David Tallerman - Prince Thief

As meetings to decide the fate of a city went, this one was looking a lot like the prelude to a riot.

Of the gathered audience, only a few were paying attention to the stage where I’d somehow found myself; the rest were turned to bawl at a neighbour, or to spew invectives at the rows behind them. Half a dozen self-contained arguments had broken out along the length and breadth of the room, any of which might explode into violence at the slightest provocation.

Then again, perhaps it was all that could be expected of a seating plan that placed bankers besides extortionists, veteran warriors between crime bosses and cloth magnates.

“Settle down!” bellowed Alvantes from the front of the stage. He was gripping the lectern with the whitened knuckles of his one hand, while trying to keep the stump of his recently injured other arm from view.

I doubted it was improving Alvantes’s mood that the only venue he’d been able to find for this meeting was the hall Castilio Mounteban had so recently used for the same purpose: Mounteban, the self-same scheming crook that Alvantes had fought to roust from power hardly a day before; the man who had somehow united the disparate factions before us, had then held them together with little more than threats and promises; Mounteban who, in short, was a hundred times better at this sort of thing than Alvantes himself.

“We have to at least discuss the possibility of surrender,” Alvantes cried — obviously not feeling his audience’s mood was quite volatile enough already. “We know the King is on his way. We know he intends to end the Castoval’s independence, and by force if necessary. If we fight and lose, we’ll be crushed. If we negotiate, we might still avoid the worst reprisals.”

He hadn’t finished the sentence before a dozen of those listening were on their feet, howling over each other to see who could make himself heard first.

“Avoid reprisals? Perhaps for yourself, Guard-Captain.” From his thick accent, not to mention his knotted hair and fur-trimmed cloak, it was easy to recognise the speaker as a survivor of the warlord Moaradrid’s recent invasion; one of those who’d chosen to back Mounteban rather than attempt the trek back to his distant northern home. He had a point, too. Given that Mounteban had plotted against the King and that Moaradrid’s crimes included the murder of his son, Prince Panchetto, it was hard to imagine his highness looking favourably on either allegiance.

If he thought Alvantes would be spared, though, the northerner’s grasp on recent events was shaky at best. Given that the King had already tried to execute him once, given that he’d had his father murdered in the street for aiding our escape from the royal dungeons, it was a safe bet that Alvantes’s name placed highly on our lunatic monarch’s “to kill slowly” list.

In the meantime, the racket was only getting louder. From beside Alvantes, Marina Estrada cried out, “Please, this isn’t helping anyone.”

Estrada might have been running a town until recently, not to mention orchestrating the resistance effort against Moaradrid and helping Alvantes to liberate this very city — but just now, she might as well have been trying to put out a forest fire with a thimbleful of water.

Her words were swept away like spilled milk in a rainstorm, and even the fierce northerner’s bark was already being drowned out. “You think you got problems?” roared a huge man with scar-latticed skin and a scruff of shorn hair. “If the King don’t do for us, the Boar’ll have our necks on the block before the day’s done.”

If his appearance hadn’t already given it away, the use of that particular nickname for Alvantes would have identified the man. He belonged to one of the criminal fraternities that had given Mounteban his initial leverage in the city; if I remember rightly, he went by the name of Holes Morales, in honour of all those he’d left in shallow graves outside the walls of Altapasaeda. And once again, his logic was sound: half of those here would have faced imprisonment at the very least under the old order.

A variety of similarly rough-looking characters were bickering to make similar observations, but the voice that actually made it to the surface was of an altogether different tenor. It was a squeal more than a shout, yet its note of sheer desperation was enough to cut through the uproar. “Guard-Captain Alvantes, what about those of us innocent of any wrongdoing? Will the King care that we were tricked and cajoled into treachery?”

I recognised Lord Eldunzi, eldest scion of the house Eldunzi. Given how quick he’d been to turn his coat, I felt he had a cheek. Perhaps some of the families had gone along with Mounteban against their will, but I suspected that, for most, the chance to trade profitable subservience for unrestrained wealth had been too good to miss.

Well, that more or less covered the three factions Mounteban had persuaded to share power in Altapasaeda: a resounding “three against, nil for” vote in favour of negotiation.

Not for the first time, I regretted letting Estrada talk me into taking the stage with her. I supposed she’d meant it as acknowledgment of my recent efforts in the city’s rescue. However, given how quickly our heroic liberation of Altapasaeda had turned sour, I would far rather my part be hurriedly forgotten.

I did my best to shrink into the background as Alvantes leaned forward and raised his voice once more to drown the clamour. “All right! You don’t want to surrender. Neither do I. Yet you all agree you’re not willing to fight. Who do you expect to defend Altapasaeda if not its own people?”

“Isn’t that your job?” someone piped up from towards the back.

“With what?” Alvantes cried. “A few dozen exhausted guardsmen and amateur soldiers?”

“ With what ? With those bloody giants is with what!”

That comment brought a steady roar of approval. Good luck to Alvantes explaining the concept of giant pacifism to his unruly audience — for how could anyone who hadn’t witnessed it believe that the terrifying creatures we’d brought here could barely even be persuaded to defend themselves? It was only because I’d accidentally stolen a giant and even more accidentally befriended him that I’d come to understand; for Saltlick and his people, violence was something alien and utterly abhorrent.

“The giants won’t fight for us,” Alvantes said simply. A note of defeat was starting to enter his voice, and he was hardly trying to restrain it. After everything he’d been through to save this city, everything he’d sacrificed, I could see that the churlish defeatism he was up against was grating upon his good intentions. Then there was the fact that the very threat he was striving to protect his home from was the king he’d served dutifully all his life. All things considered, it wasn’t a good day to be former Guard-Captain Lunto Alvantes.

It was only about to get worse.

“What about Mounteban?” someone heckled from towards the centre — and at the mention of that name, the atmosphere in the room changed immediately, as though every light had dimmed or the temperature abruptly climbed.

There was a pause, uncomfortably long, and then another voice echoed, “Yeah! Where’s Mounteban?”

“Mounteban! Where is he?”

“We’ll talk to Mounteban!”

In a moment it had become a chorus, that one name resounding down the length and breadth of the hall.

Alvantes stood it for a full ten seconds before he broke. Then he lashed a foot into the lectern and it tore loose with a thunderous crack, to burst into pieces on the tiles below. Alvantes stood, sides heaving, eyes roving across his suddenly-silent audience — as though challenging them to acknowledge his outburst, or to so much as whisper that hated name again.