by K. Eason
Word you want is inherited, Dek. You killed Maja to get here.
Sororicide, like matricide, was an old Illhari tradition, largely fallen into disuse since the Purge. Most families passed on their inheritance these days by waiting for a natural death. Old age. Disease. Injury.
Seems pretty natural someone might die from a sword through the chest, yeah?
Never mind Dekklis had never planned to become Senator Szanys. Three elder sisters should have guaranteed that she wouldn’t. But the first and third had no interest in
their duty
the seat, and Maja—well. Maja was rotting in the Szanys family crypt right beside their murdered mother. Dekklis wondered if ghosts could carry on blood feud with each other. Veiko would probably know, would probably tell Dekklis if she asked him. Which was exactly the reason she hadn’t.
Optio Pyatta tried again. “First Legate? What shall I tell the domina?”
Go away wasn’t acceptable, although Dekklis was tempted to try it. She could get herself a reputation for being difficult. Temperamental. Like K’Hess Rurik’s reputation, when he’d commanded the Sixth. When he’d commanded her.
She’d never thought she’d miss living in Cardik’s barracks. Stone floors, wood walls, smoke collecting in the eaves because Cardik’s garrison was Alviri-built, not Illhari, and so had a firepit in the middle of the thrice-cursed floor instead of a firedog. Or, foremothers defend, the tents they’d lived in during winter maneuvers. A whole day marching in snow, so that sweat soaked the underlayers and froze to frost on the wool tunic. And at the end of that day, four bodies crowded under canvas, gear hanging off the cross-poles, more often than not wet seeping in from the edges. Rurik, First Spear then, and closest thing in Dek’s world to god, marching up and down the camp alleys, poking his face in for inspections.
Less than a year before, all of that. She’d seen real gods in that interim. The Laughing God wearing a man’s body, crossing metal with Snow and dying on Istel’s blade.
And she’d seen Rurik’s fall from godhood to mere mortal. To her second, her bodyguard, shifting weight from one foot to the other on the unforgiving stone floor, under the unkind weight of formal legion armor. She’d asked him once to sit down and damn near lost her nose for it. The man could bite harder than Veiko’s dog.
He stood in the corner and waited, like Pyatta, for her attention. Watched, like Pyatta, his eyes on her like weights, except Pyatta was expectant and Rurik was—hell. Angry. Unhappy. Impatient.
Bored.
At least as frustrated as she was, by the morning’s Senate session. It had been very well attended, like svartjagr to an elk’s corpse. Senators had svartjagr manners, too. Dive and pick and poison whatever they touched.
Godsworn were an open secret now in the Senate. And tempting as it was to blame the rancor and division on their presence, it was only the latest excuse. There were, and always had been, trade conflicts and rivalry and simple personal dislike. The Republic hadn’t had real trouble in recent memory. The Alviri tribes had long been broken and docile, huddling in their villages. They hated their conquerors, yes, but they were not refusing to trade. And more came to Illharek each year and took the citizen’s ink. The worst and most pernicious trouble for years had been Taliri raiders, but they’d been like weather in most senators’ eyes. Bad in their season and place, but confined to the borders; the Sixth Cohort in the north and the Third Cohort in the east had been able to handle them. Illharek herself had had no natural enemies.
Until now.
She needed a report from Snow with Taliri troop-counts and placements. Some report how Cardik looked, how much was left. Needed proof, for a Senate whose majority had never set foot beyond their estates, why the remnants of the Sixth should go north again. At least she knew where the Taliri had been all summer. Fighting among themselves. Good. Let them keep fighting.
Dekklis heaved up a sigh. A scowl. Looked at Pyatta as if her optio was the personal architect of all the world’s misfortune.
“All right. Who is this person who so badly needs my time?”
“Toer Velaan, First Legate. She has—” Pyatta drew a deep breath “—an appointment.”
Toer. From the First Tier, old family, fallen on hard fortune. Dekklis narrowed her eyes and glared and hoped that Pyatta mistook the glare for displeasure instead of a frantic effort to recall why, exactly, the Toer fortune had failed. Was it trade? Or bad harvest? Or bad management? Or—
“Toer. One of four Houses to vote against every single one of the Reforms.” Istel’s voice, out of the corner closest to the chamber’s one window. Istel, who had waited with the bondies and the servants, out on the Senate plaza, and escorted her back here to her garrison apartment. He wore plain northern scout’s armor, leather and metal stitched together in segments. Out of fashion here in Illharek, out of function, too. What use for archers in the Below? What use a scout in a city whose crannies had been settled and explored generations before?
What use, he had asked her, one more legion guard in a metal shell? Fuck and damn, Dek, at least I can move if it comes to a fight.
Point, made and granted. Even Rurik had agreed. Rurik had expressed a not-so-private wish that he too might dispense with the polished nonsense he wore. Rurik might also wish he could skip the Senate sessions. But Dekklis had defied the custom that said uncut men did not stand in the Senate, and thus her military, highborn second attended with her. Even if that meant he wore the stupid armor.
Small wonder she’d had no luck with the traditionalists. Of which Toer was one, radically so. And this woman wanted to see her now, with an appointment.
She would ask Istel later where he’d gotten his knowledge of Illhari politics. Who he’d been talking to. Probably K’Hess Soren.
“First Legate,” Pyatta said again, and this time Rurik added an improper, informal, irritated
“Dekklis.”
Istel only smiled, a strange little curl to his mouth he’d brought back from the Suburba.
Dekklis flipped her hand at Pyatta. “Send her in.” Added, “Please,” to Pyatta’s stiff back, and threw “Thank you” after that. Pile the courtesies on at the end to cover the earlier lapse. Right.
So your reputation grows, First Legate.
Toer Velaan looked every bit the highborn daughter. Silk robe hanging off her tall frame, silk trousers, silk slippers. The robe hung open at the shoulder so no one might miss the Toer sigil on her skin. Fine inkwork, unusually ornate. Curls and whorls around the sigil itself, in a shade only three or four shades lighter than Velaan’s skin, so that it looked like shadows and mist around the Toer mark.
Velaan bowed. “My thanks, First Legate, for seeing me.”
“Your mother could have come herself.” That would have been proper. So would inviting Velaan to sit down, which Dekklis pointedly did not. Politics was a dance. That was the popular analogy. Step and spin and counterstep to a rhythm Dekklis did not feel. Better to call it a battle, because there were blades and sharp edges, and one misstep meant your blood on the stones.
Oh, dramatic, Dek.
But not inaccurate. Not given Illharek’s history.
Velaan dragged her gaze from Rurik to Istel. Shook her head. “No, First Legate. She could not.”
“You object to my First Tribune and the Second Scout. I assure you, their presence is quite within the bounds of Illhari law.”
“Yes, but.” Velaan inclined her head. “It would be uncomfortable, for my mother. She would find them a distraction. And she did not think you would hear her, if she came herself.”
“Because she would have asked me to send them away and I would have refused and she would have stormed out of here. How wise, your mother, to send you instead.” The headache thumped behind Dekklis’s eyes. She gritted her teeth. Leaned forward. Folded her hands on the desk. “What are Toer’s concerns, that Toer’s matron is too squeamish to voice in front of whole men but which she can send her daughter to discuss?”
Dekklis wat
ched the darkening creep from Velaan’s cheeks to her neck and farther down. Anger. Embarrassment. Maybe both. Neither leaked into her voice.
“She is concerned, First Legate—many of us are—about the unrest in the Suburba.”
“The unrest.”
“There have been reports of violence. Murders.”
“Reports? From whom, these reports?”
“Our bondies. Servants.”
Of course. Because Toer would not dirty its slippers descending below the Riverwalk. “So, you are coming to me with reports from your collared bondies, Domina. About murder. In the Suburba.”
“Hardly unusual,” Rurik murmured.
Velaan ignored him. “Perhaps the legions would be better deployed down there. To keep order.”
“This was a topic in session today. It’s been debated.” By your betters, she did not say aloud. Nor did she add to no good resolution. A not-insignificant alliance of Senators who wanted troops in the Suburba against those who wanted the legions on the roads, which meant loud arguments and no settlement and a First Legate out of patience with all of them.
Which Toer Velaan must have known before coming there.
“Your mother has already made her arguments,” Dekklis said, when Velaan did not add anything. “Unless you have come with new proposals, in which case I would ask why your mother does not raise them in the next session.”
That, the opening Toer Velaan had been waiting for. Toer wanted to play politics. Toer thought it had something the First Legate would value, something she would not want turning public. Some bribe, perhaps, or some attempt at threat or coercion.
Velaan’s chin came up. “I—we, my House—know that there are those in the Senate who do not value Illhari traditions. We know that there are, ah, opportunists who see only profit in the Suburba, instead of corruption.” Drawing more breath, gathering momentum to strike.
Counterstrike.
“Corruption, now, is it?” Dekklis maneuvered her lips into a little smile. “Toer Velaan. Please, sit down.”
Which Velaan had to do, and for which she must dip another bow. This one was not as deep, barely an adequate thanks, from subordinate to superior. Velaan was irritated. Good.
Dekklis sat back. Folded her hands across her belly, conscious that she wore no armor, not now, because even First Legates did not attend Senate sessions in steel. She might as well be naked for all the comfort this damned robe offered. She waited a beat, then two, while Toer sat stiff and impatient. Then, with a nod’s thinnest shadow: “Please. Continue.”
“Corruption,” Toer said, as if there had been no interruption. “Yes, First Legate. The murders are not simple crime. There are citizens dying. Good Dvergiri. Honest women. A butcher named Yrse with whom my House does business in the Abattoir is one such. She has disappeared and her body has not been found.”
Or her head, I’ll wager.
“Is Toer petitioning me to send troops down to search for this woman?”
“You would search for a corpse. They say her house looked like an abattoir itself. That there was blood on the walls and the floor, and not enough left of any one corpse to tell who had died or how many.”
“Your bondies told you this? Or did you see it yourself?”
Toer leaned forward. “It is plain talk in the street! Go down there, First Legate, walk through the Abattoir, and listen.”
“As you no doubt have done yourself. No. Wait.” Oh, command’s privilege, to raise a hand and hear only silence. That hadn’t ever worked on Istel or Rurik. But Toer’s daughter stopped, mid-breath.
“You know the cartels keep order in the Suburba. And yes, I see what you mean to say—they are gangs. They are sometimes”—swallow distaste and just say the word, hell, it was language Toer understood—“toadbellies and criminals. But they keep order in the streets, better than the legions can. They keep the violence from crossing the Riverwalk and climbing into the Tiers. Tradition says we don’t care what they do to each other, so long as the goods come off the barges and the Arch’s shops are well stocked. Who’s to say your butcher wasn’t involved in some cartel dispute over territory?”
“Because she was killed inside her own house, First Legate. The door showed no signs of damage. Yet someone got inside.”
“Perhaps she opened the door to someone she thought was a friend. She wouldn’t be the first to let her own death in the front door.”
“Witnesses said there were only screams and blood from inside. No sounds of battle. Nothing natural can do that.”
Natural. Oh, here it came. Dekklis steepled her hands. “Are you saying there was a conjuror involved? Because alleging Academy involvement in a cartel dispute requires that I summon a representative from the Adept Council.”
“No. No. I am saying what my mother is too afraid to say in the Senate: that by ignoring our traditions, we have encouraged the lowborn and the toadbellies to do the same. There are heretics in the Suburba, First Legate. Of that, I have proof.”
And foremothers, hadn’t Dekklis gone to Rurik with a speech very similar last winter? Hadn’t she faced him across a room much like this and explained the trouble brewing in Cardik’s Warren? Citizens dying, she’d said. And then, heretics, the word meant to shock and horrify all good Illhari. She ignored Rurik’s impolite snort, felt Istel’s gaze on the back of her head, kept her gaze firmly on Toer.
“I assume by heretic, then, you mean godsworn. But to which god? Because I understand Tal’Shik has made a comeback in Illharek these days.”
Blink. Naked surprise on Velaan’s face.
First blood.
“Surely, your mother and her allies know that godsworn were very much involved in Cardik’s trouble this winter. They should know. My First Tribune delivered his report to the Senate just this spring. The consul had him arrested—on the advice, as I recall, of your mother among others. And now you come to me with talk of heretics as if it’s some novel occurrence? You need better spies, Toer Velaan.”
“I am not talking about Tal’Shik’s worship. I am talking about the Laughing God, First Legate. He is an enemy of Illharek. He was our enemy before the Purge, and now he has returned.”
“Oh,” Istel murmured. “I don’t know. I don’t think he ever really left.”
Velaan twitched as if he’d spat on her. Arrowed such a look of hate that Dekklis imagined blisters rising on Istel’s skin. “Even,” she said thickly, “even the First Legate’s man knows the truth of it.”
“Oh. I do not doubt my man’s wisdom. Or your mother’s. I believe completely and without reservation that the Laughing God does, indeed, have godsworn in the Suburba.”
Foremothers defend us from youth. That was triumph on Velaan’s face. “Then you must understand why we cannot trust the cartels to keep order any longer. We must send the legions into the Suburba. We must eradicate the God’s people.”
“I must remind you, Toer Velaan, that I am one voice in the Senate. As is your mother. If you have real proof, or she does, then Toer can produce it. I won’t block a debate. So. There. Your errand is complete.”
Velaan drew a deep breath. Smiled, poison-sweet. “No, First Legate. It is not.”
“No? Then what? Shall I send the legion without the Senate’s permission?”
“If you lent your voice to the argument, as First Legate and not merely senator, our case would be stronger. You are the commander of our legions. If you said that the soldiers should go—”
“Then there would be one more voice shouting in the curia. No. There should be proof. Which your mother no doubt has. And which she has good reason not to produce, too, one imagines, because it will implicate her, as well.”
Velaan blinked. “First Legate, I—”
“Be quiet.” There came a time in a fight when you got tired of strike and counterstrike, blows traded with no decision, a time when you wanted the fight over. When you struck, and struck hard—
“Tell me something, Toer Velaan. Why should I mind the Laughing God�
��s people in the Suburba, when I have Tal’Shik’s all through my Senate? Are they not also heretics?”
—and hoped the other would yield ground.
Velaan’s fists clenched in her lap. “I don’t know anything about Tal’Shik’s godsworn.”
Drive her back. Disarm her. Finish this.
“Do you not? Surprising. Because they’ve been doing a fine job, until late, of controlling the God’s people. Or did your sources in the Suburba fail to report the murders last winter of several Illhari citizens? Some of them died quite spectacularly. Impaled. I’m sure there was talk. And then there’s the matter of those missing consorts last winter, all from Reform Houses, all contracted to and living with traditional Houses when they disappeared. No. I think the problem we have is not the Laughing God, it’s godsworn in general, and Tal’Shik’s in particular, and I think your mother knows very well who they are.”
Foremothers, you could cut that silence. Thick and toxic as burning pitch. Velaan’s face did not move, but her hands flexed and wriggled like angry spiders.
Then, just as Rurik shifted weight and took a step, just barely louder than the creak and clank of his armor, Velaan said, “I see that other rumors are true, Szanys Dekklis. You’ve allied yourself with the heretics.”
Dekklis held up a hand. Felt, rather than heard, Rurik stop. Matched Velaan’s tone. “Allies? No. I’m not playing favorites.”
