Swordpoint (10 page)

Halliday's guts twisted at the thought of danger in his house; it was almost with relief that he saw the state seal on the paper, and knew that whatever had happened had not happened to his family.

He scanned the letter and looked down at the waiting faces. 'It's the Helmsleigh weavers, I'm afraid. They've taken their grievances south into Ferlie, and amassed quite a crowd. They're holding council there, Tony, hard by your estates.' Ferris swore. 'And they're burning looms and houses.'

'Well,' said Ferris, his face grim. 'Then all those negotiations were for nothing. I'll go at once. Give me a cordon of City Guard, and I can raise my own men on the way to Ferlie. Just give me an hour to settle my affairs - '

'You can't travel tonight. The local bailiffs have already called up some help. If you sleep and start in the morning you'll get there more safely, and far better rested.'

There was more clatter in the yard: the arrival of an eyewitness, one of Ferris's own men from Ferlie. He had come with an escort. The men must rest the night; the weavers knew the Lord Chancellor had been sent for, and were still for now.

Lord Ferris's guests left without further ceremony. After seeing to the arrangements of his messengers, the first thing Ferris did was to pen a note to St Vier. The matter could not go forward without his close supervision; he wanted no moves made while he was out of town. For the time being, Halliday was spared.

It was late when he finally sent for Katherine. Clad only in a shirt and dressing gown, he was lying on his bed, not in it, catching a few hours' rest before the dawn. He held the sealed note out to her: 'I want you to see that your friend gets this before tomorrow night.'

As her eyes widened in protest he said, 'Of course you needn't go to Riverside yourself. I've told you I wouldn't send you back there. You have contacts. Use them. I can't send one of my own people, -someone might recognise them.' She took the letter, still staring at him. 'Kathy, you look frightened.' He drew her to the bed, and pulled a quilt over them both, undoing her clothes as he continued to speak: 'I promise you there won't be much more of this. You'll see him one more time, when I get back, and that will be all.' She gripped his shoulders, forcing him to hold her. 'I won't let him hurt you, as he did your friend.'

'It's not that,' she said; 'you never thought it was that.'

'Well, I'm sorry if I embarrassed you in front of company. There was a point I needed to make.'

'Well you made it. But he won't care what you do to me.'

'Ah,' he smiled dreamily, 'you can't believe that. But even if you do, it doesn't help him any. You see it works both ways. I can tell how you'd feel if St Vier came on any mischance.' He stilled her protests with his thin lips. 'Now don't worry. He isn't going to refuse me, and I'm not going to hurt him. But it's nice to know that I can trust you both.'

Pressed under him now, she began kissing his chest, his neck, his jaw, as though her fever of nerves could be mistaken for passion and silence his flow of words.

Ferris, breathing hard above her but refusing to be taken in, continued, 'Have you seen his scholar lover, by the way?'

'No.'

'I have; although it wouldn't have done to say so. I heard all about him in that Riverside-place you sent me to. And then he nearly knocked me down coming in the door.'

She stopped still, and had to start again. 'Oh? What's he like?'

But his hands were on her shoulders now, it didn't matter what she did. 'Thin. Ragged. He's very tall.

He leaned his full weight into her.

He slept for awhile; when he woke up she was still there, limply curled around a pillow. He said to her, 'Incidentally,' interrupting her dreams, 'incidentally: Asper - that is, Lord Horn - will probably come around asking you for more information about St Vier and his friend. Tell him everything you can, and remember what he says for me. It will amuse me to hear what he's thinking.'

She said nothing.

'Horn's a fool,' he said; 'you can see it yourself. Don't worry so much. I want you to do this for me.'

She said, 'Yes, my lord.'

In the morning, Lord Horn found St Vier's note stuffed in the back of a drawer. He uncrumpled it and looked at the forceful handwriting, trying to spare his eyes its insulting message. What had Ferris said? Every man lives at swordspoint. It had been an epigram, after all - and a clever one, too.

Chapter XIII

The new note was sealed on the outside with a thumbprint, and on the inside with the swan signet. There was only one word: Delay.

'D.E' explained Alec, chalking it on the hearth with a burnt twig-end, 'that spells de. L.A.Y., lay. Delay.'

Richard eased the note into the fire, where it burned merrily for a few seconds.

'Waste of perfectly good paper,' Alec protested. 'It was hardly written on!'

'Never mind,' Richard said; 'when Tremontaine pays me the 30 advance, I can buy you a sheaf. Is that the same D that's in Richard?'

'Ver-ry good!' Alec drawled, diverted. 'And in Diane. And duchess. There is, of course,' he added daintily, 'no D in Alec'

'Of course.' Richard picked up a practice sword, nimbly sidestepping the small grey kitten the neighbourhood cat-lady had foisted on them in return for a gift of wood ('Removing the poor thing from evil influences,' Alec had said, accepting). The kitten loved moving swordpoints.

'You'll have time for Michael Godwin now,' Alec said brightly.

'Horn's job? I thought you wrote him a letter.'

'I did. But you could change your mind.'

'I don't think so.' Richard stopped, the tip of his sword just out of kitten jumping range. 'Do you have something against Godwin too?'

'Not yet. But you're always complaining about being poor -'

'You're always complaining about being poor. I keep trying to tell you, it's a matter of challenge. You understand about boredom, don't you? Now, Halliday will be well guarded. I may have to fight several of his people before I can even reach him, unless I can plot a way to get him alone - maybe along the roofs and in through a window___'

'You know,' Alec said, 'you're going to kill that cat one of these days.'

'No I'm not.' A barely perceptible turn of his wrist brought the blade out of its reach.

'Neat,' said his friend sourly. 'They should pay you to do that.'

He sat silent for a while, watching Richard exercise. The cat stalked the swordsman's right heel in its rhythmic dance across the floor, neither making a sound. Only the wall sent up a steady thud and crack of steel; but either the neighbours were out, or they'd grown used to it. When the kitten came close, Alec darted his arm down and scooped it up. It snuggled under his chin; with one ringer he absently stroked the length of its spine. He gazed between its ears at the moving swordsman, and said silkily over the exercise, 'You've never actually seen the duchess, have you?'

'On the barge,' Richard panted. 'The fireworks.'

'So did a thousand other people. You haven't spoken to her.'

The swordsman jumped back, spun on his toe and came in low. 'No.'

'Why should she want Halliday killed, do you think?' Richard paused, wiping sweat out of his eyes. 'It's none of my business.'

'Then keep it that way.'

Richard was silent. He didn't mind Alec being there watching him: Alec never paid real attention to what he was doing. He still couldn't follow a fight intelligently. Richard changed his line of attack and winced as his arm protested: a mistake to let it stiffen in one line. His imaginary opponent parried, and he used all his reach in a complex defensive counter. His imaginary opponents were always so much better than his real ones.

'Richard.'

Alec had spoken his name quite softly, but the intensity of the syllables froze him like a scream. Carefully he put the sword down, hearing its clatter loud in the tense, vibrating silence. Alec was sitting very still, with his arms wrapped around himself, but that was good: Richard checked to see that there was no knife near him, no glass he could break. It had happened once before like this, in another time that should have been easy: the sudden change in the air, and then Alec snarling and cursing at him as Richard wrested the steel from his hand, spattered with blood from Alec's ineptly sliced wrist; Alec shouting at him: 'Don't you understand? I can't do anything right!' But he hadn't really been trying.

The memory was with Richard clearly now. He stood still, outwardly patient, his senses alert for the sudden movement, the twist of revelation.

'Do you understand what they meant by Delay?' Alec's voice was as icy-clear as an actor's off the bare walls. 'They want you, Richard, and they think they're going to have you.' Winter light from the window turned one side of his face to silver. 'Are you going to let them?'

'Not let them have me, no.' He answered as he had before. 'I make bargains, not pacts. They know that.'

'Richard,' he said with the same intense calm, 'they are not pleasant people. I have never liked them.'

'Well I'll tell you something,' Richard moved closer to him; 'I don't like most of them myself. I don't like very many people, really.'

'They like you.'

'I'm nice to them, that's why. I have to be nice to them, or...'

'Or you'll kill them?'

'Or they'll get upset. I don't like it when they do that; it makes me uncomfortable.'

Alec smiled thinly, the first trace of expression on his face since the conversation had begun. 'And I make you comfortable?'

'It doesn't matter. You're not boring, like the rest of them.'

'I'm a challenge.'

'In a way, yes.' Richard smiled.

'Well, that's something.' Alec uncurled his arms from around his knees. 'Nice to know there's one thing I'm good at.'

The kitten came back to him then, looking for the warm spot he had made with his legs.

It was his house, but Michael didn't feel right practising there. The swordstudy had started out as a joke, an unorthodox skill he might in time present to society as a colourful eccentricity; but now that it was in earnest he felt the heed for secrecy. He worked his practice and lesson times at Applethorpe's around his old schedule, being careful to appear when he was expected amongst his peers. He practised early afternoons with the academy's targets, then changed into fine clothes and made a round of visits, took his dance lessons or went riding with his friends in the hills above the city. Every other day he dined alone, early and sparsely, and walked to Applethorpe's in the twilight for lessons in the empty studio, before his round of evening entertainments began. As it grew dark they had to light candles; but both he and the Master tacitly preferred this time of day when no one else was there to observe them.

The Master was less patient with him now. The calm detachment he showed in his public lessons was no part of his personality, but a real unconcern for the achievements of his students. None of them were expected to be swordsmen: they learned what they could, what they wanted to, that was all. Michael was to master all that his teacher knew. It was a lot; and it was very precise. From his years of teaching, Applethorpe had learned to explain accurately the mechanics of any movement: what rhythms, stresses and balances were brought into play, and why. And always after these explanations came the bending of his body to specification, and the imprinting of the pattern on his muscles and nerves. Michael would be caught in a frenzy of drill-work, trying to perfect a twist of the wrist that deflected the blade without moving its tip; sweat pouring down his face and breathing a nuisance since it was more hard work; and in his ears, over the roaring of his lungs, a voice like a persistent insect would be shouting, 'Balance! Balance! That arm is for balance!' - one more thing to correct without losing what he'd gained. He turned once and shouted back, 'Will you leave it? I can only do so much!'

The Master regarded him with a calm, sardonic gaze. 'Then you are dead, and we may as well not be bothering.'

Flushing, Michael dropped his eyes, following the line of his blade to its tip on the floor. 'I'm sorry.'

The Master persisted unemotionally, 'You're not even facing an opponent yet. When you are, you have to think of where his arms are, as well as your own. In fact, you can't be thinking of your own at all: you have to know them. I'll show you.' He picked up another blunt sword, and faced off to Michael. 'Let's try it. I won't use anything you don't know.'

They had drilled together before, but always in predetermined sequences. Facing him, Michael felt a thrill of nerves, excitement - and suddenly wondered whether the Master's missing arm might not be used to throw him off balance if Michael were skilful....

As instructed, he watched his opponent's eyes. Applethorpe's were like mirrors, signalling nothing, only reflecting. Michael thought suddenly of St Vier's at the bookshop, aloof and opaque. He knew that look now.

In that instant the Master struck. Michael's defence grazed the Master's sword on its return from his chest. 'You're wounded,' Applethorpe said. 'Let's go on.'

He tried to laugh, or feel admiration, but he was filled with rage. He forgot about eyes, about one-armed men; he silently ordered himself in the Master's voice: 'Feet straight -grip loose -head up___'

He was retreating, fighting only for defence, sick with the knowledge that Applethorpe wasn't even trying to touch him. He tried at least to anticipate the attack, to have the right move ready for if, he had the feeling he was forgetting something vital he'd learned.... Suddenly he found himself advancing, the Master falling back before his attack. He thought of his newest move, the little twist that could give him an opening....

'You just fell on my blade,' Applethorpe said, his breathing only slightly ruffled. 'Balance.'

Michael dusted himself off. 'Very nice,' the Master said to his surprise, 'for starters. Did you enjoy that?'

Michael gasped, getting his breath back. 'Yes,' he said. He found he was grinning. 'Yes, I did.'

He met the duchess once, on an afternoon ride. She was dressed in grey velvet, and was sitting a nervous grey mare. Her face and hair gleamed above them like snow on a mountain. Her party reined in, and his followed suit. She leaned across to Lord Michael, offering him her hand to kiss, a perilous exercise that he was able to accomplish dextrously while their horses danced underneath them.

'I understand', he said over the general greetings, 'that Lord Ferris has gone south to quell the riots.'

'Indeed,' she said; 'the dictates of responsibility. And such dreadful weather for travelling, too.' His pulse was beating so hard he was afraid she might see it disturbing the ruffles over his throat. 'And how is your new horse?'

He didn't know what she was talking about.

'One hears you are off to the stables a good deal,' she elucidated.

Someone was spying on him. Or was it just a rumour to account for his absences? He may have started it himself. Did it mean he'd have to get a horse now? He smiled back at her. 'Your ladyship looks quite charming. I hope your lovely mount is not too tiring.'

'Not at all.'

Her eyes, her silvery eyes like mirrors - He knew that look now, and knew how to respond to it. There was her challenge to be met - met, not fled with backward glances over his shoulder to make sure she was pursuing him. It was she, in a way, who had set him on his current road with her taunting. Some day she might learn of it, and wonder. It did not occur to him yet that in attaching himself to the discipline of the sword he had already met the first part of her challenge.

He steeled his own eyes as well as he could, knowing that, with their sea-colour, they would never be as immutably hard as he would like. And he smiled at her. 'Madam, perhaps I might have the pleasure of calling on you soon.'

'Indeed, it may be soon.'

The wind blew her words away from him; but that was what he thought she said. Their parties were separating amid laughter and the jingling of harness. In a few days, a week... He rode on into the hills, without looking back.