4
After a tramp through the noisome streets of the city, Count Martuhn and Wolf grudgingly parted with a copper that a man at the fountain near the north gate would lave the filth from boots and greaves. Then the former nobleman overawed the junior officer commanding that gate and commandeered for Wolf and himself a brace of poorly gaited hacks for the remainder of their journey. In the outer ward of Pirates’ Folly, the hostler on duty looked with contempt at the sad specimens of horseflesh from which the two mercenaries dismounted… but not until he was leading them away, for the reputations of Captain Martuhn and his taciturn bodyguard were well known in all of Duke Tcharlz’s lands, and few sane men would risk running afoul of such cold, merciless professional killers. The duo stamped into the spacious anteroom—which constituted the only public entrance to the ducal audience chamber and the private apartment behind—and came to an impatient halt before the long, polished table which served as a desk for the noblemen who took turns screening visitors jfand almost always exacting all that the market would bear in fees from said visitors before granting them audiences with Duke Tcharlz). And suddenly guardsmen in all stages of dress and undress crowded out of the wide doorways of the two adjoining guardrooms, some openly grinning in anticipation, all anxious to be actual spectators to one of the rare confrontations between their duke’s most valued and trusted captain—a man either respected or feared” by every soul in the duchy—and one of Duchess Ann’s precious and unfailingly supercilious young noblemen. The duke made a practice of conferring knighthood only for military achievements, but the duchess awarded such honors for less grim and sanguineous reasons—once, for a handsome performer who composed and sang to her a song praising her beauty, grace and wit; to another, for his skill at dancing; such things as handsomeness of face and dress, inventiveness in the matters of new games or dance steps or refinements of tortures to be used upon the prisoners chosen at random from the crowded dungeons at Twocityport—whereat Duchess Ann made her court and which her husband visited only grudgingly and solely for reasons of ducal duty.
Duke Tcharlz utterly detested his fat, ugly, arrogant and frigid wife, and he fully intended—indeed, spent long hours in pleasurable contemplation of—having her murdered, painfully, the moment that he felt his power such that he could hold all his lands in his own name against either external aggression or internal dissension. His deliberate delay in disposing of Duchess Ann was but another manifestation of the mature sagacity that had seen him succeed his ducal predecessor and onetime bitter enemy, Ann’s late father. Unable, for some mysterious reason, to sire any save useless daughters upon any one of his several wives and host of slave mistresses, the last hereditary Duke of Twocityport, Myk the Wise, had been most favorably impressed with the cunning and stark bravery and tenacity displayed by young Baron Tcharlz of Newtownport in the defense—with vastly fewer forces and inferior armaments and warships—of his minuscule principality against the old king of Mehmfizport, who was then attempting to enlarge by conquest his already sizable holdings. Not much thought on the matter was required to show Duke Myk that when Newtownport fell—as it assuredly must for all the astute strategy and stunning tactics of its young lord—Twocityport would, soon or late, be next. Therefore, the old man had mobilized his existing forces and hired on every free bravo within reach, even granting amnesties for past wrongs to certain bands of pirates operating just beyond the fringes of his borders in return for their manpower and ships.
Through a stroke of purest luck, a fierce and wholly unexpected storm capsized, swamped, dismasted or drove ashore more than half of King Djahn’s huge fleet even as it proceeded northward on the river to meet this new challenge, and the pitiful remnant were fallen upon and utterly extirpated by the duke’s fleet, while Baron Tcharlz and his sketchily armed partisans hunted down and slew or enslaved almost every one of the now unsupported and unsupplied troops remaining ashore.
Hard upon the heels of this great mutual victory over what had been staggering odds, Duke Myk had suggested an alliance between his duchy and Tcharlz’s barony. This alliance was to be permanently cemented by marriage between his eldest legitimate daughter, Ann, and Tcharlz.
Baron Tcharlz knew just why this magnanimous offer was tendered him. If, with no sons of any description, the aging duke should attempt to pass his titles and lands to one of his daughters, a protracted and bloody civil war was certain to ensue between his cousins, nephews and more distant relatives; if the internecine strife did not shatter the duchy into a number of tiny, all but defenseless statelets, the borders at least were sure to fall to aggressive neighbors. But with a strong, war-wise son-in-law, still of an age and temperament to raise or hire troops and take the field against internal or external foes… Tcharlz and Ann conceived a mutual loathing upon their very first meeting, but the duke’s eldest daughter, with no choice or options in the matter, had intelligence enough to accept the inevitable with as much grace as she could muster, while Tcharlz would gladly have wed himself to a fat sow from out the ducal swineherds, if that was what it would have taken to see him inherit upon the death of Duke Myk.
There still were rumors lurking about that the demise of the old duke—less than six months after he had formally declared his new son-in-law ducal heir—was speeded along by either said heir or his agents. But there had never been any real evidence to support the rumors, and the spreading of such gossip had proved risky, and sometimes fatal, business. Only the old nobility and retainers of Duke Myk might have been sufficiently moved by tales of his murder to retaliate against his heir, and there were but a bare handful of them left alive in the duchy in this twenty-second year since the ascendancy of Duke Tcharlz. The most fortunate of them had died of age’s infirmities. Some had fallen upon the battlefields of Duke Tcharlz’s early and widely supported wars of expansion. The wisest had left for other and safer desmesnes within hours of the death of the old duke, bearing with them all their fluid wealth. Those neither wise nor warlike nor aged had died in duels or at the hands of unknown robbers or had simply disappeared mysteriously.
But still the duke was leery of disposing of the wife he had loathed from the start and now hated with every fiber of his body. The reason that he allowed that hated Ann to live lay not east of the river but west, in the person of Alex, the Duke of Traderstownport. Not only had his great-grandmother been a legitimate sister of the late Duke Myk, but he was wedded to one of Ann’s younger sisters and so felt that he had far better claim to Twocityport than did Tcharlz, whom he openly named “the Greedy.”