Chapter 26 Rescue

Elodie Vane had been watching the Tower House for two nights, and she had learned three things about it.

The first was that Lord Chancellor Mordaine Kell was no longer in it. She had watched him leave on the morning of the forty-first day, from a rooftop across the square, under a parasol she found deeply undignified. A black coach with the tower crest on the door. Gareth Vantrell riding beside it on his white stallion, which looked tired. Four wagons behind, covered in canvas, which clanked when they hit the ruts. The grey-bearded mage from the river sat on the last wagon with his black rod across his knees. They went out of the east gate, at a good pace, and did not come back.

The second thing was that the princess was still inside. Third floor, east corner, behind a window that had been shuttered and barred and, Elodie could feel it from across the square like heat off a stove, warded. Somebody had put a binding on the room. It was crude work, but strong, the kind of strength that comes from a crystal rather than a mind.

The third thing was that Guildmaster Corin Ashby had been let in by the side door both evenings, and had stayed until midnight.

Elodie had sent all three things to Miss Quill at Mrs Ostry's on the second night, in a note carried by Pellam. Then she had gone back to her rooftop and waited, because she had found, to her own great irritation, that she was not prepared to do this alone and get it wrong.

At the eleventh bell on the night of the forty-second day, the note came back. It was very short.

Midnight. Front and back. Bring Pellam. H.Q.

* * *

Brakka Ironjaw had never knocked on a door in her life, and she did not intend to start with this one.

The Tower House stood at the top of Lantern Row in the third ring, six doors along from the Countess's own house, which the Countess had pointed out with some bitterness. It was tall and white and had a great many windows and a front door of black oak bound with iron. There were two men in grey on the steps, and two more inside the door, the Countess said, and a dozen through the house, and a captain called Mors who had been a Gold rank before he went into private work.

"How many back?" said Brakka.

"Six," said the Countess. "At the kitchen door. I'll take the back."

"You will take the back," said Brakka. "I will take the front."

"Gently," said the Countess. "There's a princess inside."

"I am always gentle," said Brakka, and the warband behind her, all eight that were left, made a low rumbling sound that the Countess decided, on reflection, was laughter.

At midnight, by the chapel bell on the hill, Brakka walked up the front steps of the Tower House. The two men in grey stepped forward. She picked them up, one in each hand, by the front of their jackets, and knocked on the black oak door with them.

Twice.

The door did not open. So she put them down, and stepped back, and lowered her shoulder.

It was a good door. It held for nearly three heartbeats.

"Ha," said Brakka, standing in the hole where it had been, with splinters in her braids. "Good door. Shit hinges."

* * *

Hesper Quill was not at the Tower House at midnight. She was in the Royal Treasury, on the first floor of the palace's east wing, in an office she had last been inside nine years ago, sitting across a desk from an old man in a nightshirt.

He was the Master of Coin. His name was Aurel Dace. He had been asleep when she arrived, and he had come down in his nightshirt and a velvet cap with a candle, very cross, to find out why a junior official of the Adventurers' Guild had talked her way past four palace guards, a secretary and his housekeeper at half past eleven at night.

Then he had seen who it was.

"Miss Quill," he'd said. "The eleven coppers."

"Yes, my lord."

"I wrote you a letter."

"I still have it, my lord."

He had sat down. She had put the forty-page report on his desk, and the two hand copies of the D and V ledger, and the Land Office papers, and the two coins from the princess's purse and the dead man's neck, side by side, and the spy's drawing with Red case on it. Then she had sat very straight with her hands in her lap and waited, while he read.

He read for a long time. He was a slow reader. He was also, she knew, the most careful one in Aldmere, after herself.

When he got to the D and V ledger, the page with the account name on it, he stopped. He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on the hem of his nightshirt and put them back on and read it again.

"Household of the Lord Chancellor," he said.

"Yes, my lord."

"Written out. In the clerk's own hand."

"Yes, my lord. People who never expect to be audited are very careless with names."

The old man sat back. He looked at the coins for a while.

"You understand what this is," he said. "You understand what you've brought me."

"I understand the arithmetic, my lord," said Hesper. "I always understand the arithmetic. I need someone who understands everything else."

This page repeats text from the NovelPhoenix site without permission; the author's chapter there provides support for their writing.

The Master of Coin looked at her across the candle for a long moment. Then he got up and went to the door, in his nightshirt and his velvet cap, and opened it, and said to the frightened secretary outside, quite calmly:

"Wake the King."

* * *

Lysandra Halvere had been a prisoner in the east corner room of the Tower House for three days, and she had not wasted one of them.

The binding on the room was crude. She'd felt it the moment they put her in. A cage of force woven through the walls and the door and the shutters, tied off to a crystal set in the lintel, so that the door would not open from inside and nothing that touched the shutters would go further than the shutters. It was the sort of binding you'd put on a strongroom. Strong as an ox and stupid as one.

But it was a ward. And Lys had spent eleven years in the palace library learning wards. She had learned how to put them up. She had also learned, because nobody had thought to stop her reading the next chapter, how they came down.

You couldn't break a ward like this from inside. It was too strong. But you could turn it. If you were patient, and you had nothing else to do, and you were very, very careful, you could find the knot where the binding was tied off to its crystal, and you could pick at it with your own ward-craft, one thread at a time, like unpicking a hem. And once enough threads were loose, you could turn the whole thing round, the way you'd turn a glove inside out.

She had been picking at it for three days. She had made herself sick twice and fainted once. She had about four threads left when she heard the front door of the Tower House come off its hinges.

She stood up in the middle of the room. She listened to the roaring downstairs, deep and joyful, and men shouting, and something very heavy going through a wall.

"Oh, thank the gods," she said. "Brakka."

She put both hands up, flat, towards the lintel, and closed her eyes, and found the four threads, and pulled.

The binding turned inside out.

All that strength, the ox-strength of the crystal, which had been pointing in to hold her, now pointed out. The door of the east corner room blew off its hinges and went across the landing and through the opposite wall into the next room. The shutters went out over Lantern Row in a shower of splinters. The crystal in the lintel cracked down the middle with a sound like a bell and went grey.

Lys opened her eyes. She was standing in a room with no door and no shutters, breathing hard, with her hair standing on end.

"Well," she said. "That worked."

* * *

Elodie came in through the kitchen. The six men at the back door had been asleep when she arrived, which was rude of them, and they were all still asleep now, with the same peaceful expression and two small marks each. She had been very restrained. She had only sipped. She was saving herself.

She came up the back stairs into the main hall in time to see Brakka holding Guildmaster Corin Ashby upside down by one ankle, in his nightshirt, over the stairwell.

He was shrieking. "Put me down, you bloody animal! Put me down!" Brakka was shaking him gently, like a rug.

"Where is the princess?" Brakka was saying. "Where? Tell me, little red coat."

"Third floor! East corner! Third floor!"

"Then why," said Brakka reasonably, "were you sleeping in the Chancellor's bed?"

The captain was at the top of the stairs.

Elodie saw him before Brakka did. A tall man in black, with a long sword, coming down the stairs very fast and very quiet, the way a good swordsman moves. He'd been a Gold rank. He was better than that now. He was going for Brakka's back, and Brakka had both hands full of Guildmaster.

Elodie went up the stairs.

She hadn't fought anyone properly in forty years. She'd forgotten how much she liked it. Captain Mors was very good. He was fast and he was strong and he'd fought vampires before, she could tell, because the first thing he did when he saw her was go for her heart with a stake he'd had up his sleeve, and the second was to throw a handful of something silver at her face.

She was faster.

She took the stake off him and broke it. She took the silver on her glove and it smoked. She took his sword arm at the elbow and turned it, gently, the way you'd turn a key, until he dropped the sword, and then she put her face very close to his and let him see her eyes.

"Be still," she said.

And he was. Of course he was. It worked on everyone. It had worked on everyone for a hundred and eighty years, except one farmer.

She found that she was smiling. She let the captain sit down on the stairs, very still, and went past him to the third floor.

* * *

Lys met her on the landing. The princess's hair was standing on end and she had a cut on her hand and her riding coat was torn at the shoulder, and she was holding a sheaf of papers against her chest.

"Countess," she said.

"Your Highness. You appear to have blown a door through a wall."

"I turned a ward." Lys was breathing hard. "Never mind. Look at this. I went through his study on the way down. He left in a hurry." She held up the papers. "Look."

It was a map. A good one, a surveyor's map of the whole eastern frontier, the Greywild running down it like a long dark scar. Along the edge of the Greywild, there were fourteen small black crosses. The fourteen holdings D and V had bought.

Six of the crosses had a red circle round them.

So did one more, which wasn't a cross. It was a small neat square with a name beside it. Marsh Hold.

Beside each red circle, in a clerk's tidy hand, there was a note. Lys read them out, one after another, in a voice that got quieter as she went.

"Holding of Abel Crane. Underbarn confirmed. Occupant deceased. Holding of the widow Strand. Underbarn confirmed. Occupant deceased. Holding of Piers Whitlow. Underbarn confirmed. Occupant and family deceased." She stopped. "Six. Six of them. All along the Greywild. All farms with something under them. All the farmers dead." She looked up. "And they've all been sealed up again. Somehow. By someone. Nobody knows how. That's what this says. Sealed, and the cores taken, and the land sold."

"And Marsh Hold?"

Lys turned the map over. On the back, in a different hand, a hand that had pressed so hard it had nearly gone through the paper, there was one line.

Marsh Hold. Seal broken. Harvest at once.

The two of them stood on the landing and looked at it.

"He's gone east," said Elodie. "Yesterday morning. With wagons of collars and the mage with the rod."

"To Marsh Hold," said Lys. "To harvest it." She swallowed. "To take whatever comes out of that barn and put a collar on it."

Downstairs, Brakka had put Ashby down on the floor. He was sitting there in his nightshirt with his arms round his knees.

The front door, or the place where it had been, filled up with lanterns. Palace guards, a great many, in dark blue and silver, with an officer at their head and, behind the officer, very small and very straight in a grey coat with a satchel over her shoulder, Hesper Quill.

The officer looked round at the broken doors, the sleeping men, the Guildmaster on the floor, the orcs, and the Countess at the top of the stairs. He opened his mouth.

"By order of the King," said Hesper, before he could say anything, and held up a paper with the royal seal on it, still soft. "The Lord Chancellor Mordaine Kell is to be detained. Along with anyone acting for him." She looked at Ashby on the floor. "Good evening, Guildmaster."

Ashby put his face on his knees.

* * *

They left at first light, from the stable yard of the palace. The same yard. The princess on her grey mare, with the King's writ in her coat. Hesper beside her on a borrowed bay that she sat like a sack of flour, holding the reins in both fists. Rusk and his twelve, and forty more of the palace guard that the King had sent, because the Master of Coin had told him to. Brakka's warband, on foot, ready to run. The Countess would follow after dark. She could cover more ground at night than any horse.

Before they went, Lys rode over to Hesper.

"Can you stay on that thing for three days?" she said.

"No," said Hesper. "But I'm going to."

Lys looked at her. Then she leaned over and pulled Hesper's hands apart on the reins, and fixed them properly, one rein each, the way you'd show a child.

"Six days by cart," said Lys. "We'll do it in three."

"He did it in an afternoon."

"He's not a cart," said Lys, and turned her mare for the east gate.