Maître Gris bowed. His bow was stiff.
“Not so difficult to find, after all,” the archbishop said sharply.
The stranger smiled. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I was already in the palace,” he said. “I have business here, anyway.”
The two of them crossed the floor to the middle of the room, where Master Gilles still stood. The new man bowed very slightly, the cloak fell from his arm, and he spun as he raised his right hand and Master Gilles staggered back, gave a short scream of despair, and fell, clutching his stomach.
Without pausing, the new man’s leg shot out and he rolled Maître Gris, swept his legs and dropped him on his face, with his right arm already dislocated behind his back. The monk gave a tortured scream. The green and black man kicked him with precision.
Unhurried, the black and green stranger stepped over the thrashing monk and pointed his left hand unerringly at the archbishop. Something metal winked in his hand.
“I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced, eminence. I am Jules Kronmir, and for some days now I have fed poisoned information to your people… mistaken estimates, foolish inflations and downright lies. It has been great fun, and I confess that I feel at this late date that I can claim almost complete credit for the collapse of your forces. Because of me, you halted at Second Bridge when a quick pursuit might have destroyed the Red Knight, and because of me, de Vrailly pushed forward later, when it was the wrong move, and because of me, the city rose behind you.” Kronmir was very close to the archbishop. “Ah, and because of me, your captains hired my people and my friends as Royal Guards.” He laughed.
His eyes flicked to the two purple and yellow guards as they moved. They were unsure of themselves, halberds leveled but still out of distance to confront or attack the intruder.
He winked at the nearest. “What you gentlemen need to ask yourself is what, if anything, this useless sack of flesh has ever done for you? I would suggest that the answer is not enough. Even now, the corridors of this palace are being taken by the guilds. I recommend that you both lay down your arms, and surrender, and perhaps I’ll arrange for you to have a future.”
Both men placed their halberds gently on the marble floor.
“Cowards!” the archbishop spat. “Gilles!”
Kronmir smiled. “Master Gilles has several inches of Witchbane in his gut. I suspect he will recover in time, but he will not be casting any time soon. As for you-” Kronmir’s voice dropped to a croon, like a mother singing a lullaby. “I wanted you to hear how easily I defeated you. After that, you die, and, I suspect, burn forever in hell.”
The archbishop began the invocation of his ally.
The small steel ballestrina coughed. A six-inch steel dart went straight through the archbishop’s skull, killing him instantly. The range was four inches, and the poison on the dart was wasted.
The archbishop’s body fell forward, and his mitre fell to the floor with a silken rustle. The two purple and yellow thugs were kneeling on the floor.
Kronmir looked around, admiring his effect. Then he stepped up to the great arched window, leaned out, and jumped for the moat, his precious ballestrina clutched close.
Before Maître Gris could drag in another sobbing breath, a dozen Guild crossbowmen burst in through the main doors and rushed the room. They were on edge, weapons cocked and their captain had a drawn and bloodied sword, but they were steady enough that they did not shoot the two disarmed haberdiers.
“By the rood!” spat the captain, a heavy man from the Butcher’s Guild. “The bloody archbishop is dead!” He touched the magister, who lay sobbing on the floor. “Christ!” he muttered. “Witchbane!”
But despite the blood and the misery, the captain sounded relieved, and so, ten minutes later, was Ser Gerald Random now in full possession of the palace. He looked down at the archbishop’s rapidly cooling corpse.
“Sic transit gloria mundi,” he said. “Take the others, and keep them under guard.”
Less than fifty paces away, Jules Kronmir was climbing out of the moat in broad daylight, the least elegant part of his plan. But he made it over the low retaining wall into a cart where Lucca, his best blade, waited with dry clothes in a tinker’s donkey cart.
“What now, boss?” Lucca asked.
Kronmir had on a dry shirt and hose. He leaned back against the wall. “I think we’d like a ship,” he said. “To Venike. I am only guessing. But employers like it when you plan ahead.”
Lucca looked around as if a horde of boglins had just appeared. “Venike? Is it that bad? Are they on to us?”
Kronmir laughed. “There is no longer a ‘they’ to be ‘on to us,’” he said. “Our side is in possession. And all the dirty work is done.” He took the flask of wine that Lucca offered him, drank some and smiled his approval.
“Possibly my best work,” he added.
Chapter Fourteen
Sixty leagues south of South Ford, moving the so-called royal army had become an exercise in metaphysical logistics. They’d had two days of solid rain and everyone was soaked to the skin, ill-tempered and bug-bitten.
The sky was always full of an enemy and, according to the messages received, that enemy carried a pestilence deadly to every horse in the army. The captain, as the most powerful magister present, found himself awake all day and all night, and had three skirmishes with them before the cunning predators retired to higher altitudes.
But the captain’s need for sleep-his own weakness-and a need to rid himself of the omnipresent enemy made for the delay. He ordered the column to halt in an easily defended wagon camp just west of the gorge while he waited for the Queen’s party, a day behind, to catch up.
The lost day was welcomed by many-dry bowstrings and dry clothes cooked yellow at fires, as if nature, too, had decreed a day of rest. Out of a misty morning came a bright afternoon. Men wandered about-walking out into the pristine woodlands or along the gorge in chaotic patterns that hid-to those above-that more were leaving camp than returning. The sun dappled the glades around the camp and lit the bright green leaves and the last farmer’s fields of the now distant Brogat, and the men and women, Alban, Occitan and Morean, settled in to a good meal with heavy guards. Sukey’s girls carried mess kettles out to the mounted vedettes and Gelfred’s partisans and tried not to giggle as they passed rows of hungry men in hastily dug trenches. The guard changed an hour before sunset, and heavy patrols suddenly launched from both ends of the camp.
They found nothing, but they made the captain feel better, and they put on a good show for the distant barghasts.
Just at the edge of night, the Queen’s party came in, trailing the monstrous avians like picnickers trailing mosquitoes.
Gabriel was ready-indeed, ever since the Queen had come back into his range, he’d been in contact with her, and now, both used weak counters and cast reckless and inaccurate missiles until the barghasts grew bold. Swooping from the safety of their altitude, they dropped on the Queen’s party as they rode, fully exposed, along the low path in the gorge’s edge. They leaped like wolves upon sheep.
Sheep seldom have hundreds of professional soldiers guarding them. Nor was the animal cunning of the barghast any match for Gelfred’s hunter mind. He had designed the ambush, complete to slaughtered sheep left in forest openings-and crossbowmen in trees with woven leaf screens who could loose their bolts down into the gorge where the overbold barghasts circled below the archers, trapped like trout against a beaver dam.
Every caster present, no matter how lowly, cast together on the first shrill of the horns, and twenty-one set to frame the words Fiat Lux. Every avian was surrounded in a nimbus of light that perfectly outlined them against the darkening sky-