Blakesly House, Angels
11 Vilmath 580

 

Dawn was a far distant promise when the hot knives in Angel’s head had withdrawn enough for her to risk opening her eyes. She removed the soft cotton cloth her maid had placed there, still damp and fragrant with the scent of herbs. Her vision swam. A fragrant beeswax candle burned upon a nightstand near her bed, and beyond it she could just make out the hearth screen, back lit by the glowing embers of the fire, and the familiar armchair just before it. Her eyes focused and refocused as they moved from item to item, at first unsure why they were there, then remembering why as swiftly as if it had been a reply to a question. She blinked again, and saw something strange among the watch-pin, water glass, handkerchief, night lamp, and other errata stewed atop the nightstand. The kirpan, the miniature sword pendant that was one-half of a Guardian Paladin’s wedding token, had been stabbed into a wax candle that had been left to burn there.

That was odd. Why the candle? She had no memory of having asked for it, nor of having stabbed it with the kirpan when they’d returned her here from the Belton House some hours before, nor could she imagine young Clarice having done such a thing. The ornamental jewel and its companion sheath were honored by Guardian Paladins as symbols of a sacred mystery, not to be handled disrespectfully… 

 …though apparently an enraged betrothed who’d just learned that his “happily ever after” was a lie could treat a kirpan however he pleased. Angel’s memories of that awful night were as keen as if they’d just happened, and those events had led to this latest one with a mournful inevitability that made her throat tighten.

There was simply no way to rest comfortably. Angel rolled upright, and instantly regretted it. Her head began to throb, as if her brain were oozing molten fire from a web of fracture lines that were also, somehow, all that held her skull together. She snatched up a pillow and screamed into it, rocking back and forth steadily until the onslaught under her scalp receded.

There had been lots of bad nights lately, but this one was already one of the worst in recent memory. When she opened her eyes, she found that the room was somehow still intact, though everything had a strange, fluttering halo, or after-image, in her field of view. She drew a careful, unsteady breath, and blinked hard to clear her vision, once more spying the little kirpan in its candle-corpse. Leaning over, she braced the remains, then gingerly withdrew the little sword, wiping the ornamental blade clean with her little kerchief while she thought.

Distantly, she remembered when Louis had purchased it. They were still living in Püran-Khir then, and busily preparing for their return to Cascadia. She’d barely noted it at the time. It was merely another appropriate prop for the new role she’d just acquired. Like the gowns, the accent, and the religion, it had just been one more layer of gilt and paint for the facade that Lady Angelique Blakesly was to become.

And then Raven, angry, betrayed, had hurled it at her. She’d only just intercepted it with her hand, and it had pierced the flesh of her palm almost as deeply as it had been plunged it into the candle wax.

The memories no longer had the power to bring tears, though her heart still ached, and felt as if it always would. Angel clenched the ornamental jewel in her fist, eyes staring at the woman reflected in the vanity mirror across the room. Her long, pale hair was braided down her back, and her eyes were hard, like agates in the bottom of a well. They sat uneasily atop her cheekbones, angled and sharp-edged like the ornamental blade in her hand, like the knives it seemed she’d known how to use for as long as she could remember.

Her two very different lives had clashed before. Yet again, they’d done so disastrously. This time was no telling how far the damage would go.

Is he going to Hal Roland with what he knows? the dark-eyed woman in the mirror asked. In her mind, the voice was that of a Fernwall native, with the flat vowels and clipped consonants of someone born in the heart of Merchants’ Quarter. The inner voice she thought she used had the familiar, rounded vowels and cadent phrases so characteristic of Cascadia’s wine country, far to the south. The differences frightened her, as did the certain knowledge of whose voice it must be.

She shook her head. There were too many ramifications to this, and she hadn’t had time to think them through. “Ah don’t know. No, Ah don’t think so,” she corrected herself, shaking her head slightly. “If he could have arrested me, he likely would have by now.”

But you don’t know that for certain? her mirror image pressed.

“How can Ah know anythin’ o’ the sort?” Angel cried softly, “it’s been weeks since he found out. Don’t you think—?”

Guesses don’t do us much good, Angel. The face in the mirror tilted slightly. Roland’s not the only possibility. He could just take it straight to Remington, you know.

“Iris, he won’t do that. He loves us. You have t’ know that!”

I don’t have to know anything of the sort. She slid out of bed and rather casually tossed the pendant toward the jewelry box. You heard him, earlier. He wasn’t as drunk as he pretended to be. If he can’t arrest you because of “true love” or whatever, she went on, unable to resist making a silly gesture to mock the phrase, he could still cut the barony out from under you. If you want to keep Carlisle, then we’re going to have to take a few more precautions to safeguard it, and you—from him, and from Louis.

Angel snatched at her own hands, clasping them tightly to keep them under control. There was some information that Iris needed to know that she did not know, but Iris was supposed to be her—she was Iris, wasn’t she?—so how could she not know it? Angel herself had difficulty bringing them to mind. She could remember seeing the documents, the reports, the legal forms, but… 

“Um, maybe we ought t’ talk t’ the baroness about that.”

Aren’t you and Angelique the same…?

“Not anymore, it don’t seem.”

Since when?

Angel sighed and shrugged. “Since a few hours ago. Right before she hit Raven at the ball, Ah think.”

Shit. Does she know? Iris’s thoughts suddenly became quite loud in Angel’s head. They were angry thoughts, sometimes violent, always disturbing, and now impossible to control.

“Ah don’t think so. Not yet. Iris, stop it, Ah can’t think over all that.”

The face in the mirror taunted back with an edgy half-smile. Make me.

“Iris, that ain’t helpin’! Iris…!”

Abruptly, the knives were back again, flashing and clashing inside her head and turning the space between her ears into a battle zone. She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming, and held the heels of both hands pressed against her temples to keep her skull intact. It went on and on, shredding her apart once more from the inside until at last blackness came down upon her like a mercy-stroke.

 

Dawn had become an immediate promise when consciousness at last returned. She lifted herself up from where she’d collapsed to the floor, but in cautious stages. First, to a careful kneeling position, while her fingers gingerly traced the features of a face and aching skull that, except for a bitten lip, seemed whole enough. Only then did she rise to her feet, slowly enough to keep her head from pounding in protest. The woman she saw reflected in the mirror had blood smears in her hair and on her face, and she knew, without knowing how she knew, that the hard eyes gazing at her there now were not entirely her own.

Angel tried to speak, but the words would not come out. Startled, she drew breath to try again.

Nothing.

And then, “Just let me do the talking for a while,” Iris said, and Angel heard the flatly inflected words in her own ears, harsh and uncompromising. “We’ve got damage control to do.” She found herself walking toward her bathing chamber, though it was not by her will.

Iris, stop it. Ah don’t know how you’re doin’ this, but it ain’t right!

“Hush. Nothing is any different. You just know about it now, that’s all. Look, if you can tolerate it from Angelique, you can tolerate it from me,” she said, muttering the words as she filled the basin. “Maybe it will make a few things easier. That would be novel.”

Her heart was still racing, but her hands replaced the basin and took up a clean cloth without her volition. She felt almost as if she were in shock, and couldn’t quite make herself understand that wetness of the water and its chill were sensations she could only experience distantly, and then only if Iris’ attention drifted in the slightest. By the time those hands placed the cool, damp cloth over her face, they felt like the hands, and face, of a stranger.

“I’m no stranger, Angel,” Iris said, barely muttering the words into the washcloth. “I’ve been here all along, trying to protect your neck for you while you seem determined to let anyone with half a brain to put a collar around it. It’s just easier for me to do that, this way.”

She lowered the cloth and gazed in the mirror once more. “You don’t have to worry. I can do what needs to be done—and I hope the baroness has as much luck with her end.”

Angel winced, or rather, felt as if she should. Her face still did not register the attempt. Ah cain’t imagine what she’s goin’ t’ say about what happened at the ball last night, she thought, and wondered, too, what the baroness was going to tell the servants.

“The less, the better,” Iris said, with an impatient sigh. “You know Louis’s got to have an informant below-stairs. You know he does.”

It was comforting, in an odd sort of way, for Angel to hear her own voice speaking so confidently, as if she knew without equivocation precisely what had to be done. But, what are we going t’ do about Raven? she wondered, finding it even more curious to think about herself in terms of “we” rather than “I”. But then she remembered, with some chagrin, that there had always been more than one opinion within her on what the answer to that question should be.

“Nothing.”

The word was tersely offered, and in a way that was meant to shut down discussion. It worked, for a moment, but her heart could not be so easily silenced. We cain’t just let him go like that.

“Oh, yes we can,” she muttered, rinsing the cloth to dab at the blood on her lip. “He’s chosen a side. It wasn’t us. Maybe he’ll rat us out, maybe he won’t. Either way, we can’t trust him.”

Her heart began to pound alarmingly, and the awful, clamoring noise within her grew so loud that Iris, in control up to that point, had to drop to her knees and clutch at her head as if to keep it from exploding. “We—have—to—let—him—go!” she said, snarling in order to silence the din. “Remember… the first thing we learned… in that hell-hole, the Boeche-Briazel,” she hissed, regaining her feet with grim determination. “You don’t give anyone the chance to fuck you over—and you kill them before they get a chance to fuck you over twice. Remember?”

You are not going to kill him! Raven’s just…!

“In a position to put your neck in a fucking collar for decades!” She glared grimly into the little looking glass above the wash basin as if the person she had to convince were reflected there. “Don’t you get it yet? Pull your head out of that, that bottomless sentimental well you and catch that clue cart rolling by, baby. Even if Raven doesn’t have the hard evidence he needs to arrest you for the theft of the Mâgun-Zak, he still has found something in those documents Louis forged that exposes you for a fraud. He’s been attempting to pickle himself, instead, thankfully, and that’s all that’s saved you. If you can’t imagine how infuriated all those self-righteous society hypocrites are going to be when they hear the news, then you haven’t been paying attention.

“And hey, if that isn’t enough? Louis and all his thuggy-boys are after you now, and you can’t come clean with Remington either, not on this. You’ve told too many lies—to her face—and you’ve told them for too long. Paragon of honor that she is, she’ll be among the first to want you eviscerated in The People’s Square.

“No, Angel.” Iris paused and drew a determined breath. Twice before in her life, she’d turned her wide-ranging anger in on herself and had succumbed to nearly anhedonic levels of despair, but not this time. “Raven’s promises aren’t worth any more than he is, and it’s time you started acting like you knew it.”

Iris, that’s just not—

"If he’d had the stones to stick with you through this, he’d have found them well before that debacle last night."

No! He’s hurt—we lied—!

“What? Like he’s never told a lie?” Clenched jaws kept her from screaming it. She desperately wanted to hurl something in her rage, but there were sounds in the sitting room, likely the hall boy and scullery girl preparing it against the baroness’ appearance. She drew a deep, steadying breath instead and considered the tasks ahead of her. Angel’s inner voice rattled on while she thought.

Iris, you cain’t just strike him off like that. You cain’t. You’ve got t’ get him back. We’ve got t’ talk t’ him! Now—this morning—before he has a chance t’ do anythin’ he’ll regret!

She didn’t roll her eyes, but it was an effort. “Maybe we should go to his office at police headquarters? Assuming he’s not ass-end up in an ale barrel already, we can make it stupidly easy for him! Let’s just get it over with and the farce of a trial that will follow. Louis can sweep up the price of your bond for your indenture to the city-state and keep you like a bitch in his kennel!”

There was no immediate reply to that. Iris nodded to the face reflected there the mirror, its mask-like expression as hard and cold as the words she’d just spoken. “That’s right. Do you really want to go back to being ‘Angela’, again? By all means then, throw yourself on Raven’s mercy—think he’s learned that Paladin virtue any better than the others?”

Every question exploded vitriol in her heart. Angel could not stop weeping, but Iris drew strength from it. It schooled her into remembering why it was important to prevent anyone from hurting Angel like that, ever again. She dashed away the fresh tears that tumbled down her newly washed cheeks. “Right. Me neither. Your life here got infinitely more dangerous, so now we’re playing this out my way.”

She turned from the wet, sorrow-stricken face in the mirror and returned to the bedchamber. Categorizing and prioritizing the new threats to the life Angel had built here had made it easier to ignore how grief carved new runnels into what was left of her soul.

“Enough with the caterwauling. Better wake up the baroness, Angel. We’ve got work to do.”

 

2313 Compton Place, Upper Merchants’
11 Vilmath, 580

 

 

Louis Arnot sat in the over upholstered chair in his opulently decorated drawing room in his expensively refurbished estate house, much as he had done every single morning for the last one hundred and twenty-five. His perfumed fingers toyed with an oblong object made of ivory or bone and about the size of a calling card. It clicked and clattered atop the polished bloodwood table as he tapped it and turned it and tapped it again. His unseeing eyes gazed out over grounds that were neither lush with summer’s last heated breaths nor ripe with autumn’s bawdy displays. For one hundred and twenty-five mornings he’d sat here, surrounded with the kind of wealth that would beggar the soul of any pirate, and yet for all its comforts he knew this had become little more than a well-padded holding pen.

He glanced at a truly beautiful, dark-haired girl who writhed upon a pile of soft furs before the hearth. She was completely naked, save for a diamond collar, and a waist chain that glinted against the creamy backdrop of her flawless skin. At first glance, she seemed to be lost in mindless, erotic ecstasy. A second glance at her puffy labia and glistening-wet thighs confirmed it. Even though his eyes lingered on her there—he’d forgotten her name—his mind ranged back to the girl who had captured his attention, and what was left of his heart, years before in a country far away from these cold Cascadian winters.

Oh, Angela…  No, I suppose I must call you “Iris” now, mustn’t I. A pretty name to stand for some ugly deeds, Angela darling. Could you really pull the trigger on me, I wonder? After all we were to each other? After all I’ve given you? There was a certain wistful melancholy in the thought, and he paused to savor it as he might the bouquet of a fine wine, or a new painting he intended to acquire. When it began to bore him, he dismissed it and returned to his contemplation of his former accomplice’s flight and betrayal.

It had never occurred to him that she could have fallen in love with anyone, not really. She was no more capable of such weakness than he was, but in light of a certain item in the Standard’s society pages, he did rather have a question or two about her sanity.

 

 

A knock at the door interrupted his reading. and he looked up at his butler’s entrance. “That…  man is ready to see you now,” he said stiffly.

Louis nodded once, then slowly folded up his paper and placed it on the side table. A short, stocky man strode past the disapproving butler with a rolling gait of a workman. Though he ducked and nodded respectfully to Louis, he rather quickly found himself having trouble keeping his eyes off the naked woman rolling languidly in the furs.

“Well?” Louis asked expectantly. “Look at me, man! Not at her.”

“Yes, goodman. Sorry, goodman,” the workman said quickly, forcing his attention back to his employer. “We been done, again. So sorry. I don’t know what else to say. We got close this time, but… well… you’ll see it on page twelve, goodman.”

Louis scowled at the man and picked up the paper again. “I see noth—Ah, here’s something. ‘Chimney sweep slips on ice, falls to death’,” he quoted the headline, lifting an inquiring eyebrow.

“That’s it,” he confirmed. “He’s the one I hired. You said put the word out. I put the word out and this one comes in and says he’s heard about a fresh quick-trigger, off-book client at that new law firm off the Wyechester Road there in Upper Gate. Badger & Carson, they is. And, the client is a lady, he says. So I offers him twenty-five pounds if he can get me the goods, see? He says he can prove it tonight if I gives him a fiver, so I does. And…” 

“And he fell off of the roof of the Malmont Building,” Louis finished.

“Yes, goodman.”

The girl in the furs caught her breath in soft orgasm, causing the workman another bout of momentary distraction, but he recovered himself before Louis could say anything. “Them blue bottles from the local precinct call it an accident, but it weren’t. They was two sets of boot prints in the snow, see? One a man’s. Them would be his. The others was small, like a woman or a child. My money’s on ‘woman’, though, and she knew what she was about, that one. Just like the others.”

“She is an amazing woman,” Louis sighed thoughtfully. His gaze drifted over to the girl, still in the grip of the drugs he’d given her. Her skin was damp from her latest string of orgasms, and it shimmered like fresh milk in the firelight, but the skin he saw didn’t belong to the girl in the furs. “Perfect, in fact.” 

“Shall I kill her?”

It didn’t even break Louis’s reverie. “Kill such a fine jewel?” The girl’s drugged gaze turned up to him longingly, wordlessly begging him for a release he couldn’t give her. Even as his eyes caressed her familiarly, the fact of her presence barely registered with him. She was not the woman he wanted.

“No, my friend. She must not be killed. She must be… directed. Managed. Controlled.” He gave the workman a hard look but spoke softly. “We must recapture Iris, dead man’s trigger or no. I must possess her again. Everything depends on it.”

He leaned over in his chair and cupped the vacant-eyed girl’s chin. “I will make her more than she ever imagined she could be, as she will for me.”

 

The Rose & Woodbine Tavern, Merchants
15 Vilmath, 580

 

It was never going to be a classy place. In fact, it was quite the opposite, and that was the point. It teemed with bad music, loaded dice, cheap beer, and even cheaper prostitutes. It didn’t smell very good. It was not a place decent, upstanding citizens went to drink, eat, or fuck, but then, for the last month Vincent hadn’t considered himself “decent”, never mind “upstanding”. So he’d eaten, drank, and examined every mole and pimple in every intimate place on every whore in the tavern, because…

That was the point. He couldn’t find a point—to anything. As the youngest son of a baron, he had obligations, but no duties. He had a title (several, actually) but neither money nor station beyond what mere formality provided. He had education, but no cause in which it could be put to service. He was a cop sworn to uphold the law, but a slave because he’d broken the law. He was engaged, but estranged. He’d found a thief, but couldn’t arrest her. She knew his past, but what he’d been told of hers was obviously a string of lies. It all ran around and around in his head until he could no longer tell the beginning from the end.

In the past few days, during the brief interludes when alcoholic numbness receded far enough, he found himself remembering the last time he’d seen Angelique, at the Belton House Ball. The annual winter festivity was attended by anyone and everyone who considered themselves to be part of “society”, which, of course, meant that every society reporter in Cascadia was also going to be present.

He had not wanted to go. He had not wanted to see her. He had not wanted to be reminded of the one lie he couldn’t make true. She had lied to him, she had played him just as she had played the Ladies’ Auxiliary and everyone else in Fernwall, and what sickened him the worst was that in spite of it all, he still loved her. Deep down in his heart, he even admired her! He didn’t want to admire her, he didn’t want to love her, either. And, he told himself, he most certainly didn’t want to attend the most talked about and written about public event of the autumn season with her! He wanted to hate her or, failing that, he’d settle for simply forgetting that he’d ever been in love with her.

On his way to the ball, he’d stopped for a celebratory ale with David Cooper’s attorney, and another, a bit later, with Cooper himself. All the while, he told himself that he would go home, that he’d look up Barbara Cole instead, that there was paperwork to be done in his office, that he didn’t have time to make the long trip up to the city of Angels’ just to attend a ball. In the end, Vincent had gone after all, just as he knew he would, because he could not help himself.

He vividly recalled his first sight of her across the ballroom, looking like a wintry princess walking on clouds in a pale blue gown that sparkled and glinted like ice. Her face had lit up when she saw him, but before he’d taken two steps into the organized cacophony of the ballroom, he had been waylaid by a gaggle of young noblewomen asking him questions about, of all things, the Mâgun-Zak case!

“Is there any news, Sir Vincent?” Lady Mariel of Waterstone had placed herself in his way to ask it. He had not wanted to be reminded about the case that night, of all nights, but before he could brush off the question, one of the decorative satin ribbons she wore around her wrists had tangled about one of his legs, causing her to shriek playfully and her friends to giggle.

“How goes the case, Sir Vincent? We’re so looking forward to being able to put this horrible business behind us.” Lady Magarit had asked then, flipping her fan open to get his attention. He too had been looking forward to putting this whole messy affair behind him as soon as he possibly could, but before he could say as much, a group of young knights joined them.

“Have you caught the thief, yet, Sir Vincent?” Sir Alain of Trobiere asked. Vincent’s eyes had flicked to Angelique reflexively. He had, but there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. It was as infuriating as the charade of their “betrothal” was intolerable. It occurred to him then to wonder if their betrothal hadn’t been a part of her plan all along! Oh, that’s nicely played, he fumed. Hitch yourself to the cop, right in front of society, to make it impossible for him to arrest you without destroying his reputation, that of the commissioner, and the Law Enforcement Committee as well.

It had worked like a charm, and he had been about to find her and tell her so when she had appeared there as if summoned.

“If you would excuse me, noble sirs.” Angelique’s voice had cut across the last question. He hadn’t heard it, anyway. Dark circles under her eyes attested to the state of her health. She looked tired, and he could feel the tension in her fingers through the sleeves of his evening wear. “I believe Sir Vincent owes me a dance,” she added, with an uncharacteristic note of steel under those polite sounding words that none of the young men who had gathered around him dared challenge.

“Do I indeed? Dance with my ‘betrothed’? How positively unfashionable, Lady Blakesly,” he’d quipped back, purposely slurring his words. It made him sound more inebriated than a couple of glasses of beer could have explained. For once, his reputation served his purposes. It had allowed him to show her just what he thought of being played, and if his behavior was seen as unseemly in the process, it would be written off as the bad behavior of a drunk at a party. He’d weathered much worse.

“These are the first words we’ve exchanged in weeks, Vincent,” she had replied. Her phony Vin-Nôrëan accent was only slightly threaded through the softer, flat, vowels of what was apparently supposed to be Cascr. He wasn’t sure which was more irritating, the phony accent or the phony accent papered over with what he knew to be her native voice. She was still trying to play him. “But, if we must discuss fashion to remain civil,” she’d gone on, her eyes pleading with him, “then I am happy to do so.”

For a brief instant, he couldn’t maintain his drunken pose. She was so beautiful, and his heart ached for her. He wanted nothing more than to remain civil, to love her, to parade her around the room as his beloved, and the chosen partner of his life. Nor could he ignore just how much he loved her, enjoyed her wit, her vivacity, her lithe, trim… body.

A body well-maintained for a single purpose, and it wasn’t their bedroom adventures. She had tried to play him again, and the thought of it infuriated him. He slipped back into his drunken pose.

“Oh, by all means, my lady. Will the season’s trends in hemlines do, or would you prefer to discuss the proper bodice lace to cover a set of concealed front-hooks?” he said, every word dripping sarcasm.

“What would you know of either, Sir Vincent, other than what it took to get your hands on the body beneath?” There was little trace of a D’wanese accent in that riposte, and he felt the lissome figure in his arms stiffen and twitch under his hands.

“I haven’t had any complaints,” he shot back, “even from you.”

“Except for a recent one, perhaps: neglect.” Chameleon-like, she’d leaned toward him to breathe those words, her face tilted up to his, lips slightly parted. “Why not come back to Blakesly House with me tonight, Mar-leven? I’ve missed you dearly…” The words, aspirated with enough steam to make him want to drag her off the dance floor right then and there, and his eyes had said—his whole body had said—I have missed you too, and he knew it.

But she was still playing him, she had to be! Somehow, he had managed to dive back behind his drunken act in time to hide what he felt—from both of them.

“And will we tell truths, my love?” he asked instead, acid simmering under every word.

“I was not always—I could not… I have told you all the truths that were mine to tell, but—”

That tore it. He was supposed to be her betrothed, her soon-to-be husband. He was the one who was supposed to be privy to her secrets, to be privileged to help her in times of need! “Pardon me, my lady, but have you any idea what kind of havoc those… limitations of yours have wrought on others? Limitations that, had they not been in place, had you not exempted me from them—me! the man you are planning on marrying, remember? Had you told me the truth—I might have been able to use the information to help you and limit the collateral damage!” By the time he had finished he was shaking with suppressed rage and frustration. He hadn’t felt so impotent, or so angry at his impotence since he’d stormed out of Valemont Manor.

They were still dancing, but their dance had almost turned into a mêlee. Angelique’s body was as hard as stone again, and she knew how to use it like a weapon. She twisted slightly, then drove the heel of her shoe into the arch of his foot in calculated retaliation.

“Done is done!” she’d said, snapping off the words with calculated precision. “I cannot change the choices I made then. I was simply doing the best I could, in the circumstances. Can you not respect that, or at least attempt to understand it?”

In retrospect, he couldn’t be proud of what he said next. It had ended the evening for them both. “Respect you,” he’d shot back, rather louder than he had intended. It attracted attention neither of them needed at that moment, and it wasn’t helpful. He lowered his voice, but what it lacked in volume was compensated for in sheer vitriol. “You want me to respect you for first lying to me, then leaving me to deal with the consequences? Those are the actions of a selfish child!”

She’d stiffened in his arms, reeling back and then forward again to hit him, hard! It showed him how the guards at Bishop-Florian must have felt that night. He’d been struck less forcefully by men.

The Paladins had closed ranks around Angelique after that, and a squad from their number had been dispatched to escort Sir Vincent Sultaire from the premises. After that, he had avoided their “society” and hers. He’d even stopped going to his flat. Thankfully, the Cooper trial was largely over, and after that, he’d completely dropped out of everything. Trish, a prostitute who’d known him since before he’d been collared, had taken pity on him and introduced him around The Rose & Woodbine. It was a safe place to lay low and think—or to drink and fuck. Same thing as far as he was concerned. The people there were simple and plainspoken. They were laborers: street sweeps, chimney sweeps, garbage collectors, cab drivers, dishwashers and launderers; the good, uncomplicated, illiterate folk that kept “society” running, and they were a blessed relief from the endless judgments and interrogations that characterized his most of his experience with his own class.

“Who’s the wicked, selfish, rotten crook who stole the Mâgun-Zak and why haven’t you caught him yet?”

“Why are you and Lady Blakesly having so many problems now that you’re engaged? You didn’t really love her, did you?”

“Why was David Cooper acquitted? He stole it, didn’t he? Why did you testify against the city-state and for him?”

They all wanted answers to the burning questions that filled up the gossip columns of the major dailies, and he was the one who was supposed to have them. He did have them, and there was another point with no point: There were answers, but he couldn’t reveal them. Not to anyone, not without betraying the one woman in the world that he still loved, in spite of himself—in spite of her! He hated himself for that. He loved a liar and was a liar. He hated the lies and the secrets because they were Angel’s lies and Angel’s secrets and his own honor demanded that he not betray her, even though she had betrayed him, again and again.

It was there that he always turned on himself, inner knives flashing. He was a con. He made money—a lot of money—playing both sides of the table. He hated that, too. He was a criminal mad at a criminal for acting like a criminal. It was all just another circle; another point with no point and no amount of cheap booze or cheaper sex could change the facts. Lacking any ideas better than those he’d found any other night, Vincent had once again filled himself with stale beer, grabbed the nearest willing whore, and dragged her off to his filthy room for a plunge into physical gratification and forgetfulness.

 

Iris lunged through shadows toward her nearest assailant, jerking him in front of her to intercept the knife his buddy had thrown. He grunted and sagged as the shock took him. The elbow she jammed into his ear assisted him to the ground. One of his partners closed the distance, another knife held low. She yanked the blade out of the dying man’s chest and drove it into the belly of the living. His knees collapsed beneath him, and she knew she’d remember the astonished look on his face for the rest of her life.

It occurred to her then that she had lately been spending too much time having to fight for her life in dirty alleys.

It had been her own fault, of course. When she’d armed the “dead man’s trigger” with the case file she’d stolen, she’d hoped it would keep Louis at bay for just long enough to hand the contents over to Raven, who by then should have been armed with the truth about her past and the choices she’d made. Instead, summer had ripened into autumn, then rotted toward winter without any change in the three-way standoff between Raven, Louis, and herself, and the dead man’s trigger had become a millstone around her neck.

Louis, blast his black, oily guts, was now using it to play her just as ruthlessly as she was playing him. Publicly, it had done its job and held Louis at bay. Privately, he’d used up a half-dozen hirelings in his thus-far frustrated attempts to recover that dossier, or her, whichever his thugs could get their hands on, first.

The next candidate in line for that honor lunged toward her, wearing a thick, padded coat and swinging a heavy cudgel. The blow caught Iris on her right thigh and knocked her into a stack of crates—packed crates, as it turned out. She crumpled to the frozen ground, dazed and heaving for air. The third attacker, a heavily built woman in a thick, padded coat, moved in for the knock-out blow.

Iris braced herself, but a stuttering crash from further down the alley forestalled disaster. Her two attackers jumped and whirled, weapons held at the ready to face a new threat, but Iris didn’t even pause to look. She leaped to her left, just barely scrambling past a patch of “black ice” before she slipped on it. Black ice was especially deadly for those who “worked the night shift” because it lie hidden in the dark places where the winter sun couldn’t quite penetrate, and was almost impossible to spot until it was too late.

“Gardammit!” the woman shouted, wheeling in pursuit. “Getter, y’ stupid pig!”

Stupid Pig growled something, but Iris was in the middle of heaving herself up to the first landing of a rusty, wrought-iron fire escape and had little time to spare for translation. The growl became a yelp of surprise, chopped short by a grunt of pain. Iris turned to see that the larger of the two figures (Stupid Pig, presumably) had measured his length out on the paving stones of the alleyway.

Cursing at him for his clumsiness, the woman lunged toward Iris. Her fate differed from her mate’s only in that he was there to break her fall.

Neither had seen the black ice.

Breathing heavily, Iris leaped back down to the street, cushioning her own fall with two prostrate bodies that whooshed satisfyingly when she landed. She slammed their heads into the ice-slicked cobblestones once for good measure. Their abrupt loss of motor control gave her a moment to catch her breath, and another to look over her attackers. She couldn’t see much detail of the face of the man she’d stabbed, and there was nothing in his pouch, or his dead mate’s, to distinguish them from any of the others Louis had hired.

A low groan signaled the return to consciousness of at least one of the two survivors. She turned to kick a knife out of the man’s meaty fist—some orcish ancestry there, from the look of him—and it clattered to a stop near a pile of broken pallets. That club also needed to go, and she lofted it further back into the alley, where it thunked hollowly a couple of times, then rolled to a stop.

“Hey. You two. Hold still,” she panted, her words crystallized in clouds of frozen steam, “I need you to tell your boss something. Tell him I’m enjoying this current case-lot of dumbshit he’s hired. You’re all making this so much easier.” From her sleeve she withdrew a small, thin plaque carved from whalebone, and tossed it toward them from between two gloved fingers. It sliced through the air to land corner down in a small, grimy pile of snow, and bore only the inked silhouette of an iris.

“You can give that to Louis,” Iris instructed, turning to go. “He can add it to his collection.”

She sidled out of the alley, and then half-sprinted, half-limped up one block to mount a drain spout on the side of the next building. Her leg had begun to throb, and the muscles across her shoulders ached, but there was no help for it. There were too many unanswered questions that kept her prowling the riverbanks at night.

Sure, she knew Louis was playing for time. The biggest question was, “time for what?”

The spreading bruise on her thigh reminded her of the most obvious answer: This armed truce simply could not last. As the late summer weeks lengthened into autumn, Iris felt as if she could almost sense Louis’ brooding, scheming thoughts surrounding Blakesly House and its lady like a pall. She was having to spend more hours prying into his business dealings at night, and that meant fewer hours for Lady Blakesly to delve further into what was going on out at Carlisle during the days. She needed something else to play against him, but he was forcing her to burn her candle at both ends to get it. Eventually, her body would simply give out from the strain.

Iris sighed, then slid carefully across the ledge created by the building’s cornice to reach her next objective. She liked simple solutions. If simply sticking a knife in his ribs would have done that, Louis Arnot would not have lived long enough to see the first snows fly.

No. Louis was a fat, steaming pile of complications, and murdering him would have done nothing but expose them, likely to Angel’s detriment. Iris didn’t care for the stilted formality of noble society in Fernwall, but even she had to admit that the food, the decor, and the smell were much better than she’d find anywhere else in this town.

She leaped back upon the iron fire escape ladder, clambering up it to the sharply peaked rooftops that characterized Fernwall’s seaport, harbor district, and riverways, loosely known as Docktown. Ships of all types and sizes were berthed end to end and side by side as far up and down the river as she could see. Their irregular shapes stood out in the light of the lamp posts on the piers, and they lumbered restlessly against one another in the wind that had arisen as the larger of the two moons had set. Only the distant stars remained above, their light too small and feeble to dispel the long tendrils of darkness that rolled like fog among the masts, stacks, shacks, and warehouses that spread out before her.

It was an hour for fell deeds, when the honest and the innocent locked their doors and huddled in their beds for protection. Iris knew she was neither. Thanks to that fuck-around drunkard Vincent Sultaire, she was also quite alone. The only protections she had now were the dead man’s trigger and her ability to out-think Louis.

Iris shook herself. The night was moving on, and recent events had added yet another reason to extend her nightly prowls: She needed to ascertain Raven’s position and intentions, preferably without him finding out about it.

She didn’t want to listen to the other voices inside her, clamoring in what was left of her heart. They cried out for her to find Raven, yes, but rather to throw herself on his mercy and beg for his help!

Why don’t you, Iris? You’ve got t’ try t’ reason with him, or maybe scream at him, or fight with him if that’s what you want—

Iris snarled as she jumped between rooftops, then yelped. Her injured leg collapsed beneath her and she tumbled down the far side of a peak, crumpling into an undignified pile along the raised frontage wall. It was all that had kept her from falling to her death on the street, three stories below.

“Fucking waste of skin,” Iris said, muttering in disgust at the thoughts and feelings that she could no longer ignore or control. Not since that awful public row with Vincent—Raven—at that fancy party at the Belton House. “Get mad, get drunk, shout ugly names, storm out, whore around—he’s a fucking spoiled, pampered child.” She got back to her feet slowly, wincing briefly when she put her right foot down. “Forget him. We’ve got work to do.”

Having put some needed distance between herself and the meat she’d left cooling in that alley, Iris took a much more decorous opportunity to drop down to street level, then changed direction, hiring an all night ferryman to take her across the river. Once safely onshore once more, she found another way up to the rooftops. The word on the street was that Fernwall’s most notorious con-turned-cop had taken up temporary residence at one of the dive bars in Merchants’. She wanted to see if she could ascertain which it was, at least, before the lateness of the hour forced her to make the long trek back to Blakesly House.

As was her habit, Iris used a “switchback”—doubling back on her own trail, but at a higher or lower elevation—to throw off tails she might have accumulated. None of the night-shifters disposed to violence would dare follow her above the north bank of the Caspian and into Angels to do their dirty work. The noble classes tended to get muscular when nasty things happened in their clean streets and pretty neighborhoods, and none of them liked finding dead bodies littering up their fine streets when the sun arose in the mornings. It was the kind of thing that would have them frothing at the mouth to put more money into law enforcement in an attempt to sweep all of South End into the bay. It was also the kind of response that the syndicate bosses and crime lords feared, and so they tended to keep their activities north of the river well under wraps. Anywhere south of that, Iris knew she was fair game for any of the night’s predators that might be foolish enough to make a try for her.

Once reasonably sure she’d not been followed, Iris made her way back toward the river near “The Poleman”. It was a dive favored by the men and women who moved the barges up and down the Caspian River, and it perched on slanted timbers like a squat, fat vulture leering out over the river delta, waiting for the next tasty corpse to float by. The locals said, “Ye’ll know The Poleman’s open from two streets over,” and so it held this night. Iris heard the drunken songs, the shouting, the fights, and rowdy games long before she laid eyes on the place, and dawn was only three hours away.

She paused briefly to orient herself, then clambered down a stack of pallets to the street. Her sharp ears quickly picked up the sickening, unmistakable sounds of fists pounding into flesh, of bones breaking, of a fragile, mortal body being smashed, over and over, into stone, and she stepped further back into the shadows.

Whoa. Not my cuppa, thanks anyway. Having no desire to crash anyone else’s party at this late hour, Iris picked her way around where she thought the fight had to be, trying to stay out of sight until she was clear. As she watched, two large figures—they might have been Louis’, for all she knew—emerged from a gap between a pair of ramshackle out-buildings, glancing and skulking so furtively it almost made her laugh out loud. The mirth died in her throat when she saw the blood trickling thickly onto the paving stones, glinting dully in a street lamp’s distant glow.

She knew it was blood, though she couldn’t have explained how she knew it, nor how she knew that the freezing air would have slowed the flow already, had the victim been dead. Curious now, Iris slipped across the alleyway and waited for her eyes to adjust, eventually locating the small, crumpled form partially covered with old tarps and the remnants of a broken barrel. Kneeling, she searched for a pulse, trying first a wrist—a woman’s wrist—and then at her neck. The skull had been cracked behind the left ear, or so it seemed. Then the head shifted, rolling facial features into the light. Iris’s body went rigid with surprise and recognition.

Police Inspector Barbara Cole. What in Menelon brought you here at this time of night?

 

The Rose & Woodbine Tavern, Merchants
16 Vilmath, 580

 

Commissioner Hal Roland burst through the flimsy door of the hovel in which his most truant problem child was known to hide. It hadn’t finished splintering before the he grabbed the edge of the mattress and heaved, up ending said problem child and onto the whore with whom he spent the night onto the floor in a mess of smelly blankets and tangled limbs.

“You’re done here,” he told the girl gruffly, jerking his head toward the now-permanent opening where the door had been. “If you didn’t get your money up front, go back to hooker school. Go on, get out.” He barely spared her a glance as she scrambled for her clothing and left. Hal Roland had a reputation among his cops as a man one never wanted to anger, or to be around when someone else had been foolish enough to do so. He wasn’t particularly known for shortness of temper, nor was he extraordinarily tall or muscular. Though he’d never win a beauty contest he wasn’t all that frightening of countenance, either. When he was moved to anger, however, he had a bearing that could melt stone walls. That morning, he was angry in that “simmering just under the boil” way that threatened to explode all over the first wise-assed word to come out of young Sultaire’s mouth.

“Geez! You could have knocked!” Vincent obliged, from somewhere beneath the remains of his bed.

“I did,” Roland said, snarling and brushing splinters of wood from his suit jacket. He waited with the coiled tension of a predator while the younger man clawed his way out of the wreckage, then slapped him in the head with a thick file folder for his pains.

“While you’ve been indulging yourself in your latest temper tantrum, the rest of us have been trying to cover your ass,” he said, shouting down an irritated protest from his hungover charge. Weeks of repressed rage and frustration erupted right in the middle of Vincent’s hangover and Roland let him have it without mercy. “Including Barbara Cole—remember her?—who was attacked and nearly beaten to death last night, all in the line of a duty she wasn’t qualified to fulfill, and right now I’m about one breath away from snapping a real collar around your neck and hauling you back to the city auction block!” With a disgusted sneer, he slammed the folder down on the only other intact piece of furniture left in the room, an unfinished wooden stool.

“Wha…? Cole? Where? Why?” The younger man demanded, fumbling with blankets and sheets and bits of clothing all at once.

Roland watched him for two heartbeats. “The information’s in there,” he growled, gesturing with thick fingers at the bound stack of paperwork. “Preliminary report’s on top. What ain’t in there is that she’d been at The Poleman to make contact with a bargeman who smuggled things up and down river he wasn’t supposed to, or so he said. That was the last anyone at headquarters heard from her. Hours later—now, get this—a young woman with short, black hair and dressed in a dark blue bodysuit—desk sergeant thinks she’s a mercenary—turns up at Docktown Precinct Three to tell them about the soon-to-be corpse. She gave the exact location—two blocks up from The Poleman—and a rough description of the two suspects and then disappeared. The blue jackets found Cole less than fifteen minutes later, in time to rush her over to the closest healer’s hospice and save her life.”

A young woman with short blue black hair and dressed in dark blue… Vincent stared at him for a heartbeat, then nearly twisted his ankle slipping on sheets and blankets to get to the folder. Word of a woman fitting that description had made the rounds lately: the dark blue suit, the short, irregularly cut hair…

“Name!” he blurted, ripping open the folder. “Do we have a name yet? The Poleman…” he mumbled, riffling through the file. “She saved a cop? Cole…?” This wasn’t making any sense, but if Cole had risked her life tracking that lead down, it had to have been important.

“And you think this woman, whoever she is, knows more about who attacked Cole? Agreed. All right. I’m on it,” he said, mumbling absently to Roland as he riffled through the papers for answers. “If she’s involved in the things the rumor mill is wearing out its bearings over, then she’s part of what’s causing all the unrest locally, too.”

The grizzled old cop managed to swallow about half the ire he hadn’t yet expressed. “Unrest hell! We’re headed for a trap war, which you’d know if you’d weren’t so busy feeling sorry for yourself. You’re the only cop I’ve got left who has the contacts to find that woman whoever she is, and figure out how to stop her. Be in my office in two hours to tell me how you’re going to straighten this mess up,” he ordered, adding, “clean and sober!” on his way out.

 

Police Headquarters, Merchants’ Quarter

 

The office was musty and cold. The brazier had been neither lit nor cleaned, nor the floor swept in at least a month. His inbox was crammed to overflowing with reports, notes, calling cards (many from Angelique, that he tossed aside unopened), letters to “Chief Inspector Sultaire” and so on. He’d even managed to miss a few court dates, which he found laughable: a crook giving testimony, with a police officer’s authority, on another crook? Perhaps the only saving grace to that particular point of idiocy was that Urilian judges were notoriously hard to convince of anything, whether it was guilt or innocence.

In any event, and to his surprise, despite his gruff exterior Roland had apparently covered for him. The official excuse was that he’d been ill, and everybody in this building knew that it had been just that: an excuse.

“Well!” an inspector named Braddock had snarked as they passed in the hall. “I see the last round of ale therapy agreed with you. Back to work, then?”

“I was actually looking for the tap,” Vincent had tossed right back. “Regular administration, you know? Wouldn’t want to relapse. You should try it some time.”

Braddock’s response stopped just short of insubordination, and he wasn’t alone. Cold shoulders and backward glances followed him all the way to his office. Everyone knew about the attack on Barbara Cole, and there was no escaping the connection between that and his absence of late. In their minds, her blood was on his hands. He more or less agreed, so he didn’t order a clerk to build his fire or fetch more badly needed coffee. He saw to it all himself, useful skills he’d once been taught as “punishment chores” by his incensed father. Now, they were just a bit of self-imposed penance, a pittance offered in contrition for his sins.

Once his office was put to rights, Vincent sat down at his desk to pour through the contents of the rather thick file Roland had left with him. It included not only the attack on Cole, but also information on all of the other cases he had been ignoring while living at the The Rose & Woodbine Tavern. Of particular interest was the packet that contained a copy of the official court record of the Cooper show trial. Skimming through it, Vincent found that he remembered it vividly.

“Sir Vincent, in your investigation of the defendant, did you find any evidence that the Mâgun-Zak was in, or ever had been in, Goodman Cooper’s possession?” Cooper’s attorney had asked. The prosecution had just put an “expert” on the stand, claiming that such rare artifacts as the Zak were always hot items, so it had probably been sold within an hour “of the defendant having stolen it.” Since he was a cop, Vincent was supposed to have played along with the charade. That was how it was always done, but he’d had no intention of playing along.

“Since Goodman Cooper doesn’t even have a bank account,” Vincent had replied, using the opportunity to take a shot at the previous witness’s biased testimony, “I would have thought the prosecution’s expert witness might have explained just how a man who has never stolen anything worth more than a few hundred crowns or so suddenly learned how to hide ‘close on a million’ in hard currency, in his little flat—”

“Objection!” the City State’s prosecutor had looked livid. This was not going according to the Law Enforcement Committee’s script!

“Sir Vincent,” the court’s chief justice had said calmly, “this is not the place for sarcasm. Stick to the facts, please.” She’d then cast Vincent a hard look, one that was mirrored by the two other judges at the bench. He’d scored.

“None,” he’d replied flatly, turning back to the question. “Nor is there any evidence that he was at the scene that night. In fact, I can’t even find a witness who will testify they’ve ever seen him enter the building—in his life!” The prosecutor had looked like he wanted to knife Vincent for that one.

“Oh come now, Sir Vincent!” Cooper’s lawyer looked as if someone had handed him all his Winterfest gifts at once, wrapped in gold foil. “Everyone makes at least one trip to Bishop Florian Hall. It’s a city landmark!”

That had provided an opportunity for Vincent to drive the knife into this travesty of justice and be done with it. “Obviously, you have as little idea about how the poor in this city live as the prosecutor over there. David Cooper lives in a small one-room flat. Not exactly the kind of digs one would expect for a thief able to afford the kind of magitech needed to defeat the security surrounding the Zak. Further, his legal history is long, making it possible to work out, at least loosely, what his average annual income has been for, oh, the last ten years or so. With a few exceptions, it’s been less than five hundred pounds, yearly. Again, not exactly the kind of income necessary to buy or rent the magitech horsepower he needed to defeat the best security money can buy, or even to turn in the kinds of circles where such contacts can be found.

“The poor can’t afford club memberships any more than they can afford sight seeing trips to Bishop Florian Hall. Nor can they afford the kinds of personal trainers who teach special forces grade, hand-to-hand combat—and Cooper was never in the military,” Vincent had added, though of course these were things that everyone knew. It was part of the theater of justice—or perhaps “injustice”—that the courts had become in Fernwall. By stating the obvious, he got it written into the transcripts of the trial. That prevented the realities of poverty from being completely overlooked merely because they made the fat aristocrats that ran the legal system uncomfortable.

“And why would such highly specialized training be required?” Cooper’s lawyer had asked, encouraging his new star witness to elaborate at will.

“Four armed guards were taken down in close quarters without a sound being made. They were not killed. As the prosecution’s witnesses have already testified and the facts show, they were incapacitated, and incapacitating a victim is considerably more difficult than killing him,” Vincent had explained, barely checking his own impatience. “Yet, the thief risked the increase in difficulty rather than killing, which means the thief not only had the requisite skills, but had them at a level that let him or her feel comfortable taking on the increased risks associated with at least three perfectly silent take-downs in quick succession. The prosecution is right to state that Goodman Cooper’s record shows that he never kills, but to extrapolate from the lack of deaths involved in his thefts that he therefore possesses the training of a veteran special forces operative—or master assassin—is a leap too far.”

It had been enough. Cooper had neither the skills nor the money to commit the crime of which he had been accused. The trial had ended pretty much as Vincent and Roland had known it would. The prosecution’s flimsy circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough. Cooper was found not guilty of the Mâgun-Zak theft.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that the hunt was still on for the ancient dwarven artifact and it seemed everybody had a way to make use of the popular crisis of the day. Officially, little to no progress had been made on finding either it or the real thief, and the political ramifications were building almost as fast as the trouble in the traps. The head of the Committee on Law Enforcement in the House of Commons was screaming her bloody head off, and so was old Henry Craigmont, Duke of Trobiere. Amusing though he found it, the political screeching wasn’t the real problem.

People nobody cared about were being killed and wounded at an alarming rate, simply because they were in the way—that was the real problem.

He turned to Barbara Cole’s notes. They were extensive but incomplete, and so practically useless. Cole had been snooping about in “River Trap”, a part of town that extended about a kilometer around The Poleman. River Trap was where one went to move goods in and out of the city quietly. So far, so good, but traps were called “traps” for a reason: They kept insiders inside, but they also kept outsiders outside—once someone got inside they were “blood” and there was no going back. Betrayal of your trap was a death sentence. If someone wasn’t “blood” they weren’t getting access, end of discussion. Questions by strangers weren’t appreciated. If someone got too nosy, they ended up like Cole.

On the surface it seemed simple, but it wasn’t. While trap culture changed slowly, political structures in a trap could change overnight, especially at the street level. Every time the police made an arrest, shut down a smuggling operation, or closed off a supply line, the effects rippled out like a rock thrown into a pond. Very real and usually very poor people lost well-loved and much-needed family members, or a living, or their social status within the trap, and sometimes all three at once.

Bureaucrats and society busybodies called such operations things like “cleaning up the town”, or “sending a message to the criminal elements that they can’t operate with impunity”, or “making our city safe for our children.” Such heavy-handed law enforcement did none of those things, as anybody who had lived among the poor well knew. One thing it did do was make the traps very dangerous places for the uninitiated until a new equilibrium was established.

That’s what troubled Vincent about Cole’s attack. The killings and beatings were happening so fast that equilibrium couldn’t be achieved. The normal political power structures in the traps were breaking down, leading to violence which led to greater destabilization and more violence in a vicious spiral of distrust that typically ended in a trap war.

The burning question was: Why? What set this off in the first place? Was it really the hunt for the ’Zak? and if so, just who was doing the hunting, and the killing?

He tried cross-referencing Cole’s notes with other police activity that could have set River Trap on edge and came up with… nothing! There were a couple of seemingly unrelated sightings of a woman matching the description of Cole’s savior. One was from a beggar posing as a match seller, who claimed he saw her scale a warehouse wall. In another report he found a dock worker who thought he’d seen someone matching her description streak across Telladi-Pelletier Boulevard at the south end of Beacon Bridge. The only piece of information containing any possible relevance to the violence was a strange report about unknown sex workers frequenting the bars that the bargemen were known to patronize. The odd thing in that report was that the supposed prostitutes spent a lot of time cozying up to these equally unknown patrons, only to leave by the main door, rather than the bedroom door. In and of itself, it was a small thing, but small things had a way of setting off big things in a trap full of people who were already living on the edge. He filed that little tidbit of information away for future reference.

In a way, what he found and didn’t find relieved him. Commissioner Roland knew first hand the result that law enforcement activity had on those who lived in the traps. Officially, his internal police policy had been not to interfere unless absolutely necessary, and then to use as light a hand as possible, but something had River Trap, in particular, teetering on a knife’s edge. Just last night, one man had been killed outright and another died hours later from a knife wound in the belly. Why hadn’t the deaths at least triggered retaliatory killings?

He turned back to the file on Cole’s attack. A couple of uniformed officers had been working nearby and had filed reports. One was from a nearby shopkeeper, who told an officer one of the dead men had been around earlier that evening asking after a woman matching the same general description as Cole’s savior. The deceased had told the shopkeeper he had “something to discuss” with her, and had even offered money in exchange for the information.

So, there’s outside money being thrown around. That’s guaranteed to set trap folks’ teeth on edge. Nice, but not particularly useful.

In fact, there was very little useful in any of it. There was only one conclusion he could draw: The victims and the assailant—presumably the same dark-garbed woman as Cole’s savior—were outsiders. That’s why there had not been any retaliatory killings. It might also be the reason a trap war had looked imminent for weeks but had not yet started. There were “strange folk about” and more outsider deaths than insider deaths. The traps were confused, but also cautious. Nobody wanted a trap war. Nobody.

He sat back and stared into the fire thoughtfully. Had Cole been investigating River Trap because she had believed there was a correlation between the violence in River Trap and the Mâgun-Zak? Did she believe that it was there, or that someone in River Trap knew where it was, or where it had gone? If so, on that score Vincent was fairly certain she was wrong. An artifact as valuable as the Mâgun-Zak would not be found anywhere in the South End, never mind in River Trap. If there had been any serious negotiations going on about moving such a valuable item out of the city through the river trap underground, he’d have heard about it.

Upon further reflection, he had to admit that while he had his head stuck in an ale barrel, half the city could have disappeared and he might have missed it. In any event, it was safe to conclude that Cole had unknowingly stepped onto a battlefield where all sides had marked her as an enemy. The result was as inevitable as was the only possible conclusion: There were new players in town, players that either didn’t know about the local rules or didn’t care about them.

That description might have fit Angelique to a tee, but he’d made it his business to know that she had done little but attend to church and baronial matters since he’d caught her sneaking back into her own bedroom that night. So, who was this woman stalking through the traps, and who or what was after her?

 

Commissioner Roland’s door was open when Vincent arrived. He was facing a wall in his office, fussing over a cabinet lock.

“Unless you have a thief in the house, a key usually works best, boss,” he drawled, crossing over to Roland’s liquor cabinet.

“Maybe a locksmith. You might remember that we try to keep thieves in pens downstairs,” Roland said, giving him a very unhappy look. “This damn thing’s rusty, that’s all. And you keep your nose out of that, you’re not even dried out yet, dammit.” He turned to pluck the glass from Vincent’s hand, then slammed it upside down on the tray. “You got a lot of credibility to earn back around here. From now on, that only happens when you’re sober.”

Vincent paused in the act of unstoppering a bottle, then thought better of it and reached for the coffee pot, instead. None of this was going to be easy, but he’d asked for—no, he’d demanded—the freedom to do as he wished with his life when he’d stormed out of his father’s house. Now came the part he’d never wanted to face: the responsibility.

What was that about being pulled into the vortex, ol’ boy?

“I know I have a lot of apologies to make, and I know I’m indebted to you.” Vincent turned to face the older man and tried to smile. “You could have sold me out and nobody would have blamed you. Even me.”

Roland allowed himself to be mollified, if only a little. The younger man had charm enough, but not even his uncustomary candor could dispel the weight of the burdens on the older man’s broad shoulders. He shrugged that off and gestured Vincent toward a chair. “Had no one to blame but myself, son. I took you on as a personal responsibility, and that effectively tied my career to your sentence. I haven’t done such a great job of it. I’m just sorry Cole’s the one who had to pay the price.”

Vincent stared at the steam rising from his coffee for a long minute before answering. “You… can put that one on my shoulders too, Chief. If I had…”

He stopped and suddenly stood back up. If you’d what? If you’d not been duped by Angelique? If you’d sold her out? He walked over to the windows, and stared down at the streets. They had been his home for seven, going on eight years. He knew things about this city that no cop, nobleman, or politician would ever know, and what had he done with that knowledge? Damned little! Sure, he had conned some crooked business owners out of the money they were bilking out of the locals—and had turned a nice profit in the process—but so what? He hadn’t changed anything. The poor were still poor, and truth to tell, most of them were proud to be what they were. They didn’t want money, his or anybody else’s. They wanted work and the dignity that came with honest work. They wanted fair pay to provide for their families. It was the kind of thing the Raven couldn’t provide, and no amount of sympathizing on his part was going to help. If he was ever going to make a difference, to find a point to all this, he had to do something differently, and that had to begin now.

“If I had done the job you asked me to do, it probably wouldn’t have happened, and you probably wouldn’t be looking at a trap war for your troubles,” he finally managed to say, glancing over at his warden once before turning back to the street. “If you have any other officers in the traps, I’d suggest you get them out before it happens to them, because it will.”

“Give me an alternative.” Roland’s voice slashed through his half-voiced reverie. “You’re supposed to be the Raven. Give me a choice!”

Vincent walked slowly back to his chair, sat down, and met Roland’s gaze. “The MARCUS Agency,” he said. “Maybe Rubiyet’s. They’ve got the manpower, and inside access to the kind of information needed to do what needs to be done without triggering trap-wide violence.”

Roland’s jaw clenched, and he got up to close his office door, effectively rendering whatever was said next “off the record”. He and his department had tangled with MARCUS agents from time to time over the years, and there were bruises on both sides to show for it.

“MARCUS is a private agency. They’re not servants to anyone or anything but Goodman Marcus’ bottom line. If his people wanted to be involved, they’d be all over it already. Thing is, they know what shit smells like and they’ve got the gods-given good sense to stay out of it. Gaust is too stupid to risk anywhere near that part of town, and Cole’s damned near dead. Unless I want to use the assignment as an indirect way to kill off useless time-servers like Braddock and his cronies, I got no one else.

“That just leaves you and me,” he said, concluding the refutation by collapsing into his loudly-protesting chair. “You read the file. Lady Emilia isn’t going to stand between us and that fat-mouthed Trobiere forever. I’m frankly surprised she hasn’t summoned us both up to Angel Heights to rake us over the coals. She can’t wait all that much longer for you to extract your head from your ass, Vince, and neither can I. So, if you’re going, we’re going together—and we’re rolling for the whole house.”

In plain language, Roland was telling him that he was prepared to ignore the legal limits, to accept the risks involved, to do what needed to be done to take down as much of Fernwall’s criminal underworld as necessary to set this right.

Vincent gave him a long, hard look. Being the son of a baron, even the youngest son, he knew just how ugly power games could get, especially when they were played for territory. That’s exactly what Fernwall’s Police Chief was saying he was willing to risk: not just a trap war, but a city wide turf war!

In his rush to leave his father, Vincent was also leaving power and wealth as he understood them. He’d since learned the hard way that he’d just run from one form to another. In the end, power was power, markets were markets, and capital was capital. All the rest, the fancy titles and tall buildings and the expensive suits, those were just the window dressing that made the nobility and aristocracy feel better about themselves.

On the other side of it, the generosity to the poor in the traps made the crime lords and gang leaders feel better about themselves. It was all a game that was played with human lives even if it didn’t kill, and sometimes it did. In a turf war, there would most certainly be killing. With the traps already on edge, it would only take one mistake to set off a conflagration that could cover the city from Three Quarters to South End.

“This could get away from everyone in a hurry, boss. You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked, his voice still quiet.

The weight of his years seemed to settle on him abruptly, and Roland suddenly looked old. “What a question,” he rasped. “I came into this job with the personal mission to make law enforcement less burdensome for the vast majority of working day folk in this city. Used to be, the old-time crime bosses felt the same way—they did their crimes, but everyone knew the rules, and they never made it harder on the locals. The end of the war changed all that. The war profiteers have found a way to exploit everything they can get their hands on, and most of it his happening in parts of the city-state that I can’t see. Things have gotten so much worse for everyone that at least one of them can arrange for the theft of the Zak, and make an attempt to frame Cooper for it. Not content with that, they’ve moved on to beatings and murders in River Trap and are managing to keep South End on edge.

“Now, a few months ago,” Roland went on, leaning back in his chair tiredly, “I sent a cop out to investigate the theft of the Mâgun-Zak. It was all going along more or less according to schedule when that cop—you—dropped his line of investigation like a hot poker. You held yourself together long enough, just barely, to keep Cooper out of a collar, and then you disappeared. When you resurfaced, it was just long enough to have a huge public fight with the only noblewoman in this city besotted enough with you to agree to marry you. Then you ditched again.”

The silence around them built for several moments while Vincent braced himself for the inevitable conclusion. “I’m an old cop, Vince,” Roland finally said. “I know a causality chain when I see one. You dropped the investigation because you discovered who did it and you could not make the arrest. You couldn’t even let Cole or Gaust do it. Why? Because you felt compelled to protect the real thief’s identity. That’s easy.

“The list of persons for whom you would be willing to compromise yourself and your sentence? Extremely short, I’d say, and there would have to be some pretty hefty extenuating circumstances.”

Roland paused in his recounting, underscoring those last words and their significance with silence before he continued. “And, that’s about as far as I’ve been willing to think it over. I’ve got a lot of important people screaming at me to find the ’Zak, or failing that, they’d like me to collar the one who stole it. Thing is? They’re just as gods-be-damned indiscriminate about ruined lives as that crime boss is, and I’ve had all I can stomach of the pack of ’em. All they really want is a scapegoat, another fancy show trial to make things right all around. I swore an oath to protect and serve the parliament and the people of this city-state. The best way to do that as I see it is to stop this trap war before it starts.

“You asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this?” Roland stood up from his chair, knuckles planted as he leaned over the top of his desk. “Yeah. I’m sure. You’re my last trump, Vince. Make it right.”

The younger man swallowed hard, wondering at how wildly Roland differed from his father. Both men were angry, but unlike his father’s rages, Roland’s ire was pointed at things that mattered, at injustice and cruelty, at corrupted power, and at the notion of disposable people. He was angry at the same things that made Vincent angry. He just came at it from a different angle.

When he had left his office, Vincent had known this case was big. Now he had a better idea of how just how big it was, and how far into that old vortex he’d been drawn, but he saw no way out. If there was a way out it had to be down, right down into it. Down was the only way left he could go.

“Then get your people out,” he said standing up, “and I’ll need my tools back.” He offered Roland his hand, meeting the older man’s gaze and holding it, his own steady. There was no arrogance in his eyes, but no fear either. He was in a place he’d never been before: over the edge with a perfectly clear mind.

Roland clasped his hand, looked into Raven’s eyes, then nodded once. “I’ll send a couple of ’cruits down to the vault for the trunk. Anything else?”

“Get a few body bags ready,” Vincent said. “It’s time a few of the right people started dying.”