David Tallerman - Prince Thief

Now that I was here, however, one obvious question that I’d somehow hitherto ignored made itself inescapable: what was I actually looking for? Did princes keep gold and jewels loose in their chambers? Would Panchetto have even possessed coin when he hardly left the palace, never wanted for anything money could buy? Having spent so little time with royalty, I found it impossible to say — but I had my doubts.

I’d made it this far, though, and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving empty handed. I pushed through a silken hanging, into a room dominated by a bed fit for a small household, curtained with fine cloth of interlacing crimson and blue. Bed aside, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture in there, so I pressed on, through another hanging into a slightly smaller room, where a bath as large as a good-sized cottage was sunk into the floor.

I was about to turn back when something caught my eye: a box set with polished bronze and lapis lazuli perched on one edge of the oceanic bath. On impulse, I scurried over, drew back the lid — and almost keeled over in my delight. It wasn’t the oils and perfumes within that had set my head spinning, expensive though they no doubt were. No, it was the bottles that contained them: the flasks of cut crystal, with their jewel-encrusted stoppers of gold and silver. Melted down, the gold alone would keep me comfortable for a year.

I unslung my pack, loosed the straps and began to fill it. I went carefully at first, but soon realised it was wasted effort. Like everything else, the flasks had been designed with the clumsy Panchetto in mind; I could probably have flung them at the wall without them breaking. Instead, I crammed them in by the handful, heedless of how they clinked and rattled.

Too late did it occur to me that breaking my prizes was the least of my worries.

No, it was the noise I was making I should have been paying attention to. It was a mistake unworthy of a seasoned thief — and all the more so because it took a hand clamping my shoulder to make me realise it.

“Whoever you are,” a leaden voice declaimed, “you sure as hells aren’t Prince Panchetto.”

My mistake had been assuming there would only be one guard watching Panchetto’s chambers.

Or else it had been not keeping an eye out; or perhaps breaking into the palace in the first place; or maybe just ever returning to Altapasaeda. The more I thought about it, the harder it became to think of some point that I could definitively say wasn’t a mistake to work forward from.

In the meantime, the vice-like grip on my shoulder was doing unpleasant things to the circulation in my arm. I could already feel my fingers starting to go numb. “If you can just give me a minute to explain…”

He released my shoulder abruptly. Whatever relief I felt vanished the instant I realised it was only to clasp my wrist and wrap my arm efficiently — not to mention, excruciatingly — behind my back.

“Aaaowww,” I wailed, “there’s no need to-

Another twist, very slight and utterly agonising, was enough to make me shut up.

“You can tell it downstairs,” he said. My guard, whose face I still hadn’t seen, had perfectly mastered the forced boredom of the professional law enforcer. We might have been discussing the weather on a particularly dull day for all the interest in his voice.

Still, his professionalism couldn’t be faulted. He had me on my feet in a moment, and moving straight after, all achieved with only the subtlest manipulation of my pinned arm. I was helpless as a newborn kitten in a snake pit. My choices extended to doing precisely what he wanted or having my shoulder dislodged from its socket.

He led me at a steady march, taking a different route to the one I’d arrived by. I could hardly see where we were going for the tears stinging my eyes, but the passages looked more or less like the ones I’d navigated on the way in. The same could be said for the stairwell he manoeuvred me into and the descending levels he steered me down.

Without its prince and the bustle that had gone with his residency, the palace was sunk in a silence that worked wonderfully to channel any sound. By the second flight I could clearly make out voices, drifting from some distant other wing. One of them I felt sure belonged to Alvantes, and I could make out enough of his interlocutor’s replies to realise their voice was familiar as well, unlikely as that seemed.

On the ground floor, the landscape changed: here was the region intended for eyes other than the palace’s regular inhabitants, and the decor became suitably more grand and gaudy. My guard led me along wide passages and on through the sculpted gardens that dominated the interior yard, thoughtfully choosing a path where rich-scented flowers climbed around great edifices of cane.

By the time we drew near the far side, the conversation ahead was growing discernible. The first sentence I heard a part of distinctly was Alvantes’s, “…an amicable solution. Without shedding of blood.”

“I think that point is past,” replied the second voice.

“And food? Fresh water? Supplies of medicine?”

“Oh, yes. We have all of those. Enough for a very long time.”

Alvantes’s next comment was muted, and I missed it. The reply, however, was perfectly clear. “So you see? You have nothing at all to bargain with.”

It was the note of contempt that did it, with its particular undercurrent of arrogance. Of course I knew that voice. Hadn’t I spent days in its owner’s company? Commander Ludovoco, of the Crown Guard: the man who’d escorted Alvantes and I to Pasaeda, only to arrest us on its doorstep; the man I’d last seen delivering the King’s declaration of war and plunging Altapasaeda into disarray. I’d seen enough of Ludovoco to know that he was a conniving bastard, a political thug with his own distorted agenda and scant regard for the wellbeing of others.

I’d given no thought, though, to where he’d disappeared to after dropping his wasp’s nest into our laps. It should have been obvious. Where else than here, where he could work best to be a thorn in the side of the Altapasaedan defence? Alvantes had come here to reason with the Palace Guard, to try to persuade them to stand down now that Mounteban was no longer a threat — and perhaps it might have worked, had they not known that relief was mere days away.

All of which meant that Alvantes had just placed his life in his enemy’s hands. Under the circumstances, I doubted he was going to be pleased to see me.

There was a curtained aperture ahead and my guard shoved me hard into it, without quite releasing my arm, so that for a moment I was afraid I’d get tangled in its thick folds. Then I was through, and gawping at a large room that opened far above to the sky. It was a sort of patio, with a sunken area in the middle meant for players or musicians perhaps, and around the outside, seats, tables and decorated alcoves.

On the outer tier stood Ludovoco, along with twenty or so men from the Palace Guard. Half a dozen of them bore crossbows, which they held levelled at the occupants of the lower level — those being Alvantes and five of his city guardsmen. Beside Ludovoco was a man I distantly recognised from my time living in Altapasaeda, someone I knew only through reputation and the occasional public glimpse: Commander Ondeges, head of the Palace Guard. He was older than Ludovoco, his black hair flecked thickly with grey. Other than that, I could tell little about him; he had one of those chiselled, purposefully expressionless faces that I was starting to consider a prerequisite for dangerous positions of authority.

“Commander.” My guard addressed not Ondeges but Ludovoco, which I found surprising. He sounded not only more alert than he had upstairs but conspicuously nervous. “I found this in his highness’s chambers, sir.”