Idrian nodded to himself as if making a decision. “If you need anything – anything at all – I will exchange my services for use of the phoenix channel.”
“Oh.” Demir raised both eyebrows. Clearly that eye was even more important than he’d suspected. One would be a fool to take such a promise from a breacher lightly, and from the Ram in particular. Demir had just been offered a very valuable piece of credit. He sucked on his teeth, thinking of a way he could use it, but stopped himself. “I won’t make any promises,” he said. “I don’t even know if I can rebuild the damned thing.”
“I suggest that you make every effort possible to do so,” Idrian said quietly. “And I’m not just saying that on my own behalf. I’m only a soldier, but I know what will happen if the cindersand runs out. This phoenix channel could save the Empire; the world.”
Demir looked back to the other side of the furnace room, where Kastora’s body was still warm. The pressure of this sudden new burden weighed on his shoulders like an anvil. Despite this, his thoughts were starting to focus better, his ideas feeling more concrete than they had in years. Purpose – not just pursuit of wealth or fame or sex or revenge but real purpose – had been thrust upon him. It did not resurrect that old part of him entirely, but it did wake it up.
“Anything at all?” he asked.
“Anything within my power,” Idrian responded. “This is more important to me than you realize.”
“For now, help me get the prototype back to the Ironhorns’ camp. I’ll have Tadeas deliver it from there.” Demir stepped outside, glancing sidelong at the two Grent soldiers sharing a cigarette some ways down the road. He felt a pang of guilt that he hadn’t thought to summon them over for Kastora’s final moments. They had earned it, after all. He walked over to join them, offering them each a piece of fine-quality godglass. “Kastora has passed,” he told them. “Thank you for what you did for him.”
Tinny cleared her throat. “I don’t know who you are – I don’t even really know why this war broke out – but I’m glad you and Idrian were here for his final moments. We’ll be going, if that’s all right.” She said the last words with trepidation, as if still waiting to be murdered at any moment.
Demir gestured for them to withdraw and turned back to the glassworks. He frowned at something that caught his eye. There, sitting up in the branches of a large tree that stretched over the compound walls, was a falcon. He couldn’t name the species in the darkness, but it was a big, beautiful bird. It was wearing anklets and jesses, the little leather straps dangling from its legs. A trained bird for certain. Was it Thessa’s?
“Idrian,” Demir called, “lend me your gauntlet.”
8
Enforcers for the guild-families of Ossa fulfilled many different roles. Most were mere thugs: foot soldiers who could wield a cudgel and didn’t mind breaking legs or skulls or property. Some were bodyguards or security. The most trusted of enforcers worked as personal couriers, taking contracts and correspondence between guild-family matriarchs and patriarchs.
Kizzie had always been good at two things. Her favorite was making Vorcien clients feel comfortable. Did a warehouse get burned down? Kizzie would hold the client’s hand, commiserate, and liaise with the National Guard investigators. In her hands, an otherwise unimportant client would think the Vorcien had their best interests at heart at all times. Sometimes they really did, and sometimes Kizzie put on a good show. It helped that she had the Vorcien name and silic symbol, even if she wasn’t a “real” member of the family.
Her other skill set – the one she’d had to rely on more since falling out of favor – was finding people.
She started her work for Demir immediately, and spent the first day discovering everything she could about the one man who’d already confessed to having a hand in Adriana Grappo’s death. He was a Grent national named Espenzi Darfoor; a well-known blaggard from a family of medium importance within the Grent government. He was a gambler and womanizer with a dozen successful duels under his belt. He had no public connection to anyone in Ossa.
So why, Kizzie wondered, did he come to Ossa to kill Adriana?
The official explanation – the one that the Cinders had torn out of him using powerful enough shackleglass to drive him mad – was that he’d been paid a hefty sum by the Duke of Grent to participate in the killing. Was that true? Could Kizzie trust the Cinders, or the Inner Assembly, to actually tell the truth? Or was it all a convenient lie for a convenient war? The thought was a discomforting one, but Kizzie tried to focus on the facts as she knew them rather than jump to conclusions.
Six people, all meeting in Assembly Square, wearing masks to kill a well-liked reformer. As Demir had intimated, that was a conspiracy. Why a conspiracy, rather than just a good old-fashioned knife-in-the-dark assassination? With Espenzi in Cinder custody, insane from shackleglass, Kizzie would have to find his co-conspirators in order to get her answers.
Kizzie started at the beginning, looking for any clues that might lead down an untrodden path. She found the coach service that brought Espenzi into Ossa. She spoke with the waiter at the restaurant he ate at the night before, and then the concierge at the hotel he stayed at. She even tracked down the café he ordered tea from the following morning. She followed his footsteps perfectly all the way up until an hour before Adriana’s death.
He had no clandestine meetings with hooded figures. Not at the restaurant, café, or hotel. To everyone that had met him, he was simply a middle-aged man slipping into Ossa for a brief change of scenery. He wasn’t even armed.
It was frustratingly mundane. Not a single clue that Kizzie could use to find one of the other killers.
The following morning she changed her tactics, heading down to Assembly Square in person. The square was a busy place, filled with politicians, clerks, loitering bodyguards, and beggars. Winter solstice celebrations were still going on, causing impromptu parades of masked revelers, following the bread wagons as free food and drink were passed out to all who wanted it. Kizzie used gossip columns and newspaper reports to rebuild Adriana’s murder in her mind’s eye, trying to figure out in which directions the killers would have scattered to escape a passing National Guardsman.
She crossed the square, looking for a little nook underneath the towering statue of one of the founders of Ossa. The nook was barely two feet square and maybe six deep, and it was the home of a beggar who called herself Madame-under-Magna.
“Hey Courina,” Kizzie said, squatting down next to the nook and peering inside. It was hard to tell in the bright morning sunlight reflecting off the marble, but the nook was crammed with blankets, newspapers, and the odds and ends a beggar might collect to survive the mild Ossan winter.
A pair of beady little eyes stared back at Kizzie, and a tiny, wizened hand was thrust out of the nook. “You will address me as Madame-under-Magna!”
Kizzie glanced up at the statue rising above them. It was, she realized, quite anatomically correct, despite wearing a long tunic. “Sorry. How are you, Madame-under-Magna?” She placed a heavy coin in that wizened little hand.
The hand and coin disappeared immediately. “Well enough, Kissandra. I heard you cleaned out the Castle Hill Garroters.”
“You hear a lot of things.”
“Poor Iasmos. What a nice little boy. Dorry was the cruel one, the real leader. But they’re all gone now!” There was a strange little giggle. “I hear and I see, Kissandra. You want my services? I can tell you about a Stavri mistress or a corrupt Foreign Legion secretary.” The eyes seemed to grow a little closer. “There are things that walk in the night. I have seen them, but to tell would be a king’s ransom!” Madame-under-Magna cackled loudly. Kizzie had never actually been able to tell if Madame-under-Magna was insane, or just a good actress.