“… wouldn’t want to be the seneschal,” murmurs one of the rankers.
Those words remind Lerial just how much more he is certain, the longer he is in Afrit, that he doesn’t want to be anyone or anything in the duchy. And yet every single day brings something that drags out your duty here.
Some fifty yards down the corridor toward the entry hall, Baniel turns into a narrower side hall and then descends the steps to the cellar level. Lerial continues to follow the assistant seneschal into a narrow hallway to a larger chamber. There, several women and an older man wait.
“Gather everyone you can find,” Baniel says in a voice that is firm but not overly loud.
Lerial eases against the wall beside the archway and waits almost a third of a glass as the servants’ hall fills.
Finally, Baniel steps forward and speaks. “I met with Lord Lerial. He is the second heir to the duchy of Cigoerne. He is an overcaptain in the Mirror Lancers and a great mage as well. He is the one who defeated the Heldyans and destroyed Merchanter Jhosef and his wizards. You all know how powerful Wizard Maastrik was. Lord Lerial’s orders are very simple. We are to remain and to carry on. No one is to leave the grounds. All of us will be punished if anything is damaged or missing.”
Baniel may not have known everything about what went on in the villa, Lerial observes, but the man knows more about Lerial himself than Lerial or the lancers had told him, and that suggests, if indirectly, that Jhosef had indeed been deeply involved in the events surrounding the Heldyan invasion.
“What if the armsmen take things?” asks a woman, older from her voice.
“You have not seen the Lord Lerial. He is not that old, but iron would bend sooner than him. His men will touch nothing.”
“There are Afritan Guards…”
“They have seen the overcaptain. They will likely touch nothing, either. If they remove anything, tell me. I will tell Lord Lerial.”
“What will happen after he leaves?”
“Duke Rhamuel will decide.”
“When a great Magi’i lord destroys Afritan merchanters…” says another voice, “everything we have known will change…”
Lerial certainly hopes so.
“We must leave the change to them,” declares Baniel. “Do what you always do, and do it well, and we will survive.”
Sometimes that is enough, reflects Lerial, and sometimes it’s not.
Other questions follow, but those deal with who will handle what duties, since some servitors fled with Seneschal Kourast before Lerial’s men sealed off the grounds. When it is clear that he will learn little more from listening and observing the servants with his order-senses, Lerial eases out of the lower chamber and makes his way back to the main level, where he drops the concealment.
By then, Strauxyn has gathered up those remaining merchanter guards who had not already been captured or fled. Although Lerial spends more than a glass questioning the five survivors, only one had accompanied the group that had attacked the Streamside and he cannot recall more than waiting outside the inn and then conveying the dead to the swamp and Mykel and Oestyn back to Jhosef’s villa.
In the end, Lerial and his men take over one wing of the villa and he sleeps in a modest guest room, if uneasily.
LIII
Although Maesoryk’s villa is not located on Lake Jhulyn, the lakes are not that far apart, and the ride north to Lake Leomyn takes slightly more than four glasses. With Lerial’s forces is an additional wagon, containing Mykel’s body, packed as much as possible in salt. Lerial leaves the arrangements for Jhosef and Oestyn to the villa staff, while all the guards who died at Jhosef’s villa are buried in a mass grave on the grounds.
Just after the first glass of the afternoon Norstaan points along the shore of the lake. “You see the large buff-colored building? That’s Merchanter Maesoryk’s villa.”
“Have you been there before?”
“Only once. I’ve never seen the inside. The arms-commander … the duke, I mean, said that it was impressive without being excessively lavish.”
“Unlike Jhosef’s villa, you mean.”