Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  Marchand, the older of the two, responded, “She's not stirred, my lord.”

  The younger guard, the one Janus had manhandled previously, stood straighter as if, this time, he meant to be successful in barring Janus's way. Janus throttled the urge to rise to the challenge; there was no need to fight to enter an empty room.

  But did Marchand and the boy know it? Was Marchand's assertion an outright lie? Janus headed farther down the dimly lit corridor. Lying to a lord carried a stiff penalty, and for a lie so easily disproved? No, Janus thought, despite Rue's efforts at closing them, Psyke must still be using the Cold King's tunnels, keeping ahead of Rue's men, perhaps even undoing their labors, the better to allow herself to stealthily conspire with the duchess.

  She probably knew the tunnels better than Rue, never mind that it was his duty. He was new to the position, after all, and Psyke was fond of history in all its guises. It had been work enough to keep Maledicte hidden from her at Lastrest, once her sensible nature had sent her hunting answers to the harassment Mal visited on her. The only successful method of distraction had been the coaches Janus arranged between Rosany's Booksellers and Lastrest. The coaches had increased in frequency, bearing old, dry tomes, until Janus had been able to track his busy wife by the scatter of opened books and the scent of old vellum.

  A door shut ahead of him; his attention sharpened.

  He narrowed his gaze, picked a black-clad courtier hustling away from his room, dark head bent, trying for stealth. A hopeless task given the glimmering silver embroidery in his coat and the heavy wave of lilac scent the man favored.

  Savne again. Janus would have to dump all the opened wines and spirits in his room and inspect his bed for tampering. Arsenixa sprinkled over bed linens had accounted for the death of at least one ambitious princeling in the Winter Court. Janus had no illusions that the Antyrrian court was more civilized.

  “Savne,” he said. The slender young baronet stopped in his tracks, his loose queue of messy black hair slipping free.

  His expression shifted rapidly from sheer terror to a false civility and innocence. “Oh, my lord. How you startled me.” A certain determination reached his eyes, and Janus gritted his teeth in pained expectation.

  “Oh, my lord,” Savne said again. He dropped his voice, an excuse for sidling closer, for resting an insinuating hand on Janus's arm. “I was just looking for you.”

  As Janus tensed, the man backed away, the memory of being pushed into a wall obviously still fresh. But he soldiered on, keeping his tone falsely intimate. “Is there anything I can do to help you through this most difficult of times?”

  Maledicte would have laughed at the man's antics, so much a parody of a seduction. Maledicte would have laughed, and then when Savne stiffened in offended dignity, would have used the man's own posture to draw a blade in a perfect line from chin to crotch.

  “Yes,” Janus said. “I'll be moving to the central part of the palace. I mislike the idea of Adiran surrounded only by guards and no family. Arrange for it.”

  “Would you like the king's suite of rooms?”

  The man had no subtlety at all. Janus decided he was more offended by that than the clumsy attempts at seduction.

  “I hardly think that would be appropriate,” Janus said. “My father's suite will do nicely. It will need to be aired, though, if I'm to sleep there this evening. I'm afraid you'll have to hurry.”

  Savne nodded again, hiding his face behind the sweep of his hair, and thus his emotions. Janus waited for him to reach a decent distance, and then hailed him again. “Oh, and, Savne. If I recall correctly, my father's rooms connected to a smaller suite, often used for his paramours. Would you air those also? I have a need for them.”

  “My lord?”

  Janus strode toward him, enjoying the way Savne's body tensed. He leaned close, as inappropriately close as Savne usually favored, and fed his fingers into those dark curls. “My lady wife, you understand,” Janus whispered as if he feared being overheard.

  Simpson and Walker shifted uneasily, a betraying scuff of fabric, a gloved hand brushing a beaded hilt. Janus forced himself to forget them.

  Savne's neck was corded tight beneath his gloved hands. Janus let his fingers tighten, felt Savne's throat swell as he swallowed.

  Janus stepped away and said more plainly, “Dwelling in the old wing has worn on her excitable temperament, weighing her mind with melancholy and ghosts. I think her outlook will improve with the change of rooms. See that her belongings are transferred to the suite attached to mine.”

  Janus left the man without waiting for his acknowledgment. The work would be done, though Savne would have to chivy the servants ragged to do so. There were benefits to being wooed with such motives as Savne had: The man needed to get close to Janus to please the duchess; he could balk at nothing Janus asked. It gave him a courtier who, if not loyal, at least aped it well enough to make no practicable difference in the smaller tasks. Better still, by setting Savne to such thankless tasks, Janus spared himself the ill will of the palace servants.

  Maledicte had never quite understood that—that there could be layers of satisfaction within a simple manipulation. Maledicte had been too fond of using his wit as if it were an extension of his blade, never content unless his victims bled, and never mind that they were useless ever after.

  But this… done and well done, he thought. Psyke would find her access to the old tunnels gone. Savne would have a task to keep his spying hands busy. And Janus would be in the thick of things, not easily excluded.

  Let these aristocrats try to shut him out; while they wasted their efforts, he would take steps to ensure they could not ignore him—and damn Ivor for forcing his hand this soon.

  In his rooms, Janus pulled on a greatcoat more nondescript than his usual stylish wont, despite Padget's protest. His valet's objections faded when Janus tucked a pistol into a deep pocket and, collecting his two guards, faded back into the city's streets. He bypassed the stables and carriages, strode out onto the rough oyster-shell drive, and then onto the cobblestoned streets.

  He retraced the funeral course, noting that much of the black draping was already gone from the poorer windows, but not from any grand denial of grief, or political disloyalty, no matter how Simpson grumbled it was so. Rather, Janus thought, it was simple penury and a season unseasonably chill. The lower classes of Murne would be blanketed tonight in mourning cloth and clad in cut-down and hastily resewn fabric by daybreak.

  The kingsguards might complain about a lack of respect and worry about the national appearance, but Janus saw little difference between pennants flying and black armbands, and a populace clad in stolen blacks. Aris surely never had cared enough about the doings of his people to object to them in death.

  Janus turned his steps south toward the scented lanterns of Sybarite Street, just being lit against the earliest taste of twilight; the guards grew uncomfortable, their boot heels shuffling as if they bent their heads close to confer, their pace suffering for it. Janus allowed himself a grin, imagining them foreseeing the scandal sheets full of his impropriety; that in the same week his uncle, his king, was laid to rest, Janus worked his leisurely way through the brothels. It would be one way to shift the focus from that unfortunate illustration, though a method Bull wouldn't approve. Nor Gost, either.

  It wasn't in him to tease the guards long. He, after all, had no desire to see his name belittled. He turned his steps, heading down toward the older section of the city, the empty manor houses near the quay, and his destination.

  “Sir,” Simpson said. Janus ignored him until the man said, “My lord,” instead. Another skirmish won.

  “Yes?” Janus asked promptly and as perfectly civil as if the man had only now spoken.

  “Where do we head? If it's beyond Sybarite Street, we should summon more guards. Your safety—”

  “Scared of the Relicts?” Janus said. “And you both armed with pistol and sword. Be easy. The neighborhood we go to is not dangerous, merely
dangerously unfashionable.”

  Simpson subsided, and Janus kept his face pleasant with some effort. No wonder the Relicts continued to rot away, if even the guards were feared to go there. That would have to change, Janus thought, and soon. There would be no part of his kingdom he would be unable to rule, no pockets of savages where the only rules obeyed were those that guided beasts: fear, hunger, survival.

  He turned his steps westward, toward the district where the wealthiest of merchants had once lived. Seahook Bay, a sharply curved shoreline of toothy jagged rocks, which sailors swore were the shed teeth of the serpent god, Naga, it was all but inaccessible from the water. After a few calamitous attempts to build a pier over the rocks, the king of the time, Aris's grandfather, had decreed it unsuitable for a port and concentrated on the expansion of the southern harbor. The merchants, the wealthiest merchants, had been less persuaded; and numerous small boats had wrecked on the shore, scattering goods the merchants hadn't wanted to pay tariffs on.

  The house Janus made for was the southernmost house, and the one closest to the encroaching sea. The stables had crumbled into the water some time back, and spurred the abandonment of the house. Any closer to the Relicts, and the manor would have been filled to bursting with life; poor families, runaway children, thieves, and other assorted riffraff. But in this particular instance, the abandonment was superficial, the gates were locked tight, and the grounds secure against any would-be squatters.

  Janus, at the front gates, turned to face his guards. “Wait here.”

  “Your—”

  “Wait here,” he repeated, and reluctantly they stepped back. He might trust them with his life, or at least feel confident he could fight them off successfully; bringing them into his secrets was another thing entirely. Janus unearthed a key from his pocket, an overlarge handful of wooden haft and metal teeth. He inserted it into the lock, and turned it. As the gates rattled into life, pulling back with a mutter of clicking clockwork, Walker jumped and swore, his broad country accent deepening the oath. Janus stepped through, turned a dial, and the gates rolled shut again.

  He walked up the drive, boots crunching on shale and shell, and could smell the sea as he approached the house, the sea and more—a subtle taste he had learned to recognize as worked metal and grease, solder and tallow. Behind the house, on the sea, a pale glimmer of a sail caught fire in the setting sun.

  Reliable man, Tarrant, Janus thought, before turning to head into the house proper. He let himself through the front door, noticing that the piles of books and journals on the stairs had grown more precarious and that the dining room table, seen through a door propped open with an oblong piece of brass, was littered with papers and pens and glasses.

  Drawn in by hopes that matters had progressed further than he had been told, Janus flipped through illustrations of clockwork engineering, a giant pincer of a machine, a chain and winch, and several crossed-out sketches of a frame that had, by the acrimonious and heavily underscored comments in the margin, failed to support them.

  “Chry?” the low voice came, and after it, a figure in long skirts. “Janus. We didn't expect you this evening.”

  “Delight.” He nodded in greeting, then said, “I have an appointment with Tarrant, but even without one, I would have come. I'm sick to death of the court.”

  “Unfashionable words,” Delight said. He smiled a little around the cup of tea he had carried out with him; his lips left a red blush on the china.

  “Unfashionable household,” Janus said, returning the smile to keep any sting from the words. Seahook was not only an ill-favored house in an unpleasant neighborhood, but Delight himself was not the sort to brighten an aristocrat's gathering, not in his skirts and lacy bodices, his rouged lips and blacked lashes.

  Delight—Dionyses DeGuerre—had been run out of court years before Janus had arrived in it. It wasn't much he and his brother Chryses had done; they had chosen to attend a notorious gathering, the seasonal courtesan's promenade—the evening fantasia in the well-tended public gardens of Jackal Park when only the courtesans and their chosen escorts were permitted to attend. Chryses had desired to view the season's new beauties and convinced Dionyses to play his female host, allowing them both access to the harlot's court.

  The ruse had worked, but Janus had difficulty imagining Delight a successful woman—though he supposed the man had been youthful, willowy, smooth-skinned. From what Delight had said, he had made a more than passable pretty, so much so that Chryses, dizzy with a surfeit of flirtation and drink, turned his attentions to the lady at his side.

  Delight, loath to be unmasked and evicted, pushed Chryses off with a laughing promise of later, later… when presumably they would be less sotted with spirits and sensuality, and could laugh over the mistake.

  Only being as this was Antyre, where scandal was eagerly sought, the twins had been recognized by someone willing to spread the tale, putting the most shameful interpretation on it. And as was often the case, the greater the scandal, the greater the listener's willingness to believe. The twins woke from their carousing and found society had closed its door to them. They had lost their homes and their futures: Dionyses had lost his bride-to-be.

  It had been the first genuine moment of awkwardness between Delight and Janus, when Delight mentioned that he envied Janus his wife. That Psyke had been promised to him since birth, their estates and families long allied.

  Delight's choice to continue wearing the guise that had seen him cast from court bewildered Janus, but it was old bewilderment.

  A near year of acquaintanceship had inured Janus to Delight's vagaries, and soothed the faint irritation that though Delight chose to mimic a lady, he made no real attempt to pass as one. Maledicte had been more thorough. But then, Mal had reasons beyond simple spite.

  “Do you have time before your meeting with the good captain?” Delight set his teacup down on the pile of books, adding another ring to the stains already present.

  “Some small time,” Janus said. “The guards will be restless soon.” He grimaced. “They're feared of the streets.”

  Delight blinked slowly at him, his mouth pursing, then said, “You brought guards here? You've spent the past months slipping their lead before you came here. I began to feel like your mistress or your moneylender.”

  “Before, they reported on my doings to Aris. Aris is gone, and their reports are split among Rue, Bull, and the admiral, who bicker over what they mean. Besides, as I've been accused of regicide, I prefer their company to my own, lest I find myself tried and executed on the streets. Still, you needn't feed them tea. No sense in them becoming too welcome.”

  “I'm sure if I offered them tea, they would feel anything but comfortable,” Delight said. “But look here—” He started rifling through the papers, frowning and muttering as the plans he wanted eluded him. He paused a moment, looking at the sheet in his hand, then fumbled for his charcoals and scrabbled a series of notes in his cramped handwriting.

  “Tarrant's waiting,” Janus said. “Show me on my return. And, Delight, we need to make a spectacle soon. Gost has expressed interest in a demonstration. Three days hence.”

  He nodded absently, and Janus sighed. Brilliant, the both of them, Westfall had been right about that, but Janus would trade a small piece of that brilliance for a gift for organization. He left Delight shifting papers from one pile to the next, and stirring his cooling tea with the charcoal pencil.

  Janus took the back way down, the rickety stairs that Chryses had shored up with leftover copper wiring and random patches of wood and metal sheeting. It still swayed in the sea breezes, gave him a dizzying view of the rocky beach below. Janus wished, not for the first time, that Tarrant was a little more accommodating and that it was Tarrant's weight on the stairs instead of his. But Tarrant was a sailor through and through, held the land in the same distrust that most farmers held the sea. It served the kingdom: Tarrant had no desire to give up his ship, and he had been the first to cut sail and run rather than tu
rn his ship over to Itarus. It served Antyre well enough, allowed Tarrant to become a weapon against Harus that couldn't be traced to Aris.

  Disarmament had been the second article in the Xipos treaty. The first, of course, had been a tithe that Antyre owed Itarus, a full 30 percent of the country's profits.

  If Aris, that peaceable scholar, had died in the war, how different Antyre would be.

  Janus made it to the bottom of the stairway and saw the dim, shuttered light that let him know Tarrant was already ashore, the narrow dinghy anchored precariously on the one flat spar that reached out toward the distant ship.

  “Ixion,” Tarrant said, as he approached. “I thought it would be the admiral for sure, with Aris's death so recent. Have to say I wasn't looking forward to that meeting. Ol' Demon's never forgiven my turning pirate. He thought I should have done the same as he, sunk my girl and become a landsman.”

  “DeGuerre does seem the unforgiving sort. Besides, he's the last man I could send through Seahook's doors. Were I unable to meet with you, I'd send Delight.” Janus sat down on the rocks out of the sea spray but close enough for speech. Tarrant was a shadow in the darkness, a man both nimble and bulky. The lantern hanging from a raised hook on the dinghy's prow gave Janus the flash of yellowed teeth in a gray-streaked beard.

  “So I'm to keep on, then? I'm not recalled? Good thing, as it happens. You know you've got a dozen or more Itarusine vessels lurking around the sea borders? Not merchant ships either. Took some careful sailing, I tell you, to come this close to shore.”

  “Unsurprising news but unwelcome,” Janus said. “Itarus will be quick to act on the chaos of Aris's death. With no heir officially named—”

  “Well that's you, ain't it,” Tarrant said. “You're not telling me you'll let that idiot child have the throne.”

  Such rough support, Janus thought, and wished he could believe it. Tarrant was a man used to dissembling, a good naval man turned privateer at his king's bidding.

  “It's a matter for Parliament and the counselors to decide.” Janus chose the perfect truth and let all the rest of it remain unsaid, that he intended to make himself the only viable choice.