“We can put down the Great Wolf another day.” Orso paused a moment, frowning. “There was no trouble from the Breakers in Keln?”
Rucksted scratched at his beard. “Not a whisper. If there are Breakers down there, they were quiet as mice while my men were in the city.”
“We should take no chances,” said Pike. “Inquisitor Teufel and I will set out for Valbeck this afternoon. Ensure that the city is… pure.”
That word might have given Orso a cold shiver once, but perhaps the battle had washed away all his father’s good-natured indecision and exposed a flinty core of his mother’s cold-blooded scorn. The Union had to be brought together now. Whatever it took.
“Very good.” He drew his fur-trimmed cloak tight about his shoulders against the chilly autumn breeze and watched the corpse-gatherers at their work.
The door squealed open to reveal a dim chamber, walls glistening with damp, cut in half by rust-speckled gratings. Beyond, the wretched occupants of cells stuffed to bursting squinted into the light, shrank into the shadows, pressed themselves against the bars.
“Former members of the Open Council,” said the Arch Lector, with perhaps the slightest hint of satisfaction in his voice, if not his face. “Awaiting the king’s justice.”
Here they were, then. Some of the proud peacocks responsible for this epic disaster. There was little pride on display now. One listless young man had a bloody bandage wrapped around one eye. Another had hands over his face, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. The extravagant uniforms were torn and tattered, gold braid made muddy strings, glittering insignia of legions that no longer existed turned to so much trash.
“I must apologise for these quarters,” said Orso, stepping through the doorway and wrinkling his nose at the stink. “I know they are not quite what you are used to.”
“This is all a misunderstanding, Your Majesty!” one young lordling spluttered, face pressed so hard against the bars they left livid marks in the flesh to either side. “All a terrible misunderstanding!”
“Shut up,” snarled one of the guards, bashing the bars with a stick and making him recoil.
Orso had hoped to feel some satisfaction at the sight of his sneering adversaries from the benches of the Open Council ruined. But he felt mostly hollow, irritable and slightly disappointed that he felt nothing more. As if all meaningful emotion for the year had been used up during the battle in one profligate splurge.
“Most of those lords who rebelled are dead or captured.” Pike’s burned lip wrinkled. “Lord Isher escaped, but we will hunt him down, along with all the rest.” He gestured towards a fat man whose blond hair stuck out at all angles, his uniform so ripped it was scarcely decent, large patches of scratched and hairy skin showing. “Lord Barezin was found tangled in a briar patch. He fell from his horse while trying to flee.”
Even having heard the name, Orso could scarcely recognise the man. Barezin drew himself up with the most dignity a man stripped of all dignity could muster. “Your Majesty, I was hoping I might discuss with you—”
Orso had no stomach for his excuses, still less his bargaining. “I think everything of importance was said yesterday, on the field.”
Lady Wetterlant glared from behind the bars of the cell next door. There was an angry graze up one side of her face, but she did no pleading. “You may have won,” she snapped, “but I have no regrets!”
Orso gave a weary shrug. “Who cares?” he said.
“Your Majesty.” Pike leaned close to murmur. “I suggest they all be hanged as soon as is practicable.”
Hell, Orso hated hangings. But making the things you hate come to pass seemed to be the main duty of a king.
“See it done.” He shook his head. “What a bloody waste.”
It had been a morning of ugly shocks, but the sight of Leo dan Brock was somehow the worst of all.
A sheet was drawn up to his waist, but from its shape it was awfully clear that the surgeons had taken his left leg off above the knee. His left arm hardly looked better, wrapped in bandages to the shoulder, the dangling fingers swollen up like purple sausages. His chest, and his face, and his right arm were speckled with a hundred little nicks and scabs, stained with blue bruises. His mouth was bloated on one side, the gap of missing teeth showing through his twisted lip. He looked to have aged twenty years. All that indestructible bravado smashed out to leave him a shrivelled husk.
Orso’s great rival, in more ways than one, lying hopeless and humbled at his mercy. It should have been a proud moment. But all Orso felt was sadness. To see a man who’d been so enviably handsome, so ruined. To see a man so representative of the warrior’s virtues, so crushed. To see a man who’d stood so tall no room had seemed big enough, brought so horribly low.
He had been a hero to many. The Young Lion!
By the Fates, look at him now.
“Your Majesty,” he croaked out, in evident agony, his left arm useless as he tried to wriggle up his pillow to a more seemly position. As if any position was seemly for a man who had just lost half his limbs in one of the most infamous defeats in Union history.
“Your Grace.” The title was probably inappropriate now, but Orso hardly knew what else to say. He glanced up at Gorst, looming watchfully by the door. “You can leave us, Colonel.”
“Your Majesty?”
“What will he do?” snapped Orso. “Hop from his bed and bite me to death?”
Gorst lowered his eyes and trudged from the room, pulling the door shut. When Orso turned back, Brock had a pained grimace on his face.
“Don’t you dare take exception to my fucking tone!” snapped Orso. “Among all this suffering, you’re one of the few who can truly say they brought it on themselves.”
Brock looked down, and plucked weakly at the sheet beside the stump of his leg, and said nothing.
Orso slumped into the one hard chair in the narrow room. “Why the hell did you do it? You had everything. Wealth and status and admiration. Even your bloody enemies liked you! Do you really believe your cronies would have done so much better a job than mine?”
Brock opened his mouth. Then he gave a wincing shrug, and a grunt of pain, and his shoulders sagged. “Does it matter now?”
There was a silence, then Orso slumped even lower. “Very little.”
“My wife…”
Orso felt an ugly spasm through his face. The mere thought of Savine’s name was still painful. A splinter he could never work free. “Missing,” he growled. “But Arch Lector Pike has men searching for her. She will not get far.”
“She had no part in this—”
Orso barked out a joyless laugh. “Please. As if she ever went into anything without her eyes wide open. I’ve no doubt she’s every bit as guilty as you are, if not more so. She doesn’t even have youth, stupidity and a massively bloated sense of her own importance as excuses.”
Cruelty to a man so utterly broken in body and spirit did not help Orso in the least. It just made him feel cruel. He could be generous in victory, couldn’t he? He had won, hadn’t he?
So why did he feel like he lost?
“My friends…” croaked out Brock. His eyes looked a little wet. But perhaps that was from the agony.