Sharps (8 page)

Giraut was impressed. They were made in a far province of the Eastern Empire; ivory and some kind of incredibly hard black wood. You could rest them on the palm of your hand. Each piece had a tiny peg in the base, which fitted into holes in the middle of the squares. You could buy one second-hand for less than the price of a town-centre house, but they didn’t come up very often.

Iseutz glared at him with barely controlled fury. “Why the hell didn’t you mention it earlier? We could’ve been playing chess, instead of sitting here like idiots.”

“I didn’t think anybody would want to give me a game. I’m not a very good player.”

“Excellent. I don’t like losing.”

“I’ll play the winner,” Suidas said.

“If you want. But we’ve got to make it interesting. Say, five nomismata?”

Suidas frowned. “I haven’t got five nomismata. Sorry.”

“That’s all right, you can owe me. What about you, Giraut? Do you want a game, after I’ve slaughtered these two?”

Giraut thought about it for a moment. “For five nomismata.”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

Iseutz disposed of Addo in a dozen moves, though Giraut had the feeling he wasn’t really trying. He counted the coins out of a heavy green silk purse. Suidas refused to play, which made Iseutz extremely angry. Giraut stepped in to keep the peace, and found himself sitting across the tiny board, facing a standard opening.

He tried to spin it out, but he was never much good at deception. As soon as he’d taken her queen (in self-defence; what she lacked in skill she made up in aggression), it was obvious she was going to lose, but she fought on until he couldn’t stand it any more, and executed a simple checkmate. She looked at him, her face milk-white and her lips an impossibly thin line, and pushed Addo’s five coins across the table at him. Then she got up and stood beside the window.

There was a long silence. Then Suidas said, “I’ll give you a game, if you like. Not for money.”

What the hell. He enjoyed chess, and he was good at it. He found that Suidas was a high-class player, maddeningly slow at times, extremely cautious, with a defence he couldn’t break down, in spite of some quite inspired gambits he hadn’t thought himself capable of. In the end he lost deliberately. Suidas thanked him for the game, in such a way as to suggest he didn’t want another. They left the chess set on the table. Addo made no move to reclaim it.

Giraut must have fallen asleep. He woke up in a spasm of terror, and for a moment he was sure the man standing in the doorway must be the hangman, or at best the chaplain waiting to hear his last confession. But the newcomer walked past him, an old man levering himself along with a stick; so much effort and determination required to accomplish something Giraut did without thinking. If that was me, he thought, would I go to all that trouble just to move myself five yards?

“Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice was high, dry and brittle, and he spoke quietly, to make them all shut up so they’d be able to hear him. “You don’t know me. My name is Symbatus, and I’m the Abbot of Monsacer.” He saw Addo lift his head. “For my sins, I’m one of the organisers of the tour you’re about to take part in. Don’t worry,” he went on, “I’m not going to preach a homily. I’d like to introduce you to Jilem Phrantzes, who’s kindly agreed to be your coach and team manager.”

Understandably enough, given its history, Permia is not a religious country. There are a few Eastern Didactic monasteries in the mountains, where a few grim old men still recite the Seven Offices, and the capital has a fire altar and a temple of the Invincible Sun, mostly for the convenience of foreigners. By and large, however, the Permians have no great interest in the divine. Occasionally, one or other of the mildly hysterical mystery cults that periodically sweep through the Eastern Empire breaks out in some of the smaller fields and is allowed to burn itself out. Nothing of the kind is allowed to take hold in the major fields, with their necessarily large and volatile populations, for fear of disruption and lost production.

Director Kalojan was, therefore, something of a curiosity. A highly placed Board member, responsible for seven major mines in the Home fields, he’d been a sincere and open devotee of the Divine Flame for most of his adult life. It was generally accepted that he’d picked up the habit as a student in Chosroene, at that time the third best university in the Eastern Empire, where he’d been sent to study mathematics and natural philosophy. Although he made no secret of his faith, he never seemed to allow it to interfere with his duties as a company officer; nor did he ever try to convert any of his colleagues, although he was delighted to discuss moral and spiritual issues. He gave a quarter of his income to the poor each year, endowed a chaplaincy at the fire altar, and wore a small silver signet ring engraved with the insignia of the faith. That was all.

Kalojan did, however, attend services at the altar, which made the assassin’s job relatively simple. At the conclusion of the morning office, celebrants are required to file past the altar steps, dropping a handful of incense into the brazier as they pass it. They then leave the building through the narrow door, which symbolises the true way of the believer. Part of the symbolism lies in the fact that only one person can go through it at a time (just as no teacher or priest can achieve another man’s salvation; each believer must find truth on his own). Thus, when Kalojan walked out of the altar house into the fresh air on the morning of his sixty-third birthday, he was alone; his usual bodyguards were only a pace or two behind him, but that was enough of an opportunity for the killer to step forward and stab him through the right ear with a Mezentine left-hand dagger. Two of the bodyguards gave chase, but the killer eluded them easily in the crowded streets of the Fruit Market. Kalojan died instantly.

The first reaction to his death was astonishment. Company directors used bodyguards because, by the very nature of their office, they could expect to be attacked at any time. Of all the Board members, however, Kalojan had been considered the least offensive to the greatest number. He belonged to no permanent faction, had no ambition to seek higher office, had made no serious enemies and was, unusually for a Board member, liked and respected by the mine workers.

The obvious suspects, therefore, were the Beautiful and Good, the only people who might conceivably have wished him harm, simply because he was a fair and honourable man with the interests of both the Company and the workforce at heart. Too obvious. It was soon being argued in the camps and taverns that if someone wanted to make it look like the Beautiful and Good were out to cause trouble, Kalojan was the perfect target; after all, nobody else could have wanted him dead, so it had to be them. Suspicion soon centred on the Board, who were widely suspected of preparing a last all-out campaign against the remnants of the military aristocracy. There were several riots in the western fields, and three miners were killed at the Blue Bird mine after the prefect sent in the Blueskins. The Empire, choosing to interpret the murder as motivated by anti-religious feeling, registered an official protest and demanded a full investigation, to be observed by three archdeacons of the Fire Church. Meanwhile the Rasen family made a statement, basically saying that the rumours were true and they had proof (which they didn’t offer to share), and calling on war veterans to rally to the family’s castle at Sirven and prepare to defend it against further Company aggression. All the Board could do at first was to draw attention to the fact that the murder weapon was of Mezentine origin, suggesting the involvement of the Republic, the Western Empire, or both, a hypothesis that met with no public interest whatsoever.

With so much noise being made about the affair in every part of the country and stratum of society, the report of the investigating officer passed largely unnoticed, in Permia at least. The investigator admitted that he had no substantial clues as to the killer’s identity, allegiance or motive. The bodyguards had been unable to give him a helpful description – the man was medium height, medium build, inconspicuously dressed and masked, and all they could say about him for sure was that he could run very fast. Nobody had noticed any suspicious-looking strangers waiting outside the altar house at any time before the attack. The usual sources had nothing to offer on the subject of recent negotiations for the hire of an assassin, the provision of a safe house or the laundering of any substantial sums of money. The only concrete evidence was the weapon, which the killer had left behind presumably so as not to attract attention once he was clear of the scene. The weapon was easy enough to identify, though such objects were rare in Permia: a duellist’s dagger, designed to be held in the left hand, primarily to deflect the opponent’s sword; of exceptional quality and finely engraved with a characteristic leaf-and-scroll pattern, it bore Mezentine guild approval marks and the monogram of a famous sword-making firm. The guild marks revealed that it was over a hundred years old. It was, therefore, a valuable item in its own right, though worth considerably less on its own; weapons of this kind were almost invariably sold as part of a case (two exactly matching rapiers and daggers, for use in duelling), the value of a complete set greatly exceeding the sum of its parts. The investigator could only conclude that it had been acquired by theft, probably by a thief who had no idea of the true value of what he had stolen, and that the murderer had chosen it because it would be harder to trace back to him than, say, a newly made knife bought from a cutler’s stall in the market. However, no theft of such an item had been reported in the City in the last eighteen months, nor had any of the principal handlers of stolen goods heard of such a thing being offered for sale.

Eurid Aten was able to make a certain amount of play with the report in his speech to the Conclave of Lodges a week after the murder. The dagger, he said, was, if honourable members would excuse the pun, a two-edged clue. It was all very well the investigating officer looking up his records for thefts of fancy knives in the City, where people couldn’t afford such things and wouldn’t want them if they could. A Mezentine-made duelling set was, however, exactly the sort of status symbol you’d expect to find in a Beautiful and Good castle or manor house; had the investigator bothered to write to the heads of families to ask if any of them had an empty space in a trophy of arms they couldn’t account for? In reply, Tepan Masav pointed out that a great many Beautiful and Good heirlooms had been sold off during and shortly after the War by impoverished households. Furthermore, at least two dozen castles and many more lesser houses had been stormed and plundered by the enemy – loot from these sources could easily have changed hands many times since the armistice. Equally, the Beautiful and Good had no monopoly on fine Western antiques, very few of which had ever been exported outside the frontiers of the Empire, so it was just as likely, if not more so, that the dagger had been acquired abroad (which, in Masav’s view, was where the assassin undoubtedly came from, and his paymasters as well). In any case, surely it was impossible to believe that a member of a great family would use or cause to be used a family heirloom for such a purpose, precisely because of the implications to which the honourable member had been good enough to draw Conclave’s attention.

The report of the day’s proceedings in Conclave was one of the documents included in the weekly diplomatic bag sent by the Republic’s accredited representatives in Permia to the House. Before he left the City, the messenger stopped, as usual, at the Praetor’s office, where the dispatches were carefully unsealed, read and sealed up again. He then took the Old West Road through the mountains, crossed the border at the Triangle Pass, and followed the road across the Demilitarised Zone to the Republic’s way station C15, where he handed the bag on to the second-link courier, who rode through the night, bypassing C14 and reaching C13 just before dawn. The third-link courier carried straight on to C10 (C11 and C12 hadn’t been rebuilt yet), and the fourth-link rode without stopping, reaching the House just before the start of the morning session.

All that effort; somehow, the opposition had got hold of the investigator’s report two full days before the official courier arrived, and were able to ambush the foreign secretary with the Mezentine dagger story before he’d had a chance to read his brief.

“Which means,” the Abbot of Monsacer explained to a select committee of the Bank directors, “they must have a direct line of communication that’s at least two days faster than ours, presumably crossing the mountains somewhere south of the Blackwater and not going through the Demilitarised Zone at all.”

“That’s not possible,” one of the directors objected. “All the mountain passes are guarded. You can’t just slip across the border, not unless you happen to be a bird.”

“Maybe they’ve found a new way over,” someone suggested.

“I doubt it,” the director replied. “Every place you can possibly get through was found during the War. Mostly,” he added with feeling, “by the enemy.”

“Then they must have an understanding with the guards somewhere,” said someone else. “Like General Promachus used to say, no fortification built by men is strong enough to keep out a donkey loaded down with gold coins.”

“The likeliest explanation would be that money is changing hands at some point,” the abbot said gently. “In which case, our chances of finding out how they’re doing it are fairly remote. I think we must just accept it as a fact of life and move on.”

“But it’s maddening,” someone said, “having to learn the news from the enemy, when we’re spending a fortune on couriers and way stations. Also, I don’t like not being in control of the news supply. If people find out things we don’t want them to, any form of coherent government becomes impossible.”

The abbot smiled sadly. “All we can do is try and cope, and discredit wherever possible,” he said. “A few patently untrue stories, planted in such a way as to suggest they originated with the opposition’s news service, might redress the balance a little, but that’s your field of expertise, not mine. I’m more concerned with the message, rather than the manner of its delivery.” He paused, and looked slowly at the men sitting around him. “I don’t suppose any of you gentlemen had anything to do with the assassination.”