Not Exactly the Three Musketeers by Joel Rosenberg EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Joel Rosenberg
- Language: English
- Genre: Coming of Age Fantasy
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- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
THEIR ATTENTION IS ARRESTED
THERE WILL BE payment for your crimes, foul deceiver. Justice demands
an accounting!’’.
Beneath the flickering of the uncaring stars, the smoking torches, and
the slow, crimson-to-orange-to-blue pulse of the distant faerie lights, the
handsome young warrior leveled the point of his absurdly too-short spear at
where the obese form of the wicked prince cringed in a bed that was too
small, although understandably so: a full-sized bed would have taken up too
much room.
“Aye,” the young warrior said, his voice a stage whisper that could
carry as far as need be, his accent foreign although impossible to place,
“you may count on it, traitor Prince. You sold out Barony Furnael, and
today there’ll surely be an accounting.”
That had already been said, and not particularly well, either.
“By my fathers and theirs, I swear there’ll be an accounting,” the
ramrod-straight nobleman echoed, clapping his hand to the young warrior’s
shoulder. “I swear that to you, Pirondael, and to you, Walter Slovotsky.”
Again, he repeated himself. Redundantly.
Argh.
Neither the warrior nor the nobleman at his side seemed to notice how
the prince’s hand fumbled with a blade under his pillow. It wasn’t as though
it was hidden from them, but their gaze never left the prince’s face.
“An accounting,” the evil prince said with a snicker, “you’d have an
accounting, would you? Of course I sold off your barony, Furnael. It was
dead, gone, lost, a rotting corpse, stinking in the sun. Are those words you
do not understand, dear Baron? If the corpse could serve Bieme, then how
could I not let the Holts consume the body bite by bite? Why should I not
have allowed them to feast on the carrion?” He leaned forward, as though
about to impart a secret, and the baron leaned forward as though to receive
it, pausing dramatically, as no word would have been able to be heard
through the gasps.
Pirojil leaned back in his seat as the scene played itself predictably,
inexorably, repetitively toward the moment that Pirondael would stab
Furnael, and then Walter Slovotsky would kill the prince with the single
throw of a knife.
He had seen much better, but what had he expected? Birth of an Empire
was hardly a classic in the spirit of Iranys or Tea for the Tendentious. The
stage was too small, and the actors were by no means the best in the empire.
It did have some virtues, though: for one thing, of the three playhouses
open in Biemestren, the House of Wise Tidings was the only one featuring a
production Pirojil had not already seen at all, much less repeatedly. For
another thing, the lighting was well done: save for the stage, the room was
dark, and in the dark, Pirojil was no more ugly than anybody else; his
massive, irregular brows, his huge broken nose and jutting jaw did not
offend.
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