“Whatever comes,” Kaitha agreed, moving into a scouting position as the other heroes got in formation. The gloom deepened as the massive Dungeon Gate began to close behind them, pushing the last of the daylight into a thin sliver of silver in the dark.
Chapter 21
The reverberation of the door slamming behind Weaver Ortson rang through the stone halls of the palace. He felt like a man just arrived at a party that has already ended; the palace was empty save for a lone guard standing in the middle of the cavernous entryway. The bannerman gave the guildmaster a quiet nod and averted his eyes as Ortson hurried toward the throne room.
The hallway was as silent and empty as an old tomb. Ortson caught a glimpse of a maid in the antechamber, like a deer in a dusty glade, but she fled quickly. He took the chance to produce a flask from his tunic and, with a generous swig of liquid courage, pressed on.
Weaver had heard rumors that the palace had become somber since Johan’s return, but he’d been too busy avoiding the place to see for himself. People said that the bolder and less scrupulous among the nobility and executives still clamored for the king’s attention by day, but the king’s spirits fell with the setting sun. Andarun’s court read the king’s emotional state like seafarers watched the clouds, and departed before the storms rolled in. The lack of court intrigue was notable, but logical.
Ortson felt much more concerned by the lack of servants.
His clerks said many of the palace staff had resigned. Without a lady to serve, Marja’s handmaidens had departed for their native Ruskan. The queen’s honor guard resigned as one, ostensibly for failing to stop the queen’s last, reckless act of devotion. The bakery staff was almost completely cut without Marja’s appetites to keep them busy. Just over a week after Johan’s return, and half of the staff had left the palace.
Some of them didn’t make it home.
Ortson didn’t need rumors to know what had happened. Over the king’s short reign, he’d helped Johan find people who were poking around the northern project and the truth about the recent dragon attacks. After they disappeared, it was up to the grandmaster and High Councilor of the Heroes’ Guild to limit any investigation that could cast suspicions on the king.
Ortson paused by a tapestry depicting the Fifth Age siege of Highwatch, and thought back to his last fight at the ancient fortress. He’d been on the inside of the king’s inner circle back then, building the bureaucratic barricades that kept secrets in and prying eyes out. Yet those defenses were falling, and there were new secrets to keep quiet. Secrets that Ortson didn’t know. He worried that he was on the same side of them as the missing servants.
After all, some of the palace staff must have noticed Johan’s final words to his wife, and could have recognized them as a device from the books she infamously devoured. Some bannermen likely recognized the warped but familiar laugh amid the messenger sprite’s approximation of the Golden Dawn’s dying screams. And anyone with half a brain could tell that the timing of the king’s dramatic emergence at his own funeral was too well-coordinated, too clearly choreographed, to be a coincidence.
Perhaps the best evidence that the servants suspected the king had anticipated—even instigated—Queen Marja’s death was that there were so few of them. There weren’t even enough staff for a proper dusting, apparently; a cluster of spiderwebs lurked behind a ceremonial suit of armor, and the ceiling above it was crowded with cobwebs.
Ortson took another swig from his flask and made his way to the doors of the throne room. The guildmaster didn’t have much regard for Marja, but neither had good King Handor, and it’d never crossed their minds to do the queen any harm. It was like kicking a dog; needlessly cruel, and whatever evils Ortson had done, they had all been for a purpose. They had all been part of a plan, he reminded himself bitterly, because Weaver Ortson had always believed the ends justified the means. He’d just never been on the wrong end of the means before.
Everything had started to spiral when the king and the Tandosians started… whatever it was they were doing down in the Royal Archives. Ortson made a face at the distasteful thought and sanitized his tongue with another draught of whiskey. What was the king doing down there? Why did he assemble the Golden Dawn, only to kill them? If they needed to die, why bring them into the dungeon at all? He had so many effective means of eliminating problems up here. If something down in the dungeon drew the king into Wynspar, why kill his own heroes? The questions haunted him until the moment he walked into the throne room and realized with a start that they all shared a common answer.
Johan was clearly mad.
The paladin king perched upon the throne of Andarun, his mailed fingers digging into the wood like talons. His bloodshot eyes stared at an empty spot on the floor with all the hungry intensity of a vulture watching a marooned caravanner crawl across the desert. A joyless grin split his scarred face, and his lips twitched as he growled a one-sided conversation through his pearly, almost luminescent teeth.
“It can still work. They haven’t found… they might die. They aren’t that… no, there aren’t enough of them… Trust me, it can still work. We just need more time… just a little more time…”
Ortson walked carefully around the empty space that occupied Johan’s gaze. “Majesty?” he said tremulously. “Y-you summoned me?”
The paladin blinked and straightened, inflating with a sudden good humor. “Ah, yes. Weaver! Ha! I wanted to talk to you about the plan!”
The guildmaster’s mind frantically ran through the various initiatives the king might be referring to. Most of them weren’t the sort he’d speak of in a public place, even without any public around. “The, uh… which plan, Your Majesty?”
“Why, the plan to stop Ingerson, of course.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.” Rivers of sweat poured over the floodplain of Ortson’s brow.
“Ha! You must!” said the king. “After all, you didn’t come up with a reason why Ingerson’s quest couldn’t move forward—”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Ortson.
The king’s smile froze, but his eyes were like hot embers. “I wanted you to find a reason to bypass all this business with the dragon.”
“But…. but you asked if there was a legal rationale… there wasn’t one.” Ortson dabbed at his forehead with a sopping handkerchief, though it had all the effect of an umbrella in monsoon season.
Johan pounded the abused armrest of the throne. Cracks spiderwebbed through the venerated wood. “You’re the thrice-cursed Grandmaster of the Heroes’ Guild!” he roared. “If you can’t find a good rule, make one up!”
Ortson sputtered at the sudden reversal. “B-b-but you… I had just done that to allow the quest in the first place! It took all I had to set up two no-bid quests for the largest hoard in history in weeks. W-we bypassed so many protocols to get your quests—”
“Ingerson was supposed to try to accuse us! He was supposed to reveal that he raided the northern site!”
“I, uh…” Ortson tried to follow the king’s line of reasoning, and kept tripping at the same point. “Why would we want that, sire?”
“So we could deny everything!” said Johan, leaping to his feet. “We should be arguing about who the real criminal was! Why would I want him to go on a high-profile quest? Why would I want to send him down to investigate the dragon? And now that you’ve let him and his cohorts into the dungeon, I assume you have a plan to stop them from coming back!”
“Ah…” said Ortson. “Well, sire, I assumed that the actual dragon, or whatever else you fought down there, would make short work of them. Right?”
Johan’s eyes narrowed. He studied the guildmaster with the disgusted fascination of a child who has found a bloated, spindly-legged creature under a log. “I’d prefer to leave nothing to chance,” he said eventually.
“B-but if they return without slaying the dragon, we can say they were derelict in their duty for fear of the dragon,” said Weaver. “And if they do actually succeed, you can still deny that you killed the, uh... we can still deny all wrongdoing.”
It was a poor recovery, and Weaver didn’t need to look at the king’s face to see that it hadn’t been enough. He did though, and saw that Johan’s perpetual grin had faded into a determined grimace. The almost-unspoken accusation hung in the air like a sword above the guildmaster’s head.
“Do you think I killed someone, Weaver?”
“Of course not, sire.”
“You said I’d need to deny it. You think I killed someone?”
The guildmaster searched for an escape, but it was hard to see one through the haze of alcohol. “Not… uh, not directly,” he tried.
“Not directly?”
