Ignas gave us a sad, small, thin-lipped smile. “I can count the number of people who know my name on one hand. That’s because everyone else is dead. I say this to you only because you enter my residence carrying my brother’s mark, so you must pardon this old man for his concern.”
Red had stayed by the door, and crossed her arms as three Meewfolk rogues materialized from the shadows, lingering close by. I hadn’t seen them, hadn’t sensed them, and my HUD hadn’t picked them up until they revealed themselves.
“No problem, Your Majesty. And don’t worry about your safety: your brother’s a dick,” I said to him. “I signed up with him to catch a murderer, not become one.”
Suri made a choking sound in the back of her throat.
Ignas’ mouth quirked to one side. It wasn’t exactly a smile. His white-gray eyes were very level. Wise, cold… and as Andrik had said, disciplined. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t tell you because he swore me to a pact,” I replied. “Take a guess.”
“He hired you to kill me?”
“I can’t say.”
“Fair enough.” Ignas blew away a strand of imaginary hair, then chuckled and shook his head. For a moment, he almost seemed like the wise, good-natured man Matthias had described, but the fleeting humor was very short-lived. “So - I have been up all night, and as I’m sure you understand, I’m quite tired. I will make this short and simple. You have come to me about ceasing my activities now that Andrik’s evangelical council is all but dead. The answer is no.”
“What? Just like that?” I said.
“Yes.” Ignas replied. “Just like that.”
Suri stepped up, but I held a hand up. Eyes narrowed, she jerked her chin, then stood back.
“Well, good thing I’m not here to try and stop you. Red over there made me an offer the other night,” I said, motioning back over my shoulder. “I’m interested.”
“Then you should have listened to her during the event.” Ignas shrugged his shoulders minutely. “It’s not a light-hearted offer I make in accordance with your whims.”
“No. Defeating the monster you made out of those people at the party wasn’t a light-hearted decision, either,” I said. “But when Andrik tried to bind me to an ancestral vow to get me to kill you, I started having second thoughts. I had an older brother I owe my life to. Fratricide is way beyond my comfort zone.”
“But the persecution of my people is tolerable?” Red snapped from behind us.
“Ebisa.” Ignas’ eyes flicked up past my shoulder. “You know as well as I do that personal grievances surpass societal concerns in all men, Mercurion or otherwise. Come here and join us.”
Red - Ebisa - stalked over to us and slouched against the edge of the desk, her arms and ankles crossed.
“We worked out the pattern to the assassinations,” Suri said. “You were having those men killed to mock the virtues of the church.”
“Virtues none of those men adhered to in their pursuit of power and self-interest. Abel and Darko were despotic theocrats. Toth, Orban and Erik were hypocrites and perverts.” Ignas lifted his chin, then turned his face to look back at the fireplace. “Khors, the Forge Father. God of artists and crafters, the builders and smiths and potters who make any nation great. He is a good god, worthy of worship. And yet, Khors is only one of the Nine. Without the others to balance out the material power of his church, he quickly becomes an overbearing patriarch mired in tradition. The crafting done in his name becomes soulless, or worse - bent toward nothing but war and control.”
“The last two virtues left are discipline and honesty,” I said. “My guess is that the Duke is discipline, and your brother-”
“Is honesty,” Ignas finished. “Well, at least he hired astute investigators. But were you astute enough to be able to deduce that he has no intention of rewarding you? The men he hired you to protect are now almost all gone. Even if they had survived and you bought Andrik the Slayer in chains, he would have turned on you in the end.”
I grinned and shrugged. “Now that you mention it, I had wondered.”
Suri folded her arms. “So the affair, the suicide, everything was faked?”
“Of course,” Ignas replied. “Andrik’s assassins were hounding me within hours of my framing and disinheritance. Friends of mine helped me source a body from the morgue, which we spirited into the castle and used to fake my death while I escaped.”
“How did he frame you?” Suri asked.
“It is commonly believed that only the Royal Family can use Corvinus Rubies - that is not true,” Ignas replied. “Anyone with magical ability can use them, but the Words of Power are jealously guarded family secrets. They are conveyed only to the heir of the throne on the day he achieves adulthood. My brother spied on us during the ceremony between me and my father and learned the words - using a Mercurion-made automata, ironically.”
“Kanzo’s listening devices?” I frowned.
“Indeed. It was that device that convinced my brother to become Kanzo’s patron,” Ignas said. “Once he knew the command words for our family jewels, my dearest brother hired a Dakhari magus to ensorcell a ruby with lurid illusions. Andrik had tried to dig dirt on me for years, you see. He had failed to unearth anything that could have me disinherited, so he settled for making something up. When the recording was shown to my father, he believed that only I had the Words required for the rubies, and I’m sure you know the rest.”
“I’d wondered why you were using Kanzo,” Suri mused.
Ignas reached out, and lay a hand on Ebisa’s shoulder. “That is not the only reason.”
As one, we both looked at the masked Mercurion woman.
“Andrik used Kanzo’s listening device to take the throne,” Ignas said. “And in the process, Kanzo not only gained a great deal of wealth, he gained the Words for his own use. Andrik is a boor and knows nothing of sang’ti’tak, Mercurion artificing, and naively assumed that Kanzo would not be able to do anything with his knowledge of the rubies. Instead, Kanzo used this and his new-found fortune to commit a grave sin against his own kind.”
“Why didn’t he just marry and do things the normal way?” I spread my hands. “I mean, he’s a Mastercrafter, maybe the best Artificer on the mainland... that has to make him an eligible bachelor, doesn’t it?”
“Two reasons,” Ebisa said stiffly. “For one thing, he is nearly thirty-six years old. He is elderly by the standards of our race.”
I scratched my head. “Thirty-six is elderly?”
Ebisa nodded. Her sculpted porcelain mask gave no hint to her expression. “We are born adult, self-aware, and invested by the knowledge of our clan - ideally. But the mana which animates us decays; our lives are fleeting, and thus we are driven to make all that we can, to leave a legacy of our sang’ti’tak to our descendants. He has perhaps eight months of life left.”
“And the second reason is that he is clanless, right?” Suri asked.
“Yes. He is from Tlaxi’ca Tisaksa, the House of the Wasp, but was stripped of his House name and title for stealing blueprints for sang’ti’tak from the Clan vault,” Ebisa said. “There are Tisaksa in Taltos. His clan status is a matter of public record, and a clanless juchi cannot marry.”
I rubbed my eyes. “So the 'kicked out of my clan because of my love and peace' thing is bullshit?”
Ebisa looked down, clutching her arm with a thin hand. “Somewhat. He refused to fight in the Zaunt Civil War, but not because of his ideals. The only things Kanzo cares about are himself and his creations. Not even them. His entire life, everything he has done, is to protect and gratify himself and his pride. Everything.”
“Gods. Poor Rin,” Suri murmured.
Ebisa barked a bitter laugh. “Poor Rin? Oh yes, he loves Rin, the miracle child of her Clan. She’s Starborn... a one-in-a-million among our people, destined to be able to live again and again. He was so proud to have her as his apprentice, because she makes him feel even more important than being an Artificer for the Royal fa
mily. Kanzo treats her like a trophy, but she... he never...”
“Take off your mask, Ebisa.” Ignas dropped his voice.
Ebisa’s shoulders hunched, and she drew her arm in closer to her chest.
Ignas squeezed her shoulder, and gestured to us. “By their expressions, you know there shall be no judgment here.”
She nodded slightly, then reached up to push back her hood, revealing a smooth, hairless scalp of silver silicone. She had the usual backswept crystalline wings in place of ears, but they looked different to any I’d seen on other Mercurions. They were curly and fancy, made of red stained glass and soldered metal. She unhooked her mask, and let it fall into her hand before lowering it.
Ebisa’s face matched the rest of her scarecrow body. Her skin was drawn tight over her skull. Her nose was thin-bridged, with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. The overall structure of her face was one of was eerie beauty... but she had no lips, and more alarmingly, no eyes. In place of eyes, she had four polished Corvinus Rubies, two to each side. It made her face look utterly alien.
“He had to make do,” she hissed. Without lips, the grim slash of Ebisa’s mouth peeled back from her metal teeth with every word. “That’s what he always told me. He had to improvise. So that is what I am. His improvisation.”
“Establishing a body and brain complex enough to sustain an intelligent consciousness is extraordinarily difficult,” Ignas said sadly. “But the formulations and magic required for it are not unknown, and can be obtained by rogue artificers desperate enough to make the effort. But there is no such thing as true Life magic in the world... only the Words that simulate the complexity of life.”
“And he does not know all of them, and nor did he have the resources to properly equip my body.” Ebisa finished. “So not only am I juchi, I am an abomination. I require Corvinus Rubies to continue living, and no Mercurion will look at me, even other juchi. I am forever without any one of my own kind, even in friendship... which was surely Kanzo’s intention. This way, I could be certain that the only one who would love me was him.”
“I think you look kind of badass, to be honest,” I said.
Suri elbowed me sharply. “So you’re what is being used to blackmail him?”
Ebisa put her mask back in place, hooking it over her ears. “I am the one blackmailing him – not that he believes me.”
“Meaning?”
“He thinks I’m doing this against my will,” Ebisa spat. “He thought that I was happy in his little laboratory, entirely reliant on him to continue living. I learned where he kept the rubies I rely on to live, and I escaped.”
Suri frowned. “Kanzo is murdering because he thinks Ignas will free you?”
Ebisa drew herself up straight. “Yes. He operates under the threat that I will be revealed to our people and he will suffer their judgment. The Mercurions will cast his name from our archives here and in Zaunt. His blueprints will be burned, and no children will be modeled on him. His works will be destroyed. Even his darling Rin will purge all memory of him and find a new Master. No one will remember Kanzo, and nothing terrifies a narcissist so completely as erasure. He will do anything - anything - to leave his legacy. And so he shall: as a kingkiller and assassin, which is a lesser fate than what he has been offered if he does not comply. At least this way, he knows he shall be remembered for something.
Chapter 36
“Well damn.” I put my hands on my hips. “Guess you aren’t fucking around.”
“There is too much at stake.” Ignas shook his head, regarding Suri and I with a critical eye. “I don’t suppose you know what caused this rift between brothers to start with, do you?”
“Nope,” Suri replied. I shook my head.
“Not merely a case of simple jealousy, I assure you.” Ignas squeezed Ebisa on the shoulder and left her where she leaned against the desk, walking around it to sit down. “Andrik has never been a self-disciplined man. From an early age, he was always prone to fancies and laziness. He was smart, but would fail repeatedly at simple things - arithmetic, writing, magic - simply because he wouldn’t follow through on the work required. He was always looking for the pill to cure his woes and struggles.”
I privately winced to myself a little. That sounded awfully familiar. I’d been like that before the Army.
“You must realize that this is the reason why religion appeals so strongly to Andrik,” Ignas said. He began to fill a pipe with tobacco, and my chest panged with the memory of Matthias - and the sharp reminder that this man had been responsible for his death. “It has nothing to do with piety. When we were boys, he got it in his head that if he prayed to the gods, they would fix his problems for him. Anything from a toothache to his homework, he hoped that he could pray it away. Of course, that’s not how it works. Or it wasn’t... until he joined this, this cult.”
“Wait. This just took a sharp left turn,” I said. “What do you mean, he joined a cult?”
“Exactly that,” Ignas said. “He joined a cult. I was never able to dig into it very far, because he went to pains to hide his involvement, but I found small signs that I raised with our father. The problem was that the main symptoms of his involvement with this organization were, in my father’s eyes, ‘good’ things. Andrik lost weight. He became more aggressive, more confident, interested in matters of state. He began to devour information on magic, philosophy, statecraft... all of it with a peculiarly radical slant. He changed very quickly from a foppish young milksop into a shrewd courtier, which pleased our father but raised my hackles.”
Suri had her resting cop face back on. “So how do you know he was in a cult?”
Ignas shrugged. “I found his shrine of worship. A week after that, father came into lunch, screaming about ‘filth’ and waving a Corvinus Ruby with a very clear recording of me sodomizing a talented male Meewfolk sword dancer. I was disowned and disinherited on the spot... and thus we share this moment.”
“Can you describe the shrine?” she asked.
Ignas’s brow furrowed. “It was a nook inside of a walk-in closet in Andrik’s room. I went to view it after my spy – his valet – reported that Andrik was up to something in a part of his suite that he had forbidden the servants to enter. But it’s strange – I remember elements of what I saw, but I could not describe the shrine to you. I know that he had taken the Ravensblood Ruby – our crown jewel and a relic of the Church of the Maker – and had it set up in some ritualistic fashion. There was a deer’s heart there… but the rest, it is like my memory rejected the sight of it. I recall that there was a symbol on prominent display, and that it terrified me beyond all reason.”
Me and Suri looked at one another, then back to the king. “Do you remember what the symbol was? Like, do you think you could draw it?”
“I am afraid I cannot,” he replied heavily. “I can tell you now that it was no symbol associated with The Nine. Not even a shrine to Rusolka is as dark as what I saw that day.”
“Your Majesty, this adds a whole new dimension to everything,” I said. “May I make you a counteroffer?”
He twitched his shoulders. “You may try.”
“Call a truce. Leash your attack dog, and tell Kanzo to hold off on the next target,” I said. “I’ll investigate this cult issue for you and we’ll get evidence of his blasphemy. That’s going to discredit him badly enough that if you step in, you’ll be able to take the throne again. No one else has to die, and if we’re caught, it’s no skin off your back.”
“Not a bad idea,” Suri drawled. “My pit bosses told me to come to Taltos because the King of Cats was known to be a fair and trustworthy business partner. I’m willing to put my money on you and throw in with Hector.”
Ignas clenched his pipe down between his teeth. “No. By the time you have enough evidence to convince the Council of Lords, all of the Meewfolk of this city will be staked on the walls, the Mercurions murdered and drained for their blood, and this nation will be on an unstoppable course toward becoming a corrupt theocr
acy.”
“You’re living proof that humiliation is a devastating tool in the hand of a monarch,” I said. “If you prove you were framed and that Andrik is a fratricidal scumbag, you have a more legitimate claim than you would if you killed him.”
“None of what we have undertaken is being done lightly or without consideration of the consequences. If we even pause in our efforts, more innocent citizens will die by his hand. He has already closed the Mercurion’s quarter, and this district is next. Andrik must pay for his crimes against me and Vlachia, and I will not miss the chance to take my country back for the sake of your convenience.”
“Then we have no choice.” I shrugged. “We have to kill Kanzo.”
Ignas put his palms against the top of his desk and pushed himself up to stand.
“I want to let you both free,” he said quietly. “I do. But there is too much at stake. I’m still willing to purchase your non-involvement for the duration of the upcoming events, but if you continue to threaten me, I will retaliate.”
Ebisa slowly straightened up from her slouch.
“Go ahead. I’ll respawn at Vulkan Keep, and we’ll spill this entire thing to Andrik. This place will be crawling with soldiers within an hour.” I pulled the collar of my armor down, baring my neck, and pointed at it. “Here you go - clear shot.”
“I never said anything about killing you, Starborn,” Ignas replied coldly. “If Kanzo dies before he achieves his final aim, you will never know peace again in Vlachia or the kingdoms of our allies.”
“I have a dragon outside who will torch this place if you so much as lay a hand on either of us.” I crossed my arms.
The man’s eyes narrowed. I could see the gears turning in his head. When Ebisa made to draw a dagger, he shook his head sharply.
“You’re a strong negotiator. I can respect that,” he said. “What is he offering you both that I cannot?”
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