by Jackson Lear
A shrug of monumental indifference. “All right.”
“Thank you.”
With a quick survey of the common room, checking the faces and types of folks passing the time, I ventured back upstairs to make sure no one had left a poisoned needle in my bed.
The innkeeper was surprisingly helpful, despite not having the answer to my question. I of course hadn’t found a ring from any previous guest, but it was a useful way to uncover who might’ve occupied my room before me. They might’ve made a copy of the key and could easily let themselves in.
Or the innkeeper was involved. I wouldn’t be surprised if every room I stayed in had a long list of transients and ruffians as previous guests who looked an awful lot like I do. That way the innkeepers could position us in a familiar location, spy on us if needs be, or send a message to the city watch that ‘another one’ has arrived and maybe one of them should check it out with their own key. But the doe-eyed innkeeper didn’t seem at all evasive.
No poisoned needle. At least, none that I could find.
I ventured outside. Zara emerged from the shadows across the street. Checked both ways. Approached.
“You weren’t as careful as you thought you were,” I said.
“I know about the hay trick and you’re not as smart as you think you are. What did you mean when you said Muro was step one?”
“It’s part of closing the trap. We rile him up, he leads us to the next person to talk to, we rile them up, they lead us to someone else, and soon we stumble upon the culprit, or a pattern, or the like.”
“Who’s next on your list?”
“Lieutenant Gustali.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
“Why not?”
“Because he lives with his father.”
“I’m sure he leaves the mansion every now and then.”
“Then you’ll be waiting an awful long time while Artavian’s killer is walking around free.”
“It’s not you, is it?”
She shot me a furious look. “No.”
“Because as far as assassins go I’m sure you have the skills to pull that off.”
“I’m not an assassin. All they do is kill for money.”
“You were in Verseii at the time. You had free access to the camp and city.”
“Town. But throwing up into someone’s mouth is not my style, not when I could simply smother him with a pillow while he slept in a room all by himself.”
“And if he thrashed around and tried to fight you off?”
“What, like Artavian did?” Her eyes narrowed, piercing me like a fine dagger. “I know how to cover my tracks. It’s something you should learn if you want to make it to the end of the year alive.”
Point taken. “I’ve been hearing warnings about Arlo. Who’s the governor there?”
“Serrus Dorma.”
“And he’s cracking down on the black market?”
“Yes. He comes from a strict evangelical background and has been making life difficult for everyone who doesn’t follow his way of life. Why is this important to Artavian’s death?”
“Maybe he was killed by someone from Arlo.”
“Unlikely. This wasn’t a company hit. This was one man who knew the army schedule better than any has-been.”
“What exactly has Dorma been doing in Arlo?”
“Raiding taverns, burning down brothels, demolishing gambling dens. Things have been getting worse ever since Emperor Markolo’s coronation.”
“I thought Markolo was quite the hedonist.”
“He could be. Dorma and the emperor seem to be on greatly different sides of morality, yet they’ve been close friends for the last twenty years.”
“Friends from the senate?”
“Dorma has never been a senator. He comes from a theological law background and still serves as a judge. I believe he and the emperor got to know each other through a battle of theology versus law. What is legal in one but not the other, illegal in both, that sort of thing. What are these warnings you’ve heard from Arlo?”
“That the black marketeers and mercenaries might be driven out of Arlo and will flock to Syuss as a result.”
Zara nodded. “General Kasera has warned me of exactly that.”
“Is that why you’re traveling with Alysia?”
“I’ve been close by ever since your arrival into her life. The people you screwed over might exact their revenge on you and everyone who helped you. They might think that Miss Kasera is fair game. The problems coming out of Arlo are just another security issue to keep me on my toes.” She turned, glaring at me for one last time. “I have to tell Miss Kasera everything that you’ve been up to.”
“And the commander, I bet.”
“I don’t work for the commander.” She left, slipping back into the shadows towards the Lavarta household.
I headed back inside. The innkeeper was busy gathering an order of drinks from one table, doing his best to remember three pints of ale, two of beer, one stew, three fish, and one pie. I waited by the stairs. No one seemed to pay me any attention. No one was deliberately avoiding me either. Some of the residents in the common room were travelers. Some wore light bandages wrapped around their wrists or hands. None were young, slim, fast moving trouble makers. Instead, two of the bandaged guests were old men who were comparing their recent wounds, picking at their wraps with their mouths hanging open, saying a lot of, “Oh aye, aye,” and nodding with not much happening between their ears. The third wounded person was a woman in her sixties with her wrist bound tight. From my vantage point I was the only bounty hunter in the room.
The innkeeper looked my way, placed me, and tread forward. “Dinner, sir?”
“Thank you. I was wondering if anyone had left a message for me.”
He blanked for a moment, going through everything he had seen and heard that day. Finally, he shook his head. “No, nothing sir.”
I assumed that meant I was still clear of trouble from Muro, Gustali, and even Lavarta. I ordered some oats and strips of donkey, told the innkeeper I’d be back in a moment, and returned to my room. The piece of hay dropped from the door frame, its friend right where I left it with the bitten-off piece pointing away. Satisfied that no one had come snooping around, I descended the stairs, found a table with the two old men and their bandaged hands, and played nice for once.
They came from Newbridge, it seemed. Were on their second day in Torne. Here to see some old army buddies in something of a reunion. None of them lived in Torne, nor had they served within the last thirty years. I made some enquiries about the governor, seeing what was local knowledge, but they knew about as much as I did. They asked if I had served. No, but I knew a few former soldiers and mages. They cracked a few jokes, asked if the mages got any less dickish after retiring. Sadly, no. They laughed, I smiled, and I listened to their stories of how bored they were on guard duty, how they largely despised the people they trained with while somehow still calling them brothers, and how there was more waiting than they cared for. I asked if they ever missed it.
“Not one second,” they both said.
Yet here they were, hoping to catch up with some old buddies from thirty years ago.
“Well, you miss a few of the people, but not the life.”
They asked what I did. I fed them some line about working for the magistrate’s office in Verseii. They asked what I was doing in Torne.
“Seeing an old friend,” I told them. “I don’t suppose anyone knows what restula means?”
One of them snorted. “Who’d you piss off?”
“A woman.”
He nodded with sympathy. “Restula, yeah. You never heard of him?”
I shook my head.
“He’s famous enough to be in a lot of stories, especially in them circuses and traveling groups.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a slave. Probably the most famous one of them all from Dborov. But these days he’s the fool.”
“Was h
e a fool in real life?”
“Half and half, I guess. He fought in the gladiatorial rings, provoking the animals into chasing him. Sometimes they was lions, sometimes they was elephants.”
“And now his name is an insult?”
The old man nodded. “He was very good at what he did … in the ring. Then he pissed off the wrong person. The next time he was doing his thing he was his usual theatrical self, running from one lion or the other. Then the gates opened and out came more lions. Then more again from a different gate. He couldn’t outrun them all and he certainly couldn’t fight them all. I guess he quickly realized that he was being made an example of.” The old man grinned at me, a toothy grin as well with alcohol riding across his breath. “Did she catch you luring other women?”
I didn’t answer. The fellas laughed at me, allowing their imaginations to run wild. I was nudged a few times, slurred at, until they settled down when their friends showed up.
I sat quietly, drifting from Zara’s potential insult to Artavian and then all the way to Alysia. Whenever the army buddies clapped and laughed it brought me back to life in the Governor’s Hand. Lo and behold, there were a handful of people in the corner were playing bones. The group at the next table were drinking themselves stupid on cheap ale and bragging about the hundreds of women they had seduced in their lives.
I sat quietly, picking over my donkey meat.
The first time I saw one of our own being tanked it chilled me. Not because I had to participate and pour water on top of the guy’s face along with everyone else, but because I was certain that this was going to be my fate one day. I never told anyone. I figured half of the company members either thought the same or believed it would never happen to them, and while I could guess who thought what I didn’t want to volunteer my suspicions so early into my career.
In my twenty years there we tanked six members before me. Two we knew were going to die, no question there. They knew it too, since we all poured our drinks over them real slow like. We weren’t savoring the moment, we were just making a point to the next guy who thought about fucking us over, whoever he might be. One guy we think drowned by accident. I mean, the thing about being tanked is that it’s assumed you’re going to die so there’s no real ‘accident’, but even so he seemed the most likely to have been spared, being the Captain’s oldest friend and all. Two others made it out of the tank and stayed with the company for longer than expected.
I’d like to say that I handled the ordeal better than anyone else, but I didn’t. All it took was ten seconds with the Captain pouring water onto my face and up my nose before I spasmed with uncontrollable shock. Everyone took a turn, drowning me while I was immobile, a gag in my mouth to stop me using magic and to lock my head in place. Lieutenant couldn’t even face me, yet he still poured. Greaser too. The other sixty people kept telling me to go fuck myself. Then came the onslaught of stinging eels and rats, all crawling and slithering over my face, scratching my forehead as they scrambled from one foe or another. By then the only way you can communicate is with simple yes or no answers. I was in that thing for hours before they tipped me over.
I never saw the Captain again. I limped out of the compound, soaking wet, with Third-Eye shoving me onto the road, saying, “I hope she was worth it.”
I finished my donkey meat and oats, watched the folks head upstairs to get some shut eye, and was shooed away by the innkeeper when he said he had to lock up. I went upstairs, waited an appropriate length of time, and removed the bolt to the shutters covering my window. It wasn’t easy getting a decent grab of the window or hoisting myself up and through it, but I managed.
There were two things I needed to take care of that evening. The first was to scout around the governor’s mansion at night and learn the layout of the roads. I had a history of being chased in unfamiliar territory. If it was to happen again I wanted some kind of forewarning about where to go or what to avoid.
The second task was to return to Sergeant Muro. In the dead of night. And this time I was expecting to come away with some bruises.
Chapter Twenty-One
Throughout my entire life one thing seemed to hold true no matter where you went: the majority of people will take extraordinary measures to avoid doing the job they’re supposed to do. They’ll play up an injury to get them out of lifting something heavy, they’ll blame someone else for their own mistakes, and they might even go so far that cash-strapped workers will take their boss out on the town and shout them an endless stream of drinks so that the following day the boss is so obliteratingly hungover that their whole staff can go about their day free of repercussions.
This also means that somewhere between midnight and dawn is the sweet spot for avoiding the city watch. They’ll have been on their feet for a few hours already, they’ll find their favorite corner to lean against, and they’ll wile away the time protecting the city by doing as little as possible, providing that nothing disturbs them.
I crept back towards Lavarta’s home, dug around the fence looking for a rock, and found something left by Alysia. A sheet of paper, folded in half. It appeared to be a roughly drawn map of the city with a few arrows and words pointing out various locations, but it was too dark to make out any kind of detail. I slipped it into my pocket and moved on to my first official destination of the night.
The street of the governor’s mansion was impressively well guarded. Both the city watch and military maintained a strong presence, holding steady in stone towers while others marched with lanterns on the end of long poles, checking the top of each wall for anyone who might be sneaking their way over. As soon as the first stream of light came my way I ducked into a side street, darted away, and criss-crossed through the smaller connecting roads. For an hour I allowed my feet to take me where they wanted, checking every blind road and surveying the height of each wall. Dogs barked. I strolled away, made a note of where the canines lived, and carried on.
The evening chill had settled in, a gentle breeze carried along the river. I climbed a couple of walls, reached the roof-tops, and scanned the area around me. Some company scouts were wiling away the time, keeping an ear out for trouble but oblivious to any movement as they sat propped up on some roof. They’d say that they were staying out of sight. Their captain would argue that their job is to see what was going on and if they were failed again then he might cut off one of their ears.
From one vantage point I got to see into the governor’s grounds. Sure enough, he had a spectacular view of the river. The whole property sloped towards it at a fairly steep angle. Right at the water’s edge stood a stone jetty and a tiled patio behind it. Sentry towers lined the three walls, spikes rose from the walls, and a gaggle of geese wandered about.
The mansion itself sprawled out with various wings at right-angle directions. It’s hard to give an accurate number of stories since the house followed the slope downhill. At most there were only ever two floors but even so there would’ve been a dozen half-staircases throughout the length of the building. The main column of the house was connected to four off-shoots to the side, two to the left, two to the right, staggered so both upper wings had a clear view of the river, despite there being another wing that – if built on a level – would’ve blocked the view entirely. The upper far right wing had another wing of its own. Fat and rectangular, two stories, with a wrap-around balcony on the upper floor. The governor’s stateroom, if I had to guess. On the other side of the house was probably the wife’s residence. Whether she slept there or not I didn’t know, but Gustali was among the richest people in the province so he would’ve had more rooms than he knew what to do with. Perhaps she bedded with her husband like a happily married couple and only used the far wing for entertaining. Who knows?
I lingered for an hour, long enough to see a changing of the guard. They were tight, I’ll give them that. Silent, too. Two pocket-sized buildings were built near the street within the governor’s grounds. Home to the security detail. The replacement guards started their
shift by walking together around the outer wall of the house. They’d send the replacements up the ladder, into the watch tower, and the relieved soldier would join the group as they went to the next tower, then the one after that, doing a full perimeter sweep until they reached the guard house entrance. Then – and wisely so – another watchman went from tower to tower, checking that the sentries hadn’t been ambushed while everyone else was busy on a shift change.
All up there were eight towers. Three down one wall, three down the other, two guarding the front. One guard in each tower. Four more guards on the ground, in pairs, on patrol.
The outer walls were likely to be death traps even without the row of spikes protecting them. A few years back we hit a family who made their fortune from platinum. The matriarch had died. Her children were all fighting to be the new boss. They each hired a mercenary group to ‘protect’ them with the promise of a fortune coming their way if they ended up ruling the family. We weren’t involved and we didn’t really care what was happening, we just wanted to stir up trouble while everyone was busy. We broke into the former matriarch’s compound and immediately things went to shit.
Pug leapt onto the wall, ready to help the rest of his side up and over. The moment he landed he was flung ten feet upwards, an enchanted blast catapulting him into the air, his momentum carrying him forward in surprise. He landed, chest down, legs spinning over his spine. After three months of recovery he was ... better, but far from fine. Twig had a similar misfortune with his side of the wall but he landed on his feet, rolled, and only needed us to carry him away.
We looted the place, set fire to it because the defenses pissed us off, and by the following afternoon we were unsurprised to see the siblings fighting over the enchanted walls. I believe they divided them up and all got to carry a length of the spike rows away themselves.
From then on our research into every building included us needing to see a bird or cat walking across the outer wall, just to find out if it was enchanted. If we were in a time crunch we’d find a cat ourselves and introduce one to the other, sometimes with amusing results, unless you were particularly fond of cats.