The Justice of Kings, page 10
The three of us cut absurd figures as we sprinted across the frost-slicked cobbles, our nightclothes flapping about us like rags. I admit that once the immediate danger had passed, I found the experience quite exhilarating; it reminded me of my childhood, evading Tollish guardsmen with a hot bun or coin purse clutched in my grubby hands.
Vonvalt, prescient as ever, had been right; his would-be murderer, so creative with his earlier misdirection, had run an unimaginative path to the Gale through the insalubrious eastern closure. Here, in spite of the cold, the very air was saturated with the smell of churned mud and offal, as well as that oily, fishlike stink that suffused everything with its greasy vapour. It put me in mind of the smell that sometimes radiated off Vonvalt after he had taken fish liver oil, a concoction which he swore by as a restorative, but was as antisocial a medicine as ever existed.
“Stop!” Vonvalt called, though he had neither the energy, the range nor the breath to bring the man to heel with the Emperor’s Voice.
The man did not stop. In fact, he could not stop. In his blind haste, he had badly misjudged the bank of the Gale. Where it was not dusted with ice, the mud remained perilously slick, and he skidded down the steep slope and tipped headlong into the icy water.
“Shit,” Bressinger muttered in dismay, no doubt assuming that Vonvalt was about to ask him to attempt a rescue. But once the three of us finally closed the gap, there was no sign of the man; just a few fractured plates of thin ice and a column of froth effervescing in the ink-black water.
“Where in Kasivar’s name has he gone?” I wheezed, my breath agony in my throat thanks to the ice-cold air.
No one spoke for a few moments. We stood there, steam rising off us as though we were racehorses after three circuits in the arena, looking for any sign of the assassin. But it was clear that the Gale had claimed our prize.
“He could not swim?” I asked. It baffled me that someone could enter a body of water and simply disappear without resurfacing even once.
Vonvalt shook his head grimly, but it was Bressinger who spoke.
“The cold will have knocked all the air out of his lungs.” He spat onto the mud, then arched his back and winced as his spine popped a few times. “Nema’s tits, I did not need that.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Could he not have just held his breath?”
Bressinger shook his head. “’Tis impossible,” he said. “Think on it: how do you get into a cold bath?’
I shrugged. “With great reluctance?” I said.
“Aye,” Bressinger said. “And even then, sometimes it makes you catch your breath.” He nodded to the waters of the Gale again. They had enveloped the assassin as irreversibly as any peat bog. “When your whole body goes in like that, you cannot help but drink in a lungful. And with no air in your chest, you’ll sink like a stone.” He spat again, and then twisted his back from side to side. “The currents will have him now. By all accounts, ’tis a treacherous river.”
“Blood of gods, man, will you shut up,” Vonvalt muttered.
I looked up at him, but he did not meet my gaze. He stared at the hole in the ice, as though entranced by it.
“Sir Konrad?” I asked gently.
He sighed after a long silence. “Dubine has it,” he said. He cleared his throat a few times. Like Bressinger and I, the cold air had savaged his throat, but unlike us, he had also employed the Emperor’s Voice.
We stood there for a little while longer, but it was not long before we were feeling the cold once again. Behind us, nightwatchmen approached, drawn to the clamour and no doubt dispatched in force by Lord Sauter. With the excitement over, my mood soured as I realised that a long and tedious night of explanation and official enquiries awaited.
Vonvalt took in a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. “Back to bed, the pair of you,” he said. “I will deal with this.”
Lord Sauter’s residence was in a state of chaos when Bressinger and I got back, and though Vonvalt had been trying to do us a favour in releasing us, in fact we bore the brunt of the mayor’s questioning. Sauter seemed to be annoyed by the turmoil, but I sensed that his irritation was really a façade, masking a profound sense of embarrassment at having come within a hair’s breadth of hosting the assassination of an Imperial Justice. In fact, it was impossible not to suspect the man of having had a hand in it himself, though he did not seem like the type. He faced a flurry of difficult questions from Vonvalt in the morning, and so I could forgive his rudeness.
Bressinger insisted on keeping the snake corpses, telling me that they would fetch a handsome price at any apothecary’s as they did in Grozoda. That something so venomous could have any healing qualities at all mystified me, but he assured me that not only was it an effective counter-venom when taken in minuscule doses, it also had a broad array of medicinal properties depending on how it was mixed and blended. He had a maid from the kitchens fetch a jar of vinegar and set the gruesome trophy on the chest next to our bed. I let him do it only on the condition that he exhaustively search the bedchamber for any further signs of snakes – but of course, there was nothing.
The clouds had drawn in again and snow began to fall by the time some semblance of peace and quiet reasserted itself over the household. Of Vonvalt there was still no sign, though I assumed someone had provided him with a cloak. As it would transpire, he had gone back to the watch house, and we would not see him again until the middle of the following morning.
In spite of the night’s frantic labours, Bressinger was able to return to sleep absurdly quickly, and it was not long before he was snoring next to me. I, however, lay awake until dawn’s first grey light began to suffuse the horizon. I could not help but turn the evening’s events over in my mind again and again. Someone had tried to kill us. But for a few happy accidents, my life – or at least my life as I had known it – could have ended. It has happened to me so many times since that it is difficult to conjure up that initial crash of emotion; but I can recall, lying in the dark on that long, cold night, feeling profoundly unsettled. I did not know what devilry we had unearthed in Galen’s Vale, but for someone to try and murder an Emperor’s Justice meant that its roots probably ran deeper than the slaying of a local lord’s wife. And of course, that was the real source of my fear – that anyone would try and kill an Emperor’s Justice at all. It was – had been – unthinkable; even frantic, condemned men did not move against Vonvalt. Many things I had taken as absolutes were having their structure and limits tested. How could I possibly go to sleep when the very foundations of my worldview were being hacked away?
By the time sleep eventually found me, it was fitful and unsatisfactory. I thrashed about the bed as though I were in the grip of a fever dream, and despite Bressinger’s increasingly irritated prodding, it took a long time to find anything approaching a deep slumber.
The town was rousing itself for another trading day when my body finally surrendered itself to unconsciousness.
I dreamt I was drowning.
The following day was a wretched one. Both Bressinger and I awoke to the sound of a tremendous clattering in the street outside, and still half asleep, we dashed to the window and threw open the curtains. Light, dull and grey though enough to burn the eyeballs, hit me with the force of a blow, and I realised we had been left to sleep in until the mid-morning. Standing in the street beyond Lord Sauter’s front garden was a group of town watchmen; another pair of watchmen, stripped of their swords and armour, were standing atop the roof of the house where we had seen the silhouette the night before.
“Son of a bitch,” Bressinger said, nodding towards the thing that had made the clattering noise. As the watchmen parted, I saw that it was a crude wooden construction not unlike a scarecrow, wrapped in a tatty cloak.
My eyes scanned the garden below, but of course the corpse of the guard had been removed, and now presumably occupied a slab in Mr Maquerink’s mortuary. Physicians rarely wanted for business when Vonvalt came to town, but in Galen’s Vale they would do a roaring trade.
I wondered how Sir Radomir had taken the news; his and Vonvalt’s relationship was but one or two mishaps away from disintegration, and though the two had formed a bond of uneasy mutual respect, the sheriff did not strike me as the kind of man who would take the death of one of his own men well.
Bressinger and I dressed ourselves hastily. Vonvalt was not in his bedchamber, and we exited the mayor’s residence to make enquiries of the men gathered outside. They informed us that though Vonvalt had spent the better part of the night with Sir Radomir, he was now back in the eastern closure. We retraced our steps from the night before, our cloaks pulled about us and heads bent into the cold wind, which carried a hint of sleet.
Vonvalt was standing on the bank of the Gale with another group of miserable-looking town watchmen, his hair wet and lank. He must have returned to the mayor’s house at some point, for he was now clad in his Imperial best, though his boots and the hem of his cloak were befouled by the stinking mud. Even from a distance he looked haggard. His face was pale, and his features were drawn and tired-looking. Vonvalt did not function well without a good night’s sleep, and I knew that I would be spending most of the day trying to avoid him.
As Bressinger and I approached, we observed a group of fishermen clad in waders and studded boots as they wrestled a small, single-man rowboat from the waters – evidently the method of our assassin’s ingress. A town watchman did his best to try and usher back a crowd of onlookers which had gathered in spite of the weather, but rumours of a second murder were already spreading.
“I trust you are both restored?” Vonvalt asked us as we came within earshot. He did not take his eyes from the boat.
“Aye,” Bressinger said. “We saw the decoy from the roof.”
“Hm,” Vonvalt grunted. “A shabby ruse.”
“It nearly did for you,” Bressinger remarked, nodding at Vonvalt’s ribs where the quarrel had ripped through his nightgown.
“As though I needed reminding,” Vonvalt said. His mood was even blacker than I had anticipated. He gestured to the rowboat. “Let us hope that this at least bears some fruit. I am told by local experts—” he wrinkled his nose, gesturing to the crowd of townsfolk “—that we have no hope of recovering the body.”
“That the river produced the corpse of Lady Bauer was by all accounts a miracle,” Bressinger said. I looked at him, surprised at how badly he continued to misjudge his master’s temperament. Or perhaps he didn’t care. Either way, Vonvalt was interrupted before he could respond.
“Milord,” one of the men next to the boat called out uncertainly. Dealing with Vonvalt in his official capacity was an intimidating exercise at the very best of times, but it was clear to all Vonvalt was in a sour mood. “’Tis bare. You are welcome to inspect it.”
Vonvalt regarded the boat as though the thing were cursed. “No,” he muttered, and he turned on his heel and tramped back to the mayor’s house.
Bressinger and I were left to our own devices for the rest of the day. Vonvalt retired to bed for a few hours, and then returned to the watch house. Since nothing had been divined from the corpse of the guardsman, Vonvalt authorised the release of the body to his widow, and then attended the man’s burial late in the afternoon. I felt at least partly responsible for the guard’s death, and no small amount of guilt for missing the funeral in spite of the fact that Bressinger and I were not invited to attend, though Vonvalt would later tell me that it had been a fraught affair and he himself had not been welcome.
Bressinger went to the apothecary’s to sell his prized snake corpses, and then on to a succession of public houses. For my own part, feeling adrift and suffering from a general sense of malaise, I took the time to have a long bath. I had hoped to relax, but I simply ended up ruminating on matters for several hours.
Vonvalt returned later in the evening, and we took dinner together in the dining room. He picked idly at the spread, lost in introspection, and would not be drawn into conversation – not that there was much to discuss about what had happened. There was nothing left in its wake by way of evidence, and we could only conjecture that it was related to the murder of Lady Bauer, though even that was not a given.
I think, like me, he had been shocked more by what the attempt represented than the attempt itself. I know that Vonvalt felt very strongly that his position as one of the Empire’s foremost lawmen put him well above the risk of murder. It was not a matter of fear – his physical courage was beyond question – but thinking men are wont to dwell on things, and Vonvalt was a thinking man. He could not separate out the attempt on his life from an assault on the supremacy of the common law, and the latter was a difficult thing for him to countenance, particularly when one considers how Vonvalt had come to reach that belief. It was easy to forget, after all, that he had seen the civilising effects of the Sovan common law first-hand. His father had taken the Highmark and Vonvalt had been pressed into the Legions. He’d gone to war against his countrymen. Both he and his father had had to believe that Sovan citizenship, and what it represented, was an end in itself. How else could one have justified the horrors of the Reichskrieg? Vonvalt had embraced the ways of the Sovans with the zeal of the convert, and though he was no fool, I knew that as a consequence of his adolescence – for the man had only been fifteen years old when he had gone to war – the very kernel of his worldview was softer and more vulnerable than any would believe.
We had no choice but to put the matter to one side for the time being. It was an unsatisfactory conclusion to the business, and after a cursory meal, we retired to our bedchambers having barely exchanged more than a few words. I had hoped that Bressinger would provide a sympathetic ear on his return later that evening, but to my surprise, he was dismissive of my fears.
“Don’t let it consume you, Helena,” he said as we both settled down into bed. “He will have gathered his wits by the morning.”
“You are not worried about him?”
“No, and he would not be happy to learn that you are. It takes more than a quarrel in the night to rattle our esteemed master.” He snorted. “There is a joke in there, is there not? Quarrel? I have not the grip on Saxan that you have.”
“You speak it well enough – at least when you are sober.”
“Fighting talk,” he scoffed. “Careful; I might let the viper get you next time.”
“And just how much did you get for your snake corpses?”
Almost at once, the man’s mood turned melancholy. “It matters not,” he muttered. “’Tis all gambled and drunk up anyway.”
I paused, trying to think of the right words to say. “Thank you, by the way,” I settled on. “For saving my life.”
He waved me off. “Do not think on it. You know I would not let anything happen to you, Helena. I would sooner die myself.” He paused, and let out a great, shuddering sigh. “Nema knows I would sooner die myself,” he repeated softly.
He rolled away from me and extinguished the lamp before I could say anything. I lay a hand on his shoulder for a few moments, unsure of what to do. Then, when he did not stir, I rolled over myself, and within minutes I had fallen into a deep, exhausted slumber.
VIII
Cold Air, Hot Words
“Act in haste, repent at leisure.”
OLD SOVAN PROVERB
I awoke the following morning to the tolling of the temple bell. Despite the efforts of Lord Sauter’s staff in stoking the residence’s many fires, it still felt chilly, and I was reluctant to leave the warmth of the bed. Bressinger, however, rose with alacrity, and threw open the curtains to reveal another slate-grey sky and piles of fresh snow about the town.
“Come on, Helena,” he said gruffly. I begrudged the man for the ease with which he was able to shake off sleep. It was something he attributed to his years as a soldier. There was no hint of the melancholy which had afflicted him so suddenly the night before. Indeed, the whole business with the snakes seemed already distant, like a half-remembered dream.
Bressinger gathered up his clothes and went next door to change, and I took the few moments of solitude to rouse myself more fully. Then I donned my hose, smock and kirtle, and a gown given the cold. Vonvalt had bought them all for me as part of my retainer, and as a consequence they were all made of high-quality, durable fabric. In our early months together I had simply been grateful to be off the streets, and was happy to take whatever Vonvalt had thrown my way. Now my tastes had refined. I took more of an interest in Imperial fashions, where clothes hugged the form and felt and looked more feminine than those of the provinces – scandalously so, depending on where you went. The Sovans had done away with headdresses for women, too, most of a century before, and the style of one’s hair had itself become a fashion. Most women slavishly followed the hairstyles of the ladies of the day, though I rarely did anything with mine except tie it back.
I left the chamber and bumped into Bressinger in the hallway. He was clad in a shirt, doublet and hose, and his shoulder-length black hair was wet and had been tied up into a ponytail. We both went downstairs and met Vonvalt in the dining hall, where a hearty breakfast of bread, eggs and spiced ham had been set out as well as some steak-and-ale pie left over from the previous night. Vonvalt was drinking small beer and reading in silence from a thick tome on Sovan jurisprudence open next to him.
“Lord Sauter has not risen, then?” Bressinger asked as we sat.
“He has already left,” Vonvalt said, not taking his eyes from the book. “He has duties at the kloster, to do with Wintertide.” It was clear he was in some kind of bad mood, no doubt precipitated by the attempt on his life, or the recent letter from Justice August.
