Page 106 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

Of course, in the event I had only a moment to take in the catastrophe. I became aware of movement near me and saw that the queen had stood up in a hurry to cover her daughters’ eyes. She had heard me warn the princess not to look, had heard how earnestly I said it, and had decided that not looking, at least for a moment, would cost her nothing. But now her eyes met mine with fury in them.

She said now, in thickly accented Arvisk, “How did you know? How!”

“A hunch?” I said. But she either didn’t know or didn’t especially like that word.

She hit me. Not with an open hand, as her daughter had, but with a fist.

I will remind you that, as an Erydoni female of normal height, Queen Neffa stood just shy of eight feet tall. And she caught me flat-footed. I could just hear one of my old guild-masters telling me I had let my emotions hinder me, and that was the truth of it. Killing many thousands of persons, even persons of a different species, hinders me.

Guilty.

I fell.

I wasn’t out yet, but I was well down.

The queen saw the wig on the dead king’s head, which had half flipped off to show what a near-baldy he was. How ridiculous and tender he looked just then. His tongue’s tip was just sticking out, pink and naked. She knelt with great care to arrange the wig again and give her husband back some of the dignity careless death had stripped him of, as it strips us all in the end. She tucked his tongue back in as well.

I struggled woozily to my feet, hoping to run despite the great effort it was taking merely to stand.

But run I did not.

Because the furious, freshly widowed eight-foot-tall queen of Erydon, with a foot that measured me navel to chin, kicked me.

Now I was out.

39Hoodman Blind

I woke up over the shoulder of the king’s minister, who was the only other member of court, the queen and princess excepted, to have survived. We were walking swiftly toward the palace. I was pretty sure I had a broken rib, because every step the geezer took went from the earth through his heel and up to the rod of pure agony in my left side.

I made a little groan at one of these steps, and the karker said, “I hope it hurts. But you’ll hurt worse when we get you to the palace and find out what role you had in this”—and here his voice broke a bit—“abomination.” And that made me think of the wizard Fulvir, called the Father of Abominations, and how he’d told me he was my father, but in that Molrovan way that means he could just as well have been lying. I had always thought he was called that, Father of Abominations, because his bone magic had created beasties half-bull and half-man, or three-quarters man and one part dog, or, with another wizard named Knockburr, fashioned the great and terrible war corvids like the one sleeping on Galva’s chest. But maybe it meant me. Maybe I was the abomination. I’d just done an awful thing, after all, however much I could justify it by how dangerous the Erydoni could have been to Manreach, especially if they started sharing their many gifts and wonders with the Horde.

The city around us was in the grip of a stunned silence, the kind that precedes something yet worse. It wasn’t all silent, of course; here and there, I heard a wail of lamentation coming from some house that just heard the news. Here and there, groups of slaves, presumably masterless now, walked stunned, or gathered with others to talk about what had happened. I heard tatters and rags of it as we passed.

Masters all dead.

Not all.

Most.

Let us go back and wait to see if ours lived.

They won’t be back.

They might, and I don’t want a beating.

Nor I!

Then let us band together and give them the beating.

We had nearly reached the palace when the rumble from before began again, but louder. The ground shook beneath our feet, or beneath the king’s minister’s feet, for I was still slung over his shoulder. Now screams rang out. I saw no Erydoni on the street, but I heard some in the windows of the shaking stone houses singing that curious tune I had heard at the Ludus of the Green Devil. I imagined the geezers standing in the Posture of Receiving, and I can assure you some of them received a great deal. Dust rose here and there where buildings fell. Slaves ran hither and thither, some panicked, some with purpose. The minister, the queen, and the princess were the only ones walking, fast but with some dignity.

At least, this was how they walked until a great cloud of smoke and fire and ash rose from the side of the mountain, followed by an ear-breaking bang-BANG.

Now the last of the royals ran, and it was all so frightening and thrilling I barely felt my broken rib even as I bounced on the minister’s shoulder like a looted goat.

When we reached the palace, it was lopsided, with great cracks through its stonework, a cloud of dust around it. The huge, bronze War Gate stood open, as it usually did, and the wooden doors behind these were open as well. In we went. I would have suggested finding a smaller entryway and making a quiet entrance, but I didn’t feel like to be listened to.

Let’s just say I had a bad feeling.