Northlight (7 page)

“Thank you, no.” Esmelda shook her head, a movement that sent the muscles in her neck jumping like plucked strings. Montborne nodded to her as she pulled up a chair and sat down.

Terricel slid into the next seat, wondering what Montborne was doing here. He'd always thought Orelia was jealous of the general's popularity. And Cherida...he'd known her since he was a child. She was one of Esmelda's few personal friends; they'd been students together at the University. She'd known his father. Terricel had never seen her as shaken as she was now. She looked as if she'd gone a week without sleep, wearing the same pale green medician's smock. Tendrils of her hair had pulled free from her usually tight braids, encircling her head with a fuzzy red halo. The skin around her mouth was waxy pale.

Terricel forced the air smoothly and slowly through his lungs, keeping his belly muscles unknotted as he'd learned to do in years at the Starhall. Calmness pulsed through him. His eyes flickered to his mother's face and he saw himself mirrored there for an instant. He'd never told her what he felt in the Starhall, never asked if she'd felt the same.

Blinking, Terricel realized he'd missed a beat of the conversation.

“...does have a bearing on the autopsy,” Orelia was saying.

“He
didn't
die of the stab wound.” Cherida's mouth hardly moved as she spoke, her lips as wooden as a ventriloquist's. “I'm still looking for the cause of death. But nobody outside my lab knows that.”

Terricel's jaw dropped a fraction before he controlled his reaction. Esmelda sat very still.

“I don't understand,” Montborne said. His fingertips traced the pattern of the wood, curving and looping in a hypnotic spiral. “I was there — I caught him as he fell. My hands were covered with his blood. I saw it happen — the dagger went right in.”

“But it missed all the vital organs. No major arteries were severed. The liver capsule wasn't perforated, so there was no internal hemorrhage, just some local bleeding that any intern could have controlled. Infection would have been our chief concern, and we could easily have prevented that. He
shouldn't
have died from that wound.”

“What then?” Montborne demanded, his voice gone sharp. “Are you saying he died of an incredibly coincidental heart attack? At his age?”

Cherida held up her hands, fingers rigid. She'd bitten several nails down to the quick. “I'm still investigating.”

“It was the dagger, all right,” Orelia said. “Hold on, I'll show you.”

She got up and opened the side door. An older man wearing the black uniform of the City Guards entered the room, carrying a bundle wrapped in densely woven canvas. The officer behind Montborne moved forward, tense and alert.

Terricel stared at the Guard's face, at the same time fascinated and repulsed. One eye socket was little more than a pleated mass of scars that ran diagonally upward, slashing through the eyebrow and dividing it with a shiny gap, then continuing downward through the substance of the cheek in a deeply puckered chasm. The socket itself was hollow, the flesh twisted into a knot.

Terricel had never seen a deformity like that before. In his junior-level courses, he knew a student who'd had a leg amputated because of bone cancer, but the wooden prosthesis was always covered by his clothing.

Why doesn't he do something about that eye — get a glass one or have the scars fixed? He could at least cover it...

Wearing gloves of supple black leather, the weapons specialist laid the bundle in the center of the table and slowly unwrapped it.

“Ah!” Cherida cried, and Montborne leaned forward, his indrawn breath a hiss.

In the center of the cloth lay a dagger. Like most weapons, it used a minimal amount of metal. The guards, handle, and reinforcing strips were carved bone. The pointed tip and ribs running the blade's length were pig-steel of the type originally made in Laurea and then re-worked in the cruder norther smithies. The northers were said to be expert at assassination and sneak attacks on enemy camps, slipping their narrow blades beneath a victim's ribs in a quick, silent thrust to the heart.

Terricel's mouth went dry. For a terrible moment, the rest of the room faded. Nothing mattered, nothing existed except the dagger.
This thing killed Pateros.

Orelia's weapons expert smoothed the folds of the canvas, carefully avoiding touching the blade. The man's face was grim with concentration. Suddenly Terricel was ashamed of his own lack of compassion.

He must have fought the northers, perhaps at Brassaford. He lost an eye to keep us safe.

“Superficially,” the man said, “this appears to be an ordinary norther weapon, adorned here and here,” he indicated the hilt and guards, again avoiding any direct contact with them, “with their distinctive motifs. However, closer examination of the base of the hilt has revealed something new in their arsenal. If you will observe the pin hidden there, undetectable to casual inspection...”

He pressed the pin and a sliver of ornamented metal slid aside to reveal a tiny cup lined with a gummy residue. His mouth drew downward at the corners, except for where the scar twisted his lip.

“We have also discovered, by virtue of magnified examination, a minute tube leading from this reservoir to an opening in the tip of the dagger.”

“Poison,” Cherida said, nodding. She gestured toward it, and Terricel saw that her hand trembled. “The dagger administers a poison so deadly that only a small amount is needed. It must be brought down to the tip by capillary motion, like the fang system of a venomous snake.

“I want a sample of that residue sent to my labs right away,” she said. “If there are traces of it in Pateros's tissues, I'll find them, even if I have to thin-section his entire central nervous system. My guess, by the speed of its action, is we're looking for a neurotoxin.”

“I will see that it's done,” said Orelia.

The weapons specialist rewrapped the dagger and carried it from the room.

“I knew it would come to this,” Montborne said grimly. “Those gaea-priests have kept our hands tied year after year, while the northers are free to develop
that!
” He gestured at the empty table where the dagger had lain. “Who knows what else they've got by now?
They
don't have anybody yammering away at them about not ‘disrupting the ecosystem'!”

Orelia laced her fingers together and touched her forehead to them. When she looked up, her face was gray. “If they can make something like this, if they can infiltrate an assassin this deep into Laurea, they're capable of anything. This means they're getting ready for something big... We're looking at another Brassaford, aren't we?”

Terricel stared at the dagger. If Cherida were right, the thing was deadly even in the hands of an amateur. His eyes traced the convoluted figures on its bone handle and the pig-steel blade.

Pig-steel..
. Something went
click!
in his mind.

He cleared his throat. “The northers can't even make their own steel. How could they come up with something like this?”

“That's just it,” Orelia explained. “This dagger means they've now developed that capability. We're no longer dealing with the assassination of a single man. Even Pateros, may Harth grant him grace, can be replaced.”

“No, it still doesn't make sense,” Terricel said. “If they had a weapon like this and they could sneak it into the city, why would they pick Pateros? We'd only replace him with someone else, and he was a lot less belligerent toward them than another Guardian might be. Why not go for General Montborne and really knock out our defenses?” He glanced at the general, who was listening, eyes narrowed slightly. “I don't mean any ill wishes toward you, sir, it's just that I can't understand the logic of it...”

“Pateros and Montborne were root and branch of the same living tree,” Cherida said slowly, her bloodshot eyes fixed on the general. “Like the old proverb about power and wisdom. The boy's right, Montborne. You
would
be their logical target.”

Montborne brushed aside her warning as if his personal safety were a threat he had long since laid to rest. “I'm afraid you give the northers too much credit, lad,” he said to Terricel. “That's the kind of logic a
civilized
person would use. These savages seize whatever they can, whenever they can get it. They mean to demoralize us, to take away our will to fight.”

Terricel knew when he was being politely dismissed. Clearly, Montborne had his own unshakable vision of the northers. And who had more experience fighting them than the Hero of Brassaford?

“You see how touchy the political implications are.” Orelia looked over at Esmelda. “We don't want to do anything that could be...that could cause panic, destroy public confidence, that sort of thing.”

“I understand what you're getting at,” Esmelda said evenly. “These are difficult times, to be sure. We must move cautiously. We'll have enough of a mess on our hands, just straightening out the line of succession. If only Pateros had left us an heir. But the worst thing we can do now is to create a norther scare before we have incontrovertible proof.”

Orelia raised one eyebrow as if to say,
You think it could be otherwise?

“Initial appearances are often misleading,” Esmelda went on. “Someone with your experience knows better than anyone how the truth can turn out to be something quite different.”

“I suppose there might be other possibilities...”

“The fact is,” Esmelda said, “we have a single assassin, a dagger of apparent norther design — and
nothing else.
”

“Who else could be responsible?” Cherida sounded genuinely puzzled.

“There's no way we can keep the dagger secret,” Montborne said. “Besides, the people are going to draw their own conclusions. They aren't stupid. They all know what the northers can do. If we're too cautious in what we tell them, they'll think we're lying or covering up something worse.”

“Most people will indeed think whatever they want to,” Esmelda said, ignoring his oblique barb. “If they want to see a norther conspiracy, then the truth won't stop them.” She jabbed one index finger at the cheap gray wood in front of her. “Maybe the northers are responsible. But maybe they're not. Maybe somebody would like us to
believe
they are.”

For a long moment, no one said anything. Then one of Orelia's junior officers brought the residue specimen for Cherida.

“Who else would want Pateros dead?” Cherida asked again.

“To begin with, the Archipelago chieftains, the Cathyne merchant cartel, a madman,” Esmelda said. “Even a leader who's loved has enemies.”

Outside the City Guards building, people went about their business unsmiling, voices subdued. The overcast sky hung above their heads like a dingy pearl. False-peach trees stood like sentinels along the street, their scentless blossoms stirred only by the lace-winged pollen flies. Terricel shivered, remembering the smothering perfumed walls of his vision.

“I've got meetings all morning,” Esmelda said in the voice that meant her thoughts were three steps ahead of her words and she resented having to pause long enough to catch up. “I want you in the Archives, finding out how all the past electoral colleges were constituted, the problems they ran up against, and how they ruled on them. Look for precedents on how the separation of powers was handled. Anything that constituted a
de facto
regency. Whether the candidates were drawn from the Inner Council or collateral branches of the current dynasty. Any instance when a candidacy, even a
pro tem
, was rejected on the basis of conflict of interest with the military chain of command.”

Terricel ran his fingers over his jaw thoughtfully. “Wouldn't Karlen be the one to consult about that?”

“Karlen's expertise is in present-day law, and besides he has his hands full. You'll have four, maybe five hundred years of records to search.”

Terricel had done enough of that type of research to know what was involved, the intense concentration, the meticulous attention to detail. He slowed his steps, mentally juggling the hours he would need for his proposal presentation, as well as his other academic commitments.

“I'll have to work around my schedule for this next week — ”

“Cancel the schedule!” Esmelda snapped. “If this were trivial, I could just as well have one of my Senate pages do it. Very few have the training to know where to look and even more important, to understand the implications of what he finds.”

She paused and turned back to him, her shoulders hunching slightly. “Terr, I need someone I can trust for this.”

Terricel clamped down any further protest. “I'll take care of it. It's just this week that's the problem, anyway, and Wittnower can get someone else to handle my tutoring. Do you want a daily report or only when I've found something important?”

“I knew you wouldn't fail me.” She touched his hand and he was surprised, as he always was, by how warm her skin was. He always expected her to be cold, like a house snake.

“Things may get hectic for both of us,” she continued in her usual brisk tone. “If I don't see you at dinner, leave your notes on the library desk. Every day, even if you have nothing for me.”

Terricel found Wittnower, his History mentor, in the sunlit lounge that served the faculty and master's candidates of the Humanities school. Terricel hadn't been on campus since the assassination, and he found the atmosphere here still and dense, difficult to breathe, as if the entire University had been placed under a bell jar. They sat together in a pair of oversoft armchairs wedged in a corner. Terricel refused the usual honeyed tisane, but his mentor drank cup after cup.

“This comes as no surprise, given recent events and your mother's position,” Wittnower said. The oblique light gleamed on his pale scalp, giving it a sheen like marble. “Don't worry about the tutoring schedule. I'll shift that around and cancel the proposal presentation as well.”