‘You may tell the High Cardinal he is not to send troops to the Palace again,’ Vesna called after them. ‘If he wants to debate religious authority with me he can come alone.’
He looked up; the archers were staring out over the battlements, the same look of horror on their faces as the fleeing penitents.
‘What do you lot think you’re waiting for?’ he called. ‘Get that damn gate open before your commander arrives or you’ll wish it was a bloody prince of daemons waiting down here!’
CHAPTER 16
Count Vesna rode out from the tunnel beneath the Palace Barbican and hesitated. Nothing had changed except for the thinned lines of recruits assembled to welcome the Ghosts home, but, quite unbidden, his mind cast back to the day he first arrived here. The sights and smells had changed little in the intervening decades. While this return was a somewhat muted affair, Vesna felt his heart ache as the clatter and clamour of that day filled his ears, swamping his senses as completely as they had a young provincial noble on his first trip to Tirah Palace.
Not long past his seventeenth birthday and newly raised to his title, it had been a wary and angry youth who’d ridden into that massive hemmed space and looked around in wonder. Sotonay Shaberale had been at his side: a whiskered veteran of sixty summers who’d spent much of the previous two years teaching Vesna sword-craft. To Vesna’s surprise, they had barely arrived when a bellow echoed out over the training ground.
All eyes had turned, first to the hulking figure of Swordmaster Herotay as he roared ‘Shab!’ followed by a stream of inventive, anatomically impossible obscenities.
The Swordmaster had run from the crowd of nervous youths he’d been inspecting — hopeful farm-boys and proud young nobles alike — who watched with alarm as Herotay dragged Vesna’s mentor one-handed from his saddle and enveloped him in a bearhug that made the older man gasp.
‘What have you brought me then, you whoring old bastard? How long are you staying?’ Herotay had demanded, casting his appraising eye over Vesna. Vesna had slid from his saddle and offered the Swordmaster an awkward bow while Shab battered the man away.
‘Just long enough to get you drunk and yer wife in bed,’ Shab said with a levity Vesna had never heard before. ‘I made the journey to show the faith I got in this boy, but he don’t need me here to hold his hand.’
‘All the way from Anvee? Death’s bony cock, boy, you must be good!’
Vesna hadn’t known how to respond to that; Shab had made it clear this wasn’t the place for pride. The veteran had told only part of the truth in any case: the death of Vesna’s father had hit him harder than he then realised, and Shab had come along as much to keep him out of trouble as to recommend his pupil.
‘I realise the honour Master Shab does me,’ he had stuttered, ‘and I will endeavour to live up to it.’
Herotay had laughed. ‘Don’t you worry yourself about his honour, boy. The man’s been sniffing around my wife like a horny ferret for thirty years now; there ain’t much honour for him in my eyes. Mind you, you’re prettier than Shab ever was, so maybe you’ll do him proud there too.’
‘How proud would you be now, Shab?’ Vesna wondered aloud as he watched the Ghosts stream in, some to be reunited; all to share the grief of others. ‘I doubt you expected this when you told Herotay I was destined for great things.’
For the hundredth time that week he rubbed the fingers of his left hand together, wincing at the numbed sensation — it was neither skin nor armour but something other. He could not inspect the join between the two; that was one thing he would have to trust Tila to do for him. The only visible join was at his shoulder where the pauldron sat; his cuirass had been no problem to remove, but everything from the pauldron to his fingertips was fused to his skin: from the mail that covered his inner arm and armpit to the raised ridge of the pauldron that deflected blows from his neck, it was all a part of him. It was maybe not flesh, but the loss of any piece would hurt like a bastard to remove, even the lion-embossed plate that protected the elbow joint.
Lost in his thoughts, Vesna was an island the wary mortals skirted as they