Final interlude: The Brown Hand throws a match.
The pharmacist had saved Princep Siklovic a great deal of work. Siklovic was quick-witted enough to push the small barrel of gunpowder lying next to the body away from the smoldering remains of the weapon that was still clutching the deceased's hand.
Apart from his hand and forearm, little of the apothecary was visible, and that was for the best. His mutilated remains were almost entirely covered by the oak door. The shock of the misfire had lifted it from its hinges, but miraculously hadn't ignited the contents of the barrel. A pointed shoe still protruded from beneath the door.
Siklovic glanced out into the alley, looking cautiously. It was empty; the explosion had apparently caused no stir. The revolutionary heaved the door open and propped it precariously against the entrance. His gaze fell upon the first victim of his popular uprising. Technically speaking, it had sacrificed itself.
What remained of the pharmacist's face was completely black. His glasses had burned themselves entirely into his eye sockets, the lenses in their frames cracked and covered with fine fissures like a spiderweb. The dead man's now toothless mouth was still open in a sound of astonishment that had never been uttered.
Siklovic shrugged and examined the weapon lying on the floor with interest; its wide muzzle had cracked. Beneath the rear, tapered end of the funnel was a trigger, and to the side of it, a powder pan still glowing. Siklovic hastily stamped out the embers. He waited a moment and finally wrested the cooled weapon from the pharmacist's clammy fingers.
Ah. A slingshot, definitely. Siklovic had heard of such devices before. His education might have been limited—a glance from the edge of a carpet was enough to tell him that—but he had always been interested in ballistics, even if the word itself wouldn't have meant much to him. He had been a master with a slingshot since his early youth.
This one was better, but clearly not yet fully developed, as the corpse at his feet proved. Handguns had only recently enriched the arsenals of the kingdom and its enemies. Unlike cannons, they had the advantage of being usable at shorter ranges. Unfortunately, this also meant they could be used unintentionally against their users.
The pharmacist had proven himself an innovative early adopter of the latest technology and had made the ultimate sacrifice for research and knowledge. Siklovic took this as further confirmation that progress marched in lockstep with the revolution. The delicate question now arose, however, of how he could use the barrel of gunpowder without depriving this revolution of its most brilliant mind—himself.
Siklovic wouldn't have been Siklovic if he hadn't found the wrong answer to that. With it, he secured his place in the history books. Not as the liberator of the oppressed masses, as had been his original intention, but as the instigator of the most devastating war the kingdom had ever faced.
His flimsy plan involved smuggling the apothecary's barrel of gunpowder, disguised as a wine merchant, between the castle walls and triggering an explosion there, a signal. To do this, he first had to go to the marketplace to somehow get his hands on the wagon and cargo of one of the merchants he knew would be heading up to the castle after the market, where they offered only their sour, inferior wares, with their assortment of fine wines reserved exclusively for the king (Manacardi would have disagreed with this assessment of quality).
So he loaded a handcart he found in the apothecary's yard with his explosive cargo and set off for the market. He parked the cart at the edge of the action, decided to take a break after his many acts of benevolence, sat down on the ground, leaned against a cart wheel, reached into his pocket, stuffed a pipe in, lit it, and absentmindedly threw the match in a high arc behind him.
The rest is history. A few years later, it became common practice in the kingdom to mark pipes sold with a warning inscription carved into their bowl:
"Smoking kills."
Despite thorough investigations by the "Department for the Investigation and Prevention of Publicly Dangerous Activities Among the People," established after the Siklovic incident within the Royal Secret Service (which was still in its infancy at the time), no conclusive evidence could be established as to why the powder keg had not exploded in the pharmacy. After all, a veritable deflagration had occurred there in the immediate vicinity of the gunpowder beforehand.
For a time, a conspiracy theory persisted that pharmacists and goatherds had conspired together, only to have a fatal falling out. As a precaution, both pharmacies and goat farming were banned throughout the kingdom. This had a detrimental effect on public health and made goat cheese an almost unaffordable, scarce commodity.
Collateral damage
The explosion in the city was clearly heard and felt in the castle's audience hall. The brittle parquet floor cracked open. The master of ceremonies fell back in shock. His silk-stockinged legs stuck up next to his staff, which was stuck in one of the holes.
Henri de Laballe immediately drew his sword and looked around, ready for battle. Lackeys and other courtiers cowered under tables and benches for protection. The Countess de Laballe quickly and completely concealed the golden apple in her décolletage, however little space there was. The king blew his nose into the silk handkerchief she presented him with, as his nose always tingled when he was afraid. Now the king also had a nosebleed and soiled the finely embroidered handkerchief. Henri de Laballe considered this a fatal insult to his sex.
He had not yet had the chance to make a corresponding remark, for the fat Fleuribal d'entre Deux Mères had thrown herself at his neck, hung on him like a millstone, kicked her pillar-like legs and cried: "Save me, noble knight, oh please save me!"
Disgusted, De Laballe freed his neck from the clutching grip of her sausage fingers, shook off the feminine burden, stepped over the whimpering bundle of flesh, pulling his sister to his side, thrust his sword threateningly towards the throne – and missed the king there.
He had taken refuge behind the side curtains of the throne canopy, trembling like an aspen leaf and demanding his Gards du Corps. The noble soldiers, however, had already fled, suspecting another explosion in Manacardi's laboratory and alerting the fire watch.
This proved to be a blessing in retrospect, because after the brave firefighters realized that a fire in the city was apparently getting out of control, they actually set off there, along with their pump truck and the two leaky hoses, even though there were only inferior subjects to be saved down there.
Le Roi, however, was without bodyguards. Only a few meters now separated his anointed head from the tip of Henri de Laballe's sword, which, at throat level, was making its way to the king's hiding place.
Then Chancellor Marchand stepped into the path of the knight in silver armor. "Your Grace!" he cried, "stop! A regrettable accident down in the city, it seems; everything will be sorted out, I assure you!"
De Laballe did not lower his sword and cast a disdainful sidelong glance at the Chancellor. “Never,” he said, “has our family been so insulted! Our dowry is stained with the phlegm, the sweat of fear, the blood, and the tears of an effeminate king who is not worthy to be my brother-in-law. Your entire wretched kingdom is a most regrettable accident, and quite obviously neither you nor your king are capable of controlling it.”
“Well,” de Laballe added, parting the curtain behind which the king had sought refuge with a stroke of his sharp blade, “we will take care of this task for you.” Then he looked with disgust at the king lying on the ground, who had raised his arms protectively over his face. He would gladly have ended the king’s miserable existence right then and there. But he currently lacked his father’s consent.
Therefore, with a contemptuous snort, Henri sheathed his blade, turned around, pulled his sister with him, and called back over his shoulder: “You will hear from us. Or rather: from our cannons.” Henri de Laballe slammed the door to the audience chamber shut behind him with a thunderous crash.
Enemy swears with
“Only a miracle can save this idiotic king,” said Duc Bouchand de Laballe, briefly looking at his son Henri who had just returned, tearing a leg from the roast chicken lying on the table in front of them both and biting off a decent portion.
“The old man,” Henri de Laballe said to himself in his thoughts, with regret, “still has remarkably good teeth.” The impatient future heir, however, audibly remarked, “Quite right, Father. Bloodshed is always preferable to blood ties. Why should we let that crowned weakling marry into our lineage? War is better. But what do we do now with my sister, that silly turkey?”
The old Duc stared at the white breast meat of the chicken that his fork had just exposed beneath the grooved skin. "This marriage," he said then, dangerously quietly, "was my idea, as you may recall, my son."
A tense silence fell between the two Laballes. They scrutinized each other through lowered eyelids, as if looking through arrow slits. The older Laballe knew what the younger Laballe wanted. Always had.
During Henri de Laballe's childhood, few playmates lasted long in his company. Unfortunate accidents occurred when someone surpassed him at vaulting, hit the target more often than he did in archery, or rode better than he did. For his fourteenth birthday, Henri wished for a massacre. He got it. His father spared no expense and devastated an entire village full of serfs.
The Duke and his heir watched from a hilltop on horseback as their mercenaries set fire to huts in the valley below, spearing and hacking to pieces the people who rushed out, laughing all the while. It was then that Henri de Laballe turned to his father, overcome by the only emotion he was capable of – bloodlust. Tears of emotion welled in the son's eyes. "Thank you, mon père," he said sincerely, and then immediately fixed his gaze on the bloody scene, absorbing it as greedily as a vampire drinks its lifeblood.
Since then, the relationship between father and son had cooled. It had become clear early on that young Laballe viewed the old man primarily as an obstacle to his own rise to power. The reigning Duke's bodyguard therefore surpassed the armies of many smaller principalities and was constantly present—especially, and as always, now, as the aged Duke, in the presence of his impatient heir, was gleefully sucking the fat from the roast chicken from the tips of his long fingers, all the way down to his third, ring-adorned knuckle. Three elite soldiers stood in the background, ready to spring into action at any moment should Henri's affection for his father fall victim to a sudden twitch of his sword-wielding arm.
“Certainly, Father,” said Henri, taking his hand from the sword hilt. “What are your plans? For the war, for the country, for my sister?”
“Half-sister,” the Duke said, to the astonishment of his heir, without further explanation. With a wink, the old man poured himself and his son red wine. “She’s going to a convent, of course. I already have one in mind. The war, well…” The old Duke leaned back and let the wine goblet jiggle briefly in his hand before raising it to his lips and emptying it in one go, causing blood-red rivulets to trickle from the corners of his mouth, which he wiped away with a decisive tug of his sleeve over his chin.
“War, my son, is your business,” he said. “You were born and raised for it, you already declared it verbally in the throne room of the Shit King. I will follow up with an official diplomatic dispatch, immediately. Now wage it, your war, like a true de Laballe. I give you every necessary authority. Our army is at your disposal. Except for my bodyguard, of course.”
Few moments in Henri de Laballe's life had filled him with such joy as this one. His father had just granted him command of the entire duchy's army, ready for the welcome prospect of murder, pillaging, plunder, and destruction. This army could be deployed both at home and abroad. The inevitable victory beyond the far too confines of the Laballe family's territories could also mark the beginning of a domestic power shift, bodyguard or no bodyguard.
Henri raised his glass in a pledge. "To the Duc de Laballe and his kingdom!" he exclaimed ambiguously, seeing himself as a future duke—and perhaps even more. As for his true plans for the future, they could be quite aptly expressed in the rousing words of the unfulfilled freedom fighter Princep Siklovic: "The king must go!" With a secret addendum: "My father too!"
Henri's father rose somewhat laboriously from his seat, clinked glasses with his son all the more resolutely and declared: "Regnum instead of rectum: The incompetent shit king is in the ass."
Henri beat his chest. A spark glowed in his eyes, the kind that would ignite a wall of fire, consuming everything in its path. Henri had no more time to lose. There was much to do. And many to kill. In the end, of course, the king, just like his father. And his sister—well, she wasn't a real one, as he'd just learned. That, too, could be exploited. He could already imagine several uses for the little bastard.
As he left, the new commander-in-chief of the army of the Duchy of Laballes stroked the finely chiseled skulls on his breastplate with the greatest tenderness he was capable of. And he smiled in the way a predator raises the corners of its mouth to bar its teeth and sink them into its prey.