The Ethical Swordsman Read online

  After that they rode off into more showers, heading eastward through parts of Grandon that Niall had never seen, past the docks and the grim towering mass of the Bastion. They left the city by the East Gate, into a very flat and swampy landscape. It was bleak and largely uninhabited.

  “So, what happens when we get to Goat’s Gizzard, Leader?”

  “What I said: the nastiest people you have ever met in your life—even including your Ephraim Morley.”

  Hopeless! Stalwart Lord Hedgebury loved keeping secrets. It must be a leftover habit from his youth as a gleeman. Answers must wait until the appropriate moment and then—Hey Presto! The coin was in your ear all the time! Apart from that, he was likable and good company. For the last two years Niall had been the oldest candidate in Ironhall. Most of the masters were three or even four times his age. Hedgebury was only twice it, and socializing with a man of that middle vintage required a skill Niall still had to learn. Fortunately, Stalwart was a skilled raconteur with an inexhaustible repertoire of tales about the Monster War, life in Baelmark, and court life in general. Fate, or Queen Malinda, could have thrown Niall into much worse company.

  Goat’s Gizzard, when it crawled into view close to sunset, turned out to be a very ugly castle, a pile of gloomy black stone like a giant bubo on the swampy plain.

  “Built by Everard IV a century ago,” Hedgebury proclaimed, “to keep the Baels from sailing up the Gran.”

  “And did it?”

  “Spirits, no! It’s out of bowshot of the river unless there’s a strong north wind blowing. Even if there is, the raiders can row on past, staying close to the far shore, singing lewd songs. They rarely bothered, because the little coastal towns were much easier prey.”

  “So why are we coming calling?”

  “Because nowadays it’s used as a prison. It holds the conjurers we captured during the Monster War. They all were monsters in their day. If your conscience rebels at the idea of paying a woman for a tumble, how does it feel about people who conjure children into sex slaves?”

  “Guess.”

  As they rode toward the main gate, Stalwart said, “By the way, the keepers are an unholy mixture of Household Yeomen and Dark Chamber snoops, so tie a knot in your tongue.”

  Blades, Yeomen, and Inquisitors all worked for the same monarch, but any cooperation was unthinkable. So Niall had been taught, but he failed to see the sense in it.

  Then Hedgebury said, “I think you’d better revert to being Will for a while.”

  That confirmed Niall’s guess that he was going to be enchanted. The elementals would not answer to a fake name, but they would accept an old, rarely used one. The inquisitors were not to learn who he was.

  The drawbridge was down, but so was the massive portcullis beyond it. There was no one in sight, no bell rope, nothing to look at except another stone wall ten feet beyond the portcullis. Niall hammered on the metal with Denial’s quillon.

  Eventually two Yeomen sauntered into view to peer out at the visitors with contempt. They were a shoddy, unkempt pair. The older had a paunch and a straggly grey-flecked beard. The younger, who looked undernourished and none too smart, kept sneezing and wiping his nose on his sleeve. They each carried a pike, but neither wore armour, just rumpled, food-stained uniforms.

  “Who’re you?” demanded the fat one.

  Hedgebury produced a scroll and held it up to display the seal on it. “I come from the Queen, bearing orders for Castellan Hammer.”

  “Castellan’s indis... indisisy... posed. Come back tomorrow.”

  “Let me in and I’ll indispose him like he never imagined!”

  The fat one held out a hand. Stalwart hesitated and then let him have the scroll.

  “Here, Podge, read it for us.” The older man passed the cylinder to the younger, who broke the wax, unrolled the paper, and began to sound out the text, syllable by syllable.

  Reading the Queen’s mail must certainly be a major felony, however badly one did it. The fat man was watching Hedgebury. Niall recognized a duty. Denial whistled from her scabbard and flashed through the portcullis grid, then through the paper. The point nicked young Podge’s tongue and hit his teeth. With the width of his blade horizontal, Niall jerked the scroll upward, out of the petrified youth’s hands. The kid screamed, spewing blood.

  As Niall withdrew his sword and reached his other hand to retrieve the spiked letter, the older Yeoman tried to stab him with his pike, but the axe blade would not go through the grid of the portcullis. Sleight would, though, and through the fat man’s left ear and onward, a foot higher. He, too, screamed. Stalwart did not withdraw the rapier. He held the man helpless, transfixed though the ear. Both pikes lay on the ground, useless.

  “Nice initiative, lad,” Stalwart said.

  “Thank you—sir.” No names here. Niall was already pleased with himself, and annoyed that the older man’s praise felt good too.

  “You! Podge!” Stalwart barked. “Run and fetch Castellan Hammer or Warden Brindle right now!”

  The boy staggered away, spluttering blood.

  The fat man was snarling, clutching his ear. “You’ll pay for this!”

  “You’ll die first,” Stalwart assured him. “You tried to read a confidential royal document. They may not even waste time bandaging your ear. It’ll stop hurting when they cut off your head.”

  Someone in authority must have been standing close by, for almost at once machinery clattered and the portcullis shivered, then began to rise. Stalwart withdrew Sleight before she tore the fat man’s ear off. Niall wiped Denial on the lining of his cloak and—at the second attempt—sheathed her on his back.

  He had never seen an Inquisitor, but he had heard many lectures from the masters at Ironhall, and plenty more from visiting Blades of the Royal Guard, who referred to them as snoops. Thus, he was in no doubt as to the occupation of the gaunt man in a black robe and biretta, who now advanced to meet the visitors. His dead-fish eyes alone betrayed it. His face was craggy and totally expressionless. His hair also was midnight black, and hung almost to his shoulders.

  “Senior Inquisitor Brindle, I assume?” Stalwart said, offering the bloodstained ruin of the royal letter.

  Brindle ignored it. “Lord Hedgebury and?...”

  “My wife’s nephew, Will. Inquisitor Brindle is the warden here, Will. He looks after the inmates.”

  “We prefer to refer to them as prisoners,” Brindle said. “Although few of them are really human any more. You are to be the subject of today’s experiment?” he asked Niall.

  Stalwart exploded. “Experiment!? Your report to the Queen indicated that the enchanters had devised the spell that she wanted.”

  Brindle turned the fishy stare on him. “Prisoner Forty-two believes that he has, and none of the others who have read his text disbelieve him, but none of them would volunteer to be the first to try it.”

  Since Niall was wearing a cat’s eye sword, he was obviously a Blade, and was being hazed on principle.

  “What will happen if it goes wrong?” he asked.

  Brindle shrugged, the first gesture he had made. “It could cripple you, blind you, even kill you.”

  Stalwart stayed quiet, no doubt waiting to see how Niall would handle this. Niall turned to him.

  “If it does go wrong, after Inquisitor Brindle assured Her Grace that it was safe to use, then she will hold him responsible?”

  “Certainly.”

  Bluff called.

  It was easy enough to guess what Stalwart wanted from the conjurors, and Niall didn’t believe such an enchantment was possible. So let them try, and when it failed, the whole nasty plan would collapse, and he could go off and serve in the Royal Guard as he’d originally intended.

  He said, “Then let’s get on with it. I’m getting cold, just standing here.”

  Chapter 6

  Now you have made
it much worse.

  sir niall

  The warden led the way across the bailey, with Stalwart and Niall leading their own horses, which was a flagrant breach of normal hospitality.

  "This place is a midden!” Stalwart said. “A disgrace! Why doesn’t Hammer have his men clean it up?”

  Niall was thinking the same, looking at neglected heaps of horse droppings, a couple of broken wagons, disintegrating archery butts, and a small lake of backed-up, well polluted, rainwater.

  “Castellan Hammer is much too busy,” Brindle declared loftily.

  “Busy doing what?”

  “Drinking himself to death. Goat’s Gizzard is a penalty posting for a Yeoman.”

  “Is it also a penalty posting for a snoop?” Stalwart asked, but received no answer.

  Brindle had either recognized Lord Hedgebury, or had known who would be coming. He would therefore know that he had been the renowned Blade, Sir Stalwart. Niall decided to play nice, just to be contrary.

  “As warden, sir, you must be responsible for making sure that none of the prisoners escape? That sounds very difficult if they are all trained conjurors. How do you keep them from enchanting themselves out of here?”

  Brindle did not even look at him. “Not at all. We just keep them apart. It takes eight of them together to invoke the elemental spirits. You over there! Sergeant at arms! Yes, you. And you. Come here!” Having arrived at a door too small to admit a horse, the inquisitor now belatedly took heed of the visitors’ mounts and gave orders for rubdowns, oats, and so on. In Niall’s opinion, the two Yeomen who led them away could do with a good rubdown themselves.

  The Inquisitor unlocked the door and then paused. “Please remember that all the prisoners—and we still have more than fifty of them—were put to the Question. If you ask them about anything in their past, they will start confessing all over again. They will confess everything from failing to brush their teeth as children to how they inflicted agonizing diseases on people in order to sell them painkillers at ever-increasing prices. When one starts, any others within earshot will join in with their own woes.”

  Niall caught Stalwart’s eye and read an I-told-you-so message there. The Yeomen, and perhaps the Inquisitors, were bad enough, but the prisoners were human vermin, now enchanted into insanity.

  The door frame was low; Niall bent his head, but his sword hilt struck with a loud “clunk.” Brindle snorted—dumb swordsman!

  On his second try Niall crouched and crept through to a spacious hall, lit by barred windows set very high, whose fading evening light made the pillars and the massive ashlar walls seem like the bones of some long-dead dragons. Whatever the place might have been when the castle was built—feasting hall or stable—now it was an elementary, with an octogram outlined on the floor, a brazier to locate Fire point, and an urn for Water. But each point of the octogram was marked by a staple set in the paving, and those were not standard. Nor was the matching staple in the centre.

  A row of benches along the opposing wall was occupied by half a dozen Inquisitors, three male, and three female, ranging in age from younger than Niall to three times his age. They rose respectfully as the visitors entered, as if to prove that Warden Brindle kept his subordinates on a much tighter rein than Castellan Hammer did his. They were all impeccably trim in their black robes and birettas.

  Brindle locked the door by which he and the two visitors had entered—there was another at the far end of the hall. He acknowledged his ominous troops with a nod.

  “Today we are honoured by the presence of Ambassador Lord Hedgebury, companion of the White Star, knight in the Loyal and Ancient Order of the Queen’s Blades. And also his pretend nephew, another butcher boy, who chooses to go by the name of Will, and who will enlighten us this evening by voluntary participation in testing a brand-new conjuration created by Prisoner Forty-two. I suggest you acknowledge Will’s reckless courage with a round of applause.”

  All six clapped with great enthusiasm. Stalwart slipped Niall a surreptitious wink. Niall tried to shrug, only to discover that his scabbard made the move uncomfortable.

  “Harb,” Brindle said, “and Tenebrous, would you please fetch Forty-two, and any papers he will need to set up the rehearsal? And the rest of you bring the helpers he wants?”

  As the junior inquisitors filed out, the two Blades sauntered over to a bench and sat down.

  Stalwart leaned close and murmured, “You didn’t bow when they applauded you.”

  Niall whispered, “They’ll have to use a bigger shovel if they want to bury me in that stuff.” With the Queen newly on the throne, he was confident that the Dark Chamber would not promise her something it was not certain it could deliver.

  Brindle, meanwhile, had checked the water level in the urn and was battering a flint and steel together, trying to light the brazier.

  The air in the elementary was damp and stank of old and rot. It was also cold; Niall caught himself shivering and was not worried that this might be a sign of fear. Daylight was fading.

  Then the first two inquisitors to leave returned, one carrying a dilapidated bundle of paper, and the other a length of chain attached to a shackle around the left ankle of the very old man hobbling along between them. His hair and beard hung in unkempt wisps. His sunken cheeks advertised an almost complete lack of teeth, and his number, “42”, was either branded or tattooed in large digits on his forehead. His clothes were truly just rags, hanging on him, just as his flesh hung on his bones. His face, especially, looked as if it had melted like candle wax, pulling his lower eyelids away from his eyes.

  As the threesome was about to pass the two Blades, Forty-two suddenly stopped, almost causing his right-hand escort to drop the papers. He was staring hard at Hedgebury, and Niall felt a matching start of recognition from his companion.

  “Dr. Skuldigger!” Stalwart said. “I thought they hanged you twenty years ago.”

  The ancient one cackled toothlessly. “Wat Hedgebury! You look as if you are doing well. No, they didn’t hang me. Aw! I wish they had been so kind.”

  “Move him!” Brindle shouted. “No dawdling.”

  The escorts jostled their prisoner forward, but they couldn’t stop his hoarse screech. “Not that I didn’t deserve hanging. I was going to make a chimera out of you. Such a beautiful chimera you would have made, you and the otter...”

  The door swung open again, to admit the other four jailers with two more prisoners: Seventeen, male, and Fifty-one, female. Both looked as ancient and maltreated as the former Dr. Skuldigger. Both joined in, crying out confessions in an incomprehensible hubbub.

  Brindle raised his hands above his head and clapped three times. Evidently that was a conjured signal, for it brought instant silence.

  “Forty-two,” he shouted. “Position the participants.”

  “Me at Death,” the old man replied, sounding perfectly sane again. “Seventeen at Water, and Fifty-one at Fire.”

  The jailers delivered their charges to the respective posts, and fastened their chains to the shackles.

  “Now bring Thirty-three,” the warden commanded, “Forty-five, and Nine.”

  “And they’ve never done this before?” Hedgebury murmured, confirming Niall’s own disbelief.

  Brindle strode over to loom over Niall. “You will have to stand in the centre, but first take off everything except the scabbard.”

  “You wish to admire my goose bumps? I certainly will not. It’s too flaming cold in here.”

  Besides, there were ladies present, if one admitted that female Inquisitors could be classed as ladies. Prisoner Fifty-one did not count, being both ancient and practically naked herself.

  “I’d have thought this would feel quite warm after all those years on Starkmoor. I’ll get a blanket for you. But I will not allow this enchantment to proceed until I am quite certain that you have not been bound to the Blades. Any atte
mpt to overlay two such powerful conjurations would be inviting disaster.”

  “I’m not bound. You have my word on that, and I understand that snoops can tell when a witness is lying.”

  Brindle strode away without a word.

  “He’s probably right,” Hedgebury said. “To include your clothes in this conjuration might be very unwise.”

  With six wretched prisoners in place, Brindle sent four inquisitors back for two more, and one of the young males off on an errand elsewhere, probably to find a blanket for their bashful victim. Meanwhile the warden distributed scripts to the conjurors already in place and then handed each of them a lighted candle. Night had fallen.

  The blanket arrived. Angry, but resigned to what felt like a completely unnecessary indignity, Niall stripped completely, wrapped the blanket around himself, knotted it at his waist, and then resumed his scabbard and sword. He strode into the octogram and took his place in the centre.

  “You must face Love,” Forty-two mumbled. Could spirits understand a voice so toothless?

  But the command made sense. Obviously this ritual was to be directed at the sword on his back, and when he faced the spidery and unlovable old man at Love, he would have his back to Death, whose spirits naturally ruled any deadly weapon. In turning he stubbed a toe on the staple and swore.

  “Begin,” Warden Brindle said.

  Niall had witnessed several hundred bindings in the Ironhall Forge, and they had all started with Grand Master running a test for any excess spirits of Chance. The former Dr. Skuldigger dispensed with such precaution. He launched into a tirade banishing spirits of Fire, which naturally ruled all forms of light. The candle flames grew dimmer. He had written the largest part for himself, but the other seven all had their turns. The conjuring went on for a very long time, and Niall found himself shivering despite all his efforts not to. His feet were freezing.