The dwarf gave Pirojil a long look that as much as shouted that they’d discuss this later, privately, and that Pirojil wouldn’t much like the form or results of the discussion. Pirojil had heard enough empty threats to not react. Mackin shrugged, then stalked away.
There was an idea flittering around the back of Pirojil’s mind, but first things first.
‘Well?’ Milo asked, when the dwarf had gone.
‘Can Mackin handle the captains alone?’
‘Hell if I know.’ Milo shook his head. ‘This isn’t the sort of thing that he knows anything about, Pirojil. That goes for me, too, and –’
‘And it goes for me, and Durine and Kethol, as well, and Steven Argent has given us about as much choice as I’m giving you.’
Milo smiled. ‘Which is none.’
‘You have a keen eye for the obvious. For one thing, you can go after Mackin and get him started with the captains, and make sure he doesn’t start a fight! Get them talking about their activities last night. When you think he’s got the hang of it, I want you to get back up here and help me with the nobles – see if you can get anything useful out of Viztria; I didn’t.’
The mercenary’s mouth twitched. ‘Very well. Not that I know what to ask about.’
‘You think I do?’
Milo smiled. ‘One can always hope.’ The smile thinned. ‘You said there was one thing. Which suggests that there’s another.’
‘Pirojil nodded. ‘I … I have a question to ask you.’
‘I don’t know as I like the hesitation. You’ve not been so shy, of late.’
‘I’ll be blunt, then: what are you wanted for?’
Milo’s face went totally blank. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I think you do. I think you’ve got a price on your head, and a local one, and I want to know what it’s for.’
He sniffed. ‘It wouldn’t be for murder, that I can tell you. If there were such a thing as a price on my head, here or anywhere else. Which there isn’t.’
‘Very well: there’s no price on your head here, and I promise to give you fair warning when I next see the Constable – who, by the way, is presumably still snowed in in Kernat Village. But if there was such a thing, what might it be for?’
‘I couldn’t say.’ Milo shrugged. ‘But if I had to guess about how somebody else might have gotten himself in such a … predicament…’
Pirojil nodded. ‘Of course. Somebody else.’
‘Well, it might be that this somebody else had a different, er, profession, when he was younger and more foolish. One that paid a damn sight better than soldiering, at that – thievery, say. Maybe somebody got out of town, just in time, some years ago, having to leave too quickly to take the evidence with him. And maybe he found that his profession paid just as well in other places, too, and picked up a few other tricks of another trade, along the way. It could happen.’
‘Yes, it could.’ Pirojil nodded. ‘But why would he ever come back?’
‘I don’t know.’ Milo’s shrug was too casual. ‘Probably he wouldn’t come back. I know that I wouldn’t.’
‘But we’re not talking about you; we’re talking about this other fellow.’
‘Well … maybe when the war broke out, just maybe he would remember that he’d had a home, and a homeland, once.’ Milo swallowed hard, although his calm expression never changed. ‘Maybe he remembered those things, even though it was long ago, and just possibly he might want to, oh, kill one, or two, or maybe even a few dozen of the bastards that had invaded his home and his homeland.
‘But maybe he couldn’t quite just show up and enlist in the regulars, and find himself garrisoning the very town that he had left so … hurriedly.’
‘No, I can see that he wouldn’t be able to do that.’
Milo’s eyes went all vague and unfocussed. ‘But still, he might really want to do something about the Tsurani invasion, even if he couldn’t do much – after all, he was just one man, and the one thing he was really good at couldn’t do a damn thing to help the war effort.’ He shrugged again. ‘But I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
‘Of course not,’ Pirojil said. ‘Not that it would matter much, given that the Constable is out of town, and there’s probably nobody like that in LaMut, anyway.’
‘I hoped you’d see it that way, Captain,’ Milo said with more threat than hope in his voice.
‘This non-existent person – I wonder which baron might he have been fealty-bound to … not to Baron Morray, or to any other baron, I’d hope?’
Milo shook his head. ‘None, I’d guess, if I had to guess – I’d think of this fellow as a townsman, born and raised in LaMut or a nearby town, and not beholden to any baron.’ He looked up at Pirojil. ‘No more so than you or me, eh?’
Pirojil nodded. ‘I’d imagine so. You’d better go help Mackin gather the captains and get him started with them, then I’ll want you back up here to see what you can get out of Viztria while I take on Langahan.’
‘That sounds like more fun than talking about somebody else, eh?’ Milo brightened. ‘The dungeon, you say,’ he said, his mouth twitching. ‘I’ve never much cared for jails, for some reason or other, but this time, I’ll be on the right side of the bars, I suppose. You think that the captains will know anything useful?’
‘Nah.’ Pirojil shook his head. ‘I very much doubt it, and even if they did, they’d be no more likely to tell me than to tell you. But you never know – and I might have something else for you to do, later on.’
‘You know…’ Milo sighed. ‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’
Durine caught up with Kethol in what had been Baron Morray’s suite.
His desk in the sitting room here might have been the twin of the one in the dungeon. The books stacked on it looked to be the same ones that Durine had seen sitting on the Baron’s desk downstairs – they probably were the same ones, come to think of it; it was unlikely that the Baron maintained two sets of books – and they were stacked in the same position at the front right corner.
Durine didn’t think that the pen and mottled green inkwell had been carried up from the dungeon, and they, too, were in precisely the same place as their counterparts below, and either the finely embossed glass-and-brass oil lamp was identical to the one that stood on the desk in that small office outside the strongroom, or it had been brought up here, and the first seemed much more likely. Even the straight-backed wooden chair was identical.
Durine nodded. Baron Morray had liked things his own precise way, and it made sense that he would want his working environment to be identical in the dungeon and his suite. It wasn’t exactly a surprise that he had, as usual, got his way.
In the end, though, had he got his way? Had he really been willing to trade his chance at the earldom for the certainty of Lady Mondegreen?
It was possible. If so, he had certainly not had the best of the bargain, at least not from Durine’s point of view.
Then again, if somebody was going to kill him anyway, he had at least had one last night with his lady, rather than one last night of hoping some day to be the Earl of LaMut, so maybe he hadn’t been cheated quite as badly as it had first seemed.
‘Have you found anything interesting?’ Durine asked.
‘Interesting? You mean, like some note that says, “I killed Baron Morray and Lady Mondegreen, ha ha ha ha”, with a signature and seal at the bottom?’
‘Well, that would be interesting, but I was thinking about something a little more subtle.’
Kethol was clearly shaken; sarcasm wasn’t usually part of his repertoire.
Durine didn’t quite understand it. It was just another couple of deaths, when you finally came down to it, and Durine was used to being around death, after all, as were Pirojil and Kethol.
That was the trouble with caring about people. They were, every bit as much as horses and cows and pigs, sacks of meat; and meat spoiled and rotted, sooner or later. If you were going to rely on somet
hing, metal was always a better choice than meat, whether that metal was gold or steel.
Kethol plonked himself down in the Baron’s chair, and began going through the drawers. ‘No, I haven’t found anything interesting.’ He pulled out a small, bulging leather pouch, and upended it. Silver reals and a few small golden coins rang down onto the wooden surface. Kethol scooped them back into the bag, and put it back in the drawer.
Durine walked to the bookcase, and pulled down a volume. He riffled through the pages but didn’t recognize the language, although the glyphs looked vaguely Elvish. Carefully, he placed the book on the carpet, then pulled down the next.
‘What are you doing?’
Durine shrugged. ‘Well, it could be that the pass-phrase is on a piece of paper stuck in one of the books.’
‘Do you really have to do that now?’
Durine ignored Kethol. There really wasn’t any point in arguing, and there was nothing else useful he could do. Pirojil had intended for him to beat the truth out of Erlic, but the man was already limp with shame and self-disgust, and it was clear the only thing that Durine could have got out of the poor sod was some new bruises on his own knuckles, and the same story.
Durine didn’t have any objection to hurting people, but he didn’t need the exercise. While he wouldn’t have minded trying that technique out on some of the nobles – that Baron Viztria would, he thought, look a bit better with fewer teeth – he didn’t think that even with his present authority he could get away with that, and trying to work out the truth of something from what somebody was saying was Pirojil’s specialty, not his or Kethol’s.
He supposed that he could have taken a look at the bodies, but he had seen bodies before, and it seemed even more unlikely that his eyes would catch anything that Kethol’s eyes missed than it did that there was anything useful to see at all. The assassin had, after all, probably not carved his name into the flesh of his victims, any more than he had left a confessional note here.
There was probably more wealth in this room than in some of the bags in the strongroom below, although it was difficult to work out an easy way that they could be converted into cash, and Durine couldn’t quite see the three of them strapping bags of books to their horses before they rode out of town.
Though the sooner they did, the better.
Nevertheless, he kept working his way down the bookcase. If the pass-phrase was hidden in one of the books, it might have been written into the book itself.
And even that was unlikely.
If Pirojil had organized it, it would have been something clever – like, say, cutting the pass-phrase into a dozen parts, and giving each of the barons some of those parts, so that any three or four of them could reassemble the complete pass-phrase – and there was no reason to think that the LaMutian nobility was any less clever than Pirojil, or would simply leave such a valuable thing lying about for the easy perusal of some servant cleaning the Baron’s rooms.
He was halfway through the shelves when he noticed that Kethol was glaring at him.
‘Is there any chance you could actually do something useful?’ Kethol asked.
Durine shrugged. ‘Sure. Just give some idea as to what that something useful could be.’
‘Well, you could help me with the desk.’
Durine spread his hands. ‘I’ll be happy to help you look through the Baron’s desk, or go through his wardrobe, or anything else – but I don’t know what I’m looking for even if I see it.’
Then again … Baron Morray’s swordbelt, complete with dagger, was hanging from a hook on the wall. Durine didn’t think that the Baron had cut his own throat, and then Lady Mondegreen’s, but …
He drew the sword. A nice rapier, he decided, although the grip was definitely too small for Durine’s oversized fingers, and he would have preferred a larger bell-guard, and a polished one, rather than the deeply-inscribed curlicues that covered the surface of this one. Tastes varied, and Durine preferred things simple: he would have rather known that a sword tip would bounce off, and in which direction, rather than unreliably stick some times and bounce off at others, but that probably didn’t make much of a difference to the defender, and it might throw off an opponent’s timing, just a trifle, which could be more than enough.
Each to his own.
The light, narrow blade was well-oiled, without a hint of rust, and the tip was sharp enough to dig out a splinter. When he gripped the blade with his left hand, covering the blade with his sleeve to protect it more from the moisture of his finger than to protect his fingers from the edge, it flexed nicely, then sprang back straight. Not the sort of weapon Durine would have wanted to take into battle – even if you sharpened the edge, the light blade didn’t have enough weight behind it to cut to bone; but it was a fine duelling weapon.
He replaced the sword and drew the companion dagger. The hilt was covered with the same greenish dragonhide, and the brass hilt was inscribed with curlicues in complement to the bell-guard of the rapier.
But the dagger was heavy, balanced nicely at the hilt, and sharp enough to shave the hairs off Durine’s arm.
And utterly devoid of any blood, fresh or dried.
He hefted it in his hand. ‘Could the killer have used this?’
Kethol looked up from rummaging through the desk drawer, and his irritated glare quickly faded. ‘Possibly. Sharp?’
‘Very.’ Durine used the tip of the dagger to point to the now-bare patch on his forearm. He ran his thumbnail down the edge of the blade, and while the steel bit slightly into the nail, there weren’t any fine nicks that Durine could feel, much less coarser ones that he could have seen. ‘Hasn’t been used to chop at anything.’
Kethol shook his head. ‘Which doesn’t mean anything. The killer slit the throats very neatly.’
‘No wounds on the arms? Seems strange – you’d think that the killing of the first would have awakened the second.’
Kethol nodded. ‘I took out a guard, once, while his partner was sleeping nearby, just a few feet away, and –’
‘Dungaran?’
‘No. Semrick, I think, or it may have been Maladon. They all blur together after a while. But as I was saying, I’m pretty good, and he didn’t make a move until the knife was through his throat, but he did thrash around enough to wake up the second one, and I kind of had to rush with him.’
‘Maybe Lady Mondegreen or the Baron were heavy sleepers?’
‘I suppose so.’ Kethol sounded doubtful. ‘Either there were two killers, and they timed it well, or the killer was very, very fast. One of them thrashing around in their death throes wouldn’t have made much of a difference if the other already had a cut throat. Takes some speed, though.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Of the barons, I’d say that Verheyen and Langahan are the fastest, having watched them spar with Steven Argent the other night. Verheyen might even be a touch faster than the Swordmaster.’
‘Well, he is younger.’ Not that that had made a difference in their sparring. Speed was a fine thing, but Steven Argent had more decades of training in his wrist than Verheyen, and the Baron hadn’t laid a practice blade on him.
Which suggested an ugly possibility. ‘You don’t think it could be the Swordmaster, do you?’
‘No.’ Kethol sat back. ‘I hadn’t thought about it. Why would he want to?’
‘Well, there are rumours that he was having his way with Lady Mondegreen, too.’
‘There are lots of rumours.’ Kethol shook his head. ‘If you believe the rumours, the Lady was spreading her legs for every noble in the earldom. I don’t.’
‘Neither do I.’ Durine nodded. There was no way to be sure of anything, but he liked Pirojil’s theory that Lady Mondegreen had carefully been picking her paramours for the dark hair and grey eyes of the husband who couldn’t get her with child – which helped to explain her affairs with Morray and Argent, and if she had been willing to lower herself to commoners, added more additional local candidates than Durine could count.
/> But … ‘Everybody and his brother’s rooms haven’t been reeking of patchouli and myrrh. Argent might have decided that if he couldn’t have her, nobody else would.’
Durine didn’t really believe that, but he was with Kethol, and didn’t have to restrict himself to speaking carefully. And, besides, it was a possibility.
Kethol thought about it for a moment – the effort apparently was a strain – and then shook his head. ‘And do it in a way that could set off the very uprising that he’s been working hard to prevent?’
Durine put the knife back in its sheath. ‘I guess not.’ He paused, thoughtful. ‘Throat cut?’
Kethol shook his head in surprise at the question. ‘I already told you –’
‘No. Not here. That time in Semrick or Maladon or wherever it was.’ –
Kethol nodded, understanding the change of topic. ‘Yes. Pumped out a lot of blood, and fast, but he still kicked and thrashed like a stuck pig, even though I got through the windpipe and he couldn’t get a sound out of his mouth.’
Durine nodded. Having had some experience in such matters himself, he preferred a stab into the kidney – the shock of the pain usually froze the victim into paralysis – or a hacking blow into the base of the neck, hoping to sever the spine, but these were the sorts of things that professionals could have honest differences of opinions on and, by and large, Kethol’s results were better than Durine’s on this sort of thing.
Which suggested another, really ugly, possibility.
‘Yeah. You still prefer cutting a throat to stabbing from behind?’ He tried to make it sound like just a typical bit of shop talk, but Kethol didn’t take it that way. ‘Last night you were awfully quiet.’
Kethol pushed himself away from the desk and stood. ‘If you’ve got something to say, get it out. If you think I … I did that, then –’
Durine held up a hand. He wasn’t any more afraid of Kethol than he was of anybody else, but even so …
‘No, not really. I’ve never known you to kill anybody without a reason, and I can’t think what the reason would be. Jealousy? Anyone can see you were half-smitten with the Lady, but that’s no reason to kill her, and I was getting the impression that you liked Morray.’