The Wheel of Osheim

NINE

I returned to Roma Hall to find my brother Martus in a foul mood, waiting to pounce. “There you are. Where the hell did you vanish off to?” He strode out of an antechamber off the entrance hall.

“I had business with-”

“Well it doesn’t matter. Glad to see you’ve cleaned up. You’re lucky you weren’t shot as a ghoul.”

“A ghoul?”

“Yes, a damn ghoul. You don’t know what’s going on? Where the hell have you been? Under a rock?”

“Well yes, for some of the time. But more recently, Marsail, the Corsair Isles, the Liban desert, and Hell. So what is going on?”

“Trouble! That’s what. Grandmother’s marching the Army of the South off to Slov on some ill-conceived campaign. She doesn’t even care about Slov-it’s some damn witch she’s after. Claims the Slov dukes are harbouring the woman. A whole army! For one woman . . . And the worst of it is my command’s being left here.”

“Yes, that is the worst of it.” I made to walk by. I had an empty stomach and a sudden desire to fill it with something delicious.

“That damn Gregori DeVeer.” Martus stuck a hand out and caught my shoulder, arresting my escape. “His army of foot-sloggers are forming up as the vanguard. He’ll come back a blasted hero. I know it. He’ll be acting this campaign out around the dining table at the officers’ mess for years, lining the grapes up: ‘The Slov line held the ridge’, pushing the cherries in: ‘Our Red March infantry column attacked from the west . . .’. God damn it. And that old woman’s leaving me here to babysit the city.”

“Well. It would be nice if you could keep it in one piece.” I scratched my belly. “But does it really take . . . how many are you?”

“Two thousand men.”

“Two thousand men!” I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. “What are you supposed to be protecting us from? This is Vermillion! Nobody is going to attack us.”

“I just told you what, idiot!”

“You didn’t say-Wait, ghouls?”

“Ghouls, rag-a-maul, corpse-men. We’ve seen them all in the city over the past couple of months. Nothing the guard can’t handle, but it’s made people jumpy. They’re scared enough even with the Army of the South crowding the streets.”

“Well . . . better safe than sorry, I guess. I shall sleep better in someone else’s bed knowing that you’re patrolling the walls, brother.” And with that I turned and set off sharp enough to escape any restraining hand that might come my way.

Much as I wanted to leave matters of state to those who matter I found myself unable to shake off Martus’s complaints. Not that I cared about his lost chances for glory-but I was worried by the idea that Grandmother was leading the army off into what seemed a fairly arbitrary war just as Vermillion was starting to see actual evidence of the kinds of dangers she’d been warning us about for years. The unanswered questions led me back up Garyus’s stairs. I doubted the Red Queen would be particularly forthcoming, especially after our last meeting, and frankly I didn’t know anyone else in Red March who might have both the information I was after and the inclination to share it with me.

The old man was where I left him, hunched over a book. “Books!” I breezed in. “Nobody ever put anything good in a book.”

“Grand-nephew.” Garyus set the offending item to one side. “Explain the Slov thing to me.” There didn’t seem to be any point beating about the bush. I wanted my mind set at ease so I could go and get drunk in good company. “She’s starting a war . . . for what? Why now?” Garyus smiled, a crooked thing. “I’m not my sister’s keeper.”

“But you know.”

He shrugged. “Some of it.”

“There are ghouls in the city. Other . . . things, too. The Dead King has turned his eyes this way. Why would she rush off to fight foreigners hundreds of miles away?”

“What turned the Dead King’s eyes this way?” Garyus asked.

Not wanting to say that I had done it I said nothing. Though to be fair Martus’s report indicated that the dead had been stirring within our walls for some while and I had only just returned.

“The Lady Blue steers the Dead King,” Garyus answered for me.

“And why-”

“Alica says our time is running out, and fast. She says that the troubles in Vermillion are to distract her, to keep her here. The true danger lies in not stopping the Lady Blue. The Wheel of Osheim is still turning . . . how long remains to us is unclear, but if the Lady Blue is left unchecked to keep pushing it then the last of our days will run through our fingers so quickly that even ancients like me will have to worry.”

“So it truly is a whole army, a whole war, just to kill one woman?”

“Sometimes that’s what it takes . . .”

I came to my father’s chambers also without knowing why. To learn more about his mother’s war was the excuse that had led me there, but the Red Queen would rather share her plans with her court jester-if she had one-than Reymond Kendeth.

I knocked at his bedchamber and a maid opened the door. I didn’t note which maid. The figure in the bed held my gaze, hunched in upon himself in the gloom, his form picked out only here and there where the daylight found a slit in his blinds.

The maid closed the door behind her as she left.

I stood, feeling like a child again, lost for words. The place smelled of sour wine, musty neglect, sickness, and sorrow. “Father.”

He raised his head. He looked old. Balding, greying, flesh sunken about his bones, an unhealthy glitter in his eyes. “My son.”

The cardinal called everyone “my son.” A hundred dusty sermons crowded in on me-all the times when I’d wanted a father not a cleric, all those times since Mother died when I’d wanted the man she’d seen in him-for arranged or not she wasn’t one to have given herself to a man she felt no respect or appreciation for.

“My son?” he repeated, a thickness in his voice. Drunk again.

The reason I’d come escaped me and I turned to go.

“Jalan.”

I turned back. “So you recognize me.”

He smiled-a weak thing, part grimace. “I do. But you’ve changed, boy. Grown. I thought at first you were your brother . . . but I couldn’t tell which. You’ve both of them in you.”

“Well, if you’re just going to insult me . . .” In truth I knew it to be a compliment, the Darin part anyway. Perhaps the Martus part. Martus was at least brave, if little else.

“We-” He coughed and hugged his chest. “I’ve been a poor-”

“Father?”

“I was going to say cardinal. But I have been a poor father too. I’ve no excuses, Jalan. It was a betrayal of your mother. My weakness . . . the world sweeps along so fast and the easiest paths are . . . easiest.” He sagged.

“You’re drunk.” Though that was hardly a judgment I could wield against anyone. We didn’t talk like this, ever. Very drunk. “You should sleep.” I didn’t want his mawkish apologies, forgotten within a day. I couldn’t look at him without distaste-though what part of that was just the fear that I looked into a mirror and saw myself old, I couldn’t say. I wanted . . . I wanted that things had been different . . . I saw him from the other side of Mother’s death now. Snorri had done that for me-shown me how a husband’s grief can cut down even the biggest of men. I wished he hadn’t shown me-it was easy to hate Father, understanding him just made me sad.

“We should . . . spend some time, talk, do whatever it-” Another cough. “Whatever it is we’re supposed to do. My mother . . . well, you know her, she wasn’t so good at that part of things. I always said I’d do better. But when Nia died . . .”

“You’re drunk,” I told him, finding my throat tight. I went to the door, opened it. Somehow I couldn’t just leave-the words wouldn’t go with me, I had to leave them in the room. “When you’re better. We’ll talk then. Get drunk together, properly. Cardinal and son.”

Two days later the Red Queen led the Army of the South out of Vermillion, their columns ten thousand strong marching down the broad avenues of the Piatzo toward Victory Gate. Grandmother was astride a vast red stallion, her platemail gothic and enamelled in crimson as if she’d been freshly dipped in blood. I’d witnessed the Red Queen earning her name and had little doubt that she would soon be wearing a more practical armour and still be prepared to personally drench it in the real thing if need be. She paid the crowd no heed, her stare fixed on the tomorrows ahead. Her hair, rust and iron, scraped back beneath a circle of gold. A more scary old woman I’d yet to see-and I’d seen a few.

Behind the queen came the remnants of our once-proud cavalry, dropping a goodly tonnage of dung for the footmen to trudge through. Start as you mean to go on, I say.

I stood beside Martus, and on my other side, Darin, returned from his love nest in the country. He’d brought Micha back with him to Roma Hall, apparently with a baby, though all I saw was a basket hung with silver chains and loaded with lace. Darin kept threatening to introduce me to my new niece, but so far I’d avoided the meeting. I’m not partial to babies. They tend to vomit on me, or failing that, to vent from the other end.

“Hurrah . . . a parade . . .” The autumn sun beat down on us while we cheered and waved from the royal stand. The watching crowds had been issued with bright flags, the colours of the South, and many waved the Red March standard, divided diagonally, red above for the blood spilled on the march, black below for the hearts of our enemy. Martus bemoaned the state of the cavalry and the fact he’d been left behind. Darin observed that winter in Slov could be an ugly thing and he hoped the troops were equipped for it.

“They’ll be back in a month, you fool.” Martus offered us both a look of scorn as if I’d had something to do with the suggestion.

“Experience teaches that armies often get bogged down-no matter how dry the weather,” Darin said.

“Experience? What experience have you had, little brother?” A full Martus sneer now.

“History,” Darin said. “You can find it in books.”

“Pah. All history has taught us is we don’t learn from history.”

I let their argument flow over me and watched the infantry march by, spears across their shoulders, shields on their arms. Veterans or not few of them looked older than Martus and some looked younger than me.

Ten thousand men seemed a small force to challenge the might of Slov, though to be fair an army of well-trained and well-equipped regulars like the South can send five times its number of peasant conscripts running for their fields. Given Grandmother’s objective ten thousand seemed sufficient. Enough for a thrust, enough to secure the target area, and enough, when the Lady Blue was brought to ruin, to fight a retreat to defensible borders.

I wished them joy of it. My main priority remained unchanged. The pursuit of leisure-by definition a languid sort of a chase. I wanted to relax back into Vermillion and my newfound financial freedom, free from the threat of Maeres Allus and all those tiresome debts.

“Prince Jalan.” One of Grandmother’s elite guardsmen stood beside me, gleaming irritatingly. “The steward requires your presence.”

“The steward?” I glanced round at Martus and Darin who gave exaggerated shrugs, as interested as me in the answer.

The guard answered by pointing to the Victory Gate and raising his finger. There on the wall, directly above the gate, a palanquin, ornate and curtained, two teams of four men at the carrying bars to either side, guardsmen flanking them. Grandmother’s own.

“Who-”

But the guard had already led off. I swallowed my curiosity and hurried after him. We threaded a path behind the crowd to one of the stairs leading up the inside of the city wall. After climbing to the parapet we made our way to the palanquin where the men ushered me along the treacherously narrow strip of walkway not occupied by the steward’s box. Drawing level with the curtains I ducked through, not waiting for an invitation.

I shuffled in, bent low to keep from scraping my head, and squeezed into the seat opposite. Garyus couldn’t sit in the seat but instead rested on a ramp of cushions heaped against it. “What the hell? Grandmother made you regent?”

He crinkled his face in a smile. “You don’t think I’m up to it, Greatnephew?”

“No, well, I mean, yes, of course . . .”

“A resounding vote of confidence!” He chuckled. “Apparently she ‘stole my throne’, so I’m getting it back for a few months.”

“Well, I never said . . . Well, maybe I did but I didn’t mean-I mean I did-” The heat in that little box was oppressive and the sweat left me at such a rate I worried I might shrivel and die. “It was your throne.”

“Treason, Jalan. You keep those words off your lips.” Garyus smiled again. “It’s true that joined as we were, it was me that saw the light first. But I reconciled myself to the new order of things long ago. When I was a boy I’ll grant you it stung. We dream big dreams and it’s hard to let them go. I wanted to make my father proud-have him see past . . .” He raised a twisted arm. “This.” He winced and lowered his arm. “But my little sister has been a great queen. History will remember her name. In these times she has been exactly what our nation needed. A merchant king would have served us better in peace-but peace is not what we have been given.” He twitched the curtain open a little way. Down below us the martial pride of Red March came on rank after rank, gleaming, glorious, pennants rippling above them in the breeze. “Which brings me to the reason for my invitation.” He reached into a basket at his side and fumbled something out. It fell to the floor as he got it clear.

I bent to retrieve it. “A message?” I lifted a scroll-case, ebony chased with silver, set with the royal seals.

“A message.” Garyus inclined his head. “You’re the Marshal of Vermillion.”

“Fuck that!” My turn to drop the scroll-case as though it were hot. “. . . your stewardness.”

“‘Highness’ is the correct form of address when the steward is of noble birth . . . if we’re being formal, Jalan.”

“Fuck that, your highness.” I sat back and exhaled, then wiped the sweat from my brow. “Look, I know you meant well and all. It’s nice that you wanted to do something for me by way of thanks for the key-but really-what do I know about defending cities? I mean it’s soldiery-there must be dozens of better qualified people-”

“Hundreds I should think.” Garyus said it a little too enthusiastically for my liking. “But since when was a monarchy about rewarding individual merit? Promote from within, is our mantra.”

He had a point. The Kendeths’s continued rule depended upon the carefully constructed lie that we were innately better at doing it than any other candidates, and also the idea that God himself wanted us to do it.

“It’s a nice gesture, Great-uncle, but I’d really rather not.” Being marshal sounded as though it might involve far more work than I was interested in-which was none at all. My plans involved mainly wine, women, and song. In fact, forget the song. “I’m hardly suited.”

Garyus smiled his crooked smile and looked toward the bright slice of the outside world visible between the curtains. “I’m hardly suited to being steward now am I? Ruling Vermillion-all of Red March in fact- yet hidden away lest I demoralize our troops with my physical imperfections. But here I am, by your grandmother’s command. Which, incidentally, is where your appointment comes from. I’m not so cruel as to separate you from your vices, Jalan.”

“Grandmother? She made me marshal?” The last time I’d seen her she seemed so close to ordering my execution that the headsman probably had his whetstone out.

“She did.” Garyus nodded his ponderous head. “There’s a uniform you know? And you’ll be in charge of your brother Martus.”

“I’m in!”