“Who—”
But the guard had already led off. I swallowed my curiosity and hurried after him. We threaded a path behind the crowd to one of the stairs leading up the inside of the city wall. After climbing to the parapet we made our way to the palanquin where the men ushered me along the treacherously narrow strip of walkway not occupied by the steward’s box. Drawing level with the curtains I ducked through, not waiting for an invitation.
I shuffled in, bent low to keep from scraping my head, and squeezed into the seat opposite. Garyus couldn’t sit in the seat but instead rested on a ramp of cushions heaped against it. “What the hell? Grandmother made you regent?”
He crinkled his face in a smile. “You don’t think I’m up to it, Greatnephew?”
“No, well, I mean, yes, of course . . .”
“A resounding vote of confidence!” He chuckled. “Apparently she ‘stole my throne’, so I’m getting it back for a few months.”
“Well, I never said . . . Well, maybe I did but I didn’t mean—I mean I did—” The heat in that little box was oppressive and the sweat left me at such a rate I worried I might shrivel and die. “It was your throne.”
“Treason, Jalan. You keep those words off your lips.” Garyus smiled again. “It’s true that joined as we were, it was me that saw the light first. But I reconciled myself to the new order of things long ago. When I was a boy I’ll grant you it stung. We dream big dreams and it’s hard to let them go. I wanted to make my father proud—have him see past . . .” He raised a twisted arm. “This.” He winced and lowered his arm. “But my little sister has been a great queen. History will remember her name. In these times she has been exactly what our nation needed. A merchant king would have served us better in peace—but peace is not what we have been given.” He twitched the curtain open a little way. Down below us the martial pride of Red March came on rank after rank, gleaming, glorious, pennants rippling above them in the breeze. “Which brings me to the reason for my invitation.” He reached into a basket at his side and fumbled something out. It fell to the floor as he got it clear.
I bent to retrieve it. “A message?” I lifted a scroll-case, ebony chased with silver, set with the royal seals.
“A message.” Garyus inclined his head. “You’re the Marshal of Vermillion.”
“Fuck that!” My turn to drop the scroll-case as though it were hot. “. . . your stewardness.”
“‘Highness’ is the correct form of address when the steward is of noble birth . . . if we’re being formal, Jalan.”
“Fuck that, your highness.” I sat back and exhaled, then wiped the sweat from my brow. “Look, I know you meant well and all. It’s nice that you wanted to do something for me by way of thanks for the key—but really—what do I know about defending cities? I mean it’s soldiery—there must be dozens of better qualified people—”
“Hundreds I should think.” Garyus said it a little too enthusiastically for my liking. “But since when was a monarchy about rewarding individual merit? Promote from within, is our mantra.”
He had a point. The Kendeths’s continued rule depended upon the carefully constructed lie that we were innately better at doing it than any other candidates, and also the idea that God himself wanted us to do it.
“It’s a nice gesture, Great-uncle, but I’d really rather not.” Being marshal sounded as though it might involve far more work than I was interested in—which was none at all. My plans involved mainly wine, women, and song. In fact, forget the song. “I’m hardly suited.”
Garyus smiled his crooked smile and looked toward the bright slice of the outside world visible between the curtains. “I’m hardly suited to being steward now am I? Ruling Vermillion—all of Red March in fact— yet hidden away lest I demoralize our troops with my physical imperfections. But here I am, by your grandmother’s command. Which, incidentally, is where your appointment comes from. I’m not so cruel as to separate you from your vices, Jalan.”
“Grandmother? She made me marshal?” The last time I’d seen her she seemed so close to ordering my execution that the headsman probably had his whetstone out.
“She did.” Garyus nodded his ponderous head. “There’s a uniform you know? And you’ll be in charge of your brother Martus.”
“I’m in!”
TEN
The uniform turned out to be a baton of office and an ageing sash of yellow silk with a number of worryingly bloodlike stains on it. Over the course of the next few days I came to appreciate the cruelty of Grandmother’s revenge. After the initial joy of informing Martus that he was now my subordinate came an endless round of official duties. I had to inspect the wall guard, deal with engineers and their tiresome opinions about what needed repairing or knocking down, and officiate over disputes between the resident city guard and my brother’s newly arrived infantry.
I would have told them all to go hang, but my assistant, Captain Renprow, proved annoyingly persistent, an example of the “raised on merit” class of energetic low-born types that the system needs in order to function but who have to be watched closely. Additionally, continued reports of rag-a-maul and ghouls in the poor quarter acted as an added incentive. If there’s one thing that will get me to do half an honest day’s work it’s the conviction that doing so will make me safer.
“What are rag-a-maul, Renprow?” I leaned back in my chair, my feet in their shiny boots on my shiny marshal’s desk.
Renprow, a short dark man with short dark hair, frowned, favouring me with a stare that put me uncomfortably in mind of Snorri. “You don’t know? I’ve passed you a dozen reports . . . you attended that strategy meeting yesterday, and—”
“Of course I know. I just wanted your opinion on the subject, Renprow. Humour me.”
“Well.” He pursed his lips. “Some kind of malicious ghost. People describe them as miniature whirlwinds raising rags and dust. Whirlwinds so full of sharp edges they can flay a man, and when the wind drops the victim is possessed and runs around on a murderous rampage until they’re put down.” He puffed out his cheek and tapped two fingers to it. “That about covers it.”
“And these incidents are peculiar to Vermillion?”
“We’ve had reports far and wide, but we do seem to have a higher incidence in the city. Perhaps just because the population is so much larger.” He paused. “My father’s people know them too. But they call them wind-stick devils, and they’re very rare.” Renprow had a heritage that began far south of Liba, giving him command of many odd facts.
“Well.” I swung my boots off the desk and glanced around the room. The marshal’s manse was a spacious building but had been unoccupied for so long that most of the furniture had wandered off. “If that concludes our business for the day?” The sun had passed its zenith and I had a flamehaired beauty to visit, a sweet girl named Lola, or Lulu, or something.
Renprow’s mouth twitched into a shortlived smile as if I’d been attempting a joke. “Your next appointment is with the menonites in the Appan suburb. They’re proving resistant to the idea of disinterring their cemeteries. After that—”
“We still have dead in the ground?” I stood up fast enough to knock the chair over. “Have the guard do it for them!” I’d seen what happened when the dead come clambering back from where they’ve been put. “Better still, have Martus’s soldiers do it. I want every corpse burned. Immediately! And if they have to make more corpses to do it . . . that’s fine. As long as they burn those too.” I shivered at memories I’d been trying to bury—like the Vermillion dead they weren’t buried deep enough.