The Justice of Kings, page 36
“This is it, isn’t it?” I asked, entranced by the bright orange flames roiling into the grey sky. There was an eerie quiet. Those citizens who had been unfortunate enough to be in the street had been butchered, while the rest had fled or gone into hiding. Now, only the sounds of hooves and sabatons on cobblestones and the crackling of timber beams burning filled the cool, early-afternoon air.
“Yes, I should think so,” Vonvalt said. I turned to him. I hadn’t necessarily expected a rousing oration, but that threw me. I should have known better. Vonvalt was at his core an unsentimental and pragmatic man.
Our only route of escape, further into the town towards the eastern closure, was now blocked by a sizeable company of men-at-arms. With their initial bloodlust sated, and recognising Vonvalt for who he was, they made no move to engage him. Rather, they manoeuvred to box us in until more senior officers arrived.
“Helena,” Vonvalt murmured. He was half-crouched in a ready position, sword gripped in his right hand, dirt and blood crusting a once-pristine white court blouse. Sweat dripped off his forehead; his hair and beard looked wild and unkempt. “I don’t think I need to tell you that this will be unpleasant. They will go to great lengths to make this as painful and wretched a death as possible. And knowing soldiers as I do, I’m sorry to have to say that killing you will not be the first thing on their minds.” He stood up fully, dropping the sword slightly. He looked me dead in the eye. “I can put an end to it now, if that is what you would prefer.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening. When I spoke, I felt as though I were choking. “You mean to kill me?” I asked. My voice sounded brittle, as though I were on the verge of insanity.
“It would be a mercy,” Vonvalt said, calmly and patiently, as though he were explaining a complex point of law. “You would not feel a thing. Helena, please understand that nothing would break my heart more, but I would rather it was me, and cleanly. They will do unspeakable things to you.”
I looked around for any avenue of escape, but of course there was nothing. “We may be out of it yet,” I said uncertainly – desperately, even. The fact of the matter was, I did not want to be killed by Vonvalt or anybody else, in spite of the obvious truth of what he was saying.
Our attention was diverted to a procession of armoured knights making their way up the road towards us. They boxed in a diminutive figure which could only be Claver, though quite who they sought to protect him against Nema only knew.
“Sir Konrad,” Claver called out as the knights parted to reveal him fully. He gestured about him with both hands held wide. “Look what your intransigence has brought on this town. Your heresy.”
Vonvalt grimaced. He resumed his half-crouch, his grip on his sword tightening. “I have no intention of trading mindless jibes with you, priest,” Vonvalt spat. “If mine is the last murder you need to accomplish here in order to conclude your godless business, get on with it.”
Claver smirked. “You err, my lord Justice. Just as you once told me that you, and you alone, would decide on what made a mockery of the laws of Sova, so I, and I alone, will decide what is and what is not godless. And this—” he gestured to the burning buildings and hacked-up corpses around him “—this is the Goddess’s work.”
Vonvalt snorted with disgust. “I do not know what poison you have poured into these men’s ears to get them to follow you so, but a blind man could see the Prince of Hell’s red hand at work here.” He pointed the tip of his sword at the company of knights surrounding Claver. “Come now; have your tame idiots dispatch me. I cannot bear to hear you squeaking like a rat any longer.”
Claver drew himself up. He was losing this exchange, and it clearly infuriated him. Even with half a thousand soldiers at his back, he could not outdo Vonvalt’s natural authority.
“What makes you think I want to kill you?” he said with affected amusement. “You are to accompany us back to Sova. An example must be made of you.” He pretended to think for a second. “Perhaps a gibbet, strung from the Wolf Gate.”
Vonvalt shifted slightly, and I knew instantly what was coming. Before I could say or do anything, Vonvalt was charging directly at Claver. It was clearly hopeless; it would achieve nothing except his own death, but of course that was the point.
An overdue scream was about to escape my throat, when Vonvalt stopped. He did not stop in the sense of deliberately abandoning his charge and slowing to a halt; nor did he stop because he had been killed, like a man impaled on the tip of the pike might stop dead. He simply… stopped, mid-stride, as though a giant invisible hand had fixed him in place.
A collective gasp went up from the assembled soldiers. I blinked, then rubbed my eyes. It was as though the turning of the world – as though time itself – had simply halted, but in a way that was localised entirely to Vonvalt. I looked around frantically to see what might have happened, until I noticed that Claver had taken on an expression of intense concentration. The veins in his forehead were bulging and his entire body was trembling, as though he was carrying an immense physical weight.
Vonvalt was locked in place much as August had been on the walls of the town. He too was trembling slightly, and I could see that his entire body was rigid, as though every single muscle had been engaged for maximum effort. Only his eyes seemed to be free of the spell. They rolled around in his skull like marbles, and for the first time in a long time, he looked truly panicked.
“Sir Konrad,” I breathed, shaking my head in disbelief.
Then the impossible happened: Vonvalt began to rise into the air. Another gasp penetrated the air. Armour, swords and shields rattled as everyone watching took a step back. Faces were contorted into rictuses of disbelief and alarm. A strange throbbing sound filled the air like the rumbling of a distant earthquake. I could taste blood in my mouth. Eldritch energy radiated away from Claver like tendrils of intangible darkness. Whispers, like the chittering of insects, buzzed in my ears.
“You… cannot even… begin to imagine… the… horrors that await you,” Claver gasped. His eyes had gone completely white. He shook as though he were having a seizure. Every vein in his body bulged, like his entire blood system was trying to tear free of his skin. What had Westenholtz’s men unleashed on the world? What dark powers had they unfettered?
If there had been a strange, eerie quiet before, now there was complete silence. I knew that the Order of the Magistratum had a number of codices with powerful magicks contained between their covers, kept under lock and key in the Law Library in Sova; but the power to control a person with nothing but one’s mind – it made Claver the most dangerous man in the known world. If there had been any lingering doubt about the importance of stopping him, it was completely obliterated in that moment.
And then everyone was jolted from this collective trance by the sound of a war horn, which punctured our shock like a dagger through a lung.
Baron Hangmar had finally arrived.
XXVIII
In Lady Bauer’s Wake
“Wisdom is akin to the value of the lands in the Northmark of Haunersheim: never much appreciated.”
COUNT BREN VAN DER LARR
The note carried through the late-afternoon air like the roar of a gigantic beast. Soldiers and knights turned sharply. Claver, already overtaxed, seemed almost relieved to release his devilish grip, and Vonvalt collapsed to the cobblestones like the severed counterweight of a trebuchet.
The horrified silence was now replaced by the unmistakable rumble of hooves on earth, which did not take long to turn into the clatter of hooves on cobbles; then more sounds – the whinnying of injured horses, the screams of smashed men, the ring of steel against steel – carried on the air. From where we were we could see none of it, but the story needed only sound for the telling.
The soldiers around me rushed back down the road. Despite the fact that Claver was on their side, they clearly preferred to launch themselves into the crucible of combat than spend any longer in his presence. In but a few seconds, the priest was abandoned, exhausted and bewildered. The position could not have reversed more fully.
I rushed to Vonvalt’s side and crouched down next to him. To my immediate relief, he seemed intact. He was clearly exhausted, but whether from the fighting or from having been immobilised I did not know. I wiped his lank, sweat-soaked hair from his brow, and cradled his head as he surfaced to consciousness. A confusing mixture of emotions clashed in my heart. Not long before I had been revolted by his actions and the abandonment of his personal ethics. Now, with the very real threat of his death, I felt a cold, visceral fear. It was not just a fear of being alone again, as I had been in Muldau; my feelings for the man ran deeper, though it was not the time nor the place to explore their full nature.
“Sir Konrad?” I asked as his eyes opened. “Are you all right?”
“Kadlec,” Vonvalt said. For a second I thought he had seen the man; I even looked around, as though the Master of the Order of the Magistratum was about to stride through the smoke thickening the air.
My features creased in confusion. “What?”
“Kadlec,” Vonvalt said. He pressed himself into a sitting position, and recovered the sword that he had dropped nearby. “Kadlec has given them the old lore. The codices from the Master’s Vaults.” The sword grated against the cobbles as Vonvalt stood. “Those books have remained untouched for centuries – and with very good reason.”
I took a step backwards as Vonvalt advanced on Claver, but haltingly, as one who has only recently recovered the use of his legs. Claver emitted a small squeal and tried to push himself away, but he seemed to be pinned in place by Vonvalt’s glare. This time, however, there were no magicks involved – just the power of Vonvalt’s cold fury.
“Bartholomew Claver,” Vonvalt growled. “You have assaulted an Emperor’s Justice. You have committed the crime of treason.”
My attention was suddenly drawn to a commotion down the road. A detachment of knights on foot must have hived itself off from the enemy rear guard at the Veldelin Gate, and was now making its way back towards us. I recognised the man at the head of the group immediately: it was the unmistakable form of Waldemar Westenholtz in his black plate armour. But he was no longer resplendent, as he had been on the back of his caparisoned destrier in front of the town walls. Now his dark-blue surcoat was spattered with gore and mud, while his armour was gouged and scratched.
I do not know whether Vonvalt had seen Westenholtz and his men and was simply ignoring them, or whether he was so wrapped up in his own rage that he had not noticed them, but he continued to advance on Claver heedless. “By His Most Excellent Majesty the Emperor Kzosic IV, I, His Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt, adjudge you guilty…”
“Sir Konrad!” Westenholtz called out, lifting the visor of his helmet. His features were grimly set. He turned to say something to the men around him, and they broke into a run.
Vonvalt was nearly on Claver now. It was impossible to know who would reach the priest first. I was tempted to snatch the short-sword out of Vonvalt’s hand and finish the job myself, but as I had already learned, it required a vast store of courage to voluntarily place oneself in harm’s way.
Vonvalt reached Claver and raised his sword. “… and sentence you to die.”
Claver screamed as the sword whistled through the air towards his face. I also found myself screaming as the foremost of Westenholtz’s knights closed with the pair. For a second it looked as though Vonvalt was going to kill Claver, and in doing so lose his own head; then I felt a tremendous blast of air at my back, and an armoured company of heavy cavalry thundered past me, obscuring my view of both Vonvalt and Claver.
I staggered backwards, overawed. I immediately recognised the pangolin device of Senator Jansen on a broad, dark-blue shield. One of the knights riding next to him wore a two-headed wolf pelt like a cloak, with each head, its lower jaw removed, fixed to the crown of his helmet. Instead of a lance, he carried a standard, a red bull’s head against a white background, which must have been the device of Baron Hangmar.
They smashed bodily into Westenholtz and his men. This was no arcane, elemental power drawn from ancient magickal tomes or siphoned off from the astral planes; it was naked force, raw, powerful and brutal. I found the effect enthralling. I felt as though I were at the centre of a storm, the thunder exploding through me, energising my blood as powerfully as any herbologist’s concoction. I was filled with the bizarre urge to laugh, as though I had been overstimulated by excitement.
I watched as the head of one of Westenholtz’s knights was speared by a lance like an arrow through an apple and whisked cleanly from his shoulders. Another man was taken in the chest and the lance emerged through his back carrying what seemed like a gallon of viscera with it. A third was cut from shoulder to navel by a cavalry sabre and blood lashed the cobblestones behind him like water from a thrown pail. He took three halting steps before clattering bodily to the ground.
Westenholtz himself was battered to the cobbles by one of the gigantic destriers. The other knights around him were similarly thrown. The air was filled with the sound of crunching steel, breaking bones and the gruesome squelch of pulverised organs. I craned my neck, desperate to see whether Vonvalt had survived the onslaught unscathed, filled with a sudden horror that the mounted knights had mistaken him for another enemy and lopped him into uneven parts. Indeed, once the company of cavalry had passed, as unstoppable as a tidal wave, and run on into the enemy rear guard, I saw that Vonvalt was there, lying face down and covered in blood. Next to him was Claver, bewildered but unhurt.
“No!” I shrieked at this cosmic injustice, and started forwards – but halted so abruptly I nearly skidded over. A small group of soldiers had emerged from an alley and, having not sated their blood- and other lusts, immediately started moving towards me.
“Here, girl!” one of them shouted to me. In a strange way I was glad that he did, for it jolted me from my horrified stupor.
Now, finally, it was time to run. I cast one last forlorn look at Vonvalt’s prostrate form, and then, with a hot feeling of guilt and shame, I turned tail and fled. I paused only to snatch a discarded short-sword from the cobbles outside the temple, though quite what I hoped to achieve with it I did not know.
I sprinted madly through the streets, making for the eastern closure. From the windows I heard people shouting at the soldiers to stop, even going so far as to throw things at them – bits of food, pots and pans, logs normally reserved for burning in fireplaces. These impromptu missiles clattered to the street, but their only effect was a mild annoyance. I recall at the time being angry that these people would not do more to help me, but of course, what could they do? It is always easy to begrudge people’s inaction in situations such as this, without appreciating that they would fare no better against armed men.
Given that the soldiers were encumbered with armour, they were considerably slower than me, and the run for them much more tiresome. I should of course have ducked into a side street and hidden, or leveraged my superior knowledge of the town to lead them on a merry chase. But much like our would-be assassin from many weeks before, I found that my panicked flight was completely bereft of imagination. Looking at a map of Galen’s Vale, one could have plotted my attempted escape with a more or less straight line, and in doing so I squandered any advantage in speed that I had. It seems ridiculous with hindsight, but of course I was not thinking clearly.
It was not long before I found myself running through the thick mud that preceded the River Gale for a hundred yards at the northern edge of the closure. Whereas before it had been mostly frozen and only occasionally soft, now, as we approached spring, it was like cake, engulfing my legs up to the calf. This part of the eastern closure was completely unmolested by the fighting, and had the town’s bells, ringing in a demented chorus of panic, not sent everyone scurrying into their houses, one would be forgiven for thinking it was just another day.
I reached the bank of the Gale and turned, breath rasping in my throat, sword dangling uselessly in my grip. The soldiers were still doggedly approaching. There were only two of them now, though even just one would have been more than a match for me. Bressinger and Vonvalt had taught me the rudiments of swordplay, and sparring had formed an oft-neglected part of my syllabus, but I might as well have been a child with a toy sword against a Reichskrieg veteran.
Exhausted, frightened and with no hope of escape across the stinking, claggy mud, I lifted the short-sword up with trembling hands and held it out in front of me. I suddenly wished that I had taken Vonvalt up on his offer of a clean, quick death. There was no doubt in my mind about what I was about to endure. These men had not chased me simply to kill me.
But slowly, like ice held over a candle, I found my fear giving way to anger. I had been through so much over the course of my life, only for it to end ignominiously at the hands of a pair of murderers and would-be rapists. Moreover, it just didn’t seem right. Not right in the sense of what was right and wrong – clearly these men were about to commit a sequence of heinous crimes. But Justice August had said that I had become entangled in great, world-shaping events. My spirit, in whatever form it took, was being whisked along the great currents of history. Being hacked to pieces in the mud did not sit comfortably with that theory.
I found myself steeled by this. I did not know how, but I was going to survive – I felt it. And even if I were not, I would make a damned good account of myself. I put aside Helena the Imperial clerk and brought forwards Helena the orphaned reprobate from Muldau. These men would regret having chased me down. I resolved to attack them with as much ferocity as I could muster.
“Come now, girl,” the man closest to me said. He had the accent and features of a man from the Eastmark of Haunersheim, right on the border of the River Kova. In short, he was ugly and stupid, and it was with a profound sense of dismay that I realised that I might well be killed by such a person. “Drop the sword.”
