The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) Read online

  VALLECITO, CALIFORNIA

  Published by Storehouse Press

  P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251

  Storehouse Press is the registered trademark of Chalcedon, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Lee Duigon

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’simagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, livingor dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in wholeor in part in any form.

  Book design by Kirk DouPonce (www.DogEaredDesign.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2013955276

  ISBN-13: 9781891375644

  Table of Contents

  1. Moving Day

  2. How Jack Went on a Journey

  3. Ysbott the Snake

  4. A Mission for Ellayne

  5. Jack’s Prayer

  6. The Superstitious Troopers

  7. To Tempt the King’s Guardians

  8. How Wytt Fought a Duel

  9. How Ysbott Earned a Reward

  10. The King in the Forest

  11. How Jack Was Offered a Crown

  12. The Assassin

  13. Councilor and Prester

  14. How the Zeph Were Quelled

  15. Ysbott’s Enterprise

  16. Heralds From Silvertown

  17. How Ellayne Received a Secret Message

  18. How Martis Entered Silvertown

  19. King Ryons’ Loyal Servants

  20. How Ellayne Wrote to Her Father

  21. How Ellayne Played Music for the Outlaws

  22. The White Doe

  23. At Rest in a Gully

  24. How the Army Set Out for Silvertown

  25. Toward Coronation Day

  26. The End of a Long Walk

  27. How Martis and the Baron Parleyed

  28. How Lord Orth Came to the Palace

  29. Guests and Prisoners

  30. How Fnaa Returned to the City

  31. A New First Prester

  32. Concerning the Crown

  33. Jack’s Climb

  34. Iolo in Command

  35. How Jod Learned the Truth

  36. Martis Has a Vistor

  37. How King Ryons Came to Silvertown

  38. How Jack Left the Palace

  39. How Jack Parted from Gallgoid

  40. The End of the Night

  41. Coronation Morning

  42. A Game with Poisoned Arrows

  43. The Battle of the Brickbats

  44. How the King Was Not Crowned

  45. Tidings from the City

  CHAPTER 1

  Moving Day

  If you’ve ever had to move, you know how hectic it can be; and that’s putting it mildly. It’s even worse when you don’t understand why you have to move. Some adult has decided it, and that’s that. Worst of all is when the reason given makes no sense.

  Enith’s grandmother wasn’t making sense. Just bundle everything up and get out, she said—as if you could fit everything that was important into the back of a cart and leave all your friends behind.

  “Act your age, girl. Stop pouting.”

  Enith looked up at Grammum, who was about to shoulder a bagful of clothing to take out to the cart.

  “I still don’t see why we have to do this,” Enith said.

  “I’ve told you a hundred times: because the Lord is going to destroy this city, and we don’t want to be here when He does.”

  Oh, yes, she’d heard it a hundred times, all right. Ever since they’d started holding assemblies as decreed by the new First Prester, at which nothing was to be preached but the Old Books, Grammum had been on and on about it—the Lord this, the Lord that. And then she took it into her head that the Lord was going to destroy the city.

  Enith didn’t believe that, not for a minute. Hadn’t the Lord made a great miracle to save Obann? Hadn’t He sent King Ryons riding on a great beast that was like a walking mountain and scattered to the four winds the Heathen armies of the Thunder King? Enith hadn’t seen that because she and all the other children on the block, young and old, had been herded down to Master Harfydd’s cellar. And he and Grammum and a few of the neighbors had stood guard with carving knives and cudgels, lest the Heathen should break in. But after it was safe and they all came out again, everyone in Obann was talking about the miracle. One of the first things Enith heard was a young soldier crying, “You should’ve seen it, Master Harfydd! An animal as big as your house—bigger! And there’s thousands and thousands of Heathen dead out there!”

  So the city of Obann was saved, even though some of the Heathen did get in somehow and had burned the Temple to the ground.

  “Why would God save the city, if He was only going to destroy it?” Enith argued. It was funny, she thought, but when the Temple was standing and she and Grammum were going to assembly every week, they never used to talk about religion.

  “Because this city hanged the prophets!” Grammum answered. Whenever she said that, or thought of it, her face got hard. She never liked to talk about it, but she’d witnessed one or two of those hangings.

  It was Grammum’s claim that God had spared the city for King Ryons’ sake—the boy king who came to them on the back of the beast. They said he was a special king, descended from King Ozias whose life story was told in the Scriptures. Enith didn’t believe that, but Grammum did.

  But King Ryons was no longer in the city; and his council of advisers had taken over the government and named themselves the Ruling Council—to which title, said Grammum, they had no right at all. Enith did not know how Grammum knew such things.

  “Get a move on, Enith. The cart’s waiting.”

  Just then Master Harfydd poked his bald head and round shoulders through the open doorway of their house.

  “So you’re really going, Nywed?” he said. He was sweet on Grammum. He’d marry her, if she gave him half a chance. He was a nice man, Enith thought, and a rich man with a fine, big house. But not the kind of man to set a woman’s heart ablaze, she thought.

  Grammum was still very good-looking for a woman of her age, Enith thought. Her rich, chestnut hair hadn’t yet gone grey, and her green eyes still sparkled—quite handsome, really. Everybody said Enith looked like her.

  “I wish you’d change your mind and stay,” said Master Harfydd. They called him “master” because he owned two dozen barges that transported goods and wares up and down the river, and nobody knew how many trading posts throughout the whole country of Obann. “The danger’s past.”

  “The king has flown the nest,” said Nywed, “and he won’t be coming back. That’s sign enough for me. As long as he was here, the city was safe.”

  “But a lot of people say the king is feebleminded,” Enith said.

  “Take that bundle out to the cart—now,” Grammum snapped.

  Master Harfydd stood aside so she could pass, and Enith tossed the bundle of clothes into the cart. The driver sat patiently, chewing on a long piece of grass. His two mules dozed in harness, idly flicking their tails.

  Enith was annoyed at the king. Why couldn’t he stay in Obann City where he belonged? Some said he’d gone to Durmurot, out in the west, practically next door to the sea. Others said he was in Lintum Forest, in the east. A few said he was dead—secretly made away with by his council, or fallen down a well or something because he was a ninny.

  But Queen Gurun was gone, too, and she was no ninny. She was the one person Enith admired most in all the world. You only had to
look at her to see what quality she was. Everyone wondered why she’d left and grumbled about the council’s silence on that subject. But if they’d done away with the king, Enith thought, they’d hardly be such fools as to leave the queen alive—notwithstanding that the whole city would rise against them if they harmed a hair on Gurun’s head.

  Grammum and Master Harfydd came out to the street together. They stopped by the cart and held each other’s hands.

  “Stay, Nywed. Please stay.”

  “Why don’t you come with us, Harfydd?”

  He smiled meekly. Grammum knew he couldn’t just up and leave his business. She wasn’t being fair to him, Enith thought.

  “I’ll write to you, once we get there,” Grammum said. Considering it was Master Harfydd who’d lent them the cart and the driver, and never asked a penny for it, he ought to get more of a reward than just a letter, Enith thought.

  “My travels sometimes take me up the river,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stop in and see you after you’re settled down.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  Grammum gave him a peck on the cheek and spryly scrambled up to her seat on the cart before he could say anything more. Enith allowed him to help her up to her seat.

  “Thank you, Master Harfydd,” she said.

  “Take good care of your grandmom, Enith—and of yourself, too.”

  The driver whistled and flicked his whip, and at a slow and steady pace consented to by the mules, they were off.

  Off, thought Enith, to a stupid nothing little town called Ninneburky, where nothing ever happened and she would die of boredom.

  While Enith and her grandmother were moving, the king’s council—minus the king and with no desire ever to see the king again—met behind closed and guarded doors in the chamber that used to belong to the High Council of the Oligarchs. The members of that council had all been killed in the war, except for Lord Chutt who ran away. Lord Ruffin, the governor-general, used to sit at the head of the exquisitely polished table. Now a man named Merffin Mord sat there. He did not call himself governor-general, but as the richest and most ambitious of the group, he acted as its leader. All six of them were held to be equal in authority, but if the truth be known, it was Merffin Mord whose ideas had gotten them into the palace in the first place.

  At the moment he was angrily glaring up and down the long table, with his five colleagues glaring back at him.

  “I have only misplaced the letter,” he was saying, “and I’m sure I’ll find it soon. But I can’t order my servants to look for it, can I? Better it stay lost, than one of them should find it!”

  “Maybe one of them has already found it,” said a thin, sour-faced, grey-bearded man named Aggo. You’d never guess him for a wine merchant, but that’s what he was. “You should have burned the letter, Merffin.”

  “That is a singularly unhelpful remark, my friend!”

  “Well, I don’t see how we can reply to the letter while it’s just floating around somewhere.”

  “Gentlemen, please!” spoke up a third councilor, a little bald man. “We’re all in the same boat, and arguing among ourselves will get us nowhere.”

  “Councilor Hendy, you never spoke a truer word,” Merffin said. “I’ll find the letter myself, never fear. In the meantime, we ought at least to be in agreement as to what our answer shall be—to accept the offer, or not to accept it.”

  “If we don’t accept, our days are numbered,” Aggo said.

  “But if we do, and anything goes wrong, we’re all as good as dead,” said a fourth councilor, Frandeval Forr. The youngest of the group, and the only fair-haired man among them, Frandeval was the richest moneylender in Obann, having inherited the business from his father. All of the other councilors owed him money. “And we still have no certain knowledge of what has become of the king. We can hardly leave that out of our reckoning!”

  Merffin Mord glared at everyone again. He was sure of the support of only two of them—Ilas, the Cloth King (as he liked to call himself), and Redegger, who controlled most of the vice and gambling in the city—and both of them were sitting there saying nothing, like a couple of shy schoolgirls. The loss of the letter had very badly shaken them.

  “We may as well adjourn the meeting,” Merffin said. “Maybe overnight I’ll find the letter—and some of us will find their nerve.”

  “It’s no use trying to bait me, Merffin,” Aggo said. “If you can find the letter, I’ll vote to accept. If you can’t, I’ll wash my hands of the whole business.”

  And one of these days, thought Merffin, even as he smiled at the man, I’ll wash my hands of you.

  The councilors would have been frantic had they known that, even as they spoke, someone was making copies of the letter.

  The Great Hall of the Oligarchs—they called it the Palace now, even with the king gone—was an enormous building. Only the Temple was bigger, but the Temple lay in ruins. In addition to its meeting halls, audience chambers, and conference rooms, the Palace included offices, kitchens, living quarters, stables, storerooms, workshops, a smithy, a wine cellar, and labyrinths of attics and cellars. The rulers of Obann had been building onto it for centuries. No one knew how many clerks, cooks, watchmen, grooms, maids, servants, washerwomen, and fetchers and carriers worked there. Some lived all their lives within its walls.

  Gallgoid the Spy, a servant of the king and for long an assassin and a poisoner in the service of the Temple, operated in the palace like a spider—silent, unnoticed, with a forgotten storeroom as his office and his home. His agents in the Palace served food, dusted bedchambers, mopped floors, acted as valets, and told him everything they saw and heard.

  One of the king’s council was his agent, too—a man loyal to King Ryons. Only Gallgoid knew which councilor it was. Thanks to this man, Gallgoid quickly came to hear of the letter and so arrange for it to be stolen from Merffin Mord’s own bedchamber: for Gallgoid had agents among the councilors’ own households.

  This was the letter he was copying, and this is what it said:

  Goryk Gillow, First Prester

  By the ordination of His Universal Majesty, King Thunder,

  Lord of the New Temple:

  To the High Council of Obann,

  & to His Lordship Merffin Mord—

  Greetings!

  My lords, His Universal Majesty inquires to know the purpose of the most irregular & unlawful election of the traitor, Orth, as First Prester of the Temple in Obann. My lords, how can such things be? For there is no Temple in Obann.

  In the late war between us, this Orth conspired with Lord Reesh, then First Prester, to betray your city to our army. They admitted some of our servants into the Temple by a secret passage, & so the Temple was burned with fire & destroyed.

  Which was clean against our wishes.

  We have erected to the God of Obann the New Temple at Kara Karram, so that it should be the place where all nations shall honor the God of Obann; & we have named our servant, Goryk Gillow, First Prester.

  If it be your intention to reject our Temple & our First Prester, well: let there be war between us, instead of peace.

  But if it be your desire to accept our friendship, then you must accept our First Prester & acknowledge the sole authority & primacy of the New Temple.

  We urge you to make your intentions clearly known, & that without delay.

  So speaks His Universal Majesty.

  Also, my lords, I regret to inform you that our punitive expedition to Lintum Forest had no success: & also that the villainous & lowborn Helki, the Outlaw, has found a boy whom he proclaims to be King Ryons. Of this we have sure intelligence by many who have fled Lintum Forest and taken refuge at Silvertown, under our protection.

  Beware this treason which is hatched in Lintum Forest.

  By Goryk Gillow, First Prester, etc.

  “Very skillfully played!” said Gallgoid under his breath. This Goryk Gillow had no Temple training, but he seemed to have a gift for the game of treason.

 
Copies of the letter would be sent to Helki and the king in Lintum Forest, to Prester Jod and Gurun in Durmurot, and to Preceptor Constan and First Prester Orth here in the city. Gallgoid would advise them to be quiet and do nothing until a plan of action could be laid. Besides, there was no telling how the people of the city might react. They liked the king, Gallgoid thought, but didn’t altogether believe in him as the king ordained for them by God and the true descendant of Ozias. They weren’t sure what they believed about him. And the loss of the Temple, for all the people of Obann, was a raw and angry wound that wouldn’t heal.

  Last of all, Gallgoid would arrange for the original letter to be returned to Merffin Mord’s bedchamber, where Mord would eventually discover it and never know it had ever left the room.

  “It’d be so much easier just to poison them all,” he said. Over the past few months he’d gotten into the habit of talking to himself. There was no one to overhear. “Only I can’t, of course.” That was because the little prophetess, Jandra, when she was leaving the city to return to Lintum Forest, had turned to him and said, “The Lord is with you, Gallgoid. Sin no more.” So he abandoned the thought of doing away with Merffin Mord in some unobtrusive manner. He hadn’t assassinated anyone since then.