Wicked Bronze Ambition

by Glen Cook

  Nobody, not even the Palace, could get him to stop.

  I added, “The more I think about it, the better I like that.”

  “There is a problem.”

  “Yeah. It might look like Relway was being manipulated. He wouldn’t want anybody to get that idea.”

  “You’re entirely too cynical. And you ignore the benefits of open communication.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just explain what you’d like done and why. Clearly. In short, declarative sentences. No asides. No parenthetical remarks. No historical justification or moralizing. The way you wish clients would talk to you.”

  That sounded like . . . Hell, I don’t know what. Maybe just something too sensible, simple, mature, and unlikely for human nature, especially if the nether half of the transaction was a nut job like Deal Relway.

  “Overwhelming as a concept, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “The idea of just stepping up and saying something.”

  She was messing with me, ringing the wind chimes of a lesser and tangled intellect. She pranced back to her original point. “There would be a legal problem if our man is a priest. Clerics are supposed to be handled inside their churches even when they commit civil crimes. That goes back centuries.”

  I understood. There had been a stink about exactly that a few years ago. The Courts of Resolve ruled for a temple where a priest had committed rape, citing past practice, common law, and the fact that the cult was signatory to the Canonical Accord of the Synod of TiKenvile.

  Life gets stupid once politics become involved.

  “Got you. But what do you want to bet the Unpublished Committee doesn’t give a rat’s whisker?”

  It wouldn’t go down in total secrecy, either, if ever it happened. Relway would want the priests to know that they enjoyed no more immunity than any other criminal class.

  Yes. His branch of the Guard probably felt strong enough to begin eroding clerical privilege employing a time-honored tool: divide and conquer.

  Every cult wanted to cut the rest down. There were hundreds to cut.

  Relway might see a chance to establish the primacy of the Unpublished Committee because one of the Operators was a priest in TunFaire’s biggest denomination. If we told him.

  59

  We were clip-clopping along the Street of Dreams now, nearing its head and the great brooding mass of Chattaree, epicenter of the Orthodox rite. “Been a while since I’ve been here,” I said. There had been a case involving a bad magister back before General Block, Deal Relway, the reform of the Watch, and the founding of the Unpublished Committee. Hardly anyone knows about it. The Church handled its own dirty laundry, as ever it had. I told Moonblight the story, without nostalgia. We had by then dismounted and established ourselves on a public bench across from the cathedral.

  “I knew a little about it,” she said, never asking why we were sitting when we could go inside and do. Chattaree was open to anyone who wanted to wander in. That was part of its function. “Constance had your background examined when it became obvious that Strafa was smitten and determined.”

  That surprised me but should not have. I said so.

  Tara Chayne responded, “Strange as the Algarda family dynamics are, they are a family. Insular in the extreme, yes, but you’re right. Constance is thorough. She probably knows more about you than you remember yourself. Her unreserved approval must have surprised a lot of people.”

  Did that make me uncomfortable? Yes, it did. “It stunned me. I expected to be chopped into dragon chow first time Strafa took me to meet her formally.”

  “Presumably Constance saw something no one else but Strafa did. Quickly, anyhow. I believe I’m starting to get it.” She gestured, including Brownie and the girls, which only made me feel more lost.

  She chuckled when I moved a few inches away. “Garrett, sweetheart! You’re safe here. I don’t do my business in public.”

  Must be stamped on my forehead in big red letters that don’t show up in a mirror: THIS IS GARRETT, BORN TO BE GIVEN A HARD TIME. ENJOY. And, yeah, lately I’ve been working on clearing enough upper-level forehead to make room for all that.

  I concentrated on Chattaree, which was as much ugly citadel as it was cathedral. Never much for ambling through TunFaire’s remoter past, I didn’t know why the original builders had gone for hideous instead of sublime. And, as I did every time I beheld it, I wondered, “How many millions of old-time marks did they spend to pile all that limestone up that high?”

  “Do you really care?”

  “Not much. It wasn’t my money.”

  “The elders are still servicing the loans taken to finance the construction.”

  My opinion of Chattaree was down there with snakes’ balls. It was like the architects and artisans had made special efforts to generate the maximum in repulsion, but then had changed their minds partway through the project. They had started with a step pyramid, but once they got thirty feet above ground level, new management decided to plant a cathedral where the rest of the pyramid ought to go. That part was all soaring spires covered with curlicues and gargoyles.

  Chattaree dominated the skyline for miles around.

  I considered the steps. There were forty, of irregular height and width. Brownie came and rested her chin on top of my right leg, considered me with big brown, soulful eyes. Wishful thinking took me back to the unreasoned devotion Strafa had shown. I missed her bad. “You think Strafa and I would have made it?”

  “I don’t see why not. She was devoted to you.”

  “I got that part. But for a total genius she was a little simple. Somebody promised me she would be trouble because of the way she lived before we got together.”

  “The Algardas put that darkness behind them.”

  “Not the family complications, just the fact that Barate never let her grow up.”

  “Because she was spoiled, you mean?”

  “Partly that. And she never developed any life skills. Though I’m not quite sure that nails it, either. Kind of, the way she lived before she met me was the only way she ever lived, so that’s the way she’d always expect things to go on being.”

  “I see. You could have seen some of that. But don’t forget that when she was much younger and even less worldly, she managed a line tour in the Cantard without anybody to hold her hand. She bore down and dealt when the fire began to burn.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I didn’t think about that. Where was she? Never mind. I don’t want to know. I’d hate it if it was somewhere even worse than where I was. She never talked about it. Not even once.”

  “Do you talk about it?”

  “No.” Since I never see any of the guys I was down there with anymore.

  “Case closed. You worry too much about stuff that doesn’t matter.”

  “You aren’t the first to notice.”

  “I don’t think our man is going to come out to us. Let’s go find him. We do have other stuff to do.”

  60

  We took the steps in stages. I was uncomfortable leaving our four-legged associates unsupervised. Horses can be counted on to do whatever is evilest, while dogs are easily influenced by those who are dedicated to doing evil—although, honestly, I was more concerned about rustling than I was about critter misbehavior.

  I wasn’t sure why.

  Tara Chayne was probably right when she insisted that our Civil Guard shadows would take care of any problems. They needed us as stalking horses.

  They might even defend the dogs against the sort of refugee retards who thought pups belonged in the communal pot.

  We ran into an old priest coming out of the cathedral, long, lean, and tired looking. He would have gone to the old priests’ home by now if there were any young blood taking the cassock. The lack was surprising considering the state of the economy.

  Most of the traffic consisted of religious personnel. It was the middle of a workday in the middle of a week. Honest parishioners ought to be occupied elsewhere—unless someho
w involved in preparations for the upcoming holy days, Day of the Dead and All Hallows’.

  This old boy had one foot in the next world and was thinking on the wonders ahead. He nearly jumped out of his frock when Tara Chayne asked, “Father, can you help us?”

  Rheumy gray eyes focused. His gaze darted, assessing us instantly and possibly too accurately.

  He opined, “I suspect that I don’t have enough time left. I do have an assignment. But helping is the mission that God has given me, so I must do what I can.” Meaning he would go through the motions, though he would be wasting time on spiritual deadbeats.

  Old people can be scary the way they read you, and this one was old even to Tara Chayne Machtkess, who said, “We’re looking for my father’s cousin, Brooklin Urp. Which was his name before he took orders. My father is dying. He had a big fight with his cousin when they were young. I don’t know what they fought about. A girl, probably. I just care about getting it all settled so there aren’t any problems with the probate.”

  She lied smoothly, with conviction, sounding like a complete weasel, which I noted and would not forget.

  Unskilled liars focus on details and try to put a shine on their own part in whatever they’re trying to pull together.

  The priest said, “I don’t know a Brooklin Urp, madame. I’ve been at Chattaree forty-nine years.” And now began to show more interest in me than she. Frowning. “I’ve seen you before.”

  “I’m no regular but I do come to services.” The absolute truth. Only God Himself could fault me.

  I didn’t remember him, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t collided at some point. My most recent visit to Chattaree had been full of excitement and had taken place under cover of darkness.

  Tara Chayne pulled it back to her. “He changed his name after he turned into a priest.” Which was not unusual. New priests often want to break with their pasts. “Dad says he should be easy to find because he has this big thing on his head, over his eye.” She touched her hairline, indicating the wrong side.

  “Bezma? I didn’t think . . .” He shut up. His face shut down. “That doesn’t sound like anyone here. I’m sorry. Now I do have to get on along to my shut-ins.”

  We let him go. He had given us something. And I could pick him out of a gaggle of old priests if I had to drag him off for tea with the Dead Man.

  Tara Chayne said, “Bezma must be important.”

  “Maybe scary some, too.”

  “We maybe ought to look into that. Why scary, I mean. He didn’t scare me.”

  “But you’re you.”

  She agreed. “There is that.”

  I grunted, said, “I guarantee, some of the people here, back in the shadows, are very scary. Was there a connection between the tournaments and the Church before?”

  “Not obviously. But we never got the angle on the Operators. The ones we saw were dead. Those who weren’t dead made the bodies disappear before we could use them or identify them.”

  Shadowslinger, I recalled, had been accused of being a necromancer. Of course, there was little that hadn’t been laid on her at some point.

  Might the Operators not have a last-man-standing game of their own going?

  61

  Once inside we approached a lay brother near the confessionals. His task seemed to be to control traffic and to provide information. Cynical me, I suspected that his real function was to separate the faithful from those who came looking for the truth—whatever that might be in any given case. He might be skilled in estimating the depths of pockets, too.

  Tara Chayne repeated the truth she had created for the elderly priest out front, so convincingly that I was halfway ready to believe that she had a cousin lurking here.

  I don’t know what the lay brother thought. He nodded and delivered the occasional friendly smile that did not synch up with anything being said.

  “There is no Brooklin Urp here, ma’am. But I am sure that you want to see Leading General Select Secretary for Finance Izi Bezma. I didn’t know he had family outside. The consensus here always has been that he must be a virgin conception hatched out of a gargoyle’s egg.”

  There was an inside joke involved, for sure. It seemed some Chattaree people were not enamored of Izi Bezma. “What kind of name is Izi Bezma? Is he some kind of foreigner?”

  Moonblight hit me with a ferocious look. The man was supposed to be family!

  But he was Brooklin Urp when he was one of us.

  “Don’t know.” He did not miss our exchange of looks. “His ancestors came to TunFaire before the war.”

  That would’ve been a ways back. Maybe far enough to coincide with the start of the tournaments.

  Maybe we had lucked onto something.

  Maybe this mess wouldn’t be all that hard to pick apart after all.

  “I’ll just go see if Magister Bezma is in.” He snickered.

  Tara Chayne asked, “Is that funny?” with a compelling quality in her voice.

  “It is. He’s famous for never leaving Chattaree. He hardly ever leaves his office suite. He has his meals brought in. You can expect the Hammer of God to fall if the Leading General Select Secretary for Finance visits you on your patch.” Then he explained, for the uninitiated, “The joke is, he’s never not in. But that doesn’t mean he’ll see you. Back in a flash, folks. Anybody wanders in with a question, tell them I’m on my way. They need to confess, the confessionals on the ends are manned and neither priest is busy.”

  “Got it.” I gave him a thumbs-up. He went. I reminded Tara Chayne, “He never leaves the premises.”

  “As far as our new friend knows. There can’t be many hundred-year-old priests with the same disfigurement.”

  Couldn’t be many people at all anymore, outside the blisteringly poor. Cosmetic sorcery has become a competitive field. You can get subcutaneous cysts, small scars, and the like eliminated for the cost of a meal now that there is no demand for sorcery in the Cantard.

  I thought back to my Chattaree-related case. The villain then had not tried to disguise what he was, but he had laid on layers of misdirection. Shouldn’t I expect the same this time? Or more since the tournament scheme involved legally unsanctioned violent death?

  A thought out of nowhere. “Don’t know why I haven’t asked this before. What was all the excitement on the other side of the Hill last night?”

  The humor fled her face. “It was what we guessed. Two young people from the Hedley-Farfoul family—fraternal twins—lost their lives, quite nastily. The little blonde you described, and her companion, were in the neighborhood but not involved—though Chase found one witness who said that they had attacked the attackers, too late to help the Farfoul kids.” Chase would be her man Denvers.

  “A thing that might have been a wolf-demon, its ties indeterminate, got torn up as badly as the twins. It escaped lacking an ear, some scalp, its tail, and its right forepaw up to whatever a wolf’s fetlock is called. The patrol collected the pieces but had to give them up to the Civil Guard. The corpses, too. The forensics sorcerers are still working the area. They wouldn’t cooperate with Chase or Orchidia Hedley-Farfoul.”

  “Don’t know that name.”

  “It would be strange if you did. The twins’ mother. She keeps a low profile. She was an assassin-mage during the recent unpleasantness. The best there ever was.”

  “The Black Orchid?”

  “Her.”

  “Bless me.” Nothing would express my amazement any better. “I thought the Black Orchid was like an urban legend of the combat zone.”

  “At least nineteen people on the Venageti side wish she was made up. Not to mention all the unknowns who got between her and her targets.”

  “So, basically, the Operators didn’t think things through and maybe screwed the pooch.”

  “They did that when they killed Strafa. But yes. Orchidia was never more than a rumor here. No one who hadn’t worked with her knew much about her. Once her obligation was fulfilled, she hung up her blades and became a hous
ewife who did consulting work for the Crown. And I don’t mean consulting as a euphemism. So. Last night’s events will definitely bring the Black Orchid out of retirement. We may be in a race to avenge Strafa before she avenges Dane and Deanne.”

  I vaguely recalled an odd girl the kids called Deanne Head running with the Faction. She hadn’t found what she wanted there and had moved on. “I might’ve met the girl.”

  “She and Kevans were acquainted. I don’t think they were friends. Deanne may have had her eye on Kip Prose, too, for a while.”

  I sighed. “So the stupid tournament really has started.”

  “It’s started. It’ll get uglier if we can’t abort it. The Guards who cleaned up weren’t Specials or Runners. Could that mean anything?”

  It meant she had a fine paranoid mind tuned to sniff out wicked possibilities.

  Suppose those first red tops weren’t the real thing? Suppose they were agents of the Operators cleaning up so no useful evidence would be left for the real tin whistles? That might be why the forensics sorcerers were working the scene now.

  Clever, maybe, but foolishly lethal to try—unless you got away with it. But till some mob found themselves drowning in a pond of their own blood, showing the world the full price of stupid, it was sure to happen eventually, probably sooner than later.

  I didn’t think any professional bad guys would be dim enough to yank the Director’s beard that blatantly. They tried to get along. Even Relway knows when to pretend not to see. It would take an amateur convinced of his own brilliance to try, one with a built-in case of supreme upper-class arrogance and disdain. Or maybe someone who had spent his whole life isolated inside a cathedral, never getting any true flavor of the real world.

  62

  Tara Chayne said, “It occurs to me that it wouldn’t be bright of me to challenge anyone as powerful as this one might be, here in the seat of his power.”