King Pinch Read online

  It wasn’t until he was washed, shaved, trimmed, and dressed that a runner arrived from Lord Cleedis with orders to attend in the west hall. The timing was no accident, Pinch knew. No doubt the servants assigned him reported directly to Cleedis’s ear. The rogue had no illusions about the degree of freedom and trust the Lord Chamberlain was allowing him.

  Sauntering through the halls, the rogue took his time. No doubt everyone expected his appearance with whatever eager maliciousness they possessed. Certainly his dear, dear cousins were hardly reformed; kindness, love, and generosity were not survival skills in Manferic’s court. The rogue guessed that things were only worse now; while he was alive, the fear of Manferic had always been a great restraint.

  So Pinch ambled through the halls, refreshing his memory for the layout of the palace, appraising old treasures he once ignored, and admiring and appraising pieces new to him. It was almost fun, looking at his old life through the eyes of another. Portraits of the royal line, with their arrogance and superiority, were of less interest for him now than the frames that held them. Vases he rated by what a broker would pay, furniture by the amount of gilt upon it. Always there was the question of how to get it out of Ankhapur, where to find the right broker.

  The tip-tap of feet across the age-polished marble broke Pinch’s reverie. “Master Janol, the court awaits you in the dining hall,” said the prim-faced Master of the Table, a post identified by his uniform.

  Let them simmer in their pots. Without changing his comfortable pace, Pinch nodded that he would be coming. He was not about to be dictated to by a petty court functionary—or by those who sent him. He would arrive late because he chose to.

  Then the stone corridors echoed with a crackling chuckle as Pinch laughed at his own conceit. There was no choice for him. He would be late because they all expected him to be late. Anything else and the royal ward Janol would not be the prodigal scoundrel they all envisioned—rebellious, unrepentant, and unsubtle. Let them imagine him how they wanted; he’d play the part—for now.

  By the time he pushed open the ridiculously tall doors and strode into the magically lit dining hall, the diners had dispensed with acceptable gossip and were now trapped listening to the Lord Chamberlain describe his journey. The old chamberlain looked up as the doors creaked open and, barely breaking his tale, nodded for Pinch to come to the center of the great curved table and present himself to the royal heirs.

  The old rogue, a man of steady balance on a rooftop, icy nerve in a knife fight, and sure wit to puzzle out a magical ward, felt the thick, slow-motion dread of stage fright. It was a decade and more since he’d last been in such company, and suddenly he was worried about forgetting all the subtle niceties and nuances of courtly etiquette. It’s not that he minded insulting some portentous ass, it’s just that doing so accidentally took all the fun out of it.

  Consequently, to hide the feeling of self-conscious care, Pinch studied those at the table as hard as they studied him. Passing the outer wing, the rogue gave only cursory interest to faces that confronted him, concentrating on guessing rank and position by their dress and badges. These were the minor lords of the court, those who wanted to be players in the intrigues but were only being used by the masters. For the most part these factotums and their ornaments were dull as cattle, unaware of who he was and content with their petty positions and their ordained superiority over the common masses. They worried over who sat next to whom, dripped grease into their ruffed collars, and catted about whose looks had been enhanced tonight by some illusionist’s hand.

  Still, here and there, a pair of bold eyes met Pinch’s or a snide comment was whispered to a neighbor as he passed. Pinch took special note of these: the forthright showed some hopes of cunning or fire, the gossips were clued enough to have heard already who he was. Both might be valuable or dangerous in times to come.

  Past these room-stuffers, invited mostly to fill the table, was the second tier, and now Pinch’s interest became keen. Here the rogue noted faces and made brief nods to ladies and lords he remembered. Every lord and lady sitting here was a prince’s ally. Pinch recognized the proud Earl of Arunrock, commander of the navy, by the out-of-fashion goatee he still kept trimmed to a point. Farther along, the rogue almost gave a start to see the merchant Zefferellin, who used to broker loot from an inn near the market. Judging from his robes of severe opulence, business must have been good enough to buy respectability. Next there was a lady he didn’t know but definitely wanted to. She had a refined elegance that suggested she could break the spirit of the purest man. Finally, there was the Hierarch Juricale, a woodcutter-sized man whose black eyes glowered at people over his long bent nose and spreading white beard. He was a man whose word could inspire the faithful to kill for his cause. Even at the table he sat aloof, apart from all the others as if he alone were above all this. It was a lie, Pinch knew. There was no man more directly involved in the court’s intrigues than the Red Priest.

  These were the hands that held the knives of the princes and the Lord Chamberlain. There was nothing to distinguish them in dress from the pawns of the lower tier—who believed that clothes determined rank through the strange alchemy of fashion—but this inner tier knew where the true power lay. They had chosen their sides. Which wing, which side, how close to the center of table, all these were clues waiting to be deciphered.

  At last the regulator reached the center, where he turned to the table and casually bowed. Along the opposite side of the curving main table sat the princes four, their backs safely to stone walls. Interspersed between them were the rest of the family: Duke Tomas and Lady Grain. At the very center, in the king’s normal seat, sat Cleedis, Lord Chamberlain and Regent of the Assumption.

  Pinch waited to be recognized, but now it was their turn to make him wait. Cleedis continued with his story.

  Unlike the others, Bors the idiot prince, was the only one who seemed to show interest. He was still an idiot, that was clear. Flabby faced and jaundiced, he dumbly mouthed Cleedis’s words, barely understanding most of it. His napkin, tied under his chin, was awash in soup spill and crumbs, and it seemed to take most of the First Prince’s effort to get his spoon to his lips. Every once in a while, he would giggle softly about something that amused only him.

  Next to Bors, and looking none to happy for the seat, was Duke Tomas. Had he been two seats over, Pinch would have mistaken the duke for Manferic, his late brother, even though the duke was gleamingly bald where the late king had had a full head of hair.

  “Dear coz, the years have made you forget your manners.” The jab brought Pinch back to the front and center, and he bowed quickly before even looking to see who had stung him. It didn’t matter; even after fifteen years it was impossible not to recognize the voice, a baritone of biting silk ripe with arrogance.

  “Quite true, Prince Vargo. Otherwise I would have remembered your impatience, too.”

  Across the table glowered a muscular man, Vargo, second son of Manferic. He was several years Pinch’s younger, although his face was hard and sharpened to a point by his impeccably trimmed Vandyke. His casually tossed blond hair offset the red of his beard, and he easily could have been a dashing cavalier if it weren’t for the un-satiated savagery that twisted even his brightest smile.

  “I present myself, Lord Chamberlain,” Pinch-now-Janol continued before his adversary could recover from the rogue’s bon mot. “I am Master Janol, royal ward of the late King Manferic.”

  A susurration of muted surprise trickled from the outer wings, as those guests previously clueless of Pinch’s identity grasped the import of his arrival.

  “I … beseech … your permission to join you at table as was the courtesy my late guardian extended to me.” This part of the ritualistic greeting came hardest for the regulator. It was galling to go through the show of asking the favor after the old man had forced him here in the first place. Hiding a grimace, the prodigal courtier bowed once again, this time with more flamboyance. The fear that threatened to pa
ralyze him was fading as the familiarity with the air around him grew.

  Lord Cleedis raised a glass of amber wine as if this were the first time he had seen Pinch in years. The gold elixir sparkled in the light from the mullioned windows that lined the base of the dome above.

  It was all a conceit. Everyone at the table knew the old man had gone to fetch the errant ward, though the thief couldn’t imagine why the chamberlain had risked absence from the court for so long. Gods knew what the princes had done—or might have done—in the regent’s absence.

  “Truly we are pleased to see our long-absent cousin. I, who was your guardian’s servant, will not dishonor his name by sending you from this hall. Prepare a place for Master Janol where he can sit with honor.”

  In an instant the servants silently swooped on the diners, producing a chair, linens, goblet, and trencher. It had all been prearranged, of course, so there was no need for direction as they uprooted the foremost noble of the second tier and laid a place for the rogue. This displacement triggered a chain reaction of shifting and squeezing as each noble vainly refused to relinquish his position in the chain of importance. At the very end of the semicircular table, the lowest courtier of the lot found himself dangling off the end, trencher perched on his knees.

  Pinch squeezed himself into place between Prince Marac and a glistening courtier simmering at the insult of being supplanted by a mendicant relative. The man sipped his wine through clenched teeth and eyed Pinch in way that was reminiscent of the lizards he used catch. Pinch considered being friendly, but the man was a reptile and hardly worth the effort. Instead the rogue ignored him, because it made Pinch’s presence all the more stinging and that made Pinch happy.

  “Prince Marac …” The rogue’s cup raised in a genial toast.

  Marac, youngest of Manferic’s sons and the one Pinch liked the best of the slippery lot—because the youth had been easy to intimidate—eyed Pinch the way one neighbor eyes the other when his best hound has disappeared. He tried to look for the evidence of a bloody knife while trying not to seem like he was looking.

  Marac was no longer the ten-year-old youth that Pinch remembered. That one had been replaced by a poor imitation of Prince Vargo. His face was fuller and rounder than sharp-cheeked Vargo, and his beard had the thin, brushed softness of youth, but already the eyes were hidden barbs. His straw-blond hair was longer than his brother’s and straight where the other’s was tangled. With all these differences, there was still a foundation that was Manferic’s bloodline. Perhaps the two weren’t Manferic progeny, but unfinished duplicates the wizard-king had fashioned in some long-forgotten laboratory, and their lives from childhood to death were one vast experiment. It would be so like the way he raised me, just to see what he could build, Pinch thought.

  Prince Marac acknowledged the toast, and the glow of his face melted into a lipless smile. “Your unexpected return is a pleasure, cousin Janol.”

  That was all lies, from front to end.

  The prince sipped at his scented wine while the servants dished out the next course, a sweetly stewed, steaming joint of some meat beyond the rogue’s ken.

  “An excellent cut, isn’t it, Your Highness?” suggested the lizard-eyed noble at Pinch’s other hand. The man was determined not to be left out of the conversation.

  “Quite good hunting on your part, Lord Chalruch.”

  As if the words were a signal, the table that had been so quiet while Pinch sat himself roiled into gossip and banter once more.

  “Thank you, milord. I bagged him in a perfect—”

  “So cousin, how fares it you’ve come back here? How long has it been?”

  “I’ve been abroad on fifteen years, Prince Marac.”

  “Not long enough,” Vargo suggested from the other side of the pearly Lady Grain.

  She laid a hand on his. “Vargo, you’re being unkind.”

  “And what possessed you to return now?”

  “—shot at a range of a good hundred rods—” the bore continued to a young lady on the left, who being reduced to helplessness by the seating struggled to feign interest.

  “Indeed, what?” spoke a new voice from the other side of the Lord Chamberlain. Pinch had to lean out to get a clear look at his interrogator. It was Throdus, the sharpest thinker of the princes. In looks he was coal to his brothers’ bonfires: dark hair, smoke-filled eyes, lean, and pale—as unlike Manferic as the other two were like him. Only the icy rigor of his manner showed the true family line.

  “I brought him back,” Cleedis intervened while chewing on a piece of bread. “It was your father’s request, one of his last. He wanted his ward reunited with the rest of the family. Toward the end, he greatly regretted certain events of the past. It was for his memory that I tracked down and brought back Master Janol.”

  “Father’s mind went soft,” Vargo stage-whispered to Lady Grain.

  “And now Cleedis’s, too. It must be contagious,” added Marac.

  “—clean through the slug’s heart.” The bore prattled on, apparently determined to slay his trapped audience as surely as he had the beast. Tired of the man’s determination to plow blindly onward, Pinch deliberately jerked away from Marac with staged indignation.

  “They wrong you, Cleedis!” At the same time, the rogue banged his elbow against the bore’s arm just as the other was about to sip his wine. The yellow liquid splashed all over the man, soaking his white silken doublet an off-color stain.

  “Sir, you’ve bumped me!” he blurted out, seizing Pinch by the arm.

  Pinch gave the lord a cursory scan. “A terrible accident, indeed,” he said with a fraudulent sympathy. “If I were you, I’d go change or people will think I didn’t have time to go out back and pluck a rose.”

  “Pluck a …?” The indignant bore stopped when he followed Pinch’s gaze to the honey-hued stain that spread over his hose. His face reddened. “Perhaps that’s sound,” he said as he slid away, holding his napkin strategically in place. “But you’ll hear from me again, sir, and soon I promise!” With that dreadful parting threat, the man hurried away.

  “I’m sure I will, though any time is bound to be too soon.”

  A sigh of relief rose from those who’d been audience to the man’s court.

  “I must say cousin Janol has at least livened conversation at the table,” the Lady Grain smirked from her seat. “These dinners were threatening to poison us with dullness.” She held up her goblet to be filled from the fresh bottle the servant was pouring down the line.

  “Better poisoned words than poisoned wine,” Pinch suggested. He raised a fresh glass in toast. Everyone automatically lifted their glasses, only to hold them just at their lips, suddenly alarmed by the rogue’s hint. Each watched for someone else to take the first sip.

  “Come, drink!” urged Pinch once again raising his glass high, cheerfully stinging the group like a sandfly. “Drink to … oh, the memory of King Manferic! A toast to the late King Manferic!” he offered loudly so that no one could ignore it.

  “To Manferic!” echoed the room. Glasses tipped back as the lesser tiers drained away their cups, while at the main table, indecision still paralyzed the lords. Refusing the toast meant a loss of face, drinking required trust. For a long moment, nobody did either.

  Finally, disgusted or courageous, Vargo gulped down his portion. As he thumped his goblet down on the table, there was a long swallow from the others as they followed suit. It was only when they had all set their goblets down that they noticed Pinch had not touched his.

  The rogue smirked a know-everything smile. “No taste for the bub, I guess.”

  “We were wondering why Father had you here,” said Throdus from down the line, “and now we know. You are dear Father’s last cruel jest. This way he can mock us even from beyond the grave.”

  “Enough of this!” Marac blurted with all the grace of a master-of-drill. “Cleedis, when do we hold the ceremony of the Knife and Cup? Things have gone long enough without a true king.”


  “Hear, hear!” chimed in Throdus. “You’ve been stalling four months now, first saying one thing and then another. I say we have the Hierarch declare the date today.”

  “There should not be haste,” Vargo countered, sounding uncharacteristically statesmanlike.

  The Second Prince was stalling, Pinch realized, until he could get other plans realized. That was important knowledge, since it meant the Second Prince was a man to be watched.

  “Prince Vargo speaks wisely,” defended Cleedis. “Rushing the ceremony will bring evil luck to the whole kingdom. The Hierarch has chosen the date—the first day of the Money Festival. He says that is the best day to guarantee profit and prosperity for the new reign.

  More time was not a bad idea by Pinch either, since he wasn’t even sure of his own part here. Cleedis had dropped enough hints for the rogue to know his job involved those instruments of the succession. Whatever he was to do, after the ceremony would be too late. Thus it was the rogue weighed in, “Fools spend a copper and hurry themselves to the gaol, while sages spend an ingot and buy the judges.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” sneered Marac.

  In his years abroad, Pinch had faced witnesses in a score of trials and, as was the obvious testament of his being here, had yet to feel the noose. “Patience for fools.”

  At that, Marac abandoned the table with a snarl. “If that’s the decision, then I see no cause to remain here!”

  “Nor I,” calmly added Throdus. He stepped away from the table. To Vargo he added, “You have a plan and I will find it out.”

  The creaking thump of the great doors marked the pair’s departure. After they were gone, Vargo, too, took his leave. As he left, he laid a hand on Pinch’s shoulder and whispered a word in his ear.

  “I don’t know what your game is, dear coz, whether you’re sided with Cleedis or another, or whether you’re just a fool to come back here. But remember this: Cross me and you’ll cross no one else in Ankhapur.”