Styke climbed to his feet and limped toward the guard.
“Hurry it up there,” the guard said. “I haven’t got all day.”
I wonder, Styke thought to himself, what you’d look like without arms.
“Pit,” the guard breathed as Styke came up beside him, “you’re a big one, aren’t you?”
Styke averted his gaze. He knew what kind of attention his size attracted. It was never good, not here. Guards liked to make examples of the biggest inmates to keep everyone else in line.
I could squash you like a bug. The thought came unbidden, and Styke quickly suppressed it. No room for that kind of thinking here. He was a model inmate, and he’d continue to be until his time was done, or else he’d be here until they worked him to death. A brief memory flashed through his mind—blood-spattered gauntlets on his fists, sword in hand, belting out a lancer’s hymn as he waded, unhorsed, through enemy grenadiers, each one as big as this arrogant guard. He blinked, and the vision was gone.
The guard finally took a step back and held the door open for Styke, directing him down another dusty hall with only a single window. “First door on the right.”
Styke followed the instructions and soon found himself in a small, brick room. It reminded him of a confessional at a Kresim church, though instead of a wicker screen between him and the next room over, there was a thick, iron grate over the window. Above it was a sign in broad letters that said PAROLE. The room was well lit, probably so the judge could get a good look at the monster he was about to let loose on the world.
“Please sit,” a voice said from behind the iron grate.
Styke sat on a low wooden stool, nervously listening to it creak beneath his bulk.
Several moments of silence followed, until Styke lifted his gaze from the floor to peer through the iron grate. He’d been through this process twice before now, and he knew the song and dance. Parole judges were simply whichever senior prison administrator had the time for you, meaning that the difference between freedom and another two years of hard labor depended heavily on whether they’d gotten up on the right side of the bed that morning.
What Styke saw on the other side of the grate made his heart sing.
“Raimy?” he asked.
Four-thumb Raimy wasn’t much to look at. She was a middle-aged woman, small and unimposing, with a pair of spectacles dangling on a chain around her neck, and dressed in what passed for a smart suit in the labor camps. She was the camp accountant and quartermaster. Being one of the few inmates who could read, write, and do sums, Styke had helped her with the books on more than one occasion. He liked the quiet of her office, where Celine could play on the floor and he could stay out of trouble.
Raimy coughed. She shuffled through her papers, picked up her pencil, and promptly fumbled, letting it roll across the desk and onto the floor. Instead of retrieving it, she carefully plucked a new one from her front jacket pocket and tested the tip.
“Benjamin,” she said.
“How’s it going, Raimy?” he asked.
She gave him a wan smile. “Cough’s bad. You know the dust on these dry days. How’s your knee?”
Styke shrugged. “Hurts. Friend of mine got that cough once, back during the war. He added honey to his whiskey. Didn’t clear it up completely, but it sure made him less miserable.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She cleared her throat, the sound turning into a coughing fit, then shuffled through her papers once more before continuing on in a formal tone. “Convict 10642, Benjamin Styke. Your ten-year parole hearing has begun. Is there anyone to speak for you?”
Styke glanced around the tiny room. “I’m not allowed letters or outside communication, so I’m not sure if anyone even knows I’m still alive.”
“I see,” Raimy said. She checked a box on the paper in front of her, muttering, “no advocates,” before continuing on in her formal tone. “Benjamin Styke, you were sentenced to the firing squad for disobeying orders from your superior officer during the revolution. Your sentence was reduced by the grace of the Lady Chancellor to twenty years of hard labor. Is this correct?”
“I wouldn’t say reduced,” Styke said, holding up his mangled hand and spreading the fingers as well as he could. “They gave it two goes before deciding it would be easier to have me dig trenches than soak up bullets.”
Raimy’s eyes widened and the formal tone disappeared. “Two volleys from the firing squad? I had no idea.”
“That was my crime,” he confirmed, lowering his hand. “And my sentence.”
Raimy coughed, dropped another pencil, and fetched a new one before checking a box. “Right. Well, Mr. Styke, I’ve spent the last hour reviewing your case. You’ve gone seven years since a violent incident and five since any marks have been made against your record. Considering the, uh”—she cleared her throat—“average life span of an inmate at Sweetwallow Labor Camp is only about six years, I’d say you’ve done very well for yourself.”
Styke found himself sitting on the edge of the stool, ignoring the protests from his bad knee as he leaned forward. “Have I been granted parole?” he breathed, not daring to show the elation growing inside him.
“I think …” Raimy was cut off by a sudden knock on the door on her side of the grate. She frowned, setting her pencil down carefully, and stood up to answer it. “One moment,” she told him, then stepped outside.
Styke could hear muted voices on the other side of the room, but nothing loud enough to understand. The voices suddenly grew louder, until Raimy broke into a coughing fit. Silence followed, then Raimy came back inside the room.
She had another piece of paper in her hand, and she carefully set it flat on the table, then slid it beneath the rest of his file. She stared at the desk, one finger drumming nervously.
Styke didn’t know what this meant, but it couldn’t be good. He was almost falling off his stool now, and wanted to reach through the iron grate and shake her. “Parole,” he said helpfully.
Raimy seemed to snap out of her reverie and looked up at him, smiling. “Ah, where was I? Yes, well, I have good news and bad news, Mr. Styke. The bad news is that I must, in good conscience, deny you parole.” She continued on quickly: “The good news is that I am able to offer you a transfer to a labor camp with a less … dangerous reputation. Soft labor, as some of us like to call it.” She let out a nervous chuckle, coughed, and continued: “The beds will be softer, the hours shorter, and the facilities better.”
Styke stared, his heart falling. “Another labor camp?” he asked flatly. He felt in shock, as if he’d been punched in the gut. “This is my life. Do you think I care if my bed is a little softer?”
A bead of sweat rolled down Raimy’s temple.
“I know you can let me out,” Styke said, slapping the wall with his good hand. The sound made Raimy jump. “I know it’s up to your discretion. I’ve kept my head down for ten years. I’ve taken beatings without a protest, I’ve starved when the gruel is thin. Bloody pit, I taught you to read after you faked your way into a job as the camp quartermaster. I thought we were friends, Raimy.”
Raimy remained still. Her hands lay flat on the table, her eyes straight ahead like a deer caught in the garden. Her only movement was a violent tremble moving up and down her body. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Sorry? Sorry for what?”
“I didn’t know you were that Ben Styke.”
“What do you mean by that Ben Styke? How many of us do you think there are?” Styke stood up, barely feeling the twinge in his knee through the anger. His head grazed the ceiling of the parole cell. For some reason, the tremble going through Raimy’s body made him even angrier. They’d spent countless days together in her unguarded office, even had a few laughs together. She’d flirted with him. And now she was shaking, terrified, even though she was behind an iron grate? “Are we friends?” he demanded.
“Yes,” Raimy squeaked.
Styke wrapped his good hand and the two working fingers of hi
s bad hand around the bars of the grate. He tightened his grip and, with one solid yank, ripped it out of the wall. Raimy’s mouth fell open but she remained transfixed as he set the grate to one side and leaned in over her desk, fishing through her papers until he came to the last one.
It was a note on stationery from the office of the Lady Chancellor. It had three sentences:
Mad Ben Styke, formerly Colonel Styke of the Mad Lancers, is a violent murderer guilty of several war crimes. He must be denied parole. Make it convincing.
It was signed by Fidelis Jes, head of the Lady Chancellor’s secret police.
Styke could hear someone yelling in the hallway. They’d heard the racket, and the yelling was soon followed by the pounding footsteps of the guards. Styke crumpled up the note and flicked it into Raimy’s face. “You can stop your damned trembling, then. I don’t hurt my friends.”
He turned away from her, spreading his arms wide, and waited for the first guard to come through the door.
CHAPTER 4
Michel was in a tiny, out-of-the-way neighborhood called Proctor, about a mile and a half west of the docks and two hundred feet above them in the very center of the Landfall Plateau. Favored by pensioned veterans and small immigrant families, Proctor wasn’t a great part of town, but it wasn’t a slum like Greenfire Depths, either. Most people couldn’t find it on a map, and that made it a good place to stay out of trouble. Or in Michel’s case, keep someone else out of trouble.
Fidelis Jes wants to see you.
The words frayed Michel’s nerves in a way that very few sentences could. It was just an hour after canceling his training session, and he paused to read the note Warsim had handed him. It was on embossed stationery marked with a Platinum Rose. No mistaking that signature. Only two people in Fatrasta had a Platinum Rose—Fidelis Jes, and the Lady Chancellor herself.
What could the grand master want with a Silver Rose? Michel had seen Fidelis Jes on many occasions at headquarters. They’d even exchanged a few words. But Michel had never been summoned to his office.
Perhaps, he reasoned, it was a mistake. Or perhaps he’d be meeting with someone else in the grand master’s office. A niggling fear in the back of his head told him that he’d let something slip to the wrong person and he was to be brought up on charges against the state. He wanted to dismiss it as a ridiculous notion, but not even the most loyal Blackhat was beyond reproach. Surely, he decided, he’d have woken up in a cell if that were the case.
“The wrong word at the wrong time,” he muttered to himself, “can lose you your head in this city.”
He smiled reassuringly at his reflection in a nearby shop window. “You’re a damned good Blackhat. You’ll be fine.”
“Says you. Look, just take care of this thing and then you can go get your face stomped in by the grand master.”
He checked his pocket watch. His meeting with the grand master was in forty-five minutes. He’d want to be early but, he thought as he eyed the house across the street, there were some things more important than work, and this was one of them. It was a task he was going to leave until tonight, but depending on his talk with Fidelis Jes he might not have the opportunity. He crossed the street, taking the alleyway around to the back door, and was inside after slipping the lock with the blade of his knife.
The little house wasn’t much to see. It had one room with a loft bed upstairs. The table and both chairs were covered in old penny novels. There was a rocker over by the window, empty, with a red shawl draped over the back. The air smelled strongly of lavender, likely to cover up the underlying scent of mildew. It took him only a moment to find the source of the latter—a pile of books in the corner, soaked through, with the telltale yellow streaks on the plaster above them that indicated a leaky roof.
Michel sighed and cleared away some of the books, making room for the box of food he carried under one arm. He made a quick circuit of the tiny house, noting cracks in the plaster, a second leak in the roof, and that one of the chairs was being held together by a length of tightly bound cord.
He bent over, rubbing his finger gently over a break in the front window pane, when he caught sight of a short, plump woman walking down the street. Her long, reddish-brown hair had begun to gray at the temples, and her dress was threadbare. She walked with a brisk, determined stride and held a sack stuffed with penny novels in one hand, smiling and waving at everyone she passed.
First of the month, Michel remembered. The day the bookstores put out their latest dreadfuls.
“You should say hi,” he said to himself.
“To the pit with that. I don’t have time.”
“You’re a terrible son.”
“I know.”
He ran to the back door, slipping out into the alley just as he heard his mother’s loud greeting to her neighbors and the fumbling of a key at the front door.
He felt a wave of relief as he returned to the main road, the close call behind him. Visiting his mother inevitably led to a fight, and he didn’t need that right now, not with a meeting with the grand master looming over his head.
A thought struck him. Perhaps his years of hard work had been noticed. Maybe he wasn’t going to the grand master’s office for punishment, but rather for a reward. He blinked through a drop of sweat that rolled into his eye, a brief fantasy playing through his head. He could be getting a promotion to Gold Rose. His friends would never buy another drink. His relations would live in big houses near the capitol.
He wouldn’t have to slip his mother boxes of food because she spent her pension on penny novels.
He quashed the thought, not daring to hope, and decided to put on his best face. Whatever it was Fidelis Jes wanted, Michel would be a professional. The grand master could not be charmed or flattered. He respected power and competence. Michel couldn’t offer the first. The second … well, Michel was very good at his job.
The not-so-secret headquarters of the Landfall Secret Police, known colloquially as the Millinery, was located just a few blocks down the road from the capitol building. The Millinery was an austere palace, a thoroughly modern construction of black granite with few windows on the first floor and castle-like battlements on the roof. It was the official face of the Blackhats, set up with barracks, holding cells, training yards, and offices that encompassed two whole city blocks. They even had a division just to take public complaints.
The resemblance to a regular police house was not, Michel suspected, accidental. The Lady Chancellor wanted people to trust the Blackhats.
Fat chance of that.
But public relations was not, thankfully, part of Michel’s job. He entered through the wicket gate on Lindet Avenue, tipping his hat to Keln, the old gatekeeper standing just inside the door, before winding his way through the halls of the Millinery until he reached the northeast corner on the fourth floor. He dabbed the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, straightened his vest, and entered the offices of Fidelis Jes.
The grand master’s offices consisted of two rooms—a small antechamber with a desk and waiting chairs, and a much larger office behind it, the double doors open to reveal a brightly lit room, decorated with colorful Kressian murals and furnished with mahogany furniture. The mahogany didn’t surprise him—Fidelis Jes struck him as a mahogany sort of man—but the colors and light certainly did. Michel had expected something far more dour for the offices of a man who, among his many titles, was counted as the master of assassins.
“Michel Bravis here to see the grand master,” he said to the secretary.
The secretary was a middle-aged woman with delicate, elfin features, short black hair, and excellent posture. She smiled at Michel from behind her desk and he sought to remember her name. Dellina. That was it. A Starlish who’d been with Fidelis Jes since just after the war. Jes’s only confidante, other than the Lady Chancellor herself. Michel wondered how many state secrets Dellina had floating around in her head.
“You’re his eight fifteen?” Dellina asked.
�
�That’s right,” Michel responded. “Michel Bravis.”
“Of course.” Dellina beamed in that warm but oddly condescending way that only secretaries could manage. “Agent Bravis. Thank you so much for coming in on such short notice. The grand master is running just a little bit late today, so if you have any morning appointments I can have a messenger at your disposal.”
Michel frowned. “For what?”
“To delay any other appointments you may have. For your meeting with the grand master.”
“Oh! Of course. No, that won’t be necessary.”
“Very good. You can have a seat just over there.”
Michel had barely dropped into a chair and begun an examination of the room when the door burst open and Fidelis Jes strode through it. Michel leapt to his feet, hands behind his back, shoulders squared at attention. Jes didn’t seem to notice. He was wearing a pair of formfitting trousers and a flowing white shirt, most of the buttons undone, his clothes soaked through with sweat.
“You’re late, sir,” Dellina said in a disapproving tone.
Jes flipped a hand dismissively. “Construction,” he said. “My normal route has been blocked off by a new series of public tenements Lindet has going in. Make a note for me to skip Hawthdun Street tomorrow.”
“Of course, sir. Your three eight o’clocks and your eight fifteen are all waiting, sir.”
Fidelis Jes was often referred to as an ideal specimen of human fitness by the city’s gossip columns and Michel could find no argument against it. Jes had a finely chiseled chest, shoulders and arms to match, and legs that would make an athlete weep. He was supposedly in his forties but didn’t look a day over thirty, with refined cheekbones that gave him a haughty, memorable face. Rumor had it that Jes jogged around the base of the Landfall Plateau every single morning. Michel had never seen him jogging personally and assumed it was some kind of in-joke among the Gold Roses. Yet here he was, soaked with sweat, first thing in the morning.
Jes entered his office and closed the doors behind him. His voice came out muffled. “Who the pit is that?”
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