Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  Bull reached down a hand, pulled Janus to his feet. “Your arm?” Bull asked. “Did the poison penetrate your shirt?”

  Janus sighed. “Sir Robert will be so pleased.”

  Bull raised a brow, but his hands, tightening on Janus's sleeve as if he had been about to rip it away, relaxed. “Will he?” The physician's reluctance to work was legendary.

  “He bandaged me so thickly I doubt the Naga-blessed ocean wave that sank the Redoubtable could do more than dampen the wound. The duchess never had a chance. Inept to the last.”

  “Hardly that. Only look what comes of my bones,” Psyke said. She wandered forward, untouched by either shot or poison, and knelt to examine a dark splotch spreading over the creamy marble floor.

  It wasn't blood as Janus had first assumed; it was a singular pearl, knocked loose from Mirabile's bones in the duchess's rush toward Janus. The floor around it was blackening, the marble flaking, the fine silver veining in the stone going rusty.

  “No,” Janus agreed, fighting the urge to strip out of his coat and burn it. “Perhaps not inept.”

  The crowd, made aware of the danger by Psyke's examination, began to push and shove to leave. Small shrieks rang out as the courtiers discovered that the venomous gems had scattered far and wide through the hall. One courtier, the rakish lord nicknamed Gamble, hampered by his evening wear and the lingering remnants of a night spent in dissipation, fell, putting his hand square on a star ruby. He wailed and Janus laughed.

  Rue turned from where he was studying the hole the pistol shot had left in Janus's chair, and frowned. “You find this mayhem amusing, sir?”

  “It's only that I've never imagined our Lord Gamble, the king of the cardsharps, ever slow to pick up a jewel.”

  Psyke laughed, bright and malicious, and the courtiers' attempts at flight became a rout. They might not understand it, but they remembered Mirabile laughing as the debutantes died.

  Soon the hall was left to those who had need to be there. Rue, Bull, Admiral DeGuerre, surprisingly standing firm, though his hands quivered on his sword hilt as if seeking a more tangible enemy. The guards, eyeing each other suspiciously, remained, as did the duchess's servants, now huddled even more tightly together and weeping.

  Psyke approached them and they shied back.

  “What will we do with her servants?” Bull said. His attention seemed to be bent mostly on a girl too young to make her own way in the world, likely the cooking tweeny.

  “Stones,” Rue said, “would be customary for associates of one accused of treason. And they might consider it merciful.”

  “Stones is finite,” Bull said, “and quite full. Given Lady Last's testimony, it seems the women were too afraid to assist and too afraid to flee. Let them find other work.”

  Janus thought there was the difference between the two men. Rue, a nobleman's get, if impoverished, still was quick to sentence the commoners; Bull, the self-made man, saw their faces and preferred to mete out mercy.

  Janus said, “I sympathize, Bull, but who do you think will employ them? None in the courts who've witnessed the duchess's handiwork will, of that I'm sure.”

  “I will,” Psyke said. “I will take them all.”

  When Janus opened his mouth, as reflexive in his denial as any of the courtiers, she said, “You complain that my maids are either lazy or dead. Here are some that are neither and in need of employment.”

  She turned to the gray-haired woman among them, the one whose face showed only dismay, whose eyes kept returning to the ruin of the duchess's body. “Do you know where the girl went, Charlotte? The nameless scholar who drank tea like a foreigner, stewed with sugar?”

  “The spy,” Charlotte said. “She pretended to quality, pretended to aid the duchess, but she sent letters to the palace at all hours, wrapped in veritable tubes of wax.”

  “Likely to Ivor,” Psyke told Rue. “Her accent was faintly Itarusine. I think her one of his pets.”

  Janus growled. Rue and Bull had been so sure that the assassin couldn't escape from the docks, and yet… It would be like Ivor to hide his pawn in the heart of the city.

  Psyke studied Charlotte long enough to make the woman fidget, and then she said, “Rue, I have doubts.”

  Rue paused in his gingerly prodding of Mirabile's gem-studded skull. “My lady?”

  Psyke closed her arms about herself, rested her fingers, light as thistledown on her shoulders. She said, voice tentative, “I've been thinking on it. Truthfully, I do little but relive it in my dreams. The chapel was dark, and I was afraid, and Haith's hands came down on me. And Aris was dead at my feet, and so sure of himself. Though even he never claimed Maledicte as his assassin, only that he believed Janus was behind it.”

  Rue said, “You believe something different now?”

  Psyke said, “Shorn of terror, of grief, of an attempt at meaning—what I saw was a slim man or tall woman, dark haired, stepping out of the shadows with an unaccustomed blade in hand. Celeste's aide also matches that description.”

  “Not Maledicte,” Rue said.

  “Maledicte's dead,” Janus said. “As I've said, repeatedly.”

  “I know the lists of the dead,” Psyke said. “He is not among them.”

  Rue interceded, though his eyes were intent, filing away information that Janus would once have killed him for hearing. “Alive or not, you think him blameless in Aris's death,” Rue said. “Where then do we begin the search for the assassin?”

  “Ivor's chambers, where else?” Janus snapped, his voice rough. “The missing valet your men failed to locate. A woman, not a man, and one eyed, which would account for the veil. And call back the duchess's servants. They worked for her. They can remove her corpse and her ghastly, cursed jewels as their first task.”

  ♦ 24 ♦

  ANUS WAS IN THE OLD wing's dungeons, eating Delight's breakfast—venison steaks, soft-boiled eggs, and a second pot of tea—when Delight returned, the morning fog making a curling mess of his hair.

  “I've set up the spyglass,” he said. “Anchored it to the peak of Sea-hook's roof, or as high as what remains. We'll see the Itarusine fleet approaching. Did you eat my toast?”

  Janus waved at another covered tray. “Didn't bother. By the time the servants climb up two flights of stairs from the kitchens, walk the length of the palace, and come down two flights of stairs, it's cold.”

  “And if they come around the palace, it's dusty from passing the stables,” Delight said. “Amazing how inconvenient palace living can be. Chryses—” He broke off, poured himself a cup of tea with a slowly steadying hand. “Chryses,” he repeated, defying his grief, “would have been appalled. He thought the palace meant endless luxury. Not cold toast and having no one to send for the broadsheets. I had to run down a boy on my own and he called me names after I tossed him a copper.”

  “Box his ears next you see him,” Janus said. He held out a hand for the broadsheet, and Delight, juggling tea and toast, passed it over.

  Janus's provisional content with the day—the duchess disposed of, Ivor discommoded while the guards searched his wing above—shattered like the teacup the hastily-spread-out sheet pushed from the table.

  Poole's caricature was the least of it. Ugly, yes, and the man most certainly had more than one informant in the palace nobles, but as appalling as the portraiture was, the accompaniment was worse. The sketch, hastily done—either Poole had been rushing or his health was failing—showed the throne room peopled by a grinning wolf, the duchess's body spread out before it, and a barefoot shepherdess cradling Mirabile's skull. In the borders of the sketch lay commoners shot or stabbed by palace soldiers.

  The accompanying text eschewed the usual coy format of Lady S——or Lord G——and stated directly that the king was dead, the country on the brink of disaster, and the palace overrun by a savage from the Relicts and a madwoman. That if there was to be a future, the people of the city needed to jar the complacency of the noble class and make them see sense.

  Jan
us rose, broadsheet clutched in his fist, and went into the hall calling for Bull.

  Once he had run the man to earth, still in his dressing gown, though the pile of papers about him suggested he had been working for some time, Janus thrust the sheets at him and said, “Forget Poole. We want the editor. Our circumstances are dire enough we cannot stand for a call to open revolt.”

  Bull threw off his dressing gown, revealing a workman's linen shirt, open at the throat, and a pair of woolen breeches. “Collect your guards—those you can trust not to shoot you at any rate—and call for the carriage. I'll send a boy to the Particulars and they'll meet us at the broadsheet's offices on Darter Street. We'll put a stop to it.”

  “If it can be stopped,” Janus said. Fear was a motivator that could not be denied, and the people on the street—poor, hungry, expecting the Itarusines to come sweeping in like a vast spring tide—were afraid as much as they were angry. The only thing slowing them was their ingrained apathy wrought by years of gradual decay. Apathy, though, could be overcome.

  On the silent carriage ride to the crowded offices in Darter Street—amanuenses, employment agencies, the shops that sold poorly made livery for the middle class establishments, and a slew of cheap solicitors—Janus watched the people making way for the carriage. Not so bad yet, if a palace carriage drew evasion rather than confrontation. At least, as long as it was a palace carriage with a full complement of kingsguards riding alongside, with a crew of Particulars, scruffy and well armed, walking down the street to meet them.

  The editor, young and foolish though he was, had evidently had wiser thoughts after the damage was done. The front of the shop was locked; there was a flurry of movement within. The Particulars caught him attempting to scale out the back window into the filthy alley, and dragged him back.

  “Don't kill me,” he begged at once. “I'll run a retraction.”

  Janus sighed. “That works when the damage done is a lady's name bandied about, when a lord is called coward. It works rather less well when you've attempted to foment rebellion.”

  The young man licked his lips. “M' uncle said—”

  “Who's your uncle?” Janus asked. “He's given you bad advice.”

  “Poole,” the young man said. He raised his chin, and, yes, now that Janus looked for it, he could see some of Poole in the boy in the shape of the bones.

  “Poole never told you to do such a thing,” Bull said. “Poole's smarter than that.”

  “And his correspondence has been severely curtailed besides,” Janus said.

  “His messenger brought a note. I just did as it said.” The boy scrambled for the overstuffed desk, digging through curls of parchment and thin scrap paper in its pigeonholes like a terrier hunting a rat. “Here,” he cried, “here!”

  Bull took it from his shaking fingers and said, while idly perusing it, “Who's the messenger, then? Who fed you such a line?”

  “Harm,” the young man said, and Bull traded a slow smile with Janus.

  “Ivor's men do seem to have a taste for hiding in plain sight. His assassin at the duchess's home and his agitator making pilgrimages to Stones.”

  Janus said, “I'd expect little else from Ivor's men.”

  Poole's nephew watched the exchange with the dawning of hope. “If I tell you where he lives …”

  “You tell us where Harm lives, and I'll see you on a sailing ship rather than buried in Stones,” Janus said. The boy blanched, but scrambled for another piece of paper, scrawling down Harm's direction.

  “This time of day, he's likely at the Seadog, talking to sailors,” the boy said.

  Janus hadn't thought of the Seadog in months, that low dive of a tavern on the edge of the Relicts, though he had spent his last quiet evening with Mal there, drinking Absenté, drinking Itarusine brandy, until they were interrupted by a man demanding a duel. It had signaled the beginning of the end for Maledicte, and Janus could only hope it augured the same for Harm.

  THEY FOUND HARM LOUNGING IN the nearly empty Seadog, a plate of fried bread piled high beside him, as shiny and greasy as the table itself, a cup of ale at his lips. When he saw them enter—Janus, Bull, and the boy, followed by three Particulars—he raised the mug in their direction.

  “You've finally caught up with me, then,” he said, a man so used to controlling an audience that he pitched his voice to carry to all the dim corners of the tavern. He rousted a pair of sailors from their alcoholic stupor, caused a young lordling to hide his aching head with a groan and a feeble wave to the early bartender to bring him another cup.

  “Come to kill me? The poor workingman who was nearly killed once before by your infernal machines?”

  Bull waved two of his burliest Particulars forward. Harm chuffed into his drink. “Have the courtesy to let a man finish his drink.” It wasn't ale, despite the common mug; the slosh of it left a sweet sting in the air; the plate of bread held sugar also. Absenté, Janus identified, and no drink for a poor workingman. Then Harm shifted awkwardly on his stool, brought his face into the feeble sunlight ghosting into the tavern, and Janus saw him properly, the first time the man wasn't retreating at speed.

  Janus laid his bad hand on Bull's arm, forestalling the command to seize Harm. “I know you,” he said.

  “And well you should, nearly flaying a man—” Harm said.

  “No,” Janus said. “I know you. Casmir Marta Grigorian, prince descendant. I know how you truly received those wounds—laid out on the cold slate before Grigor's throne while his guards beat you like a dog. But does your audience know? You're one of Grigor's spawn, so out of favor for killing his favorite daughter that he sent you here.”

  “That's not true!” Poole's nephew sputtered. “He's an antimachinist who's been punished for speaking the truth—”

  “He's an Itarusine prince,” Janus said, “albeit a negligible one.”

  Harm licked his lips and set down his mug. “I remember you as well. Ivor's trained pet.”

  “I've outgrown that role,” Janus said. “While you… you'll die in yours, a one-note performer to the last. Bull, hand me a pistol.”

  Harm stood upright so quickly the chair went sprawling behind him, his fist closing around the saber at his hip. “I am a prince of the blood. You can't execute me.” Remarkable, really, that anyone ever believed Harm anything but an aristocrat. It only exposed how willing people were to believe someone who told them what they wanted to hear.

  Poole's nephew made a tiny, betrayed sound that Janus ignored. Life dealt betrayal and disillusionment far more often than it dealt anything else. Better the boy learn it now, while he was still alive to change his ways.

  “You're a prince descendant,” Janus said, “a dead man only allowed to live so long as you're useful. You killed Fanshawe Gost, you killed Chryses DeGuerre, two noblemen of Antyre. I think Grigor would consider it fair trade.”

  Bull cautiously handed Janus a primed pistol, seemingly uncertain of Janus's intent. Poor Bull likely thought it a bluff. Bull didn't understand the ways of the Itarusine court. Unfortunately for Harm, Janus did.

  He aimed the pistol with care, the scent of gunpowder acrid even before firing, the weight of it uncomfortable in his right hand. He preferred to shoot left-handed; it tended to throw off a duelist, but the wound on his left arm was hot and tight, and his fingers trembled.

  Harm said, “You'll shoot me for two meaningless lives, lives that I was set to remove by Ivor Sofia Grigorian? Ivor has far worse to his name. Or did you think it coincidence that he was here barely a fortnight before your king died?”

  “Causal relations are easily made, and as easily disproved,” Janus said, though inwardly he was exulting. This once, Ivor might have outfoxed himself. To use Casmir, his own despised kin, as his stalking horse was clever. To see Casmir killed for playing the role was twice as clever, pleasing Grigor and granting Janus a convenient scapegoat for any lingering deaths. But Casmir was Winter Court enough to try to take Ivor with him.

  “And you're a liar
by trade, spilling stories among my people, claiming a name and history not your own. Still, your words are … intriguing. What think you, Bull? If you heard a man accuse another of murder on the street, would your Particulars count it as evidence or hearsay?”

  “It would warrant investigation,” Bull said. “I'd imagine Captain Rue would think the same.”

  Harm relaxed, content that he had a value, and Janus pulled the trigger. The explosion jarred his body and rang in his ears, enormously loud inside the tavern. Poole's nephew shrieked and collapsed as if Janus had shot him instead of Harm.

  Bull twitched, taken by surprise. The sullen bartender and the early morning sailors drinking were unsurprised.

  “Bring his body,” Janus said. “I want to send him back to King Grigor and if we leave it here, it'll be disfigured or stolen.”

  The burly Particular, lacking a task now that Harm was dead, seized Poole's nephew instead. “Will you shoot him, too, my lord?” he asked. His jaw tightened.

  “There's no need,” Janus said. “The Explorations is the place for foolish dreamers. Set him on a ship.”

  “It won't change anything,” the young man said. “Matters have gone too far for that!”

  “And a good part of that is your doing,” Janus said. “Remember, I'm showing you mercy Do try not to make me regret it.”

  “You should regret it,” the young man said. “You should regret every moment the palace has spent punishing people for their poverty.”

  Bull growled and the guards dragged the editor outside.

  The burly Particular lingered. “Begging your pardon, my lord,” he said, “but there's some truth to what he says. The people feel trapped. There's no jobs in the city, and what there is pays nothing. If they don't make money, whole families are ending in jail, and if they turn to thieving, well it's jail again, only with a whipping first.”

  He darted a glance at Janus, expectation of understanding in his eyes. “You remember, my lord, what it's like on the streets.”