Looks were exchanged. In a moment, one tall scholar stepped forward. “I am.”
“You are aware what these are?” Ferbin asked, pulling the two fat envelopes from his jacket. More wide eyes, and some nodding. “If you are loyal to your Head Scholar and your rightful king, guard that stairway with your life. Make sure nobody else comes up it, and stop anybody from leaving the roof too, until we’ve gone.”
“Sir.” The tall scholar looked initially doubtful, but he took a couple of his peers and went to stand by the steps.
“The rest of you, kindly stand over there,” Ferbin said, indicating the far corner of the roof. There was some muttering, but the scholars complied. He turned back. Holse was removing the nose bag from one of the caude. He emptied the bag with a flick while the creature was mewling in protest, turned the caude round to face towards the nearest edge of the roof and then quickly threw the emptied bag over the beast’s head. “Do the same with the other one, would you, sir?” he asked Ferbin, and moved to the caude which was still tied up. “Make sure it points the same way as that one.”
Ferbin did as he’d been asked, starting to understand why. He felt sick. The two caude with the nose bags over their heads laid their heads obediently on the surface of the roof and might already have been asleep.
Holse gentled the third caude, patting its nose and murmuring to it even as he brought the short-sword to its long neck. He slashed its throat, deep and hard, and the creature jerked back, snapped its tied reins and fell over backwards, wings half extending then folding back again, long legs kicking, then — to the shocked cries of several of the scholars — it went still, dark blood pooling on the roof’s dusty paving.
Holse flicked blood from his sword, sheathed it and strode past Ferbin. He whipped the nose bags off the two surviving caude; their heads rose and deep grumbling noises issued from their wide mouths. “Jump on, sir,” he said. “Try and keep it from seeing the dead one.”
Ferbin mounted the nearest caude, fitting himself into the deep saddle and drawing its belt over while Holse was doing the same. Ferbin was buttoning his jacket tight when his caude bent its long leathery neck back and looked at him with what might have been a puzzled expression, possibly registering the fact that it had a rider different from the one it was used to.
Caude were fabulously stupid animals; the intelligence had been bred out of them as obedience and stamina had been bred in. Ferbin had never heard of one being trained to accept just one rider. He patted the beast’s face and sorted its reins, then kicked its sides and got it to rise on its great long legs and half open its wings with a dry, rustling sound. Suddenly he was towering over the collection of startled, shocked-looking scholars.
“Ready?” Holse shouted.
“Ready!” Ferbin yelled.
They kicked the caude forward to the edge of the roof; the animals jumped on to the parapet and in the same heart-stopping movement launched themselves into the air just as shouts from the stairway end of the roof rang out. Ferbin whooped, half in fear and half in excitement, as the great wings opened with a snap and he and the caude started to fall towards a flagstoned courtyard half a dozen storeys below, the air roaring in his ears. The caude began pulling out of its dive, heavying him into the saddle; the wind screamed about him and he caught a glimpse of Holse to his side, grim-faced, hands clenched round the reins as they levelled out and the giant beasts took their first flap at the air. Distant popping noises behind them might have been gunfire. Something whizzed past between his caude and Holse’s, but then they were beating out away from the Scholastery over the fields and streams.
7. Reception
A reception was held in a grand drawing room of the palace after the state funeral of the late king and his internment in the Hausk family mausoleum, which lay some distance outside the farpole edge of the city walls. It had rained since morning and the day was still dark beyond the tall windows of the great room. Hundreds of candles burned by mirrored walls; the King had recently had installed lights which consumed lampstone, and others which arced electricity to make light, but both had proved problematic in operation and Oramen was glad to see the candles. They gave a softer light and the room didn’t stink of the noxious gases the other types of lamp gave off.
“Fanthile!” Oramen said, seeing the palace secretary.
“Sir.” Fanthile, in his most formal court clothes, all trimmed with mourning red, bowed deeply to the prince. “This is the sorriest of days, sir. We must hope it marks the end of the very sorriest of times.”
“My father would have wanted it no other way.” Oramen saw a couple of Fanthile’s assistants waiting behind him, as good as hopping from foot to foot like children in need of the toilet. He smiled. “I believe you’re needed, Fanthile.”
“With your leave, sir.”
“Of course,” Oramen said, and let Fanthile go to arrange whatever needed to be arranged. He supposed it was a busy time for the fellow. Personally he was quite content to stand and watch.
The atmosphere in the echoing great space, it seemed to Oramen, was one almost of relief. He had only recently developed a feeling for things like the atmosphere of a room. Amazingly, this was something Ferbin had purposefully taught him. Before, Oramen had tended to dismiss talk of such abstracts as ‘atmosphere’ as somehow unimportant; stuff adults talked about for want of anything actually worth discussing. Now he knew better and, by measuring his own submerged mood, he could attempt to gauge the emotional tenor of a gathering like this.
Over the years, Oramen had learned much from his older brother — mostly things like how to behave so as to avoid beatings, tutors tearing their hair out, scandalised lenders petitioning one’s father for funds to pay gambling debts, outraged fathers and husbands demanding satisfaction, that sort of thing — but this was an instance when Ferbin had had a proper lesson he could actually teach his younger brother, rather than simply exemplifying the bad example.
Ferbin had taught Oramen to listen to his own feelings in such situations. This had not been so easy; Oramen often felt overwhelmed in complicated social environments and had come to believe that he felt every emotion there was to feel at such times (so that they all cancelled each other out), or none at all. Eitherly, the result was that he would just stand there, or sit there, or at rate just be there, at whatever ceremony or gathering he was present at, seemingly near catatonic, feeling thoroughly detached and declutched, a waste to himself and an embarrassment to others. He had never suffered especially as a result of this mild social disability — one could get away with almost anything being the son of the King, as Ferbin seemed to have spent most of his life attempting to prove — however, such incidents had come to annoy him, and he’d known that they would only increase as he grew older and — even as the younger prince — he’d be expected to start taking a fuller part in the ceremonial and social workings of the court.
Gradually, under Ferbin’s admittedly casual tutelage, he had learned to seek a sort of calmness in himself and then amplify what feeling was still there, and use that as his marker. So that if, after a little immersion in a social grouping, he still felt tense when he had no particular reason to, then the shared feeling amongst that group must be something similar. If he felt at ease, then that meant the general atmosphere was also placid.
There was, here, he thought — standing looking out over the people collecting in the great drawing room — genuine sadness as well as an undercurrent of apprehension regarding what would happen now with the great king gone (his father’s stature had risen all the higher with his death, as if he was already passing into legend), but there was too a kind of excitement; everyone knew that the preparations for the attack on what was thought to be the now near-defenceless Deldeyn were being stepped up and the war — perhaps, as the late king had believed, the last ever war — was therefore approaching its conclusion.