.  Her heart began to race as she drifted through the Sphere.  She had spent most of her professional life working with aliens, studying their cultures and technologies in the hopes of promoting interspecies cooperation and harmony, yet the Sphere was just too alien for her mind to process.  It was so huge, built on such a great scale, that she felt like a fly crawling across a cathedral window, something so far beyond the poor creature it couldn’t even begin to comprehend what it was crawling on.  The other alien races humanity had encountered, in nearly a hundred years of contact and conflict, had all been understandable.  Whoever had built the Sphere was not.

She tried to calm herself as she glided onwards.  The Sphere was inert, powerless, and yet it wasn’t.  The xenospecialists had noted and logged everything from strange lights, with no discernible source, to faint flickers of energy and gravitational pulses that came and went so quickly that even the most sensitive equipment in the known galaxy was barely callable of detecting their presence before they were gone.  Athena had read the reports, when she’d been assigned to the project, and she’d had trouble understanding why so many of the exploration team had managed to get lost in the structure.  She knew now.  The interior seemed purposely designed to be confusing.  There were even hints it restructured itself when humans weren’t looking.

And some of us are sure we’re being watched, she thought, grimly.  What if we are?

The thought taunted her.  It had been nearly a year since HMS Lion had stumbled across and Sphere, during the final days of the Virus War.  Since then, a covert project had been mounted to explore the alien artefact and unlock its secrets, a project that – so far – had produced precisely nothing.  Athena had read the reports from the first teams, brimming with excitement and enthusiasm until they’d started their work.  They’d drawn a series of complete blanks.  They didn’t know what material had been used to produce the alien artefact, let alone what it was intended to do.  They didn’t even know why it had remained undetected in the system for so long.  There were even people who wondered if the Sphere hadn’t been detected because it simply hadn’t been there.

A shiver ran down her spine as she drifted into the next chamber.  It was hard, sometimes, to avoid the sensation she was being watched.  They hadn’t found anything to suggest they were, but that was meaningless.  Whoever had built the Sphere was so far ahead of humanity that their surveillance tech, assuming they even relied upon something as primitive as tech, might be completely undetectable.  The human race could produce bugs so small they couldn’t be located without the proper equipment.  Who knew what the Builders could produce?

She frowned, turning slowly to take in the entire chamber.  It was a bare sphere, within the Sphere, the bulkheads utterly unmarred by even the slightest hint of writing.  The bronze material had defied everything humanity had thrown at it, from pens designed to leave marks on everything to laser cutters capable of slicing through a battleship’s hull.  It was maddening to think of all the secrets waiting for discovery and exploitation, if only they could figure out how to unlock them.  And yet, they’d found nothing.  There was a small but growing consensus amongst some of the scientists that there was nothing to find.

This installation was clearly not abandoned in a hurry, she reminded herself, grimly.  They had all the time they needed to strip it bare, taking everything save for the shell itself.

It was possible, she’d been assured.  The Sphere might be nothing more than a hollowed out asteroid, as far as the Builders were concerned.  They might have abandoned it, secure in the knowledge they’d taken everything that could be used to unlock their technology or leave a trail of breadcrumbs to their homeworld.  Athena would have believed it herself – she knew how carefully warship datacores were swept for sensitive information, then rigged for destruction if there was even the slightest chance the warship would fall into enemy hands – if she hadn’t seen so many oddities surrounding the alien structure.  It just didn’t feel dead and cold, abandoned like so many mined-out asteroids.  It felt as if it was watching and waiting as the team probed its innards.

Perhaps its an intelligence test, she thought, as she proceeded into the next chamber.  And we’re failing.

Athena keyed her sensors, taking a reading and comparing it to what she saw.  The results made no sense.  They never did.  Some suggested the Sphere was bigger on the inside, some suggested it was collapsing in on itself … she gritted her teeth and looked at the nearest bulkhead.  Her sensors insisted the walls were closing in.  Her naked eyes told her the bulkheads weren’t moving.  Athena sighed, inwardly.  There was no way to know if the Sphere was spoofing their sensors deliberately or if the structure was just too alien for the sensors to handle.  Athena wasn’t sure, sometimes, if she could handle it.  The Sphere was just too big.

We’ve seen larger structures, she reminded herself.  But none of them were quite so solid.

She shook her head slowly as she made her way onwards, feeling oddly isolated even though the rest of the team was only a radio call away.  They’d been told, at first, never to be alone on the alien structure, but they’d rapidly discovered that the more interesting events only took place when there was only one or two witnesses.  It didn’t help, when they reported their findings back to Earth.  Athena had a feeling, reading between the lines, that there were factions on the homeworld that thought the researchers were seeing things.  There was no shortage of tales of weird sightings in the depths of space, of alien starships and entities that were – somehow – never captured by starship sensors.  It was generally believed most of the stories were made up and yet …

Her radio crackled, once.  Athena keyed her wristcom, feeling a shiver run down her spine.  She’d been told to remain in touch and, if there was a hint she was losing contact with the rest of the team, to back out at once.  The Sphere just wasn’t safe.  She thought she saw something at the corner of her eye, a flicker that was gone when she looked at it.  Her radio crackled again.  There was no reply.  She swore under her breath as she made her way back to her hatch.  Perhaps it was nothing, just a random burst of energy within the alien structure.  Perhaps it was not …

Light flared, behind her.  Athena spun around.  The chamber had come to life, glowing energy flaring through the air.  A wave of panic shot through her.  She was alone and defenceless and utterly unaware of what was happening … she found it hard to believe, deep inside, that a super-advanced race would deliberately seek to harm her, but it was hard to be sure.  How many insects were trodden on by humans, without any malicious intent?  The light grew brighter.  She hoped – prayed – that her recorders were still working.  They were meant to record everything and yet, ever since they’d started exploring the Sphere, there’d been odd gaps in the recordings.  It was suddenly very easy to believe the Sphere was toying with them.

The glow sharpened, the lights becoming something oddly familiar and yet alien … it took her several seconds to realise she was looking at a holographic starchart.  Humanity’s holographic projects always had a faint sense of insubstantiality, a reminder they really were nothing more than illusions.  The alien projections were so sharp, so perfect, it was hard to believe they weren’t real.  She reached forward, despite her training, and felt resistance as her fingers brushed against the holographic star.  Solid-light projections?  They’d always been theoretically possible, but no one had made them work.  Not until now.

And then the hologram just snapped out of existence.

Athena felt a sense of overwhelming loss as darkness crashed down on her.  The starchart was gone, as if it had never been … her radio crackled, her team trying to contact her.  She barely heard them, tears prickling in her eyes as she tried to come to terms with what she’d seen.  Her CO was demanding she report immediately, that she make her way back to the starship, but she couldn’t bring herself to reply.  Would they believe her?  Athena hadn’t believed some of the stories she’d heard, from the first teams to explore the alien structure.  It would be ironic, indeed, if her team refused to believe her.

“I … I think I found something,” she said, checking the wristcom.  The sensors insisted they’d recorded everything.  She hoped, desperately, that they were correct.  “I’m on my way.”

Her heart started to pound, again, as she recalled what she’d seen.  The sensors might not have recorded anything – there was no way to know, not until she got back to the ship – but she had.  There were ways to get memories out of someone, even memories that they didn’t consciously recall.  She could be hypnotised and urged to draw out the starchart and then …

If that was a starchart, it might have shown me their homeworld, she told herself.  We can find them.  And then, we can learn so much …

Prologue II: London, United Kingdom

“They used to say my ancestors couldn’t see the white man’s ships on the horizon, so alien they were to their experience,” Admiral Lady Susan Onarina said.  “I think I understand how they felt.”

She studied the report, feeling unsure of herself.  Training and experience demanded she rebuke the xenospecialists for a decidedly careless approach to exploring the alien structure, although – going by the reports – it was clear they’d had littler choice.  The weirder manifestations never showed themselves to more than two humans and there was only one witness to the alien starchart.  Susan didn’t like the implications.  The Sphere was clearly neither dead or understood.  It might be playing with the human explorers or it might just be letting off random bursts of energy or it might be something in-between.  It was just too alien for anyone to be sure of anything.

“I always had the impression such stories were exaggerated,” Admiral Paul Mason said, as he sipped his tea.  Her old friend, and occasional lover, had been running the top secret research program into the enigmatic aliens since the first traces of their existence had been discovered, back during the war.  “They might not have been capable of building ocean-going ships, but they certainly understood the concept.”

Susan nodded, although she wasn’t so sure.  Humanity had encountered two alien races – three, if one counted the Virus – that possessed more advanced technology, but it hadn’t been that advanced.  The tech had been understandable.  Human scientists had been able to reverse-engineer captured alien technology or, knowing something was possible, simply figure out how it was done and produce their own version.  It had never been easy – and she knew there’d been admirals who’d expected the scientists to simply wave a magic wand and put the new tech into production instantly – but it had been done.  Here, though … the scientists didn’t even know where to begin.  The tech was just too different.

The RAF of the Second World War might not have been able to duplicate a jet fighter of the Troubles, she reflected.  But at least they’d understand the concept of a flying machine.  Here …

She shook her head, slowly.  The Sphere didn’t have any technology, at least as far as the explorers could determine.  It was just an empty shell.  And yet, it was clearly doing something.  Susan had read the reports, each one really little more than empty speculation that read like something out of a science-fantasy novel.  The tech was welded into the bulkheads.  The tech existed in some weird alternate dimension.  There was no tech.  Instead, there was an alien ghost playing games with humans unable to so much as detect, let alone deduce, its presence.  They just didn’t know.

“The starchart does match the local stellar environment,” Mason said, quietly.  “And, if the tramlines are as laid out on the map, we can get a ship to the alien homeworld.”

“If it is their homeworld,” Susan said.  “And if they’re not trying to lure us there …”

The thought made her feel cold.  She was a student of history.  She knew what happened when a primitive race met a more advanced one, even when there was no malice involved.  The primitive race found it hard, almost impossible, to take the shock.  How many human societies had collapsed, falling to pieces in the wake of contact?  The Vesy really hadn’t had an easy time of it, after they’d encountered humanity.  The gulf between the two races was just too wide for them to catch up, at least quickly enough to matter.  Susan had read those reports too.  There was a very real chance the Vesy would lose what remained of their own culture, becoming little more than copies of humanity.  And the hell of it was that copying humanity might be their only chance to survive.

Whoever built the Sphere might not mean to harm us, she thought.  But contact with them might be destructive, all the same.

She sipped her tea, organising her thoughts.  The human race had been spacefaring for nearly two hundred years when it had discovered, to its dismay, that it wasn’t alone in the universe.  The concept of aliens had been far from unknown.  Indeed, it had preceded the first true offworld settlements.  And while there had been a gulf between humans and Tadpoles, the gulf hadn’t been insurmountable.  There had been some culture shock – Susan could hardly deny it, given the number of humans trying to model themselves on the Tadpoles – but not as much as the politicians had feared.  The Tadpoles had not been vastly superior.  But whoever had built the Sphere was different.

Mason cleared his throat.  “What are you going to advise the PM?”

Susan said nothing for a long moment.  She was mildly surprised the government hadn’t asked her to step down, or resign, after the murky end of the war.  She’d already been in office longer than she’d expected.  The government just had too many other problems to worry about her … she wondered, idly, if that was about to change.  What would she advise the PM?  There were risks, very real risks, in trying to make contact and yet, failing to make contact would have other risks.  It was just a matter of time before someone else sent a ship to the alien homeworld themselves.

If it is their homeworld, she thought, numbly.  What happened to them?

It was a worrying thought.  The days when the human race had all of its eggs in one basket were long gone.  Earth had been shipping out millions of colonists yearly, before the war, and the colonisation program was starting to pick up steam again.  A race that had been in space for far longer should have filled up the entire galaxy by now, leaving no room for humanity and its peers.  Where were they?  The researchers speculated they’d drawn back, leaving room for the younger races, but Susan was too cynical to believe it.  She knew from experience that principles often went by the wayside when they demanded sacrifice of any sort.  Maybe they’d run into something even a super-powerful couldn’t handle.

“We need to know what happened to them,” she said.  “And we have to get a handle on their technology before we encounter someone far more advanced than ourselves.”

“And promote British interests,” Mason added, dryly.

“That goes without saying,” Susan said, although she had her doubts.  She knew how Britain would react if one of the other Great Powers suddenly gained access to super-technology and she was entirely sure they’d react the same way.  “I’ll discuss it with the PM, but the final call is a political one.”

She rubbed her forehead.  The war was over and yet … it wasn’t.  Not quite.  The virus’s power had been broken and yet, it was still out there.  It might never be eradicated completely, no matter what they did.  And humanity was too tired and divided to continue the fight.  She had no idea if the plans for a united government would ever be put into practice or not – they were far from popular, now the war in space was over – but it might not be enough to save the day.  Humanity needed to rest, not to find new challenges.

And yet, we have no choice, she thought, tapping her console.  Her aide would set up the meeting with the PM, as soon as possible.  If we don’t go look to see what’s there, who will?

Chapter One: London, United Kingdom

Commander Staci Templeton awoke, drenched in sweat.

For a moment, she was unsure of where she was.  The nightmare had been intense, a bitter reminder of HMS Unicorn’s final moments before she’d rammed the alien brainship, blowing both starships into atoms and giving HMS Lion a chance to escape before it was too late.  It had been a hard battle, and a costly one, but they’d won.  Or had they?  Her nightmare had been so intense, so real, that she honestly wasn’t sure what was real.  She’d seen the virus infecting the ship, the crew turning into monsters before her eyes …

She rubbed her forehead as she sat up in bed.  She’d declined the offer of a bed in the admiralty barracks, or a room at one of London’s many clubs, and chosen a simple bedsit on the outskirts of the city, simply because she wanted to be alone.  Her peers didn’t know what to make of her.  She’d been ordered to abandon ship, to abandon her commanding officer, and yet they judged her for leaving him behind.  One did not abandon one’s comrades, they said, even if one was ordered to do so.  Staci knew she’d feel the same way, if she was in their shoes, although she knew it wouldn’t make a difference.  Captain Mitch Campbell, Staci’s friend and mentor, had gone down with his ship.  All she could have done, if she’d stayed, was add one more name to the final casualty list.

And he told me to go, she thought.  She felt guilty, even though she had been obeying her commander’s orders.  She’d had commanders she hadn’t really respected, men and women who had never inspired loyalty in their subordinates, but Captain Campbell had been a good man, even if he had been fucking a married woman.  I had to do as I was ordered.

The thought hurt as she stared around the cramped room.  She’d spent the last nine months, after her return to Earth, standing in front of a Board of Inquiry and answering their questions … the same questions, time and time again.  It felt like torture, even though she understood the logic.  It was supposed to be hard to maintain a consistent lie if one was constantly asked the same questions, slightly differently phrased every time.  She suspected that wasn’t the real reason.  If the Board had thought she was lying, they had the right – and the duty – to pump her full of truth drugs and ask her questions while the tech monitored her brainwaves to make sure the drugs were working.  No, she was sure they were drawing the inquiry out as long as possible, simply because of the political implications.  Staci snorted at the thought as she clambered out of bed, feeling old despite her relative youth.  If Captain Campbell had kept it in his pants, perhaps his death and his ship’s destruction would have passed unremarked.  Perhaps …

She staggered into the tiny washroom and glared at herself in the mirror.  The face looking back at her didn’t feel like hers.  Blonde hair, blue eyes, a trim yet muscular body … she’d put on a little weight, she noted sourly, because she hadn’t kept herself in shape.  She’d allowed her hair to grow out, when it had dawned on her she wasn’t going to be reassigned to a new ship in a hurry … she ran her hand through her curls, wondering if it was worth getting it cropped short again.  The navy didn’t encourage long hairstyles.  They got in the way when one had to throw on a spacesuit in a tearing hurry.

Her nightmare flickered at the back of her mind as she stepped into the shower, washed herself hurriedly and then clambered out before the water could shut off automatically.  London was still in lockdown, the water – and everything else – rationed to ensure everyone had enough to eat, drink, and wash.  It didn’t bother her that much – the navy rationed water even though there was no shortage of ice asteroids that could be mined – but she’d read endless complaints on the datanet.  The civvies believed the war was over.  Staci wished they were right.  Sure, the virus’s space fleet had been destroyed, but there were still hundreds of infections right across the Human Sphere and beyond. 

They just want it to end, Staci told herself.  And who can blame them?

She flicked the wall-mounted screen on as she returned to the bedroom and started to dress.  The BBC was as bland and boring as ever, talking heads pontificating about politics and the endless debate in the House of Commons over who – if anyone – should succeed Prime Minister Harrison and lead Great Britain into the post-war world.  Staci rolled her eyes as they brought on a series of academics, none of whom had any experience of the real world nor any awareness of just how unworkable their suggestions actually were.  One might as well wave a magic wand, chant some bastardised Latin, and expect it to actually work.  She dismissed the thought as she finished dressing, then forced herself to watch a mindless show about navy life, silently listing the many inaccuracies in the show.  She’d reached fifty-seven when her wristcom bleeped, informing her she had an appointment with the First Space Lord in two hours.  She sighed as she stood, keying her wristcom to call a taxi.  The Board of Inquiry had probably reached its decision.

And that could be either good or bad, she thought.  She’d had the feeling the verdict was already done and dusted, before the inquiry actually started, but that hadn’t stopped the assembled officers from giving her a very hard time.  Bastards.  They’d had plenty of time to review the records well before she’d returned to Earth.  They had no real cause to give her a dishonourable discharge, or even a black mark in her file.  If the Admiral herself is speaking to me …

She put the thought out of her mind as she checked she had her wristcom and pistol, then made her way downstairs.  The bedsit appeared empty, no one manning the desk in the tiny lobby.  She knew it was an illusion.  The people who rented rooms – often for little more than an hour or two – wanted privacy, without any real social interaction.  Everything was electronic.  There was no such thing as room service and she wouldn’t have trusted it if there had.  The rooms were so unclean she dreaded to think what might come out of their kitchens.

The taxi was waiting for her.  She climbed inside and forced herself to relax as the driver drove into London, passing through a handful of military and police checkpoints before finally reaching Whitehall.  There were fewer with every passing month, she noted, although it hadn’t stopped the civvies complaining.  Staci understood their point.  She was used to passing through endless checkpoints, when making her way from one posting to another, but it was irritating to have to show her papers time and time again.  And yet, there was no choice.  A single zombie could cause no end of havoc, if he got into Central London without being detected.  Staci had seen the statistics.  Better to endure some minor inconvenience than get infected and killed.

Perhaps on the streets, perhaps in a hospital bed, she thought, coldly.  There were ways to purge the virus from a host’s body, but they were sometimes fatal.  The civilians don’t understand how hard it is, even with modern medicine, to cure the infection.

She put the thought out of her mind as the taxi stopped outside the Admiralty Building to let her disembark.  A unformed aide saluted, then led her down a series of corridors – and two more checkpoints – into an antechamber.  Staci had expected to be told to wait, to cool her heels to show her who was really in charge, but instead she was shown straight into the admiral’s office.  She stood to attention and saluted.  Admiral Lady Susan Onarina was one of the few flag officers who’d enjoyed Captain Campbell’s unstinting respect.  Her record spoke for itself.

“Commander,” Lady Susan said.  “Thank you for coming.  Tea?  Coffee?”

Staci relaxed, slightly.  The offer of a drink was a clear sign she wasn’t in real trouble, although she wasn’t out of the woods yet.  The admirals would be looking for someone to blame for Unicorn’s destruction and her commanding officer was dead, his body nothing more than atoms orbiting an alien star.  Staci doubted they could make her the scapegoat, but they could make life very hard for her if they decided she’d been technically in command of the frigate during its final moments.  She knew officers who’d landed in hot water because they’d been technically in command, but never been aware they were the senior survivor until it was too late.

The aide brought her a cup of tea, then withdrew silently.  Staci studied the admiral thoughtfully, waiting for her to speak.  Lady Susan was a dark-skinned woman, her dark hair slowly shading to grey.  Staci felt a twinge of sympathy.  Lady Susan had been a starship commander, but now she was flying a desk in London, the uniformed head of the Royal Navy who was permanently accountable to politicians who knew little about how the navy really worked.  It couldn’t be an easy position, no matter the honours regularly poured upon the incumbent.  Staci wanted to climb the ladder, but perhaps not that high.

“The Board of Inquiry has finished its deliberations,” Lady Susan informed her.  “They have ruled that you are personally blameless in the loss of HMS Unicorn and, in fact, following the orders you were given by your CO was the right course of action.  The tactical analysts will be debating the precise course of the final battle for many years to come, I fear, but their conclusions will not affect you personally.  Captain Campbell’s final report on you, filed before he departed on his final mission, included a recommendation for you to be promoted to captain as soon as possible and given your own ship.  I have chosen to accept his recommendation.”

Staci’s breath caught in her throat.  She’d known she was personally blameless, but … her career might have suffered, just for spending so much of the last couple of years as Captain Campbell’s XO.  The man had had powerful enemies.  It would have been easy for one of them to insist his recommendations were worthless, that Staci might even have picked up bad habits from her former CO.  Who knew?  Some senior officers, no longer in touch with the realities of naval life, became political creatures, fighting bitter bureaucratic wars rather than concentrating on what was really important.  And they might have casually destroyed her career in passing.

The admiral smiled.  “You are being given HMS Endeavour,” she added.  “And we have a very specific mission for you.”

Staci blinked.  Endeavour?  A deep-space survey ship, if she remembered correctly.  Her class had never been particularly popular, not when they were intended to serve as both military and civilian vessels.  The Royal Navy had done its best to keep survey ships and crews isolated from the rest of the fleet, although – with an increasing need to find newer tramlines – it was common for prospective admirals to serve a term on a survey ship before they were promoted.  And she was being given a survey ship?  She wasn’t sure if it was a sign the admirals thought she’d join them one day or a cunning plan to get her out of their hair for several years.  Before the war, it had been common for survey ships to spend years away from home.

“I … thank you,” she managed.  A survey ship … it would be something different.  And yet, she was sure there were more qualified officers.  She’d spent most of her career on frigates and gunboats, not capital ships.  “What do you want me to do?”

Lady Susan smiled again, perhaps recognising the unspoken question.  “Tell me … did you hear anything about the alien artefact discovered at Virus Prime?”

“Yes, My Lady.”  Staci had no trouble recalling the details.  “I was told it would be studied properly after the war.”

“Quite.”  Lady Susan leaned forward, slightly.  “Unfortunately, too many people on both Lion and Unicorn were aware of the artefact’s discovery.  They certainly heard rumours, rumours that – as always – grew increasingly wild as they moved from mouth to mouth.  We were careful, in line with protocols devised after the first hint there was an ancient and very powerful race out there, to try to limit word spreading from place to place, but we may have been unsuccessful.  We don’t know how many unfriendly powers may have heard the stories.”

Staci frowned.  “If the stories are that wild, Admiral, surely they won’t be believed.”

“We hope not, yet we don’t know,” Lady Susan said.  “You can read the reports later – I’ve had you cleared for them – but right now, all you need to know is that an alien starchart was discovered within the artefact under odd and slightly unclear circumstances.  If it is accurate, we may know where to find the alien homeworld.  Your mission is to travel to the alien homeworld and, if possible, attempt to make contact.  Your orders are a little vague, I’m afraid, because we don’t know what you’ll find.  You’ll have considerable freedom to proceed as you see fit.”

Because I’ll be travelling well outside the flicker network, Staci thought.  I’ll have a true independent command.

She schooled her face into impassivity.  It was hard not to feel a twinge of excitement, mingled with unease and fear.  She knew the basic parameters of interstellar combat, as laid down by the known spacefaring races.  There were few true surprises.  But unknown tech, from an unknown race … who knew what it could do?  Who knew what certainties would vanish, as if they’d never been, in the face of technology she didn’t have the slightest idea was even possible?  Her imagination provided quite a few possible answers.  Who knew what was so far beyond her imagination that it would blindside her completely, if it was deployed against her?

“We don’t know much of anything about the Builders,” Lady Susan said.  “We know they were watching the virus, Captain, and we know they had some means of keeping it in check, preventing it from trying to overwhelm their installations.  We know they left a large artefact behind, something we cannot even begin to understand.  Beyond that, all we really have is speculation.  Did they create the virus?  Did they let it go or … or did it break free of their control?  Or … or what?  We don’t know.  We dare not assume their motives are friendly.”

“If they are unfriendly,” Staci pointed out, “we may be … screwed.”

“They may do us a great deal of harm, just by existing,” Lady Susan said.  “Our existence did the Vesy no favours, when they finally realised just how advanced we were.  There have been hundreds of complications, from them trying to discard their old ways and embracing ours to demands for newer and better weapons, medical technology and everything else we can offer them.  In a sense, their society may have hit a brick wall and stopped dead, the moment the Russians landed on their world.  They are steadily losing the ability to innovate for themselves – and why should they, why should they even try, when we already have all the answers?  The same could happen to us.  It has happened, in the past.”

“Not on such a big scale,” Staci said.

“No,” Lady Susan agreed.  “But contact between two very unequal societies has always been painful, even when there is no hostile intent.  We know a great deal about how the universe works, and we were capable of using what we knew to catch up with the first aliens we encountered.  But what will happen to us when the gulf is so wide as to beyond all hope of jumping across, before it is too late?  That’s another reason for sending you out alone, Captain.  If you encounter something beyond our ability to accept, word will not spread beyond the handful of people already involved in the project.”

“It seems unlikely,” Staci said.

“We don’t know,” Lady Susan said.  “What if we encounter an alien race so advanced they just need to snap their fingers to do anything?  What if we encounter a race of pure telepaths, who can read our thoughts effortlessly?  What happens if they know there’s life after death, or think their religion is the one true faith, or something – anything – that will disrupt our society and damage it beyond all hope of repair?  We have to plan for the worst, without even being sure our thinking can encompass the worst.”

“I see your problem,” Staci said.  Her stomach churned.  “How do we know they’re not already watching us?”

“We don’t,” Lady Susan said, flatly.  “And because we know nothing about them, we don’t know what they’ll find objectionable.  Not yet.”

Staci nodded, grimly.  The idea of being watched by alien minds was unpleasant, even though she’d spent most of her life in the navy, where there was no such thing as privacy.  It was rare for a pervert to take advantage of it and, if one did, she knew how to deal with it.  But watching aliens?  She hoped they were just being paranoid.  They might never know for sure.

“I understand,” she said.  “I won’t let you down.”

“I’m sure of it,” Lady Susan said, passing Staci a datachip.  “Your orders.  A shuttle flight has already been organised to get you to your new command.  Once you assume command, prepare for departure.  I want you ready to depart by the time the ambassadorial and xenospecialist staffs arrive.”

“Understood,” Staci said.  She felt a thrill of excitement, even if they were plunging into the unknown.  “We’ll be ready.”

Fantastic Schools 5 and Fantastic School Hols – Call For Submissions

Fantastic Schools 5 and Fantastic School Hols – Call For Submissions

Wisecraft Publications is putting out a call for submissions for the next pair of Fantastic Schools anthologies.  We are looking for stories (3000-12000 words, unless by prior arrangement) set in magical schools, or related in some way to the theme of magical education.  If you are interested, please read the guidelines below and then drop us an email with your proposal.  All profits shared equally.  Please also forward this email to anyone you think might be interested.

Check out the first volumes here.

e

Fantastic Schools V.5

We are looking for generalist stories set within a magical educational environment.  They can be of any sort, including sporty, bully-gets-theirs, newbie wins respect, dark lord gets beaten by students, etc.  We prefer reasonably stand alone stories, but feel free to write them in your own worlds; we invite writers to include details that might draw new readers to their stories.

Fantastic School Hols

What do students do on those long school holidays?  Work experience?  Private tutoring?  Visit each other’s homes … whatever else … as long as it touches on magical education in some way.  We prefer reasonably stand alone stories, but feel free to write them in your own worlds; we invite writers to include details that might draw new readers to their stories.

Guidelines

We are looking for submissions of stories dealing with any aspect of life at a magical school and/or magical education. School life, extracurricular activities, teachers’ trials, life as a magical custodian—this is your chance to explore beyond what has appeared in your favourite magical school, be it Hogwarts, Roke, Whitehall, or more.

The Fantastic Schools anthology is intended for a YA and general audience. Stories do not need to be directed at a YA audience, but story content should be appropriate for both teen and adult readers.

Magic schools must be original to the author or used with the author’s express permission, which must be provided in writing beforehand. No unauthorized fan fiction will be accepted.

Please query with your story idea, so to avoid too many stories on the same exact topic.

Word count: 3000 to 12,000 (for longer stories, inquire.)

Payment: Authors will receive equal shares of 55%  of profits.

Please send queries and questions to:

Note: Query acceptance does not guarantee a place in the anthology. 

Her Majesty’s Warlord 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Duke of Wellington, I’d been told, had spent the weeks before Waterloo riding over the battleground, picking his positions for the coming encounter that would decide the future of Europe.  I’d done the same, riding around the countryside and making careful note of advantageous – and disadvantageous – terrain.  The landscape was rough – sweeping flatlands broken by dried-up rivers, passes and rough wildlands slowly giving way to desert – and hard, the people who lived there prematurely aged by hardship, but it would have been attractive if it hadn’t been marred by enemy raiders.  I was unsure, as I distributed my troops and waited, if the raiders were still there.  The locals were unwilling to give us so much as the time of day.  I didn’t really blame them.  It would take months, if not years, to win even a little trust from people who saw us as predators, rather than protectors.

I’d set up my headquarters in a small village in the rough centre of the region.  It wasn’t much of a place, and my troops tripled the population just by being there, but it gave me a chance to make nice with the locals while holding my men in readiness to respond to any crisis.  I’d asked the locals what they wanted or needed from us, but most of them refused to answer or made absurd demands that suggested they didn’t take the question too seriously.  I had my men dig a pair of wells, searching for water, in the hopes it would win us some credit with the villagers.  Thankfully, we avoided any washing machine debacles through the sheer lack of washing machines.

Fallon called me as I drilled my troops.  “Sir, I just got a message from Village Nineteen,” she said.  “They’re under attack!”

I felt a flash of excitement as I drew my bugle and blew a string of notes, ordering the men to mount up and prepare to ride out.  The villages had no names, so – as we’d updated the maps to actually match the terrain – we’d assigned them numbers, just to make it easier to tell them apart.  I doubted the villagers were pleased about that – it would make the villages easier to tax – but it had to be done.  The last thing I needed was to have half my troops go to the wrong village because they didn’t know which one I meant.  Village Nineteen was deeper within the region than I’d expected, at least as a possible target.  I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being taunted.  Or lured into a trap.

My eyes ran over the map as Sir Essex entered.  “How many attackers?”

“The report says thirty horsemen,” Fallon told him.  “They have rifles.”

Sir Essex snorted.  I frowned.  Rifles?  The warlords were arming – rearming – as quickly as possible, but … I didn’t like the implications, if they’d sent rifle-armed troops this far south.  Did they have enough of the new weapons they could afford to lose some?  Or … or what?  I was all too aware there were people in Damansara who would happily sell the rope the hangman would use to hang them, let alone weapons to the warlords.  Had the bastards managed to buy weapons from Damansara?  Or was I overthinking it?

“Thirty horsemen,” I repeated.  The numbers wouldn’t be exact, of course, but I’d trained my people to be as accurate as possible.  I’d read too many battle reports, and accounts of the engagements I’d fought, that insisted both sides had deployed absolutely ridiculous numbers of troops.  “We need to move fast.”

I drew a line on the map as Fallon updated me.  In theory, thirty horsemen could move off the roads – such as they were – and travel cross-country.  In practice, that wouldn’t be easy.  The terrain was just too rocky for anyone’s peace of mind, if they wanted to ride at speed.  It would be breakneck speed.  I smiled at the weak joke, then motioned to Sir Essex.  I disliked the idea of relying on him to do anything, but I didn’t have a choice.  I couldn’t replace him at short notice, not now.  Besides, his part of the operation would play to his undoubted bravery.  And strengths.

“I want your men to serve as beaters,” I told him.  Village Nineteen had a detachment of troops in position to defend the locals.  I suspected they’d only have to fire a single volley to convince the raiders they wanted to go somewhere else.  I liked to think the horsemen would charge right into the teeth of the enemy’s fire and get slaughtered, but after what had happened the first time someone had tried …  “Drive them up north, towards this pass.”

“We can run them down,” Sir Essex assured me.  “And bring them to battle …”

I shook my head.  The cavalry were too light to risk an engagement, particularly against rifle-armed troops.  Their armour was very limited and I doubted it would stand up to rifle fire, no matter what the cavalrymen claimed.  As long as they pressed hard, but not too hard, the enemy shouldn’t dismount to fight.  If they did … I hoped Sir Essex would have the sense to keep his distance.  I’d fought an incredibly one-sided battle when a warlord’s troops had charged straight into my fire, getting themselves slaughtered for nothing.  I didn’t want my troops to repeat the same mistake.

“Drive them towards the pass here,” I ordered, tapping the map.  It wasn’t quite Little Bighorn, but it would suffice.  Assuming the cavalry got into place, as planned, the raiders would have to get through the pass at speed if they wanted to get into the desert.  It wouldn’t be as foolish as it looked.  If I hadn’t had the mounted infantry with me, there would have been no way to get a blocking force positioned in time to be useful.  “We’ll set up a trap and greet them with a hail of fire.”

Sir Essex looked irked.  I sighed, inwardly.  He wanted glory.  So did I, but I wanted victory all the more.  There would be enough for both of us and more, if the plan worked.  I gave him a handful of orders, checked the latest updates from Fallon, then sent him on his way.  If it worked as planned …

They’re skirmishing along the edge of the defence line, I thought.  How long will it take for them to realise they’re wasting their time and abandon the engagement?

The question ran around and around in my mind as I led the way outside – Sir Essex’s men were already vanishing in the distance, hidden behind a huge cloud of dust – and mounted up, Fallon sitting behind me.  The mounted infantrymen looked ready, but grim.  Some of them had seen combat before, yet only a handful had ridden horses into battle.  Too many cavalrymen had refused to transfer … I told myself, firmly, that they’d regret it, once the mounted infantry won its spurs.  I raised my voice and barked a command, then charged out of the camp.  There was no time to delay.  We had to get to the pass before the raiders tried to get through it.

If nothing else, we’ll give them a fright, I thought.  They probably thought they could get in and out unopposed.  By the time the other garrisons heard about the raid, it would already be over.  Or so they thought.  My command and coordination system was pathetic, by US Army standards, but compared to what the locals had had only a year ago it was marvellous.  They won’t be expecting us to get into position so quickly.

Dust rose as we galloped on, pushing the horses to the limit.  I hated to do it, but speed was of the essence.  We had to be there before it was too late or the entire exercise would be worse than useless.  The roads trembled under our hooves – I saw fleeting glimpses of shacks and hamlets and half-tended patches of land – as we moved.  I reminded myself, once again, that we needed a better road network.  The kingdom couldn’t be bound tightly together without one.  The locals probably wouldn’t want to help, though.  Better roads would also make it easier for distant landlords to tax them too.

My horse started to twitch uncomfortably as the pass finally came into view.  It wasn’t the gorge so beloved of wild west movies – I could have taken a horse over the sides, if I’d been prepared to take the risk – but it would suffice.  Sir Essex was pushing the raiders towards us, giving them only one option to escape his pursuit … I gritted my teeth, telling myself Sir Essex didn’t have the imagination to do something really stupid.  If he’d followed the first set of orders, he shouldn’t be able to run the raiders down.  If …

I dismounted, passed the horse to the handlers and started to snap orders.  The men dug in rapidly, shovels breaking the hard ground rapidly and piling up soil to give us some additional protection.  I directed Fallon to stay in the rear and report on what happened, then hide under a spell and retreat if the enterprise ended in total disaster.  I hoped the princess would have the wit to keep Horst and Fallows in her employ, if I died, and that they’d learn from my mistakes.  Who knew?  Perhaps my death would keep her enemies from tightening the noose around her until it was too late.

Don’t make yourself more than you are, I told myself, sharply.  Princess Helen’s enemies don’t hate her because of you.  You’re just an excuse to undermine her.

Time seemed to slow down as we dug in and waited.  I kept the men busy, trying to make sure they didn’t have time to brood.  Wars had always been hurry up and wait.  You got into position, you prepared to meet the enemy, and then you had to wait for the bastard to show himself.  No military force could remain on alert permanently, no matter what politicians and thriller writers claimed.  It was true here too.  I’d read accounts of castles that had been captured because the defenders were tired and worn, the attackers sneaking up and getting over the walls before the defenders could react.  Here, at least, we knew the raiders were closing.  They’d been running from Sir Essex as soon as they spotted the cavalry charging to the rescue.  I was mildly surprised they hadn’t tried to make a stand.  It would be a risk, but not a foolish one.  Sir Essex might have impaled himself – and his men – on the guns before he had a chance to realise he’d fucked himself.

I allowed myself a moment of relief as the enemy raiders came into view.  I raised my telescope to my eye and peered towards the advancing horsemen, frowning at their appearance.  They looked wild, a strange combination of armed and armoured cavalry and tribal warriors.  I frowned as I realised they were mercenaries.  That explained the reluctance to close with the defenders, or make a stand against my cavalry.  Even if they won, they’d make enemies and take heavy losses.  I gritted my teeth.  I’d never liked mercenaries – few professional soldiers did – and here, they were the worst of the worst.  No wonder the princess’s enemies kept insisting I was a mercenary.  It was a great way to smear the princess without actually getting into hot water.

“Prepare to engage,” I ordered, curtly.  “Take aim.”

My lips twitched as the infantrymen prepared themselves.  There was no such thing as taking aim at individual targets, not here.  The pistol on my belt was the most accurate weapon in the kingdom and hitting a fast-moving target, even for a marksman like me, isn’t anything like as easy as the movies make it look.  My men would fill the air with a cloud of bullets and balls, enough – I hoped – to guarantee at least some hits.  Why not?  It had worked before.

“Hold fire,” I ordered.  “On my command …”

I braced myself, silently counting down the seconds as they charged into the kill-box.  It was never easy to pick the right moment to open fire.  Start shooting too early and the enemy might have a chance to break contact and run, start shooting too late and the survivors might charge into your lines in hopes of cutting you apart before you could fire a second volley.  I didn’t want the bastards to get out, let alone have a chance to strike at us.  I wanted them dead.  If we took prisoners, we’d only keep them long enough to force them to answer questions before we hanged them.  Given their crimes, it was clear they could no longer demand protection under the laws of war.

Which don’t always apply to mercenaries either, I reminded myself.  The rules were complex, and more than a little confusing, but it was rare for mercenaries to survive being taken prisoner.  The king might want to recruit them; the average soldier wouldn’t want to give him the chance.

“Fire,” I snapped.

The first line of infantrymen fired a ragged volley, the second following suit a moment later as the first hastened to reload.  It wasn’t a proper skirmish line – we didn’t have the numbers or the room – but it would suffice.  The enemy force shattered, mercenaries scattering in all directions as our bullets cracked into them.  Men fell from their horses, the poor beasts staggering and collapsing under our fire … I felt a twinge of guilt, which I ruthlessly ignored.  I wanted them dead – not just dismounted – but I could rely on the locals to deal with a mercenary trying to escape on foot.  They could be quite imaginative, when they had a chance to take revenge.  I’d heard horror stories that I’d thought, at first, were meant to keep young soldiers inside the wire before I’d discovered they were, if anything, understated.  The locals hated mercenaries.

I peered into the smoke, cursing – once again – the lack of smokeless powder.  The wind was against us, to the point we were actually creating our own smoke screen.  The first line of infantrymen fired again, the second readying itself before I stilled them.  I couldn’t tell what, if anything, the enemy were doing.  Were they dead?  Trying to push through the blockade?  Turning to try to break behind us, or ride up the walls, or …

My heart sank as the smoke cleared.  I’d told Sir Essex to keep his distance to avoid friendly fire.  He’d either disobeyed orders or lost control of his men, because they had crashed right into the enemy rear.  I saw them exchanging blows with the mercenaries, their horses slamming into other horses … the nasty part of my mind wished I’d ordered a final volley, one that might have taken out Sir Essex as well as the mercenaries.  It would have looked like an accident.  Hell, it would have been an accident.  Now …

The skirmish came to an end with a sudden finality.  The cavalrymen posed dramatically on their mounts … I bit my lip to keep from opening my mouth and treating Sir Essex to a blast of my weapons-grade vocabulary.  Four of his men lay dead, two more were badly injured … they’d need a magical healer if they wanted to keep their arms.  A chirurgeon couldn’t have done more than amputate the broken limps and left them crippled.  Luckily for them, they could afford it.

“A glorious victory,” Sir Essex said.  I came very close to socking him.  “We drove them into your arms, then delivered the final blow.”

I said nothing until we were out of earshot.  It was common courtesy – praise someone in public, rebuke them in private – and yet, it was all I could do to resist the urge to scold him in front of the entire force.  Sir Essex was grinning like a loon … I felt my fists clench as I looked back at the bodies.  The cavalrymen were snooty bastards to a man, but they’d been under my command and they hadn’t deserved to die.  And Sir Essex hadn’t even had the courtesy to die too.

“I told you to keep your men back,” I snapped.  It was quite possible one or more of the dead cavalrymen had been the victim of friendly fire.  Bullets didn’t have IFFs, even in the modern world.  I knew at least one jarhead who’d accidentally – I hoped to God it had been an accident – been shot in the back by one of his comrades.  “And now some of them are dead because of you.”

Sir Essex glared.  “I had to close with them …”

“No you fucking didn’t,” I snapped.  If he’d told me he’d lost control … I would have understood.  I would have chewed him out a bit, but I wouldn’t have been mad.  “We had them.”

I met his eyes, daring him to hit me with a stream of justifications.  Or his fists.  I didn’t care which.  He’d certainly won some glory, but the dead cavalrymen had powerful and well-connected families.  Sir Essex might be in some trouble, if he made an issue of it.  I waited, then shrugged.  Right now, I had other problems.

“I expect you to think about your orders, and to adapt them to the circumstances you face,” I snarled.  “But if you blatantly disobey me in the face of the enemy again, you will not live to regret it.”

I turned away, half-expecting him to put a knife in my back as I strode back to the battleground.  The bodies were already being looted, infantry and cavalrymen arguing over who should get the loot.  I took command, directing the money to be shared evenly and everything else handed out on a first come, first served basis.  Two mercenaries had survived, both badly wounded.  I told the chirurgeons to at least try to keep them alive.  If they could be made to talk …

If nothing else, we just proved mounted infantry can win a battle, I thought.  I’d have to get back to the city quickly, both to report to the princess and make sure the broadsheets ran my version of the battle.  And we taught anyone planning to raid our territory that they can’t get away with it.  Not now.

I smiled, although my heart was cold.  We’d gotten lucky.  I didn’t want to admit it, but it was true.  The raiders hadn’t realised what we could do, which had let us drive them into a trap.

Next time, it wouldn’t be so easy.

Her Majesty’s Warlord 20-21

I will try and do 22 tomorrow, but no promises.

Chapter Twenty

“Elliot,” Fallon said.  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

I blinked.  It was rare, very rare, for Fallon to call me by my name.  She was always more aware of our different backgrounds than I, even though I had tried to tell her – time and time again – that she could use my name.  She was more than just a soldier under my command or a servant in my household.  Her magic made her my social equal and …

“I don’t have a choice,” I told her.  “I have to fight the duel.”

We stood in the antechamber, preparing ourselves.  Lord Thurston had upped the stakes time and time again, from gambling everything on the duel to insisting it be fought in the gladiatorial arena, in front of a gawking crowd.  I was surprised the king – and the council – had gone along with it.  Blood and gore was all very well, and I’d heard tales of far worse on the arena’s sand, but it wouldn’t do to have the commoners watch aristocrats fight and die.  It might give them ideas.  I wasn’t sure if Lord Thurston intended to make my defeat as public as possible, so no one would be in any doubt who enjoyed the favour of the gods, or if he hoped I’d be cowed by the ever-increasing stakes and run for my life.  It wasn’t as if I couldn’t have escaped.  I could have fled the city at any moment, taking enough loot to live comfortably for the rest of my life.  No one was even trying to stop me.

But I can’t run, I thought.  I had my pride.  And even if I’d been prepared to put it aside, I had too many other people depending on me.  I have to win.

I hefted my sword and tested the weight, carefully.  Lord Thurston had the right to choose weapons – apparently, his birth trumped my statues as the challenged party – and he’d chosen broadswords, rather than pistols or something that would leave our pride dented, but our bodies unharmed.  I suspected he thought he’d have the edge and he might well have been right, if I hadn’t trained so extensively.  I told myself, sharply, not to get overconfident.  Lord Thurston had gambled everything on the duel, to the point he simply could not afford to lose or be seen to run.  He’d do everything in his power to kill me.

“There are spells,” Fallon said, quietly.  “I can give you a hand …”

“They’ll catch you.” I said, flatly.  The arena was surrounded with anticheating spells.  I’d checked.  “And then we’ll both be in deep shit.”

I turned and looked at myself in the mirror, shaking my head in amusement.  I looked like a barbarian warrior out of a fantasy written by someone who knew absolutely nothing about real barbarians.  I’d chosen to disdain armour, all too aware that even the best local armour wouldn’t turn a sword.  Modern body armour might have been better, but I didn’t have any.  Instead, I’d donned a simple outfit that allowed me to move freely.  It might give me an edge.

The bell rang.  I braced myself, then stepped through the gate and out onto the sands.  The sun beat down, the air hot and dry and stinking of blood.  I thought I saw faint traces of dried blood – or worse – on the white sands as I raised my sword, saluting the royal box.  The crowd roared, in approval or simple anticipation of the bloodletting to come.  I shuddered.  If I had time, when I had time, I was going to introduce football and basketball and other sports that didn’t involve actual bloodshed.  Who knew?  Perhaps the novelty of having the players survive to play another day might catch on.

And the gladiators will probably be relieved, I thought.  They might be feted as heroes, but they’re one misstep away from being nothing more than dead bodies on the sand.

I sighed inwardly as the cheering grew a little more rote.  Lord Thurston emerged from his gate, on the far side of the arena, and raised his sword.  I guessed his family had placed ringers in the crowd.  If so, they needed to get their money back.  Lord Thurston was not popular.  No one booed him openly, but no one seemed inclined to waste their energy cheering either.  I tested my sword one final time, then walked forwards.  He’d donned heavy armour, glinting in the sunlight.  I hoped the weight would slow him down.

And that he didn’t think to go potty before he put it on, my mind whispered.  An old joke ran through my head.  Let all who go to don armour tomorrow, remember to go before they don armour tomorrow.

The arena felt huge, bigger than a football field, big enough for a demolition derby.  I felt absurdly small as I made my way towards him.  The crowd quietened, anticipation hanging on the air.  I thought I understood, finally, why so many football players thought they were important, that people actually gave a damn about their opinions.  The approval of the crowd was intoxicating.  I snorted, inwardly.  I’d seen men perform acts of heroism that could easily lead to serious injury or death – and sometimes did – and yet they’d never been feted like sports stars.  It just wasn’t fair.

The world isn’t fair, I reminded myself, as we closed.  And you should know it by now.

I raised my sword, deflecting a blow as Lord Thurston stabbed at me.  He was a few years older than me, if I recalled correctly, but he was no slouch.  There was real power behind his thrust, enough to drive a sharp blade through armour if he’d stuck home.  I silently complimented myself on my foresight as I stabbed at him in return, darting in and out of range with casual ease.  He didn’t seem pleased.  I could afford to let him waste his energy, carrying the armour as he came after me, then close again once he was too tired to stop me.  I wondered, idly, if he’d used something to boost his strength – he could have bribed his way through the spells – then told myself not to get cocky.  The man who’d taught me unarmed combat had been old enough to be my father.  He’d still kicked my ass up and down the training field. 

The crowd cheered loudly as our swords met, the clashing echoing through the air.  I doubted they could see much of anything – we were too tiny figures, lost in a vast arena – but I took heart anyway as I danced back and forth, forcing him to come after me.  I watched him carefully as he stabbed at me, trying to gauge his strength properly.  It was hard to be sure when he’d start to flag, if indeed he would.  He’d grown up training to fight in armour and, if he realised what I was doing, he might pretend to be running out of steam well before he was actually on the verge of exhaustion.  I darted forward, dodged a blow and cracked the flat of my blade against his helmet.  It had been an accident – I certainly would have preferred to hit him with the edge, slicing his head in two – but the crowd roared with laughter, then started to jeer.  Lord Thurston’s face was hidden behind his helm, yet I knew he was angry.  His sword came very close to cutting me in half.

Sweat dripped down my forehead as I pulled back, for once glad of the sheer size of our battleground.  If he pushed me against a wall, he’d have me trapped, but it wasn’t going to happen.  I jumped back and forth, trying to force him to open his defences and give me a clear shot at him.  Lord Thurston was good, I admitted sourly.  His armour slowed him down, but it also let him get away with things that would kill me.  The blow I’d struck would have knocked him out, if his helm hadn’t protected him.

We kept going, the crowd cheering and booing as we struck at each other.  I thought I sensed him flagging, but he picked up and continued before I could strike at him.  He pushed at me, stamping forward … I felt a twinge of regret that the duel was to continue until one of us emerged victorious, rather than simply running out the clock.  I reminded myself, sharply, that Lord Thurston had set out to destroy the princess and come very close to suceeding.  Too many people believed the lies, or pretended to.

The thought gave me a burst of strength.  I pushed forward, aiming at his heart.  His sword came up to block me and, for a moment, we pressed against each other.  His hand twisted … I saw a glint, just in time to jump back before the dagger was thrust into my heart.  An appalled silence fell as the crowd saw the dagger … Lord Thurston had tried to cheat!  I wondered, numbly, how he’d even brought the dagger into the arena.  The guards had poked and prodded at me so thoroughly that I’d wanted to tell them they should have brought me dinner first.  And flowers.

I drove forward, pushing before the umpire could decide what to do.  Legally, he should call a halt and declare a victory in my favour; practically, whatever he did, he would make some very powerful enemies.  Lord Thurston staggered backwards, too late.  I rammed the sword into his armour, driving the blade into his chest.  Blood spurted, splashing against my hands and pooling on the ground.  I felt a twinge of disgust.  I’d seen horrors, back home and here, and it wasn’t the first time I’d killed, but …

Lord Thurston crumpled and hit the ground, blood spilling everywhere.  Modern medicine couldn’t have saved him.  I didn’t know if magic could, but no one seemed inclined to try.  The crowd went wild, chanting my name, as Lord Thurston twitched one final time and died.  I cut off his head, removed the helm – for a wild moment, I thought his family had tried to send in a substitute – and held it up.  The cheering grew louder.  I grinned savagely, breathing in the praise, then saluted the royal box one final time before turning and heading back to the gate.  I had no intention of fighting another duel if I could help it.

Remember, you’re mortal, my thoughts mocked.  And all of this is fleeting glory.

The gladiators cheered too, as I stepped through the gates.  I nodded back, treating them as equals.  The nobility funded fighting teams, gladiators who fought for the amusement of the crowd as well as their patron’s good name … it was just like football back home, with big corporations funding the teams and doing their best to avoid controversy.  I was definitely going to try to push for a local Superbowl, when I had time.  There would be much less bloodshed.

“I knew it!”  Fallon gave me a tight hug, her breasts pressing against my bare chest.  I felt a surge of lust I knew I should ignore.  “I knew you could do it!”

“I knew I could too,” I lied.  It had been closer than anyone knew.  Lord Thurston had taken one hell of a risk, bringing that dagger into the arena.  If he’d stabbed me … perhaps he’d thought he could mutilate my body before anyone realised what he’d done, disguising the true cause of death.  There was no CSI here, no forensic experts capable of working out what had happened to me.  Or Harbin Gallery, who I’d shot in the back.  “I told you I could.”

I washed quickly, then changed into a tunic before heading to the royal box.  The commoners might have been cheering – I could still hear them, echoing in my ears – but the nobility were much less pleased.  I could feel eyes boring into my back as I walked towards the throne, where Princess Helen waited for me.  If looks could kill, and I’d been told there were spells to do that, I would have been ashes on the floor.  I sighed, inwardly.  It didn’t matter that Lord Thurston had slandered the princess, to the point it would make life difficult for her future husband.  It didn’t matter that he’d cheated, bringing a concealed weapon into the arena.  It didn’t matter … not to them.  All that mattered was that I’d killed one of their own, shedding his aristocratic blood on the sands.  I tried not to show my disgust too openly.  Lord Thurston hadn’t had to insist on a public duel.  He could have fought me in the palace courtyard instead.

“We congratulate you on your victory,” Princess Helen said.  Her tone was flat, her face impassive, but I could sense her relief.  My victory was a sign from the gods that the stories about her were lies, damned lies.  The priests would be pushing that line as soon as they heard the news.  A few donations from the palace would see to it.  “And we invest you with Lord Thurston’s holdings, with his children as your wards.”

A rustle ran through the gathered nobility, but no one dared object openly.  Lord Thurston really had staked everything on the duel, confident he could win and take everything he thought I owned.  Some of his family property was entailed, meaning it would have to go to his heir when the young man came of age, but the remainder was mine, by right of victory.  Hell, I’d have plenty of time to organise the entailed property to suit myself before I had to surrender it.  A thrill of anticipation ran through me, followed by a grim awareness I was now effectively stepfather to a bunch of children, legitimate or not.  And, given how poorly my various stepfathers had treated me …

Do better, I told myself.

“The gods have spoken,” Princess Helen told the crowd.  “And their will cannot be challenged.”

I kept my face impassive.  Lord Thurston had been careless.  He’d made it too easy for me to track him down, to prove he’d been behind the broadsheets.  Someone else might be a hell of a lot more dangerous, either by hiding behind cut-outs or simply hiring assassin after assassin until I ran out of luck.  The thought mocked me as I took a bow, accepting the former lord’s goods as my own.  I might have won a battle, but I hadn’t won the war.  In many ways, my position had just become a great deal more dangerous.

The princess left the arena, probably to give thanks to the gods herself.  I was tempted to stay, to lord it over the aristocrats who now had to treat me as one of their own, but I ached too much.  We took the carriage back to the mansion, where the staff and craftsmen greeted me with open relief.  I’d done what I could for them, but Lord Thurston would have been within his rights to treat them as his vassals if he’d won.  I didn’t have a heir of my own, let alone any entailed property.  Lord Thurston would probably have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

I took a long bath, then changed into a simple tunic and started eying the bed.  It had been a long day, after all.  I could go to bed early, couldn’t I?  I was still warring with myself when there was a knock on the door.  I sighed and opened it.  Sigmund stood there, looking as if he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.

“My Lord, Lady Thurston has arrived,” he said.  “She seeks an audience with you.”

I blinked.  It was rare for a married woman to visit without sending a messenger first.  I’d learnt that in Damansara.  And … I frowned.  Lady Thurston.  Lord Thurston’s widow.  Did she want revenge?  Had she brought a weapon?  Or …

“Show her into the sitting room,” I ordered, curtly.  Should I be alone with her?  I didn’t know.  “And ask Fallon to join us.”

Sigmund bowed, then withdrew.  I collected my pistol, then headed out and down the corridor, meeting Fallon on the way.  Lady Thurston sat on an armchair, standing as I came into the room.  She reminded me of someone, although I couldn’t place the name.  Curly dark hair, a mature face still showing hints of the beauty she’d been, a dress designed to show off a surprising amount of skin … I eyed her warily, all too aware it might have been an act to get me to lower my guard.  The locals might see women as harmless, as little more than children, but I knew better.  I’d known women who were fully the equal of their male counterparts.

“I am too old to beat around the bush,” Lady Thurston said.  She didn’t look – or sound – as if she was mourning her husband, although there was something brittle in her voice that suggested she’d been pushed to breaking point.  “What do you intend to do with me?”

I took a breath.  Fuck.  I’d inherited the man’s wife as well as his children.  Of course I had.  A wave of disgust shot through me.  Lady Thurston was in her late thirties, at best.  She was no child.  The idea she was my property, the spoils of combat … my new world found a new way to disgust me every single day.  I tried to think, wondering precisely what my duties were.  What was she to me?

“Nothing,” I said, finally.  There were implications I was missing.  I was morbidly sure of it.  “I want you to keep raising your children and running your household.  As long as you don’t turn against me, you can keep doing it.  I’ll even provide pin money.”

“And will you look for a new husband for me?”  Lady Thurston seemed shocked.  I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely wondering or trying to push her luck, just a little.  She’d grown up in an environment where showing intelligence was not regarded as a plus, not in a young woman.  One could go quite some distance if one was constantly underestimated.  Just ask my ancestors.  “Or marry me yourself?”

“When things quieten down, we can consider possible husbands,” I said, trying not to show how it disconcerted me.  What was I meant to do?  Put out an invitation for possible candidates?  “If that is what you want to do, you can do it.”

I sighed, inwardly, as we exchanged a few more pleasantries before she went back to her home – mine now, at least for the moment – and I went to bed.  She was mine too, legally speaking.  And I couldn’t just give her a pension and let her go.  Of course not.  That would be too easy.

“I’ll just have to change things,” I muttered, as I closed my eyes.  “And quickly.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“We may have a problem,” Princess Helen said, four days later.

I resisted the temptation to point out we already had too many problems.  I’d spent the time between the duel and the early-morning summons to the palace trying to sort out my inheritance from Lord Thurston, which had meant a series of interviews with his legitimate children, his illegitimate children, a small army of relatives and his servants.  They’d all been immensely awkward, from the children who seemed to think they’d be sent away to boarding school – or somewhere – to the servants who didn’t know what to make of me and didn’t know if I’d be staying.  It was clear, just looking at his account books, that Lord Thurston had been in serious trouble.  If he hadn’t been an aristocrat, he’d have gone under long ago.  I suppose that explained the duel.  If he’d won, he might have been able to keep his creditors at bay long enough to recover.

“A small town was attacked, only a day or so ago,” Princess Helen said, tapping the map.  “I only just got the word.”

I frowned.  There was no such thing as a military computer network here, not even a simple radio or telegraph system, but I should still have been alerted before I got the call to the palace.  Simple mischance, incompetence, or something more sinister?  I knew there were aristocrats plotting against me, their plots now driven by hatred as well as disdain for the mercenary who’d somehow climbed to a very high position indeed.  If someone had set out to make me look incompetent … I shook my head.  The communications system here was a nightmare.  It was quite possible the messenger had simply gone to the palace first, rather than the garrison.

“The warlords?”  I studied the map thoughtfully.  Her finger was resting on a position close to the desert, but not that close.  It was nicely isolated, off the beaten track.  The warlords could easily send a force to attack it, but it would be a little pointless.  What could they gain from the raid?  There was nothing, from slaves to simply slaking their sadistic lusts, that couldn’t be done elsewhere.  “Why?”

“Good question.”  Princess Helen shot me a sharp look.  “Why would you attack the town?”

I considered the question carefully, but drew a blank.  The nameless town – the mapmaker hadn’t bothered to find out what the locals called it, before drawing the map – was just too isolated.  It was one of many towns permanently on the brink, inhabited by people trying to scratch a living from the harsh and unforgiving soil, all too aware that a single bad season would result in starvation and death.  And … it was roughly between Roxanna and Damansara.  I might have left the city-state, but I still had friends there.  They would have told me, I was sure, if Warlord Cuthbert had been sending raiding parties south.  Hell, it would be a risk.  The city’s armies or the liberated peasants might trap and destroy the raiders, even if we didn’t.

“I wouldn’t,” I said, finally.  Our intelligence network was pretty shitty – the communication delays meant there’d always be a time lag between something being seen and the reports reaching us – and the raiders could have kept their presence a secret, simply by not attacking the town.  “It would be pointless, at least if I wanted to fight a war.”

“The war is already underway,” Princess Helen said.  “And this might just be the start of a whole new round.”

I nodded, slowly.  Warlord Cuthbert knew he was right at the top of the princess’s shit list.  Of course he was.  He’d tried to snatch her, with the intention of raping her and then forcing her into marriage.  The idea she’d have warm cuddly feelings towards him … I shook my head, reminding myself that the princess’s feelings might be tainting her judgement.  She would want a reason to go after the warlord, and yet …

The map taunted me.  It just made little sense.  The town was important to the inhabitants, but not to us.  I stroked my chin as I recalled the intelligence reports.  The warlord was trying to build up his forces, like the rest of his peers, but he wasn’t ready for open war just yet.  How could he be, when discontent was sweeping his lands and forcing him to worry about his internal security?  Did he think he could wear us down through pinpricks?  Or was he trying to distract us?  Or … was it just desert raiders?  There wasn’t much cover for bandits, not that far north, but there was enough.  I’d heard enough stories about tribesmen in the desert to wonder if there was some truth to them.

“We need to react,” Princess Helen said.  “Can we stop them before they get home?”

“It depends on where home is, for them,” I said.  If the raiders were on horseback, they could be well on their way north by the time the messenger reached us.  “And we don’t know where they came from, not for sure, or what they’re really doing.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Princess Helen told me.  “I need you out there, stopping them.  We need to make a show of force.”

I feared it wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew she was right.  The commoners, particularly the peasants, were sullen subjects at best.  They had no respect or liking for the king – they’d never met him – and they’d switch sides, if they were given a flat choice between swearing to follow the newcomer or being slaughtered.  The only way to keep them onside was to make it clear that we would protect them, while not preying on them.  And while many noblemen might sneer at the thought of peasants opinions actually mattering, I knew better.  The peasants could do a lot for us, or our enemies, from harassing isolated troops to providing supplies and intelligence, intelligence that would almost certainly be more accurate than the intelligence we got from the local garrisons. 

“We have been meaning to carry out exercises,” I said.  “I want to see how the army performs away from the city, before we mount any major offences.  I’ll send out several companies of infantry and cavalry, perhaps the mounted infantry too.  They should be ready to go.”

The princess raised no objection.  She was probably the only aristocrat who wouldn’t.  The concept of mounted infantry, of infantrymen who rode to war and dismounted to fight, had given the more traditional cavalrymen the vapours.  Their objections had been long, loud and come far too close to blocking the whole concept for my peace of mind.  I hoped the concept would prove itself, when the time came.  A failure now would be utterly disastrous.

And they used to have to pay for their own mounts, I reminded myself.  One of my other innovations had been having the army pay for the horses, rather than the rider.  It had suddenly made it a great deal easier to recruit both cavalry and mounted infantry, although the former were still crammed with aristocrats.  And the sooner they charge the guns and get killed, the better.

I told myself, firmly, I shouldn’t be thinking like that as I exchanged a few final words with the princess, then headed down to the garrison and summoned my subordinates.  I’d done my best to restructure the army, but – thanks to the traditionalists and my very limited time – the kingdom’s military was still a hodgepodge, with almost no standardisation in anything beyond gunpowder weapons and other modern kit.  There were regiments with only a hundred men and companies with over a thousand.  Given time, I thought, the problems would be ironed out and everything would be nicely standardised.  I just didn’t know if I’d have the time.

“Our objective is to secure the region, then attempt to locate and destroy the raiding parties,” I said, once I’d explained what had happened.  The messenger hadn’t been too clear on how many other, if any, towns had been attacked, but I was fairly sure there would have been others.  “The marching infantry will garrison the towns, and follow all the rules, while the mounted infantry and the cavalry will attempt to locate the enemy.  Our magicians” – I nodded to Fallon – “will keep us connected, ensuring word is passed from garrison to garrison as soon as the enemy are sighted.”

Sir Essex gave me an oily look.  “Am I to understand, sir, that you are taking command yourself?”

“Yes.”  There was no way I could put someone else in command.  Sure, there might be advantages in exposing an aristocrat as an incompetent, but they’d be heavily outweighed by the disadvantages.  I couldn’t afford failure, even one that was – coldly speaking – little more than a pinprick.  “You’ll be coming with me, as my second.”

He didn’t look pleased, I noted, as I drew lines on the map and issued more precise orders.  I suspected he wasn’t thinking ahead, not when a failure would be my failure.  But then, command of the operation would make him look good … as long as he didn’t lead his troops into a trap.  I told myself to keep an eye on him.  Sir Essex wanted to shine and he didn’t care how many risks he had to take to do it.  It would have been easier, perhaps, if he’d been a coward.  Instead, he was brave enough to be dangerous. 

“I want you to remind your men of one thing above all else,” I finished, as I sent Cheswick for fresh horses.  “We are going to help the locals, not to prey on them.  If anyone abuses the locals, if they steal or rape or kill or anything, they will be hanged.  I want you to drive the point in, again and again.  They will be hanged.”

I dismissed them, my words ringing in their ears.  They had to take it seriously.  If one of my men, just one, mistreated the locals, we would all suffer for it.  I intended to make damn sure that anyone who did was punished, punished openly and savagely.  The locals already hated and feared soldiers, regarding them as little better than mercenaries.  The last thing I needed was for them to turn on us.

We galloped out, three hours later.  I’d hoped to leave earlier.  My old commanders would have been pissed beyond words if the Quick Reaction Force took so long to get going, let alone the Rapid Reaction Forces that were meant to be ready to deploy halfway around the world at a moment’s notice.  I kept my temper barely in check as I marched up and down, readying the troops and then leading them out of the city.  We’d drilled, but the thing about emergency drills is that they always leave out the emergency.  I kicked myself for not doing more and better drills, even though I had been a little distracted.  If I’d known what was coming …

The thought mocked me as we galloped – and marched – onwards.  I left Fallon on my horse from time to time and strode beside the men, hoping to set a good example.  The temperature rose sharply, sweat trickling down my back, then dropped as night started to fall.  We made camp, throwing together a rough palisade before most of the men ate and then slept on the hard ground.  A centurion would have wept to see us, I was sure, but at least we were relatively safe.  I didn’t let myself sleep at first, not when I wanted to make sure the guards were actually awake.  If they were asleep – if they were lucky – they’d be flogged.  If they were unlucky, a raider would sneak up on them and cut their throats where they lay.

We resumed the march the following morning, the men grumbling and moaning as they formed up.  I ignored the grumblings.  Knowing when to turn a blind eye – or ear – is, in my view, a very unappreciated military skill.  People sometimes need to vent and stopping them merely keeps the sentiment trapped inside them, where it curdles and turns poisonous.  I kept marching myself, directing Sir Essex and his men to flank our formation and keep the enemy from sneaking up on us.  The fact this kept him out of my hair for a few hours at a time was completely coincidental.

“I got a message from the city,” Fallon said, halfway through the day.  She’d been riding – and the men had grumbled about that too – but she was still drenched in sweat.  “They’re asking if they should send more men after us.”

I shook my head.  “No,” I told her.  “They’re not ready to leave the walls.”

The secret to marching long distances is not to think about the distance you’re marching.  I tried not to think about how we’d travelled much further, much faster, during the opening days of the Iraq War.  Here … I wished, not for the first time, for tanks and armoured infantry fighting vehicles, for a way to get my men to their destination without tiring them out.  The drills just hadn’t been good enough … I told myself, firmly, that we’d have railroads in a few years, with an entire network binding the kingdom together.  The warlords wouldn’t stand a chance.  Sure, they could tear up the railroads in places, but that hadn’t stopped General Sherman from tearing up the South. 

And if I had the Army of the Potomac under my command, or even the Army of Northern Viginia, the warlords would be fucked, I thought, sourly.  Just the expertise those men had would be enough to win the war, even without their supply lines …

I was aching by the time we reached the ruined village and searched the remains from top to bottom.  The attackers, whoever they were, had been brutal.  The entire village had been slaughtered, from elderly men to babies who couldn’t have been more than a few months old.  The bodies had been badly mutilated, ripped apart so viciously I found it hard to believe the attackers had even been human.  Werewolves were a thing, weren’t they?  I’d heard stories of werewolves, legends that veered between people with unfortunate curses to walking monsters that pretended to be human.  Or perhaps it was something else, something no one knew existed because no one had survived the encounter long enough to report back.  Or …

They didn’t take prisoners, I thought, numbly.  Behind me, I heard Fallon being sick.  She wasn’t the only one.  I’d seen worse, when Islamic State had blazed a trail of death and destruction across the Middle East, but it was still shocking.  They made no attempt to enslave anyone, or even to keep them around for a little fun.  They just killed everyone in the village.

“We found tracks heading north,” Sir Essex informed me.  “Horse tracks.  We can go after them …”

“No.”  I took the map from my pocket, cursing – once again – the local mapmakers.  The majority didn’t know the meaning of gradient, let alone accuracy.  There might have been better off writing here there be dragons on parts of the map, if only to make sure no one took them seriously.  I was trying to train up newer and better mapmakers, but it was a long slow process.  Too many people were too invested in ensuring accurate surveys were never carried out.  “We proceed as planned.”

I snapped orders, distributing my forces in a manner that would probably get me in some trouble if I proposed it at home.  I didn’t think the raiders would want to risk going up against even moderate opposition, not when it might mean leaving bodies behind for later identification.  God knew, most of the terrorists and insurgents back home had gone after soft targets, the ones that couldn’t or didn’t shoot back.  If I protected most of the towns, the raiders would have to pick on the ones that didn’t look defended.  And if I was lucky …

“They might be gone now,” Fallon said, afterwards.  “What’ll you do if they don’t show up?”

I shrugged.  The region we were defending looked small on the map, but it was easily large and rough enough to hide several armies.  Sir Essex had suggested sweeping from one end of the land to the other, an impossible task without an army of impossible size.  The raiders would have no trouble evading us if we tried, then striking in our rear and making us look like fools.  There was nothing to be gained by punching at nothing.  Instead, I’d batten down the hatches and set out to secure everything I could, then start putting pressure on the raiders. 

If they’re tribesmen, they might just vanish back into the desert, I thought.  But if they’re raiders from a warlord, they’ll need to hit us again, just to embarrass us.

“Right now, we can secure our people,” I said, finally.  I made a mental note to bring more supplies next time, then hand them out to the locals.  The good thing about muskets, even primitive ones, is that they don’t require years of training.  I couldn’t turn the towns and villages into castles, but I could make the raiders think twice about picking on them.  “And then we’ll see if we can chase them down.”

I doubted it would work perfectly – and I remembered, all too well, what had happened to Custer – but it would suffice.  I hoped.  The deployment served more than one purpose.  It would give my men much needed experience, as well as a chance to get used to working with the locals rather than knocking them about and stealing their stuff.  And if we didn’t find the raiders, I’d at least be able to claim we scared them off.  Who knew?  It might even be true.

Four days later, we found out it wasn’t.

Her Majesty’s Warlord 18-19

Chapter Eighteen

“I hope you’re certain,” Princess Helen said, later in the day.  “If you’re wrong …”

I nodded.  I’d had the printer and his apprentices interrogated repeatedly, poking and prodding at their story to make sure it was, as far as they knew, the truth.  The truth spells had been tested and retested, time and time again, just to make sure they could only speak the truth … as they knew it.  I’d gone through the records and traced the money as best as I could, although that hadn’t been easy.  Lord Thurston had either been incredibly careless – and that wouldn’t have been a surprise, given how many noblemen believed themselves immune to consequences – or someone was trying to frame him.  I didn’t need to recall stories about magicians disguising themselves to imagine ways someone could pretend to be Lord Thurston, particularly to a mark who’d never met the real lord.  Hell, the only thing that made me certain I had the right man was the sheer carelessness he’d displayed.  A person trying to frame him would have been a little more careful, right?

And the printer and his staff weren’t that careless about their backer, I thought.  They needed to know who was funding them and why.

My lips twitched in cold amusement.  The printer had wanted – of course – to know who he was dealing with, if only so he could pass the blame up the chain if something went wrong.  He’d had Lord Thurston’s agents shadowed, watching them from a safe distance as they made their way back to their master’s mansion.  I was surprised the lord hadn’t realised his agent might be followed, although I supposed it wasn’t that bad a mistake.  A commoner on the wrong side of the river would draw the wrong sort of attention from the guards.  Lord Thurston might have assumed the shadow couldn’t get across the bridges and therefore couldn’t follow the agent to his final destination.  Idiot.  It wasn’t as if everyone had servants living on the premises.

I put the thought out of my mind, hardening my heart as I followed the princess into the council chambers.  The broadsheets had been banned, of course; the king, against my advice, had sent out a missive ordering them rounded up and burnt, without being read first.  It had been a mistake.  How could anyone be sure they were burning the right thing without reading it to make sure, which – combined with the king’s orders – gave the lies credence?  I understood the king’s feelings – if I had a daughter, and someone lied about her like that, I would have spent hours rearranging his face – but it really had been a mistake.  He couldn’t have given the lies more credibility if he’d stood up and told the world they were true.

And telling them the stories were true might have been taken for a lie, I thought.  The old joke haunted me.  The government and the media only pretend to tell us the truth and we only pretend to believe them.

The councillors watched us avidly.  I doubted many of them believed the lies, not in their heart of hearts, but it didn’t matter.  They’d use them to beat the princess’s polices to death regardless.  I hated them in that moment, hated them with a passion I normally reserved for terrorists, bullies and their enablers.  Princess Helen had little real privacy, even in her bedchamber.  There was no way she could have sneaked away for even a few minutes, not without being noticed.  She could no more have had a decade-long affair with me than I could have jumped to the moon.  And yet … I ground my teeth.  If one of them dared to compliment me on seducing the princess, I was going to hurt him and to hell with the consequences.

My eyes met Lord Thurston’s.  He looked calm and composed, a little too calm for my peace of mind.  He looked like a man who’d just thrown a smart remark into the crowd and settled back to watch the chaos, a faint smirk drifting across his lips in a manner that suggested he couldn’t quite hide his delight.  I wondered, keeping my own temper in check, if he was causing trouble for the sake of it, or if he was embarking on another plan to undermine the princess’s position.  Did he hope the princess would marry him?  It was unlikely – the man was married, if I recalled correctly – but possible.  Or maybe he just hoped to be the kingmaker rather than the king.

I felt another surge of hatred as the room quietened.  I’d never liked the subtle warfare between staff officers, bureaucrats, and politicians, the sneaky jostling for position that consumed their energies and diverted them from their actual job.  It was no skin off my nose who took the lead, who got precedence, who spoke first or last … and yet, it meant the world to them.  There were diplomats who could be relied upon to waste time arguing over the shape of the table, spending months haggling over minor points while the important issues languished.  And yet … I’d spent enough time as a staff officer to read the room.  The princess – and, by extension, her father and myself – had lost face.  It was subtle, barely detectable, but it was there. 

The king spoke, calmly.  I tried not to wince.  This was a time to be firm, to assert authority over his councillors … I reminded myself, not for the first time, that the king had very little authority.  He hadn’t even been able to choose his councillors.  I sighed inwardly.  The men were too powerful to just ignore, but that didn’t mean he had to consult them on each and every matter crossing his desk.  Or maybe he did.  He could try to build up a staff of officers loyal only to him, but with powerful aristocrats demanding positions of responsibility and prestige there were few postings he could offer to his loyalists.  And even if he did, who’d listen to them?  The lords knew who called the shots.

Perhaps we need to invent a few new posts, I mused.  Call someone the Most High General and drown him in honours, in hope he doesn’t notice he has no real authority.

I put the thought out of my mind as the king called on me.  The councillors studied me thoughtfully.  I wondered what was going through their minds.  They’d never liked me, and I was certain they didn’t believe the stories, but … did they think I was about to be fired?  Or told to report to the block for my execution?  It was certainly possible.  I had few illusions.  One of the reasons the princess had hired me, rather than someone with a pedigree that stretched back into the mists of time, was that she could get rid of me if I proved a burden.  I silently marked my exit, checking my plans for a hasty departure.  If they did try to get rid of me, I intended to be gone well before they could send for the headsman.

“This morning, I was awoken to news of the most horrifying kind,” I said.  I did my best to sound like a judge, regretful and yet firm about the need for a convicted man to face his punishment.  “Our Crown Princess, the Heir to His Majesty’s Throne, had been slandered in the most terrible fashion.  Her image was defamed.  Her conduct was maligned.  Her reputation, the most important thing in a young woman’s position, was dragged through the shit!  And the cowards didn’t even have the guts to stand up and sign their names to their libels!”

I let my words hang in the air.  Perhaps I was laying it on a little thick.  Perhaps not.  I wanted them to understand, to feel the cowardice shown by the broadsheet writers.  They didn’t have the concept of internet trolls, of people who were brave only as long as they remained anonymous, but they understood cowards.  I wanted them to know the writers were cowards who didn’t even have the nerve to stand in front of the palace gates and shout their smears at the walls.  The fact it would have led, rapidly and inevitably, to their arrest and execution was beside the point.

“It could not be borne,” I said.  “How could it?  Imagine it was your wife who was being defamed in such a manner!  Imagine it was your daughter, who was being smeared by cowardly shits!  Imagine it was someone – anyone – who could not counter the lies, who couldn’t say anything without it being taken as proof the lies were actually true!  The cowardly shits defamed your princess, cowardly lying about her in a pitiful bid to destroy her reputation.  Their lies are the lies of cowards!”

I kept using that word.  I wanted it at the front of their minds, even as I lowered my voice.

“I investigated.  The broadsheets had been distributed by street urchins.  I found some of the little brats and made them talk.  They told me they’d been hired by a printer to distribute the lies right across the town.  I followed their directions and raided the printer’s shop, hidden under a pub.  And I found more than enough evidence to confirm the cowardly shits had used that printing shop.  I found broadsheets that were, as impossible as it might seem, even worse than the ones that had already been distributed.  The cowardly shits, not content with smearing the princess, intended to do far worse.”

I paused.  It sounded as if I’d done everything myself, without Violet or Fallon or anyone else.  It was probably better that way.  If something went badly wrong, if I found the tables turned, they’d have a chance to escape if they lost my patronage.  I hoped so, anyway.  The locals might say that ‘I was only following orders’ excused everything, something I found hard to accept, but I doubted they’d extend such courtesy to my people.  They might simply be executed, pour décourager les autres.  Sigmund might get away, on the grounds I’d inherited him along with the mansion.  I wasn’t sure about the others.

“I followed the money,” I said, looking at Lord Thurston.  He was still smiling, somehow, but there was an edge to it that suggested he’d started to realise something had gone wrong.  “The printer could not have afforded his printing press, let alone the services of a magician, without a backer.  Nor would he be willing to smear Her Highness unless he thought someone would protect him, in the face of the princess’s anger.  It was surprisingly easy for him to trace his backer.”

Lord Thurston stopped smiling.  I met his eyes and grinned, savagely.  He flinched.  I allowed myself a moment of pure relief.  I’d wondered, despite everything, if I’d fallen for an elaborate con.  Lord Thurston had enemies, people powerful and determined enough to frame him for slandering the princess.  They would come out ahead, whatever happened.  And no one would ever know what they’d done.

“We checked and rechecked everything,” I said, drawing out the moment as long as possible.  “The printer and his staff were interrogated in the harshest possible manner.  They could not conceal anything from us.  We have their backers.  We have the people who funded the pub, and the printer’s den, and who gave orders to the City Guard to leave it strictly alone.  It was, after all, an unlicenced printing shop.  We know who did it.  We know who slandered the princess.”

Lord Thurston twitched.  I smirked.

“Lord Thurston,” I said, coolly.  “Do you have anything you want to say to us?”

He reddened, but said nothing.  I met his eyes, hoping he’d say something to incriminate himself.  It would be difficult to prove in a court of law … if, of course, there was such a thing in the kingdom.  Sure, Lord Thurston had provided the money – and given orders to the guardsmen – but it wasn’t quite proof he’d backed the broadsheets.  If he kept his cool, if he was careful to ensure there was reasonable doubt, he might just get away with it.  His enemies wouldn’t jump on him if they thought he might survive and recover, then take revenge. 

“You coward.”  I let the word hang in the air, a challenge he could hardly ignore.  “You lied about the princess, your future queen.  You slandered her, in front of the entire city.  Everyone, from the highest to the lowest, heard your lies.  Your cowardly lies.  You didn’t even have the nerve to sign your name to the lies.  You cowardly shit!”

Lord Thurston clenched his fists.  “You dare …?”

I allowed my smile to turn savage.  He clearly wasn’t used to thinking on his feet.  He could still get out of it, if he threw the printer and his agent under the bus.  It wouldn’t be easy – the odds were good his agent was a relative, perhaps even a bastard son – but it could be done, for the good of his family.  And yet … even that would make him look weak and careless in front of his peers.  His prestige would take a severe blow.

“You coward,” I taunted.  A rustle ran around the room.  “You can’t even face up to your crimes like a man.”

Lord Thurston glowered at me.  “You are a mercenary,” he said, in the sort of tone one might use to describe a child molester.  “You dare lie about me?”

“You dared to lie about your princess,” I pointed out, snidely.  “You couldn’t come out and say it, could you?  You had to knife her in the back.”

A rustle ran around the chamber.  There wasn’t a one of them who hadn’t participated in underhand dealings, from time to time.  I would be astonished if there was even one who didn’t have blood- literal blood – on his hands.  Everyone knew the truth, no matter how much they denied it.  And yet, they claimed otherwise.  They pretended they were men of honour.  There was no way they could look away from Lord Thurston now.  They had to condemn him if they wanted to uphold the lie.

Lord Thurston stood.  “You have lied about me,” he said.  His voice was shaking with rage.  “Worse, you have called me a coward.  And yet, you have done it in council, in a place where I am forbidden to teach you a lesson you so richly deserve. You would not dare to say such lies in public.”

I grinned.  “Want to step outside?”

The council snickered.  Lord Thurston turned purple.

“I call challenge upon you, to meet me in the arena to face the test of swords,” Lord Thurston said, sharply.  “My second will call upon yours to make the arrangements.  If you refuse my challenge, you will be known as a base and cowardly dog and banished from the kingdom forthwith.  And may the best man win.”

He turned and stalked out of the chamber, closing the door behind him.  I cursed under my breath as the councillors started to chatter amongst themselves, some discussing the evidence while others – unconcerned about guilt or innocence – were placing bets.  Lord Thurston had turned our plans upside down.  We’d intended to force him into a position where he’d have to resign and go into exile, surrendering his power and position in exchange for his life.  We hadn’t seen the challenge coming.  In hindsight, I reflected as the king brought the meeting to a close, that had been a mistake.  A bad one.

“That …”  Helen glared at the table as soon as the councillors were gone.  If her father hadn’t been there, I was sure she would have been swearing like a trooper who’d just heard all leave had been cancelled.  “That …”

She stood and started to pace the room.  I understood her frustration.  It would take time to arrange the duel and … oh, I shared her frustration.  If Lord Thurston won, it would be taken as a sign of either innocence or godly approval.  There would certainly be people willing to believe, or pretend to believe, it was one or the other.  If he lost … would it really prove his guilt?  I could easily imagine people claiming he’d merely lost to a mercenary blademaster, something that proved nothing beyond me being a better swordsman.  Hell, I probably wasn’t.  I’d trained on rifles and pistols and weapons unimaginable to my opponent.  He’d had a sword put in his hand, as soon as he’d grown big enough to carry it.

My mind raced.  I could have the bastard assassinated.  God knew I’d be much more careful about the plans than Lord Thurston himself.  He clearly hadn’t thought about how best to hide his involvement.  I’d done better, when I’d funded underground and unlicenced broadsheets.  And yet … they’d have me interrogated under truth spells, if Lord Thurston accidentally and yet brutally cut his head off while shaving.  A strong wizard might be able to defeat a truth spell, without making it obvious.  I couldn’t.  I’d tried, more than once.  It simply wasn’t possible.

“We have time,” I said.  “How long can he delay the duel?”

“He issued the challenge in council,” the king said, quietly.  “He’ll have to send his second to yours within the day, with a formal written challenge.  Then … a couple of weeks, no more, unless something happens.  I dare say he’d try to set the date as quickly as possible.  The longer the delay, the greater the chance the stories will spread out of control.”

I nodded.  Lord Thurston couldn’t prove I’d lied about him.  I hadn’t.  But if he won the duel, people would keep their mouths shut if they knew what was good for them.  I silently complimented the bastard on his quick thinking.  He might not come out smelling like roses, but … he wouldn’t stink of shit either.  No one would dare repeat the charges in public.

“I’ll meet him soon,” I said, trying to sound confident.  I wasn’t.  I’d had swordfighting lessons, but I was no blademaster.  “And between now and then, I’d better start practicing for the duel.”

Chapter Nineteen

“We are very clear on the importance of cleanliness,” Sister Anabella told me.  “We have whipped, then dismissed, people who ignore our strictures.”

I nodded as I looked around the vast hall.  It was a strange place, a combination of soup kitchen, school and hospital.  One section held students – male and female, young and old – learning their letters, another had young girls being shown how to perform basic medical procedures, a third had older women cooking on communal stoves, then sharing their meals with their families before washing up the tools for the next set of users.  I allowed myself a tight smile.  I’d never realised, not until I’d wound up in Damansara, that the poor often didn’t have any kitchens, to add to everything else they lacked.  Now, thankfully, I could do something about it.

Sister Anabella kept talking, telling me everything the Nightingales had done to make the world – or at least this small part of it – a better place.  I listened carefully, giving her my full attention.  She was a bastard daughter, raised with her father’s family and yet not quite one of them.  She’d embraced the Nightingales with both hands and, when so many noblewomen had backed out when it became clear it was real work, had risen quickly within the order.  I suspected she was delighted to have a chance to show what she could do, particularly as the Nightingales were not supposed to care about one’s birth.  She had earned her place, rather than inheriting it.  I hoped – prayed – the order wouldn’t become warped and twisted as it grew older.  Right now, it was as flexible as the average start-up industry.  Later, it would have to manage the transition to a steady-state organisation without becoming rigid in its thinking.  I could name a dozen companies that had destroyed themselves through not thinking about the need to remain agile, even as they became so deeply embedded in the world it was hard to imagine a world without them …

“We have around fifty new volunteers at this place alone,” Sister Anabella continued, waving towards the young women studying medicine.  “Most of them are from the poorer parts of the city, but some are nobility.  A few may even make it.  I’ve had to send a number to the other kitchens, to ensure they do the scut work before graduating into medicine.”

I nodded.  “Any problems?”

“A few.”  Sister Anabella’s lips thinned.  “A couple of fathers, unwilling to let their daughters take the oaths and join us.  Stepmothers, who practically threw their stepdaughters at us even though the poor girls didn’t want to join.  Others … who don’t believe us when we tell them how important it is to wash everything, from top to bottom.  Or think we intend to make them pay for our services, sooner or later.  There were even a handful of families who refused to come for food, for fear it might be poisoned.  And …”

She scowled.  “There was a girl who tried to lord her birth over everyone else,” she admitted, curtly.  “And then she had the nerve to complain when I dismissed her.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.  Too many noblewomen had joined, at least at first, because it was either fashionable or a chance to wield real authority.  The former had often bowed out very quickly, the latter had been reluctant to learn to take orders as well as give them.  I could understand their feelings – they might be de facto princesses, but they lived in gilded cages and had very little say in their own lives – without condoning them.  “Did her family make a fuss?”

“No.”  Sister Anabella shook her head.  “I think they’re waiting for the duel.”

I groaned, inwardly.  Two days had passed since Lord Thurston had issued his challenge, since he’d sent his second around to arrange the details.  In that time, every broadsheet in the city – and every herald and bardic singer – had had its say, from staid articles condemning the duel without ever addressing the issues behind it to screeds supporting me, or him, or the princess, or simply demanding that every last member of the aristocracy duelled to the death.  I’d made sure to plant some stories myself, particularly from my unlicenced printers.  Even if Lord Thurston won the duel, everyone would know he’d been a coward who’d tried to destroy the princess’s reputation.  I hoped some of that shit would stick.  God knew, there’d be people who wanted it to.

“We’ll see,” I said. 

I sighed as she led me through the rest of the building.  I was mildly surprised Lord Thurston hadn’t demanded we hold the duel at once.  It would have given him his best chance of victory.  I’d spent hours training, to the point my arms and legs ached worse than my first day at boot camp, and I knew I was getting better with a blade.  Perhaps he hoped I’d run.  He was going to be disappointed.  I’d taken some precautions, and ensured my staff had money so they could escape if I lost, but I had no intention of running.  I wanted to kill him.  And I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d run. 

And it would have cost me everything, I thought.  Where would I have gone?

I felt a twinge of … something … I didn’t want to look at too closely.  A year ago, I’d had nothing tying me down.  I could have wandered the world, singing for my supper – more accurately, they would have paid me to stop singing – perhaps even gone looking for my mystery predecessor.  Now, I had friends and followers and an establishment of my own … as long as I could keep it.  Too many things, from the Nightingales to land and army reform, depended on me being in place to keep them going, at least until they snowballed too far too stop.  I was pretty damn sure Lord Thurston was trying to stop them before it was too late.  What else could explain the risk he’d taken?

“The major problem is the fallen women,” Sister Anabella said.  “They’ve been working hard, as I told my superiors, but some of them find it hard to leave their bad habits in the past and others are being harassed, just for leaving their pimps and coming here.”

“I don’t think anyone will change their habits overnight,” I said.  I’d once watched a movie where former slaves went to military training and became soldiers overnight.  It was never that easy to leave the past behind and the producers should have known it, although I understood the point of a training montage.  “Are they causing problems for you?”

“Most of them, no,” Sister Anabella said.  “But the ones who do cause big problems.”

I nodded.  Too many women had had no choice, only a few short months ago, but to sell their bodies if they wanted to survive.  The brothels took them in, used them up and then cast them out to die.  The poor women were often blamed for their actions, as if they’d had a choice.  They were looked down upon by other women, who never stopped to think it could have easily been them condemned to choose between selling themselves and death.  The Nightingales were at least trying to do something about it, offering the fallen women a chance to become something better, but …

“If they are responsible for the problems, then deal with them,” I told her.  “If they are being harassed by their former pimps, have the pimps dealt with instead.”

Sister Anabella nodded, as if she’d been given the keys to the kingdom.  I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.  I might have to arrange guards for the schools and kitchens, perhaps drawing on trained soldiers.  I’d been in the City Guard.  The guardsmen tended to look the other way when pimps were involved, simply because they wanted free sessions in the brothel.  Which way would they jump, if they had to choose?  I suspected they would do their best not to make a choice, as long as that was an option.

“We have been teaching the girls to sew and repair clothes,” Sister Anabella explained.  “It may even bring in a small profit, one of these days.”

“Make sure they keep most of their earnings,” I said.  “We don’t want to discourage them.”

Sister Anabella nodded once again.  I doubted she really understood.  She had never had to earn her keep, not in her entire life.  She’d been luckier than most bastard children … I wondered, idly, if she appreciated it.  Perhaps, perhaps not.  Who knew?  It wasn’t something I could ask.

I finished my tour, then left.  The soup kitchen and schooling program was going well, better than I’d expected.  I’d figured there’d be more bumps along the way.  It wasn’t easy to convince people who were set in their ways to change, not when the old ways had kept them alive.  Hell, it was hard enough telling them to boil water and use soap when they washed and everything else I’d taken for granted only a couple of years ago.  If nothing else, making sure everything was reasonably clean would lead to one hell of a population boom shortly.

And we’ll have to be ready for that too, I mused, as I strode up the street.  We’ll need to start overwhelming the warlords, one by one, and ensuring people have the opportunities they need to flourish.

I sighed inwardly.  A surplus of young and angry males wasn’t good for any society, if those young men had no hope of a future.  I’d seen too much evidence of it, from incels in the United States to insurgents and terrorists in the Middle East.  It was easy to dismiss such concerns, to treat them as entitled pathetic failures in life, but it was a mistake.  I’d been a young man.  It was easy to become lost in resentment, to become so focused on one’s own feelings that you lost sight of the fact other people had feelings too.  Right now, there was an undertone of resentment and class hatred running through the city.  It was only going to get worse if no one did anything about it.

The streets seemed a little cleaner, I noted.  The locals were poor, but they weren’t right at the bottom.  They’d taken the warnings about cleaning their streets to heart.  I suspected they’d also started gathering manure and selling it to the factories, something that both disgusted and amused me.  It was astonishing to think people would actually pay for shit – it wasn’t as if there was a shortage – but they would.  And besides, it helped keep the streets cleaner.  It …

I tensed as my instincts sounded the alert.  The streets were quiet.  Too quiet.  My hand dropped to my pistol as the back of my neck tingled, senses honed in combat warning me that I was being watched by unfriendly eyes.  I kicked myself, mentally, for getting lost in my own thoughts.  My old sergeant would have done worse, if he’d known.  I forced myself to keep moving, readying myself to dodge a threat as soon as it materialised.  Thankfully, there were no sniper rifles here.  I’d got weaponsmiths working on newer and better rifles, but – right now – the safest person in the area was probably the target.  They were just too inaccurate.

A pistol boomed.  A bullet snapped through the air, missing me easily.  I darted forward, drawing my sword in one hand and my pistol with the other as I ran into the alleyway.  A man stood there, holding a flintlock in one hand and a nasty-looking black dagger in the other.  He dropped the flintlock as I came at him and raised the dagger.  It glinted oddly, as if the light was bending around it, as if my eyes didn’t quite believe it was there.  A charmed blade.  Wonderful.  I stabbed with my sword, a move that would probably get me killed if I tried it on someone who knew what he was doing, and stuck him in the neck.  He gurgled and fell forward, blood pouring from his wound.  I eyed him warily as the knife hit the ground and shattered, his body falling beside it.  I doubted he was faking it – I had felt my blade slice his skin – but my instincts were warning me to be careful.  Something wasn’t right ..

No, something was behind me.  I ducked as another dagger slashed through the air, passing through where my head had been only a few short seconds ago, then threw myself backwards and crashed into my assailant.  The dagger went flying.  I felt him strike me in the back.  It was sore, but hardly enough to slow me down.  He hit the ground, me on top of him.  I rolled over, came upright and slammed my fist into his chest.  He grunted, the breath bursting out of his lungs.  I held him down, pressing my hand against his neck.  He was strong, no doubt about it, but he couldn’t do much while I was braced to crush his throat.  A smart man would hold still and wait for a chance to break free.

I frisked him quickly with my other hand.  His clothes were simple, without any livery, but they were clearly expensive.  He had combat leathers under his shirt and trousers, no match for real armour yet capable of providing a surprising amount of protection.  I’d been lucky to knock the breath out of him.  He had a small money pouch attached to his belt, enough coin to bribe a guardsman or deter a thief … or to pay an assassin.  My mind raced.  Who’d sent him?  Lord Thurston?  What would happen to him if I was assassinated before the duel?  Would he be interrogated?  Or would everyone just breathe a sigh of relief and move on?

Well, you did call him a cowardly shit, my thoughts mocked me.  I guess you were right.

“Two options,” I growled.  “You can tell me who hired you or I push down.  Hard.”

He stared at me.  I saw him weighing his options, wheels churning behind his eyes.  I didn’t have a magician with me, so he’d expect me to resort to torture.  He had to be trying to decide if he could hold out long enough to sell me a lie.  Perhaps he could.  I’d seen men break down and beg to be allowed to talk, and others hold out even after the gloves were taken off and the interrogators resorted to extreme measures.  I didn’t give him time to think.  Instead, I pushed down on his neck, slowly shifting my weight to threaten to crush his windpipe.

“Well?”  I kept my voice cold, leaving him in no doubt he was on the verge of certain death.  “What’s it to be?”

“I don’t know him,” the man said, his words coming out so fast they practically tripped over themselves.  “He was a toff!  He came to the Rabid Wolf and hired us.  Gave us twenty gold each and the promise of a hundred, if we killed you and made it look like a mugging.  He said …”

I cut him off by pressing down.  “What did he look like?”

“I don’t know!  He wore a glamour!  He went up to the girls and never came down …”

Or he adjusted his glamour and simply walked out the back door, I thought, coldly.  Lord Thurston’s agent, if it was his agent, had been a little more careful this time.  The Rabid Wolf … I’d never been there, but I’d heard the stories.  A wretched hive of scum and villainy that made the average wretched hive look like a child’s playground.  And I’ll bet good money he never intended to pay you the rest of the money, after you returned victorious.

I stared down at my prisoner, keeping my hand firmly in place.  Should I kill him?  I had no qualms about killing someone who was trying to kill me, but murdering an unarmed and helpless prisoner went against the grain.  There was no way I could take him prisoner nor let him go without unacceptable risk.  He might try to stab me in the back or even come at me later, perhaps with a better plan.  I briefly considered knocking him out and dragging him to the guards, but how long would he remain a prisoner?  His paymaster might pay to get him released, or sent to the hangman before he could talk.

“If I let you go, you’ll have an hour or two to get out of the city,” I told him.  “I’ll be making a full report.  Your actions will be deemed treason.  The Guard will be looking for you.  You will not be released if you are caught.  Do you understand me?”

I saw his face fall.  Treason wasn’t a harmless little prank.  The Guard would start searching for him in earnest, bringing the heat to anyone who might have the slightest idea who he was and where he might be.  There was no honour amongst thieves, not when said thieves were getting their collars felt by the cops.  The patrons of the Rabid Wolf would fall over themselves to betray the target, just to get the guardsmen out before they lowered the tone still further.  His only hope of escaping arrest and a quick march to the headsman was to run as fast and as far as he could. 

“Yes,” he said.

I took his money pouch and weapons, more out of spite than greed, then lifted my hand and smacked the side of his head.  He’d be dazed, just long enough for me to put some distance between us.  If he was smart, he’d search the dead body and then start running before the guardsmen came looking for him.  Not that I had any intention of actually reporting him to anyone.  Right now, I had other problems.

And if nothing seems to come of it, I thought as I hurried away, Lord Thurston or whoever was actually behind the assassins will never be sure what really happened today.

Her Majesty’s Warlord 17-18

Chapter Sixteen

I should have expected trouble.  I should have expected the recall back to the city.  But, somehow, it came as a surprise.

The message was blunt, without the frills I’d come to expect from the locals.  Come back now.  Helen.  I briefly considered taking my horse, and as much money as I could stuff in my saddlebags, and setting off into the unknown before deciding it would be better to return to the city and find out what was actually happening.  Besides, there were too many people who depended on me now.  I’d served under leaders who, when the going got tough, got going.  I had never trusted or respected those bastards and the last thing I wanted was to wind up like them.  My subordinates would start looking out for their own interests and desert me so quickly my ears would be ringing with sonic booms.

I checked the messages, mundane and magical, from Roxanna as we made our slow way back to the city.  There was nothing to suggest why I’d been called back in a hurry, no warlords shifting their forces onto the offensive, no nomad raiders harrying farmers and traders as they made their slow way down the few ancient roads that crisscrossed the desert.  I feared it had something to do with my work on the estate, even though – according to the law – I was the sole master of my domains.  I did my best to consider the possibilities, then put them out of my mind as we made our way home.  I’d find out soon enough.  Until then, there was nothing to be gained by worrying about it.

The city felt reassuringly normal as we galloped through the gates, down the roads, across the river and into the mansion.  Sigmund greeted us with a florid bow, suggesting he – at least – didn’t know any reason I should be shunned or disrespected.  The man was a social trimmer, I’d discovered.  He’d be at my service until I fell from grace, whereupon he’d shift his loyalties to whoever took my place.  I didn’t really blame him, although I found it hard to trust him.  Choosing a side was always dangerous, even when the consequences were merely career-destroying.  If he was too loyal to me, and I found myself on the losing side, he’d be executed too.

“There’s a message from the palace,” Sigmund informed me.  “You are to report there in four hours.”

I nodded, without a trace of the irritation a local-born nobleman would show.  They would have objected loudly to having to go to the palace at once, without even a day or two to recover from the long ride across the country.  I’d been in worse places.  I knew how to ride to the sound of the guns, fight for hours, and then ride back again … I smiled in cold amusement.  Someone might have thought they were putting me in my place, but they’d given me time to shower and shave and answer the call of nature.  My old drill instructors would say they were coddling me.  And they would have had a point.

Fallon caught my eye.  “Do you want me to come with you?”

I shook my head, ignoring the brief twitch of disapproval that crossed Sigmund’s face.  He didn’t like Fallon, for reasons I didn’t fully understand.  I didn’t care either, as long as he behaved himself.  Trying to force people to be inclusive is a recipe for exclusion.  I’d learnt that lesson in school, then the army.  The trick was to manipulate people into working together, rather than forcing them.  They’d become more inclusive without ever realising how much their attitudes had changed.

“I’ll go alone,” I said, seriously.  I didn’t need a small army of guards to show off my position.  Besides, Helen would see it as disrespectful.  It was bad enough half the councillors insisting on bringing enough bodyguards to mount a small coup.  “You get some rest.  I’ll see you later.”

Fallon dropped a curtsey, then hurried off.  I followed at a more sedate pace, carefully checking the tell-tales I’d left behind as I entered my rooms.  The maids had washed the sheets and laid out new clothes, but left the locked drawers and cabinets strictly alone.  I allowed myself a moment of relief as I headed into the shower to wash, then change clothes.  It still felt weird to have someone clean my room for me, let alone treat my room as communal territory.  I might be the lord and master of the mansion, with the power of life and death over my servants, but I had very little privacy.  I dreaded to think how many of my servants might be in enemy pay.  If I was running an op against me, bribing the servants to turn them into spies would be the very first thing I’d do.

I dismissed the thought as I changed into a simple outfit, for a given value of simple, attached my sword to my belt and checked my weapons.  It felt odd to carry a sword too, even after all this time.  I looked at myself in the mirror and rolled my eyes – I looked like a fantasy warrior out of an absurd television show, my clothes so bright no one could possibly miss me in a crowd – then shrugged.  It was what the locals wanted, I supposed.  I was in no position to challenge it, not yet.  Besides, if I had to run, I could slip off my shirt and trousers and be instantly anonymous.  My underclothes were decent and, more importantly, something akin to what the average commoner would wear.

Clothes make the man, I reminded myself, as I walked to the palace.  Or so they believe.

The thought made me smile.  Back home, wearing a military or police uniform didn’t mean you were in the military or a serving police officer.  Here, wearing aristocratic clothes marked you as an aristocrat.  A commoner who wore an outfit like mine would be mistaken for an aristocrat, at least until he let his story get too specific.  I’d heard all sorts of rumours, back in Damansara, about commoners who’d posed as nobles, artfully exploiting the aristocratic reluctance to admit ignorance about anything.  The stories had all been officially denied, which suggested there was some truth in them.  Rupert had admitted as much.

My smile grew wider as I walked into the council chamber, despite a growing sense I was alone and isolated.  Helen and her father nodded to me, but showed no other sign of familiarity or support.  I wasn’t too surprised – there were limits to their power, limits that would remain until I knocked the army into shape – but I couldn’t help finding it a little disconcerting.  Helen had recruited me, after all.  Surely, she should offer me a little more public support.  But she wouldn’t, not if it meant undermining her position.  I didn’t let my dismay show on my face.  There were so many eyes watching me that I was sure one of them would spot any hint of weakness, spurring my enemies to jump on me.

The king motioned for the doors to close, which they did with an ominous thud.  I schooled my face into immobility as the table quietened, waiting to see who’d speak first.  The king should always take the lead, I’d been told, but I’d attended enough meetings to know he was frequently disrespected by his councillors.  The bastards were the poster children for disloyal councillors, men who’d turn on their nominal leader and his daughter in a heartbeat if they thought it was in their best interests.  And there was nothing – for the moment – that the king could do about it.

“We have called you here to answer serious charges,” Lord Daladier said.  The Councillor of State fixed me with a stern look, something that might have been intimidating if I hadn’t been on the battlefield, fighting wars none of the men in front of me could imagine.  “We have heard tell that you have been giving land to the peasants.”

I kept my face impassive as more and more councillors joined in, passing judgement on my land reform program before knowing anything about it.  I didn’t know who’d told them about the program, or why, but it was clear they didn’t know what was really going on.  Some seemed to believe I’d just surrendered everything to the commoners, others hinted – darkly – that I was shattering all precedent and threatening the very basis of the country itself.  I supposed the latter might have had a point, although not in the way they meant.  The country rested on a social structure that was rigid, so rigid it would remain unchanged until it was destroyed.  And I was threatening to change the structure beyond repair.

I didn’t break it, I thought, as the denunciations went on and on until they were repeating themselves time and time again.  And only time will tell if I made it better.

The king, eventually, called a halt.  I was mildly surprised he’d intervened so quickly.  It wasn’t as if everyone had had a chance to repeat themselves for a third time.  I’d been in more chaotic meetings back home, but at least the attendees hadn’t echoed each other quite so badly.  It was like listening to a mob of parrots, mindlessly parroting the same thing over and over again.  I understood what they were doing – it was important to show a degree of unity – but it was still irritating.  They could simply have muttered their approval, then shut up.

“Lord Elliot,” he said.  “Would you care to respond to these charges?”

I bit down the sarcastic remark that came to mind.  There hadn’t actually been any charges, merely a collection of accusations based on rumours … certainly, nothing that had been put into writing.  I’d learnt, very early on, that anyone who refused to put something in writing was unsure of himself, that a good test of their mettle was to demand they put pen to paper – or hand to keyboard – and actually wrote something that couldn’t be denied.  It was often a good way to shut someone up too, if they thought they might have to account for what they said.  Hell, just writing it down would often show them how stupid they were being and let them back off before it was too late.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, calmly.  “We have a major problem, in that we do not produce enough food to keep the kingdom fed, let alone support the army.  Our population is constantly on the brink of starvation.  We are dependent on food imported from warlord-held territories and that food can be cut off very easily, leaving us at their mercy.  It has happened before and it will happen again.  By reorganising the farmlands, I hope to produce more food over the next few years, which will both save us from being dependent on the warlords and let us support a far larger army.”

Lord Fulbright snorted.  “By giving the peasants your patrimony?”

A rustle ran around the table.  Lord Fulbright glared them into silence, then continued.  “I have it on good authority that you have given the peasants your lands,” he said.  “My peasants are already grumbling, demanding that I share my lands with them too.  How dare you, sir?  How dare you?”

What, already?  I doubted he was telling the truth.  Peasants are naturally conservative.  They have to be.  Embracing new ideas could be the kiss of death, if the ideas looked good on paper yet didn’t work in the real world.  I’d calculated it would take at least a year or two before the benefits became obvious,  by which point it would be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle.  Are you telling the truth, or are you just exaggerating for effect?

I leaned forward, pretending to take him seriously.  “I have not given the peasants my lands,” I said, resisting the urge to say they weren’t really mine.  I had no hereditary claim to them and everyone at the table knew it.  “What I’ve done is allow them a greater share of the crops, if they produce more, and given them the freedom to look for newer and better ways to increase yield.  This will not only increase food production, but expand our tax base and allow us to support a far larger army.”

“And if there are ways to increase production,” Earl Marshall said, “why haven’t they used them already?”

Because you fucking idiots don’t let them keep more than the bare minimum, you stupid bastard, I thought.  My ancestors had been slaves.  I knew the stories.  Why bother working your ass off when someone else, someone who thought himself your owner, pocketed the rewards?  They could double or even triple their yield, in a year or two, if you actually rewarded them!

It took me a moment to compose myself, to keep my tones bland.  “They just need a little encouragement,” I said.  “And I have provided it.”

“Hah,” Earl Marshall said.  “Peasants are always lazy and shiftless.”

I met his eyes.  “Let me propose a wager,” I said.  “Give them a couple of years.  I bet a thousand golds that food production will double, perhaps even triple.  In fact” – I allowed my eyes to sweep the room – “let me offer the wager to everyone.  A thousand golds, that yield will double.”

They stared at me in utter shock.  The value of local money was never very well defined – the economy had yet to see the value of standardising everything – but a thousand golds, a thousand gold coins, was a major fortune.  It would be like betting a million dollars … more than that, really.  I was a wealthy man, by local standards, and yet I wasn’t sure I could afford to bet everyone.  And yet … I hid my amusement with an effort.  The majority couldn’t hope to pay, if they lost the bet.  I could use it as leverage later, if – when – I won.

“I’ll take that bet,” Sir Essex said.  The Master of Horse glared at me.  “In fact, I will double it.”

“Be my guest,” I said.

Helen’s face was so blank I knew she was trying not to laugh as I collected bets from a dozen councillors.  If I lost … it would be inconvenient, but she’d survive.  If I won … she’d have the pleasure of watching the councillors struggle to pay me, their credit sinking as it became clear they’d have to struggle to pay their debts.  I wondered, idly, how many of them were in hock to local loan sharks.  They’d have real problems if all their debts were called in at once.  Sure, they could refuse to pay, but no one would ever loan them anything ever again if they tried.  I rather hoped they would.

“The stories were spread by underground broadsheets,” Lord Daladier said.  The Councillor of State switched gears with impressive speed.  I told myself he’d be in deep shit when I won my bet.  “We need to do something about them.  And quickly.”

“Shut them down,” Sir Essex growled.  He glowered at the Lord Mayor.  “They are causing discontent.  Find them and shut them down.”

Sir Horace winced.  “The printing presses are very hard to find,” he said.  “My men have been unable to locate the underground presses, not in time to keep them from churning out their lies.”

“And you have been funding the broadsheets,” Sir Essex said, turning his gaze to me.  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I said nothing, meeting his eyes and holding them for a long cold moment.  Sir Essex was, in one sense, my social equal.  In another, he was my subordinate.  I wasn’t fool enough not to let my subordinates talk and express their opinions, but there were limits.  He stared back at me, unwilling or unable to admit he might have crossed a line.  I sighed, inwardly.  It wasn’t easy to learn how to take criticism, but it wasn’t easy to learn how to give it either.  Talking to someone as though they were an idiot was the quickest way to get them to reject your advice, if they didn’t fire you first.  Their resentment would overwhelm their common sense.

“The printing press is here to stay,” I told him.  “There is no hope of banning them from the city, let alone the country.  We can make life harder for the printers themselves, but we can’t stop them.  Worse, we will be unable to counter their lies.  By funding broadsheets of my own, I can address the lies by countering them with truth.”

My truth, I added, silently.  My official broadsheets were so carefully written to follow the party line they’d make the average communist blush.  The unofficial ones were much more truthful.  And you won’t even see how they’ll change the world until it is too late.

I smiled as I addressed the table.  “We will challenge the wild stories and break them down.  We will explain what is really happening, ensuring that wild rumours do not spread out of control.  And then we will regain a degree of control.”

“You think you can turn poachers into gamekeepers,” Lord Hatcher said.  “Do you think the Levellers will be impressed with your broadsheets?”

“My Lord.”  I chose my next words very carefully.  “If we refuse to discuss certain issues, and punish people for daring to suggest they should be discussed, we will cede control over the debate to people who do not have our best interests in mind.  We cannot keep the broadsheets from spreading.  The mere act of trying will give them credibility.  The more we crack down, the more people will believe their lies are actually true.  We need to address the lies openly, knocking them down one by one.”

“And when you lose your bet,” Sir Essex said, “will you put that in the broadsheets?”

I allowed myself a light smile.  “Will you let me refuse?”

He smiled back.  I sighed, inwardly, as the discussion moved to other things.  I’d expected resistance to the land reform program, but not so quickly.  Who was pulling the strings?  Who was trying to rally resistance now, rather than waiting?  Someone with enough experience to know about other land reform programs, like the one in Zangaria?  Or … or what?  I had the unpleasant feeling that the council meeting was just the first volley in an undeclared war.

And, as it happened, I didn’t have to wait long for the second.

Chapter Seventeen

The mansion didn’t really feel like home.

It was like the White House, in a sense.  It wasn’t just the President’s residence, as long as he remained President, but the centre of government, with staffers going in and out of the building at all hours of the day.  The mansion was just the same.  I might have an entire floor to myself, but the rest of the building was occupied by my employees and servants.  Even the floor wasn’t wholly mine.  Fallon had a room near me, while the maids had alcoves within metres of my door.  My predecessor, apparently, had thrown fits when the maids didn’t arrive within a minute of him ringing the bell.  I found it hard to comprehend such a shitty mentality.

I slept lightly, my pistol under my pillow and a pair of daggers concealed by the side of the bed.  The mansion wasn’t precisely hostile territory, but I was uncomfortably aware the defences weren’t as strong as I would have preferred.  There were just too many people coming and going for the building to be really secure.  Fallon and her teachers had tightened the wards as much as possible, but they’d cautioned me they couldn’t be relied upon to keep out everyone.  They couldn’t read minds, apparently.  I rotated the guards, and paid them well, and hoped for the best while preparing for the worst.  If I had to sleep with one eye open, it was what I’d do.

The banging on the door shocked me out of a light sleep.  I grabbed the pistol as I said upright, bracing myself for everything from a lone assassin to a small army of men intent on kidnapping me.  It took me a moment to realise the banging was actually knocking, a very masculine knocking … I blinked, feeling a little discomforted.  Fallon and the maids were the only ones who disturbed me and, according to the clock, it was still too early for anyone to wake me.  I kept the pistol in my hand, concealed under the blankets, as I barked for the knocker to come in.  My eyes widened, very slightly, as Sigmund stepped into the room.  He looked deeply worried.  That worried me.

“My Lord,” Sigmund said, holding out a tray.  “This … this … this broadsheet was pushed into the mailbox, sometime last night.”

I frowned as I took the paper.  It was clear, right from the start, that it had been produced by an underground printer.  There was just a single sheet, rather than the folded collection of pages from a legitimate printing shop.  I cursed under my breath as I parsed out the words.  It talked about Princess Helen.  Princess Helen and me.  The writer wasn’t a very good speller, but he more than made up for it in imagination.  His detailed outline of everything I had – supposedly – done with the princess was staggering.  I’d read erotica that was less detailed and … I shook my head in grim amusement.  The writer was probably also a virgin.  At least one of the positions he described was physically impossible.

“I see,” I said, finally.

Sigmund nodded, gravely.  “I thought you should see it at once.”

I reread the paper, fighting down the urge to tear it into very little pieces.  There was no point.  The printer could have produced a few hundred copies, then hired street rats to distribute them before the first rays of sunlight brought the city back to life.  It was far too late to stop it.  By now, the stories would be spreading from one end of the city to the other.  I grimaced in distaste.  It meant very little to me, but Princess Helen would be outraged.  If people believed the stories …

They will, I thought, grimly.  They’ll want to believe.

My thoughts raced.  It was probably too late to put the genie back in the bottle – my earlier thoughts came back to haunt me, mocking me – but we could do something to teach the printer a lesson, perhaps even discredit the stories before they spread any further.  We couldn’t prove Helen hadn’t lost her virginity to me – there were spells to repair a broken maidenhead, apparently – yet if we could put the printer on trial for slandering the princess, we might be able to limit the damage.  I cursed, again, as I stood, Sigmund politely averting his eyes.  I needed to act fast.  It wasn’t going to be easy.

“Bring me Kava,” I ordered.  “Bring it to the office.  And then wake Violet and tell her to meet me there in thirty minutes.”

Sigmund’s lips thinned – he really didn’t like Violet – but he bowed and obeyed.  I hurried into the shower and washed quickly, trying to come up with a plan.  I’d have to send a message to the princess, if she didn’t already know what was happening, and it would be better if I was able to suggest we were already working on it.  She was helpless to react herself, damn it.  I had to do something for her.

A prince would probably find the broadsheet to be nothing more than truly absurd flattery, I reflected.  I’d met too many nobles who boasted of their sexual prowess in a manner that would make a frat boy blush.  But for her, the article could be the kiss of death.

I scowled as I stepped back into the bedroom, dressed quickly and made my way down to the office.  The article wasn’t true.  I was pretty sure I would have noticed having sex with her, certainly in a manner that would leave us both crippled or dead.  And yet, what did it matter when so many people would want to believe it?  Helen might find herself branded damaged goods, forced to marry someone who’d pretend to look past her supposed lack of virginity … bastards.  I ground my teeth.  The person behind it was going to pay.

Sigmund, bless him, had already brought the Kava.  I poured myself a mug and drank it quickly, then poured myself another one as I sat and forced myself to think.  The printer would already be on the move, perhaps even heading out of the city.  Or did.  I found it hard to believe anyone would print such grotesque nonsense unless they had a powerful backer, perhaps more than one.  Hell, for all I knew, it wasn’t an underground printer.  There was no reason the other nobles couldn’t set up their own printing shops, to churn out broadsheets and suchlike for themselves.  Why not?  I’d done it?

Violet stepped into the room, carefully angling herself to mark the exits without making it obvious.  She hadn’t changed much, in the weeks since entering my service.  She still looked scrawny, despite better food; her clothes still looked as if they’d been passed from person to person, patched and patched again so many times it was hard to tell if there was anything left of the original outfit.  Her tutors had told me she was very intelligent, but completely uneducated.  I wasn’t surprised.  On the streets, showing you were intelligent was a good way to get your ass kicked.  Better to be street-smart than book-smart.

“Sir.”  Violet made a movement that might, if one had been feeling very charitable, be called a curtsey.  She was still nervous around me, around everyone.  “How may I be of service?”

She sounded like someone parroting words she didn’t quite understand.  I sighed, inwardly.  It wasn’t easy to convince her, or everyone else I’d recruited, that I had no ulterior motive in arranging for their education.  The slave children, thankfully, had had some education before their parents had been enslaved.  Violet had none – and feared what I might ask from her, in return.  I’d be quite happy to have her doing nothing, beyond helping me spread the word through the city.  There were limits to how far the Nightingales could reach.  Too many of them were noble-born and thus given to lecturing or hectoring the poor, rather than helping them.

I held out the broadsheet and watched her struggle to sound out the words.  She was intelligent, remarkably so, but she’d only been learning for a few weeks.  Normally, I would have waited for her to finish, to parse it out for herself.  This time, I took back the paper and read it to her.  Violet’s eyes went wide as she realised what it said.  She knew how dangerous the rumours could be, if they got out of hand.  And they would.

“Someone printed this,” I told her.  “Someone printed this and arranged for it to be distributed.  I need you to find that person, and quickly.”

Violet looked oddly relieved.  I blinked, then realised she was glad to have a chance to repay me.  “Yes, sir,” she said.  “When I find them, what do you want me to do?”

“Alert me.”  I pulled out my pouch and passed her a handful of coins.  She made them vanish with practiced ease.  “There’ll be a special reward for you if you find the printer today.”

“Yes, sir,” Violet said.

She turned and hurried out of the room, without any of the elaborate formalities the locals used to waste time.  And establish the pecking order.  I smiled after her, silently praying she’d be safe.  Giving her so much money was risky, not just because she might decide to take the coins and run.  By her standards, it was enough cash to last for a lifetime.  If someone realised she had the money, he might decide to take it.  Violet had a dagger tucked in her sleeve, and probably other tricks I didn’t know about, but she was still horrifyingly vulnerable.  I felt a flicker of guilt at sending her out, despite the awareness it was her world and she knew how to navigate it.  I couldn’t go with her.  I was just too noticeable.

I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I busied myself catching up on everything I’d missed when I’d been away.  Military training – retraining – was proceeding apace, to the point I wasn’t really needed.  Not yet, anyway.  The men would have to be marched out of the city soon, to be tested in the field before they faced a real opponent.  The barracks were meant to be secure, with the troops barred from entering the city itself, but I would have been astonished if some of them didn’t slip out at night.  God knew I’d done the same, when I’d been a young solider myself.  The exercises outside the walls would sort the men from the boys.

It was nearly four hours before Violet returned, looking grubby.  Sigmund escorted her back to my office, his nose twitching as if she stank worse than the average jarhead after a week of field exercises.  I sighed.  I understood his feelings – and his fears, given that Violet really had grown up on the streets – but he was being stupid.  How could she get past her origins if she was constantly being reminded of them?

“I found the printer’s shop,” Violet said.  “I can lead you there.”

I nodded.  Back home, the government and police tended to frown on someone taking the law into his own hands.  Back home, despite the best efforts of credulous academics and rich kids who’d never endured so much as a single day of discomfort, we had the rule of law.  Here … I could assemble a posse and carry out a citizen’s arrest and no one would say me nay, as long as I was careful.  I gave Sigmund orders to summon Fallon and a handful of men, then wrote a quick note to the princess to inform her of what I was doing.  I hadn’t heard anything from her since the first message, back when I’d read the underground broadsheet.  I hoped no news was good news.

It’s like dealing with internet trolls, I thought.  Feeding them only makes it worse, banning them only convinces everyone else you had no good answers to their lies.

I bounced questions off Violet, making her go through the details again and again until the posse had assembled.  Violet hadn’t found it too difficult to track down the printer.  He’d hired street kids, as I’d guessed, to distribute his wares, without thinking how easy it would be for someone to bribe or threaten them into revealing his name.  It was simple and yet … something nagged at my mind as we made our way down the road, across the bridges and down into the lower regions of the city.  I was missing something.  But what?

The printer’s shop was underneath a small pub, a good choice for someone who might want to spark a riot to cover his escape.  I’d carried out busts in pubs back in Damansara, before I’d been dismissed from the City Guard, and they’d always turned violent.  It was nearly noon and there were already people inside, well on their way to drunkenness.  I sighed inwardly as I issued my orders, blocking all the exits we could find.  There might well be a tunnel between the pub and the blocks next door, or a hatch leading down into the makeshift sewers.  If I was an underground printer, I would have made damn sure I could get out and run for my life if the target of my libels came calling.

I nodded to Fallon, who opened the door and cast a spell.  Blue-white light flared, sending a chill down my spine.  I still wasn’t used to magic.  There was a crashing noise from inside, glasses and plates hitting the floor … I shoved past her, club in hand, and pushed my way into the pub.  The patrons were lying on the ground or slumped over the tables, twitching like men who’d been hit with tasers.  I led the way past them, looking around for the stairs.  They were hidden in the backroom, clear proof the publican was up to something.  Fallon hurled another spell down the stairs, trying to stun everyone before they could run.  I hurried down myself and kicked open the door, darting into a surprisingly large basement.  A man jumped up, waving his hands as he cast a spell.  I ducked as a fireball shot over my head and splattered against the far wall, then hurled my club with deadly effect.  The magician crumbled, his senseless body crashing to the ground.  I allowed myself a smile.  Magicians were dangerous, no doubt about it, but they weren’t gods.  They could be beaten, if you refused to panic.

“Search the rest of the pub,” I ordered Horst, as I surveyed the printer’s basement.  There were copies of the libellous broadsheet – and worse – on the wooden tables, freshly printed and prepared for distribution.  I allowed myself a moment of relief.  We’d got the right people.  “Take everyone into custody.  Tell them we’ll pay well if they cooperate.”

“Yes, sir,” Horst said.

I glanced at Fallon, then peered at the prisoners.  There were seven of them, all men.  Four looked like apprentices, although they weren’t wearing apprenticeship clothes; the fifth older and apparently wiser, dressed in an outfit that marked him as a tradesman.  I guessed he was the printer, judging from the ink on his hands.  The magician didn’t look to be anything like as old as his master.  I judged he wasn’t that much older than Fallon.

“That’s him,” Violet confirmed.

“Good,” I said.

I hauled the printer to his feet as Fallows and the rest of the posse marched the prisoners upstairs, careful to ensure the magician remained unconscious.  It would be far too dangerous to wake him, at least until we had him locked in antimagic shackles or dosed with antimagic potion.  Even a relatively low-power magician could escape, if he had a chance to realise what was happening and react.  The printer stared at me, his entire body twitching helplessly as the spell slowly wore off.  I didn’t bother to tie him up.  I just shook him violently.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” I said, coldly.  “You can talk – and we will use magic to verify you’re telling the truth.  If so, after you help us nail the person behind you, we’ll let you go without handing out the normal punishments for your crime.  If you refuse to talk, we’ll make you – and, after that, your tongue will be removed and your hands chopped off.”

He shivered.  I’d seen a man have his tongue cut out, in Damansara, for lying about his superiors.  Others … I’d seen a woman walking around with a scold’s bridle, apparently for spreading rumours about her neighbours.  The printer thought I wasn’t bluffing.  I wasn’t sure myself.  I’d been trained to believe torturing prisoners was wrong, that it was largely pointless if one happened to want real information … although, if someone just wanted someone to lock up for the crime, I supposed torture served a very useful purpose.  The City Guard hadn’t really given much of a damn over guilt or innocence … why should it?  The guardsmen weren’t paid to actually solve crimes, merely to keep everyone in their place.

“Well?”  I put as much threat as I could into my voice.  “I know someone was behind you.  I know someone paid you to spread lies.  I want that person.  Now.”

“I … he’ll kill me!”  The printer tried to pull free.  I held him too tightly for him to escape.  “I …”

“If you cooperate, I’ll give you money and let you run,” I told him.  “If you don’t …”

The printer swallowed, hard.  I thought I knew what he was thinking.  If he told all, I might betray him.  If he kept his mouth shut, I’d hurt him until he talked.  He wouldn’t even be able to lie, to mislead me.  Fallon would see to that.  And if he somehow managed to keep his mouth shut anyway, he wouldn’t live long in jail.  His mystery backer would make sure of it.

“It was Lord Thurston,” he said.  “It was!”

I stared at him for a long moment.  Lord Thurston?  The Councillor of Foreign Affairs?  For a moment, I wondered if the real backer had used a glamour, wearing Lord Thurston’s face to mislead the printer … it was possible, certainly.  Lord Thurston had too much to lose … didn’t he?  Or was he secure in his position, confident he could withstand the princess’s anger?  He might be right.  Despite his title, he spent most of his time haggling with the warlords rather than foreign countries.  They might react badly if he was removed.

“We’ll see,” I said.  I felt as if I’d gone hunting for rabbits and found myself facing an angry tiger.  “And then, if you are telling the truth, we’ll give you a chance to run.”