Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  There isn’t much more to tell about what happened. The broadsheets have most of it—special editions this evening. What they don’t have, because an assistant chief constable, brother of one of Miri’s guards, whose sisters are amongst her maids—aren’t these family connections useful?—anyway, he took charge of the knife when it was found a few blocks away. It’s one of Mieka’s,

  “Holy fuck,” Cade blurted.

  presumably lost two Winterings ago at Great Welkin. The constable who found it recognized the maker, because he bought his own knives (which constables aren’t supposed to carry, but there it is) from the same man. They’re quite costly and not the sort that a street ruffian would carry (unless he stole it). So the constable described the blade to his superior, who described it to his brother (the guard), and that’s who surmised that the thistle etching might mean it belonged to Mieka. He told Miri, and she told them to substitute another knife and bring that one to her.

  Cade groped his way to a chair and sat down. The manservant asked if he wanted a drink. He shook his head, then changed his mind. “Whiskey.” He considered. “Not too much. I haven’t eaten today that I recall.”

  Now, trying to place the blame on Mieka for this is beyond ludicrous. So why use his knife? Vren thinks—and I hope I get this in some sort of logical order—that, firstly, it would have been easy to confirm it as Mieka’s by asking the maker. Secondly, because it went missing at Great Welkin, it could have been found by anybody there. Thirdly, this anybody could have been a servant or a guard employed by the Archduke, or it could have been one of the crowd—who could have sold it on in Gallybanks, to be sold again, and so on from there.

  Miri, on hearing this, suggested that somebody in the Constabulary or Judiciary connected to the Archduke will put forth the former possibility, and here’s why. When everybody at Great Welkin is questioned, there will be countless witnesses to the fact that everyone was snug in bed or on duty or otherwise accounted for as being exactly where they all belonged. What Miri missed is this: By requiring his household to be questioned, not only does he clear all of them but he makes it publicly known how loyal and devoted they are, because even though the suggestion was made that one of them could be so infuriated by rumors about a play that he’d do such a thing, all of them will say that those rumors are utterly ridiculous and the Archduke is the finest man and the best master who ever lived.

  Cade’s brain was whirling—even more so after he took a large swallow of whiskey. Convolutions and complications in abundance, and those three women had figured all of it out in a few hours. They could have had careers writing for the stage.

  And yet they weren’t done.

  About two minutes after I pointed this out, Miri said this: that she wouldn’t put it past him to sacrifice one of his own people in order to provide a culprit. How much better a demonstration of their zeal to protect him and his interests than that one of them should kill Vered for daring even to hint at what the rumors hint—and how appalled he would be, how sickened, how penitent that any of his servants would dare. Not to speak of how quick he would be to hand that person over.

  Part of him admired the Princess’s thinking; part of him sorrowed that she had learned to think that way; most of him was infuriated that they lived in a world where such thinking was not just possible but necessary. More strongly than the need had come to him in a very long time, he wanted to hit something. He wanted to mark a wall, a window, a face with his grief and rage, do visible damage, leave evidence of what he was feeling. It scared him, this ravening impulse to violence. He’d thought he’d outgrown it—or at least learned to overcome it.

  However, because the knife isn’t available to serve as a prop in this little farce, we’ll be spared the spectacle (reported lavishly in all the broadsheets, of course) of the Archduke’s people adoring him. The authorities will pull in some random lout off the street. People must have someone to blame for the death of this beloved man. Therefore someone will be found. Miri will try to do what she can for whomever they end up arresting. But unless the real murderer is discovered—and there’s no hope that he will be—some poor innocent fool will end on the gallows.

  Wavertree, like Kevelock’s house, is said to be hip-deep in candles, flowers, and grieving strangers. Miri and Vren send their love to all, and their sorrow. So do I. They also say to go home and get some sleep. So do I.

  Chapter 30

  Rauel, Chat, and Sakary didn’t emerge from the drawing room all day. Cade eventually explained his sorting system to the manservant, collected Mieka, and left the way they’d come. It was nearly dinnertime when they finally got home. Once everyone—Mistress Mirdley, Derien, Jindra, and the guards captain—had been reassured that they were just fine, Cade guided Mieka into the dining room and shut the door.

  “Your turn now,” he said. “You’ve been taking care of everyone else. Now it’s your turn.”

  All the way back to Moonglade Reach, he’d felt how tense Mieka was. Now he stiffened even further, if that were possible, as if holding himself tight so he wouldn’t disintegrate. When Mieka spoke, Cade knew he’d guessed correctly.

  “I wasn’t doing it for any of them. I was doing it for me. So I didn’t have to think.”

  “What didn’t you want to think about?” But he knew this, too.

  “It could’ve been you, Quill.”

  “He wants everyone to think it could’ve been any of us.”

  “Religious fanatics?” Mieka was still standing in the middle of the rug, seeming to move only when he breathed and spoke. “That’s shit and we all know it. I can’t lose you, Cayden.”

  “You won’t. Go on up to bed. I’ll have Mistress Mirdley bring you some dinner.”

  Mieka didn’t seem to have heard him. “If it had been you—it could’ve been, you know it could.” All at once he began to tremble. “Gods, Quill, what if it had been you?”

  “Mieka, stop it.” Crossing the room, he took the slight shoulders in his hands. Nightmares haunted those eyes, and bleak unreasoning terror. He understood. He knew those things himself, in excruciating Elsewhen detail. “That’s not what he wants.”

  Mieka looked up at him, frowning. “What d’you mean?”

  “With Vered gone, the Shadowshapers will never perform that play.” Suddenly Cade caught his breath, needing no Elsewhen to know what Mieka was about to say before he said it. “We can’t,” he blurted. “Mieka, we can’t!”

  “We’ve done it before. Us and what’s left of the Shadowshapers, the Sparks and Hawk’s Claw if they want to join us—we can, Quill. We owe it to him.”

  “The Archduke, or Vered?”

  A grim little smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Both.”

  Mistress Mirdley brought in a large dinner tray and stood there, arms folded, until they sat down and began to eat. Derien and Jindra joined them, but only to deliver an armful of broadsheets; they’d already had dinner in the kitchen. Once they were alone again, they took turns reading aloud. Most simply reported the few facts known. The more sensationalist papers speculated without evidence about Vered’s personal enemies, bemoaned violent crime in Gallybanks, and featured lurid drawings of what the attack might have looked like. The Nayword confined itself to reviewing Vered’s life and career, with a short, heartfelt essay by Tobalt Fluter mourning the uniquely creative artist who had been lost.

  The gist of it all was that the previous night—had it really been only last night?—Vered had stepped out of a hire-hack in front of Rauel’s house in Peasmarsh Square. The hack driver swore that there was no one in the street; the assumption was that the assailant had been hiding in the bushes of the central garden, and run across to the house behind the hack as it left. Vered was attacked at the steps and died instantly, his heart pierced by a knife which had been found discarded one street over and was of no distinctive type or manufacture.

  Cade kept his voice steady as he read this part, and didn’t look at Mieka. He hadn’t yet shared Lady Megs’s latest le
tter, and mayhap he never would.

  The hack driver, hearing someone cry out—almost certainly Vered—turned his vehicle around but saw no one. At this point, a maid opened the door and began to scream. Rauel was there a moment later, yelling for a physicker and a constable.

  “I wonder,” Cade mused, setting aside the terse summary in The Nayword, “who they’ll find to stitch up as guilty. They’ll have to blame it on somebody,” he added when Mieka glanced up from picking at his dinner. “Megs said as much, and she’s right.”

  “They’ll never find who really did it, you mean? Well, what would you expect?” He waved his fork at the other broadsheets. “That’s why all the articles about thievings and murderings. It’s preparing everybody to accept whatever hapless geck they choose to play the role of guilty party. What else did Megs say?”

  “Not much,” he lied, reaching into his jacket pocket for the letter.

  “Quill.”

  He ought to have known he couldn’t get away with it. “Miriuzca has someone of her own in the investigation—brother of one of her guards, if I understand it aright. So she’s getting accurate information. Here—she agrees with you,” he said, and read out the last paragraphs, leaving out everything regarding Mieka’s knife.

  “Sends her love, eh?” But his heart wasn’t in the teasing, and Cade escaped by shrugging it all off. “I’m thinking,” Mieka went on, “that Mistress Mirdley put something sleepy into the pudding. I’m for me bed. Don’t sit up too late brooding, old dear. The next couple of weeks are gonna be brutal. After all,” he said, getting to his feet and starting for the door, “we have a very long performance to rehearse.”

  He was gone before Cayden could observe that the play had got Vered Goldbraider killed, and what made him think the Archduke would stop there?

  His fist crumpled Megs’s letter. The Archduke. What gave him the right to take Vered’s life? How did he justify depriving Bexan of her husband, his children of their father, his friends of his company, all the Kingdom of his brilliance?

  The rage returned, more powerful than before. He felt as if his body wanted to run in twenty directions at once. Pacing—table to windows to door to the bar—didn’t work. He had to do something, hurt something, or go mad. Some lingering remnant of sanity told him, Outside—you can’t do as much damage outside—

  Rumble appeared out of nowhere, startling him, staggering him back against the bar. The cat froze, arched, glared up at him as a glass dislodged by his elbow shattered onto the floor. He turned, seeing the shelves with all the resplendent glassware that had been Blye’s homecozying gift. Yes, that would hurt. He took the single step separating him from those shelves with their serried ranks of blue and green and yellow glasses of varying sizes and shapes and swirling patterns, no two alike, each made with love and skill and Blye’s cunning magic. He drew his arm back, ready to sweep them all into splintered oblivion.

  “If you do,” said Mistress Mirdley from the doorway, “you’ll pick up every shard with your bare hands.”

  Flinching, he stumbled against one of the tall stools and managed to sit down before he fell down. “I could have stopped it. I could have changed it.”

  “I doubt that. Nobody I’ve ever heard of could keep Vered Goldbraider from doing exactly as he pleased exactly when and as it pleased him to do so. But I’m willing to listen if you have a different notion.”

  “The first time I saw it, Bexan was screaming. Minster bells were ringing—I don’t know, I didn’t follow it, because it was the night at Great Welkin and I saw Mieka and Yazz—”

  “And so you followed that one instead. I see. If there was a first, there was a second.”

  “Bexan wasn’t there this time. It was just a voice. I couldn’t see anything. Somebody in the darkness, a man saying that it wasn’t—that the drinking didn’t make them what they are, but what they are made the drinking necessary, and he was wrong—and someone else saying ‘Do it, do it’—oh Gods, I don’t know, I didn’t stay with that one, either, because I’d just seen the Archduke and the gold, Kearney Fairwalk’s gold, and—and that was more important.” He stood up, paced to the dining table, to a cabinet, to a pair of soft chairs by the windows. “More important!”

  “Are you sure it was Vered the man spoke to?”

  “The night felt the same. The darkness had the same feeling to it as the one where Bexan was screaming. It was—it was evil.”

  She was quiet for a time. “Cayden,” she said at last, “it was blood this man spoke of. Surely you guessed that.” When he shook his head, she sighed. “Drinking the blood of man or animal isn’t what makes the Knights what they are. It’s sharing the blood of one already a Knight. And it doesn’t happen all at once. But after they become what they become, drinking blood is necessary to keep them alive.” She paused, looking far beyond him into an unimaginable distance—the past? “They crave blood that is drenched in fear. Survival is possible with cold, stale blood. Better that it comes warm from the veins of a dying, frightened animal. But best of all, hot and pulsing from the throat of a terrified man who knows full well that he is about to die.”

  “You’re talking about them as if—you keep saying they are, not they were.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were quoting someone.”

  “Yes.” She came closer. “You’ve said that you see only things you can change. Very well. Let’s agree for the moment that this is always true.”

  “Those Elsewhens came because I could have stopped what happened. He’s dead and it’s my fault. I didn’t look. I wouldn’t see.” Rumble leaped into his lap, startling him again. “How did you know why I see the Elsewhens?”

  She gave a complex snort. “I’ve known you since I first swaddled you. And it happens I don’t agree with your ‘why.’ What about Alaen and Briuly Blackpath? You can’t tell me there’s anything in the whole wide world you could have done to warn them. So what does this do to this idea of yours that you see only things you can change?”

  “I think there’s more than one kind of Elsewhen,” he admitted. “But most of them—I didn’t see anything more because it was too late. If only I’d looked and seen and understood—”

  “And done what, exactly? Taken away all his pens and paper? A tregetour with an idea and the sheer stubborn grit to carry it through—there’s nothing more dangerous in the world.” She lowered herself into a chair and leaned back into its velvet-upholstered depths. “Something did change. In the second, his wife wasn’t with him. You didn’t hear the chimes. Can you think of anything that you did to influence whether she was with him or not?”

  He thought back over the last few days. No, further back than that—anything he could have done between the night before Wintering two years ago and the Elsewhen about the gold.

  He had sent the babies a collection of cuddle-toys for their Namingday present. From his grandfather’s library, he’d given Vered and Bexan a very old book of Piksey rhymes, charmingly illustrated. He’d spoken with Vered any number of times, and with Bexan, written a few letters, sent the footman over to Wavertree with a jar of Mistress Mirdley’s special remedy for colic.…

  Hopeless. Tracking down what he might have done—or might not have done, and there was the real prospect for insanity—was utterly hopeless.

  “So,” Mistress Mirdley said in a satisfied way. “You don’t know. You’ll never know.” She was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again her voice had softened. “Am I afraid for you, boy? That’s what you want to know. Yes, I am. I’m not about to tell you how long I’ve served the Silversun family. You and Derien, you’re the last. At least one of you had better marry and have sons, that’s what I say. Looks as if it’ll be Derien. But it would be nice to have you alive long enough to make the choice if you want. And with him slithering about…” She ended with a shrug.

  “It’s not me he’s after.” But he would be, if Touchstone and the remaining Shadowshapers did what Cade and Mieka thought they ought to do. What they m
ust do.

  Still … once the third play was out there, what could Henick do? Another death? Unlikely. In a way, performing that play in public would keep all the rest of them safe. He wouldn’t dare another murder, not with Princess Miriuzca keeping ostentatious watch.

  Then he remembered the gold coins. The ones that now would never be struck—or at least would not come from Fairwalk’s cellar of gold. Whatever plot would have produced them for a preposterous rate of exchange with the old ones, it would culminate in Cyed Henick’s making himself King. How could Touchstone possibly be important enough to endanger a scheme that huge? True enough, they’d had some small successes in confronting him. But they were players, theater people, not powerful nobles or politicians. Whatever victories they’d known were private, personal. Nothing to shake a nation.

  Once he was King, he could rid himself of Touchstone whenever he liked.

  Which led to a question. Two questions.

  “Why Vered? Why now?” He turned in his chair, sat straighter. “It was just a play. Insulting, yeh, but Cyed Henick’s been squinted at sideways all his life. His father was a traitor who started a war.”

  “And lost it.”

  “I know,” he said impatiently. “And I’m sure that rankles, just as I’m sure he wants all the power his father was unable to grab. But how could a play—” He broke off and shrank back into the cushions as if the Archduke stood before him now. “It’s the end of the Shadowshapers as a viable entity. Everyone saw after they broke up that they weren’t anywhere near as good without each other as with each other. Together, they had influence. Power. The best and most popular group in Albeyn—everybody wanting to see them, brag that they’d seen the latest play ten times, read every interview to find out what they’d do next, and now they’re poring over the published plays—”

  He looked around distractedly, but they were in the dining room, Mieka’s side of the house, not the drawing room where there were shelves with a tasteful display of books of general interest. One of them was a signed collection of the Shadowshapers’ original works, sent by Vered and Bexan as a homecozying gift. He knew from an article in The Nayword that there had been three print-runs so far—and now, after Vered’s murder, there would be a dozen more.