The Price of Valor Read online

  She stood behind Raesinia now, along with a pair of blue-uniformed Grenadier Guards. Of the three organizations that had once protected the king, the Armsmen had been officially subsumed into the Patriot Guard while the Noreldrai Grays had been disbanded in disgrace, leaving only the elite army detachment on duty. The Patriot Guards, of course, were charged with the safety of all the citizens of Vordan, but they answered to the Deputies-General, and specifically to the Directory of National Defense. Which means they answer to Maurisk.

  At that moment, one of the assistants waved to the men on the Directory platform and gave a thumbs-up. The pair of them scuttled out of sight, leaving only the black-robed scholar at the center of events. He bowed in the direction of the Directory, and one of five men sitting on their platform stood up and stepped forward to a low rostrum. Claudia looked down at Emil, frowned, and flicked him lightly on the side of the head.

  “Put that book away and pay attention,” she said. The boy sighed as he obeyed, scowling at the speaker.

  Chairman of the Directory of National Defense Johann Maurisk did not cut an imposing figure. He was tall but painfully thin, the hanging folds of his dark coat making him look like a scarecrow, face pale under a gray bicorn hat. He did have a strong voice, though, strong enough to ring out across the square and quiet the murmuring of the crowd.

  “Citizens of Vordan!” he said. “We are gathered here to bear witness to a great step forward. One more relic of the past, laden with superstition, is swept away by the miraculous products of the modern age!”

  There was a cheer from the crowd, but not a loud one. Banners fluttered and whipped in the wind, held aloft on poles or in raised hands. Blue and white for the Radicals, black for the Conservatives. The factions in the deputies were mirrored among the common folk, and pockets of color were mixed with blobs of black. Bedsheets and pillowcases dyed with ink flapped as the Conservative supporters cheered for their hero, while the Radicals remained ominously silent.

  “The genius responsible is Doctor-Professor Sarton,” Maurisk went on. “I will let him explain the workings of the device.”

  Emil, who’d sagged with boredom as the de facto ruler of Vordan spoke, raised his head as the scholar beside the metal table straightened up. This was Doctor-Professor George Sarton, whose work the Directory had so enthusiastically embraced. Back before her father’s death, when Raesinia had been sneaking out of the palace to organize the student radicals against the Last Duke, Maurisk and Sarton had been members of the inner circle of her conspiracy. He was an awkward, gangly man, with an unfortunate stutter that turned his face red with the effort of forcing out the words. He addressed Maurisk directly, leaving the rest of the assembled dignitaries to stare at the back of his head.

  “I have made a s . . . s . . . study of the methods of execution used by the kings of Vordan,” he said. It sounded like a rehearsed speech. “They have always been cruel and inhumane. A modern s . . . s . . . state may require men to die for their crimes, but it takes no pleasure in cruelty. I wanted to provide a means to end a life with an absolute minimum of pain.”

  Sarton turned to the metal table, running his hands across the steel with evident pleasure. “Hanging,” he went on, “requires a great deal of s . . . s . . . skill on the part of the hangman to produce a quick death. Having one man who must fill the role of executioner is against the principles of equality embodied by the Deputies-General. A mechanism is much more s . . . s . . . suitable.

  “As every man knows, it is the heart that is the seat of the emotions, including pain and suffering. Destruction of the heart, therefore, brings painless and instantaneous death. To achieve this, I have employed the power and precision of modern clockwork. No expertise is necessary. The condemned is positioned here”—he patted the center of the table—“and bound in place, and then it only remains to throw a s . . . s . . . switch.”

  He pressed something on the side of the table. Just left of the center, where a man’s heart would be, a foot-long pointed steel piston slid straight up with the speed of a striking cobra and a clank of shivering metal.

  “The procedure is utterly painless,” Sarton said. “The heart is punctured before it has time to react. The limbs may twitch, but the s . . . s . . . soul has departed.” He smiled beatifically, and for a moment his stutter vanished. “I call it the Spike.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Then the crowd began to cheer, Radicals and Conservatives alike. Sarton dipped his head politely at Maurisk, and the chairman got to his feet again.

  “These men,” he boomed, gesturing at the huddled prisoners, “have confessed to their crimes! They are Borelgai spies. Paid to work against us, to spy and to sabotage, by a nation of shopkeepers and Sworn Church toadies. For years we have suffered the Borels to live among us, tolerated their poisonous words and let them work their malignant influence. All for a dangled purse of gold!”

  Raesinia tensed. Maurisk was looking in her direction, and it seemed for a moment he was speaking to her directly. Her father, Farus VIII, had been responsible for much of the “tolerance” that the chairman so disliked. Some of it had indeed been for gold—loans from the great bankers of Borel had kept the Crown afloat—but there was also the little matter of the War of the Princes, which had ended with the death of her older brother Prince Dominic and Vordan’s humiliating surrender.

  “No longer,” Maurisk said, his voice ringing off the flagstones. “The veil is torn. The enemies who have intrigued against us for years have been stung into action by the great steps forward we have taken, the establishment of the Deputies-General to ensure justice for all Vordanai. We are at war, my friends, and that means we do not need to abide this treachery in order to salve the feelings of merchants in Viadre! We can finally deal with such vile acts in the manner they fully deserve.”

  Cheers rose again, wild and uproarious, mixed with shouts of “Death to traitors!” and “Down with Elysian slaves!” A regular chant emerged, spreading and growing in volume, until it shook the square. “To the Spike! To the Spike!”

  Emil joined in, enthusiastically, until his mother flicked him on the ear. “Emil! A gentleman does not hoot with a crowd. Applause will be sufficient.” He subsided into clapping, and Claudia leaned closer to Raesinia. “He’s a fine speaker, don’t you think? Very loud. I could hear every word!”

  “Oh yes,” Raesinia muttered. “Very fine.”

  Maurisk gestured to the guards, who grabbed one of the prisoners and hauled him up onto the platform. Sarton’s assistants reappeared, and with the guards’ assistance they manhandled the man onto the Spike, lying facedown. Leather straps secured his arms, legs, and head, threaded through buckles built into the table, and a wide belt was cinched around his waist to keep him from arching his back.

  When the prisoner was secured, the guards stepped back. Doctor-Professor Sarton looked to the Directory, and Maurisk gestured sharply downward. The black-robed scholar touched the switch, and the Spike gave a clang. A tiny steel point appeared, protruding from the prisoner’s back like a strange metallic growth. The man jerked once, then lay still. Raesinia felt her gorge rise, and swallowed hard.

  Underneath the Spike’s platform, someone must have been working a mechanism to reset the clockwork. The steel piston withdrew, the machine click-click-clicking loudly as it was reset. When the guards untied the straps and lifted the corpse away, there was barely a stain on the steel surface.

  “How lovely,” Claudia said. “So much more civilized than a hanging. I always hate the way they kick and squirm.”

  “Mama, where does the blood go?” Emil said. “I thought it would spurt all over the place.”

  “I imagine there’s a special drain,” Raesinia said.

  “A special drain,” Claudia said, “of course! What a clever idea.”

  “Yes.” Raesinia’s voice was flat as she looked at the seven remaining prisoners. “Dr. Sarton has always
been very . . . clever.”

  Confessed traitors, Maurisk had called the condemned. Huddled together, dressed in rags, they did not look terribly traitorous. Sothe had told her of the methods Duke Orlanko had employed to extract a confession, when one was required. She wondered if Maurisk had taken a page from the same book. She looked away, the pit of her stomach sour.

  “Come on,” Raesinia said to Sothe. “We’re leaving.”

  “Leaving?” Sothe leaned close and lowered her voice to a whisper. “We’re here at the invitation of the Directory. Are you sure that’s wise?”

  The tone of Sothe’s voice told Raesinia that she was sure that it was not, but Raesinia chose not to hear the rebuke. “We’ll tell Maurisk my delicate digestion was upset by the spectacle. That ought to make him happy.”

  Sothe pursed her lips but didn’t argue. Raesinia murmured something indistinct and polite-sounding in Claudia’s direction, nodded at the fat arms merchant, and pushed her way back through the box. Her guards, after a moment of surprise, trailed behind her. Raesinia hopped down the two steps at the back of the box and onto the cobblestones as another cheer rose from the crowd, indicating that the Spike had claimed another traitorous victim.

  Maurisk. The thought of him made her want to spit. When they’d worked together, she thought of him as an idealist, full of bold but impractical ideas. Once he’d gotten into the thick of the politics of the Deputies-General, though, he set some kind of speed record for selling out his high-minded ideals in pursuit of power. The complicated dance of parties, forming and re-forming like bits of foam in a bubbling soup pot, had somehow conspired to elevate Raesinia’s old companion to the very height of power.

  The war had done wonders for his authority, of course. The deputies had been content to endlessly debate the proper formula for a constitution when things had been going well. Once word got out that Vordan was at war with three of the great powers—including Imperial Murnsk, seat of the Sworn Church itself—the deputies had been running scared. They’d heaped powers on Maurisk’s Directory of National Defense, and what they hadn’t given him he’d taken for himself when he found that no one was willing to object. Only Durenne, new Minister of War and the one Radical member of the Directory, acted as a counterweight, and not a very effective one. While the war went on in the north, the east, and the west, Maurisk was busy trawling the capital for enemy spies, devising new methods of execution, and monitoring sure every publisher and pamphleteer published only what was “appropriate and beneficial to a modern state.”

  “Well?” Raesinia said to Sothe as they walked toward the north end of the square where the royal carriage waited.

  “Well what?”

  “What do you think?” Raesinia jerked her head over her shoulder, at the spectacle unfolding behind them.

  Sothe shrugged. “One way of killing a person is much like another.”

  “Maurisk’s always hated the Borels. Now he’s got people seeing them on every corner.”

  “I wouldn’t be so certain he’s wrong. The Concordat certainly intercepted quite a few Borelgai spies, and I can’t imagine they’ve relaxed their efforts now that we’re at war.”

  “I don’t doubt that they’re there. I question whether Maurisk’s crowd could find them.” The Directory had wasted no time building the Patriot Guard into a considerable force, much larger than the old Armsmen, but so far they seemed more interested in prestige than in fighting. Certainly Maurisk had no well-oiled intelligence service to match the peerless machine run by Duke Orlanko, the spymaster who’d so nearly seized the throne. Raesinia sighed. “Maybe we ought to rebuild the Ministry of Information.”

  Sothe raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure that would go over well.”

  “We’d call it something else, of course. But we need some way of getting information without—”

  For a moment, the world went white. A sound like a hundred-gun cannonade slammed into Raesinia with physical force, pulling at the lace of her dress before rushing on to shatter the glass in the shop windows ahead of her. The ground shook, a single pulse, as though a giant hammer had come slamming down.

  Sothe reacted first, knives appearing in her hands as if by magic, stepping between Raesinia and the source of the blast. Her two guards belatedly began to fumble with their muskets, still disoriented from the concussion. Raesinia, her own head ringing like a bell, turned and saw a tower of ugly black smoke rising into the sky.

  “What—” she managed to say.

  “This way,” Sothe said, disappearing one of her daggers and grabbing Raesinia’s arm. She pulled her to the edge of the square, into an alley between two shops, and shoved her up against the wall. The entrance was barely wide enough for one person to squeeze into, and Sothe stood athwart it, daring anyone to try and push past her.

  The screams began, and the clatter of boots on flagstones as the crowd gathered for the execution rushed to escape whatever had happened. Most of the commoners would flee south; here at the north end of the square, the fleeing mass was more distinguished, deputies and merchants, Conservatives and Radicals alike pushing and shoving in their haste to get away. There were a fair number of Patriot Guards mixed in as well, tossing their halberds aside to speed their flight.

  “Could something have gone wrong with Sarton’s machine?” Raesinia said.

  “Not unless it was packed full of powder,” Sothe said shortly, eyes never leaving the crowd. “That was a bomb.”

  “I thought so.” Raesinia shook her head, trying to clear the daze that had swept over her. “I have to get out there.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Sothe said. “That could be exactly what they’re planning on. A bomb to panic the crowd, and another assassin ready to strike in the confusion. An old trick.”

  Raesinia lowered her voice. “You know we don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I know that if you get shot in the head in public, and get back up again, people are going to comment.” Sothe’s tone was grim. “It’d be either a miracle or sorcery, and in my experience demonic intervention is usually more believable than divine.”

  Four years ago, Princess Raesinia Orboan had been on her deathbed, coughing her lungs to bloody pieces. With the king already suffering from the illness that would eventually kill him, and Prince Dominic dead two years previously at Vansfeldt, the Last Duke had acted to make certain the succession remained under his control. The Priests of the Black, the secret order of the Sworn Church that wielded sorcery in order to suppress knowledge of the supernatural, had guided Raesinia through the ritual of invoking the true name of a demon.

  The creature had settled deep inside her, binding itself to her body and soul. Its power restored her to perfect health, repairing her flesh almost as soon as it was injured. As best Raesinia could tell, she couldn’t be killed. She hadn’t aged a day since—something that was becoming increasingly problematic now that she was approaching her twentieth birthday—and she could no longer even sleep. While she was, technically, still alive, she had come to believe that she was no longer human.

  Only a tiny handful of people knew the truth. Orlanko, of course, who’d once thought to use the knowledge to control her. His allies in the Priests of the Black, and Sothe, who’d once been his top agent. And Janus bet Vhalnich, who had been tasked by king with finding a way to free his daughter from the supernatural trap.

  The crowd was thinning out. There was no sign of the two Grenadier Guards, and Raesinia hoped they’d only been swept away in the confusion and not trampled underfoot. Screams and shouting continued near the base of the pillar of smoke, which she could now see rose from the where the royal box had been. A ring of Patriot Guards stood around it, halberds unshrouded, looking nervous as other men milled around behind them.

  “I have to go,” Raesinia said. “I have to see what’s happening.”

  “Your Majesty,” Sothe hissed, “please—”
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  But Raesinia was already squeezing past her, out the mouth of the alley and back into the square. Sothe swore softly and hurried after her as she dodged a few stragglers and reached the ring of guards. Clearly, no instructions had been issued, and the Patriot Guards were not clear on whether they were supposed to be keeping people out or protecting them, but in either case none of them were prepared to bar the queen’s way.

  Raesinia passed through their circle and nearly gagged at the thick stench of powder. Clouds of evil black smoke still billowed upward, but she could tell the explosion had indeed been centered on the royal box, where she’d been standing only minutes earlier. Guards and deputies rushed around in the murk, helping the injured or shouting unintelligible orders.

  “Help!” The voice was high and terrified, a boy’s. Emil. “Someone help!”

  Raesinia darted forward and caught sight of him amid the billowing smoke. He was limping across the cratered flagstones, desperately tugging a limp body by one arm. Tears streamed from his eyes, cutting channels through a layer of soot.

  “Please help,” he said, voice going faint. “Mama won’t get up. I think she’s hurt.”

  Emil’s right hand was fastened tight around his mother’s, and a patter of blood dripped from a gash on his calf. His skin was milk white under the gray soot. Raesinia took one look at Claudia and averted her eyes; the ground beneath her was a slick of red, as though someone had spilled a bucket of paint.

  “Your Majesty!”

  Sothe appeared at Raesinia’s side, with a trio of Patriot Guards behind her. She’s always had a gift for taking charge in desperate situations. “Help the boy!” Raesinia barked.

  Emil screamed as one of the guards pulled Claudia’s limp hand from his grasp, then sagged into a dead faint. The guard caught him, looking uncertain.

  “Up the street,” Sothe said. “There’s an aid station forming. He needs bandaging.” The guard snapped to obey, and Sothe turned to Raesinia. “Your Majesty. You have to come with me.”