Chapter 213 The Undercurrent

The King watched Leon speaking from that wheelchair and felt a thing or two out of joint in his mind:

When the man could stand, he'd never cared to open his mouth in the great hall. Now that he sat, he had opinions?

Two men seated in one great hall — where would that end? If he dared hold forth on court business today, then... he need never come back to Augustburg again.

If I cannot handle Voss, can I not handle one lame-legged brother of mine?

Ambrose, standing at Leon's side, all but laughed out loud:

Brother — the scar has healed, and the lesson with it. Wasn't this the very thing to run a mile from? The royal brother is about to take heads, and out you step, crying "Hold the sword!" — if that isn't stupid, it's silly. Let me watch how you climb down off this one.

Prince Ian eyed Leon cold and level. Leon had come back somehow different from before — so he felt. Could it be that odd-looking wheelchair had lent him the nerve to cross the King?

Leon's face held level as a pond — as though the firewood under his cauldron were blazing to the rafters and the water in his own pot had never so much as shivered. He said, unhurried:

"Your brother heard that county name and found it familiar — put his mind to it a moment, and why: it is the very fief Your Majesty has just granted the Princess Isolde.

Your brother has heard it said that in Isfeld and Lornmere there walks a monster. Its footprint is broad as a cattail leaf; when it walks, the ground nearby trembles like an earthquake; its cry carries to the very clouds. It meets a man and does not eat him — and yet the man is left without flesh or blood, only an empty skin hanging.

Thinking on it now — it must be this Goldwater, bleeding Isfeld white at the vein, that set the common folk inventing such a monster to point at him by."

A monster? The seven-foot horse-cleaving blade the King had raised in his breast slipped quietly back down.

Roland took up Leon's thread:

"Your Majesty, what the Baron of Charnwood says is no made-up tale. The Isfeld monster-story is bound up besides with the Odenheim lands — there is a case hanging unresolved in the middle of it.

Irony of it — because the masters so seldom go, our land in Isfeld was simply taken over; and the land so taken is the land that haunts. And the man who took it is this very Goldwater, magistrate of Isfeld.

He worked the county office's power over boundary lines to overturn every last loose end left from the year Prince Jasper bought the land up. The Odenheims sent men to the county office to argue it out with Goldwater — and found him bragging on every corner of his ties to Director Joss and the Grand Marshal.

With the one hand Goldwater was reporting Isfeld's auspicious doubled wheat up to the throne, coining favor out of Your Majesty; with the other he was buying the farmers' wheat off as sub-grade at beggar's prices — squeezing the folk till their taxes went unpaid and they quit their villages to go vagrant. The countryside's grudge has been banking up a long time.

In those days your servant was still in the Lohenheim army, and set a household captain with men to gathering Goldwater's offenses into evidence. A pity the work was never finished: my father was shifted to the Thornford garrison, and we left the East Capital with him.

Lately the Justiciary has been recruiting clerks, and that captain left the Odenheim household guard and took post as a circuit inspector.

Meeting him by chance in the street the other day, he told me one thing in haste: Goldwater's elder kinsman, serving as a military aide in the Zarren army, broke the rules of the service — and was ordered beaten to death under the staves by the deputy marcher duke of Zarren of that day, Joss Wray.

It may well be for this very cause that he means to drag Director Joss and the Grand Marshal in by the hair.

Your Majesty can summon this circuit judge and ask him — one question, and the thing is known."

The duty justiciar, hearing his own circuit judge named, spoke up in haste:

"We have indeed taken on circuit judges of military background this while past, to thicken the policing of the capital. This inspector-judge's name is Little North."

This text traces back to NovelPhoenix, where its author publishes the chapter; the copy before you was not approved.

"Your Majesty, since Goldwater touches a private case of the Odenheim house as well, and the three judicial offices are all present in the hall, we may as well call this inspector in and ask — so to do the Princess justice, and give Isfeld back a clean blue sky."

Voss saw the Baron of Charnwood spin out one monster-tale and the wind of the hall come round on the instant — Goldwater's sucking of the people's fat and marrow now the whole matter. That much he would not let pass.

"Summon Little North."

In Augustburg, by the old kings' day, the Grey Wolf men already stood past a hundred thousand; generation upon generation had merged in, and the foreigners who still carried Grey Wolf clan names were few.

Leon had turned it over in his mind: to work those Grey Wolf lads quickly into the upper capital, they must take surnames in the native fashion. Else they would sit forever outside the stream, clerks and never officials; even in the army they could climb no higher than junior captain.

Before Askar Corin went over to the Justiciary as an inspector, Roland had talked it over with Corin and with Nansen. The two of them took no gloom from it — the very contrary:

This was the rhythm of men meant for high office one day.

The three put their heads together, and out of the three syllables of "Askar" they took "Ashe" for their surname.

Nansen Ashe came off well enough. Corin Ashe was another matter — in the old script his given name was a fiend to write, and do what he might, he never got it down.

Lora, at the posting house, heard the tale from Roland when he came to fetch them, and felt it in her own fingers — her sympathy went out whole — and she laughed:

"His steppe lies north of the Aurelian. Just call him Little North."

Corin, hearing that it was Lora herself who had named him, agreed before he gave the matter one thought. He tried writing it out — easy, no gainsaying. The next day, reporting for duty, the signature question was settled too.

The fearsome, dashing Askar Corin, come to Augustburg, had turned into the adorable Little North.

Corin was brought to the Palace of the Holy Crown in short order.

He went along taking that towering pile in with open curiosity — the rolling hills, the water gardens:

So this was where the Empire's King kept house. Only a place like this was fit for her to live in all her days... The ground before the Supreme Hall lay open and wide — fine for riding, that. If they grassed it over, better yet...

Deep in these wool-gatherings, he found himself already led up into the Supreme Hall.

"Little North — you were sent by the Odenheim house to look into Goldwater. What did the looking turn up? Before His Majesty, tell it all, and tell it straight."

It was Voss who put the question first.

From what Roland had just set out, everyone understood: today's bad-coin business would end settled on Goldwater's head. But a moment before, the origin of that coin had set the Exchequer and the War Office all but drawing blades on the Silver Shield — and the ministers in the hall had sweated clean through their robes:

Inside the palace walls and out, it was Silver Shield everywhere. Even the man on the throne doesn't dare move against Voss — and the War Office goes and lights that firecracker? Wouldn't that be marching the whole of us to our deaths in one body?

Old matter, gone moldy with the years, and the King will not have it dug — and now only one magistrate to be called to book... Best news there is.

Under every eye in the hall, Corin pulled a stack of papers from inside his robe:

"These are only part of Goldwater's offenses. He cheats the throne and blinds the folk below; he stops at nothing; and he carries a set spite against officers of the court, and works to churn the court itself."

Von Klein, tap-tap-tap, carried the stack of charges up before the King. He turned two pages — and there indeed was the matter Roland had spoken of. The kinsman of Goldwater's beaten to death under the military staves was one Harold Goldwater.

And a strange coincidence it was. That night — a crowd of them over a hot-pot supper in the backyard of the vault — Corin had told a thing he and his had heard through a wall, and everyone had laughed: Goldwater would eat even his own brother's bones.

The truth of it: Harold really was Goldwater's elder kinsman. By rights, if Goldwater would not avenge him, he ought at least to have kept a mile off Joss Wray.

But no. This turtle's egg, to get his hands on a magistrate's post, threw himself at Joss Wray with everything he had. Joss Wray paid him no mind — whereupon the man dredged up his beaten-to-death kinsman to wring pity with, and Joss Wray at last consented to see him once.

It had all been told for a joke. Leon had spiced and stretched it, worked it over into a tale — and now stood it up in open court:

In this life, at this hour, Joss Wray had not yet treated the King; he was not yet a man of power. Let him carry a debt of favor to the Odenheims now, and he could still be turned to use.

A court is a place of every man cheating every man.

To hold a treacherous minister in your grip, you must out-calculate him.

From where Leon sat, Joss Wray's face could not be seen. But the kneeling man's back — the shoulders had come down, just a little.

He knew his own case: with the ghost-story to carry the people's heart, and the Odenheims' own interests to stand for proof, this baffling question of where the bad coin came from had been blown off like wind through the clouds — muddied over, and passed by.

Leon had read it true. Not Joss Wray alone — even Voss was quietly revising his opinion of the man:

The Baron of Charnwood — one fall, one wit gained the wiser. Rounder than he used to be.

This once you read the room — knew to boil the big down small and the small down to nothing. You show and I show. Voss keeps account.