Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  “The wounds were dealt unevenly.” Sir Robert braved the glacial silence the duchess's confession had left in the room. “The shot should not have missed the heart at such close range, the saber wounds were awkward, as if the wielder used two hands to compensate for the weight of an unfamiliar weapon.”

  Bull and Rue shared a glance, before Rue spoke. “You believe the assassin an amateur?”

  Sir Robert rubbed at the collar of his hastily donned smock that showed splashes of drying blood. “I only mean to say that I understand the Earl of Last to be experienced with both a saber and a pistol.”

  Janus tried to hide his surprise at defense from an unexpected quarter.

  DeGuerre raised both hands, brought them down in a sharp gesture of exasperation. “And so it begins again. Janus profits, and yet… he cannot be blamed.”

  “He is,” Psyke said. “I saw it myself.” She drew her arms tight about herself, rocked in her seat, nearly pitching to the floor. “It is the same as before.” She laughed, the sound strained and terrible. “Exactly the same.”

  Rue dropped to his knees, “My lady—”

  “No,” she said. “I saw him. Saw him come out of the darkness, like a piece of darkness, death in his face.”

  “Who?” Rue said. “Who did you see?”

  Psyke shivered all over; cold, thought Janus, not fear, though it played well to the room of men who didn't know what real fear looked like. “I saw him.”

  “Last?” DeGuerre said. “You saw Last himself?”

  Psyke laughed again. “Not Last, but his hand. His evil desires made flesh. I saw Maledicte.”

  WHEN THE CHAOS CREATED BY Psyke's announcement had faded, Celeste Lovesy removed Psyke, weeping, dragging Lord Blythe in their wake. DeGuerre departed with a final, disbelieving glance toward Janus and a mutter about beginning funeral arrangements. Rue, Janus, and Sir Robert stood in a silent circle around Aris's body.

  Janus touched the cold, still face once, and turned away, his thoughts churning like a whirlwind.

  “Will someone tell Adiran? Will he understand?” He let the words free, empty things to hide his bewilderment. Had Maledicte done this? Killed Aris, the king he had been unaccountably fond of, and without even a word to Janus? But Ivor—Ivor had a hand in this, Janus was certain of that.

  “He won't be told the entirety of it,” Sir Robert said. “Only that his father has died.”

  Janus nodded.

  “Sir Robert, his majesty had you to see Prince Adiran frequently of late,” Rue said. “For any cause? Is the prince ill? We need him hale, more than ever now.”

  Sir Robert shook his head. “I forget sometimes, how gossip drives this court. Yes, I've been attending the prince. King Aris believed he saw improvement in the boy's state.”

  Rue hissed, a tiny, quick sound urging Sir Robert to belated caution. Janus chose to stay unoffended. Let Rue caution Sir Robert as he would. Janus could collect the information from a handful of voices, nurserymaid, pages, servants, guards. In the meantime, he worried about Psyke's words.

  If naming Maledicte was a lie meant to wound, it was a careless one easily turned back on her. Everyone in Murne knew that Maledicte, the god-touched murderer, was nothing but a collection of bones fed to the sea; Janus had seen to that himself, burying the truth of Maledicte's escape with another man's body.

  If Psyke spoke truth … No, Janus thought. Maledicte was gone. And did he return, it would be to Janus first of all, not to kill the king in the silence of an old chapel.

  “… Maledicte,” Rue said and drew Janus's attention like a magnet. “You examined him, did you not? His body? Is there any chance Lady Last is correct?”

  Janus turned away to hide the sudden startled heat in his chest and face, the racing of his heart. To consider the illogical, the impossible, to ponder ways it could be made less so, made Rue a dangerous man.

  Sir Robert cleared his throat. “None at all. Lady Last is overset. Maledicte is dead—stabbed, buried, unearthed, and hanged for the crows to feed. Barbarous, but effective.”

  “He had a god's aid,” Rue said. “Does death apply to one such as that?”

  “You might recall, Captain,” Janus said, his voice rough, “Sir Robert claimed the king's assassin a paragon of ineptitude. I assure you, even a year dead, Maledicte would have shown more skill than that.” The look he earned from Rue was an ugly thing, but Janus didn't care. The memories Rue had stirred were ugly also. He felt physically sick. The scent of blood in the air, Janus swallowed, fought bile.

  “Gods.” Sir Robert shook his head. “Life immune to death. Rankest superstition. I thought better of you, Captain.”

  Janus pushed away from Aris's body, from Rue and the physician and the whole, bewildering mess, and headed for the door. One person held the answer he needed.

  “Last,” Rue said.

  Janus refused to turn and meet those intelligent eyes. “Do you have further need of me, gentlemen? I'd like to see to my wife.”

  ♦ 3 ♦

  HERE WAS, THE YOUNG ASSASSIN thought, such a thing as being too well informed. Ivor had given her a map of the hidden passages which she had received gratefully, but he had gifted her also with far more palace legend than she wished to know, old deaths and disappearances; at this moment, she feared her fate would be to add to their number.

  Lost in the darkness of the Cold King's private tunnels, her racing heartbeat and her panicked breath were the only sense that the world moved on, that time had not locked up about her, sealing her in the dark and dust. If only she hadn't lost her lamp. Sweat trickled into her eye, stinging, and she rubbed it away, transferring streaks of drying blood from her red-washed hands to her cheeks.

  She fumbled her way to the wall. Her fingernails scrabbled at the tightly joined stones, collecting dust and dirt and old, dried mold as she fought to regain her composure, to find the way out. She felt one step from animal terror and that had to be avoided at all cost, or she'd run, mindlessly panicked, through the tunnels until she either brained herself on a protruding stone or ruined Ivor's careful plan.

  It had been a simple enough task Ivor had given her: Use the palace's oldest defenses to kill its newest king. Simple instruction, simple plan, but the execution had been difficult. Her aim had been off—she rubbed at the straps of her eye patch resentfully—and she'd needed the sword. And all Ivor's training failed to prepare her adequately for the awkward weight of a man's body slumping over a blade embedded in his guts, tearing the blade from her grasp.

  She had had to wrest it free, Aris groaning pitiably, his hands feebly grasping at her thighs, turning what should have been a neat job into a slaughter. Bad enough that she had to slice his throat to make him die when the bullet hadn't done it, when the gut wound hadn't done it. Worse was the sudden cold realization that he hadn't been alone. When his voice, his breath was finally, finally silenced, she heard gasping sobs beyond her own.

  She'd whirled, slipping on the spew of blood and intestines beneath her feet, and gotten a quick glimpse of gilt hair, a face going to shadow in openmouthed terror, and then the Countess of Last vanished, seemingly dragged into shadow.

  The blade had trembled in her hand, but she moved forward, hunting that pale hair. The chapel shook under the weight of a sudden distortion, as if the very stones had released a long-held breath. The hair on her nape rose; every muscle in her body shuddered, and she turned and fled.

  As a girl living in the Explorations, she had attempted to steal away Miranda's husband, unaware that Miranda had once been Maledicte, Black-Winged Ani's chosen courtier.

  The assassin lost her eye to Miranda's blade, lost everything else in the lingering shadow Ani's wings cast: her village burned, her parents died, and she had been harried from one false refuge to the next, until she learned the only way to shed Ani's attention was to shed herself.

  She'd forfeited her wants, her past, and her name, ever aware that Ani listened for it still. A single recitation of her name and Ani's wings would
close over her once more.

  To be hunted by a second god—the thought was more than she could bear.

  A glance back and a shifting shadow set her moving forward again in blind panic, her blade scraping lichen into a fall of dust that trickled into her boots and left a pale mark on the stone, a clear signpost to her direction. The rasp echoed oddly, bounced back at her, rippled along the walls, and settled like fog, hopefully as confounding to any pursuer as to herself.

  Challacombe, the spymaster, hadn't been in her plans either.

  She'd fled the god's approach, blundering back into the tunnels, and found the spymaster awaiting her, teeth clamped on his cigarillo, eyes furious, a pistol to hand. “Assassin,” he breathed. “Who sent you?”

  Filled by terror, she hadn't even paused, bulling into him, heedless of the pistol, the explosion held tight between them, and then she was past him, tripping over the lamp, spilling its oil into the thirsty dust, disappearing into the Cold King's tunnels gone stranger still in the darkness.

  It had taken her three turnings with her breath coming fast, a ruinous stitch in her side, to realize that she had been shot. Not fatal, not even close to it, but it burned and hurt until she tightened the waistcoat brutally close over the wound.

  The spymaster hadn't been so fortunate. She had left him behind, his blood slowly felting the dust beneath his corpse.

  The god's presence filled the tunnels like the strange stillness before an earthquake, changing her path, tangling her in a spiderweb of blind turns and false exits. Her fingers, replacing her vision, fumbled desperately along the stones, hunting for the little carvings that mapped the tunnels, but found none. Her skin crawled.

  Legend had it that the Cold King built the tunnels not to escape his enemies but in a vain attempt to protect his loved ones from himself. The Cold King, the first of the Redoubts, had taken the throne by force and by the will of a god. But alliances with gods were treacherous, and Thomas Redoubt… changed, found Haith's likeness settling into his skin, raising horns from his skull, raising scales along his skin, and leaving death and illness in his wake.

  Superstition, Ivor had scoffed, a grain of truth distorted for better telling; and she knew that was true. But the assassin also knew how tenuous the line was between legend and actuality.

  The god's presence found her again, swept about her like a whirlwind, raising grit and dust, but causing no more harm than stung skin and burning eyes. She cowered nonetheless, waiting….

  But after a long moment where all she heard was the frantic thud of her heart, she realized the god was waiting also, waking slowly, studying the world.

  A ringing bell shook the walls: the chapel bell tolling, its vibration turning the tunnels into pipes, and the god's attention faded. She crouched and covered her ears until the echoes stopped.

  She gasped, glad for the first time to hear the rasp of her voice, the angry thumping of her heart. She crept forward on hands and knees, and her shoulder brushed some imperfection in the stone. Her coat seam tore, and she reached out, nearly laughing. There it was, one of the directional markers, a sinuous stone lizard, feeling oddly alive beneath her trembling fingertips.

  She followed its cue, making her way through the dark until a faint bleed through of light and the sounds of uneasy horses led her into the oldest stall in the palace. She waited for their curiosity to override their sense of duty, and crept out into the palace mews. The horses nearest her raised their heads and whinnied at the scent of blood.

  In the torchlight, she found herself gore smeared, nearly head to foot. A quick casting about found a stable boy's cheap woolen coat laid over a bale of hay. She dragged it on, rinsed her face in a horse trough, scrubbing off the worst of the blood, before heading into the night and the docks.

  She'd have to find a message boy to take a carefully worded missive to Ivor. Ivor's plans were thorough, his temperament nerveless; still, things had changed. It wasn't simply Janus he was challenging, and the court; there was a god returned to the city and what gods wanted all too often boded ill for mortal ways.

  ♦ 4 ♦

  ANUS STRODE THROUGH THE HALL at an unfashionably quick pace, blind to the luxuries that usually soothed him; the eggshell and gilt papered walls, the raised niches that once held small idols and now held a fortune's worth of spring roses in blue vases. Now he noticed only that the plush carpet was unpleasantly stained in a staggered, crimson trail, showing the path Aris's body had come.

  Once outside the royal residence, the lingering scent of blood gave way to waxed flagstones and polished wood, and approaching him, the prince-ascendant, no doubt coming to offer his aid to a palace in chaos. Ivor smiled, that same complacent amusement he gave those whose job it was to entertain him. “A lucky thing you sought my company tonight,” Ivor said.

  “Your company changed nothing,” Janus said, voice as brittle as his nerves. “They still suspect me, think it my plan if not my hand.” Janus was in no mood to play the role so clearly outlined for him: meek with gratitude that Ivor's company had saved him from immediate arrest.

  “Shall I vouch for your sterling character?” Ivor said.

  Janus found himself more frustrated yet by the laughter in Ivor's eyes. He wanted Ivor to feel the same confusion, the same unfocused pain. He drew back his hand in a fist, all poise gone, reduced to the Relict rat who wanted to share his hurt.

  Ivor seized Janus's hand before he could strike, using his calmer temper to gain control. “Oh, you know better, pet,” Ivor said. “Temper leads only to mistakes.”

  “Let me go,” Janus gritted out.

  “Prince Ivor,” Rue said, coming down the corridor with another squad of kingsguards behind him. “The palace is unsettled. It would be best if you returned to your quarters. The country cannot afford to have another Itarusine auditor killed on our shores.”

  Ivor stepped back from Janus and smiled at the captain. “I don't think there's any danger of that.”

  Janus bit back a growl, and watched as Rue and the guards managed to sweep Ivor up in their passage, asking questions about the servants Ivor had brought with him, allowing Janus to escape.

  A familiar dark head passed, and Janus reached out, shoved Savne against the wall. The young courtier, an obsequious hanger-on of his, lost his breath and Janus took ruthless advantage of it. After all, it wasn't often that Savne could be silenced.

  “Where is my wife?” Janus asked.

  “Last—” Savne gasped, throat obstructed. The glossy dark hair, the dark eyes, the pale face flushing to red with the pressure on his throat—Janus released him, a little shaken. Savne was a poor imitation of Maledicte, and one made pathetic by being so deliberate, but even that false face made him ache with loss.

  “Where is Psyke?” Janus said. “I know you're Lovesy's man. She escorted my wife where?”

  “Just to her quarters, just that.”

  “Be more precise,” Janus snapped. “If you must ape Mal, recall his words were never less than precise.”

  “Lady Last has been returned to her own quarters,” Savne said, rubbing his throat with shaking fingers.

  Janus swung away from him, making for the stairs to the old wing, and Savne called after him, “'Tis a pity her door is well guarded. Rue holds her in near as much regard as the king did.”

  “Fool,” Janus said under his breath. Savne lacked even the meanest intelligence to fuel his spite. Psyke and Aris? Yes, the court whispered and gossiped over their closeness, but Janus knew better. Aris feared intimacy with women, feared another child born mindless. Psyke had been Aris's spy now declared herself Janus's enemy and that was a matter of far more import than whether or not shed cuckolded him.

  The chill of the old wing flowed down to meet him as he closed on the uncarpeted stairwell. He made short work of the stairs, and the palace servants that saw him made haste to clear his way.

  Two blue-clad kingsguards, a young man and an older one, watched him approach with expressions veering toward dismay and pa
nic. The guard was soft these days; the most seasoned had followed their maimed Captain Jasper into the ranks of the city Particulars, where they tried to discipline an increasingly troubled populace. The remaining guards were the lazy ones who wouldn't leave a familiar life for confrontations on the streets, the greenest of recruits, and the few paranoid loyalists who thought a threat to Aris would come from within the palace walls and not without. Janus doubted they enjoyed being proved right.

  The young guard, showing more bravery than sense, made the mistake of stepping forward, hand raised to slow Janus. It was a moment's work to step into the man's reach; the recruit's hand went to his blade, but he was too slow or too uncertain to draw it. Janus pinned the guard's sword arm behind his back before the lad could finish dithering. Using the boy as a shield, Janus pushed the other guard back and slammed the door open to his wife's chambers, an incongruous clutter of pastel and gilt furnishings adrift in a granite cave.

  An opened interior door granted him sight of his goal: Psyke sat at her dressing table like a statue. If she had been overwrought and frantic when he had last seen her, now she had plunged into despairing stillness. The only liveliness about her was her voice, issuing a series of commands to her maid. “No, Dahlia. I don't need to change my gown. I don't need an infusion of Laudable, and I don't need you.”

  Dahlia fumbled the pearlescent bottle, dropped it, staggered forward trying to catch it, and squeaked when Janus made his entrance, the guard struggling in his grip.

  Psyke's stillness only grew deeper, an animal freezing before a predator's gaze.

  “Get out, girl,” Janus said. Dahlia, after a last look at her mistress, darted for the door, leaving the bottle rocking on the carpet. Janus shoved the young guard after her, and bolted the door whose latch, like all those in the old wing, would withstand armies.

  Assured of their privacy, Janus paced the room, trying to outwait that furious pounding in his chest. Right now, he wanted her dead, wanted that delicate neck between his hands—it wouldn't take much effort. She was thin boned and slight, untrained in even the slightest defense, as helpless as a rabbit before a hound.