Sliding Void by Stephen Hunt Read Free Book Online Page A

plumbing?’
    Lana slapped Calder on the arm. ‘Time to have some fun, your highness.’
    Fun . Calder remembered what that was like. It seemed a hell of a long time ago, though.
     
    ***
     
    Sibylla dragged herself out from under her heavy, warm, quilted blankets, pulling back the velvet curtains on the large four-poster bed. There was the sound again. She hadn’t been certain at first, what with the noise of the loutish high marshal snoring beside her, but someone was clearly urinating within earshot. Given that the only chamber pot in the royal apartments was tucked under her bed, and the nearest toilet over the moat’s ramparts lay a corridor’s walk away, this wasn’t a wholesome development.
    The recently crowned queen reached under the bed, finding the hidden holster of her dagger. She removed it, holster and all, not yet drawing it. The blade was poisoned and she didn’t want to risk pricking herself, still half-asleep. Not unless there really was an assassin inside the palace’s royal apartment. Perhaps someone on the staff who had needed to fill up with a couple of litres of liquid courage, only to find themselves caught short on the way to give Sibylla a helping shove off the throne. One of her younger sisters’ blades maybe, hoping to move herself up the line of royal precedence now there were two kingdoms to claim, rather than one? Or a loyalist from the previous regime? Perhaps Sibylla hadn’t purged the ranks of the royal bodyguard as severely as she thought she had?
    Sibylla felt the cold from the wind before she spotted the open door on the balcony. Her royal gown of state lay spread across the floor, and the smell! She stepped barefooted through the warm puddle soaking her clothes, and mastering her revulsion, she tore back the heavy curtain outside. The balcony was empty. She stepped carefully outside, her dagger drawn, ready to slice the rope of any attacker’s grappling hook. But Sibylla found only the forty-foot drop of the granite walls outside, the dark bulk of the city below, just a few windows lit by candlelight at this late hour. Merely the cold to kill her with pneumonia if she tarried out here naked too long.
    For a second, Sibylla thought she heard a distant echo of familiar laughter. Calder Durk? The mocking noise came from the sky. A distant shape dark against the black of night sky, some crow shrinking into the heavens on a freezing cold night? She kicked her way past her ruined garment in disgust. Did ghosts get to piss one last time, before being carried away into the Halls of the Twice-born? Away into the heavens? She sighed. Maybe the priests would know? There would be a lot more of them crossing the ice from Narvalak in the years ahead.
     
    ***
     
    Matobo had the contents of his storage chests laid across his bed, sifting through the things he’d collected during his years on Hesperus.
    ‘There isn’t much to show here for years of freezing my ass off on this lousy planet,’ he told his hound.
    The throat muscles around the dog’s neck bulged as it started to speak. There were some things that even top-notch genetic engineers couldn’t get right. ‘You should’ve told Lana the truth.’
    Unsurprisingly, Matobo didn’t agree. ‘If she knew about the prince, there is no way she’d be shipping out with him. Not even as stowage, let alone crew.’
    The hound shook his head sadly. ‘You think I don’t know, but I do. It was you who warned the priests the prince was heading for the baron’s castle. You set Calder up to be betrayed. Ally or not, Baron Halvard had no choice. It was switch sides or be invaded.’
    Matobo shrugged, but didn’t deny the accusation. ‘Calder wouldn’t have left if he still thought he had a chance to get his kingdom back, would he? And this way everyone thinks he’s dead. Killed in an oil blaze set by the baron’s assassins, murdered with nothing left to live for.’
    ‘You underestimate them ,’ growled the hound.
    ‘Yeah well,