The two Watchmen shuffled aside as he came to the doorway. Undreth wheezed a welcome; Kirn, a longtime partisan of Albrecht, satisfied himself with a moue of distaste. To the first, Demansk responded with a polite nod; to the other, not so much as a glance of appraisal. Kirn was a meaningless enemy. His vote was a given, and, for the rest—
Once he was past, where Kirn could not see his face, Demansk’s lip curled. There was an old saying, very popular among Vanbert’s lower classes: a nobleman’s trough is his grave. Kirn, in particular, was notorious for his gluttony. He would be dead anyway, soon enough, from natural causes.
The floor of the chamber was marble, inlaid with large copper and silver medallions. Each of the medallions recorded the name of a victorious battle or siege. A good two thirds of the floor was spackled with the things. Pausing for a moment to scan the Councillors assembling on the tiered stone benches which encircled the floor everywhere except the entrance, Demansk reminded himself of those medallions. Whatever else could be said of today’s Vanbert, there was nothing false or illusory about those victories.
Workmen had already prepared a spot for the next. Quite some time ago, now. Demansk’s lip curled further, into a gesture of open derision rather than simple humor. Preble, that medallion would read—whenever Albrecht finally managed to reduce it.
His open sneer, and the source of it, had already been noticed by at least a dozen other Councillors. However dull-witted they might be in many respects, Councillors were hypersensitive to political nuances. A number of them grinned; several scowled; several more looked away, feigning indifference.
Albrecht, as the old saying went, had truly hoisted himself on his own assegai. The year before, he had taken advantage of the stunning defeats which Adrian Gellert had inflicted on the Vanbert besiegers of the rebel island to have Jeschonyk and Demansk removed from command—heaping a mass of contumely on the first and a fair portion on the other. And he had also taken the occasion to get himself appointed the new commander of the besieging forces.
A necessity, that, if Albrecht’s ambitions were to go any further. The Confederacy might be corrupt, but the rot still only went so far. No Councillor, even in modern times, could hope to attain the Speakership without a modicum of martial glory to his name. Albrecht had been famous for his political maneuvering, not his skills on the field of war. He’d seized the opportunity to have himself elected the commander of the siege precisely in order to remedy that flaw.
Demansk’s sneer was now a thing of pure histrionics. He allowed the assembling Councillors to get a full taste of it, while he himself kept his eyes visibly on the spot long-since prepared for the missing medallion of triumph.
Albrecht had discovered, the hard way, that it was much easier to deride besiegers than to surpass them. A year had gone by, and Preble was still in rebel hands. Even after Adrian Gellert and his brother Esmond left the service of the King of the Isles to go to the southern half of the continent, the islanders had been able to keep fending off the Confederate forces.
Albrecht had been handicapped, of course. Needless to say, both Jeschonyk and Demansk himself had used their influence to keep Albrecht from getting the massive resources he needed to end the siege quickly. Jeschonyk simply out of political revenge, Demansk because—even then—he had begun seeing that he might someday need to overthrow the existing order.
The chamber was almost full, now. Only a handful of Councillors were scurrying to take their seats. Demansk left off his sneer and strode to his own accustomed place, on the lowest tier of benches reserved for the Confederacy’s ten Justiciars.
When he sat down, he made the ninth present. The tenth was not there, and would not be. Justiciar Albrecht was far away, staring at the island of Preble from a Confederate rampart. And, Demansk had no doubt at all, gnashing his teeth in fury and frustration.
Albrecht’s many supporters, of course, would do what they could to advance their patron’s interests at this emergency meeting of the Council. But without Albrecht himself there, to guide them with his political cunning and his seemingly bottomless coffers, they would have a much more difficult time of it.