An Unfortunate Accident
In the private rooms of the Gilded Coven, behind shutters drawn against the street and doors that locked from the inside, the first attempt was never called an assassination. Not by Cassovar, who did not use words he might one day hear read back to him. Not by Velisse, who would have wanted a figure set beside the word before she let it into the room. Not even by Emmeran Vos, who had spent a lifetime saying things that could not afterwards be quoted.
They called it an opportunity. They called it a failure of maintenance, an unfortunate weakness in old stone, something no one could reasonably have foreseen. Those were the phrases that went round the table and came back again, a little smoother each time, like coins worn thin by too much handling.
That language made it easier.
The balcony overlooked the western court of the palace, and for most of the year nobody stood on it but the pigeons. It was a narrow shelf of pale carved stone thrust out from the wall above the colonnade, with a balustrade of stone lilies gone soft at the edges with weather, and it rested on two great columns that rose from the court below. It was old, and rarely used except during formal addresses to the city. The rest of the time its doors stayed shut, and the birds had it to themselves.
The masonry beneath it had been repaired twice in the previous decade. A third inspection had recently been ordered, and the report had gone, as such reports went, into a queue of other reports waiting for money and masons. It was there, in the gap between inspection and repair, that the idea took shape.
No one proposed killing the Supreme Ruler outright. Pel Sarin had stopped attending their meetings. Sarethe had withdrawn almost entirely, so that her chair by the window stood empty more evenings than not. Cassovar had begun limiting what was said even among people he trusted, and whole evenings now passed in careful conversations about nothing at all.
But Emmeran Vos had connections among contractors, and after that the thing found its own way down, the way water finds the lowest ground. One contractor employed a mason. The mason had debts. The debts could disappear, quietly, the way debts did when the right ledger was closed, and the mason did not need to know why.
He only needed to leave one support untouched.
Velisse read the estimate twice.
They were in a small upper room of the Merent house, late in the afternoon, with the shutters half drawn and a bar of dusty light lying across the table between them. The room smelled of beeswax and of good wine that nobody had touched. Velisse sat very upright in her chair, small and neat, with her dark hair drawn back hard from her face, and she ran the ink-stained second finger of her right hand down the column of figures one more time before she looked up.
It was a mason’s estimate and nothing more: the age of the stone, the load it bore, the cost of a repair not made. She had read a thousand documents like it, and she had never before read one that made her want to wash her hands. “How certain?”
At the far end of the table Emmeran shrugged, and the rings on his fingers caught the light as he did it. “Certain enough.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is an old balcony.”
“I know what it is.”
Cassovar stood by the window with his back to them, a lean dark shape against the bright gap in the shutters, and said nothing. Behind Velisse, Odran was pacing again, up and down the narrow length of the room in his good boots, so that the floorboards complained at every turn.
“He is scheduled to speak there?”
“In nine days,” Emmeran said.
“For how long?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Odran stopped. For a moment he was entirely still, which in Odran was rare enough to be noticed. “That is enough.”
Velisse turned her head and looked at him. He had a face that hid nothing, and she found that she did not like what it was showing her. “You sound very comfortable with this.”
“I am comfortable with ending a problem.”
Cassovar turned from the window. “No.”
Odran frowned at him. “No what?”
“You are not comfortable.” Cassovar’s voice was as level as it ever was. “You are excited.”
Colour came up into Odran’s face all at once, the way it always did. “That is not fair.”
“It is exactly fair.” Cassovar left him standing there and looked down the table at Emmeran, and Velisse watched him do it: the long, still face, the silver at his temples, the single chain of office lying flat against the sober Coven cloth. He came to the table and laid one finger on the estimate and tapped it, once, the way he tapped every document he meant to remember. “If this happens, it happens once.”
Emmeran nodded, and repeated the terms back to him in his quiet, careful voice, as a man repeats the terms of a contract to be sure there has been no misunderstanding. “No improvisation. No second attempt. No loose ends.”
Velisse stared at Cassovar. Somewhere in the street below, a cart went rattling over the cobbles, and she waited until it had passed. “You have already decided.”
He looked at her. “No.”
“You are giving instructions.”
“I am limiting damage.”
“That is deciding.”
Cassovar’s jaw tightened. For a moment, in the slanting light, he looked older than she had ever seen him look — not tired, exactly, but worn at the edges, like old stone that has stood too long in the weather. “We have spent a year trying everything else.”
Velisse said nothing. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and went very still, which was what she did when a sum came out wrong and she could not yet find the error.
He went on, more quietly. “If the balcony collapses, there is no knife. No poison. No assassin to capture.”
Odran sat down abruptly, as though something had gone out of his legs. “What if he survives?”
No one answered immediately. The bar of light had crept a little way across the table while they talked, and now it lay over the estimate, so that the columns of figures seemed almost to shine. Velisse looked at them and did not look up.
Emmeran finally said, “Then it was an accident.”
The Supreme Ruler’s study was warm that evening, the fire banked low and the lamps turned up, and it smelled as it always did of cedar oil and old parchment and, faintly, of Balif’s tea, which had been poured an hour before and had gone cold on the corner of the desk without his noticing. The ruler sat in the deep chair by the hearth with reports from the southern provinces stacked on his knee. Balif stood at the shelves with his lenses on the end of his nose and his white beard tucked against his chest, pretending to look for a book, and thinking about newspapers.
Balif knew nothing about the balcony. What he knew was that the Gilded campaign had changed, and that worried him more than anything the Coven had yet done.
For weeks the newspapers had been growing quieter. Some of the loudest merchant associations had stopped publishing statements altogether. Several known Gilded organisers had suddenly lost all interest in public rallies. Odran Pell still gave speeches, but even those came less often now, and they had lost something of their heat.
The pressure had not disappeared. It had only become less visible, the way a fire in peat goes on burning long after the smoke has stopped, and Balif did not like it at all.
He took off his lenses, looked at them, and put them on again. “They’ve gone quiet,” he told the shelves.
The ruler went on reading. “Who?”
Balif turned and stared at him. After a moment the ruler felt it, as he always felt it, and looked up from the report. “Merent?”
“The Coven. At least the part of it that has been shouting at you for the last year.”
“That seems like good news.”
“It might be.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” the ruler said.
“I am not.”
The ruler returned to the report and turned a page. “Why?”
Balif took a moment over that. He went to the desk, picked up his tea, remembered too late what it would be, drank some anyway, and set the cup down again with an expression of quiet betrayal. “I don’t know.”
The ruler waited, so still in his chair that a fly might have taken him for the furniture.
Balif frowned at the cup. “That is not going to be a satisfying answer.”
“It rarely is.”
Balif walked over to the window. Outside, the lamps of the city were coming on one by one beneath a sky the colour of slate. “They were spending money every week,” he said to the glass. “Pamphlets. Speeches. Delays. Then suddenly half of it stops.”
“Maybe they realised it wasn’t working.”
“I hope so.”
Behind him the Supreme Ruler looked up. Balif could feel it on the back of his neck, and he went on without turning round. “I just don’t think Cassovar Merent loses interest because something fails.”
“No.”
“That is all.”
“That is not all,” said the ruler.
Balif looked back over his shoulder. The ruler had laid the report down on his knee and set one hand flat on top of it, which meant he would not pick it up again until he had what he wanted. “Say what you mean.”
Balif hesitated. It was the hesitation of a man who disliked saying anything he could not footnote. “I think they may have changed methods.”
“Based on what?”
“Nothing solid.”
“Then we watch,” said the ruler.
Balif nodded. It was the right answer, and it did not make him feel any better. The ruler picked up the report again and found his place. “Anything else?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You are speaking from the western balcony next week.”
The ruler looked up at him. Balif shrugged, and became interested in a loose thread at his cuff. “It has nothing to do with this. I just dislike that balcony.”
“Why?”
“It shakes.”
“It does not shake.”
“It does.”
The ruler pointed at him with the report. “You are afraid of heights.”
“I am afraid of falling.”
“There is a difference?”
“A significant one,” said Balif, with dignity.
The Supreme Ruler looked back at the report, and that, plainly, was the end of it. Balif collected his cold tea, thought better of it, and left it where it was, and he went out into the corridor muttering something about architects, and about the kind of people who built things to stick out of walls.
The morning of the address was clear, and the western court filled before noon.
They came in through every gate under a sky scrubbed pale by the night’s wind, and by the time the bells rang the half-hour there was barely room in the court to turn round. Merchants came in their good coats. Guild representatives came under their banners, workers came in aprons and leathers straight from the shops. A pair of broad-backed stonekin porters stood at the rear like a second wall.
A dwarven smith had his apprentice up on his shoulders, a feather-crested courier perched on the rim of the fountain, and a crowd of goblin children had climbed the stone urns along the colonnade and were refusing to come down for anybody. Hawkers worked through the press selling hot chestnuts and sugared almonds, and the smell of them hung warm over the court.
Some of them still carried signs against the ruler. Others carried banners in support of him, and here and there the two sorts of people stood close enough together to argue, and did, with enthusiasm.
The speech itself was meant to announce a new agreement on inter-guild transport routes, one of the projects that had survived the Gilded obstruction. Balif had read the agreement. It was a good one and quite extraordinarily dull, and he suspected that most of the court had come less for the routes than for the chance to see the ruler, and to shout at him or for him, according to taste.
The Supreme Ruler arrived with a small group of officials, and Balif was among them. They came in by the colonnade beneath the balcony, out of the sun into a long cool shade that smelled of old stone and pigeons, where a narrow stair climbed inside the wall to the balcony doors. The ruler went up first with his guards. The ministers followed. Balif, whose knees had opinions about stairs, lingered at the bottom of it, and looked up at the balcony.
Then he looked at the stone beneath it. The great outer column stood a few paces from him at the edge of the shade, carrying its share of the balcony on its carved head. Balif looked at the column for a long moment. Then he looked back up at the balcony.
One of the guards at the foot of the stair noticed him doing it. “What?”
Balif pointed. “Has that always been there?”
The guard followed his finger. A thin crack ran along the underside of the outer support, where the column’s head met the stone it bore, so fine that it might have been a shadow. The guard looked at it and shrugged. “It is old stone.”
Balif stepped closer. He pressed one hand flat against the column, as a physician lays a hand on a patient’s chest, and felt the stone cool and gritty beneath his palm. Dust fell. It came down in a thin pale trickle from the crack above him and settled on the back of his hand, and on his sleeve, and kept falling.
His expression changed. “Get him off.”
The guard frowned. “What?”
“Get him off the balcony.”
Above them the balcony doors had been thrown open, and through them the Supreme Ruler had already stepped forward into the light. The crowd saw him, and the court below began to cheer and jeer in equal measure, a great wave of noise that broke against the walls and came rolling back again.
Balif moved. He took the stair faster than he had taken any stair in twenty years, one hand on the wall, with the guard pounding up behind him and his knees shouting at him with every step, and he came out onto the landing behind the balcony doors with no breath left to spare. The ruler was standing at the balustrade with the sun on him, one hand raised to the court. “Your Grace.”
The ruler glanced back.
“We need to go.”
“Why?”
“Now.”
Something in Balif’s face made him stop. Balif never knew what the ruler saw there; he only saw the raised hand come slowly down.
A low sound came from beneath the stone. It was not loud. It was a grinding noise, slow and deep, like a millstone turning over on dry grain, and Balif felt it through the soles of his boots before he heard it. One of the guards on the balcony heard it too. Balif saw the man’s head come round.
Then the outer edge of the balcony dropped.
There was no moment of stillness, no breath in which to be brave or to be afraid. The two guards nearest the ruler seized him by the arms and the back of his coat and hauled him backward toward the doors, and as they did it the stone broke loose beneath his feet. A section of the railing, stone lilies and all, tore away and fell into the courtyard below. People screamed. Then, with a roar that seemed to go on and on, the entire front half of the balcony collapsed, and dust came boiling up past the doors in a great pale cloud and filled the air.
The Supreme Ruler hit the floor of the landing hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Balif, who had been reaching for him, landed beside him in a heap.
For several seconds neither of them moved. Below them the court was all noise — screaming, shouting, the long rattle of smaller stones still falling — and the dust drifted down over everything, soft as flour, and settled in Balif’s beard. Then the ruler coughed.
Balif turned his head and looked at him. The Supreme Ruler of Ashkar lay on his back on the landing with plaster in his hair and his coat torn at the shoulder, staring up at the ceiling, and he was alive. “You still think it doesn’t shake?”
The Supreme Ruler turned his head and stared at him.
Balif closed his eyes. “Sorry.”
The court below was chaos, and Balif went down into it as soon as his legs would hold him.
The dust was still settling when he came out of the colonnade. A great heap of broken stone lay where the front of the balcony had been, with the stone lilies scattered across the flagstones like flowers thrown at a funeral. The crowd had broken back from it in every direction, and now it was coming forward again in pieces: people searching for each other, people shouting names, a stonekin porter lifting a slab off somebody’s legs as easily as a man lifts a door. The goblin children had come down off the urns at last, and were very quiet.
Three people had been injured by falling stone. One guard had suffered a broken arm. The Supreme Ruler had escaped with bruising along his shoulder and ribs, and he would not let the healers make a fuss about it, and the healers made one anyway.
Within an hour, the palace announced that structural failure was the likely cause. Within two hours, Balif had ordered the balcony sealed, and the doors at the top of the stair were nailed shut with planks while he stood and watched it done.
By nightfall he had found the inspection report. It was in the works office at the end of the stable yard, in a cabinet of such reports, filed in perfect order between a leaking cistern and a cracked chimney. The support had been marked for repair. The repair had been signed as completed. It had not been completed. Balif stood in the lamplight with dust still in the creases of his coat and read the document three times, as though it might say something different on the third reading.
It did not. The name at the bottom belonged to a mason named Jorven Kale.
Jorven Kale had disappeared the previous morning.
The records room was cold after midnight, the fire long dead and only one lamp burning, and that was where the Supreme Ruler found him. Balif was sitting at the long table with the inspection report in front of him and a dozen other papers around it, and a cup of something that had once been hot standing at his elbow. “You should be sleeping.”
Balif did not look up. “So should you.”
The ruler closed the door behind him. He moved more carefully than usual, Balif noticed, keeping his left arm close against his side, and he did not sit down. “What did you find?”
Balif handed him the inspection report. The Supreme Ruler held it to the lamp and read it, and Balif watched his face and learned nothing from it, which was what usually happened.
“Completed.”
“Yes.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No.”
“Could it be fraud?”
“Yes.”
The ruler looked up from the page. Balif took off his lenses and held them, and went on. “He was paid for work he didn’t do.”
“That happens,” the ruler said.
“Yes.”
“And he is missing.”
“Yes.”
“That also happens.”
Balif looked at him. “Not usually the day before a balcony collapses under you.”
The ruler set the paper down on the table between them. “Do we know he caused it?”
“No.”
“Do we know anyone paid him?”
“Not yet.”
“Then we have nothing.”
Balif’s hand closed hard around his lenses, and he had to make it open again before he bent them. “We have enough to investigate.”
“Yes.” The ruler’s voice was firm, and he said the next words slowly, so that there would be no mistaking them. “To investigate.”
Balif nodded. He understood the distinction. An investigation could be conducted in a records room after midnight, by an old man with no standing and a cold cup of tea. An accusation would be conducted in public, and once begun, it could not be stopped.
The ruler picked up the report again and looked at it once more. “Quietly.”
“I know.”
The Supreme Ruler started toward the door. He had his hand on the latch when Balif spoke. “Your Grace.”
The ruler stopped. Balif was not looking at him. He was looking at the papers spread in front of him, the reports and the requisitions and the one signature that should not have been there.
“I don’t think this was an accident.”
The ruler did not answer immediately. Neither did he dismiss the idea. He stood with his hand on the latch and his bruised shoulder held stiffly, and the lamp hissed between them.
Finally he said, “Find out.”
Then he left, and Balif sat alone in the cold, and reached for his tea, and drank it, and regretted it.
Jorven Kale was found four days later, alive — barely.
He had been beaten and left beside a drainage canal outside the city, among the reeds where the water ran brown and slow. When he woke, in a narrow whitewashed room that smelled of vinegar and clean linen, he remembered very little. Or claimed to.
Balif interviewed him personally. He pulled a stool up beside the cot and sat down on it, with a grunt from his knees, and looked at the man in the bed. Jorven Kale was perhaps forty, with a mason’s thick shoulders and a mason’s ruined hands, and the hands shook so badly that he had to hold them together in his lap. His left eye was swollen shut. The other one would not settle on anything for long.
“I did the inspection,” Jorven said.
“Did you repair the support?”
“I was going to.”
“But you signed that you did.”
Jorven looked down at his hands. “Yes.”
“Why?”
No answer. Balif waited.
Jorven swallowed. “I needed the payment.”
“So you stole it.”
“Yes.”
Balif looked at him for a long moment. “Who paid you?”
“The palace.”
“That is not what I meant.”
Jorven’s breathing changed. It was a small thing, a catch and then a quickening, as though something had walked across the room that only he could see. Balif noticed.
“Someone else spoke to you.”
“No.”
“Jorven.”
“No.”
Balif leaned back on the stool. The man was terrified; that much was obvious to anyone with eyes. He was terrified in the way of a man who had been told exactly what would happen to him, and had then had it happen.
“Did someone tell you not to repair it?”
Jorven shook his head. He did it too quickly. Balif waited, and said nothing, and let the silence do what silence does, and after a while Jorven’s good eye filled with tears and spilled over. “I don’t know anything.”
Balif’s face softened. He did not press. He sat for a while with his hands folded on his knee, an old man on a hard stool, and let the mason weep, and only when it had passed did he speak again, gently. “Who did this to you?”
Jorven looked at the door. Then he looked back at Balif. “I don’t know.”
That answer might have been true.
The Gilded Coven had not ordered Jorven beaten, and that became a problem.
Cassovar confronted Emmeran in private, in his own study at the Merent house, with the lamps lit and the curtains drawn and the door locked. He did not offer Emmeran a chair. He stood behind his desk with one finger resting on the closed lid of an inkstand, and did not raise his voice. “Who touched the mason?”
Emmeran frowned. “No one.”
“He was found half-dead.”
“I heard.”
“You said no loose ends.”
“I said nothing about beating him.”
Cassovar stared at him. The finger on the inkstand lid had gone still. “Then who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is not acceptable.”
Emmeran looked irritated, which was more than he usually allowed his face to look. “Do you think I control everyone in this city?”
“You arranged the contact.”
“I arranged a contact with a contractor. The contractor spoke to someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Cassovar’s face tightened. And for the first time, standing there in his own study with the lamps burning, he began to understand what they had created. They had tried to build distance between themselves and the act. Now that same distance meant that they no longer knew who was involved.
Odran came in before either man could say more, without knocking; he had always had a gift for arriving at the wrong moment. He was still in his rally coat, and his broad face was flushed with the cold or with something else. “He lived.”
Cassovar looked at him. “Yes.”
Odran shook his head. “I told you we should have used something certain.”
Cassovar crossed the room and struck him.
It was not hard enough to knock him down. It was hard enough to silence him, and the sound of it seemed very loud in the little room. Odran stared at him with one hand at his cheek. Cassovar’s breathing was heavy; he could hear it himself, and he disliked it.
“There were people below that balcony.”
“So?”
Cassovar only looked at him.
Odran realised what he had said. Cassovar watched him realise it, watched it go across that open, unguarded face like a cloud across a field. Neither of them spoke.
And at the edge of the lamplight, Emmeran watched them both.
The second attempt came months later, and no one within the Coven called it a second attempt.
Cassovar had forbidden further action. He had said so plainly, in a room where there were no minutes, and nobody had argued with him. That did not mean everyone obeyed him.
Odran Pell had begun meeting with men outside the Assembly, in the back rooms of wine houses in the newer Gilded districts, where the furniture was expensive and the wine was not. They were younger merchants, most of them, and minor nobles, and people with debts. People who had lost money in the expansion and could not stop adding up how much. People who thought Cassovar had become afraid, and said so, and liked the sound of Odran saying it louder. One of them knew a stablemaster attached to the royal household.
The plan was crude. A fastening pin would be filed almost through. The carriage would leave the city, and somewhere on rough ground the pin would snap, and the axle would give way. If the road happened to run along a steep descent at the time, then what followed would be unfortunate, and very sad, and nobody’s fault at all.
No one would need to be present.
The royal stables smelled of hay and leather and saddle soap, and of the horses themselves, warm and patient in their stalls. The stablemaster had worked among those smells for most of his life, and he did not know who the target was.
He was told the carriage belonged to a Gilded debtor whose death would settle a dispute. He was paid half in advance. He spent most of it before the work was done.
Two days before the journey, he became frightened. He tried to undo what he had done, but he could not replace the pin without attracting attention — a new pin had to be drawn from the stores and signed for — and so, being a man and frightened, he did the most dangerous thing he could have done.
He told his wife.
His wife told her sister, in strictest confidence. Her sister told a palace laundress, over the copper on wash day, in strictest confidence. The laundress, who had opinions about the royal family and no gift for keeping them to herself, told a guard, and was not asked to keep anything confidential at all.
By the next morning, Balif was standing in the royal stables, in the grey light from the high windows, holding the damaged pin in one hand.
The stablemaster was gone. His room above the tack store had been emptied in a hurry.
Balif stared at the carriage. It stood in its bay with its traces down and its paint gleaming, a handsome thing of black lacquer and gilt, and it looked exactly as it had always looked. The captain of the guard stood beside him with his helmet under his arm, a square, weather-darkened man who had been woken before dawn and had not yet forgiven anybody for it.
“You think this was deliberate?”
Balif held up the pin. The bright scar of the file ran almost all the way round it, so that only a sliver of iron the width of a fingernail still held the two halves together. “What do you think?”
The captain shrugged. “I think someone filed through it.”
Balif nodded. “That is where I am too.”
The Supreme Ruler was less patient this time, and Balif, standing before the desk in the study with the pin wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket, had expected nothing else. The ruler did not trouble to greet him. “Find him.”
“We are trying. The whole guard is trying.”
“He worked inside my stables.”
“Yes.”
The ruler set down his pen, very precisely, beside the paper. “He sabotaged my carriage.”
“Yes.”
“And no one noticed him leave?”
“No.”
The ruler got up from behind the desk and paced once across the room, to the window and back. Balif watched him do it. In all the years he had known the man he could count on one hand the times he had seen him pace, and every one of them had been bad.
“He had help.”
“Probably.”
“From the Coven?”
Balif hesitated. “Maybe.”
The ruler stopped in the middle of the rug. “You’ve said maybe for a year.”
“Because I do not have proof.”
“I nearly fell through a balcony.”
“I know.”
“Now someone files through my carriage axle.”
“I know.”
“What would you call that?”
Balif looked at him. He took off his lenses, and folded them, and held them in both hands, and for once he did not look at his notes. “Two attempts.”
The room went quiet. It was the first time either of them had said it plainly. The Supreme Ruler looked away.
Balif went on. “I don’t know whether they came from the same people.”
“Do you believe they did?”
“Yes.”
“And you still cannot prove it.”
“No.”
The ruler rubbed one hand slowly down across his face. Balif waited.
Eventually the Supreme Ruler said, “Increase the guard.”
Balif nodded, and the ruler added, “Quietly.”
“Yes.”
“And no public accusations.”
“I agree.”
The ruler turned and looked at him. “That sounded painful.”
“It was.”
The Supreme Ruler almost smiled. Balif saw it begin at the corner of his mouth, the old dry humour that so few people in the realm had ever seen; and then it was gone again, as though a door had closed on it. “Find the stablemaster.”
They found him before sunset, at the foot of a warehouse in the river quarter, among the barrels and the gulls.
He was dead. He had fallen from the warehouse roof — or at least, that was what the first report said. Balif read it without speaking, at a table in the guardhouse by the river gate, with the evening coming down blue outside the window and the smell of tar and fish coming in. The captain of the guard stood across from him and waited for him to finish. “Witnesses?” Balif asked.
“Two.”
“Did they see him fall?”
“No.”
Balif looked up. “They heard it.”
“Yes.”
“What was he doing on the roof?”
“We don’t know,” the captain said.
Balif placed the report down on the table and laid his hand flat on top of it. The captain waited.
Balif eventually said, “I am getting tired of not knowing.”
The failed attempts produced an unexpected effect: the Supreme Ruler became more cautious. Not fearful. Cautious, in the way a man becomes cautious who has stepped on a rotten stair and will never again step on any stair without testing it first.
Routes changed. Food was inspected. Public appearances became less predictable, announced late or not at all. Maintenance crews were screened before they were allowed through the gates, and palace employees were reviewed, every one of them, from the chamberlains down to the boys who swept the yards. The ruler disliked all of it. Balif disliked telling him it was necessary. The guards disliked Balif, who kept asking them questions they could not answer, and everyone, from the kitchens to the council chamber, disliked the new routine.
The Gilded Coven watched from a distance, and for a time, nothing happened.
Cassovar refused to approve anything further. Velisse supported him, and said so. Sarethe knew only that the ruler had survived two suspicious incidents. She did not know the Coven had been involved — not yet. Odran grew impatient, and paced more, and spoke less. Emmeran became quieter still, which hardly seemed possible. That made Cassovar nervous.
The third attempt was the most dangerous, because no one planned it properly.
A hunting party was scheduled in the northern foothills, where the forests climbed in dark folds toward the snowline and the streams ran loud and cold all year. The Supreme Ruler had hunted there many times. The route was known. The terrain was isolated, a long day’s ride from anywhere that mattered.
Odran heard about it from a cousin attached to the court. He told three men. One of those men knew another man who supplied hunting hounds, and that man knew others. No written order was ever given, and no payment was made in advance. The plan grew through suggestion, the way rumours grow in a tavern, each man adding a little and believing the rest had been settled by somebody else. A guide could take the wrong trail. A patrol could be delayed. A predator could be driven toward the hunting route.
It was messy. Too many people knew fragments of it, and too many things could go wrong, and most of them did.
The Supreme Ruler changed the route that morning, because heavy rain in the night had washed out a crossing. The hunting party never reached the planned location. The men waiting there waited for six hours, in the dripping undergrowth, while the rain came and went and came again and nobody came up the trail at all. One panicked. Another ran. A third was caught by a local patrol, wet to the skin and talking too much, and he carried a Gilded coin purse.
That was the first real mistake.
The military post sat on a shoulder of the foothills like a grey stone box that somebody had set down and forgotten, and it smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and boiled cabbage. Balif questioned the man there, in a bare room with one window, at a table scarred by generations of soldiers’ knives.
The man’s name was Terik Vann. He was not a professional killer; that became obvious almost at once. He was perhaps twenty-five, thin and badly shaved, with a soldier’s borrowed blanket around his shoulders and his own clothes still steaming by the fire. His hands would not stay still on the table. He kept asking for water.
Balif gave him some, and watched him drink it, and waited until he had finished. “Why were you there?”
“Hunting.”
“With a crossbow and no bolts?”
Terik looked at the table, and Balif waited, and at last Terik said, “I lost them.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
Balif sighed. It was the sigh of a man who had sat across a great many tables from a great many lies. Across from him, Terik looked close to tears.
“Who sent you?”
“No one.”
“Who paid you?”
“No one.”
Balif reached into one of his many pockets and placed the coin purse on the table between them. It was good leather, with the Coven’s gilt pattern along its seam. “Where did this come from?”
Terik looked at it as though it might bite him. “I won it.”
“Where?”
“Cards.”
“With whom?”
“I don’t remember.”
Balif stared at him. Terik swallowed.
Balif sat back in his chair. “I am going to tell you something.”
Terik looked up, and Balif said, “I believe you are frightened.”
The man said nothing. Balif let the silence sit for a moment before he went on. “I also believe you are not important.”
Terik’s mouth tightened. It was the first thing Balif had said that seemed to reach him, and it reached him in the wrong place.
Balif went on, without unkindness. “That is good for you.”
“Why?”
“Because important people are harder to protect.”
Terik stared at him. Balif pushed the coin purse a little closer across the scarred wood, until it lay just in front of the young man’s restless hands.
“Tell me who gave you this.”
Terik’s breathing quickened. “I can’t.”
“You can.”
“They’ll kill me.”
Balif said nothing. He did not promise anything. He had found long ago that frightened men could smell a promise that could not be kept, and that it made them more frightened, not less.
Terik looked toward the door, and then back. “There was a man.”
“What man?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“What did he look like?”
Terik hesitated. “Gilded.”
Balif frowned over the top of his lenses. “That does not narrow it much.”
“He had one of their rings.”
“What ring?”
“Black stone. Gold edge.”
Balif’s expression changed. Several minor Gilded houses used that design, and none of them, so far as he knew, had any business in the northern foothills. “Anything else?”
Terik nodded, and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. “He said we weren’t supposed to kill anyone.”
Balif leaned forward. “What?”
“He said we just had to make sure the ruler went down the west trail.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Terik.”
“I don’t!” The man was crying now, openly, the tears running down into the stubble on his chin, and he did not seem to notice them.
Balif waited. He let him cry. After a while Terik wiped at his face with the corner of the borrowed blanket and spoke again, so low that Balif had to lean closer to hear.
“He said other people would do the rest.”
By the time Balif returned to the capital, Terik Vann was dead.
The message was waiting for him at the palace gate, in the rain, folded small and sealed with the mark of the military post. Poison, it said. Mixed into his evening meal. The guards responsible for watching him had eaten from the same kitchen, from the same pot, at the same hour, and none of them had become ill. The poison had been put into his bowl specifically.
Balif read the message twice, standing under the arch of the gate with the rain dripping off the stone above him. Then he went to his own rooms, and did not light the lamp, and sat alone in the dark for a long time.
The Supreme Ruler found him there before dawn, when the windows were just turning grey and the first carts were rumbling in the streets below. “You heard.”
Balif nodded. He had not taken off his travelling coat, and it was still damp at the shoulders.
“Was he useful?” the ruler asked.
“A little.”
“What did he say?”
Balif told him — the coin purse, the cards, the man with the ring, the west trail, the other people who would do the rest. The ruler listened without interrupting. When Balif had finished he went and stood at the window, tall and still against the greying glass, with his hands clasped behind his back. “A Gilded ring.”
“Yes.”
“Which house?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we narrow it?”
“Not enough.”
The ruler turned. “Someone killed him inside a guarded post.”
“Yes.”
“Before he could identify anyone.”
“Yes.”
The Supreme Ruler’s face hardened, and his voice, when it came, was quieter than before, which was how Balif knew how angry he was. “That is not coincidence.”
“No.”
For once, Balif did not qualify the answer. The ruler noticed. “So now you agree.”
“I agreed before.”
“You kept saying we had no proof.”
“We still don’t have enough.”
The ruler looked at him, and Balif saw the anger plainly now, cold and contained and very quiet. “Then what would satisfy you?”
Balif kept his own voice low. “Something we can use without starting a guild war on suspicion.”
That stopped him. The room fell quiet.
Balif went on. “If you accuse the Coven publicly and you are wrong, you fracture the realm.”
“And if I am right?”
“You may fracture it anyway.”
The Supreme Ruler looked away. Balif did not enjoy saying it. He had spent his life believing that the truth, properly told, was a kind of protection, and he was discovering, late, that there were truths which protected nobody at all.
Neither of them spoke for a while. At last the ruler asked, “What do you suggest?”
Balif looked down at the table. “More guards.”
“I already have more guards.”
“Different guards,” Balif said, and did not explain.
“What else?”
“Stop announcing routes.”
“Fine.”
“Screen the kitchens.”
“Already done,” said the ruler.
“Then we keep looking.”
The Supreme Ruler gave him a tired look. “For what?”
Balif met his eyes. “The person who is getting impatient.”
Odran Pell was becoming impatient, and so Balif did not have to wait long.
The hunting failure had been his doing, and Cassovar discovered that within a week. The confrontation took place behind locked doors in Cassovar’s study, with the curtains drawn against the afternoon and a fire burning that nobody needed, and Odran stood in the middle of the carpet in his good coat and found that he could not keep his hands still. Cassovar did not shout. Odran had come ready for shouting. He had his answers ready for it, the way a man has his fists ready, and Cassovar’s quiet frightened him more than any shouting could have done. “You acted without approval.”
Odran stared at him. “There was no approval to get.”
“Exactly.” Even then, Cassovar did not raise his voice.
“We have been sitting for months.”
“Because we agreed to stop.”
“You agreed.”
Cassovar stepped closer. He was not a large man, and Odran was broad enough to have made two of him, but Odran found that he wanted very much to take a step back. “Do you understand what you have done?”
“I tried to finish it.”
“You hired idiots.”
“They nearly succeeded.”
“They were caught.”
“One was caught.”
“And now he is dead.”
Odran looked at him. He did not mean anything by it; he did not know anything to mean. But he had a face that hid nothing, and he had never once in his life been able to make it lie, and he saw Cassovar see whatever was in it. “You killed him?”
“No.”
“Did Emmeran?”
“I don’t know.”
Cassovar’s face changed. Odran shrugged, because he did not know what else to do with his shoulders. “He was going to talk.”
Cassovar stepped back. “You don’t even know who did it.”
“No.”
“You don’t know who is cleaning up after you.”
Odran frowned. “Why does that matter?”
Cassovar stared at him, and for a long moment Odran had the uncomfortable feeling of being added up, like a column of figures that had come to the wrong total.
“Because if we do not know who is doing the work, then we do not know who knows what we are doing.”
Odran finally understood. It came to him slowly and then all at once, the way cold comes up through a floor, and for a moment neither of them spoke. The fire muttered in the grate. Cassovar sat down behind his desk, as though his legs had decided for him, and the room seemed smaller than it had been. “This stops.”
Odran shook his head. “No.”
Cassovar looked up. “No?”
“We are already in it.”
“That does not mean we continue.”
“It means stopping is more dangerous.”
Cassovar did not answer. Odran went on, and heard his own voice getting louder, and could not help it. “If he finds out now, what do you think happens?”
Cassovar looked tired. He looked, Odran thought with a jolt, like an old man, and Odran had never once thought of him as old. Odran leaned forward with both hands on the edge of the desk.
“We don’t get to go back to pamphlets.”
That was the part neither of them wanted to admit.
Elsewhere in the city, in a high narrow house with a view of the river, Lady Sarethe Vey sat by her window with a cup of tea at her elbow and rubbed her temple with two fingers, and began to suspect something.
She had heard about the balcony. Everyone had. The carriage incident had been quieter, but not quiet enough, not in a city where every laundress had a sister. And the death of a man in military custody, somewhere up in the northern foothills, had reached her through another channel entirely — an old acquaintance, a careless remark over dinner, a pause in the wrong place. Sarethe had sat in the Mercantile Assembly for longer than most of its members had been alive. She had learned a long time ago that when three unlikely things happened close together, it was rarely because the world had grown unlikely.
She requested a meeting with Cassovar. He delayed it twice. On the third request, she did not wait for an answer, but came to his house uninvited and had herself shown into his study, and sat down in the chair by his window to wait. It was late in the evening when he came in and found her there. “You cannot keep doing that.”
“Apparently I can.”
He closed the door. He did not sit down. “What do you want?”
Sarethe looked at him. She had known him for most of her working life, and she knew that long still face as well as she knew her own ledgers, and she watched it now the way she would have watched a column of figures that she suspected had been altered. “What happened to the ruler’s balcony?”
Cassovar’s expression did not change. “It collapsed.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because the mason disappeared,” Sarethe said.
Cassovar said nothing. Sarethe went on, in the same tired, even voice.
“And because someone tampered with a royal carriage two months later.”
His face tightened, very slightly, at the corners of the mouth. It was the smallest movement in the world, and a stranger would never have seen it. Sarethe saw it. “What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
“Cassovar.”
“Nothing.”
She stared at him. He turned away from her, toward the fire, and stood with his back to her as though there were something in the coals he needed to see.
“That is not an answer I believe.”
“Then I cannot help you.”
Sarethe stood up, and remained standing, with one hand on the back of the chair. “Is Odran involved?”
Cassovar looked back at her too quickly. That was enough.
Sarethe’s face changed. She felt it change, and could do nothing to stop it. “Oh,” she said.
Cassovar moved toward her. “Do not.”
“Do not what?”
“Ask questions you do not want answered.”
Sarethe looked at him, and what she felt rose in her throat so sharply that it was almost disgust. “I wanted the expansion resumed.”
“I know.”
“I wanted pressure on the throne.”
“I know.”
“I did not agree to this.”
“You don’t know what ‘this’ is.”
“No.” She looked at him for a long moment, the man she had sat beside through all those years of budgets and banquets and quarrels about the price of grain. “But neither do you anymore.”
Cassovar did not answer. Sarethe took her coat from the back of the chair and left without another word, and she closed his front door behind her softly, as though there were someone in that house she did not want to wake.
That evening, Cassovar stood alone in the Mercantile Assembly chamber.
The great room was empty and very quiet. The ledgers had been removed from the long table, and the lamps were nearly out, so that the gold in the marble walls had dimmed to a dull brown and the carved reliefs of the Coven’s great achievements had sunk back into shadow. His footsteps had sounded very loud when he came in. Now he stood still, and there was no sound at all.
He thought about the first meeting after the expansion decree, at this same table, with the lamps all lit and every seat filled. Twenty-eight million crowns. At the time the number had seemed enormous, a disaster, the end of the world. Now it felt almost harmless. Money could be lost. Money could be recovered.
This was different.
The Coven had spent months trying to make the Supreme Ruler weaker. Instead, they had made him more guarded, more suspicious, and harder to reach than he had ever been. And every failed attempt had left behind another person who might talk. Another payment. Another favour. Another body.
Cassovar stood in the dark and finally understood the problem. They had approached assassination the same way they approached commerce. Layers of intermediaries. Distributed responsibility. No single person knowing too much. It had seemed safe.
Instead, it had created a chain he could no longer see from end to end. Somewhere in that chain, people were killing witnesses without his permission. Others were making new attempts without his knowledge. The conspiracy no longer belonged entirely to the people who had begun it.
And the Supreme Ruler was still alive.
Cassovar stood there for a long time, while the last of the lamps guttered. Then he sent for Emmeran Vos.
When Emmeran arrived, quiet as ever, with his rings glinting faintly in the last of the light, Cassovar did not invite him to sit. “We need someone better.”
Emmeran looked at him. “For what?”
Cassovar was silent. Emmeran understood.
“The last attempts were mistakes.”
“Yes.”
“And you want another,” Emmeran said.
“No.” Cassovar’s face, in the dim light, looked very tired. “I want the next one to be the last.”
Emmeran considered him for a while, in his careful, unhurried way. “That will cost more.”
Cassovar almost laughed. Of course it would. Everything did, in the end. “How much?”
“I don’t know yet,” Emmeran said.
“Find out.”
“From whom?”
Cassovar looked toward the dark windows. They had exhausted bribed workers. Contractors. Stable hands. Amateurs, all of them — people who panicked, people who talked, people who died before anyone understood who had silenced them. He no longer wanted accidents arranged by frightened men. He wanted professionals.
Emmeran waited. Cassovar finally said, “Someone who understands how to disappear afterward.”
Emmeran’s expression changed. There were very few guilds in Ashkar for whom that description meant anything, and only one for whom it meant everything. Neither man spoke the name. They did not need to.
Far beyond the golden halls of the Gilded Coven, there were people who had made careers from entering rooms unseen, wearing faces that were not their own, and leaving behind questions instead of witnesses.
The Shadow Weavers had once helped the Coven move kingdoms. Now the Coven was preparing to ask them to remove a single man.