by Eric Flint
Ruy sighed. “And are we well chastised?”
“No, we seem to be feckin’ heroes.”
“Heroes? We almost allowed the pope to be killed. That’s a second time, for me, I might add.”
“Well, I guess they’re feeling shockin’ generous. Some of them, anyhow.”
Ruy raised an eyebrow. “And whose opinion of us is not so high as the others’?”
“Well,” Owen murmured. “Not so much a lower opinion, but a clear desire to get personally involved.”
“Ah.” Ruy smoothed his moustaches. “That would be our intelligence chief, Estuban Miro.”
Owen glanced over. “He was right, y’know.”
“Please do not remind me. I wish to enjoy my wine.”
“Well, enjoy all you like, but he was the one who said the one thing we couldn’t control was infiltration, not unless we were in Grantville itself.”
Ruy shook his head. “Perhaps, but even then—”
O’Neill nodded. “Aye, even then. There’s always enough money, or enough dirty secrets to expose, to get some damned idjit to break his word, to let the wolf in the door. Particularly if it’s a wolf that bleats like a sheep.”
Ruy turned. “You have learned something?”
O’Neill shook his head. “No, but I think I’m on the scent.” He stood. “You ready to take a walk?”
“For what?”
“For asking a few pointed questions of that ugly bastard whose leg you filleted.”
Ruy was on his feet before O’Neill had finished his sentence. “Let us go at once.”
* * *
The prisoner was being kept isolated in a narrow room in which the night-servants usually napped as they shared shifts.
The moment the man with the squashed nose saw Ruy enter the room behind O’Neill, he sneered. “Here to finish the job, Spaniard?”
Ruy simply smiled. “My associate is unlikely to allow me that singular pleasure.”
O’Neill sat on the bed. He patted the bloody wrappings on the fellow’s leg; the man winced, went pale. “Still stings a bit, eh? A shame, that is. But as to your fears of imminent demise. I’m happy to say that my good friend is correct: there’ll be no killing you today. And not tomorrow. Not for some time, I expect. If ever.”
The man did not look relieved. “And whose clemency is this? Your soft-headed pope? I almost think I liked him better when he was a favor-peddling fop without the nerve to do his own murdering.”
“Ah, an’ sure that he has a high opinion of yourself, as well. But enough pleasant chatter; down to business, then. You’ll not die because it’s clear you know who sent you here, and why. At least, that’s what the others tell us,” O’Neill lied.
“Which others?” the fellow asked.
“Now, see, that’s where you lack understanding of this process. We ask the questions; you answer them.”
“Or what? You’ll disembowel me? You think I didn’t consider that beforehand? You think I care?”
O’Neill glanced at Ruy, then back at the man. “Y’know, I’m not the one in this room that you have to worry about. I said you’d not be killed, and I meant it. But whether you find living a pleasant alternative…well, I can’t answer for that. Not in my hands alone, y’see.”
Ruy just smiled.
The man actually threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, you are fools. Greater than I thought! You think I’d lie to protect the bastard who promised me silver, more than I could carry, to manage the murder of your precious Roman Pimp—I mean, Pope?”
O’Neill frowned. “Can’t say as I know one way or t’other about that. Seemed to me you were straight serious enough when you said you’d given thought to what might happen to you.”
The man shrugged, looked away. “I was prepared for death, I was prepared to live with more silver than I could spend. I was ready for anything in between.”
O’Neill exchanged quick glances with Ruy. “But you weren’t prepared to die to protect the identity of who sent you.”
He looked back. “That’s right. Because if Urban isn’t dead, then it’s all the more important that you know who was behind this.”
Ruy took another step into the room, hand on the hilt of his main gauche. “And who would that be, you murderous dog?”
“Who do you think, you Spanish pig-fucker? The next hypocrite-who-would-be-pope: Borja.”
Ruy stopped. This was too easy. “And why would you betray your employer?”
“My employer?” The turnip-nosed man threw back his head and laughed. “More like my tool.”
“Your tool? To achieve what?”
“Idiot! To ensure the destruction of popery: to put an end to the greed, the hypocrisy, the mammon that oozes out of Rome like pus from a buboe.”
O’Neill studied the man closely. “You know I’m an Irishman. So you know it’s coming on half a millennium that our country hasn’t been our own.” His face lost its ironic animation. “I have no small amount of familiarity with the sound of righteous indignation. Particularly the kind that’s just high talk to conceal the personal grudge beneath. To hide a wound that won’t heal, a wound in the heart. As when one loses one’s kin to an invader, a usurper, a thief with a crown.”
“Or a miter.” The words came out like an animal snarl. The misshapen face looked upward, contorted in an arresting mix of vicious hatred and emotional agony. His verbal rage came out through a mist of distempered spittle. “Can you guess how I knew who that prat von Meggen was? Or how I fooled those farm boys into thinking they could become the new Swiss Guard? Because my own grandfather was one and died at the battle von Meggen went on about. I didn’t tell them, of course. I just needed to stay close enough to introduce them to Norwin’s thugs, who were smart enough to work for coin, rather than for their taskmasters in Rome. And then I faded away, neither group the wiser.”
“That’s what Borja hired you to do?”
“More than that. They needed someone to make the bombs, to sneak in the weapons. Pity you didn’t open all my barrels when I came through the tollhouse, Spaniard. You might have recognized the pieces of the pepperbox revolvers. But then again, I doubt you’d have dirtied your hands with it, and only you and a few others would even recognize the parts, mixed in with all my ironmongery.”
It was a contention that Ruy could not contradict, no matter how much he wished to. “Go on.”
“I don’t need your prompting, Spaniard. Any more than I needed prompting when Borja’s agents approached me. They suspected I’d work for them. What they didn’t guess was that I would have done this all for free, even if I knew that, at the end of it, I’d be drawn and quartered for my trouble.”
“I’ve heard men say such things before,” murmured O’Neill. “Back in Ireland. After their towns are burnt, or their families put to the sword.”
The man’s nose became very red. “Don’t think to get cozy with me, you shit-brained bog-hopper. We’ll not be weeping together at the end of this conversation or any other. I know what you think of me. And I don’t care. But it’s true enough that there’s plenty of misery in the lands beyond your muck-loving Ireland. You see, I too was born Catholic. That’s the height of the joke, don’t you see? At least in your land, it’s the other side—the Protestants—who make your life a living hell. But in my canton? It was my own church.
“They taxed me like a serf. I didn’t protest. They—meaning the Spanish who marched through the Valtelline to the German wars—took my two oldest boys and fed them to the Protestant cannons. And I mourned, but still prayed.
“But then my youngest, he married a Lutheran. And could you blame him, seeing what his own kind had done to him and his family?” He settled back, his eyes narrow, his voice becoming cool, detached. “News got around, of course. It always does. So the next time the Catholic armies came marching through, my youngest and his wife fled to my house. And mind you: I never missed Sunday mass, was generous at the poor box, and never spoke an ill word against the local priests
or Rome.
“But none of that mattered. The Spanish came to my farm. Dragged the two of them out and killed them in front of each other, made sure each one was alive long enough to know that the other was dying. I tried to stop them; the captain galloped straight through and over me. I can still remember him laughing as his horse’s hoof came down on my face.
“My wife wouldn’t stay in the root cellar when she heard the screaming; she came out and grabbed a broom to start beating them off. Before she landed a single blow, they cut her to ribbons—literally, to thin bloody strips—with their halberds. When I tried to get up, to stop them, the officer rode over me again, but instead of killing me outright, he just left me with this bad hip as a parting gift. I screamed every Spanish curse I knew at him, told him to kill me like a man, to finish what he’d started.”
The man smiled. “Do you know what he said? Death would mean the end of my suffering. It was a better punishment for me, and a better example for the good of the Church, that I should live with the disfigurement that would also be my badge of shame until the day God himself took me. And in whose name did he do it? Surely you can guess.”
O’Neill murmured, “Pope Urban VIII.”
“Well, I guess not all the Irish are as stupid as they say. But either way, you weren’t smart enough to stop me.”
Ruy came a step closer. “No, we weren’t. So why don’t you show us just how smart you are?”
The man spat at the Catalan and missed. Which, Ruy allowed, was fortunate, because he wasn’t sure he could have stayed his hand in time. “You don’t need to trick me into telling you how I worked this. I want you to know. I want you to be able to check every fact, trace every lead back to Rome.”
O’Neill nodded. “Because then there can be no peace among the Catholic nations of Europe, or even the Hapsburgs.”
“My, you are smart for an Irishman; I’ll bet you don’t even have a tail. Of course that’s the point, you dullard. And it will happen no matter who sides with whom, in the end. Spain can either protect or disown Borja; either way, someone will have to march into Rome and unseat him. With any luck, they’ll destroy what little he’s left of the Holy City. And if Spain supports him? Why, I saw none other than Bedmar, the cardinal-protector of Spanish Flanders in the line in front of me when I entered Besançon this time. So, what will his leash-holder, Fernando, the presumptuous ‘King in the Lowlands’ do? Support Philip his brother and king of Spain, or take a stand against him? And given that his wife is the sister of the emperor of Austria—and so, another Hapsburg—all is set fair to split that dynasty right down the middle, with all of Europe taking one side or the other.” He leaned back; his smile would have been a suitable decoration on a tombstone. “I just hope I live to see it: to see it all burn, become the pyre that finally consumes the Roman Church and all its depravity.”
“So, you understand politics. And are well-informed. Atypical for a farmer.”
“I haven’t been a farmer since I lost the ability to steer a plow, to work a hard day in an alpine field, you idiot. So I made my trade ironmongery. I had always been good with languages—you get a lot of experience at that, in the cantons—and with turning a profit, no matter how poor a year we had. Before long, I was traveling past Zurich, up to Basel, to Constance, even to Besançon.”
“Which is how you were known here, had the contacts and information you needed.”
“Ah, so the Spaniard has a brain, too. And uses it for something other than cheating and buggery. Impressive. Of course, when Borja’s agents contacted me last year, I knew that contacts and information wouldn’t be enough. I would need leverage.”
Ruy frowned. “Ridiculous: Borja could not have known that there was a colloquium being planned last year, much less that it would have been in Besançon.”
The man sneered. “So maybe I was hasty presuming you had a brain. Of course he didn’t know that, yet. But he knew Urban would turn up somewhere, and Rome has deep pockets. From what I can tell, Borja contacted someone like me in every region: someone who hated Urban, who would be willing to take coin to assist in an attack on him. I just volunteered to do more than he expected, and was in the right place—and had the right leverage—to do it.”
O’Neill nodded. “What leverage?”
The man smiled. “When you’re on the road a lot, as I am, you notice changes in traffic. The new balloon traffic to Basel increased, then began going even further west. Turned out they were mostly landing in Besançon. Now, most people wouldn’t hear much about that. But it turns out that wherever up-timers go, they are always bringing or buying metal. It’s their lifeblood, it seems. And there was a lot of metal moving in the direction of Besançon, just like the airships. So off I went to see what I could see.
“At first I thought it was all due to this new up-time company that Bernhard the Pretender had brought in: the Silo Design and Construction Corporation. But a little more time in town made me think otherwise. I started seeing your Wild Geese and the Hibernians. Then I heard word that your Moorish wife had been here for months. Not seen often, but still often enough to establish that she wasn’t merely traveling to and from Besançon frequently: she was living here. And that told me all I needed to know.”
Ruy nodded. “That Urban was here, or would be soon. And that therefore, you needed to procure leverage to infiltrate one of the places where he would appear.”
The man gestured all around him. “And where else would he appear, where else could he hold a colloquium, but in this palace? No other place in Besançon is large enough, and conveniently, the Granvelle’s are a dying line, at least insofar as the ones who should live here are concerned. All of them live elsewhere. So I knew where I needed to find the leverage: amongst the staff of this place, with whom I had already traded and so, knew their names and faces.
“That was where I had to do a little extra work. Greed would not be enough of an incentive. Any person with enough authority to be useful would be making a reasonable living as a retainer in this palace. They might wish more money, but I had no way of being sure that, when push came to shove, their greed would be greater than their fear. No, I had to find someone who had something to hide, something that, if revealed would endanger them, force them to flee as far as they could. If they could. That is the sort of threat I needed to hold over them: that not cooperating with me carried a greater surety of disaster than agreeing to help.”
Ruy hoped his smile looked like a predator baring its teeth. “It seems you yourself have excellent skills in depravity and cruelty.”
The man smiled back just as mirthlessly. “I had excellent tutors. At any rate, it took a little while frequenting the less reputable establishments of both the Buckle and the Battant, but I eventually I came across what I was looking for: one of Palais Granvelle’s heads of staff lurked around the most despised spot along the waterfront. Its depravity is so great, it doesn’t even have a sign. It is only known among the thieves, swindlers and perverts of this town—of which there are a fair number.
“From there on, it was a simple matter of following him—Delgado, the head of the kitchen staff who was also, as luck would have it, the assistant major domo—and confirming what was said of him, and which my observation suggested: that he was inordinately fond of youths at that point of life where their peach fuzz is about to become a man’s bristles.
“Mind you, he was careful about his buggery. Never with locals: usually young apprentices, sent here by their families to finish their tutelage under another master. Or new hands on the river boats. That sort of thing. Never for long, and never seen together in public. They prearranged rooms in which to rendezvous: usually in flop houses, sometimes in a tavern, but that was riskier.
“Delgado maintained the appearance of preferring women, went so far as to hire prostitutes to disappear into rooms with him: discreetly, but still publicly. He was careful with his money, lived alone, had no close friends, was not a besontsint. In short, he was perfect: on his own, hiding h
is depravity, and guilty of a crime that would certainly destroy him figuratively, and maybe literally, if it were to become common knowledge. And no, I doubt you’ll find him: the pervert fled the moment he saw what w—what I had put on the covered trays.”
O’Neill leaned forward. “Was that what ‘we’ or what ‘I’ put on the trays?”
“Mostly just me. But the grenades that were disguised as jam pots, I had a young fool help me with those. He was so green and from such a shithole that he’d never seen a jam pot before. Probably never had jam.”
Ruy wasn’t sure if there was more to the man’s stumble over the singular versus plural pronoun, but there wasn’t time to examine every question detail in this first interrogation. “So Delgado was not aware that he was aiding and abetting assassins?”
“Of course not, imbecile! Telling him would have been as foolish a risk as announcing it on the street, no matter how terrible his perversion. I just made it clear that a certain victualer wished to gain the favor of the house, and that the major domo was receiving bribes from the current provider. So Delgado only had two jobs: first, to ensure that the major domo was removed, which involved the minor matter of planting false evidence. Which you two apparently swallowed whole, thank you very much. The second job was to allow me to bring in and oversee a shipment of special delicacies from the new victualer, to be received the night before today’s banquet, and then served to all the dignitaries today. Who were expected to rave about it and so bring about the desired change in victualers.”
O’Neill frowned. “And he believed that?”
The man chuckled. “When a fool can’t be found, one can usually be made. Just give a desperate man a reasonable sounding explanation for why a single, modestly dishonest act will produce an outcome he very much wants. Or needs. A man in that position can convince himself that the most improbable scenarios are true.” He shrugged. “A few leading conversations, a few drinks, and I got the rest of what we needed from him: the daily schedule of patrols in the palace.”
