Kings and Assassins (4 page)

“Gut shot at close range,” Sir Robert said, “followed by saber. A foreigner's choice of weapon.”

“No foreigner did this,” Psyke said. She darted her gaze up toward Janus, and the open blueness of her eyes, the fear and pain, the bewildered betrayal in them confused him. Was this acting? If so, it was of a caliber to match the grandes dames of the stage.

The guards brought in Lord Blythe; the young man looked both furious and scared, full of fading bluster. Behind him, the Duchess of Love came in like mourning itself, draped in black bombazine and her jet-crystal gloves.

“King Aris is dead, they tell me,” she said. “Is this true? Is Antyre without its king?”

“It is,” Rue said. “Will you attest to—”

“Last claims innocence,” DeGuerre said, interrupting, “though his wife claims otherwise. Last says you and Blythe will vouch for him.”

Celeste Lovesy's lips tightened. She said nothing. Blythe coughed, and when all eyes turned upon him, he fell silent after another glance at the duchess. Her gloved hand fell heavily on his arm.

Warrick Bull narrowed his eyes. “Speak up, and speak truly. Were you playing cards with the Itarusine prince and Last?”

“Yes,” Lord Blythe said, though the single syllable was grudgingly given. Janus felt a relief of tension he hadn't realized he bore. “From after dinner until the bells rang.”

The duchess, when pressured, admitted that she had found both Blythe and Janus in Ivor's company with every appearance of having been there for some time. The words were dragged out in poisonous short phrases. Yes, she had seen him. Yes, there were glasses aplenty laid out, and most of a bottle of brandy gone. Yes, there were coins, both Antyrrian and Itarusine, piled up as if several games had been won and lost.

“The wounds were dealt unevenly.” Sir Robert braved the glacial silence the duchess's confession had left in the room. “The shot
should not have missed the heart at such close range, the saber wounds were awkward, as if the wielder used two hands to compensate for the weight of an unfamiliar weapon.”

Bull and Rue shared a glance, before Rue spoke. “You believe the assassin an amateur?”

Sir Robert rubbed at the collar of his hastily donned smock that showed splashes of drying blood. “I only mean to say that I understand the Earl of Last to be experienced with both a saber and a pistol.”

Janus tried to hide his surprise at defense from an unexpected quarter.

DeGuerre raised both hands, brought them down in a sharp gesture of exasperation. “And so it begins again. Janus profits, and yet… he cannot be blamed.”

“He is,” Psyke said. “I saw it myself.” She drew her arms tight about herself, rocked in her seat, nearly pitching to the floor. “It is the same as before.” She laughed, the sound strained and
terrible. “Exactly
the same.”

Rue dropped to his knees, “My lady—”

“No,” she said. “I
saw
him. Saw him come out of the darkness, like a piece of darkness, death in his face.”

“Who?” Rue said. “Who did you see?”

Psyke shivered all over;
cold
, thought Janus,
not fear
, though it played well to the room of men who didn't know what real fear looked like. “I saw him.”

“Last?” DeGuerre said. “You saw Last himself?”

Psyke laughed again. “Not Last, but his hand. His evil desires made flesh. I saw Maledicte.”

W
HEN THE CHAOS CREATED BY
Psyke's announcement had faded, Celeste Lovesy removed Psyke, weeping, dragging Lord Blythe in their wake. DeGuerre departed with a final, disbelieving glance toward Janus and a mutter about beginning funeral arrangements. Rue, Janus, and Sir Robert stood in a silent circle around Aris's body.

Janus touched the cold, still face once, and turned away, his thoughts churning like a whirlwind.

“Will someone tell Adiran? Will he understand?” He let the words free, empty things to hide his bewilderment. Had Maledicte done this? Killed Aris, the king he had been unaccountably fond of, and without even a word to Janus? But Ivor—Ivor had a hand in this, Janus was certain of that.

“He won't be told the entirety of it,” Sir Robert said. “Only that his father has died.”

Janus nodded.

“Sir Robert, his majesty had you to see Prince Adiran frequently of late,” Rue said. “For any cause? Is the prince ill? We need him hale, more than ever now.”

Sir Robert shook his head. “I forget sometimes, how gossip drives this court. Yes, I've been attending the prince. King Aris believed he saw improvement in the boy's state.”

Rue hissed, a tiny, quick sound urging Sir Robert to belated caution. Janus chose to stay unoffended. Let Rue caution Sir Robert as he would. Janus could collect the information from a handful of voices, nurserymaid, pages, servants, guards. In the meantime, he worried about Psyke's words.

If naming Maledicte was a lie meant to wound, it was a careless one easily turned back on her. Everyone in Murne knew that Maledicte, the god-touched murderer, was nothing but a collection of bones fed to the sea; Janus had seen to that himself, burying the truth of Maledicte's escape with another man's body.

If Psyke spoke truth …
No
, Janus thought. Maledicte was gone. And did he return, it would be to Janus first of all, not to kill the king in the silence of an old chapel.

“… Maledicte,” Rue said and drew Janus's attention like a magnet. “You examined him, did you not? His body? Is there any chance Lady Last is correct?”

Janus turned away to hide the sudden startled heat in his chest and face, the racing of his heart. To consider the illogical, the impossible, to ponder ways it could be made less so, made Rue a dangerous man.

Sir Robert cleared his throat. “None at all. Lady Last is overset. Maledicte is dead—stabbed, buried, unearthed, and hanged for the crows to feed. Barbarous, but effective.”

“He had a god's aid,” Rue said. “Does death apply to one such as that?”

“You might recall, Captain,” Janus said, his voice rough, “Sir Robert claimed the king's assassin a paragon of ineptitude. I assure you, even a year dead, Maledicte would have shown more skill than that.” The look he earned from Rue was an ugly thing, but Janus didn't care. The memories Rue had stirred were ugly also. He felt physically sick. The scent of blood in the air, Janus swallowed, fought bile.

“Gods.” Sir Robert shook his head. “Life immune to death. Rankest superstition. I thought better of you, Captain.”

Janus pushed away from Aris's body, from Rue and the physician and the whole, bewildering mess, and headed for the door. One person held the answer he needed.

“Last,” Rue said.

Janus refused to turn and meet those intelligent eyes. “Do you have further need of me, gentlemen? I'd like to see to my wife.”

HERE WAS, THE YOUNG ASSASSIN
thought, such a thing as being
too
well informed. Ivor had given her a map of the hidden passages which she had received gratefully, but he had gifted her also with far more palace legend than she wished to know, old deaths and disappearances; at this moment, she feared her fate would be to add to their number.

Lost in the darkness of the Cold King's private tunnels, her racing heartbeat and her panicked breath were the only sense that the world moved on, that time had not locked up about her, sealing her in the dark and dust. If only she hadn't lost her lamp. Sweat trickled into her eye, stinging, and she rubbed it away, transferring streaks of drying blood from her red-washed hands to her cheeks.

She fumbled her way to the wall. Her fingernails scrabbled at the tightly joined stones, collecting dust and dirt and old, dried mold as she fought to regain her composure, to find the way out. She felt one step from animal terror and that had to be avoided at all cost, or she'd run, mindlessly panicked, through the tunnels until she either brained herself on a protruding stone or ruined Ivor's careful plan.

It had been a simple enough task Ivor had given her: Use the palace's oldest defenses to kill its newest king. Simple instruction, simple plan, but the execution had been difficult. Her aim had been off—she rubbed at the straps of her eye patch resentfully—and
she'd needed the sword. And all Ivor's training failed to prepare her adequately for the awkward weight of a man's body slumping over a blade embedded in his guts, tearing the blade from her grasp.

She had had to wrest it free, Aris groaning pitiably, his hands feebly grasping at her thighs, turning what should have been a neat job into a slaughter. Bad enough that she had to slice his throat to make him die when the bullet hadn't done it, when the gut wound hadn't done it. Worse was the sudden cold realization that he hadn't been alone. When his voice, his breath was finally,
finally
silenced, she heard gasping sobs beyond her own.

She'd whirled, slipping on the spew of blood and intestines beneath her feet, and gotten a quick glimpse of gilt hair, a face going to shadow in openmouthed terror, and then the Countess of Last vanished, seemingly dragged into shadow.

The blade had trembled in her hand, but she moved forward, hunting that pale hair. The chapel shook under the weight of a sudden distortion, as if the very stones had released a long-held breath. The hair on her nape rose; every muscle in her body shuddered, and she turned and fled.

As a girl living in the Explorations, she had attempted to steal away Miranda's husband, unaware that Miranda had once been Maledicte, Black-Winged Ani's chosen courtier.

The assassin lost her eye to Miranda's blade, lost everything else in the lingering shadow Ani's wings cast: her village burned, her parents died, and she had been harried from one false refuge to the next, until she learned the only way to shed Ani's attention was to shed herself.

She'd forfeited her wants, her past, and her name, ever aware that Ani listened for it still. A single recitation of her name and Ani's wings would close over her once more.

To be hunted by a second god—the thought was more than she could bear.

A glance back and a shifting shadow set her moving forward again in blind panic, her blade scraping lichen into a fall of dust that trickled into her boots and left a pale mark on the stone, a clear signpost to her direction. The rasp echoed oddly, bounced back at her,
rippled along the walls, and settled like fog, hopefully as confounding to any pursuer as to herself.

Challacombe, the spymaster, hadn't been in her plans either.

She'd fled the god's approach, blundering back into the tunnels, and found the spymaster awaiting her, teeth clamped on his cigarillo, eyes furious, a pistol to hand. “Assassin,” he breathed. “Who sent you?”

Filled by terror, she hadn't even paused, bulling into him, heedless of the pistol, the explosion held tight between them, and then she was past him, tripping over the lamp, spilling its oil into the thirsty dust, disappearing into the Cold King's tunnels gone stranger still in the darkness.

It had taken her three turnings with her breath coming fast, a ruinous stitch in her side, to realize that she had been shot. Not fatal, not even close to it, but it burned and hurt until she tightened the waistcoat brutally close over the wound.

The spymaster hadn't been so fortunate. She had left him behind, his blood slowly felting the dust beneath his corpse.

The god's presence filled the tunnels like the strange stillness before an earthquake, changing her path, tangling her in a spiderweb of blind turns and false exits. Her fingers, replacing her vision, fumbled desperately along the stones, hunting for the little carvings that mapped the tunnels, but found none. Her skin crawled.

Legend had it that the Cold King built the tunnels not to escape his enemies but in a vain attempt to protect his loved ones from himself. The Cold King, the first of the Redoubts, had taken the throne by force and by the will of a god. But alliances with gods were treacherous, and Thomas Redoubt… changed, found Haith's likeness settling into his skin, raising horns from his skull, raising scales along his skin, and leaving death and illness in his wake.

Superstition, Ivor had scoffed, a grain of truth distorted for better telling; and she knew that was true. But the assassin also knew how tenuous the line was between legend and actuality.

The god's presence found her again, swept about her like a whirlwind, raising grit and dust, but causing no more harm than stung skin and burning eyes. She cowered nonetheless, waiting….

But after a long moment where all she heard was the frantic thud of her heart, she realized the god was waiting also, waking slowly, studying the world.

A ringing bell shook the walls: the chapel bell tolling, its vibration turning the tunnels into pipes, and the god's attention faded. She crouched and covered her ears until the echoes stopped.

She gasped, glad for the first time to hear the rasp of her voice, the angry thumping of her heart. She crept forward on hands and knees, and her shoulder brushed some imperfection in the stone. Her coat seam tore, and she reached out, nearly laughing. There it was, one of the directional markers, a sinuous stone lizard, feeling oddly alive beneath her trembling fingertips.