Impossible Odds Page 2

  It was the glare of the torchlight that made Elson’s eyes hurt.

  His new girl was probably balling that redhead in Blue Company right now.

  Every hour or thereabouts, Nolly gave the other signal, so Elson shouldered his halberd and marched around to the back door to relieve Blaccalf. Then he was all alone and could shiver all he wanted. He could keep his eyes closed so that torchlight didn’t pain him. He could run on the spot to try and warm up. He could scratch for the flea. At least the mosquitoes seemed to have taken pity on him. He decided it was no great honor to guard Grand Duke Whosit of Wherever, who was no doubt swiving some cute blonde in a featherbed upstairs. He was screamingly mad at Sergeant Bates.

  Tramping boots announced the return of Blaccalf.

  Elson went round to the front and took up his position. Just when had the spirits decreed that he must stand out here freezing in the dark to guard some rich foreign slob he had never met, a stuck-up slob who wouldn’t ever give him as much as a nod of thanks? That same slob was upstairs right now swingeing some slutty twigger! Why didn’t Nolly just tell him to go off home, or go off and find his girl, whatever bed she was in?

  Nolly gave the signal again.

  Count three…

  For variety this time, as they were about to pass in the middle of the step, Elson pushed his dagger into Nolly’s left eye. Nolly dropped his halberd. He didn’t fall down. He just leaned forward and made little whimpering sounds as he watched the thin stream of blood trickling off the hilt of the dagger and splashing on his boots.

  The overhead light was too bright for the next bit. Elson walked unsteadily down the steps. Then he swung his own halberd horizontal and held it with both hands so he could cut his throat. The process was not as painless as he had hoped. He should have kept the edge sharper.

  Nolly stopped trickling and stopped complaining. He stumped down the steps and headed around to the back of the house, looking for Blaccalf.

  Elson finished dying and walked back up, then in through the front door.

  The Blades approved of Quamast House because they knew that any questionable guests billeted there would not go sneaking out any secret passages. No assassins were going to sneak in, either. When it had been built by King Ambrose, the Guard Commander had been the great Durendal, now Grand Master, and he had made sure that it was built right. With the outer doors and windows securely barred, as they were, Valiant and his little squad had nothing to do except stay awake at the bottom of the staircase. From there they had a clear view of the upstairs balcony and the doors to all the bedrooms.

  It was an easy chore and tonight they even had a rookie with them, who must be introduced to some of the fiendish dice games the Blades employed to while away their stints. No charge for instruction. IOUs accepted without limit. Some recruits needed years to pay off their initiations.

  Of course Cub Bernard first had to be baited about that slinky White Sister he had acquired. It was unseemly that a freckle-faced tyro, not two weeks into the Guard and barely through his orgying lessons, should collect something like that when better men hankered in vain. They quickly discovered that young Bernard was not the average run-of-the-mill Ironhall innocent. He could see that they were all as jealous as stags with glass antlers. He gave back as good as he got, inventing much lurid detail.

  Abandoning that game as unwinnable, Valiant, Aragon, and Richey got serious. They found a massive oaken dining table and, with some difficulty, dragged it to the bottom of the stair. They tried to move the two colossal bronze candelabra closer to it—however exceptional a Blade’s night vision, in monetary matters he liked his brothers’ hands well lit. Finding the monsters immovable, they settled for the existing illumination and got down to concentrated instruction.

  “You know Saving Seven, of course?” Valiant asked.

  The kid said he didn’t, so Richey demanded to see the color of his money and Aragon produced a bag of eight-sided dice. Each face represented one of the elements, he explained, and you rolled them four dice at a time. The object was to roll seven elements but not the eighth, death. Roll a death and you had to start collecting from the beginning.

  “First player has a slight edge,” he added, “so we’ll give you the honor. After that the winner starts the next one. Put a farthing in the pot and roll four.”

  On his first try the kid rolled two airs, a water, and a chance, so he counted three. Sir Richey paid his farthing and rolled two deaths, which put him out of that game altogether. The other two scored four elements apiece.

  “Just keep going,” Richey said. “You can fold, pay the same price as the last man, or double it.”

  Nobody doubled on that round, which saw the kid roll love, time, and fire, while Valiant and Aragon added one element each. Being ahead with six, lacking only earth, Bernard doubled the price, but failed to improve his score. The others paid when their turns came, with the same lack of progress, so he doubled the price again. He had spirit. With the pot starting to look interesting, he rolled a triple death. Valiant and Aragon exchanged angry glances. Richey guffawed.

  Bernard brightened. “What does that mean?”

  “It means you win,” Richey explained quickly, before the other two could invent a new rule for the occasion. “Roll a quadruple death and everyone who was in the game at the beginning has to pay you the final amount of the pot. That’s called the ‘massacre.’ Another game, Freckles?”

  “Why not?” Bernard raked in the coins.

  It is regrettable that skill, virtue, and experience are no match for fickle chance. The brat won four games in a row, two of them with triple deaths. The next game turned out to be a never-ender, where everybody kept rolling single deaths and no one could reach the magic seven. With the pot growing enormous and three sharpies’ reputations at stake, the betting grew desperate, until eventually they had the kid cornered. They were all sitting on winnable arrays and he was back down to two. All three of them in turn doubled the bet, expecting to price him out of the game. Perhaps he was too dumb to see that he could not win from there in a single roll. Or perhaps it was just that he was playing with their money and they were all writing IOUs. He not only stayed in, he doubled yet again.

  Then he rolled a quadruple death.

  The appalled silence was broken by a yell from Valiant, who had his back to the staircase and was facing the main door. He leaped to his feet, whipping out his sword. “Intruder! Richey, get him. You two come with me.” He ran seven or eight steps up and turned to survey the hall.

  “You’re seeing things!” Aragon said, but he went to join his leader, blocking the way to the guests above. So, to his credit, did Bernard, who might reasonably suspect a trick to cheat him out of half a year’s pay.

  Sir Richey strode forward to the main entrance carrying his saber, Pain, at high guard. The little vestibule was dark, but when he reached the line of pillars, he shouted, without turning his head, “The door’s still barred!” He stopped. “I can smell blood! There’s blood on the—” Something standing behind the nearest pillar lurched out at him. Possibly the stains on the floor had distracted him, but he parried the halberd thrust admirably, caught hold of its shaft in his left hand, and swung Pain at his assailant’s neck.

  A Blade had little to fear in such a match, and Valiant wisely did not send him reinforcements. The staircase was still the key. He said, “Aragon, waken the Duke and the Baron and get back here.” Aragon went racing up the stairs.

  Richey, having almost decapitated his assailant, let go of the halberd. That was a mistake, for the intruder did not drop. Instead he swung the halberd at Richey’s midriff. Richey leaped back, parrying. His opponent shuffled after, repeatedly stabbing at him. As they came closer to the stairs and the light, Bernard cried out in horror. Now it was clear that the intruder was a walking corpse, for its head hung at an odd angle and it was soaked in dried blood from cuirass to boots. The gaping wound Richey had made in its neck was almost bloodless, but there was another, a crusted bla
ck gash. Its throat had been cut twice, and it was still fighting.

  Nearer still, and Richey, incredibly, started to laugh, albeit shrilly. The apparition continued to thrust at him with the point of its halberd, which he parried effortlessly, as if it were made of stiff paper. He tried a few cuts of his own, knocking the apparition aside like straw. It kept coming back, but was obviously harmless.

  “It’s only a mirage!” he shouted.

  Upstairs, Aragon was yelling and beating on doors.

  Another Yeoman wraith came into view around the staircase, from the kitchen quarters. It moved with the same awkward walk and it had a dagger hilt protruding from its left eye. When it reached the table it dropped on all fours and crept underneath.

  “Leave it alone,” Valiant said. “Ghosts can’t hurt us.”

  Richey had almost reached the stairs and his opponent was transparent, barely visible at all. He was letting its clumsy strokes go, for they passed clean through him as if he were not there. Likewise, Pain whistled through the shadow without effect.

  The table tilted, spilling dice and money. Valiant and Bernard watched in amazement, for all four Blades together had barely managed to shift that monstrosity. For a moment it stood on edge, then tipped over, impacting one of the candelabra. They went down together with a crash that shook the hall. Most of the candles winked out. Darkness leaped inward.

  Richey screamed as his opponent’s halberd impaled him. Pain went skittering off across the marble floor. Richey fell; the corpse withdrew the halberd and stabbed him again. Then again. The second intruder clambered off the fallen table and went lurching toward the other candelabrum with both arms held across his eyes.

  “Save the other candles!” Valiant yelled. He and Bernard went plunging back down the stairs.

  Bernard got there first with a couple of giant, reckless, ankle-risking strides and made a spectacular lunge, thrusting his rapier into the armpit gap in the side of the dead man’s cuirass. He did not stop there. Sword and Blade together went clean through the smoky figure. Bernard hit the floor in a belly flop and slid past Sir Richey and the thing that kept stabbing at him. He lay as if stunned. His heroics had been unnecessary, for the corpse he had been attacking had faded to almost nothing beside the candelabrum.

  Upstairs, doors were flying open. Unfortunately, the light pouring out of them did little to brighten the deadly gloom below.

  Valiant took station under the remaining candelabrum, parrying the efforts of the second shadow to throttle him until he realized that it could not harm him. A third intruder shuffled in from the kitchens, completely enveloped in a heavy carpet. Valiant waited until it was close and then charged it, thrusting Quietus through the rug and feeling her jar against a steel cuirass inside. The occupant retaliated by tipping the carpet over him and body-checking him. He was thrown over backward by the weight of a big man in half armor, but by the time he hit the marble, the load on top of him was no more than that of the rug alone.

  He struggled free of it. Now two of the wraiths flitted around him, struggling to injure him with no more success than he would have fighting mist.

  Voices upstairs shouted that help was on the way. Out in the shadows Richey lay on his back, obviously dead. Bernard sat up. The first Yeoman corpse swung its halberd at him. Bernard rolled nimbly aside. Steel rang on stone where he had lain. His move put him within reach of his rapier, Lightning. He grabbed hold of her hilt, but was not quite fast enough getting back on his feet. Still off balance, he parried the halberd aside with his left hand and drove Lightning through the corpse so that two-thirds of her stuck out of its back. That stroke would certainly have ended any living opponent, but the dead one ignored it and fell on top of him. They went down together, with the corpse clawing at his throat.

  Valiant reached him, swinging Quietus like a broadsword. He chopped the thing’s head off with one stroke, executioner style. The helmeted head hit the floor with a clang, but the decapitated corpse paid no heed and continued its two-handed throttling of the boy.

  The third wraith was going up the stairs, at first flitting like flying ash, gradually slowing and growing solid as it reached the darkness. Aragon and the fat Baron were coming down to meet it, brandishing candlesticks and lanterns, and it faded back to harmless, flickering shadow.

  Struggling to save Bernard from strangulation, Valiant went to work on the monster’s arms. He had almost cut through one when he was hurled to the floor. He looked up to see the corpse with the dagger in its eye. It lashed out with its boot. He tried to roll away and it followed, kicking him with bone-breaking impacts. He couldn’t breathe; he was as good as dead.

  Then Aragon and Baron Fader brought their lights and it again faded to smoke.

  “Quickly!” the Baron shouted. He was a gruesome apparition himself, with a voluminous white nightgown billowing around his great bulk and spikes of white hair and beard sticking out in all directions. “Before they escape! We must pen the shadowmen in here. Come, come!”

  “Bernard?” Valiant croaked, gasping at the pain in his ribs.

  “Bernard’s dead!” Aragon shouted. “Can you walk?” He had both hands full of lanterns, four of them.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” the Baron screamed in his squeaky voice. “They will escape. They will attack the palace! Hurry!”

  Bernard was starting to rise, his eyes like blank white pebbles. Valiant struggled to his feet and recovered Quietus. He tottered back to the stair between the other two men. The shadowmen followed, five ominous, barely visible shapes at the edge of the brightness, one of them headless.

  Wrapped in a heavy red robe, the Grand Duke was struggling to overturn the candelabrum. His two manservants were coming down, half naked, but bringing more light.

  “Stop!” Valiant shouted.

  “No!” the Baron retorted. “This must go.” He threw his great weight into the argument. The candelabrum shivered. Only when Aragon joined in did it rock and then topple, hitting the ground with a noise like a falling smithy and snuffing out most of the candles. The Baron stamped on the others, dancing grotesquely while waving his many-branched candlesticks, in danger of going up in flames himself. Then the six living men hurried up the stairs together, leaving the lower floor to darkness and the dead.

  They piled into the ducal bedroom and slammed the door. The Baron slumped down on a chair, which creaked alarmingly. The Grand Duke fell on the bed and buried his face in the covers.

  “We must warn the Palace!” Valiant whispered. His bruised chest was an agony.

  “No, is all right!” Baron Fader proclaimed, wheezing after his exertions. “Schattenherren are deadly in darkness, but then they cannot pass through walls.”

  “Can’t they just open the doors and walk out?” Aragon demanded.

  The fat man shrugged. “Hope they won’t. They want us and will stay close to us. Of course if someone else comes or goes by too near the house…then they might. Daylight comes, they will die.”

  Richey had died. Bernard had died. Valiant wished he had.

  Sister Trudy would breakfast alone.

  I

  At the Break of Day

  • 1 •

  Enter!” Grand Master said.

  Sir Tancred did so and closed the heavy door behind him, moving with the feline grace of an expert fencer. He had changed out of his mud-soaked traveling clothes into fresh, crisp livery, and no one could have known from the look of him that he had spent the better part of a day and night on horseback. His silver baldric marked him as Deputy Commander of the Royal Guard; his presence here at Ironhall, far away from Grandon where the King was, meant that something was seriously awry.

  “All bedded down?” Grand Master inquired dryly.

  “My charges are. Your two are falling all over themselves getting dressed.” Tancred’s thin smile was a formality, not denying the underlying worry. “Unless they decided I was just a nightmare and went back to sleep.”

  Grand Master grunted and turned back to stare out
the window at the first glow of sunrise on the wild crags of Starkmoor. Early-morning chill dug into his bones, making him shiver and pull his cloak tight about him, yet in fact his study was still warm from the previous day’s heat. Tancred was not even wearing a cloak over his jerkin, and that display of youthful vigor made Grand Master feel old. He was old, Lord Roland, although he rarely had to admit it, even to himself. He was too old to be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, too old to deal with unexpected, unwelcome visitors, and too old to tackle a monstrous problem created by a fool of a king.

  “I regret that I brought such trouble,” Tancred said quietly. This was their first chance to talk privately.

  “Not your fault.” It was Grand Master’s fault. Yes, the King was being totally unreasonable and Leader was a worrywart, but the responsibility was Grand Master’s. If his duties required him to refuse direct orders from his sovereign, then he should be prepared to do so and take the consequences. It was guilt that gnawed at him this morning, not age. In a long life of service, he had rarely known such a sense of failure.

  “Exactly how many warm bodies does His Majesty expect me to produce?”

  “Beg pardon…the warrant.” Sir Tancred stepped closer to hand over the baleful paper, a single sheet that might dispose of many young lives. “He left the number blank. He said to tell you at least one, but he knows you don’t like to assign less than three private Blades at a time. No more than three, he said.”

  “How considerate of him! As soon as possible, I assume? Ram the swords through the boys’ hearts and throw the lot of them on the first ship out of country by this time tomorrow?”

  “Even sooner!” Sir Tancred smiled, although he must be shocked to hear such sarcasm from a man renowned for his discretion.

  Idiot king! Athelgar certainly knew that Ironhall had no boys ready to graduate as Blades, because it was only two weeks since he had made his semiannual pilgrimage to the school to harvest the latest crop of seniors, binding them to absolute loyalty with the ancient, arcane ritual. Grand Master had wanted to release six candidates and had reluctantly included another three to please Sir Florian, who was anxious to build up the Guard’s numbers. The previous Commander, Sir Vicious, had preferred to keep it lean—as Grand Master himself had, back in his own time as Leader, forty years ago. Florian saw safety in numbers, which was his privilege.