It worked: he heard a soft oath from inside, and as a cold smile skinned lips back from teeth he knew why. Because of his appearance. Pale from nervousness and shrouded in black from head to heel, there would be only the barest suggestion of humanity about the face revealed in the stark lantern-glow. Any other points of reflected light came from metal; the black, glinting hilt-guards of a sword, and rank-insignia so immediately impressive that even to consider it might not be genuine would feel like the beginning of a crime.
And there was always the possibility that this dark figure really was
Kagh’ Emvakh
Commander Voord, of evil reputation. That thought in itself was quite enough.
“You grow wise—at last,” Aldric observed bleakly, and with those comforting words he stepped across the threshold, staring unblinking at the man who had opened the door until he bowed very low and slid it shut again. It was the courier; no longer wearing his distinctive robe, Aldric still recognised him by the heavy mustache swept halfway across his face. “Better,” the Alban said, Voord-style. Haughtily. “But your manners need mending. Take care that I don’t mend them for you—because my way leaves scars.” That too was in keeping with what Aldric had guessed of Voord’s reputation; but so much so that when the courier flinched from the threat, it made him feel uncomfortable. He was here to gather information, not to terrorise.
But there was a crossbow in the corner of the little room, a weapon covered less than adequately by a length of cloth. It was both spanned and loaded, its threat such that Aldric-“Voord” favoured it and then its owner with the lift of disapproving eyebrow before dismissing them both with a shrug. “What’s your message?” he demanded, resorting thankfully to an easier level of speech but retaining his air of arrogance by the simple expedient of keeping his back turned.
“Message, sir?”
“Message, idiot!” Aldric let it snap out, knowing well enough how any officer of rank, let alone Voord, would treat a subordinate who did no more than echo his questions. “Are you deaf? Or merely impudent?” He half-turned and slapped one leather-gloved hand with loud significance—he had no time to be subtle—against the menacing jut of Widowmaker’s hilt. “Because if impudence is your problem, be assured I have a cure for it!”
The courier drew in a noisy breath to deny the allegation; and lost his chance as the man he knew as Voord swung round on him at the first sound of inhalation. “Yes?” the officer said nastily; there was a handspan of blade clear of his sword’s scabbard now. Then, nastier still and most unpleasantly perceptive: “Who else was here tonight?”
Usually the weatherbeaten color of old brick, the courier’s face was shades paler already; and at this question it blanched as near to bone-white as such a complexion ever could. He was caught off-balance by every alternative he could choose: repeating the question to gain time would merely further aggravate this already all-too-angry
hanalth
, and a refusal to say anything would have the effect, whilst lying to a man who most likely knew it all, chapter and verse… In the end he told the unvarnished truth, for safety’s sake—and that was worst of all. “Commander Voord,” the messenger faltered wretchedly.
“Yes? What?” Aldric rasped the reply, deliberately misunderstanding.
“No, lord. N-not you. Another…”
“Another
what
?” Aldric let his tension vent itself in feigned impatience. “By the Father of Fires, I’ll gut the man who gave a fool this mission!” His raging stopped abruptly as he decided it was “time to understand,” and he repeated, “Another?” in a voice so soft it barely carried across the room. But the courier could guess what thoughts must now be tumbling through “Voord’s” mind.
Aldric stared at him and allowed a released breath to hiss slowly out between clenched teeth. “There was someone else? Pretending to be me?”
The courier nodded.
He instantly regretted it, for the back of one black-gloved hand lashed him across the face. “And you believed him.” Aldric let the words come out without inflection, but inside himself he felt sick; delivering that backhand slap might have been in keeping with the part he played right now, but it was not in keeping with the way he had grown up, or with the company that he had kept, or with the Code that still wrapped around his life more closely than he knew. How closely could one play a role like this before it became reality? Aldric was frightened of learning such an answer.
“You believed him,” he repeated—not a statement, but an accusation of guilt. “And so you told him what should have been for my ears alone. And you let him go. But you kept
me
standing in the street!” Aldric let the feigned outrage drain from his voice, only to replace it with an equally feigned and equally realistic note of suspicion which edged each word like a razor. “Yet you didn’t think to mention this previous visitor. Was that because you hoped I wouldn’t know about him? Was that it?” He purred the last, soft and cajoling, letting it fade into silence. Then: “
ANSWER
ME!
FKAAHR
, SCH’DAGH-VEH
!”
Terrified by the intangible thing that was the reputation of the Imperial Secret Police, and more particularly by the less intangible and all-too-widely-known reputation of
Hautheisart
Voord, the courier fell to his knees and spilled everything he knew in a tremulous whimpering which was all mixed up with pleas and abject apologies. The very sound of it was enough to clench Aldric’s stomach into a nauseous knot. He had killed men in the past, but he had never—until now—driven any man so far down the road of absolute fear. It said more than he had ever wanted or needed to learn about what Voord was really like, and about how skilfully Aldric had simulated him. For just one self-loathing, disgusted second the Alban was within a muscle’s twitch of walking out. Then the preliminary babble of excuses came to an end and the true message began.
And Aldric, too, felt the icy touch of terror…
It was a plan of sweeping concept, of elaborate construction, of ruthless simplicity; and it reeked of Lord-Commander Voord.
As he filled in the details of the instructions which the courier relayed to him Aldric began to understand a great, many things more clearly. Why so much time and money had been expanded to lay hands on him and bring him to Egisburg; why Voord had allowed himself to be overruled with so little protest from one who was—and it could scarcely be denied even now—of considerable standing and high rank. It explained, too, a reason behind the small annoyance which had troubled Aldric as he had left Kathur’s house in Tuenafen as far behind him as he could—even though his own stupidity hadn’t given him the time to leave it as far behind as he might have wished. The apparent theft of one of his paired
telekin
. Most people, he had discovered, knew at least a little about Albans: about their fanatical adher-ence to an outmoded Code of Honor, their suicide daggers… and about the spring-guns which were in their modern fashion as typical an Alban weapon as the
taiken
had been in the past.
Let such a weapon be found close by Princess Marev-na’s murdered body, and its mate found bolstered at the saddle of the King of Alba’s envoy, then no court of justice anywhere—at least within the borders of the Drusalan Empire—would require or search for any other evidence than that set out before them.
For this was first and last a plan involving murder.
Aldric considered and rejected the daintier term “assassination,” because he refused to let it dignify what he was hearing. There was no daintiness here. He wondered when and why and how the plan had first been mooted, and at whose suggestion, and realized that though the message was for Voord alone he could trust nobody now. He dared not fling what he had discovered in Bruda’s face, for was Bruda not Voord’s superior, and as likely implicated as not?
But the basic idea was so
simple
! Trial was what his mind continually returned to, for Aldric knew that in other circumstances even he would more than half believe that King Rynert would have someone murdered for political advantage. He knew, if certain suspicion was knowledge, why the last emperor had died so suddenly: and there were bound to be other informed sources than himself. Dewan ar Korentin, for one. That the big bear of a man who had become his friend should soon think him capable of murdering women made Aldric’s blood thicken in his veins. And Dewan would believe, because he knew the ruthless rules of expedience as well as any and he had been present when Aldric swore on his Word to do what was necessary to aid the king.
Marevna, alive and imprisoned in the Red Tower, set pause to the continued strife within the Empire that brought a wary peace to Alba; the peace which lasted only for as long as the Imperial armies were turned inward. While the princess was held by one faction as surely for the behaviour of the other, cooler heads than those of the military might prevail, and could lead to ultimate agreement that such leashed-in force might bet-ter be expended in bringing the benefits of unity within one Empire to those not yet part of the greater whole. Annoyingly, aggressively independent Alba, for one. But Marevna dead and entombed with her ancestors at Kalitzim would be no bargaining counter for any side to use. Unless by the manner of her passing.
A simple appeal to simple emotion would be all that
Woydach
Etzel’s faction needed; it was he who stood to gain the most, he most likely who was behind this plot— and certainly he who would know how to make best use of such a Hell-born opportunity. Aldric could hear the speeches in his head already: not the mannered rhetoric of Osmar’s plays, but the fieriness of words intended to lash up a frenzy of grief and thus create a common cause. Revenge!
That was something which Aldric knew all about. A thirst for “justified” vengeance was a thing of frightening intensity among individuals, and none were better qualified to admit it than himself. He had felt it; had seen its blue-white burning in Ykraith the Dragonwand; had seen it burning just as hot in the blue eyes of Gueynor Evenou, now Overlord of Seghar. And such an emotion running unfettered through an already militaristic empire was not a thought he cared to dwell on overlong.
But another thought drifted, settled and took on solid form.
Seghar
, said the thought.
This has happened to you once before. To play the scapegoat, betrayed by a blade that was yours and could be no-one else’s
. That was the time when Crisen Geruath murdered his own father and used Aldric’s
tsepan
to do the deed. Almost forgotten voices linked Voord’s name with Seghar, and with Crisen; the details were long lost, but the connection had been made. It was enough.
More than enough.
Then the farther door slid open and another man came in, saying as he entered, “Serej, has the Commander—” He and his voice stopped in the same instant. Aldric didn’t know him, had never seen him before, and it was plain from his expression that this lack of recognition was returned. More words made it plainer yet: “Who in the Fires are you—and what are you doing here?”
Aldric didn’t have to be watching to know that the courier—Serej?—had jerked himself backwards and was now staring from one to the other with shock-widened eyes. And he didn’t need sharp ears to hear the soft obscenity born of sudden realization.
“He said that
he
was Voord, Etek.”
“I’ve worked with Voord bef—” Again his words were cut off short—and Etek himself was within a finger’s thickness of the same fate—as Aldric, without even the warning of an intaken breath, flicked hand to hilt and whipped Widowmaker’s already-loosened blade clear of her scabbard and straight out into the first cut of
achran-kai
all in the one sweeping arc. Only a slight knowledge of Alban swordplay and the spasmodic quickness of the fear of death saved Etek; for while the first had given him an inkling of what to expect, only the second was fast enough to evade the terrible gray steel that blurred through space his throat had occupied a split-second before. Wisps of his beard drifted in the
taiken’s
wake, razored off without so much as a tug to show where hair and wicked edge had met.
His own army-issue shortsword came from its own sheath in the same instant as his sidestep, lifting frantically to block the downward second stroke of the inverted cross as it descended on a line running right between his eyes. At the last moment his block changed to a glissade deflection, and as metal shrieked and sparks flew from the point of contact Etek’s eyes bulged with the discovery that a square impact from this intruder’s blade would snap his own in half.
Serej the courier picked his moment, then lunged towards the loaded crossbow propped against the wall. All he had to do was reach it, point it and pull the trigger. Serej’s hands were already reaching out when he half-heard a scuff of soft boots before that noise and all else was drowned in the sound of a shout.
“Hai!”
Aldric had caught the courier’s move, and had broken contact with Etek’s blade for long enough to spin right around before facing him again. It was movement so unexpected that Etek did nothing even though for just an instant he was offered the target of an unprotected back, and it was so swift that he had no time to use his chance before that chance was gone again. But Aldric’s turn was still enough to let him cut, just one; it licked out at full force—savage, graceful and perfect.
Serej the courier continued on a lunge gone loose and uncontrolled, and it ended as he slapped down full-length against the floor. Momentum skidded him a little further forward, close enough for his outstretched right hand to reach the waiting crossbow… even though he no longer had a use for it. The impact of his fall had parted the last few tissue adhesions in his sheared neck—and as his body stopped, his head rolled free.
Aldric knew that the man was dead; had known it halfway through the arc of the cut, when he felt the crisp-to-yielding jolt along his arm as Isileth the Widowmaker made another. He had held no malice for the man and felt the anguish of his killing burn within him; but all of his attention was refocused now on Etek and he forced the hurting down, back from the distracting
now
. There would be more pain before he was finished here; and he would have to finish quickly, for this man had already survived two strokes more than he had been expected to. The clangor of steel was a sound which always drew unwelcome attention, and the sooner such a sound was curtailed the better.