Guardians of the Flame - Legacy Page 7

  There was a rap on the knocking board.

  "C'mon in," he called, without looking up.

  It was Tennetty, carrying his breakfast tray awkwardly; she was much more comfortable with a sword at her waist than with a breakfast tray.

  She set it down less gently than he'd have preferred.

  "Easy on the crockery, eh?"

  "If I break it, I pay for it. Okay?"

  The years hadn't treated her badly, but they hadn't left her alone, either. Her stringy hair had gone mostly gray, and her remaining eye had laugh wrinkles around it, but she still carried herself comfortably, easily, as she seated herself across the window seat from him, pouring herself a cup of herb tea first, and then handing him one. Not a bad trade: From the neck up, she looked older than her forty or so years; from the neck down, she was still strong and wiry.

  "Since when are you sitting in for the upstairs maid?" he asked, reaching out an eating prong to spear a mouthful of ham. It was a bit too heavy on the salt, but nicely smoky; he washed it down with a swallow of tea, regretting it instantly when he realized how hot the damn tea was.

  Not bothering to mask her amusement, she handed him an earthenware mug of water as she shrugged. "When the dragon called, I was down in the kitchen, hearing from U'len what an ungrateful wretch you are, how you don't finish what you start. And since we've got some business . . ."

  He raised an eyebrow. "We do?"

  "Yeah." She nodded. "I want to go with Ellegon again; be attendant this trip. Maybe spend some time in Home with the boy, teach him the right way to use a sword."

  "I'd really like you around for the council meeting. Keep an eye on my back, eh?"

  She shook her head. "I don't think so. With all the musclebound swordsmen you have cluttering this place, the only danger is that you might get glared at too hard."

  He didn't like this. Having Tennetty watching his back was something he was used to; he'd miss her. Then again, if Tennetty was added to the group, Karl would have even less reason to worry about Jason. If Ellegon, Tennetty, Bren Adahan, and Valeran couldn't watch the boy, then things were in worse shape than Karl knew how to deal with.

  What really bothered him was the usual: It was the difference between Tennetty and sane people; she liked violence, particularly when slavers were on the other end of the blade or gun.

  He pursed his lips. "Getting twitchy again?" Tennetty didn't take to peace well; this wasn't the first time she'd made such a request.

  "Yeah."

  Or the first time he'd granted it. "Have a nice time, and say hello to everyone for me, okay? But easy on the load on the way back; I don't want to overtax the dragon."

  "Thanks, boss." She smiled. "What would you think of coming along?"

  He shook his head. "Sorry—too much to do. Besides, I'm slowing down. I don't want to be around when you go looking for trouble." He gave her his I'm-damn-serious look. "And I'd better not hear about your getting the boy into any danger; he's too young."

  "That he is. But it's too bad," she said, picking up and corking his ink bottle, then setting it down gently on the windowsill.

  "What are you doing?"

  She shrugged. "Well, you said you were slowing down—"

  In one smooth movement, she drew her beltknife with her right hand and lunged for him, the knife held properly, the point moving to cut him economically from just above the crotch to the sternum, one slash gutting him like a trout.

  Reflexes took over; with his left foot, he kicked her hand away, then batted his pen and lap desk aside, while he used his right leg to kick himself out of the window seat, rolling away once, then bouncing to his feet.

  She was still coming at him; he scooped up a throw rug and tossed it in her direction to slow her down enough for him to retrieve his sword from the swordstand.

  He tossed the scabbard aside; Tennetty had already drawn her own sword, and moved to an en garde position, standing easily.

  Slowly, she lowered the point of her sword and resheathed her dagger. "Slowing down, eh?"

  He sighed as he lowered his own sword. "I wish you wouldn't do that. I really do."

  "I wish you wouldn't give me any nonsense about slowing down. Had to show you better."

  He knew better; she'd done it for her benefit, not for his. "Sorry, Ten, but I can't go. I've got to hold court, and then I'm going to ride back to Arondael and supervise the maneuvers." It was one thing to hold Arondael responsible for any violence; it was another thing to let that pot boil unattended.

  She shook her head. "Night before last was the most fun I've had in what feels like years. Peace is too wearing on us bloodthirsty types. Including you," she said.

  She just didn't get it. The fact was that Karl Cullinane really didn't like violence. He committed it, when necessary; he tried to be damn good at it; but he had no compunctions about avoiding it when possible.

  He rubbed the fingers of his right hand over the stumps of the outer fingers of his left. Violence had costs; Karl Cullinane had been lucky to lose only three fingers. Tennetty had once lost an eye; Chak, Rahff, Aveneer, and all the others had died. Some quickly, some slowly—but they all were dead, dead, dead.

  Mortality pressed down on Karl Cullinane like a corporeal weight. Again, he rubbed his stumps. If he'd been just a few inches to the left, out of the blast shadow, it might have been his head.

  All he'd lost was fingers. . . .

  *Look at it this way—nobody can count better in base seven than you.*

  Thanks, Ellegon. "Some other time, okay? And you'd better leave me alone; I want to finish this letter in time."

  She nodded; wordless, she sheathed her sword, turned, and left.

  He gathered together the scattered writing materials, uncorked the ink bottle, dipped his pen, and got back to writing.

  —as far as the survey goes, Lou, I only see three possibilities. Either:

  1) you're going to have to train a surveyor for me, or

  2) we're going to have to do it sloppy-and-dirty, or,

  3) you're going to have to give up, come here, and do it yourself.

  You see a fourth?

  Personally, I'd rather have it be you, but Ranella—excuse me: Master Ranella; she insists on it—would prefer that you train someone for her. That way, she'll have someone to teach her some of the advanced tricks of surveying; she can already manage a beam level.

  Advice: Since you say that Petros—and tell the kid to keep his hands off my seed!—is capable of handling an election in your absence, come on along. Seems to me that a bit of air travel would be good for you.

  But take your pick. And, if you do decide to go, don't publicize it ahead of time. You are not to leave Home announced; that'd just be asking for trouble.

  Meanwhile, the new Furnael puddling operation is humming along, and I'm looking forward to finishing the Bessemer plant next year. Schedule still obtains: I want fast troop trains able to run from border to border within five years; full commercial use within ten—

  —and that had better be it. I've got to polish off my letter to Slovotsky and the dwarf, and then go play emperor.

  I guess I deserve it; I didn't have to decide to have all capital crimes tried in the capitol.

  As always, old friend, you have

  All my best

  Karl Cullinane

  Even in the old days, before Karl had taken over from the late, rarely lamented Prince Pirondael, trials in Bieme had been held in the courtroom, in, quite literally, the room where the prince held court.

  Not that trials had happened often: court trials were exclusively for dispensation of high justice, for members of the nobility formally accused of crimes. The low justice was managed by the nobility, and that justice—such as it was—generally consisted of said noble ordering his armsmen to mete out a punishment, anything from a mild whipping to a dramatically painful execution, as an encouragement to others.

  Karl shrugged as he walked into the courthouse, two of the four door guards taking u
p positions on either side of him as he walked down the corridor.

  Things change, but they don't change enough. He'd been able to reduce the amounts and kinds of crimes, and to require that any trial for a capital offense take place at Biemestren, in the emperor's courtroom, but there were restrictions on how fast he could make changes.

  He needed the cooperation of the Holtish barons, and that was a fact. The "Little Pittsburgh" steel plant in barony Furnael was only generating pig iron, and was a long way from paying for itself; it had been built with tax money, collected by those selfsame barons.

  The Nyphien border had to be guarded by more than Tyrnael's troops; that meant a national army, and both the money and the men had to be provided by the barons.

  And who would build the railroad? That would require manpower, and money. Tax money. Steel would have to be diverted from the mill—assuming that the Bessemer plant was on line by then—and a right-of-way would have to be partially seized, partially bought, and completely cleared.

  The peasants, the rock on which any agrarian-based society rested, wouldn't provide the necessary wealth out of the goodness of their hearts—peasants were no more altruistic than anyone else—or because they loved the emperor. They would have to be compelled, and that meant enlisting the cooperation, if not the affections, of the ruling class.

  He needed the barons, and that meant he had to be cautious in what he changed, in what he did.

  Not that there were no changes, particularly in Holtun.

  Military government gave him the excuse to make more sweeping alterations in society; and each Holtish baron knew that to rise up against the imperial governor meant immediate and savage retribution. Castle Keranahan was only a scattering of stones, and instead of banishing or killing off that barony's nobility, Karl had insisted that they remain as pensioners, and examples, at other castles in Holtun, under even less favorable circumstances than those of the relatives of the late Prince Pirondael. Of those, Karl had pensioned off some to outlying baronies; others he had simply banished.

  Not so for the nobility of barony Keranahan.

  Keranahan had had to be conquered; it had been necessary to make an example of the rebellious barony, else Holtun might have deteriorated into constant rebellion.

  Perhaps it was unpleasant for, say, Lord Hilewan to be spending the rest of his life mucking out stables, but it was a lesson to the others.

  Lessons were important.

  * * *

  As Karl Cullinane walked into the noisy courtroom, the bailiff rapped the hilt of his halberd smartly on the stone floor, and as if someone had yanked the speaker cord, all three hundred people in the room—jurors, defendants, complainants, and observers—fell silent.

  Lord Kirling, a minor noble of barony Tyrnael, rose to his feet, his immediate half-bow perfectly correct, even if just a shade perfunctory. "Greetings, your highness."

  None of the others rose; Karl had been able to get away with insisting that commoners were not to rise in the presence of the emperor; that was a duty imposed only on the nobility.

  "Greetings, Lord Kirling. Greetings, all."

  From his seat on the emperor's throne, Thomen, Baron Furnael, nodded, his hands folded away in his black robes; he did not rise. It was a fine point of etiquette, but one that the boy—boy, ha; Thomen was a full twenty years old—had picked up without it having to be specifically explained to him: Being a judge was, by imperial decree, exclusively a commoner's occupation, so if a member of the nobility was to sit the judge's bench, he did so under the fiction that he was a commoner.

  Thomen accepted his role eagerly, often slipping a half-voiced article between his first and last names, sometimes referring to himself not as Thomen Furnael, but Thomen ip Furnael—Thomen of Furnael—or sometimes simply as Thomen ahv Restaveth—Thomen the Judge—as though he were a commoner, whose surname usually was, at least in the Middle Lands, a function of his place of residence or his occupation.

  "Your honor," Karl Cullinane said, "a good morning to you."

  "Highness," Thomen said, his slate-gray eyes impassive, missing nothing. "Good morning." His voice took on a ceremonial aspect. "I ask that you replace me here," he said, "so that I may sit and learn from you, and so that your greater wisdom may enlighten these proceedings."

  Karl Cullinane shook his head, folding his arms across his chest. "If my wisdom were the greater in these matters, I would be the judge here, not you."

  As the relatively new custom demanded, Thomen again indicated the throne minor. "Then I ask that you join me here, so that I might enlighten you," he said, with just the slightest twinkle in his eyes.

  Karl half-bowed. "I thank you for the invitation. With your permission?"

  At the boy's nod, Karl slowly walked to the dais, turning and seating himself on the lower throne before examining the room.

  Over in the jury box, the dozen jurors' grimy faces were expressing puzzlement and shock; the implications of the five-year-old ritual often still had that effect. It was one thing to hear that their ruler customarily humbled himself before even a simulated commoner; it was another to see it.

  Karl was planning for the future. The rule of a limited monarch was a step up from the rule of an unlimited one. The rule of law, even of good law, was by no means an ideal situation; it was merely possibly safer than the unfettered rule of individual men, and both safer and more stable than anarchy.

  Anarchy. He muzzled an intolerant chuckle, thinking of how some of his college libertarian acquaintances would have handled things in his position. Their nonstate might have lasted longer than a tenday, although not much longer; it certainly would have turned bloody quickly. Then again, one of the self-centered bastards would have refused the crown in the first place, and let a bloody succession battle—in the midst of a bloodier war—decide the question.

  Libertarian idiots figure the only blood of value courses through their own veins.

  The sophistries of simpletons . . .

  He shook his head and forced himself to pay attention to what was going on.

  Thomen quickly dispensed with several local cases. With the jury's consent, he ordered a harnessmaker to redo a shoddy job on a horsecollar and fined a wineseller for improper disposal of trash; dismissed a smith's theft complaint against his cooper neighbor for lack of evidence, digressing to suggest that the two collectively keep track of the cooper's band stock; and finally sentenced a trembling peasant to time served plus an additional day in the castle's dungeon for public drunkenness.

  Karl approved, although he might not have wanted to punish the peasant for drinking. Then again, he didn't particularly approve of drunken revelers caroling through the town while people were trying to sleep. Close call.

  Then came the sentencing of the poacher.

  The quick-eyed little man was brought out in chains, a huge armsman on either side half-carrying him.

  Karl leaned over and whispered, "What are you going to do about him, Thomen? Put the fear of the gods into him?"

  "No." The boy visibly suppressed a smile. "I'll put the fear of me into him. I follow through." He turned to the prisoner and raised his voice. "Vernim ip Tyrnael," Thomen said, "you have been found guilty of poaching deer on the private preserve of Listar, Lord Tyrnael. It has been determined by a jury of your equals that neither you nor your family suffered from excessive need; it has also been determined to my satisfaction that this was not the first time you have stolen from the baron."

  Karl remembered hearing Ellegon's version of the case. Vernim was the nth in a line of small-plot farmers whose holding was outside of Myaryth, a small town in Tyrnael, right on the edges of Baron Tyrnael's personal preserve.

  Tyrnael was a reasonable sort. He didn't mind a bit of rabbit hunting or pheasant snaring on his land—he even encouraged the first, to prevent the rabbits from overrunning his preserve. But deer were in short supply—and no wonder: Tyrnael's constable had literally unearthed evidence that Vernim's family had long been taking at le
ast ten deer per year out of the preserve.

  Nothing terribly surprising about it, but it had to be discouraged. The trouble was that, technically, poaching on baronial or princely land had long been punishable by death, and Tyrnael had—almost certainly deliberately—not asked Karl to waive the death penalty for Vernim.

  Not a good situation.

  Tyrnael was a solid ally, and Karl had no intention of slapping the baron in the face. In fact, Karl would have been tempted to close his eyes and let the baron execute Vernim, except that he had established that baronial courts could mete out the death penalty only for murder.

  Tempted . . . it wasn't right to kill a man for poaching a few deer for his pot.

  It just wasn't right. Karl was glad that Thomen had decided to frighten the man.

  " . . . and the fact is, Vernim, that you deserve to end your days kicking on an impaling spear. But the emperor has outlawed that, and instituted the noose. Which is what I'm tempted to sentence you to."

  Vernim should have been trembling, white-faced. But, defiantly, he threw back his shoulders, the look of a man past fear on his face. "May I speak now, your honor?" he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Shit. Karl looked over at Thomen. This wasn't the way it was supposed to go. Thomen had clearly intended to scare the peasant with the threat of death, and then to substitute some number of blows with the whip or tendays in the dungeon—enough to make the point that poaching was not going to be tolerated.

  But—

  "You have no right to judge me. What are you? Some kind of god? No; you're a man, just like I am." He started to turn his back on Thomen, but the guards yanked him back by the chains, a marionette on a string.

  "Gag him," Karl said, forcing himself to keep calm while his mind raced.

  There it was, the danger of being too damn clever. Thomen had frightened the poacher past fear, left him feeling that his fate was already sealed, that he had nothing to lose.

  Helplessly, Thomen glanced at Karl, then recovered what was left of his composure. "You have, Vernim ip Tyrnael, eaten your last meat, poached or otherwise. You are sentenced to be thrown into the meanest cell in the dungeon of Biemestren Castle, there to be fed only on water until such time as you can conveniently be transported in a prisoner's cart to barony Tyrnael, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, to be buried in the ground, the ground salted."