The Unwilling Warlord (4 page)

“Of course,” the king agreed. “Of course. Take him to his room, then, and let him recover himself. We’ll speak with him more when he’s rested and has eaten.” He waved a hand in dismissal.

Lady Kalira bowed, and Sterren imitated her again. Then she motioned for him to follow, and led the way to the right, through the crowd to a door, and out of the throne room. Alder and Dogal followed discreetly.

They emerged into a corridor, where Lady Kalira turned left and led the way up curving stairs. Sterren’s stiff legs protested, but he followed her.

At the second floor she kept going, and Sterren followed without question.

At the third floor he paused, hoping she would change her mind, but she kept on climbing. He suppressed a moan.

At the fourth floor he considered asking how much further they had to go, but couldn’t think of the right words in Semmat.

At the fifth floor he was panting heavily.

At the sixth floor the staircase ended, and he breathed a sigh of relief as Lady Kalira led him down a passageway — and then she reached another staircase and started up again. He balked.

Alder and Dogal came up behind him and did not stop; he yielded, and hurried on, up into the tower.

After just one more flight, on the seventh floor, they left the staircase and headed down one more short passage, to an iron-bound door. Lady Kalira turned a large black key in the lock, and then swung the door open to reveal the room beyond.

“This is your room, as the warlord,” she announced. She stood back to let him enter. “It was your great-uncle’s for almost twenty years, and his father’s — your great- grandfather’s — for half a century before that.”

Sterren stepped in cautiously.

He was in a large, airy chamber, one side mostly taken up by three broad, curtainless, many-paned windows. Thick tapestries, slightly faded but still handsome, hid the stone walls. A high canopied bed stood centered against one wall, with a table on either side, a wardrobe beyond the left-hand table and a chest of drawers to the right. Opposite the bed was a desk, or worktable, flanked by tall bookcases jammed with books and papers. A chair was tucked away in each corner of the room; counting the one at the desk, there were five in all.

Sterren turned, and discovered that the wall around the doorway was covered with displays of weapons — swords, knives, spears, pole-arms, and a good many he could not put a name to, even in Ethsharitic. He wondered if he, as warlord, was expected to learn to use them.

The weapons were all dusty. In fact, everything was covered by a layer of dust — the desk, the books, the papers, everything. The air was full of the dry, dusty smell of disuse. It was plain that nobody had been living in the room recently.

Hesitantly, he crossed to the windows and looked out. He judged the angle of the sun and decided he was looking almost due north.

The view was spectacular; he could see the castle roofs below him, hiding his view of the outer wall and most of the surrounding village. Beyond that he could see a few houses — and then the plain, rolling on into the ­distance, spotted with farmhouses, orchards, and various outbuildings, marked off into individual holdings by hedges and fences. He saw no roads, however; what traveling was done here was apparently done straight across country.

To the right he thought he could see, out near the horizon, the farms and grasslands fading into desert sand; somewhat to the left of center he thought he might be seeing the peaks of distant mountains somewhere beyond the horizon.

He turned back to the doorway, and saw that Lady Kalira and the two soldiers were still standing in the corridor. He had a sudden vision of the door slamming, trapping him inside.

“Aren’t you coming in?” he asked.

Lady Kalira nodded and stepped in.

“What did you wait for?” he asked.

“I would not enter your private chamber without an invitation, Lord Sterren,” she replied.

Baffled by this pronouncement, which clearly implied that he had some authority and was not merely a prisoner, it took Sterren a moment to realize that Alder and Dogal were still waiting in the hall. He looked at Lady Kalira.

She looked back, paying no attention to the soldiers. “May I sit down?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sterren said in Ethsharitic, again caught off-guard by her sudden deference. He corrected himself, re­peating it in Semmat, as he remembered his escort waiting for him, back out on the plain.

Maybe they were serious about calling him a lord.

She pulled a chair from a corner and sat. Sterren considered for a long moment before lowering himself cautiously into the chair by the desk.

The healing salve on his saddlesores was working; he could sit with only mild discomfort.

“You must have questions,” Lady Kalira said. “Now that we’re safely home, maybe I can answer them.”

Sterren stared at her for a moment, still puzzled, and then smiled crookedly. “I hope so,” he said.

Chapter Five

“Everything in this room is yours,” Lady Kalira said. “This, and the position of warlord, are your inheritance from your great-uncle Sterren. Nothing else; everything he owned when he died is right here, or was given, at his request, to others.”

Sterren struggled with that for a moment, and carefully phrased a question.

“How did he give anything to me? How did he know I . . . I was alive, when he hadn’t seen my grandmother for so long?”

“Oh, he didn’t know you existed, but he had no choice in the matter,” Lady Kalira said, waving the question away. “Semma has very clear and definite laws on the lines of succession. This room and its contents were his as the warlord, not his, personally, so he had no say about who would receive them, nor who would receive the title. If people were allowed to influence successions it would result in all sorts of intrigues — and frankly, we have too much of that even as it is.”

“Succession? Intrigues?”

Lady Kalira explained the words as best she could, and eventually Sterren thought he understood.

“But why me?” he asked. “Isn’t there anyone here who could be warlord?”

The noblewoman snorted in derision. “Your ancestors,” she said, “were about the worst line in the whole family at providing enough heirs. It doesn’t help that warlords tend to die young, in battle.”

That statement, when the unfamiliar terms had been defined, did little to help Sterren’s peace of mind, but he made no comment.

“After you,” Lady Kalira continued, “the next heir is the old warlord’s third cousin — your third cousin twice removed. That’s only the seventh degree of consanguinity. You’re an heir in the third degree of consanguinity. That’s a pretty big difference. And besides, you’re young and strong . . .”

Sterren took this as flattery, since he knew he was relatively scrawny.

“. . . and she’s past fifty. If she had a son — well, that would be the eighth degree, but it might do. Unfortunately, her only child is a daughter. Unmarried, even if we allowed inheritance by marriage instead of blood.”

An attempt to explain the new words this time was unsuccessful until, exasperated, Lady Kalira rose and crossed to the desk, where she found a sheet of paper, a pen, and ink, then leaned over and began drawing a family tree.

Sterren, still seated, watched with interest as she ran down the history of Semma’s nine warlords.

The first, Tendel, was the younger brother of King Rayel II, born almost two hundred years ago. His son, also named Tendel, followed him, and a grandson after that, but this third Tendel managed to get himself killed in battle early in the disastrous Third Ksinallionese War, before he got around to marrying and siring heirs. His brother Ster­ren inherited the title as Fourth Warlord, only to get himself killed three years later in the same war.

This first Sterren had been kind enough to produce five children, though three of them were daughters, and the younger son died without issue. The elder son succeeded as Fifth Warlord. His only child became Sixth Warlord, and in turn produced only one son, the eventual Seventh Warlord, before meeting a nasty end after losing a war.

Sterren, Seventh Warlord was only twenty-one when he inherited the title, and lived to be seventy-three. He was something of a legend. He broke with tradition, and instead of marrying a distant cousin married an Ethsharitic woman he found somewhere.

They had three children, though the second one, Dereth, died in infancy. The eldest, Sterren, eventually became the Eighth Warlord — and the youngest, Tanissa the Stubborn, ran away with an Ethsharitic trader in 5169 and was never heard from again.

She, of course, was Sterren of Ethshar’s grandmother. And since her brother never did get around to marrying or producing children, that made Sterren the Ninth Warlord.

The next-closest heir was Nerra the Cheerful, a granddaughter of the Fourth Warlord’s eldest daughter — not exactly an obvious choice.

Lady Kalira put aside the sketchy geneaology after that and continued her explanation without further prompting. Sterren listened politely, following the unfamiliar words as best he could.

When it had become clear that old Sterren was finally dying the royal genealogist, unaware of Tanissa’s son and grandson, had needed over an hour simply to determine who the heir should be.

He had noticed the notation in the records of Tanissa’s elopement, and had reported it, along with his conclusions, to the king and his advisors. After considerable debate Agor, the castle theurgist, had been called in; he in turn had called up Unniel the Discerning, a minor goddess, who after much coaxing had, in her turn, called upon Aibem, a more powerful god, who had, finally, informed everybody that although Tanissa was dead, her grandson was still alive and well.

After that, of course, Lady Kalira and her little entourage had been sent to find Sterren and bring him back to Semma, and they had done just that. Lady Kalira, who was not anywhere in the line of succession for warlord, had gotten the job because she was the heir presumptive to her cousin Inria, Seventh Trader. Inria, eighty years old, could not have made the trip herself.

When Lady Kalira had finished, Sterren nodded. “And here I am,” he agreed. “Now what do I do?”

“I would think that would be obvious — you’re to take command of the army and defend Semma.”

“Defend Semma?”

“Protect it from its enemies,” she explained.

“What enemies?”

“All enemies.”

“Semma has enemies?”

“Of course it does, idiot! Ksinallion, for one, and Oph­kar, for another.”

Up until that moment, Sterren had entertained a vague hope that his unwanted new job would turn out to be a sinecure, with a title and pay and no duties. He suppressed a sigh of disappointment.

It came as especially bad news that both Semma’s larger neighbors were considered enemies — but at least, he told himself, he hadn’t arrived in the middle of a war.

“Do you think that . . . that a war may come soon?”

Lady Kalira grimaced. “Much too soon,” she said, “from the look of you, and what I’ve seen in the barracks of late.”

Had his knowledge of Semmat been good enough for the job, Sterren would have made a retort about being glad to relinquish his position as warlord, which he hadn’t asked for in the first place, if she thought someone else could do better.

Instead, he asked, “What do I do now? Today?”

“Well,” Lady Kalira said, looking about the chamber, “I suppose you’ll want to settle in here, maybe clean up a little. I’ll have Dogal fetch water and something to eat; I don’t suppose that you’ll want to come down for lunch. You’ll be expected to eat at the High Table at dinner, of course, to talk to His Majesty and meet some of the people here — the princes and princesses, for example — but I think you can leave all that until dinner. For this afternoon, I would recommend that you take some time to learn the situation here — talk to your officers, maybe look over the barracks, that sort of thing. You’re the warlord; you must know more about it than I do.”

Astonished, Sterren said, “But I was never a warlord before!”

“It’s in your blood, isn’t it?”

“Not that I ever noticed,” Sterren replied.

Lady Kalira ignored that, as she turned to the doorway and called, “Dogal, go down to the kitchens and get wash water and something for Lord Sterren to eat, would you?”

Dogal bobbed his head. “Yes, my lady,” he said, and then quickly departed.

“Alder, here, will help you unpack, if you like,” she suggested.

Sterren nodded absently. Alder stepped into the room, carrying the bundle of possessions that Sterren had collected from his room back on Bargain Street. He deposited it upon the bed and began untying it.

“My officers, you said,” Sterren said. The phrase carried an impression of power and authority, and he felt a sudden surge of interest.

“Yes, of course,” Lady Kalira replied.

“I suppose I should meet them, talk to them.”

“Yes.”

The thought of all those stairs came to him, and he asked, “Could you send them up here?”

“Of course, Lord Sterren,” Lady Kalira said, with a faint bow.

The bow startled him. Lady Kalira noticed his surprise, and explained, “Lord Sterren, I think I really should tell you that as warlord, now that you have accepted the position and that the king has acknowledged you, you outrank me. In fact, you are now one of the highest-ranking nobles in Semma. Historically, the warlord and the foreign minister are equal in rank and second only to the king and his immediate family, with all others — steward, treasurer, trader, all of them — your inferiors.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Sterren mused on that for awhile, wondering just what such an exalted rank would actually mean in terms of power, privilege — and responsibility. He almost forgot Lady Kalira was there until she reminded him.

“My lord?” she asked.

“Ah,” Sterren said, startled. “Yes?”

“Lord Sterren, I’m tired and hungry, too. If you have no more questions, may I have your leave to go?”

Startled anew, Sterren stammered. “Of course,” he man­aged at last.

Lady Kalira curtseyed, then turned.

“Send up my officers,” Sterren called, “when I’m done eating.”

He was sure she had heard him, but she said nothing as she slipped out of the room.

He stared after her for a moment.

The switch from her role as exasperated jailer to one of deferential subordinate was curiously unnerving. He was not accustomed to having anyone defer to him. He had always settled for simple tolerance, which was all a tavern-gambler or street brat could reasonably ask.

There was something very seductive about the thought of a woman unable to leave his room until he granted permission. Admittedly, the aging and irritable Lady Kalira was not herself seductive in the least, but the idea of such power certainly had its appeal.

But it came with the job of warlord, with all the un­known hazards and duties that must surely imply. War meant swords and blood and death and killing, and he wanted no part of it.

But Semma had been at peace since twenty years before he was born. Maybe he could defend it without fighting any wars, as his immediate predecessor, the great-uncle he had never known, had.

“My lord,” Alder said, startling him from his muddled thoughts, “shall I hang this in the wardrobe?” He held up one of Sterren’s old tunics.

“Yes,” Sterren said. He took a sudden interest in his belongings, seeing that everything went somewhere appropriate, and that he knew how the room was arranged. It was becoming clear that, barring the unforeseen, he was going to be staying for quite some time.

He was unsure, now, whether that was good news or bad.