Canticle

Erlund looked surprised. “Dead? Our best scouts couldn’t touch them. How is this possible?”

Lysias shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but the captain that served as his aide had awakened him with the note. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ve dispatched a wagon to bring the bodies back. They were Marshers, just like the letter indicated. They died on their feet, and according to Captain Syskus they are uninjured beyond minor cuts and scrapes.”

Erlund thought for a moment, his spoon pausing midway to mouth. “I will want the House Surgeon’s thorough report,” he said.

Lysias nodded. Perhaps that crafty old cutter could find some trace of whatever magick the assassins had employed. He’d seen nothing like it in all his years, and it hearkened back to ancient history lessons in the Academy, tales of yore from the days before the Age of Laughing Madness when the Wizard Kings ruled the Old World with their Blood Guard and their spells of dark power, brokered in the Beneath Places under the earth. “You shall have it, Lord.”

“Good.” The Overseer spooned the gray, steaming oats into his mouth and chased it with what looked like honeyed lemon beer. “When do you think it will be safe to return to Carthos?”

Lysias had thought about this, knowing the answer he was about to give would not sit well. “I don’t,” he said. “I think staying here is more defensible.”

Erlund shook his head, putting down his tankard. “I’ll not hide here much longer, Lysias. Esarov and his intellectual troublemakers need to know that they have failed and that the Delta’s Overseer is very much alive and in power.”

In this, he is like his uncle. Lysias felt frustration brewing within him and forced his voice not to show it. “It is not prudent, Lord. The city-states are no longer safe for you. At the very least, have Ignatio put another double in your palace until we know more of the nature of this threat.”

Erlund’s eyes narrowed. “General Lysias?” he asked, his voice low.

Lysias met his eyes and held them. “Yes, Lord?”

“When have you ever been able to sway me from what I considered to be the right path?”

Lysias finally looked away and in doing so, accepted the rebuke. “Never, Lord.” But it may yet be your undoing, he thought. It had certainly undone Sethbert.

“Very well.” The Overseer then changed the subject deftly. “And what news from the cities?”

“Samael and Calapia are stabilizing with the increased troops enforcing martial law,” he said. “Berande will secede within the month, regardless of what we do.” Erlund looked up at this, his eyes betraying his question before his mouth could speak it. Lysias continued. “The governor there has no will to resist, and the people are calling for elections, echoing the Reformist rhetoric about the original Charter of Unity and the Settlers’ original intent.”

When those first founders had established their cities, they’d formed a document that, as everything else, had evolved into something entirely different. Of course, these were the early days when the Androfrancines were a fledgling company with its ragged ash-hued army carving out a fortress in the deep woods of the Second River’s isolated valley. Every noble on the Delta learned that charter inside and out from boyhood.

Erlund growled. “Idealist rubbish. This unrest is not about liberty or enforcing some naive interpretation of a charter intended for another time.” Anger flashed in the Overseer’s eyes. “This unrest is a looking backward to better, simpler times in the face of economic decline and abject poverty.” He waited a moment, as if deciding whether or not to say what was on his mind. Then, he said it. “My uncle brought this about when he destroyed Windwir and took us into war against the Gypsies and the Marshers.”

There was a light tap at the door, and Erlund tapped a small brass bell. It rang clear and the door opened. His aide stepped inside. “Lord Erlund, your next appointment is here.”

Erlund nodded and leaned forward. “Ignatio,” he said. “With his intelligence briefing.”

Another similarity to Sethbert, Lysias thought, keeping the military and intelligence compartmentalized. Erlund was brutally careful in this, so much so that if the bird hadn’t come directly to Lysias with its warning, he had no doubt that Erlund’s man, Ignatio, would have handled the evacuation and the manhunt. Erlund would have insisted on it.

“Thank you for your time, Lord Erlund,” he said. As he turned to the door, he saw the dark-robed spymaster. Ignatio was Erlund’s own man. He’d had Sethbert’s spymaster killed early on, not trusting him to take well to the new administration. Ignatio was the illegitimate son of a Franci arch-scholar, and it gave him an edge. Even now, his eyes moved over the room and over Lysias. And as Lysias moved past him, a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.

“General Lysias,” he said. “I heard your men found the attackers. That is most excellent.” It was a message, Lysias realized: I heard.

Of course you heard it, Lysias thought. But he smiled. “It is fortuitous.”

Ignatio bowed slightly and entered the room, taking the seat that Lysias had stood from. Lysias left, making his way through the wide hallways of the hunting lodge until he found the landing and the staircase that would lead him to the front doors. He had a desk covered in reports waiting for his review, and he made mental note to have his closest officers cull the ranks again for any of Ignatio’s spies. They would be shipped out to enforce martial law, and some night in the weeks ahead, they would go out on patrol and not return.

Ignatio was shameless in his espionage, and try as he might, Lysias was unable to even those odds. For the past seven months, there had been strange goings-on between Ignatio and Erlund. Lysias had glimpsed it again and again. An entire basement had been quickly absorbed by the intelligence officer’s men, and a week ago, six of those men had been killed, their bodies hauled out beneath blood-soaked sheets to disappear wherever it was that Ignatio had made a hundred other bodies go. And as much as it had distressed the spymaster, it enraged Erlund. Lysias had reports of black-cloaked riders sent out from Erlund’s private guard, spies that hunted north, west and east. Those that rode east had still not returned.

As he left the hunting lodge and made for the nearby barracks, Lysias tried to look at the sky and find something beautiful in the crisp winter day. It had rained, melting the last night’s snow quickly, and the morning smelled like pine needles and loam.

Maybe I am too old for this work now. He hadn’t felt that way before Windwir, and especially before leading those guards into Sethbert’s bedchambers to arrest the madman. He’d felt it then, the weariness creeping up on him; he had not equated it with age. But the capstone was when his own daughter took up with a Secessionist librarian, fleeing with him to Parmona when that city threw down its governor and his brigades. That was the day he first felt old. And the look in her eye that last time he saw her, so much like her mother, sparked another feeling within him that he desperately wished to misplace. But these days, he carried it around with him and it weighed him down; he could not defeat it despite the strategy and forces he mustered.

I have helped to make this happen.

Pushing back that sudden stab of guilt, General Lysias grabbed hold of what had always sustained him in times past.

He was, after all, first and foremost a man of duty.

Rudolfo

Rudolfo stood in his dressing room and let that moment of silence and stillness wash him. He’d spent much of the day dispatching birds and discussing his investigation strategy with Captain Philemus. Sometime in the night or early morning they expected return birds as they probed the Forest Gypsy’s slight but effective network of spies and informants elsewhere in the Named Lands. He anticipated their news, but there were other birds coming-birds that he did not look forward to once Turam’s ailing king learned of his only heir’s demise.

Between the birds and Philemus, he’d also managed to sit long enough to hear the Physician’s report on his autopsy of the one Marsher already cooling in the ice house. It was perplexing news.

“I’ve seen nothing like it,” the Physician told him, and the River Woman next to him nodded her agreement. “His heart gave out, along with the rest of his organs.”

Rudolfo had made the first suggestion that came to mind. “Poison, then?”

But the Physician shook his head. “I think it was the blood magicks.”

Hours later, the puzzle stayed with him and he sighed, looking to the dressing room’s one small window to gauge the day’s remains. It would be dark soon, and he still needed to sit with Winters, discuss his strategy and hear her thoughts before she left tomorrow with her people. He did not envy the path ahead of her.