Thief's covenant

“How many of you,” the sergeant asked, surveying the room as a whole, “are up on the latest gossip?”

Several Guardsmen exchanged glances and guiltily raised their hands.

“Was Lemarche still involved with Adrienne Satti?”

“Last I heard, yes, sir,” one of them replied.

“Find her. Now.”

They failed; no matter how they tried, they found no trace of the woman among the dead. Chapelle nodded with each report, his expression growing ever more certain.

Damned aristocrats! He could have told them it would end badly, with her. Although, he admitted to himself, I didn't expect it would go this badly.

“We'll have these bodies picked up, gathered, and…reassembled as best as possible,” Chapelle told his men. “I'm fairly certain I know what's happened, but we have to identify them, all of them, to be sure.

“I also need a volunteer,” the sergeant barked as his men fell eagerly in line to depart. “Someone to stay behind and ensure the room's not disturbed until the clean-up workers arrive.”

Julien Bouniard moved forward, arm half-raised, only to fall back-eyes and mouth agape, obviously shocked to the core-as a blond-haired figure appeared before him.

“I'll stay, sir,” volunteered Henri Roubet, a constable some few years older than Julien himself.

Chapelle quirked an eyebrow. “Resting Roubet,” the others in the unit called him. “When Roubet volunteers” was, so far as they were concerned, roughly analogous to “When pigs fly,” or “When hell freezes over.”

Well, perhaps the surrounding scene of depravity had kindled some residual spark of responsibility in the man. Be a shame to squelch it before it could spread.

“Very well, Roubet. You're on watch. I don't imagine you'll be waiting too terribly long; shouldn't be more than half an hour. Report to the main office when you've been relieved.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Chapelle pivoted on his heel and marched from the room, grateful to be away. Julien Bouniard fell in line with his compatriots, but his expression remained thoughtful, his thoughts clearly on the man who stayed behind.

“Well, that's just dandy!” the young woman spat under her breath as the guards sorted through the ledger below. “What kind of secret cult keeps written records, can you tell me that?”

Judging by the sudden sense of disapproval-the emotional equivalent of a saddened headshake-she was fairly certain he couldn't.

“Don't you have any say over the doings of your own worshippers? Because I've got to tell you, the way they were running this thing…”

Her throat closed and her eyes widened, first in surprise at hearing the name “Adrienne Satti” spoken by the gravel-voiced sergeant, and then in mounting horror as the implications sank home. A hole opened in the pit of her stomach, just wide and deep enough for her soul to drop slowly and painfully through it. She watched, barely comprehending, as the bulk of the Guardsmen departed, leaving a trail of bloody bootprints in the corridor beyond the chamber door.

“Oh, gods…” Not even a whisper, now, but the faintest susurrus of exhaled breath. “Oh, gods, they think I did this!” For the second time in an hour, she had to blink hard to keep the tears from falling. “How could they possibly think…” Adrienne felt, once again, a touch of sympathy in the back of her mind.

“This is your fault!” she exploded at him, her fear turned suddenly to anger. “If you hadn't stopped me from going down to them, I could have explained it! I could have told them what really happened! Now it's too late! I-”

“Had better come down from there right now, Mademoiselle Satti, before I am forced to shoot you down.”

Adrienne froze, cursing her own stupidity. She peered downward, past the dusty beams on which she lay, past the horned form of the god. The remaining Guardsman looked up at her, an odd expression plastered across his scruffy face. His rapier hung sheathed at his left hip, but in his right fist he clenched a gleaming flintlock pistol-a Guard-issued special with a frame molded of brass rather than wood, reinforced to function as a brutally efficient head-breaker. In her youth, before the aristocracy, Adrienne had more than once been on the butt-end of those so- called bash-bangs.

But rarely had she stared so squarely down the barrel of one.

“I'm not going to ask a second time,” the Guardsman warned.

Adrienne slid off the beam. Limber as a double-jointed cat, she swung from the nearest horn and clambered down the statue without pausing for breath (or to acknowledge her incorporeal partner's sudden squawk of indignation at having his likeness used as a stepladder). In seconds, Adrienne stood upon the blood-slick floor.

Frowning thoughtfully, the Guardsman took a moment to examine his catch, difficult as she was to see beneath the filth and caked blood. She looked to be maybe fifteen, give or take a year or two; still somewhere in that nether realm between childhood and womanhood. Her hair, to judge by the few unsoiled strands he could see, was an earthy brown, and her eyes shone with a blue-green hue so liquid that he almost expected to see waves. A small, ever-so-slightly upturned nose sat in the center of a slender face. Impossible to tell precisely what her outfit had looked like; what remained of it gave the rather hideous impression that she'd fashioned her wardrobe from the scraps left over on a slaughterhouse floor.

“Do you normally find blood so fascinating?” Adrienne finally barked irritably. “Or am I special?”

“Rather clever of you to hide out here until we'd departed,” Constable Roubet told her casually, flintlock aimed unerringly at her bloody cleavage. “A pity you didn't notice me, or it might've worked.”

“I was distracted,” she muttered, shooting an aggravated glower toward the statue. “But look at me, Constable. You can't honestly believe me capable of this, can you?” She pressed her right hand to her heart-more than a bit melodramatically-and blinked at him. “I only survived by hiding in the rafters. I can only thank the gods that the killers weren't as observant as you were, or else-”

“Shut up before I shoot you.”

Adrienne's jaws snapped shut with an audible click.

“Even if I believed a word of it,” the Guardsman told her, shaking his head, “it makes no difference. I'm not the man making the decisions here.”

The young woman nodded slowly. “I think I'd like to speak to an advocate just as soon as possible.”

Roubet smiled grimly. “I'm sure you would. If you hadn't tried to kill me during your escape, you might have lived long enough to do just that.”

“What are you talking…?” And then she understood, and her knees threatened to give way. “You're not a Guardsman,” she whispered hoarsely.

“I am, actually. But I'm also a great deal more.”

Frantically, she judged the distance between them. Twelve feet, give or take. She could cover that swiftly enough, but not so fast that he couldn't pull the trigger. And even if she reached him, she wasn't armed.

“So what is it, then?” she asked, stalling desperately for time. “Dead women tell no tales? You blame all this on me and the real killers go free?”

“Something like that.”

Roubet's arm straightened, the bash-bang shifting until it came directly in line with her heart. The barrel gaped open before her, an endless tunnel to hell.

“I'm sorry, Olgun,” she whispered, unable to look away from the pistol. “I tried.”

She felt a brief surge of emotion from the near-dead god, followed by the faintest tingling in the air. She had just enough time to wonder if she'd imagined it before the flintlock's hammer crashed down with a deadly clank-

And detonated with a sharp crack and an ear-rending screech of metal. Shrapnel ripped through the soft flesh of Roubet's hand and arm, scored the stone floor in a staccato patter that punctuated the Guardsman's cry of pain. With a resounding thud, the remainder of the now useless weapon dropped to the floor, sending cracks shooting through a small blot of dried blood.

Roubet himself followed an instant later, clutching the bleeding wreckage of his hand to his chest and sobbing inconsolably.