The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (31 page)

Sometimes if the Duke slept well the headache would be gone in the morning. But it would ooze back into his skull over the course of the long days spent in his throne room. The room had changed now to the point that it was in no condition to receive visitors nor to host any banquet or ceremony. The twin thrones of mahogany inlaid with silver and upholstered with silk still sat on their dais, though Cyril hardly ever sat in his and his wife’s had been empty for twelve years now apart from the jeweled circlet sitting untouched on the pillow, which the Duchess’s staff still dusted and fluffed every day.

The throne room was vast and church-like with stone columns running down a central aisle and wide windows of stained glass high in the tall walls, facing due east and west to dapple the parquet floor with pink light at dawn and somber purple in the evenings. Beneath the windows the paneled walls were covered with adornments, primarily the Chengdean banners of a gold flower on a green field. The blossoms were a species of lotus with four curving petals native to the banks of the Black River, and thus commonly called the Black Lotus despite being a deep yellow bordering on orange. The ancient Ettacean name for the flower was the
chengde
, and it had given this place a name nearly fourteen centuries ago.

Between the banners, murals and torch brackets were dozens of decorations of a classic Daulic type; embossed shields mounted over crossed swords. The shields displayed the heraldry of prominent provincial nobles with the family names etched in flowing script on fired clay tablets mounted beneath them. The tablets and even a few of the names such as Gaehei, Vracchi, and Chirobbi hearkened back to ancient times when Chengdea was the twelfth and last province of the Ettacean Empire. A mixture of modified Ettasi names and old Leutian families such as Dolmonum, Towsan, and Orbachauer had become part of this land’s history during the long centuries when Chengdea had survived as an independent successor-state to the fallen empire, ruled by Dukes who still modeled their authority on the defunct Imperial writ.

Most of the shields and the family names were newer and purely Daulic, for the Nan River Kingdom had held sway here for some three-hundred years since its knights had poured into the Duchy to battle the unholy monstrosities that had scuttled out of Vod’Adia and the Wilds at the Second Opening. The Duchy was saved but at the price of independence, for the knights had not gone home after the last wight was hewn asunder, the last shadowy wraith banished. As the shields told, the descendents of men who had been but squires and knights in the Dead War were barons and earls of Daulic Chengdea to this day.

There were two shields above the thrones, that above the circlet in the empty chair was the ancient sigil of the Halvalons of eastern Daul. Cyril’s wife had detested her family banner for while from a distance it just looked like a white dove flanked by two sets of three wheat sheaves, once you got close you could see that the dove was holding an eyeball in its beak, hanging by a red nerve. Duchess Jasmine Halvalon Perforce had been a women of refinement whose sense of decorum did not embrace severed body parts on banners, and especially not on tableware.

The last shield, mounted above the ducal throne, was such a simple design as to have been an afterthought, consisting only of a diagonal gold band on a green background. The design, and Cyril’s family name of Perforce, had only been in existence since the ongoing Ayzant war began with the catastrophic battle of the Icheroon. There on an insignificant stream in the bad borderlands between the Kingdom of Daul and Ayzantium the cream of Daulic chivalry had ridden their heavy horses downhill into sucking marshes that must have looked dry from above. They had been butchered by Zantish peasants with scythes and threshing flails. A line of Dukes who had ruled Chengdea for a century was ended there, as were many much older Daulic families. In the chaos that followed thrones and fiefdoms across the provinces changed hands until seized by someone strong enough to hold onto them. In Chengdea the last man standing had been a minor knight whose lineage dated from Daul’s occupation of the Winding River lands, across the Girdings in Orstaf. Sir Cyril Balabushevych had been crowned Duke Cyril I in this very throne room, with a horse saber in one hand and the dead Duke’s widow in the other. The new Duke had lost the old Kantan mouthful in favor of
Perforce
, which was both Daulic and indicative of the manner in which his line had come to power.

The younger Cyril had been there as well, barely more than a boy at the time. He had held a blunderbuss on the sweating Jobian priest who conducted the dual wedding ceremony and coronation. As he now remembered it, Cyril had also had a splitting headache on that day.

Within five years the boy had gone from the bastard son of a minor knight who’d had to rent horses for jousts to being crowned himself as Duke Cyril II of Chengdea, for his father’s reign was short. It had ended with a drunken fall down five flights of circular tower stairs. The man who had killed something like fourteen or fifteen rival claimants for the Ducal throne in single combat had met his end after tripping over a cat.

To the equal surprise of Cyril II and the Chengdeanese, the young man had proven up to the task of ruling the Duchy, even as the war with Ayzantium slashed bleeding hunks out of the Kingdom’s southern, coastal flank. Chengdea met all royal demands for manpower and supply from the new King of Daul, Hughes III, who had also come to the throne as a youngster after the old king’s death on the Icheroon. Perhaps because of their likeness in age the young King seemed to trust his young Duke from the beginning, and the two had begun and maintained a warm correspondence between Chengdea and the royal capital of Bouree, or else with Hughes’s headquarters in the field. For Cyril the richest reward of the relationship had been his introduction at the King’s behest to Jasmine Halvalon, the beautiful golden-haired daughter of a powerful but under-titled baronial family in the east.

The demands the war put on Chengdea were severe but not crippling, and Cyril maintained enough forces at home to keep a lid on Magdetchoi raids from the Vod Wilds across the river. With Jasmine’s invaluable assistance he was careful to spread the burdens in men and material among his barons and earls as best he could, and willing to dip directly into the Ducal treasury when necessary to pay his own people for what the King could otherwise take from them by right. The revolts and unrest that had flared up in other provinces had not been felt on the Black River, and noblemen with lineages as long as the history of the province had grudgingly warmed to the upstart Duke. His refined wife was invaluable there, as well. Sad to say, after Jasmine’s illness and untimely passing a dozen years ago, the hearts of the common men and women of Chengdea had further opened to the widowed Duke.

That was all before the Ayzants had set siege to Larbonne, closing the Black River to the trade that was the lifeblood of the Duchy. Cyril’s already strained treasury lurched into the red, and that was actually the least of his problems. Of more concern was that with the fall of Larbonne, which all signs said could not be far off, the Ayzants would have an open path north on rivers and roads directly into Chengdea, and the King had as yet given no sign that he apprehended the threat. Hughes had his army in Chevagia, north of Roseille, Larbonne’s sister port to the east which the Ayzants had occupied for decades since early in the war. Roseille could scarcely even be considered a Daulic city any longer, yet there was Hughes perched above it with his massive army like a row of ducklings peering over the lip of a high nest, unwilling to hazard the jump to the water.

Or so it was said in the Ducal throne room of Chengdea, not by Cyril but by any number of his nobles whom he had gathered there to plan the defense of the Duchy. While the walls still bore their rich adornments, the floor had been cleared of carpets replaced with reed mats. Some of the carved benches and chairs remained but they were pushed back against the walls for instead of a grand banquet board smaller tables suitable for maps and stacked ledgers filled the floor. Around these, all day every day, stalked those knights and barons who were not serving this year with the King’s army. Most had already done at least one tour with the King and those men spoke among themselves of Hughes’s unwillingness to move his army anywhere that might leave his capital of Bouree exposed, no matter the result for Larbonne, Chengdea, and the rest of “his” Kingdom.

Every day as the word from downriver grew worse the awareness grew among the noblemen of Chengdea that they were going to be on their own. Many a goblet of wine was emptied and many a bold oath was sworn. Men proclaimed that the Duchy would be stoutly defended from the southern baronies to this very throne room, if need be. Given the size of the mercenary-swollen Ayzant army in Larbonne, most thought it probably would.

Such plans as were generated concentrated mostly on slowing the Ayzants in the south so that winter might close the roads to marching armies. Spring might bring relief from Hughes. Or it might not. But no one in Chengdea countenanced supplication to the bloody crown of Ayzantium.

Though he said no such word, Cyril thought spring would be too late. The Shugak of the Vod Wilds were quiet now, running their operations around Vod’Adia, but with the Opening and Closing of that fell place the hobgoblins and bullywugs might well take advantage of Chengdean concentration in the south to raid across the river anywhere else they liked. Good guardsmen on the banks of the Black were necessary to keep the Magdetchoi in check, and Cyril knew that the northern barons loudly proclaiming their dedication to the greater cause of the Duchy would feel far different when their own people were menaced from another quarter, back in their own lands.

As for those nobles, fewer by the day, who still had confidence that the King would come to their defense…Cyril did not disabuse them of that notion. He let their fellows do it for him. Cyril had begun to lose his own faith in Hughes several years back when the King’s personal correspondence had begun to grow strident, paranoid, and increasingly divorced from reality. Hughes had spent most of last year assuring Cyril that his position in Chevagia would keep the Ayzants from moving troops out of Roseille and the Chirabis for an attack in the west, on Larbonne. Cyril had received few letters from Hughes since that attack had happened. In fact, the only direct orders he had received in the last six months had been brought to Cyril in person by a High Lord Knight of the King’s own household, who had insisted on dispatching a Chengdean force on an ill-conceived reconnaissance south to the siege lines, sending a group that had been at once too large to avoid detection, and too small to engage in serious battle. They had been lost almost to a man, and at a personal cost to Cyril that had been far too high to pay. Hughes’s man had slunk back to Chevagia, and Cyril never received as much as a word of condolence.

That had been three months ago, and it had been something of a tipping point for the Duke, moving him decidedly toward something he had been considering for a few years but only ever spoken of with one other person. On the dark night that the body of Sir Lucas Towsan had returned home to Chengdea in a wagon, the Duke had spoken of his thoughts to a third person, Lucas‘s father. A few more knew of it by now though nothing had yet been done about it, apart from Cyril allowing his nobles to come to the realization in their own time that they, the Chengdeanese, were very much alone.

As evening approached on the Eighth Day of Ninth Month and the nobles began to discuss dinner as much as the defense of the Duchy a servant handed the Duke a folded note, one name and a few words scribbled on embossed castle stationary. Cyril excused himself, clapped a somber baron on the shoulder, and made to leave the chamber. Everyone stood to attention and the Duke gave all a nod, but he met the eyes of one thin old knight in particular and beckoned for the man to join him.

Knight-Baron Gideon Towsan, head of Cyril’s Household Guard, was a foot taller than his Duke and some fifteen years older. Despite having the close-cropped gray hair and tidy triangular beard suitable for the generation of Daulmen leaving their fifties, it was Towsan who had to shorten his long stride to walk beside his Duke, as Cyril was of a broad and slightly bow-legged build that marked his Kantan ancestry by way of Orstaf. The Duke’s brown hair was worn short as well, but he had gamely followed the present Daulic style by wearing a flared moustache and allowing his beard to grow long, but only from his chin, and binding it with silver wire.

“
Pagette,” Cyril said a name as the two men marched down the long hall to the portal connecting the throne room to the upper courtyard of Chengdea’s castle, high on the northern-most hills of the city.

“
He has found another…possibility?” Towsan asked carefully. The two nobles passed by uniformed spearman at the wide door who briskly saluted their Duke and commander. Cyril nodded to both the guards and the question. Towsan eyed the men to make sure their chain mail was immaculate, their gold and green tabards bright and without wrinkle.

Cyril and Towsan crossed the grass of the open courtyard passing under trees and around a great central dais mounting an enormous bell as old as the realm, the bronze so green it looked like jade. A mallet hung from the crossbar as a striker though the bell was so old the castle staff thought the thing might shatter if it was ever struck.

“
Adventurers,” Cyril muttered. “Dunderheads bound for disaster in Vod’Adia. I cannot believe I have countenanced this plan.”

Safely beneath his own brush of moustache, Towsan smiled faintly. The present incarnation of this stage of the plan had not been conceived by Cyril, but rather by the one person the Duke had never been able to deny. Not since her mother had died.