by Tessa Afshar
“Do you want to know what the commission is, or moon over your pretty face?”
Lysander took a deep swallow of his wine. “By all means. Entertain me.”
When Darius finished doing just that, Lysander shoved his cup away and set down his forgotten carving. “You swim in dangerous waters, Darius.”
“Will you join me or not?”
“Keep your beard on, Persian. Of course I will join you. I was merely making an observation.”
The tavern—Pardis—had been named after the lush Persian gardens that reminded visitors of paradise. There were a couple of pots of droopy yellow violets outside the tavern’s peeling walls, but beyond that, Darius could not find any similarities to the formal gardens.
He had already looked over the place and directed each of his men to their assigned location. The men blended well with the crowd that had gathered in the dark corners of Pardis, drinking cheap wine and making noisy conversation. There was one entrance and one back door. Reconnaissance should prove simple.
They were more than an hour early. Darius, aware that their target might have taken the same precaution, studied the place, looking for signs of danger. Niq and Nassir came in together and sat on torn cushions arranged against a wall. Darius placed himself in a dark corner facing the brothers. They put a filthy sack before them on the dirt floor. He had given them the sack as a hiding place for the ivory box, which contained the dagger. In a place such as Pardis, a priceless box would draw as much attention as the bejeweled dagger lying snug within.
Near their meeting time, a slender man approached the brothers. Without invitation, he sat down, his movements fluid. Darius could feel his team of men growing tense as a strung bow. He withheld the signal for attack, however, wanting to make certain there was no mistake. If they captured the wrong man, the right one, were he present, would fly without detection.
The noise in the tavern had risen to a crescendo, preventing him from hearing the conversation between the man and the brothers. Darius studied him minutely, looking for clues to his identity. He could be a soldier; he had the bearing of one—the ease of movement, the athletic build. Slowly, the man reached a hand inside his outer garment to extract something. Darius straightened, ready to spring. But the man merely withdrew a couple of coins and gestured to a pin that rested on Nassir’s shoulder. Nassir shook his head. With a subtle movement of eyes and neck, he shifted the direction of his gaze so that it encompassed Darius. Then he shook his head again.
Loud enough so that Darius could hear, he bellowed, “I said my father gave it to me, and I don’t want to sell it. Now put your money away and leave us in peace. My brother and I don’t want company.”
The man responded with a rude gesture and rose. Darius nodded to two of his men, indicating that they should keep an eye on him. The possibility existed that Nassir and Niq had betrayed him—that this was, after all, the assassin, and the brothers had just tipped him off. The man left the tavern shortly, followed by Darius’s guard. Now he was two men short.
Darius resumed his watch. Lysander, his bright hair darkened with oil and slicked back, sat to the right of the brothers, keeping an eye on the entrance as well as on Niq and Nassir. He had an interesting trick of folding his massive body into a twisted stoop that made it seem shrunken and unimpressive. In spite of his arresting looks, he could make himself seem invisible in any crowd.
With a casual motion, Lysander lifted up the back of his hand and wiped it across his nose. Darius tensed. This had been the agreed-upon signal between them of a possible development.
A new man approached the Babylonians. He was tall and carried himself with a regal air. His clothes, though plain, were made of fine cloth. No sweat stains. No repairs. He made a furtive examination of the room. He had intelligent eyes, Darius thought. For a moment those eyes rested on him. Darius buried his head in his cup, letting his hair fall across his face. When next he lifted his head, the man was taking a seat with the brothers.
A shiver tickled the back of Darius’s neck. The conviction that he was looking at his prey filled him. Wait. Wait, he cautioned himself.
The man pointed to Niq’s head and said something. Niq ran a hand through his short hair and shrugged. The man then pointed at the sack. Nassir leaned forward and whispered in the man’s ear. In the ebb and flow of noise in the tavern, several moments of quiet settled over the room. In the relative silence, Darius could hear the man’s voice, accented with a guttural undertone that he could not recognize.
“You brought me the package?” he asked, and gestured toward the sack again. Nassir hesitated and then pushed the sack toward him. The man pulled the sack open. Without extracting the ivory box into common view, he opened the lid and examined the dagger.
Darius gave the signal to his crew, and they descended on him in a purposeful circle of menace. The man saw his betrayal instantly. He cursed, jumping away from the brothers, the sack still in his hand. Darius picked up speed, hurtling his body toward the man, but someone slammed into him drunkenly, slowing his progress by a fraction of a moment. He shoved the drunk aside, once again gaining speed as well as a free view. Then he saw the flash of the dagger.
Their prey had no chance of fighting his way out, no matter how skilled he might be, Darius reasoned. The odds were simply against him. But he could not silence a nagging premonition. He observed Niq taking a battle stance, stepping cautiously forward.
And then the unthinkable happened. The man did not fight. He turned the dagger and, in a flash, before any of them could reach him or have hope of disarming him, drew its sharp edge against his own neck. Niq was upon him, and then Darius and Lysander. Darius pulled the dagger away from his still-clutching fingers and laid him on the ground.
They had arrived too late. With knowledgeable precision, their prey had severed an artery. Copious waves of blood gushed out of the self-inflicted wound and pooled in the hollow of his neck, overflowing onto the dirt floor.
“Who?” Darius screamed in impotent rage. “Who sent you? A name. Give me a name and I will take care of your family.”
Gathering the last of his strength, the man moved his lips. It wasn’t to speak. He spat into Darius’s face and then went still.
The crowd began to gather like flies around stinking carrion. “Get rid of them,” Darius told one of his men. His lips barely moved. Shock gripped him. He forced himself to focus past the dead man, trying to salvage what he could of the wreck of their mission.
“Carry him outside and put him in the cart. You three, stay here and search this area. Perhaps before killing himself he discarded something that might reveal his identity. Look under the cushions where they sat. Examine every unlikely hiding place.”
Outside the tavern, he turned on Niq. “How could you let him do it? You were much closer to him than I. Why didn’t you stop him?”
Niq flushed. He drew a hand down his face, his expression drawn. “I ask pardon, my lord. I thought he was preparing to fight. I took my time, calculating how to bring him down without harming him. I never thought he would turn the dagger on himself.” His mouth opened and closed like a fish. “I am mortally sorry, my lord.”
If he weren’t so horrified by the events of the past few minutes, Darius would have enjoyed Niq’s first foray into humility. Instead, he tried to determine if the young Babylonian was putting on an act. In truth, Niq’s reading of the situation had been identical to his own. Suicide had not entered his mind. In Niq’s expression and words Darius saw a reflection of his own feelings. Shame. Failure. Shock.
In spite of his conviction that the boy was innocent of wrongdoing, he turned to two of his men and bid them to search Niq and Nassir to ensure they were not hiding a secret message from the assassin. The brothers said nothing, but he could tell that they were offended by this order, which brought their integrity into question.
“It’s for your own good,” Darius said. “This way no one can accuse you of offense later.” His words seemed to calm them.
> He dispatched the remaining four Immortals. “Go back inside and interview the landlord. See if our man arrived on foot or on horseback. Take charge of his horse if he has one. Find out if he has been here before.”
He threw a handful of gold coins at Mardonius. “Find out if anyone in there knew him. Perhaps someone might have at least noticed which direction he came from today.”
Motioning to Lysander, Darius went to the cart where they had laid the dead man. He was young—not yet past his twenties. Glazed black eyes stared unseeing into the overcast sky. Darius did not close them. “Did you notice the hatred in his face when I said that I would care for his family if he supplied me with a name? He spent the last of his meager strength spitting in my face. That’s not the act of a detached professional.”
“I thought the same. It might be that he hated Persian officials in general. There are plenty of men who bear a grudge against your empire.”
Darius leaned further into the cart until the assassin’s dead face was only a hand’s breadth away. The man’s beard had been carefully trimmed and curled. The scent of sandalwood still lingered in his hair, now mingling with the odor of blood. Everything from his expensive leather shoes to his clean skin indicated that he had been a man of some wealth. “True. But unless he has no family, it takes a lot of hate to refuse protection for those you love when you know you won’t be there to provide it yourself.”
He lifted the man’s hand and examined the well-groomed fingernails more closely. “He’s not the typical assassin, you must admit. We’d best search him and see if we can unearth any secrets from his corpse. He certainly refused to divulge anything whilst living.”
As Darius expected, the man carried nothing on his person that hinted at his identity. He had a dagger with a serviceable bronze blade and a plain wooden handle tucked into his belt. Good enough to carve an enemy’s belly. Too nondescript to be useful for their purposes. A thousand men might own a similar weapon. His clothes, new and immaculate, hid nothing, not even a coin that might reveal a location by virtue of where it had been minted. He wore no jewels and did not carry a seal. The man was like a blank clay tablet.
They stripped him, layer by layer, until he was naked. Suddenly, Darius went still. “He had strange taste in tattoos for someone who hated the empire.” He pointed at the man’s arm. The stylized image of a hawk with open wings, the sun shining above him, had been tattooed in black ink into the flesh of his bicep. It was one of the official symbols that Cyrus the Great had adopted to represent his rule over Persia. Cyrus’s heirs had continued to use the spread-winged hawk through the generations. Artaxerxes still used it on some of his flags.
Lysander frowned. “A royal mark, symbolizing Achaemenes, the ancestor of King Cyrus, and your own ancestor, if I am correct. Why would he bear a Persian royal symbol but spit upon a Persian official?”
“There are deep secrets at work here. The more I know, the less I understand.”
They covered the body, placing the clothes and the dagger in a separate bag, intending to study them further once they returned home. The Immortals who had been sent to search for hidden clues came back empty-handed. Darius was past disappointment. Then Mardonius ran out.
“I have a lead, my lord. One of the customers walked here from his house. He said he saw our man partway down the road, walking toward the tavern.”
“In which direction?”
“To the south, my lord.”
“Good work.” Darius said, trying to sound calm. “Can you lead us to where he was first seen?”
Darius and Lysander followed Mardonius, leaving behind the rest of the men to guard the body and the Babylonian brothers. Mardonius marched down a narrow road with high walls on either side. He took several turns, arriving at an even narrower road jammed with small houses, which were joined together by virtue of shared walls on either side.
“Here is where our witness lives,” Mardonius indicated a small house with a brown curtain for a door. “When he came out of his house a couple of hours ago, he saw our man striding further ahead down the road. He remembers him because although his clothes were plain, they appeared new and of good quality. He said he displayed a regal bearing.”
“Did he go straight to Pardis? He stopped nowhere on the way?”
“Nowhere, my lord.”
Darius looked around. “So, in order to get from his lodgings to Pardis, he had to walk down this road. Mardonius, fetch four of your comrades and search this area. Go house to house and ask if anyone has lodged our man or seen him over the past few weeks. It is possible that he rented a room or house somewhere nearby from one of the locals. The landlord probably has no idea that he has been harboring a criminal. But if we find his lodgings, we might discover some evidence amongst his possessions. Lysander and I will question the people down this road. You and the others check out the roads and alleys to the east and west.”
Mardonius sprinted away. Lysander scratched his square jaw. “I thought of something. In two days, the representatives of the provinces will bring their tributes to the king for the New Year. There must be an official list. If this misbegotten son of a donkey was supposed to offer a gift from a certain province, we’ll know where he is from by virtue of his absence.”
“Good thinking. We’d best begin our search, though. Every bit of information will help.”
Darius lost count of the number of residents they questioned. Several of them remembered seeing the man over the past month, but could not recall the location of his lodgings. Nor had they seen him communicating with anyone in particular. It was a girl—young enough to be unmarried and old enough to have discovered the thrill of speaking to the opposite sex—who finally provided them with a solid lead. Darius did not reveal that the object of their search now lay dead at the bottom of a cart. Instead, he hinted that he wished to find him in order to give him some beneficial news.
“I know the one you mean,” she said, managing to swish her hair, play with her long earrings, and giggle at the same time. “Always clean, that one, and smelling of exotic perfumes. Very pleasant to speak to.”
“You’ve spoken to him?” Darius tried to hide his impatience and smiled at her with inviting warmth he did not feel.
“Certainly. He compliments me every time he sees me.”
Lysander leaned forward, enveloping the girl in a blue gaze so fervent she blushed. The poor child, Darius thought, his conscience a little stung. She stood no chance against two men who could wrap a roomful of aristocratic women around their fingers.
“And why shouldn’t he compliment you?” Lysander said. “Such a pretty girl. Look at the size of those eyes. A man could drown in them.”
More giggles. Darius rolled his eyes. “Did he tell you his name?”
“Achaemenes.”
Darius’s spine stiffened. “Are you certain?”
“Of course. It’s not a name I would forget, being so royal sounding and all. He’s an important man, I’m sure of it, although he never brags.”
“Does he have friends? Anyone in particular he speaks to or spends time with?”
“Not that one. He likes to keep to himself.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“What do you mean? I would never visit the home of an unmarried man.”
“I meant no offence. Only, seeing as you are friends, I thought perhaps he has let you know.” Darius knew that Achaemenes—if that were his real name—would never reveal the location of his lodgings to an indiscriminate young woman with a loose tongue. Their man might have a taste for flirtation, but that did not render him careless. However, Darius did not put it past the girl to follow him puppy-eyed, determined to find out for herself.
He was not disappointed. Ten minutes later, he and Lysander were inside the modest house the man had rented while in Susa. They lit a lamp and began a thorough search, sparing nothing in their zeal to unearth the man’s secrets.
As he shoved his hand through one pillow, then another, Darius ve
nted his questions. “Achaemenes? A Persian name to be sure, and very royal. One of the rulers of the Pasargadae tribe. I believe Xerxes named one of his sons after him as well. But our man did not come from Persia; he spoke with a foreign accent. He had arrived here with the express purpose of killing the king. How could he be called Achaemenes? He must have made it up.”
“Then again, there is that tattoo.” Lysander rummaged through a sparsely-filled chest. “A foreigner who is Persian and yet hates Persia. An admirer of the Achaemenid dynasty who plans to kill the king. What a riddle.”
“It gives me a headache. Artaxerxes is going to have a conniption when he finds the man is dead, and I have no viable lead to follow.” Frustration boiled over. With uncharacteristic violence, Darius shoved a fist into the wall above where Achaemenes had laid out his pallet. The wall was made of thin, cheap boards. It rang hollow. Darius sucked his bruised knuckles thoughtfully before tapping another long plank with a probing knock.
“Whoever put up these boards performed a shoddy job and left a space between them and the outer wall. If I were going to hide something, I’d pick the other side of one of these panels.” He continued to walk around the room, knocking against the boards, with Lysander doing the same in the opposite direction.
Darius jumped back as a long wooden plank swung up and almost hit him in the chin. Then his eyes lit up. “Finally!”
He fished out a leather pouch and a diminutive flask from inside the hidden cavity behind the board. Lifting the lid of the amphora, he sniffed. “Poison,” he said, his voice grim. “This is what he intended to use on the dagger.”
With a quick motion, he undid the leather strap around the pouch and upended the contents into his palm. Gold coins. Darius blew out a deep breath and smiled. Here at last, was the clue he had sought. Those coins could lead him to the location where the plot had originated.
The Persian Empire allowed the nations under their standard to rule themselves by their own laws, mint their own coins, speak their own languages, and practice their own religions. So long as each province paid its annual tribute in a timely fashion, good will abounded to everyone. The Persians had proven themselves magnanimous in their mastery. Different provinces in the empire enjoyed a great deal of freedom, retaining their unique traditions and customs.
