The Iron Palace
Praise for the novels of Morgan Howell
“Intriguing world building and wonderful characters made this an awesome book.”
—Romance Book Wyrm, on
A Woman Worth Ten Coppers
“What makes Coppers—and, so far, Howell’s writing as a whole—a standout is the complexity of her characters, and the sensitivity with which she portrays their struggles.… Howell brings the gritty, ‘real world’ flavor of urban fantasy to the more traditional landscape of high fantasy [and] manages to avoid the clichés of both.”
—The Accidental Bard, on
A Woman Worth Ten Coppers
“What Anne McCaffrey and Naomi Novik have done for dragons, Morgan Howell has done for orcs.… Ms. Howell has written a spellbinding high fantasy novel that is refreshingly original and shows how talented a storyteller she is.”
—SF Revu, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
“An involving, entertaining mix.… Dar [is] a fascinatingly thorny character.”
—Locus, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property and
The Queen of the Orcs: Clan Daughter
“Howell has created a fascinating, believable world and a compassionate, kick-ass heroine who helps the weak and uses wit and agility to survive and triumph.”
—Booklist, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
“Every once in a while, a novel comes along with a character that I absolutely love. [Dar] is such a character. She is fierce, protective, passionate, scarred, loyal, and wise.… I truly loved King’s Property and I highly recommend it.”
—Fantasy Debut [fantasydebut.blogspot.com],
on The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
“Author Morgan Howell has created an outstanding foundation for the next two books to build upon.… Be warned, you will not want to put down this story.”
—huntressreviews.com, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
“An unusual tale … Howell’s depiction of orc culture is fascinating—these orcs are as big, strong, and dangerous as any in fantasy, but they also have moral and ethical issues of importance. This is not a book to read for fun on a rainy night—it’s a book to think about.”
—ELIZABETH MOON,
Nebula Award–winning author of
The Deed of Paksenarrion, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
“Dar never loses our admiration and compassion—qualities at the heart of any struggling hero. King’s Property tests your own presumptions of ‘the other’ and brings to mind the cultural prejudices and wars born from betrayal that are so sadly evident throughout our own history.”
—KARIN LOWACHEE,
author of Warchild, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
“In a crowded field, Howell has succeeded in creating an original and vivid fantasy. [The] characters display unexpected depths of humanity—even when they’re not human. I was captivated by Dar. Highly recommended.”
—NANCY KRESS,
Nebula Award–winning author of
Beggars in Spain, on
The Queen of the Orcs: King’s Property
BY MORGAN HOWELL
THE SHADOWED PATH TRILOGY
A Woman Worth Ten Coppers
Candle in the Storm
The Iron Palace
THE QUEEN OF THE ORCS TRILOGY
King’s Property
Clan Daughter
Royal Destiny
The Iron Palace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2011 by William H. Hubbell
Interior map and illustration: © William H. Hubbell
Cover art: Gene Mollica
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52477-5
www.delreybooks.com
v3.1
For my sons,
Nathaniel and Justin
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
From the Scroll of Karm
Acknowledgments
These things crack a stone—
iron, frost, and love.
—Averen proverb
ONE
THE NIGHT roared with the sound of rain. Its damp chill flowed from the hut’s unglazed windows and drove the old peasant and his wife to huddle by their hearth. There they shivered despite the fire. Then, mingled with the noise of falling water came the jangle of distant bells. They rang out in an uneven cadence. Jang! … Jang! … Jang! Jang! … Jang! The elderly pair glanced at each other uneasily.
“Karm preserve us!” said the woman. “A cursed one!”
“Mayhap ’twill pass us by,” said her husband.
“Pray Karm it does,” replied his wife. She arched her thumb in the Sign of the Balance. But as the couple listened, the bells sounded ever closer.
“Don’t just sit there!” barked the man. “Get an offerin’. Mind ye, nothin’ fine.”
The man’s wife rushed to a basket and hastily rummaged through it until she found three moldy roots. Then she hurried back to her husband and pressed them in his hand. “Ye do it, Toby. I’m afeared.”
There was no reply, only the sound of bells.
Mayhap its tongue’s gone, thought the man. He’d heard tales of a cursed one whose entire face had rotted away. The peasant shuddered at the thought of it as he strained to see some movement. The bells sounded close before Toby finally viewed a dark figure staggering like a drunk across the rain-soaked field. It seemed more a phantom than a person, for Toby saw no face, only a pale orb with dark spots for eyes.
“I’ve roots fer ye,” Toby cried. The figure kept advancing. When it was twenty paces away, Toby saw the face was wrapped in bandages with two eyeholes that likened to sockets in a skull. Toby tossed the roots at the advancing stranger. When they splashed on the wet ground, he slammed the door.
Jang! … Jang! … Jang! The bells sounded louder.
“ ’Tis supposed to go away,” said the woman. “Go away!” she shouted at the closed door. “We’ve fed ye, now leave us be.”
The bells rang a few more times, then stopped. For a spell, the silence was a relief, but it quickly turned ominous. The pair listened for some sound that indicated the visitor was retreating. All they heard was falling rain. At last, the woman spoke. “Do ye think ’tis still here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Better look.”
Toby walked hesitantly to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out. A sodden form lay motionless on the ground. A hand wrapped in filthy bandages still gripped a belled staff. The derelict was dressed in layers of rags and so wrapped with bandages that it was impossible to tell if a man or a woman had collapsed in the mud. “ ’Tis here,” Toby called back to his wife. “Mayhap ’tis dead.”
“Oh nay!” exclaimed the women. “If ’tis dead, then the curse will pass to us!” She grabbed a broom, opened the door wider, and prodded the still figure with the broom handle. “ ’Tis alive yet!”
“Pah, woman. ’Twas yer proddin’ that made it move.”
Then the couple heard a soft moan. “Get the wheelbarrow,” said the wife. “It hasn’t died yet. Ye can take it to the hermit.”
“But that means I’ll have to touch it!”
“Do ye want yer fingers and toes to rot off?” asked the woman. “ ’Cause ’twill happen if the curse passes to us.”
The man said nothing, but he threw on his cloak and exited the hut, giving the prone figure a wide berth as he did so. Soon he returned with a rickety, wooden wheelbarrow. “Ye’ll have to help me lift the wretch,” he said.
The body had the stature of a man, but when the couple hefted it into the wheelbarrow there seemed little substance beneath the soaked rags. Nonetheless, the body’s putrescent stench made lifting it a trial. They gagged from the odor that evoked disgusting images of what the filthy rags and bandages hid. Those images spurred the old man as he pushed his loathsome load across the field. Upon reaching the muddy road, he headed for the hermit’s abode. Don’t die, the peasant pleaded silently. Don’t die yet.
Toby’s destination was the ruin that housed a solitary man with a reputation for taking in the unwanted. The hermit, whose name no one knew, had lived there for many winters. A few folk said he was holy, while most claimed he was ill omened and kept their distance. Toby was one of the latter, and he had no qualms over leaving a cursed one at the man’s door.
After passing through fields and woods, the road headed uphill toward the remnant of a castle. The stronghold of some forgotten lord, it had fallen long ago in an equally forgotten battle. Over the intervening generations, most of its stones had been carted away to build humbler structures, but the massive blocks of the keep remained. The hermit lived among them. By the time Toby reached the jagged-topped hulk, he was breathing hard. To his eyes, the ruin was an impressive sight, the largest building he’d ever seen. It was also an eerie place and haunted by all accounts. The rain and darkness enhanced that impression, and the peasant was anxious to finish his task and depart.
The keep’s gateway was high upon its wall. The gate and the stone ramp leading up to it had disappeared long ago, so that the gateway seemed more like a huge window in the roofless wall than an entrance. A sizable crack in the wall’s base served as the current means to enter. Toby pushed his wheelbarrow through it into the keep’s lowest level. There, the thick walls of the basement storerooms remained, although all the floors above were gone. One of those storerooms had been roofed over to become the hermit’s home.
Toby removed the cursed one’s belled staff from the wheelbarrow before tipping its load in front of the closed door. Then he struck the staff against the flagstones hard and rapidly to jangle its bells. That done, he dropped the staff on the still figure by his feet, grabbed the handles of his wheelbarrow, and fled into the night.
TWO
DAVEN SLEPT lightly and had wakened when the wheelbarrow’s wooden wheel rumbled over the ruined keep’s stone floor. Nevertheless, he didn’t greet his late-night visitor. The hermit’s residence was the dumping place for sick and dying strangers, and he assumed that whoever was bringing someone to his doorway would prefer not to be seen. The jangle of bells confirmed his assumption. Another cursed one, he thought. Daven waited until his visitor had departed before opening the door.
The hermit didn’t fear the wretch he found there, for he didn’t believe the rotting curse passed to anyone upon death. He had cared for—and buried—nearly a dozen of those so afflicted with no ill effect. Nevertheless, he saw the benefit of the superstition, for it offered the cursed some protection. Likewise, the practice of giving them food to go away gave them a means to survive. It was a miserable existence, and Daven pitied the cursed. Despite their repellent and malodorous bodies, he made it his work to care for them as atonement for a deed that continued to haunt him.
The still form beyond the doorway smelled like a corpse, so Daven felt for a pulse. When he found a faint one, he gently dragged the cursed one into his home to tend him or her. First he lit a fire, then filled a pot with water and set it on the flames to warm. Afterward, he turned his attention to the cursed one’s bandages. The soiled wrappings that the cursed wore served mostly to hide their sores. Seldom changed, they usually did more harm than good. Daven unwrapped a hand first, expecting to find festering stumps where fingers had been.
Instead, the hand was perfectly intact. Daven stared at it for a moment in surprise before exposing the other hand and finding it in the same condition. Then he pulled mud-caked cloth from around a foot. Not a toe was missing. The remaining foot proved equally undamaged. Nevertheless, something was rotting. Daven temporarily ignored the mystery of why someone would bandage healthy limbs and uncovered the face. When its wrapping fell away, he uttered a sharp cry and jerked back.
The face was that of a man. Though gaunt and covered with grizzled stubble, it was whole and without a single sore. Nonetheless, the face was marked, but not by affliction. It bore tattoos that made it appear frozen in a moment of rage. Dark-blue lightning flashed down a furrowed brow and scowl lines were needled into the sunken cheeks. The closed eyes lay in pools of permanent shadow. In the dim light, the effect was menacing, but that wasn’t why Daven was so startled. His last encounter with a Sarf—for the man’s tattoos marked him as one—had nearly cost him his life. If his pursuer had been able to swim, Daven would have surely perished. He still had nightmares in which the Sarf found him to finish his assault. The man before him was a different Sarf, but for an unsettling moment, Daven thought the wrath needled on the face might be directed toward him.
Daven turned his attention to caring for the unconscious Sarf. Thinking the source of the smell might be a festering wound, he began to undress him. When he removed a grime-covered overblouse, he found the decayed carcass of a hare dangling from the Sarf’s neck like a pendant. It was the origin of the disgusting smell. Daven disposed of the carcass outside and burned the clothes tainted by its stench.
The Sarf lay unconscious throughout the process, and he remained so when Daven removed the rest of his clothes to bathe him. The man’s body was almost skeletal. It was also filthy and crisscrossed with old scars. A jagged one that ran from the collarbone past the navel looked as if it should have been fatal. Yet the most remarkable thing about the Sarf’s body was its chill. Usually the extremities of those suffering from exposure were colder than the torso, but the opposite was true with the unconscious man. That suggested an otherworldly cause. A spell? wondered Daven. He might learn the answer if the man revived.