Covenant's End (18 page)

“I daresay, I can hear you,” the older thief protested from across the chamber, idly studying a crystalline vessel of a rich wine.

“I'm not surprised; it really isn't much of a dare.” Shins cast about the room, sort of idly flailed her hands a bit, and then resumed her previous spot beside the hearth. “Gah!”

“Widdershinsian catastrophe or not,” Robin insisted, “I still have responsibilities.”

“‘Widdershinsian'…?”

“I have to make decisions about the Witch, and for that I need to know how business is running. You're lucky I just asked her to go, but I knew I'd slow everything down too much if I went along.”

“Oh, all right. Point made. Let's start with the basics. Broad strokes. If Faustine's not back after that, we'll go look for her before we get down to details. Okay, Robs?”

Robin appeared rather less than okay, but she nodded agreement.

“Good. Evrard hasn't learned anything, so let's start with you, Igraine.”

“Certainly,” the priestess began. “I've been…uh, Widdershins?”

“Yeah?”

“Is Evrard
supposed
to be turning that color? Because that doesn't look entirely natural to me.”

“I'm sure he's fine. You were saying?”

“O…kay…. Since I wasn't trying to drag a bloody, collapsing companion with me, I had no difficulty in reaching the Basilica. I spent the day speaking with his Eminence Sicard's people. No new
information, but I
can
confirm that there's almost perfect overlap between the Houses whose priests are claiming to be able to ward off this latest supernatural threat, and those that have refused to put soldiers on the street to help keep the peace. And also that not a single one of them has suffered any sort of attack by the fae, at least not that's become public knowledge.”

Shins chewed the ends of her hair a moment. Then, “All right, Renard?”

“Ah, my dear lady, I am sorry to say I discovered nothing from my Guild and underworld contacts we had not already known. I fear I'm in the same spot as Monsieur d'Arras. Albeit apparently less crimson about it.”

More unintelligible grumbling from Evrard.

“What of you?” Renard asked, after sparing the aristocrat no more than a passing glance.

“Oh,” Shins replied, “right. Well, I'm wanted for the murder of…” She swallowed, hard; it was still so difficult to say. “Major Julien Bouniard.”

It proved impossible to make out Robin's, Renard's, or Evrard's responses beneath Igraine's strenuous and rather unpriestly “Horse shit!” but Widdershins was pretty sure they all amounted to that same general sentiment.

“Kind of what I said, only with less, uh, feces. And not everyone believes it. Julien's friend Paschal knows better. But the order came from the top.”

“Commandant Archibeque?” Renard asked.

“Yep.
Oh!
Also, he's possessed by Lisette's fae.”

That
, of course, required more than a bit of elaboration. Shins had just gotten everyone to stop shouting questions at once and had begun to explain what had occurred at the headquarters of the Guard, when a faint, even timid, rap on the front door halted her in mid-word.

They all knew who it probably was, yet hands dropped to weapons and muscles went tense until Evrard, after a careful peek through a tiny sliding window, hauled the door open and stepped aside for Faustine to enter the suite.

Her hair and skirts hung limp, weighted down and fatigued by the damp, and all of that made perfect sense. Shins's gaze flew almost instantly to the woman's face, though. The redness, puffiness…that wasn't rainwater glistening on her cheeks. Faustine had been crying, and hard.

Shins felt a faint tingle in her nose, almost like a building sneeze, except spiritual. She knew what it meant, knew Olgun had sensed something she couldn't, and needed her to smell it, too.

He guided her, softly, gently, and there it was. Clinging to the courier's clothes.

The faintest, lingering whiff of smoke.

And Shins knew. As thoroughly as if Faustine had already spoken, as if she herself had witnessed it, Shins knew. She slumped hard against the stone of the hearth, and only that kept her from the floor.

“A problem in Davillon that's not my responsibility,” I thought. I'm
so
stupid…

Olgun's comforting touch warmed her from within, and she was grateful, but she could barely even feel it.

“Faustine?” Robin was on her feet, hand clasped unconsciously to her throat. “Shins? I don't…. What's going on?”

“It's…Robin, it's…” Faustine's voice cracked. She took a single step, arms raised, then froze, blatantly uncertain what to do, knowing only that these would be among the hardest words—for herself and the woman she loved—that she would ever,
could
ever say.

“It's gone. Oh, Robin, I'm
so
sorry. The Flippant Witch is gone.”

Candles flickered, a few of them guttering, adding more of a waxy scent to the room than any great degree of illumination. Oil lanterns and the chandelier sat cool and dark; nobody had felt it proper to wander around lighting them.

The gloom seemed more appropriate to the mood.

“Everyone got out,” Shins said softly to the weeping girl beside her. Robin, completely limp, still hiccoughing now that her body could no longer handle the sobs, huddled near one end of the sofa. She shook inside the circle of Faustine's arms, wrapped around her, while Widdershins lay what she meant to be a comforting hand on Robin's shoulder. She
hoped
it was comforting; she knew it wasn't.

A quick flicker, and she found herself catching Faustine's eye. The courier offered a wan smile through her own tears, and Shins returned it. The both of them struggled to hold back their own grief, to be strong for the woman they both loved, each in their own way, and both barely managed. For that moment, at least, Shins and Faustine completely understood one another.

“The property's still mine,” the thief continued, growing desperate. “We can—we
will
—rebuild. It'll be just like new…”

Robin sniffled, and Shins could think of nothing more to say. In fact, this was far from the first time she'd said precisely that, since Faustine's revelation, in the hopes that repetition might penetrate Robin's grief.

Except that Robin didn't
want
the Flippant Witch “like new.” Neither did Shins.

Something
else
Lisette had taken from her. One more mark on an ever-growing list.

“Why is she doing this?” Renard muttered. For a long time, everyone else had remained silent, out of shared grief or at least respect, but the night wouldn't wait indefinitely.

“Are you kidding?” Igraine snapped, less angry than incredulous. “She didn't need any better reason than to hurt—”

“No, no, I get that.” Renard reached upward to idly stroke the feather he was accustomed to wearing in his hat, apparently only recalling when his fingers came together that he currently wore no such thing. “I mean…all of this. Everything she's doing, everything we talked about last night, I'm still not seeing how it's all connected.”

“I think I am,” Widdershins said. Then, “Did you guys practice that? Even your blinking's synchronized.”

When the staring and blinking continued to happen, and further speech continued to not happen, Shins squeezed Robin's shoulder one last time and stood, idly meandering from sofa to hearth and back. “I ran into some, uh, political maneuvering when I was away, so I've sort of been thinking along those lines. It came together when I found out the snake had her talons in the Guard, too.”

“A snake with talons?” Renard gibed, for all that his voice remained strained.

“A very dishonest snake. I'm sure she stole the talons from something that needed them more than she did.

“Look at it all together. Davillon's on the edge of panic and a collapse of law and order. The city's been pretty well isolated from outside help. The Church is paralyzed trying to deal with about a thousand crises at once. The major Houses are on the edge of open conflict—at least political, if not actual violence.

“The fae are responsible for the weakening of the Church and appear to be cooperating to bolster the claim that the priests of these minor Houses can protect people. Those same minor Houses have
not
put soldiers on the street, so they're in a good position to hunker down
and ride out what's coming, without taking the kind of damage their bigger rivals will. And some of those Houses have new leadership—almost as if the old patrons were in the way of something, yes?”

Nods all around.

“And the Guard, too,” Faustine interjected in growing understanding. “We never did get a really good reason why they've suddenly devoted so much manpower to guarding the walls, and it's partly the lack of those soldiers on patrol that's forced the Houses to step in.”

“Precisely!” Shins spun so quickly her hair made a hail-like
pitter-patter
across the wall beside the hearth. “So in other words, Lisette—who already runs the criminal underworld in Davillon—is poised to see Houses and priests, who are presumably loyal to her, rise to become the predominant legal powers in the city. And she has enough influence to keep the Guard too busy to do anything about it, if not actually make them assist.

“Government. Commerce. Church. Law. Underworld. She
told
me the whole city would be hers, but…I thought she was just taunting me. I don't think so anymore.”

“Gods,” Igraine marveled. “It's absolutely insane, and it's enough of a twisted web to make a spider dizzy, but…she really just might do it. Lisette may be on the verge of ruling Davillon!”

Faustine, however, was shaking her head. “For how long, though? A city in that much chaos, and possibly with the fae running free? How long could she possibly maintain that?”

“I don't think she cares about anything that far ahead,” Shins said. “I think as long as she gets her reign as queen of the heap, nothing else matters.”

“There is no way,” Evrard declared, leaning so far forward in his seat that his grip on the armrests was all that kept him in it, “that either the Church or the Galicien throne would allow someone to just step in and take over a major city!”

“What would they do about it?” Renard countered. “The military and the Church are both occupied at the border. All they know is that there's some social chaos happening here, and that's no different than half a dozen other cities. Lisette could have the situation stabilized, with nobody the wiser, long before any official eyes turn this way.”

“And even if the throne
did
find out,” Igraine added, “if Lisette's smart enough to play along, pay taxes, do everything the nation expects a city government to do…the cost in money and lives to take Davillon by force might not even seem worth it.”

“Politics,” Robin all but spat.

“Could we maybe tell people?” Shins asked without much confidence. “Stir up the rest of the city against her? Her control's nowhere near absolute, yet.”

“How would we prove any of it, dear Shins?” Renard asked. “We certainly won't get the Guard to turn against the orders of their commandant without overwhelming evidence, and trying to get all the major Houses to do anything together is rather akin to neatly stacking live eels.”

“No!” Robin sat bolt upright, fists clenched, visibly startling the hell out of Faustine. “None of this crap! No negotiations, no schemes, just kill the bitch!”

Shins shuddered. Her dear friend was the last person in the world from whom she wanted to hear that level of vitriol. Even Olgun blanched. “Robin,” she began, “we can't. She's too—”

“What about Bishop Sicard's ritual?” Evrard interrupted. Then, at Faustine's puzzled expression, “His Eminence dabbles a bit in magics beyond the priesthood's norm. Last year, when we battled Iruoch, he was able to link us, in pairs, allowing us each to draw on the other's strength and skill.”

“And potentially killing both if one were badly injured,” Igraine reminded him.

“It's not a bad idea,” Shins said, “except…I don't think it'll work. I saw how fast Lisette moved, how unnaturally—worse than Iruoch, in some ways. And her allies can manifest around her. I don't think we could take her even with the ritual, and that's assuming the Gloaming Court couldn't just sever the hopping link.”

“That's very possible,” Renard confirmed. “We had protective wards on the Shrouded Lord's office. They never even triggered; she just walked right through them.” He smiled, then, at Widdershins's double-take. “What, you thought you knew everything there was to know about the Guild?”

“It does make sense,” she whispered at Olgun's protest. “They'd be very well hidden. Even you might have missed them.”

The tiny god managed to convey the distinct impression of crossing his arms and slumping to his seat in a huff.

“You're both right, though,” Shins said thoughtfully. “We need to be stronger, and we need to be more direct. Igraine?”

“Hmm?”

“You said something the other night about the heads of the major Houses still attending Church services, yes? In order to keep up appearances during this whole mess?”

“I did. And I already hate this plan.”

“You don't even know what it is yet!”

“I've heard enough to know I hate it.”

“You haven't,” Shins insisted. “Wait until I've gone through the whole thing,” she added with a wry smile. “
Then
I promise you'll have heard enough to hate it.”

Shift change at the various station houses, and the buildings all but bled the black and silver: tabards and hats and medallions of Demas, patron deity of the Davillon Guard. This flowing into streets already
crowded with workers and crafters, vendors and patrons, racing against the setting sun to see who could reach home first. Men and women came, men and women went, and the result was somewhere between a spinning tornado and a cresting tide.

“There should be a term for that,” Shins whispered to Olgun, crouching at the very edge of a nearby rooftop, precisely midway between an old and worn waterspout gargoyle and a disturbingly broad speckling of old bird droppings. “Something to combine filling up and mixing up at once. Fixing! Wait, that's already a word. Milling? Oh, goose muffins! I think my language is full.”

She might have had more to say on the topic—no, she
doubtless
had more to say on the topic—but her deity shouted and pointed, or performed his equivalent thereof.

Shins peered down, dubious. “Are you sure? From here, all the guards just look like big floppy hats. All right! I'm sure you
can
sense it. Excuse the feathers out of me!

“What? No, I don't
have
feathers in me! You excused them out! Weren't you listening?”

She was already moving, jogging along the rooftop, leaping a narrow side street, keeping their quarry in sight. Widdershins still couldn't actually see anything to mark this one guardsman as different from any of the others, but she recognized him all the same; when Olgun had singled him out, her own senses had latched onto him as well.

Unfortunately, there was precious little even Olgun could do about the growing width of the roads, and thus the widening gaps between buildings. Shins still wasn't at her best, though it wasn't far, now; but even if she had been, some of those jumps were beyond her. Far sooner than she'd have liked, she had to trade in the soaked rooftops for the slightly less soaked cobblestones. The throng of travelers offered plenty of cover, so she wasn't too worried about being spotted. Losing the target, on the other hand…

After a trek that Shins swore should have taken them to the far end of Davillon and back again, the roads began to thin—in terms of width and traffic both—and she decided the man wasn't going to offer a better opportunity than this. Breaking again into a run, she turned down a side street and then another a block ahead, paralleling the main road. With Olgun's assistance, the ground flew by, her feet spraying lingering puddles of rainwater in a wake behind her.

More than fast enough for her to be waiting a few paces down the next side street, when the man she'd been following passed it by.

“Hey! Commandant Archibeque! You dropped your…uh…mustache!”

Said mustache, a thing of iron gray to match the beard, of course still clung to the leathery and leather-hued face that turned her way.

“Yes,” she murmured at Olgun's protest, “I'd rather have jumped him by surprise, too. Main avenue's still too crowded.”

“Is this meant to be a jest?” He took two steps from the intersection, confident but wary. “Because I'm not laughing.”

“Aww, you're not? I thought you were just hiding it really well.”

“Young lady—”

“Oh, stuff the ‘young lady' nonsense.” Although fairly certain it wasn't necessary, Shins moved half a pace from the wall, ensuring that her face was visible in the light of the setting sun. “You know exactly who I am.