“To appeal to your sense of decency.” Kora took in the room with a rapid, sweeping glance. She found nothing unexpected: the wooden desk with its front piece that spanned three feet, the cot Zalski once had commented on, two short stools, and three or four boxes stacked neatly against the wall.
“Let me rephrase. What exactly do you want?”
“Your help,” she said. “Your support, in setting things right and putting Rexson on the throne while there’s still some measure of a royal family to restore.”
Argint chuckled to himself, shaking his head. “You’re desperate.”
“I’m not desperate. I’m determined to see this done, and in the right way: the safest, most direct way possible. That involves you. With you on our side, our victory involves fewer deaths, surely you realize that? I’m speaking of Zalski’s men, of your men. If you ordered them to surrender, they’d surrender. They would live. Like I said, you’re a decent man. You broke no oaths. You didn’t conspire against the king. You were loyal to him, and loyal to the army. Now you lead the army. What you say, they do.”
The general insisted, “You’re desperate, Porteg. It’s over for you. You secured your brother’s safety, and now you’re scrambling to save your neck. I can’t say I blame you. I’d be doing the same thing. Your brother first, though…. Your priorities are straight, I’ll say that for you.”
“In case you’re curious, I convinced my brother to attend Zalski’s school. And he will, if it opens, but I’m not here to save myself. If turning myself in would somehow keep Zalski from my family, I’d do it in a heartbeat. The man’s infringed more than enough already on my brother’s life. I will find a way to keep Zacry away from him. You can help me. If you choose not to, well, I’ll have to try something else.”
Argint’s eyes had not left her since she entered. The same as in their previous meeting, he seemed unsure what to make of her, whether to trust her or to disregard her pleas, to hear her out or to toss her out the door. “How did you know where to find me?” he asked. “Was it that chain?”
“It was the chain.”
“So you’ve been here before.”
“In a manner of speaking. Only once.”
“When, exactly?”
“When Zalski offered you the post of general. Please try to understand, I know that chain might make it seem there are some surface similarities between him and me. But there are fundamental differences. I didn’t seek out the power that chain gave me. You may or may not believe me, and I can’t go into details, I won’t, it would compromise other people, but I didn’t want that magic, and I didn’t abuse it. I used it to gather information, intelligence, for the defense of myself and my friends, nothing more.”
“You should be more careful, Porteg. You just revealed you have no spies among my ranks.”
“With all due respect, I never said that.”
“If this magic was so distasteful, you would only have used it if you had no other access to the Palace. So either you’re telling boldfaced falsehoods, or the League has no spies. Which is it?”
“We have no spies.”
“Again you prove my point: you’re desperate. I imagine the prince put all his hope in the spy that fell.”
“Does that really matter?” said Kora.
“Desperate causes don’t appeal to me as a general rule.”
Kora decided to backtrack. “I saw this place once, using the chain. We were hoping at the time to save Fontferry’s mayor.”
“Yes,” said Argint. “Yes, if you were here when you say, you’d know that operation.”
“I knew about it before then. That’s why I made sure to eavesdrop. I wish there had been another way, but I don’t apologize for trying to protect Jonson Peare. In fact, if I still can do something to save the man, I will. If that costs me your aid, so be it. My hope is that Zalski will let the plot go.”
Argint began to pace the room. “I understand what you’re saying. The chain made you uneasy. What I don’t understand is how that makes you different from Zalski.”
“That’s because Zalski’s never told you why he wants the Librette Oscure, am I right? Why he’s actively pursuing it, and has been for over a year. Why he restrained himself from killing Bendelof Esper. He doesn’t want you to know. Well, you should know. You should know what you’re supporting.”
Kora explained about the mindstone, about Zalski’s aims. Argint listened as he walked back and forth, avoiding her gaze, staring at the floor. “Nothing I’ve ever done comes close to that kind of invasion. Of violation. There are some things a human just doesn’t have the warrant…. The man you answer to actively seeks that power, for crowd control. Crowd control, General, to scare the masses.”
“It’s a moot point,” said Argint. Kora’s eyes grew wide, and he explained, “He’ll never find the book. Your lot will make sure the spell stays hidden if you accomplish nothing else. Zalski’s aims are disturbing, to be sure, but he won’t fulfill them, and even assuming he might, I’ve never been one to…. How does the expression go? To bite the hand that feeds me? Respect deserves respect. Trust earns trust. I don’t betray those who treat me kindly.”
Kora stared at him, disgusted. She had no response for this. Neither she, nor Lanokas, nor Neslan had suspected the General could disregard Zalski’s evil after seeing its full force. “I thought you were different,” she muttered. “I thought you were….”
“I support the side fate pulled me in line with. That’s no different from you, Porteg. No different from you, I won’t have you invade my office to look down your nose at me. We’re finished here.” He stepped toward the door, but before he could open it, the bells on top the building chimed the hour. One, two….
Argint stopped dead. “My meeting with Zalski.” Kora’s stomach fell somewhere to the region of her knees. Footsteps were approaching down the corridor.
“Trasporte,” she whispered. “Trasporte, Despareska….”
Nothing happened.
“Behind the desk,” Argint hissed. He tugged her toward the only space where she could possibly hide herself; the cot was raised, the floor beneath exposed. “Behind the desk, and don’t move. Don’t even breathe.”
Kora rolled beneath the desk, to the spot where a chair would normally be tucked. She lay on her side, scrunched in a ball, her back against the wooden slab that served as the furniture’s front. Her booming heart would give her away, she was sure of it. To be trapped like game, like a rabbit, after all she had been through; when she had planned just an hour ago to transport out as a last resort…. Her blood went cold. A sharp knock sounded on the door, and Kora screwed her eyes as Argint let in Zalski.
“Punctual to the minute, as always.” To Kora’s relief, the General sounded perfectly in control. Her blood began to thaw, until a recognizable voice responded.
“How comes the transition?”
Even if he finds you, Zacry’s safe. Nothing else matters. Zacry’s safe.
Kora’s eyes were still pressed shut. What if Zalski spoke something damning, revealed sensitive information, so sensitive that Kora must not live to pass it on? Would Argint reveal her? Pretend to discover her, as though she had entered without his knowledge? He could do that. He had the wits. Or would he wait until Zalski left, and then dispatch her? She had never felt so helpless, not even in Galisan’s warehouse, when Menikas stopped her rushing back to headquarters. Not even when she had failed to save Sedder.
Argint said, “The transition’s on schedule. I’d say that right now, Crabe handles eighty percent of my old duties.”
“That much?” said Zalski. “He’s that competent?”
“That’s why I chose him to replace me. He’s more than competent. He’ll head Yangerton operations as well as any. I’m in the process of training him to update the city registry, he’ll need to do that next year.”
“And he’ll listen to orders?”
“Orders from you or myself, delegated through his Captain, yes. Take a seat, Zalski.”
The scrape of two stools across the floor made Kora shiver. However, neither man placed himself behind the desk.
“How do I put this?” said Zalski. “How certain are you of Crabe’s character?”
Argint said, “An important issue, that. One I take seriously. I don’t need to remind you how shocked I was when Wilhem Horn proved a fraud. I worked with him more than once. He was pleasant enough, and diligent, I would never have suspected.”
“So you investigated Crabe?”
“To the letter of the law and in excess of it. I had him followed for five days straight. Read his correspondence. Searched his home.”
Zalski said, “And you’re certain of his character?”
“Completely.”
“I did the same with Wilhem, Argint.”
“I’m convinced Crabe’s loyal, I can say no more than that. If you want him to speak with Malzin, I’ll arrange it. That’s the only further test I can imagine.”
Zalski’s voice was cold. “Arrange it. I won’t have another spy infiltrate my ranks.”
“You paid your sister back three fold for Wilhem, don’t forget that.”
“Yes, losing their headquarters was a blow, not to mention the Carder woman. As for Miss Esper, I should have paid her as she deserved. I should have killed them all. They’re flies, damn flies. One doesn’t ignore a fly.”
“One swats it.”
“Grombach said I should swat them.”
“Alten Grombach was impulsive. You were right to question him.”
“And wrong not to follow his advice. I could have broken them, picked them off one by one, pair by pair, as they returned. Where are they now? Have you turned up any leads?”
“Nothing here, which is hardly surprising. They had no place in Yangerton left to go. I’ll keep retracing my steps, of course. It’s so unlikely they’ll return here they just may try it, to throw us off.”
“Malzin’s searches have come up empty,” said Zalski. “She’s about to move on to….”
“Her men are capable, Sire. I know, I was one of them for years. They’ll find what remains of the League, they’ll just need time. When they reach the right location….”
Silence. Kora would have given anything to see Zalski’s face. Why had Argint interrupted him, did he wonder? Did he suspect the actual cause? She took Argint’s advice to her literally, holding her breath until the sorcerer spoke again. “No doubt of that,” he said. “No doubt.”
Argint asked, “What precisely did you wish to discuss? Besides Crabe?”
“The Tricentennial.” The men spoke for another hour. It so happened Zalski did think the assassination plot compromised, due to Petroc’s chain and Kora’s use of it. Jonson Peare must be suffered to live, at least through the celebration, at least until the League had ceased to function. To Kora’s unsurprise, destroying his sister’s band of renegades was Zalski’s most urgent business. Her back aching, never daring to open her eyes, Kora did what she could: wait and pray, pray that Zalski would soon walk out, without her; that Argint would let her follow. Finally, the stools scraped the floor again. Zalski took his leave.
Argint wasted no time when the sorcerer had gone. Before Kora could unfold her sore, tense body, she saw her host and his sword before her. He bent down, she was sure with the aim to stab her. She flattened herself against the inside of the desk, and then realized he extended not the blade, but the hilt in her direction. The weapon was sheathed. She took hold, and Argint helped her out and up. She grimaced, stretching the small of her back. Then she looked at him with incredulous vulnerability.
“You didn’t turn me over.”
“You spared my life in Hogarane. Now I’ve spared yours.”
“You could have, you should have, turned me over.”
Argint was unmoved. “I owe you nothing from this point on. Nothing, I can’t make myself clearer. If you come near me again, I will cut you down.” He jerked a finger in the exit’s direction. “Get out. And be warned, if you so much as startle an individual in this building….”
“That’s not who I am. It’s not, I would never sneak up on someone.”
“Then what would you say you did to that man in my regiment? The one who died at that farmhouse in Hogarane, the one whose head you bashed against the shelving with more force than you did mine? He had a wife and four children. You wouldn’t have known that. I doubt you would have cared. So yes, I warn you, if you should startle a single person on your way out, just one, Zalski educating your brother is the least of your concerns. I will personally see that you pay. Now go.”
“I’ll go, I will. As soon as you check that the way’s clear.”
Argint verified there was no one in the hallway. He shepherded Kora through the door, then slammed it at her back. She made herself invisible and transported, not to Fontferry, but to the road that crossed in front of her parents’ home. From a quarter-mile out she began to walk, her thoughts all twisted, convoluted. She needed to set them straight before facing her companions.
Kora realized, with a jolt, that the last time she passed that bush had been a year ago. Almost a year, when she had gone out for flour and eggs. Had it really been the next day, the following morning, that she first set eyes on the man who just treated her so coldly? That the comrade he mentioned, the one to fly into the room and be thrown into the bookcase, had lost his life? Kora had not touched the man herself; that was the princes’ doing, though technically they had not touched him either. Their telekinesis killed him. What guilt did Kora carry by association? Surely some small measure. And she had never given the guardsman a second thought.
This is war. War, I didn’t ask for this, not for any of it. Let Argint think what he’ll think, I never attacked a person who wore no uniform. I’ve done nothing but try to protect my own. Perhaps I’ve killed; I never murdered. So why…?
The first sight of home wiped her mind, and her conscience, clear. Overcome with nostalgia, she stopped in the road. That old post, it was where she would enter Trenzern, the imaginary kingdom she created with Sedder and Hunt. That oak, across the field, was the tree she used to climb with her journal on lazy summer afternoons. Right here was where Zacry, aged four, fell and twisted his ankle. Sedder carried him back to the house. And there….
Kora crept forward. There stood the house itself, fully in view. Even from a distance the blue uniform of Malzin’s sentry clashed with the wood of the door as he stood at attention before it. Only Malzin herself could say how many men were inside, how many strangers had rooted through Kora’s things, besmirched the very journal she had thought of a mere minute before. Kora marched toward the soldier, her muscles tense.
He won’t know what hit him, the bastard.
She brought herself as close to the sentry as she dared. She drew a breath to let out a spell, one to maim. Before she voiced it, an image flashed across her brain: Zalski, walking up to ambush the League at the Landfill, trying to decide which death-dealing word would cause the greatest pain.
Kora dropped to her knees. She nearly screamed, almost let loose a string of curses to the sky, but the house, the soldier, were too near.
What am I…. What am I doing? What’s happened to me?
Shaking, she settled on the earth.
I have to calm down. I have to, or I’ll do something crazy, something like…. I’ll end up like Petroc. Like Zalski himself. I’ll prove Mayor Peare right. Zalski’s guards here, they violate memories, only memories. Well, memories can’t save me. If this means fewer elites at the Palace when we attack, maybe it’s worth the loss.
But what a loss. What price could she place on her childhood? “I shouldn’t have come back,” Kora thought. “I don’t belong here anymore.”
Why had she given all this up? In a way, the ruby had forced her to let it go. Enter a safehouse or join the League, those had been her options. She made her choice with little thought and even less understanding of what it meant to throw her lot in with the resistance. Had she known, she
would never have taken that oath.
She remembered, as though from a time as distant as Trenzern’s adventures, how she once told Sedder that if she were to die, she would die with honor. Her head had been filled with romantic delusions: sincere ones, but delusions nonetheless. There was nothing romantic about death, nothing to idealize about the gurgling noises of a man somehow drowning with his feet on the dirt; about the desperation in a woman’s eyes as she pleaded wordlessly for the life of her compatriot; about the gloopy, browning pools of blood left behind when someone had his throat cut after-hours in a warehouse. When Kora first joined the League, she had turned nostalgic about the years spent in the cottage that rose not twenty yards away from her. Now, she would give anything to return to those first days under Menikas’s command. Those days when Sedder was with her, and Zacry in his mother’s care, and the fight had not yet turned personal.
Now the personal aspects consumed her. Her mind forced her, every time she fell asleep, to watch Zalski again send an unbroken jet of water down Sedder’s throat. To see her brother traipse, his chin held high, into the room across from Bennie in that tower. To hear the crunch of a wooden chair and human bone upon impact with a cobblestone street. Kora could hear it now, it echoed in her brain, and she struggled to prolong the sound, to remember, precisely because she had lost all idealism, because she had nothing left to force her to keep going if not the urge to avenge Kansten, to make Zalski pay for abducting her brother, to fight in Sedder’s memory.
445
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rankush Returns
“The Giver bless us!” Bennie cried, when Kora walked in the barn. “The Giver bless us all, we thought….”
Neslan clapped Lanokas on the back, while the prince ran a hand down his face in relief. Hayden looked up from where he sat shredding lettuce, as though his ears did not offer enough proof that Kora was with them, physically sound. Laskenay glided to her feet to ask, “Will Argint help us? You were gone for so long, we took it to mean things either went extremely well….”
The Crimson League (The Herezoth Trilogy) Page 51
