08 A Little Hatred: Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘Orso is here?’ she whispered. She had hardly thought of him since the uprising. Hunger, cold and the constant threat of death rather blunted one’s appetite for romance. Now his grin came up in her memory, painfully sharp, and she felt weak with a sappy welling of relief.

‘Guess they managed to prise him out of the whorehouse,’ said Liddy. ‘No doubt he’ll be bringing the Inquisition with him.’

‘Oh,’ said Savine, stupidly. For most people here, a horrifying prospect. For her, the best news in weeks.

‘Seems the party’s over,’ murmured May.

There was a rumble and Savine jerked up. On the other side of the river, the roof of a burning mill was falling in, fountains of sparks towering into the night, smoke boiling as half of one wall toppled inwards. The brave new age collapsing on itself.

Crown Prince Orso was riding to her rescue. Perhaps she should have laughed at that. Perhaps she should have wept at it. But she had no laughter and no tears left. She was a husk.

She sat on the bank and watched the flames dance in the water.

Eating Peas with a Sword

‘Should we attack, Your Highness?’

‘Attack, Colonel Forest?’ Orso did not blame the man. Violence is very much the job of a career soldier, after all. But the limits of his imagination were becoming clear. ‘Attack who? The city itself is an asset, not an enemy. As for the inhabitants, we really have no idea who is loyal and who disloyal. Who a rebel and who a hostage. Making war on our own citizens … it would look dreadful. We would create more rebels than we killed.’

Orso peered through his eyeglass towards Valbeck again. He could see tiny buildings, towers, pinprick chimneys, dark columns rising from the stricken city that he feared was the smoke of destruction rather than of industry.

How he would have loved to order a glorious charge. To put rebels to the sword, to root through every house until he found Savine. To whisk her off her feet and kiss her fiercely and so on, much to her great delight. To be, for once, the one to rush to her rescue. But Orso knew he had to put the children’s stories to one side and think.

She was tough. A great deal tougher than he was. She was resourceful. A great deal more resourceful than he was. Her best chance – everyone’s best chance – was for him to move slowly, cautiously and very, very boringly. He blew a sigh from puffed cheeks, itchy with the beginnings of a beard he hoped might look military but suspected would prove to be another of his many mistakes.

‘Attacking the city with an army would be like eating peas with a sword,’ he said. ‘Messy, frustrating and you’ve a good chance of stabbing yourself in the face. We need to be measured. Calm. The firm but necessary hand of authority. We need to be the grown-ups.’ For once in his life.

Orso snapped his eyeglass decisively closed. Vital to look decisive, especially when you haven’t a bloody clue what you’re doing. He had been making it up as he went along all his life, of course, but never before had the fates of many thousands of other people depended so directly on his total ignorance. Perhaps that’s what makes a hero, though. The towering self-confidence to dance at the brink of disaster and never consider the drop.

‘Surround the city,’ he said, tapping the eyeglass thoughtfully into his palm and letting his eyes wander across the fields around Valbeck. ‘Deploy our cannons where they can be clearly seen but not used. Block every route in or out, cut off their supply, make it abundantly clear that we are in charge.’

‘Then?’ asked Forest.

‘Then find out who’s leading the rebels and …’ He shrugged. ‘Invite them to parley.’

‘War is only ever a prelude to talk,’ came a voice. A man stood nearby, in neat civilian clothes. A man who Orso had, as far as he was aware, never laid eyes upon before. A nondescript man with curly hair and a length of wood in one hand. He smiled at Orso. ‘My master would thoroughly approve, Your Highness.’

As a crown prince, Orso was used to forgetting nine-tenths of the people he was introduced to, as well as to total strangers sticking their noses into his business, and so he remained scrupulously polite. ‘Pardon me, but I am not sure we have met …?’

‘This is Yoru Sulfur,’ offered Superior Pike. ‘A member of the Order of Magi.’

‘I was just now struggling to put out a fire in the North when the unmistakable tang of the Union in flames reached my nose.’ Sulfur smiled wider. ‘Never any peace, eh? Never the slightest peace.’

‘His Eminence the Arch Lector,’ said Pike, ‘as well as His Majesty your father, were very keen that Master Sulfur should join us.’