by J B Lucas
“I don’t want any more bad news today,” stated the spymaster, his eyes closed. “If it’s bad news, tell me tomorrow.”
Sapp, Parp, and Yellan looked at Tristofan. He stared at Loreticus, then gestured back towards the door. The four turned and started walking out awkwardly, the chest swinging and banging their knees. The weight of it caught his imagination, as did the anticipation of bad tidings.
“What’s in there?” asked Loreticus before they got too far.
“A dead person, sir,” said Parp.
“Great. Who?”
“Ibor Country,” the postie answered. Loreticus scratched inside his ear and looked at Selban. The agent waved his hand in dismissal.
“Go to Sempus and tell him it’s a present from me. We’ll deal with it tomorrow. Who are you all anyway?”
“He’s mine,” said Selban and pointed at Tristofan. “He’s a good one.”
“We’re posties, sir,” said Sapp, gesturing between himself and Parp.
“You?” asked Loreticus, jutting his chin out at Yellan.
“Freelance, sir,” said the skinny man.
“Oh.” Loreticus turned back to the table and poured himself a glass of wine. “Tomorrow,” he called out over his shoulder.
The sun came up early to find them both still near the table. Loreticus had wrapped himself in a blanket, whilst Selban was curled up on the path.
“Did someone bring you a corpse last night?” asked Selban without getting up.
“I think so,” said Loreticus. “In a trunk, I think.”
Selban sat up, grunted thoughtfully and lay back down on the ground.
“You’ve got to see the emperor today,” stated the agent.
“Bugger.”
“And then Antron.”
“Everything happens in threes.”
“Then go see Struss if you want to make it three. Nothing happens because you expect it to,” said Selban, and rolled himself into a chair. “This predilection of curses and patterns is just your way of hoping to control the world.”
“You think? Well, thank you my philosopher in a wine beaker. But perhaps you’re right. It feels incredibly messy. There’s no resolution to any of it.”
“My recommendation is that you have three bastards to deal with . . .” They glanced around nervously, and Selban lowered his voice. “You’re by no means the biggest bastard of them all, so point them at each other and get out the way.”
“A bowl of scorpions.”
“Indeed. Put them in a pit and let them deal with each other.”
The Struss household was being packed up when Loreticus arrived.
“Where is he?” demanded the spymaster of the doorman. He was one of the same guards from their first visit.
“I’ll fetch him, my lord,” said the man and galloped off.
Loreticus sat on the steps and held his head.
“Get me water!” he shouted at no-one. A servant came quickly with a jug and cup. Loreticus filled the cup three times, gulping down the flavoured liquid, then poured some straight from the jug on to his face, and rubbed to get the stink of wine off his skin.
“What do you want, spymaster?” growled Struss. Loreticus blinked away the water and stared at him.
“I need a confession,” he stated.
“No. You had enough of my secrets last night. Now is the time for me to take my daughter and to go home. There are people there who know us and will help us. People who share our grief.”
“And how exactly do you expect to take your daughter home with you?” asked Loreticus, his hangover prodding his temper forward. “Has it occurred to you that you are not in control of this situation?”
“I’ll beat my way through to your damned door, spymaster, and I’ll beat your devilish face until I get my child. Your guards won’t always be there.”
Imelda came to stand by her husband.
“I realised last night why Pia didn’t want to recognise you as her father,” he said.
“Last night when you were obviously in your cups?”
“She must have seen you kill him.”
Servants packing and carrying paused for a heartbeat as they heard this, then continued on to the line of carts outside the house.
“I’ll beat you now for your crude accusations,” spat Struss, but Loreticus stepped back into the street. It was only a pace, but it took him away from the threshold of the house, away from the shadow, out into the sunlight.
“You can’t kill everyone you find makes your life untidy, Struss,” he said, more loudly now. “You’ll not be leaving with your daughter until you make amends with the gods.”
Struss ran towards him, grabbing his tunic in tight, panicked fists.
“Maybe I won’t kill everyone, spymaster, but I can kill you. Leave the gods to look at me and let them ignore her. There’s nothing but your thin accusations for you to spread around. Nothing. And he had no family to pick up the case.”
“He had your daughter, you old fool,” said Loreticus and slowly reached up to Struss’s chin. He squeezed the man’s throat slightly, just enough to distract him. “And I’m not working for his family. I work for the emperor.”
Struss dropped his hands, and Loreticus stepped away, half loping into the hand-drawn carriage that he had hired for the journey. The peasant pulling the vehicle looked at him nervously, then eyed the larger man, obviously hoping to get away as soon as possible. Struss stared at Loreticus, his expression revolving between fury and concern.
As Struss moved back inside the house, his wife watched him, and he did not have the temerity to return her gaze. Instead he started shouting at the servants and workmen to be finished as quickly as possible.
The small carriage wobbled precariously as it bounced down the filling streets. An angry sun had risen that morning and there was no hiding from it as the driver plunged face-first into knots of pedestrians or gaggles of buyers standing by stalls.
He had nothing, and even though his accusation would carry weight with the emperor, it wouldn’t satisfy his internal sense of justice. Struss was violent, unrepentant, and he made his household suffer with warped logic.
The people in the street spread and made a path for a small troop of brilliant soldiers who marched past. No-one but the spymaster paid them any notice, because to see them was an hourly experience. But these triggered Loreticus’s mind, and he saw the crest of Antron glimmering on the front of their breastplates.
Another problem, he thought. The general would not have his concern about fair justice; he would stab first and apologise after. If he thought that Loreticus had put a spy in his midst, then there would be blood. If the scenario was reversed, and Antron had promised to catch a spy in Loreticus’s network only to turn up with a corpse, he himself would have suspected the general of covering his tracks.
This damned curse that had plagued him for a week was the sinew between these crises, it was the burden which sat on his shoulders and coloured his dreams.
In his exhausted state, he imagined Selban’s voice unprompted; “Stick them all in a pit together and let’s go to lunch.”
Maybe that was the best solution.
“Pia, he told me everything.”
She observed him with her strange blue eyes, taking in the details of his face as she tried to understand his bluff.
“No,” she said.
“Do you know why he killed your husband?”
“He didn’t mean to kill him.”
“Yes, he did, Pia. Do you know who Roban was?”
“Yes.”
Loreticus sat at the desk in his rooms in the tower, grateful for the rest after the stairs. A breeze came through the windows, and the mountains had their purple hats back on. It felt cleansing.
“Your father thought that the gods were after you.”
“It gave him no justification,” she said quietly, her voice crumpled. Her hands twisted on her lap and she gave them
her attention. “He took away my love.”
“Understand your father. He thought that the gods were coming after you anyway. Rather he invokes their wrath than you did. He was doing what he believed his paternal duty was. He was standing in the way of anything threatening his child.”
She looked up.
“What is going to happen to him?”
Loreticus shrugged. “He’s not admitting to it formally, but he doesn’t seem like a man who cares about the guilt.”
“He can live with anything if he has me around. He’d murder the entire world to make sure that I stayed safe. He doesn’t understand.”
“Your parents are waiting for you before they leave the capital. They’re going back to the farm to give you space. Do you want to do that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What about if it was only with your mother?”
Pia looked up optimistically, then guilt flooded her mind and drowned out any other emotion.
Loreticus nodded and walked her down the stairs to where a pair of guards were waiting to take her home.
Loreticus sat, waiting for the emperor to finish his thoughts. He patrolled the gardens with a studied, kicking walk, rarely looking up from his contemplation. The spymaster was one of several people waiting for his attention, wedged between three other plea-seekers, all sitting squashed together on a bench where they had been instructed to wait by the steward.
The great man lifted his head, changed pace and walked over to the quartet decisively. He levelled a finger at the first man on the bench, an old zealot who seemed totally unperturbed.
“Manio, chief accountant for the palace farms.” The emperor winced, moved his digit to the next person.
“Kavan, militia in the army. News on runaways, my lord.”
The finger came along to Loreticus, then dropped and the emperor gave a brief, shallow smile of recognition. He glanced at the next visitant on the bench, then gestured for the young spymaster to follow him.
“Good news?”
“Yes, my lord,” replied Loreticus. No matter how many times he met this man, there was always an underlying level of uneasiness. The emperor had seen everything, done everything of note for the last forty years. He had conquered the entire border regions and had humbled other kings. Loreticus felt an obligation to keep him interested. “We have found the murderer, but we have no proof, the militia would not be able to punish him, and he’s leaving town.”
“So very much a mixed message then, Loreticus?” It was a rhetorical question, and he began to pace again, leaving the benches behind. The young spymaster felt that perhaps the emperor was looking for privacy rather than inspiration in this meandering. “I cannot bring revenge on a man without proof,” he continued. “Especially not on someone the gods are protecting.”
“I don’t know that they are, sir,” said Loreticus. “In fact, I would say that that is why he’s running from the repercussions.”
“I don’t want to know his name, so that I don’t come into their divine whimsy. But then again, it certainly doesn’t seem right to kill a man on his wedding day. I’m sure that he has cursed the palace with that young tutor’s ghost until this is resolved.” He folded his arms and turned to look down at the spymaster. “Is there anything that you could do to help justice be served?”
“I’m sure there is, sir.”
“Good, then I’ll leave restoration of the natural balance to you.” He clapped his hands as if brushing off dirt, then turned and started back towards the bench, and Loreticus’s exit. “But my advice to you, young spyling. Don’t get your hands dirty. Let someone else interfere with the gods’ plans and suffer the consequences. I want as many people between me and you, and this action as possible.”
General Antron was a proud man, a man who often reminded people of a condor made human. The beakish nose that came off his flat cheekbones was not dominant enough to be imperial, but it indicated some breeding somewhere along the way. The mixture of ready violence and elegance was intoxicating, creating a certain glamour around his presence. Loreticus watched him from the shadows of a market stall, irritated and glad at the same time as he watched Antron. He always seemed to be acting a part and was worried that he couldn’t see the edge of the stage.
Antron was a few years older than Loreticus, but he was already one of the few generals in the empire in command of the vast army. He was young, vibrant, virile, and successful; you only needed to ask him to hear the long list of evidence. Loreticus could smell impending decay in this man’s potential however, and it came from within Antron; nobody was that publicly happy with their achievements unless they believed internally that the success wasn’t deserved.
The general sat with some of his senior officers now, in a tavern, drinking, laughing, pushing food down. Eligible society maidens had drifted towards the party like flies to spoiled fruit, and they glided along in pairs and trios, catching the soldiers’ eyes on their repeated passes. Loreticus pushed himself off the wall and wandered into the sunlight, drifting along the near side of the shops.
“Ah, Loreticus, thank you for the excuse to get out,” shouted Antron. The spymaster was still twenty yards away from the table, with a dozen people between him and the general. He smiled and shuffled through the bumbling pedestrians.
“How are you, old friend?”
“Very well, general. ‘Old friend’? Aren’t you exaggerating a little there?”
“Fine.” Antron poured him a large glass of thick, black, pungent wine. Loreticus’s mutinous head immediately started to ache at the imagined taste of more alcohol, and his stomach ran to acid. “What’s the news of my little task, spymaster?”
“All sorted,” said Loreticus with a smile, and poured some of his wine into Antron’s cup before topping up his own with water. “Good news and bad news. The good news is that there will be no more leaks from this source. The bad news is that justice has already been exacted from him.”
“Someone killed the person I wanted to kill?”
“Yes.”
“That’s unfortunate for both of us. Who?”
“Well, did you hear about Princess Alba’s tutor?”
“The chap killed in your gardens?”
“No,” corrected Loreticus. “Not in my gardens. Next to my gardens. Anyway, it turns out that there was some kind of lucrative trade that fell through. Ibor tried to kill his partner, but killed the groom by mistake, blah blah blah.” He knew that Antron lost interest when it came to the crimes of small people; too many and they were too inconsequential. “So his partner killed him. They were making money off selling your plans to our enemies.”
“Well, it seems that you have solved the problem but left me dissatisfied. I want his partner in crime.”
“You can have him, but he’ll deny everything of course.”
“So why did you drag me here out to tell me this? Why aren’t we smashing down this man’s front door?”
Loreticus pointed at a slow caravan of carts weaving their way through the foot traffic. The line was being led by a carriage, cooled in shadows, containing the two ladies of the household. At the back of the train was a cart with some of the larger valuables from the Struss house, driven by the patron himself with a guard. Loreticus caught Tristofan watching him, and the boy nodded. As he scampered off, several of the servants behind the cart took note and disappeared into the crowd as well.
“That back cart has your dear Ibor Country in it.”
“Ibor? It was that little weasel?”
“Little dead weasel.”
“And who is the partner?” Antron turned to the spymaster. “Loreticus, what are you playing at?”
“General,” said Loreticus in his most humble voice, “One day you will lead this empire, either through the armies or on the throne. I just know when to invest in the right person because, well, after all that’s my profession. This Westerner who killed your man laughed when I told him you’d be an
gry. He wagered that one day you’d be one of his debtors. Like most rich merchants, he thinks military men are easy to fool and simple to pay off.”
“That arrogant idiot,” growled Antron.
“I thought that perhaps you’d like the chance to correct his opinion of you, so a couple of his more helpful staff stowed a trunk in that cart with the rest of his valuables. If you didn’t dare to teach the traitor a lesson, at least it will give him a surprise when he arrives at his estate.”
“Is he connected?”
“No,” said Loreticus. “Not him, but the emperor believes that his mother and daughter are protected by the gods.”
Antron snorted gently in what passed for laughter.
“He’s one for his superstitions,” said the general. He gestured to his men to stop drinking. “I want that cart at the back there separated from the rest of the train. And I want that fool riding it bound, gagged, and brought to my gaol before he knows enough to fart.” He waved a hand and several of the officers jumped up, drawing their swords. He gestured to one of the more senior soldiers who hadn’t risen. “Take a look for an old friend tucked up in a trunk in the back.” The grey-haired man nodded without a crease of emotion, and trotted off to lead the gaggle of giants striding through the market.
Within a minute, they had surrounded the cart, cutting it off from the rest of the caravan. Struss started shouting, waving his whip at one of the officers. With negligible fuss and incredible pace, the soldier climbed up and hit Struss’s jaw with his sword hilt.
“Well, spymaster, I owe you a favour it seems. Could you tell the landlord here to send me the bill for this lot? I’ll settle as soon as it gets to me.”
“Don’t worry, general. This is on me.”
“Easy to fool and simple to pay off, spymaster?”
“Investing in people, general.”
Antron smiled, and then turned his nose toward the ruckus, watching his officer rummage through the cart, find something, then order the others to throw the limp body of Struss on top of the luggage. The cart in front hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared to stop in case they were next. The general turned back to Loreticus.
