He continues to list invented liaisons with various creatures while I scramble to my horse, draw my sword, and then hack at his neck to shut him up. His head tumbles into the grass, blood pumps from the stump a couple of times, and the horses whinny at the approach of predators. Cursing that he had been able to get to me and deny me what little pleasure I could take from his begging, I leap onto the horse and gallop back into the city.
My repeated requests for a Brynt hygienist to be sent to me from Talala Fouz have gone unheeded. The king wants me dead, I know it. Or so weak that I fail to dislodge the Hathrim and then he can remove me for that. The Fornish ambassador says there’s a Brynt hygienist in Pont whom they would be happy to send except that Gorin Mogen’s navy is making the passage too risky.
I have few options left. I can’t leave the city to seek aid while there’s an invading force on my doorstep, and there’s no chance of me receiving help for days at this point. If it is Kalaad’s judgment for me to die in the most humiliating way possible, I suppose I have earned it. But I will defy such an end as long as I can.
“Tomorrow our story will catch up with where we began, the night of the Bone Giants’ invasion. Until then!”
Toast, interrupted. Should anyone ever ask for a quick summary of my existence, I think that will do. The violent knock on my door as I was bringing breakfast to my mouth so startled me that I dropped my toast facedown. I could almost hear a mournful foghorn bellow through my shock as I stared at it, and I considered wailing an impromptu dirge, but the knocking continued, so I went to answer. The person responsible for destroying my breakfast was none other than Gerstad Nara du Fesset, looking grim.
“Oh, no. What’s the trouble now?” I asked her.
“No imminent danger,” she said. “But there’s someone who needs to see you.”
“Uh … the pelenaut?”
“Someone who works for the pelenaut. Are you ready to go?”
“More ready than I am to clean up my toast.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Never mind. Let’s go.” I followed the gerstad down to the warehouse district surrounding the docks. She wouldn’t tell me anything more about who we were going to see but instead spoke of what had happened at the chowder house.
“How’s your wound? I’m still terribly sorry about that.”
“It’ll be fine. The hygienist says I’m free of infection. And it’s not your fault. There’s no reason for you to feel guilty about it.”
“I see plenty of reasons. But I’m glad to hear you’ll heal. And at least I have something to do now that might make up for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll be gone for a few days, working on something. If there are any more security worries, you’ll have someone else visiting you.”
“Oh. Well, I hope you’ll be safe.”
We turned down a narrow alley between buildings with only a sliver of sun illuminating it from above. It smelled of mold and other things that thrive in low-light, musty environments. The gerstad stopped at an unusual solid metal door with no handle on it and a slot at eye level. She knocked on it twice. The slot opened, and a pair of dark eyes peered out.
“I’m here with the professor as ordered,” she said. The slot slammed shut, and then a series of clacks and clicks signaled locks tumbling open. The door scraped open, and she ushered me through first. Two gigantic mariners waited inside, blocking our path down a hallway so narrow that they almost had to stand sideways. They searched me for weapons but not the gerstad.
“Clear,” one of them said.
“This is where I leave you, Dervan. Go with these men and be well.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“They’ll take you to the man who’s speaking for the pelenaut in these matters.”
That didn’t give me any useful information and it annoyed me, but I understood that I must be meeting someone my wife might have known. Vague sentences and security paranoia could only mean I’d stepped into state-sponsored skulduggery. I nodded a farewell, and one guard closed and locked the door behind her.
The other beefy mariner grunted and indicated that I should follow him down the hall, which was singularly strange. The floors, walls, and ceiling were all metal. There were slots and sometimes holes all along the walls, and I glimpsed eyes watching us on the other side of them. They could, no doubt, thrust spears or shoot bolts at us through those apertures. Holes arranged in lines in the floors waited to receive the metal bars of portcullises that were currently drawn up into the ceiling, allowing us to pass. Anyone trying to get down this hall without permission would have tremendous difficulty pulling it off—even one of the blessed. Nothing to set on fire and too narrow for a Hathrim to navigate anyway. No earth for a juggernaut to manipulate. No plant life for a greensleeve to twist. And the entire foundation of the building would be salted, no doubt, to prevent any trickery from below. I wondered what defense they would have against a tempest trying to infiltrate as the wind and soon had my answer: a series of three rooms that functioned as air locks.
“This side of the building and the other are completely sealed off except through these doors,” the mariner explained when I asked. “No way for a tempest to open them. They’d have to become solid eventually, and then they’d be vulnerable.”
“Incredible. Even the pelenaut doesn’t have this kind of security.”
The mariner shrugged. “Pelenauts are easy to come by.” Implying that whoever I was meeting was more important than our rightfully elected ruler. Interesting.
“I’ll leave you here. Someone else will take you the rest of the way on the other side. Just wave at the people on the other side of the windows. They know you’re coming.”
“Okay. Thanks. Have a great … well, do you ever have a great day doing this?”
“Every day he doesn’t die is pretty great. I think he has to be pretty old by now.”
“You mean whoever it is I’m meeting?”
He grunted and waved me through the first door. It slammed behind me, there was a hiss of pressure, and through a window of thick glass on one side I saw a pair of mariners. I waved, they nodded, and then they turned a wheel set in the wall that unlocked the next door in front of me. Once I stepped through, the procedure was repeated twice more. Once I was past the third air lock, the hallway looked considerably more friendly. A young woman waited for me in a well-lit and much wider hallway decorated with art instead of murder holes. Her clothing was a riot of bold colors, a statement of defiance against the atmosphere of doom surrounding her. She smiled a practiced smile, and her voice matched its brightness.
“Good morning, Master du Alöbar! Welcome! If you will follow me, please.”
“Okay, hello. What’s your name?”
She spun on her heel and spoke over her shoulder as she walked briskly down the hall. “We don’t have names here. I think you’re the only one in the building who does at the moment, so congratulations. You’re about to meet someone known as the Wraith, if he’s known by any name at all. You may simply address him as ‘sir.’ ”
“The Wraith?” I snorted. “That’s a mite pretentious, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t suggest you share your judgments with him. Please do not attempt to look at his face. If you do see him, even by accident, we will have to kill you. Is that clear?”
Her voice was so joyful that it took a moment for the import of her words to sink in. “What? You’re being serious?”
“Very serious. If you see his face, you will die. Is that clear?”
“It’s terrifying.” She turned to look at me, the smile gone. “It’s also clear,” I added, and the smile came back. Approval for good behavior. “Does the pelenaut know about all this?”
“Yes. Your orders are coming from him. But the Wraith will be able to explain and discuss some things that the pelenaut cannot in court or anywhere else. This environment is much more secure.”
“I’ll say. It’s a shrine to paranoia
.”
We arrived at a door that had a normal knob on it, and she paused with her hand on it, the smile erased from her face again. “Sit in the chair on the other side of this door. Do not try to explore the room. Remember, if you see him, you die. Just listen and answer and stare at the wall. When you’re finished, I’ll escort you out.”
Wondering if I could trigger an approval response, I said, “Thank you. I will do exactly as you say.” Victory! She grinned at me and opened the door.
The room was largely shrouded in darkness ahead except for an upholstered chair near the door and a small table next to it with a single candle and a glass of water. The chair faced a wall to the right of the door where two sconces with enchanted Hathrim fireglobes in them pointed to a canvas on the wall depicting a verdant, forested shoreline with a single ghostly figure standing there. A wraith among the trees. Death waiting among all the life. The message lacked subtlety, though I supposed he was at least hewing to a consistent theme.
I sat in the chair as promised, crossed one leg over the other, and stared at the painting, hands folded in my lap. I could see nothing else in the room even if I tried, but there was plenty of darkness to my left once the weak glow of the candle failed. I did hear some shallow, labored breathing and eventually a moist cough and a noisy clearing of the throat. A man’s phlegmy rumble spoke from the darkness.
“Master Dervan du Alöbar. Thank you for coming.”
He said it as if I’d been given a kind invitation rather than picked up by a military officer and escorted there. I’d much rather have been searching for Elynea and her children than dealing with this nonsense, so I took what petty revenge I could, perhaps driven mad by lack of breakfast. “My pleasure, Master Butternuts.”
The moist cough again. “You may call me sir, or, if you must, Master Wraith.”
“Oh, no, I’m not falling for that. They told me very clearly that I would die if I saw your face and I would die if I called you anything but Master Butternuts. I don’t want to die, so Master Butternuts it is. I’m kind of shocked you would try to trick me like that. I don’t know why I deserve any of this.”
The room was silent for a while except for the wet breathing. “Someone thinks they are being funny, like divers who take their dates to see the penis corals. They point and laugh for three or four seconds and thereby waken the longarms who live among them. When that first tentacle shoots out and wraps around their wrists, they stop laughing.”
He could feed his intimidation to the bladefins. “You’re right, Master Butternuts. This isn’t funny. Why am I here?”
He coughed, and something splattered in the darkness. Gross. “The pelenaut and the Lung grow more worried about these approaching allied armies. They may not be allies after all. The pelenaut may have mentioned this.”
“Yes, he has.”
“We’re like a litter of kittens in a burlap sack right now. We’re not sure what’s going to happen next, but we’re pretty sure the situation isn’t good. We don’t know how big the force is, nor do we know precisely where they are at the moment. We have not had time for any of our scouts to get out there and return, and we’ve had no additional Raelech couriers. But the bard’s story is pointing to some uncomfortable possibilities. Do you know why he was there, in the west, with a juggernaut?”
“The Triune Council sent him.”
“An afterthought. But sending a juggernaut was a misstep, and that was urged by a council member named Clodagh. You mentioned to the pelenaut that she was one the bard said nothing about.”
“That’s correct, Master Butternuts.”
“Bennelin would have fallen to the Bone Giants regardless, but sending a juggernaut away just prior to an attack has damaged her influence. She’s even more dangerous as a result.”
“How so?”
“She’ll be wanting to repair it now. She needs a big victory to overshadow that mistake. She has to gamble. She may be looking for a legacy beyond merely defending her country.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think the Raelech faith allows them to consider conquest.”
“I agree. So they won’t call it that. They’ll take over and call it ‘aid to an ally in need.’ We’ll be a ‘protectorate’ or a ‘benign dominion’ or some other euphemism that means we exist to please them, like one of their ceramic sex toys.”
“Wait, back up. How would they take over?”
“They arrange an accident for the pelenaut and let things fall apart like they absolutely would without his leadership. Then they offer to help. Their forces intermingle with ours. The population becomes used to following Raelech orders. And slowly, for our own good, we do things their way instead of ours.”
“That’s an imaginative scenario. Uncomfortable to contemplate.”
“As a fresh cob of corn shoved briskly up your anus.” His throat rumbled as he tried to clear it, but nothing came of it this time and he cursed before continuing. “I’m paid to imagine such things and prevent them from happening.” I suppressed a chill at his words. I’d heard Sarena speak them before, word for word. It didn’t matter if she’d heard them from him or the other way around: this man had most likely been her mysterious overseer who had supervised her operations and whom she had never named.
“So you admit that you have no factual basis for this Raelech conspiracy.”
“It is a fact that Clodagh has a militant mindset and is willing to send juggernauts abroad at the least provocation. It is a fact that we are still not sure how we’re crossing the ocean safely to strike back at the Bone Giants, so what use is sending an army here now? And it is a fact that Fintan knows things about the Nentian viceroy he shouldn’t know.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“He’s a damned skilled spy. And he’s here looking for weaknesses.” He got excited at the end of that and raised his voice on “weaknesses,” and this inspired a juicy coughing fit. I waited until he’d recovered to answer him.
“Unless he’s here to tell the story like he claims.”
“Of course he’s here for that. But that’s not the only reason he’s here. He wants to take a peek at whatever he can in the palace.”
“But he can’t get in there. When he’s not with me, he’s under surveillance, is he not? You seem to have it covered.”
“Maybe. What we’d all like to know is how he knows the inner monologue of Melishev Lohmet. I can’t believe that Lohmet would volunteer such sentiments as we’ve heard so far. Contempt for his merchants, his army, and his citizens, suspicions that his king is spying on him, openly coveting the throne, and his outright murders—he’d never want that to be public. On the one hand it’s as entertaining to us as a frenetic marmot orgy in the springtime. On the other it’s frightening because it means the bard gained access he shouldn’t have. Which means we need to guard against the same thing happening here. Imagine him talking to some other crowd of people that way about Pelenaut Röllend.”
“Rölly isn’t a degenerate like Melishev.”
“No, he’s not. But you don’t get to spend more than a day being pelenaut without making a decision that will cast you in a bad light if presented at the wrong place and time. On election day it’s all cake and tits and you think it’s good to be pelenaut. After that it’s tough.”
“You’ve seen a few elections, then?”
“More than you. I’m an old man with a sharp mind and a soft, shitty body. I like cake too damn much. The point is that we don’t want people hearing about us someday the way we’re hearing about the Nentians. I want you to ask the bard straight how he found out all that shit about Melishev because this is something you can be openly curious about. Everyone’s curious.”
“You think he’ll answer honestly?”
“No. But I think he’ll give you a more thoughtful answer. Others have asked him, of course, and he laughs off the question or gives a flippant reply. I want to know what he says to you.”
“All right. Is that all?”
??
?No. We need to keep your manuscript secure. You’ve written some things about our open suspicion of Rael that will be harmless later, but we don’t want it to get out right now. We’ll send some people over to make some modifications to your home.”
“Wait … you’ve read it?”
“Of course I have. I’d be a bloody incompetent master of spies if I hadn’t.”
I gritted my teeth, trying to think how they could have read my manuscript without me knowing. It had to be while I slept or while I was out. I was out often enough to make it feasible. “Fine. What else?”
“Stay away from the palace from now on. If the pelenaut wants to see you, he will meet you elsewhere. That way if you show up at the palace, we’ll know it’s not you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We think it likely the bard will try to impersonate you to gain access to the palace. It’s all about security. Expect to be poked and prodded from now on to make sure you’re not the bard.”
“Understood, Master Butternuts.”
Silence for a few beats, then: “I’m starting to think you may be an asshole.”
“This from a man who threatens people with death if they look at you.”
A snort. “Very well. You may have your petty digs against my vanity. It is the least I can do after all your wife did for me and this country. In deepest sincerity, Master Dervan, she was our finest. An excellent spy and an excellent person. I wish she were still with us. I’m very sorry about what happened.”
I squeezed my eyes shut to prevent emotions from leaking out of them and spoke through clenched teeth. “And do you know what happened, Master Wraith? Sitting here in the dark, did you ever find out who was responsible for her murder? Or who came up with a poison our hygienists couldn’t counteract?”
“No. But I haven’t given up on seeking answers. I continue to devote resources to it despite our other priorities. Because the source of that poison does need to be found, and we need to muster an appropriate response.”
“You will inform me of any developments?”