by J. B. Lucas
The spymaster was shaken. Normally Loreticus was the predator, the one with the might of the empire behind him. This was carried out by someone with knowledge, access and an agenda against him specifically.
“On that note, why did you have the others brought all the way up here? It must have been exhausting for whomever did it.”
“Oh, I didn’t want to have to keep walking up and down the stairs today,” replied Pello without a trace of guilt. Loreticus stared at him for a moment, orienting himself to the idea that this was logic rather than laziness on the part of the boy.
“Well, I suppose that it maintains some sense of privacy,” he muttered.
“It doesn’t look like Statian,” said Pello, drawing his attention back to the face.
Loreticus paused, now realising the horrible newness of the situation for Pello. His junior’s pale cheeks evoked his own virgin investigation of a violent death.
“Have you seen a dead man before?”
“Not up close,” replied the boy. “And not in a room with more dead than live people.”
Loreticus nodded and gestured for him to sit at the room’s writing desk. He resisted an urge to rub Pello’s shoulder in sympathy.
“Draft a message from an alias to Javus to ask whether the fanatics had a hand in this,” he instructed. Pello tucked away his scraps of paper entitled “Assassination Investigation Project” and drew out a fresh sheet.
“Yes, sir.” A pause as he scrawled the date and one of his master’s spare identities. “Do you think he would tell us if the Butcher had been involved?”
“If he knew,” replied Loreticus, and instinctively checked for anyone else in the room. “And stop calling Talio ‘The Butcher’. I’ve managed to drop the habit after ten years and your repetition isn’t going to help.”
The row of corpses lined up. An acquaintance murdered and dumped at his door. These were ugly recurrences of the events of the civil war.
“It is uncomfortably convenient that it happened last night. Today I was due to meet the emperor and the generals to explain my case for a rapprochement with the zealots.” He looked down at the row of bodies, willing himself not to check any were spying on him. “There’s one missing from here. I couldn’t bear to have him laid out with the others. A tall man with brown hair. I’ve asked the physicians to wash him down to see if there is anything we might recognise.”
“Could it be Marcan?” asked Pello, filling out new knots on his large string of logic again.
“No,” replied Loreticus. “I feel something inside me that Marcan is still alive. He has great tasks ahead of him.”
“Bringing the country back together will be a victory, sir,” stated Pello.
“Yes, it will. And I think this emperor might have been willing had he known the state of the finances. As soon as the clerks see we’re running out of money, they look after their own wages first and the soldiers’ last.”
“So the clerks might have killed the guards?”
“No, you plum,” snapped Loreticus. “But these two things surely aren’t a coincidence. Marcan disappears, his bodyguards are murdered. That much is tight logic. Whether it had anything to do with the conversation planned for today is the crucial question.”
“Why, Loreticus?”
“It shows who benefits. An unstable empire benefits the zealots in their new country, but simply killing the emperor benefits those who inherit the throne – in other words, the Imperial Cousin Ferran or General Antron. It’s a ridiculous situation.” Another sigh. “All I want is a peaceful city and short-sighted people spend their time tearing up maps.”
Pello moved to the desk, scrawling a large knot between the cluster on the left and the one in the middle. Pello wrote “Who benefits?” above and put a column of dashes next to it. Loreticus watched him, knowing that he would fill out that list with names as they occurred to him. The boy’s pale tunic glowed in the light from the window, making Pello look up again at the clear blue sky. Loreticus followed his gaze. The heavens stretched in their perfection to the mountains at the edge of the kingdom, the great looming slopes.
“It really is strange it all happened on such a quiet day,” he said.
Loreticus considered him once more, then said, “Go and get changed for the reception tonight. Be back here in an hour with a clear head on your shoulders.”
Chapter 3
The fashion in the capital was to hold parties timed precisely for when the sun went down. The light was hypnotic, a delicate blend of heat and gold, and the common philosophy was that this twilight calmed the spirit and encouraged fraternity between even the grubbiest of rivals. And so it was tonight, with the three vainglorious generals acting as a fraternity of hosts.
Loreticus and Pello arrived perfectly on time, when there were enough cliques to flit between but not enough of a crowd to get wedged against any one of them. Loreticus smiled, his perfumed grey hair styled tightly against his skull, his lips and tongue moist with a deep-red wine as he kissed wives, hugged husbands and clapped sons on the shoulder. He was in demand, and sometimes a queue formed near him as people looked to his stately figure as a safe harbour in the current storm.
Loreticus wasn’t one of those guests who were cynical and half-hearted about an invitation only to remember how much they enjoyed company when they arrived. He was a committed misery and exuded joviality as only self-aware depressives could.
Smiling, smiling, he waded through the people, walking obliviously into deep conversations with a delightful comment irrelevant to any past dialogue. After each greeting, Pello corrected his clothes from behind, and flattened any lose hair.
Loreticus reached the end of the hall, sucked in a lungful of air and let his smile drop.
“How are we doing, dear Pello?”
“One-third of the triangle, Loreticus. Avoid General Iskandar, straight line to General Antron, a few nice words about how tall he looks, spin to the Imperial Cousin Ferran to tell him how funny he is, and then home.”
The older man nodded, palmed his hair back above each ear and looked out at the crowd. From anyone other than Pello, these would have been words seeped in sarcasm, but the boy was deadpan and unfortunately all too accurate.
Antron was on the balcony, letting the falling sun lift the military gold from his cloak’s clasp. He was laughing a little too noisily, moving a little stiffly and all-round smiling too much. Loreticus noticed with a certain disapproval that Antron’s cloak was the wrong style for the occasion.
Had Loreticus’s late wife been here, his discomfort would have amused her. Now the recollection of her filled him with remorse. All these people were still here, populating the world with their chatter, their white teeth and togas and smooth hair, their perfume and the chink of glasses touching. The noise of blended conversations was overwhelming.
“Back at it,” he said and wound up a momentum to start walking. “Hello! Hello!” he called to the bankers and the doctors. He smiled so easily and so convincingly that his eyes closed behind his thick black lashes and people wondered how he saw to walk.
He glided past General Iskandar, who deigned not to notice him as Loreticus squeezed the hand of a chubby duke and took a hug from his tall, angular wife. The Imperial Cousin Ferran was on the third leg of his route, the one which took him back to the door, and when their eyes met there was a brief, not unwelcome nod of lifelong acquaintances. The three generals looked like wolves amongst these negligent sheep. Loreticus noted the way that Iskandar avoided any chance of catching the eye of Ferran or Antron. Subconsciously they had split the room and the crowd, who flocked to bleat around each of them. “Normally it is a snarling battle with these three unchaperoned in the room together. Either there’s an invisible chaperone, or I’m missing something,” Loreticus mused to Pello.
“Well, they seem to be keeping their distance from each other,” replied the young man. “Divide and conquer the masses, et cetera.” Loreticus watched him from the side of his eyes. Pello’s pe
nsiveness either meant a question or a conclusion. “Could it be that these three generals came together for the sake of the empire in a time of need? Buried their differences and formed a partnership?”
“Perhaps,” said Loreticus. “Their new camaraderie is certainly welcome. The question is whether they had any hand in the chaos.”
Antron, content in his role of host, cut another conversation short to wait as Loreticus crossed the last few steps.
“So what do I call you now, Antron? Generalissimo? Emperor? Prince?” asked Loreticus.
“Good god, Loreticus, your small talk seems to dry up if the other person lacks breasts. You call me Antron, like you always have and you always will.”
A moment in which Antron’s eyes couldn’t quite connect with Loreticus’s. They were exactly the same age, peers from the academies of their youth all the way to fighting shoulder by shoulder every day during the civil war. But somehow Loreticus was settled in his skin, whilst Antron was still growing. It was this innate unease which had created a distance between them, and it was perhaps the bond between Antron and Iskandar.
“What a view!” exclaimed Antron, looping his arm around Loreticus’s ribs. “What an incredible sight. The capital.”
He opened his arms to encompass the great city which tumbled out from under the lip of the balcony. All roads pointed to the palace, with the grand, palm-covered main street, the corda, striking its mercantile path between the heavy gates and skirting past the palace one block away.
“Yes, I’ve always loved this aspect.”
“Of course,” said Antron, his smile undiminished, “You know this view well.”
“I do. The old emperor’s favourite place, other than his garden.”
“Well, not many people had been here before we invited them tonight. There was quite a lot of excitement.” He looked around behind them at the filling room. “Very excited.”
As Loreticus looked out across his home town, a sudden feeling that Antron might throw him five or six storeys down to the flagstone courtyard made him turn with an unusual paranoia. General Antron was a clumsy creature, an oik despite his glamorous family.
We invited them, repeated Loreticus to himself with an inward snarl. He unsheathed a smile for Antron and opened a different conversation.
“Are you already moving in?” he asked, indicating the gaudy display of trinkets. The general had them displayed as talking points along the far end of the balcony, where he seemed to be receiving the worthier guests that night. “I don’t know whether you and I have ever been that close now I consider it, Loreticus,” he began. His sharp Adam’s apple bounced in his veined throat as he swallowed a decision. “I have a . . . prize, let’s call it. One of the hardest times for me was when I led out my army against another tribe the week after Marcan took the throne. Another emperor, another barbarian. My life was repetitive to the point of worthlessness. Perhaps there had been valour and glory in my ascent, but now I was simply all-powerful as a military man. Of course, Iskandar is the greatest general in the empire’s history, but where am I in those books? An easily forgotten peer of his at best. And then my view changed and I no longer saw the next rival as someone new, but simply the same man I had fought thirty years ago, just in different armour with a different army.”
Loreticus examined the man as he hesitated before his next thought. He was a unique and impressive man, imposing, assured, and in any age other than when Iskandar stood near him, he would have been celebrated as a military genius. But to Loreticus, Antron only survived on one plane, that of battlefields. Perhaps they were incredibly complex and Antron’s gift was in the deep, precarious strategy which had led him so far. Loreticus doubted it. Antron was a physical man who presumed that the tangible outweighed intelligence.
“Do you know my darkest secret yet, spymaster?” He watched Loreticus with his face partially turned away, as if he had suffered a recent slap.
“Your collection of skulls? All of the chieftains that you’d conquered, the men you’ve killed in hand-to-hand fights.”
Antron raised his eyebrows and nodded with a strange satisfaction.
“Very good,” he said. “Very close. I’ll spend the rest of the night working out which of my most trusted servants told you. Is that as much as you know, or can you speculate?”
“A mountain of skulls? An ossuary with a mosaic of a map? A dining room kitted out with furniture made of the larger specimens? A suit of armour made from the bones of vanquished enemies?”
Antron laughed. “No, none of those, although I shouldn’t pretend that they are all beyond me. Blood and guts and the pressure of leadership can scar a man inside, Loreticus. If you fail, I take over, and I took over a lot when you failed with the zealots. No, I have become an artist of sorts and my old enemies are helping me in my endeavours. Between us, we are creating the shape of my lifelong enemy.” He looked deeply at Loreticus, wondering how best to explain, or perhaps considering whether he knew all of his secrets already. The spymaster’s face was expressionless, other than a mild frown. He couldn’t help but fear what Antron was about to say. “So I’ve had a sculptor build me a golem, a skeleton of my foe using broken remnants of my past enemies. The skull is that of a huge warrior I defeated when I was young, the bones of the hands came from an eastern lord who you might remember tried to challenge the family. His spine comes from everywhere, made up of knuckle bones, vertebrae, anything I could find. My problem was that by the time I’d finished his human form, I still had a dozen years and two dozen foes to commemorate. That’s when I realised that he was a demon, and we built grand wings and a wicked tail. And now I’ve almost finished, but for the final piece. I don’t think that I shall take to the battlefield again. If I did, it would be vanity not necessity.”
“You’ve almost finished?” asked Loreticus. “So it shall remain incomplete? Rather unlike you, Antron.”
“Ah, I didn’t say that,” replied the general. “I had been saving the tip of the tail for someone in particular and now it seems that it might need a substitute.”
They looked at each other in silence, Loreticus feeling the pounding of his heart increase as he wrestled to understand the violence in the man in front of him. Even if he had seen the battles, lived the fighting, it was hard for Loreticus to put a shape to bloodshed, let alone identify the traits of a violent person in a face.
“Oh,” he said abruptly, as if catching the thread of the whole conversation. “Am I the tip of your tail?”
Antron shrugged. “Not at the moment,” he said. “You would be a good fit though.”
“Antron,” chided Loreticus in mock bravery, “you know that I’ve never been one for volunteering. Polishing up my punch bowl to wear as a helmet to war, no, not for me.” “No, to you the secrets of the lords and ladies and the tender exchange of coin.”
“Indeed, well put.” Loreticus looked around the bobbing and chattering heads, eager to find a change of topic. Something made him fear finishing the conversation in case it had repercussions with this madman that he hadn’t previously considered. “Is Princess Alba coming tonight?” “I doubt it.” Antron turned to face the crowd, now looking in the opposite direction to Loreticus, but still close enough for the spymaster to feel the breeze from his movements. “If Alba did come, I’m sure it would only be to wish you a happy birthday.”
Loreticus raised his eyebrows and turned his face to the general.
“Oh, you’re not the only one with informers in the palace, dear Loreticus. Many happy returns! Should I announce it to the crowd?”
Loreticus smiled, turning back to look out at the mountains as the sun began to fall.
“No, please don’t. If I wanted a public display of adoration, then I would have paid for it.”
Antron nodded, steering the spymaster with a hand which turned into a clasp. The general’s grip was like stone, cold, rough, unhuman. It held the chill of violence in each of his flat-ended fingers.
They turned their backs on th
e dusk-sunk city and to the wide opening which led from the pale marble floor of the balcony on to the chequered tiles of the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” called Antron. Conversations quieted immediately, and a breathing hush kept the room. “It is with immense pleasure that I should remind you that it is Loreticus’s birthday today!” An impulsive round of applause, hundreds of eyes prodding Loreticus’s face for an expression. “Let us all raise our glasses and sing for his rude health over the next year.” He turned, hugged the taller man with a flawless gesture of friendship and led the crowd in a cheerful rendition of the traditional song.
Loreticus looked around the room, over the faces of the new people of note, the generals, their bankers, their wives and friends, the gleaming gold, the new haircuts and blunt perfumes, the clothes that were a little too colourful. And he smiled so wide that his eyes closed.
The room was fresh, quiet after the party. Outside a nocturnal bird whistled occasionally, answered by a distant partner his hearing couldn’t reach. Loreticus ran his fingers over the smooth surface of the kitchen table, tracing letters and names in the fine dust. The sharp moonlight sketched the edges in the room, the plates and the cups on the side which the servants had left without packing. Pans were stacked, clay jars lined up.
In this kitchen, he was still in the company of Dhalia, his wife, as her ghost drifted between the table and the counter cheerfully, making the servants laugh, berating Loreticus with her wise humour, driving life and breath into every corner of the large room. She, her world, her life was never complete. There were always things that could be done to make it more beautiful and to prepare it for their pending family. Let her worry about what happens in the home, she had told him. His job was to keep her neighbourhood safe.
Dhalia had lost her brother and her father in the Terror, horrific wounds in a family which had been closer and more welcoming than any other he had visited. Even with this shadow in her mind, she had embraced Loreticus into her life with all of the risk and the blood and the sins that he carried in his role. She had ignored the worst of his deeds, instead celebrating the mind of a good man. He had always prepared for the day he would leave her a widow.
