Kings and Assassins (29 page)

Janus oversaw Poole's transfer from the relatively cozy room high above the stench and clamor of the central cells, and watched with a smile when Poole gagged visibly as the big broad doors swung open, revealing people all going rigid in the sudden light, more like startled vermin than humans.

“Back,” the guards yelled, “back up.”

They gave Poole a none-too-gentle nudge inside, suggesting that Poole, during his stay upstairs, hadn't managed to make allies of the guards.

Ill considered of him
, Janus thought, but that was Poole. For all his claim of protecting the common man, he was as willing to overlook the ones who served him as any aristocrat. The doors slammed shut behind him, giving Janus a last glance of the man's rigid spine, his arms clutched tight around his handful of paper.

Janus tipped each of the guards involved with a luna, collecting their smiles in return, before seeking out Damastes again. The man hastily tucked the earring away from where he had been studying it in a rare shaft of sunlight.

“S funny,” he said, once his treasure was hidden again. “Your father was the one who put'im here. Now you've consigned him to the death Last didn't.”

“I don't want him dead,” Janus said, unwilling to bandy words. “Part of the payment is to keep him alive but miserable.”

“You really are a right bastard,” Damastes said, raised his hands in automatic apology. “Wasn't meaning nothing by it. Not your birth, anyways.” The man's gray eyes were sly, making mockery of his apology, but Janus ignored it; he'd heard worse.

He stepped out into the daylit yard, eyes watering again as the scent of new graves assailed him.
Three days
, he thought. He gave Poole three days before the man sent either a letter or word, well within the time Janus needed.

Janus raised a hand, and the carriage was brought around. He collapsed into its fragrant interior; the scent of wood polish, cedar, and lavender was a balm to his senses after the reek of Stones.

“My lord?” Simpson asked. He coughed into his gloved hand and looked as horrified as if he had found his skin blistered with plague marks.

“Return to the palace,” Janus said. “We're done here.”

UTSIDE THE KING'S STUDY, THE
noonday sun lit trees thick with rooks. Janus eyed them warily, searching for some sign that they had purpose beyond simple animal need for shelter, and finally drew the curtains back, darkening the room back to predawn light.

“Are you listening, Last?” DeGuerre asked. The tone of voice left no doubt he thought the answer no.

“Always to you,” Janus said. It was truth; DeGuerre might be a conservative thorn in his side, but he had a powerful following. The fact that DeGuerre took his truthful response as a veiled insult only made it more appealing. “Shall I repeat it back like a schoolboy? You believe Bull and I are overreacting to the unrest in the streets, that it is only the usual malcontents voicing their unreasonable demands for jobs, for shelter, for food, for a life not lived in desperation.”

Gost, sitting behind Aris's desk, having assumed the position of authority with a slick ease that made Janus itch to have him thrown out of the room, derailed DeGuerre's protest with a quiet “Hector.”

Bull sighed and spoke before anyone else could. “Egalitarianism aside, I stand by my findings. Murne is overcrowded, the city streets full of those who seek a life more profitable than the farming communities outside.”

DeGuerre said, “Only proves my point. Malcontents all. They come from farms where there's both work and food.”

“There's work enough for entire families, yes, but not food enough—not when a third of their crops goes to Itarus and the rest is sold to merchants who have little money of their own. Is it any wonder they flock to Murne? Or sell their children?”

“A pretty drama for the serial sheets,” DeGuerre said. “Every story is a stage tragedy.”

“It's true,” Bull said. “Farmers have always sent their children into Murne to find jobs. Only, in recent years, there have been no jobs to find.”

“Itarusine merchants don't hire Antyrrian brats,” Janus murmured. “What was Aris thinking to allow so many of them to profit here?”

DeGuerre looked as if Janus had stumbled upon a question he had asked himself more than once.

Gost tapped the ink bottle with a lazy hand, his nails clicking against the glass, drawing their attention. “I believe Aris saw it as his own quiet war of attrition against the country that held the reins. He assumed that their interests were more personal than political. A reasonable enough assumption. Men are driven by their own urges, not abstractions. You must admit it in yourself, Last. You wish to be king to please yourself, first and foremost.”

DeGuerre's gaze, softened in thought, narrowed again as distrust bloomed anew in his heart. Gost smiled, that paternal smile that hid nothing but smug self-satisfaction.

“Aris was naïve if he thought the Itarusines would shift allegiances,” Janus said. “Grigor supports their endeavors financially, or did you think it coincidence that while Antyrrian merchants struggle under the weight of an aristocracy that thinks it good financial sense to shirk their bills, the Itarusine merchants prosper? Aris didn't welcome émigrés. He welcomed spies.”

“I suppose Ivor shared this information with you,” Gost said.

DeGuerre, like a trained dog, began muttering.

Gost, Janus thought, needed to be silenced, but he doubted a friendly request would suffice. Dagger, sword, a hired footpad on a dark road—it begged for blood.

DeGuerre's rant wound down with a last, familiar splutter. Janus
didn't bother listening. DeGuerre was bluster and bluff, prone to speaking wildly while his actions were the very model of caution.

Bull said, “Aris knew they were spies. He thought it a fair exchange as it gave us a chance to infiltrate their line of information. But this purging of Antyrrian employees is new and worrisome.”

“Soldiers preparing for action,” Janus said.

“Some of them have families,” Bull said. “Antyrrian wives, mistresses, children.” It was a pragmatic and oblique solution; Janus thought better of the man than he had in months.

Gost said, “Are you contemplating punishing Antyrrian citizens in hopes that their Itarusine families will be swayed? I doubt you'll see any result beyond rousing the city against you.”

“Some men are softer than others,” Janus said. “Some lack the stomach for—”

“Murder?” Gost asked, that slight smile touching his mouth again. One word, and DeGuerre and Bull were drawn back into the fold, Janus excluded as the dangerous outsider.

Janus was more relieved than not to hear Evan's familiar scratchy stutter-tap on the door. “Yes,” he said, and DeGuerre flung up his hands in exasperation.

“Last, we haven't begun to solve the problems you've raised. Your attention is required….”

DeGuerre trailed off but Janus hardly noticed. Not when Evan came in, all tight shoulders and jaw clenched with silent effort, beneath the weight of the man leaning on his narrow form. Delight petted the boy's tousled hair once, before releasing him to stagger toward Janus. His skirts, ragged and torn, hampered him; he limped as if he'd taken a fall, and his hands were blistered and red. Released, Evan backed out of the door, biting his lips, as if Delight's distress had made itself at home in his own heart.

“Janus—” Delight said. His voice was rough and cracked as if he'd been inhaling… It was smoke that trailed in with him, the acrid scent of ruination and flame.

Janus took three steps forward, clasping Delight's forearms, partly to keep Delight upright and partly to assure him of his welcome. He couldn't miss Delight's cringing glance at the admiral.

“What's happened?” Janus asked, though he could guess; a fire at Seahook. What he needed to know was how bad it was. How ruinous it would prove to be.

Delight swayed. Exhaustion and pain made themselves seen in ringed dark eyes, in the careful stiffness of his shoulders as he held himself upright. He stumbled, foot snagging in a skirt draggle, caught Janus's vest, and said, heedless of his near fall, “Did you mean for him to die?”

Janus's mind, usually his best and most reliable tool, blanked. Delight had come to the palace,
Delight
, not Chryses. Come to a place where he was unwelcome and scorned.

“I'm building a future at your command,” Delight said, hands tightening on Janus's clothes, though a blister popped and he flinched. “I think you owe me the truth at least. Did you expect him to die? Set him back to spying on Harm as punishment for his actions at the docks?”

“No,” Janus said. “I told him to be careful—” He sucked in a breath, shaking the weakness from his voice. “No,” he said again, trying to ensure that Delight believed him, but hearing only uncertainty in his own voice.
Had
he meant Chryses to die?

Delight let out a sigh and sagged forward, nesting his forehead against the juncture of Janus's collarbone and chest. He smelled of soot, blood, and sweat; his hair was burned also, frizzled and snarled along his spine. Janus touched it gently, felt the way Delight trembled with the effort of controlling his grief.

“Who's dead?” DeGuerre demanded. “Explain yourself!”

“Hector,” Bull said. He put his hands on DeGuerre's shoulders, holding him back when DeGuerre moved toward Delight.

“Damn you, it's my—” DeGuerre broke off, unwilling to claim Delight even in extremity. Like Last, Janus thought, only taking him back when forced.

Janus stroked Delight's spine, the knots of it pressed against his hand. “I burned it,” Delight whispered, the sound carried on an upward puff of soot. “I burned Seahook to deny them the satisfaction of firing it themselves. Burned my notes to ashes rather than let the antimachinists take them.”

He shuddered in Janus's arms, and Janus raised his head, met Bull's blank gaze, Gost's speculative one, and DeGuerre's carefully turned back.

Delight flinched again in Janus's arms, from a pain purely mental. Fear crept across his face; the exhaustion fading. The man expected recriminations, Janus realized, now that the story was out.

Janus touched his cheek, brought Delight's face from hiding, and said, slow and seriously, “You could have done nothing else. You defended your country's best interest, though it cost you dearly.”

Delight shuddered against him, relief as much a burden as the fear, and said, “I let him burn, too….” If the man hadn't been so exhausted, so dried by the heat of the blaze, he would have had tears standing in his eyes, Janus thought.

“Then he'll have a marker more fitting than any gravestone,” Janus said. “A marker of slagged metal by the sea.”

Delight sagged; his clutching hands loosened. “You won't let him be forgotten. They were his plans, too.”

“We'll put his name on every engine we build,” Janus vowed. Delight sighed.

He settled Delight in the armchair, poured him a cup of tea, and Delight drank it, heedless that it was cold and overbrewed, having been served several hours earlier during Janus's breakfast.

“The antimachinists—” Janus began.

“Where's Chryses?” DeGuerre said, anger making him do the unthinkable and address his disowned son to find out what had happened to the disgraced one.

“He's dead,” Delight said. He covered his eyes with scorched palms, breath ragged behind their dubious shelter.

Janus poured a generous splash of whiskey into Delight's teacup before adding more cold tea. Delight drank it down like it was nectar, and the whiskey sparked heat in his flat, glazed eyes. “
Your fault,”
Delight said. “If you'd allowed us on the estate, we'd have been working in security, where Harm couldn't have—”

“Harm,” Janus said. “He was behind this?”

Delight nodded, looking down at the teacup, his burned braid
sliding perilously close to the surface, adding the taste of char to an already unpalatable drink. “Four of them,” Delight said. “With Chryses's body between them. Two were Antyrrian bullyboys. The other two were Itarusine. The one who killed Chry was Itarusine.”

“You know this for certain?” Gost said at the same moment DeGuerre growled something ugly under his breath.

“They spoke Itarusine,” Delight said. “Not something you'll find your average man doing.” He clutched the teacup in his hands, burned fingers bleeding on the pale china.

Gost spoke into the quiet, his voice so poisonously reasonable. “You were in some distress, surely you were mistaken. Itarusine thugs within our shores? Murdering aristocrats? Even disgraced ones? It seems more likely your argumentative brother quarreled with a man equally hot-tempered—Harm is reputedly foul-mannered—and it followed him home.”

“You've always over-dramatized yourself,” DeGuerre muttered. “Why else still wear—”

Delight closed his eyes against the weight of their disbelief. Janus thought them not so much skeptical as afraid.

“Whatever they're planning,” Delight said when the silence had returned, “they're starting it now. Harm's no longer content to wait for commands. He's gotten them.”

Janus felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Behind him the open doorway felt suddenly populated.