Windsinger

by A. F. E. Smith

  ‘I think so …’ Yet even as he said it, Caraway was on his feet.

  ‘I’d better go. I need to follow this up. But, Zander … thank you. Maybe you’ve ended the war after all.’

  He was out of sight before Zander had the chance to formulate a reply.

  TWENTY

  A man who was plotting against his overlord, Sorrow thought, really ought to know better than to leave his window open. Particularly when that man was also wealthy enough to be a prime target for every thief this side of the border.

  Admittedly, the open window was at the back of the house, top floor, where no-one could reach it in a hurry. And the occupant had gone so far as to station a guard at the back door as well as the front. All the same, she’d known thieves who could have turned over the whole place before either guard or homeowner knew what had hit him.

  Of course, could have wasn’t the same as would have. The Charoite Quarter might seem to offer the richest pickings, but in fact it was hardly ever burgled; the best targets were those who were comfortably well off, not extraordinarily so. Comfortable wasn’t enough to put expensive security measures in place, and comfortable couldn’t afford to hire some ruthless bastard to find out the name of the thief and make them pay in blood. Sorrow herself had done more than one job like that on behalf of the city’s elite, tracking down a petty thief or opportunist who had more intelligence than sense and showing him the error of his ways. The very rich never cared much about getting their money or possessions back; what they cared about was demonstrating their power. Sending a message. In all Sorrow’s years as a sellsword, none of them had ever asked her to kill anyone. They preferred to leave their victims alive.

  She’d never been bothered by that sort of job. She’d never been bothered by any sort of job. But now, she found herself grimly satisfied by the idea of doing to Derrick Tarran what his kind had ordered done to so many others.

  We’ve found out who owns that warehouse, Caraway had said to her, holding out two pieces of paper. The one where the smuggled firearms were stored and the Free Arkannen group met. I need you to interrogate him.

  Sorrow had taken the papers. One was a will leaving all Giovano Maurais’s property and possessions to his daughter and only child, Liliane. The other was a deed recording the marriage of Liliane Maurais to Derrick Tarran.

  Tarran, she’d said. Aren’t they the taransey people?

  Yes. Derrick Tarran is the current owner of the taransey distillery. We believe he supplied the poisoned bottle for the group.

  Right. She’d shrugged. Seems like you have enough evidence to make an arrest. So why ask me?

  Because we don’t have any time. I need him to talk, and quickly.

  Go beat him up yourself. You’re perfectly capable of it.

  Naeve … He’d given her a pleading look. You know I can’t. I have to be the law. And the law goes and arrests him, and we have a polite conversation in which he tells me precisely nothing, and I search his house and find no evidence … and then when I’m forced to release him because I can’t make anything stick, he goes home and burns whatever it was he managed to conceal from me in the first place. I can’t risk that. This is the only chance we have to end this war.

  So – just to be sure – you want me to break into his house and make him talk, by any means necessary?

  Caraway had hesitated, then nodded. Do whatever it takes. But, Naeve, remember … I trust you.

  She glanced up at the open window one more time. Yes, she had known plenty of thieves who could have made a dramatic entrance through that window. She, on the other hand, was going to take an easier route.

  Straightening up from her crouch behind Tarran’s outhouse, she hurled a stone at the fence on the opposite side, then emerged from her hiding place. As she’d hoped, the sound of the impact had made the young guard turn his head. She was by his side before the moment’s distraction had passed.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said softly. ‘Unless you want to die horribly.’

  He had enough sense to obey, but his eyes cut towards her in a clear demonstration of scepticism. ‘I don’t think you’re tall enough to cut my throat, sweetheart.’

  She gave him something akin to a smile. ‘It’s not your throat that’s in danger, darling.’

  His gaze moved slowly downwards. When he looked back at her, his cheeks were visibly paler.

  ‘I really don’t think it’s worth losing that on Derrick Tarran’s behalf,’ Sorrow said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘What do you want? Who are you?’

  She pressed the pistol into his groin a little harder, and he suppressed a yelp. ‘Naeve Sorrow. You may have heard of me. I want Tarran’s back door key.’

  The guard nodded, sweat on his brow. Ever so slowly, he slid a hand into his pocket and brought out a set of keys. Sorrow took it.

  ‘Good. Now bugger off and pretend you never had this job, or I’ll blow your balls off.’

  Once he’d gone – vaulting over the wall as if he feared she was about to use him for target practice – she unlocked the door. Maybe the guard would go for help and come back, but she doubted it. Besides, she’d be gone before then. All the same, just in case, she locked the door behind her before venturing further into the house.

  She found Derrick Tarran in a room that looked like an office, sitting at a desk with his back to her. She didn’t bother with subtlety. After closing the door silently behind her, she crept up behind him and held her pistol to his head.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said, as she had to the guard. ‘I’m sure you’re filthy rich enough to know what a pistol can do to your skull.’

  He had tensed at the first sound of her voice, but now his shoulders relaxed again.

  ‘Quite so,’ he said affably. ‘But if you want money, you should know I don’t have much to hand. We filthy rich don’t keep it in the house, you know.’

  Sorrow didn’t point out that he was certain to have a safe full of valuables somewhere in his office. Instead, she took out the cord she’d brought with her and, as swiftly as possible, began tying him to his chair.

  ‘Is there anyone else in the house?’ she asked as she worked.

  ‘My wife is upstairs. My son is out. The servants are doing whatever servants do.’

  ‘All right.’ She finished the last knot. ‘Then you’d better keep your voice down. Understand? Make a noise that’s loud enough to fetch anyone, and I’ll kill you.’

  Without waiting for a reply, she walked round into his line of sight and sat down on the edge of his desk. His eyes widened, then narrowed.

  ‘Naeve Sorrow. You, of all people, should know what will happen to anyone who steals from me.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t want your money. I want information. And you, of all people, should know what I’m willing to do to get it.’

  ‘I’m not one of your low-class thugs, Naeve. Touch me, and I’ll see you hobbled and blinded. Forced to live out your days without teeth or fingertips. You think you’re the only sellsword who can do that kind of work? If I send enough of them after you, even you won’t be able to escape.’

  Sorrow smiled.

  Then, very deliberately, she leaned forward.

  ‘Ah, Derrick. You’re a clever man, but you’re missing one very important fact.’ She put her lips right up to his ear, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘This time, I have the law on my side.’

  He scoffed. ‘Sunk so low as to accept jobs from the Watch, now, have you? I hate to tell you this, Naeve, but you’ve been misinformed. The Watch won’t touch me.’ Abruptly, he turned his head until they were almost nose to nose; his hot breath left flecks of saliva on her skin. ‘Money does a remarkable job of proving one’s innocence.’

  She straightened up, resisting the urge to wipe her face with her sleeve. ‘The Watch might be in your pocket, but the Helm aren’t.’

  ‘The Helm?’ For the first time, she saw unease in his expression. ‘What have they got to do with it?’

  ‘I’m here
on Darkhaven’s behalf,’ Sorrow said. ‘You’ve been playing at sedition, haven’t you, Derrick?’

  ‘I don’t know what you –’

  ‘Free Arkannen.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not a very original name for a rebel group, is it? Do you actually believe all that shit about reclaiming Mirrorvale for the Mirrorvalese? Or is this war simply a way for you to make money?’

  His lips curled contemptuously. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I was there, Derrick. At the meeting after the ambassador’s death. I didn’t see your face, but I know it was you. What was it you said?’ She pretended to think. ‘Oh, yes. Soon the Kardise scourge will come to an end. Does your Kardise wife know that’s your opinion?’

  ‘Prove it.’

  She drew Caraway’s papers from her inside pocket and held them up. The man’s eyes widened a fraction, and she saw the bobbing of his throat as he swallowed.

  ‘Being on the side of the law is a pain in the arse,’ Sorrow said. ‘You have to have a load of evidence before you can do anything. Look at poor Captain Caraway and his futile attempts to get even the slightest whiff of information from your kind. If it was up to me, I’d have worked my way through every damn investor’s house I could find until one of you squealed.’ She shrugged. ‘But luckily for your colleagues, we discovered this first.’

  ‘I don’t see how that proves anything.’

  ‘An investor going by the name of Jack Malone stored illegal firearms in a particular warehouse where the Free Arkannen group met. An investor going by the name of Jack Malone is also listed as purchasing the bottle of taransey they used to kill the ambassador. Since you own both warehouse and distillery, and since you went out of your way to claim the bottle had been resealed despite your own foreman’s opinion to the contrary, it’s not hard to see the truth. You poisoned it yourself, before you even put the seal on it. Not many people in this city could do that.’

  ‘If you know all this, then why are you here?’

  ‘I need more,’ she said. ‘That’s why. I need evidence that proves Free Arkannen, and not Ayla Nightshade, was behind the Kardise ambassador’s death. And you’re going to give it to me.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  Sorrow glanced down at her pistol, turning it over in her hands, then placed it carefully beside her on the desk.

  ‘About eight years ago, I was employed by a factory owner like you,’ she said. ‘One of his supply trains had been robbed, and he wanted revenge. He thought the usual people were behind it – you know, the crime syndicates, the fences and traffickers. The ones who make a profit from other people’s loss, just like your kind do, but don’t try to set themselves up as respectable citizens in the process. Their existence always seems to piss off your lot. I suppose it’s like looking in a more honest mirror.

  ‘Anyway, after a bit of persuasion, I found out it wasn’t a syndicate job. The thieves had been employed by another factory owner. Young man, up-and-coming, investing in the same kind of goods. I went after him. But when I caught up with him, he offered me twice as much pay to keep it quiet. So I went back to the thieves.’ She shrugged. ‘Ever heard a finger break, Derrick? It’s quite a distinctive sound. Just like a twig snapping, and as easily done.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Tarran demanded. There was an edge of fear underlying his voice, but it hadn’t quite broken through yet. He still believed himself untouchable. ‘You work for the highest bidder. Is that it? You want paying for your silence? I can offer you two hundred ranols –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Three hundred –’

  ‘I don’t want your money.’ Strange, how she could say that with barely a pang of regret. It wasn’t as if Caraway was going to pay her anything like three hundred ranols for this job. She would have taken it, once.

  But that was before the bastard sitting in front of her had sent her country to war.

  ‘Come on, Naeve,’ he said, moistening dry lips. ‘Profits are low. I didn’t get nearly as much for those firearms as I’d hoped. The most I can offer you is four hundred –’

  She snapped the little finger on his left hand.

  When he’d finished groaning and cursing, he looked up at her wild-eyed and drenched in sweat. A spreading patch of damp on his trousers told its own story.

  ‘Bitch! Whore! I’ll cut out your eyes with a –’

  Calmly, she broke a second finger. It really did sound like a dry twig snapping.

  ‘You forget,’ she said, over the sound of his pain. ‘I work for Darkhaven now. If I so much as graze my knee after I leave this house, you’ll find yourself on trial for treason before you can blink. Your only hope of getting away with nothing worse than a few broken bones is to give me what I want.’

  ‘All right! All right. It was as you say. I supplied the poisoned taransey to the group. One of the other men said he could get hold of an antidote to the poison.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘I don’t know. We wore masks, remember? I knew who one or two of them were, but not the whole group. Safer that way.’

  ‘But this man supplied the antidote.’

  ‘Yes. In fact, he was the one to come up with the plan in the first place. Said he knew someone on the inside. Someone in Darkhaven. Said he could convince her to plant the poisoned bottle, deliver the antidote. I simply supplied him with the taransey to pass on to her.’

  ‘And then you killed her.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘But you agreed to it. I heard you.’

  ‘I … it wasn’t like that. The same man came to us after the ambassador was dead. Said we’d have to do something about the girl, stop her talking, or the entire plan would fail. We agreed. And that was when he told us he’d already taken care of it.’

  ‘This mysterious man – do you know anything else about him?’

  ‘Only that he was the one who brought us all together.’

  Sorrow thought about that. So the softly spoken man she’d overheard at the warehouse had been the instigator of the group, despite the fact that he’d apparently allowed Tarran to take the leading role. Ideally she’d find him and drag him off to Darkhaven to confess his crimes. But the important thing, here and now, was to get the evidence needed to stop the war.

  ‘This is all very well, Derrick, but I’m going to need proof.’ She dug around in his desk until she found a sheet of paper, then scrawled out a summary of what he’d told her.

  ‘Sign this,’ she ordered him, sliding it beneath his good right hand and tucking the pen between his fingers. Even with his wrists tied to the arms of the chair, he ought to be able to manage. He looked at her sullenly.

  ‘I’m not signing any –’

  ‘Sign it.’ She picked up her pistol again. His sullen expression became more pronounced.

  ‘Wrong hand.’

  She shrugged. She couldn’t have known he’d turn out to be left-handed.

  As he wrote his name at the bottom of the page, wincing and cursing at the pain, Sorrow tried to decide if she’d done enough. Ideally she’d hunt down the softly spoken man and, with him, any evidence of this previously unknown antidote to the poison that had killed Tolino. Still, she had a signed confession from one of the perpetrators; surely that would be sufficient to call a halt to the war. She took the confession from Tarran – making sure to remove the pen from him as well – and tucked it into her pocket.

  ‘Anything else?’ he growled.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘I’d like to know why you did it.’

  It was an odd question. Not one she’d intended to ask. She didn’t care why people acted in the stupid ways they did; all that mattered was the results.

  Yet something was niggling at her. There was something she was missing. And until she’d worked it out, she didn’t plan on leaving.

  ‘Why do you think I did it?’ Tarran retorted. He’d recovered himself somewhat, now, though his two broken fingers were swelling and darkening. ‘To put a stop to Ayla’s crazy plans for peace
. The city is already overrun with foreigners, and now she wants to usher in more of them? Not that you’d understand –’ his gaze swept her contemptuously – ‘but some of us don’t want to see the Mirrorvalese bloodlines diluted any more than they have been already.’

  Since Sorrow had always enjoyed the fact that she had ancestors from every country in the known world, she was able to ignore the insult. Instead, she pointed out, ‘You have a Kardise wife. Your son is half Kardise. By your reckoning, you chose to dilute your own bloodline.’

  ‘That was different,’ Tarran said dismissively. ‘I married for profit, not principle.’

  She shook her head, the niggle becoming an itch. While human inconsistency never surprised her any more, the distillery owner’s motives were far more inconsistent than most. It wasn’t impossible that a man could believe strongly in keeping foreign blood out of Mirrorvale and yet take a Kardise wife – just unlikely. Far more probable that profit, not principle was his driving force in everything. She’d said it herself: is this war simply a way for you to make money? And the answer was almost certainly yes.

  ‘Profit,’ she said. ‘That’s the truth, isn’t it? You’re not doing this out of principle, but out of greed …’

  Her voice trailed off. Something was yelling in her subconscious, trying to make itself known. And then, suddenly, she had it.

  ‘But you don’t have anything to gain from war,’ she said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve only just realised it. You own the taransey distillery. A few other factories around the city, none of them making things that would be relevant to the war effort. You’re one of the few investors in Arkannen who stands to earn almost nothing from this conflict! Admittedly there was that shipment of illegal firearms, but that hardly brought in the kind of wealth that people like you are interested in. So …’

  She stared at him, and he stared back. His face was impassive, but small beads of sweat glistened at his hairline.

  ‘So you must be earning money from this another way,’ she said. ‘Someone’s paying you for it.’

  ‘No.’