Guilty Blood (12 page)

At the yard's end, the face of the palace extended in an elaborate porte-cochère, its symmetrical pillars supporting balconies studded with statues, anonymous in the fog. Something in those shadows moved. It was nothing more than a shifting of fog and shades of black, but I was sure it was more than just nerves and mist. Crouching in the dark, several breaths passed before I saw it again. It was a window, which something had passed by. Then again. And again. Figures walking in line, as though in some grim processional.

Once the forms seemed to have passed, I crept under the portico, slipping between pillars patterned with knights and huntsmen. Here the main entrance into the palace stood partially open as well. Had the fortress's royal former inhabitants been hosting a midnight ball I imagined the entry might have looked much as it did now, inviting guests to partake of the festivities within. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd forgotten my invitation. Watchful for whatever had moved, I cautiously slipped inside.

Within rose a foreboding foyer, elegant with shadows and the silhouettes of darkened masterpieces. Chandeliers sprouting the antlers of dozens of stags and hundreds of unlit candles hung lifeless in the gloom. Whoever had been invited to tonight's event apparently wasn't interested in the royal décor. Yet, that they hadn't tarried here was a relief, the dusty smelling hall almost perfectly still. All that moved was the faintest flickers of light from the ornate doors at the long chamber's end. Light that, as I watched, was snuffed to faint slit by the door's closing.

I chased after the light, doing my best to keep my footfalls from echoing upon the dark tile floor, it being my only destination in the darkness of the deeper hall. Listening at the cold metal, not a sound came from within, and I knelt to peer through the gap between door and floor. I could tell the room beyond was vast, but could see little more than a few inches off the cold stone floor. Especially as something was blocking my view: a body, dropped in the chamber's center.

Seeing and hearing nothing else, and fearful that I might be looking at Rarentz's corpse, I prayed the hall be as empty as it appeared and pushed upon the door to peer beyond.

Twin braziers lit the ancestral throne room of generations of Ustalavic rulers, a crypt of forsaken opulence rising intimidating and forlorn. Columns marching along the chamber's edge supported tiered galleries above the business of the audience floor. Banners and decorations that once festooned the balconies hung moth eaten and rotting, sagging from the shadowy heights like the webs of some massive, lurking spider queen. Yet the focal point of the chamber was the throne, a majestically grim thing of silver, ebony, and oily purple silk upon a frame of deepest black marble. And the figure upon the throne, Prince Lieralt Ordranti.

He was much as I had seen him in the alley two nights past, yet, like then, he seemed even more there, healed, if one can say such things of the dead. Where my first sight of him had been of a corpse riddled with wounds, they had faded in the days since. Now only one marred his noble form, a gash at the center of his chest. One wound. One victim remaining—Troidais.

The prince wasn't alone, though. While I had been prepared for the terror of his wandering soul, the murdered royal had somehow drawn a vestige of his long dead court from Stagcrown's haunted stones. Seeming to fade in and out of existence, chilling vapors as insubstantial as the night's fog floated through the hall, the shades of a hundred grim courtiers and aristocrats. The costumes of an age past adorned aristocrats the very memory of which had rotted away, their spectral finery draping mere skeletons. Skeletal ladies and lords waited in uncanny silence, patience for the commands of their spectral prince. A chill seized me as I wondered if I were glimpsing the afterlife itself.

Yet one figure was definitely real. Rarentz, lying at the room's center, unmoving and, I hoped, only unconscious.

"This place is no longer for the living, good lady" came the prince's slow, formal words, echoing their deadliness through the crowded chamber's unsettling quiet. "Leave."

I'd be lying to say that I bravely stood my ground. Truth be told, I almost obeyed. Part of me was screaming for an excuse to flee, and there the greatest terror I'd ever known bid me do just that. But another part of me, a part I'm sure will someday kill me, knew that if I fled, I'd be saving my own life at the cost of another's. I held my ground, and took what I hope looked like a deliberate step into the crowd of souls.

Swallowing hard, I prayed my words wouldn't betray my fear. "Lord Ordranti, apologies, but I can't. Not when the one you've taken is innocent."

Dozens of gazes, eyes replaced by oblivion's absolute black, turned to face me, hollow and dispassionate. All but one pair, the prince's eyes smoldered.

Raising his hands in an imperious gesture, the crowd parted and three figures in heavy cloaks dragged themselves forth. These were more solid than the room's other terrors, things with form and flesh and faces. Yet I wish they hadn't, for those features were what made two of them instantly recognizable, the corpulent Lord Halboncrant and the once proud Garmand Ferendri, both now lifeless, walking corpses.

"And these?" the prince tested. "Were these innocents as well?"

"Of your murder, yes." I said, trying to walk the line between respect and insistence. "Your highness, you were killed over a hundred years ago. Those who betrayed you have met their punishment in death."

The prince shook his head thoughtfully. "Did they? And what do you know of death's punishments?" he waited, baiting me to test my empty religious rote against his deathless perspective. I deferred. "Do these, then, look like the sons of traitors? The shamed offspring of criminals punished for betraying their families' most sacred duties?"

With another gesture the corpses staggered forward, ungainly and slow, but still with some measure of the dignity they held in life, the already reeking Halboncrant still draped in his silks and gaudy jewelry.

"This land's honor is dead. I knew that in my time, and was killed for daring to free my people from the exploitations of families called noble only as a matter of tradition. I see now that Ustalav has fallen from a nation of heroes to a nation of victims. So be it, then. It is my will that all be equally victimized, starting with those most deserving of justice: traitors to the crown."

"Who are you to judge me, who should be your prince!"

He pointed, taking in the three dead men and Rarentz upon the ground. "Should the sons of traitors continue to enjoy the privileges of their titles? Should a master keep a servant who steals from him? And by extension, should a ruler heap favor upon families who repays him with treason? Just as the greedy servant is cast out of the house, so too will the traitor lines be ended."

"But these men didn't betray you, or your family," I insisted, still hoping to make him see what seemed like such an obvious point. "You're condemning innocent men."

"That justice's execution has been delayed is regrettable, but guilt taints these families' blood, and only by spilling it might it be expunged," the prince decreed, his words those of a judge. "Had this happened in my time, the result would be no different."

I took a step before I was even sure what I was doing, my flesh bristling with a chill. I knew I wouldn't convince him, especially as he defended his murders with the skewed logic of the entitled. The assembled dead looked on in silence, siding with neither the prince nor me.

"So good people should die for their parent's sins? Are we really nothing more than our blood?" I kept talking, trying to distract him, taking another slow step.

Lieralt didn't even hesitate, "My lady, you may never know the burden of your blood, and were I you, I would pray to the goddess daily for that mercy. Yet for some of us, our blood is a chain, one that binds us to duties that perhaps we would not choose. We are but links in such chains, bound to our fathers and our sons for generations into infinities past and future. I tried to alter the responsibilities of my blood, and for that I was punished, my place in my family's chain severed. Yet my murderers too denied the responsibilities of their blood, and so does justice demand their families' chains be severed. That their families were given one more link then they deserved should be seen as a mercy, but not a reason to deny justice."

I'd neared the base of the throne, my locked eyes and slow nods hopefully suggesting I'd been listening intently. In truth, the prince's words were distant, nearly drowned out by the sound of blood pounding in my ears. I was close enough to see through him here. That he was a thing of ether and death and not flesh and blood maybe explained his cold vision of justice.

Looking at the floor I shook my head, trying to look defeated, at the same time calling upon whatever nerve I had left. I only expected to have one chance.

Ignoring my repulsion for the thing, my hand was around the dagger and the same motion that yanked it from its sheathe sent it flying at the throne. The blade's gemstone hilt seemed to catch fire as it flew, looking more like the eye of some ravenous creature than ever before. When it struck, it embedded itself into the back of the throne solidly, quivering with a resounding thrum.

Yet it thoroughly missed the prince.

In that second I knew I was dead.

Instantly Lieralt was in motion, rising from the throne, his blade materializing from the shadows. "How could you know what hell it was, locked in that thing for a lifetime? Living for more years in my own corpse than in my living body," he started slowly, even calmly, his voice growing terrible with anger until it was a resentful shout echoing through the throne room. "How could your words color me a tyrant, then your hands repeat an injustice a thousand times worse? Who are you to judge me, who should be your prince!"

He moved with such speed I couldn't follow him. I cringed from the blow I expected to pierce straight to my soul. But it didn't fall. Swiftly I looked about the room. The corpses, the spirits, they were all there—bar one. Prince Lieralt was nowhere to be seen.

Motion from the floor caught my attention. Rarentz. Knocked out, he finally seemed to be coming to. Instantly escape seemed like a possibility. If I could get him to his feet and running, we both might be able to escape the palace, even the city, before the prince attempted to take both our lives.

Rushing to his side, I kneeled to help him up. Whispering urgently, hoping his groggy mind might understand my tone if not my words. He complied slowly, rising and taking a staggering step, still unsteady on his feet. I put an arm around his waist to steady him and he turned to look at me quizzically.

"Have you known betrayal?" came Prince Lieralt's voice from Rarentz's lips.

I gaped and staggered back, jerking my hands from the repulsive things using Rarentz's body like a puppet. Doing so I stumbled into the rigid corpse of Garmand and tripped backward, landing on the first step of the throne.

"Have you known your vision, your life, ruined by the pettiness of the scared and weak?" the prince, or Rarentz, went on, taking a step toward me. The corpses parted to admit their master, and four dead men looked down upon me. I could feel the scream welling up in my lungs as I scrambled up the stairs until my back struck against the base of the throne.

"Do you still think the traitor's dagger a suiting end?" he gestured toward the devil blade above me. "Would you exact the justice you claimed I was so unsuited to?"

My mind grasped for options, for ways to escape. With Lieralt and Rarentz sharing one body, who knows what the dagger might do. It might trap Rarentz, condemning him to a fate like the prince. Or it might trap both of them together, sealing them both away in an entirely different kind of damnation. I shook my head.

"Truly?" he said, reaching out to Garmand's corpse and drawing the dead man's own thin dagger from his belt. "But I find your idea so…" he lifted Rarentz's hand and ran the blade down the length of his forearm, drawing out the final word, "inspired." Blood welled up from the long slash to run courses down Rarentz's arm, dripping from his elbow in a steady stream of heavy droplets.

I gasped my disgust, horrified by the sight of Rarentz's eyes, flickering between the blank dispassion of Lieralt and the panicked helplessness of one held prisoner in his own body. "Stop!" I shouted, knowing it sounded pitiful.

"How, dear lady?" he said mockingly. "How will they speak of him? How will his wretched family be remembered?" He swapped the blade into his bloody hand, "Shall he have died in a duel from a dozen cuts?" As swift as a butcher, Lieralt sliced scores into his captive's arm.

Again I shouted, but was ignored.

"Or shall we indulge irony with an assassination?" he quipped, placing the dagger behind his back. He didn't wait for a response before gasping, "Ah, no. I have it," he put the blade to his throat, "a suicide. How the neighbors will talk." He laughed vicious and terrible.

"Can't choose?" he taunted after a moment more. "I'll do it for you then." Placing the blade to Rarentz's temple, he began pulling it across his brow and down his far cheek in a languid stroke. Again the crimson welled up and overflowed, covering Rarentz's face in a mask of blood, made all the more terrible by the prince's laugh coming from his trembling lips.