Powerful people have power over you only for as long as you believe that they do. Then the day comes when you realise that they are just people, and everyone can die the same way. In a world where you can do absolutely anything, why would you fear anyone? Your only restraint is your own conscience, and I didn’t really have one of those. That was the bit I was missing, after all.
No, I was done.
I was done with it all, but I knew I would have to play Vogel’s game for a while yet before I could begin to extricate myself from the web of the Queen’s Men.
‘How good of you to ask, Tomas,’ Vogel said, and the frozen razorblade of his smile was the coldest I think I had ever seen it. ‘If it would suit you, I would very much like to make you the second most powerful man in the country.’
That threw me, I had to allow. I blinked and looked at him, and still his soulless eyes bored into mine.
‘If that suits you, of course,’ he said.
‘You want me to . . .’
‘Remove First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov and assume his place as presiding head of the governing council, yes,’ Vogel said.
‘You want me to arrest him, or . . . not?’
‘What in the gods’ names for?’ Vogel snapped, and in that moment he was the Provost Marshal again. ‘He disappears, and you are voted presiding head of the council. That will be expensive, but it can be taken care of easily enough. This isn’t difficult, Tomas.’
‘I would be most grateful if you did, Tomas,’ Ailsa said.
You know he thinks he’s in love with you.
Aye, I dare say Ailsa would be glad to see the back of Aleksander Lan Letskov every bit as much as Lord Vogel would, albeit for completely different reasons.
The man had done nothing to me, save to probably try to fuck my wife. Which was more than I had ever done, I had to admit. I paused for a moment and massaged the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb. Me, the First Councillor? It was ridiculous. I had only been on the governing council for a matter of weeks, for Our Lady’s sake, but of course that didn’t matter. I was officially a member, and any member of the council could be elected to the podium by a majority vote of their peers. With two-thirds or more of them taking the house of law’s coin they would vote the way they were told to, and he had more than enough support to carry the vote in a landslide. I could be the presiding head of the governing council within weeks. The second most powerful man in the country, as Vogel said.
I supposed there could be worse outcomes.
Respect, power, authority. Those are the levers that move me.
‘No,’ I said.
Vogel stared at me, and that stare could have frozen a cannon mid-fire.
‘No?’ he said.
‘Let Markova have it. She’s one of ours, isn’t she? She’s welcome to it, and with my blessing. I’m more use to you out on the streets than I would be stuck in the council chamber every day, and Markova will make a much better job of it than I would. I’ll get rid of Lan Letskov for you, but I’m not going to waste my time heading the governing council. That’s a job for a career bureaucrat, not a soldier.’
He was a subtle and clever man, was Dieter Vogel. He was much cleverer than me, I have no doubt, but in this he had fucked up, and he had fucked up very badly.
If there’s one thing I truly understand, it’s how to move people. The first thing I do upon meeting someone new of any importance is to work out their levers, and it seemed that Vogel thought the same. Find the levers that move a person and you can make them do anything, and to his credit he had found mine. However, the thing that has to be understood is that I had been doing this for so long that I knew when I was being moved in turn. Being bullied. I could feel my levers being pulled, and I wasn’t having it.
Oh, no, not one little bit I was not.
This cunt thought he knew me, and he thought he could buy me with promises of power and influence that would keep me out from under his feet and away from the things he didn’t want me looking at, and he was wrong on both counts.
I wasn’t going to let that pass. I would get rid of Aleksander Lan Letskov if he needed me to, but after that we were done as far as I was concerned.
I was done with being Lord Vogel’s fucking puppet.
*
First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov was considerably wealthier than Archmagus Nikolai Reiter, for all that the latter was the head of the house of magicians. It seemed that the archmagus drew a good deal less coin from the coffers of his house than some of his opposite numbers did from theirs, although of course Lan Letskov was a hereditary aristocrat and had probably inherited the majority of his wealth, as such people usually did.
I stood across the street from the gates of his estate that night, hiding in the shadowed doorway of a closed bank with Oliver and Emil beside me, and I watched the movements of his house guard. No, I decided then, this wasn’t going to work. I had managed a frontal assault on Lord Lan Yetrov’s estate the previous year because Fat Luka had bought his head man and most of his staff, and I had secured the support of his wife in advance. That wasn’t going to work here, I could see that. The Lan Letskov estate was like a fortress, and even with Bloody Anne and Beast and help from Iagin’s crew, I simply didn’t have the manpower to take it by force.
