Nicely Strange Stories Home

Bad Guys Young Swaymth - he would have to start referring to himself as 'Swaymth the Second', or perhaps he'd simply have all references to his father expunged from the records - stepped down over the limp body of the former King, pulled the dagger out of the old man's back, wiped it on the royal dark-blue silks and sheathed it. He glanced down at the courtiers, gathered in a nervous knot at the base of the steps leading up to the throne. "Any questions?" he muttered rhetorically. The courtiers involuntarily stepped back, shaking their heads. Swaymth the Second gave them his coolest smile, stepped backwards (he didn't quite trust them that much yet) up to the throne and sat down, one foot resting jauntily on the body. "Good." At almost the same time but half a continent away, Prince Haribed was lurking in the Kitchens, examining the labels on jars by candle-light. He paused at every sound, expecting to be discovered by one of his father's informers or, potentially more dangerous, the cook (an immensely fat man who reigned over the kitchen in much the same way that the King ran roughshod over the country). He located a particular jar of spices without arousing the suspicion of anything bigger than the rats under the stoves. Pulling the stopper, he added a generous dose of black powder from a vial he'd kept hidden in his sleeve; he stoppered the jar and turned it over a few times, mixing the black and light-brown powders together until there was no evidence of his tampering. The King liked cinnamon on his breakfast toast, he knew. Tomorrow would herald the setting of the old King's sun and the ascendancy of his own star. He almost felt something approaching a feeling of regret at the idea of losing his father ... but not quite. Swaymth was supervising the purging of untrustworthy elements in his empire. It was exhausting, tedious work; he had three advisers that came closest to what he considered as trustworthy, and each had a long list of people who they thought should be executed. Combining the lists was proving to be a major task, and he was about ready to toss it in and have them all killed - the advisers as well - when news of the decline in health of King Chemane changed everything. With a new command in the neighbouring kingdom, two-thirds of his spy network was rendered next to useless, and new scouts would have to be infiltrated. He settled for using half a dozen men and women that he knew he could trust and eight who were near the top of all three adviser's lists. The advisers he kept where they were, hoping that each would be too busy back-stabbing the others to have any time for plotting against him. He was beginning to get a handle on the job of king. He scanned, for the fifth time that hour, the long list of spies, potential spies and subvertible ministers in the surrounding kingdoms; after uncrossing his eyes, he decided to take a break and do something he wanted to do for a change. Perhaps have some new clothes made up. Black was de rigeur for evil rulers, he knew; an Evil Ruler was what he'd decided on being. There hadn't been a truly evil ruler since the time of his great-grandfather, and Swaymth was sure that surpassing him would be no problem. Evil was something he felt came naturally to some. Perhaps he'd have his personal guard done up in black as well, to inspire some terror in the peasants. Prince Haribed wiped away an imaginary tear as he regarded the funeral pyre, thrice as tall as the tallest guard which stood by it, and gestured to the torch-bearer; the flames shot up the oil-soaked logs and a pall of black smoke rose to the sky. He stood watching it burn for longer than was really necessary; his mind, in fact, was occupied in the things he was going to do after his coronation. It had been a while since the land had been ruled by an evil king, and he felt it was about time for a return to traditional values. The first thing he'd need was appropriate clothing. In black. He sent for the maids. Swaymth was on the point of accepting what his courtiers had told him; then, he remembered he was the king! Which meant he always got his way, no matter how unreasonable. He composed his features, sat back and asked (calmly - he didn't want to appear petulant, after all), "There isn't any to be found, anywhere?" The foremost of the pack of courtiers (a man slightly older than his recently deceased father and slightly braver than the rest of the sheep) shrank back slightly (this was encouraging; they'd learned to interpret his disapproval as something potentially life-threatening) and quavered, "We have searched the markets of the kingdoms, Lord, and the markets of the surrounding countries. We thought they were lying, trying to drive the prices up, but after we killed a few of them we learned that all available stocks of black crushed velvet had been bought up by representatives of Ashakhyre." Swaymth knew that name from somewhere ... it was in the back of his mind, a faint memory... "Ashakhyre?" "The kingdom to the immediate north, Sire." The toadying lackey (Prince Haribed couldn't remember his name, so he simply thought of him as Toady) gestured floridly at the outspread parchment. Someone handed him an intelligence report, which said (translated from security-talk) that they didn't know anything about the place apart from its name. "Spies?" "We keep sending them in, Sire, but they never come out again. What information we do have is from border observers." Haribed allowed a measure of venom in his voice. "Are their walls particularly tall, or is there some other reason we can't see over them?" Toady didn't catch the sarcasm but the others did, and backed off accordingly. "We're currently investing heavily in sorcerous means of information- gathering, drawing up some cost-effectiveness estimates and making discreet enquiries about -" Haribed cut him off, gesturing to the guards, "Take him out and dangle him over the moat." Toady squawked as they dragged him away. Haribed found a list of competent sorcerers amidst the other papers and decided to scout them himself. He'd learned from his father that wizards needed to be impressed, and he didn't trust his lackeys to do the job. Swaymth rode out at the head of a pack of his 'elite guard', half a dozen men in the darkest grey uniforms he could provide. They had standing orders not to lean against anything blacker than their uniforms, and their horses were all either brown or dappled grey. The pack coursed through the tiny village market, knocking over stacked cages containing bedraggled chickens, scaring the peasants and generally reinforcing their right to ride anywhere they wanted. Swaymth thought their whooping cries sounded a bit forced, but couldn't think of a good way of telling them so. It was a lot easier to make people wear dark grey uniforms than it was to tell them they weren't shouting right. He followed a path into a heavily-overgrown (or in his view, under-utilised) forest, occasionally looking back to ensure that his gang was still with him. Seeing a thin curl of smoke from a fire, he spurred his horse onward and made what he thought was quite an impressive entrance into the small clearing in front of the cottage. A young man in a brown monk's robe was on his knees, digging in a vegetable plot with a hand-scythe. Swaymth reigned his horse and called out: "I would have words with Ventrad the Dark." The young man, obviously not impressed by the finery displayed by the soldiers whose horses were now tromping his garden, sat back on his haunches and retorted, "I would bloody well have words with him as well. He told me that this place had an inside toilet when he sold it to me." Quick on the uptake, Swaymth asked, "You are not he?" The man stood, brushing dirt from his knees. "I am Franklin the not-particularly-any-colour-really. Well, okay, colour me gullible - I trusted that bastard. I should have known that if he was selling up and moving to Ashakhyre, he could tell me anything he wanted about this place, then just cut and run." Swaymth clenched his mailed fist, gritted his teeth and snarled. Haribed entered the tavern as inconspicuously as possible. He needn't have bothered, since there was a brawl going on; he let the distraction draw attention from him and crossed to where the oldest man he'd ever seen in his life sat behind a chess-board. Haribed sat down opposite the old man and pretended to examine the chessboard as if considering a tactical problem of infinite complexity. Again, he needn't have bothered as no-one had made a move in the game, but he didn't know that. The prince glanced up at the old man slyly, and was about to butter him up with some remark about life being a game when he noticed that the old man's eyes were pointing in different directions and that his beard was wet with drool. He waved a hand in front of the man's face; nothing. The tavern's pot-boy came over to take his order. Haribed gestured at the superannuated chess-player. "This isn't by any chance Giles who is also known as Giles the Tactician, is it?" The pot-boy sniffed and rubbed his nose on his sleeve. "No, sir, that's his old dad, known as Shuring the Dribbler. Giles recently found work next door." Haribed frowned. "What, in the brothel?" "No, sir - the kingdom next door. Ashakhyre." "I see," he muttered darkly. Swaymth's first thought was 'here is the man who's been buying all the black cloth'; he dismissed this when he noted the shabby condition of the man's cloak. This imposing gent stood in the middle of the street, blocking their path; hands on hips, he sneered, "I hear you're looking for a Bursorary. Well, I'm your man." Swaymth cocked his head to one side and frowned. "Did you say `mercenary'? I'm looking for the toughest fighters-for-hire, putting together an elite -" The man shrank back, eyes wide. "Uh, no - I'm Bertram the Bursar, feared by students across the land... uh, I'm primarily known for my work in finance, student loans, that kind of-" his words were cut short, as was he, by Swaymth's sword. The old woman paled, recognising Haribed, backed off and protested, "Sire! That bread was perfectly fresh when we delivered it! And the ergot-contaminated batch was supposed to be for that bunch of mystics who live in that mountain monastery, I told your guards that but they -" "Peace, goodwife," Haribed cautioned, hand raised in kingly benevolence, "I would speak with Jassan, he who is known for his biscuits even in distant-" he stopped, seeing her glance northwards. "Let me guess. He's just moved to Ashakhyre." The woman bowed her head. "That's it. I've had quite enough." He turned to his lackeys, cringing behind him. "I think it's time we ..." "... declared war on Ashakhyre. They've taken our best magicians, our best fighters, our smiths, our carpenters, the cooks, the doctors, the stable-hands ... they've even taken the musicians!" Swaymth glared down at the four courtiers who remained. "If we don't do something, we won't have any subjects left! All Ashakhyre will have to do is put up signs saying that our lands are now part of their kingdom. In theory, they started it. It's obvious that we have no option but to..." "... defend ourselves to the best of our ability. Gather our armies and ..." Haribed paused in thought, chin resting on a dark-blue-gloved fist. "Yes. Send a page to Prince Swaymth. I'll dictate a message, cautious extension of the hand of friendship, combining our forces to combat this dark menace from the north, et cetera. We can stab him in the back later." He paused again before realising that the toady which he'd trained to laugh appreciatively whenever he said something particularly dark had run off a few days ago. He didn't feel up to laughing appreciatively himself. On assembling their forces, each discovered that they couldn't field an actual army of more than a dozen men, and so the two processions leading into the Kingdom of Ashakhyre were both more pomp than substance; Swaymth led his envoy on his darkest of dark grey horses, dressed in clothing dyed black with the last black dye to be found anywhere. He'd been cultivating a goatee beard but didn't have the hormones for it, had shaved it off and made a bad job of that as well. His elite fighting force was now down to three men with four horses; the rest of his entourage was made up of anyone he could pressure into following; three peasant boys wearing page's tunics and a village idiot who had been chased off but had followed them anyway. Swaymth was loath to reduce his envoy by twelve percent and had let him come along; he was prepared to hint that the drooling madman was actually either the world's greatest performance artist or an incredibly devious spy. Haribed hadn't done much better. Two of his guards were actually ex-soldiers of Swaymth's who'd intended to flee to Ashakhyre and had become lost on the way. His entourage included two heralds, but neither of them owned a trumpet and one of them had a sore throat and couldn't announce anything except that he was infectious. The two processions met on the main road into Ashakhyre and self-consciously proceeded slowly into the capital. The fact that this kingdom was prospering wasn't lost on either of them; each believed that Ashakhyre's success was at their expense and that it wouldn't last if their respective kingdoms collapsed. A hundred yards from the palace gates, a deputation from Ashakhyre came out to meet them. Swaymth was surprised to note that the armoured figures were all women; Haribed was stunned because he recognised their leader: "Mother, what are you doing here?" She frowned, hands on her hips. "What did you expect me do to? Hang around and wait for you to poison me like you did your father? Besides, conditions are much better here." Haribed darted a poisonous look at Swaymth, who was having trouble concealing his laughter. The two princes dismounted, were escorted through the gates and into the palace. Swaymth couldn't help noticing the topiary garden, being tended by his ex-gardeners. For a moment his resolve wavered; perhaps this Ashakhyre had already won ... then he gathered his courage about him and decided to challenge this upstart leader to single combat. And cheat. And kill him and take this kingdom for his own. The idea of returning to his own draughty, damp castle didn't really appeal to him. Haribed was wondering if he could somehow persuade someone here to add a little something to Ashakhyre's evening meal when they were brought before a huge throne carved from black stone. The walls were lined with guards, each an impressive specimen of medieval law enforcement, each dressed entirely in black, of course. On the throne sprawled a slight figure, also dressed in black. A woman. In point of fact, a girl, no more than fifteen years old. It took a few seconds for the princes to realise that the almost palpable waves of deference in the room were directed at her. Their jaws dropped almost simultaneously. Haribed, who was marginally the more intelligent of the two, found his voice first: "YOU? But - you were only six years old when - you were ... uh ..." She smiled haughtily, gestured regally. Swaymth almost snarled with envy; he'd been practising that gesture for months and still hadn't got it right to his satisfaction. "I understand that you're both experiencing personnel problems. I'm prepared to offer you positions in my intelligence or military structures, if you'd like." Haribed drew himself up with icy indignation. "A prince - " Swaymth interrupted, "Nay, a KING -" Haribed nodded and continued, "A KING does not work for a ... a CHILD!" She considered this; pursed her lips, then nodded. "Very well. You're free to return home. If any of your companions would like to consider relocating here, they're quite welcome to." Swaymth was about to retort icily that his elite fighting force couldn't be bought off that easily when he realised that he was alone. Obviously, his elite fighting force could be bought off that easily, as could Haribed's retinue. His shoulders slumped in defeat. "I accept the position of general of your armies.' She agreed with a smile and a twinkle in her eyes which, to everyone else, suggested that he'd be doing more strutting around in uniforms than actually giving orders. Haribed looked from Swaymth to Ashakhyre with the mounting feeling that he was being edged out, and was about to protest when she said, "And to you, I offer the position of Commander-in-chief of my intelligence network." Haribed opened his mouth as if to protest, then closed it again, his expression so obviously blank that no-one was fooled. One could hear the gears turning in his head at the end of the hall. Ashakhyre smiled and murmured, "I'm sure we're all going to get on famously." Haribed and Swaymth glanced at each other and grinned evilly.

( top ) All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated.