After that all this was going to grow harder. It wasn’t a happy thought.
Penric quartered the streets of Patos near the army barracks and parade ground, trying to puzzle out his approach. Walking up to the front gate and knocking seemed a poor one. In his new retrospect, it struck him how thin his preparation for this emissary’s task had been.
He wondered if he’d been missed from the bottle dungeon yet. Fortunately, he’d found a clothing stall and food from a street vendor before being confronted by his cot in his little inn, for he’d fallen like a tree into the linen-covered, wool-stuffed mattress, and slept in profound exhaustion. When he’d woken in the late afternoon, he’d found he’d not lost as much time as he’d imagined. Unlike home, where people seized the afternoon to get as much done as possible before the dark and the cold closed in, here the citizens evaded the bright hours, crawling into the burrows of their houses to escape the heat and emerging just about now.
He wriggled his feet in his odd leather sandals. His workman’s garb was unexceptional, a sleeveless tunic and trousers that were expected to ride short in the legs anyway. He’d knotted his hair on his nape, still blond but not hanging out like a signal flag. A countryman’s straw hat shaded his eyes. His accent, broadly archaic from the far northern mountains of Cedonia, marked him as not from around here, so legitimately lost, without making him alien.
Until you start talking at length, and that scholar’s vocabulary begins falling out, commented Des. In that country accent, it’s like a donkey opening its mouth and spouting poetry.
I’ll try to be more brief, Pen sighed.
Curse it, he had to start somewhere. He spotted a lone soldier, not an officer, leaving the squared-off barracks grounds, and angled over to accost him before he disappeared into the close, winding streets of the civil side.
“Pardon me. Can you tell me where to find General Arisaydia? I was given”—Bastard’s tears, don’t say a letter—“a package of figs to deliver to him.”
The soldier stopped and stared. “Hadn’t you heard? He was arrested. Four days ago, by the governor’s guards. By Imperial order, it’s claimed. I don’t know where they took him, but he’s sure not here.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the military quarter now suddenly not Pen’s goal.
Pen swallowed in shock. Seven or so days after his own arrest—if the two were connected, why the delay? Gathering other evidence?
“On what charge?” Pen managed.
The soldier shrugged. “Treason, I guess. They can slap that on anything. Sounds like shit to me.” He hesitated, as if wanting to call back his unguarded words. “But what do I know?” He shouldered away from Penric and strode on, surly. Disturbed.
Seven days. Time for a speedy courier to ride to the Imperial capital, a day or two for debate, persuasion—plotting—a couple of days for an arrest order from high enough up to be returned? Very high up, it sounded like. Officers at Arisaydia’s level could be moved around like game pieces only by the most powerful of hands.
However it had come about, it was plain that rumors were running through the army like dye through wool. If Pen wanted answers without bringing attention to himself by asking questions, he needed to find a place where the military talked to each other. Handily, several taverns catering to the soldiers’ trade clustered in the nearby streets. He glanced into a few until he found one that was more crowded, and where his countryman’s dress would blend in, and slipped inside.
He held a tankard of vilely sour ale and wandered about, listening for key words and especially for the key name. He found it at a table with half-a-dozen low-grade officers, a couple captains-of-hundreds and their lieutenants. He slid onto a stool by the wall and pulled the brim of his hat a little farther down over his eyes, and simulated a workman’s tired doze. Well, simulated the doze; the tired was authentic.
“It was never peculation, not him,” one scoffed.
“I’d not heard that one,” said another. “Plotting betrayal with the Duke of Orbas, I was told. Or the Duke of Adria. Or of Trigonie. Some frigging foreign duke or another, anyway.”
Universal scowls greeted this claim.
“Or no duke at all,” growled a grizzled captain. “Some trumped-up charge by those eunuchs at court, more likely.”
Another made a crude joke at the expense of mutilated men, which his comrades seemed to find more black than funny.
“Yes, but what’s Arisaydia have that that crowd of mincing bureaucrats would want to steal?”
The grizzled captain shrugged. “The loyalty of the Army of the West, for starters. Enough high-born bureaucrats, whether they still have their balls or not, have military nephews who might like to filch a rank they can’t bloody earn.”
“Surely the emperor,” began another, but his captain held up a stemming hand. He began again more carefully, “Surely those Thasalon courtiers are not to be trusted…”
Men at this level could hardly know more than Penric did, but their talk was alarming.
No, sighed Des. All standard army-issue bitching about the civil government, so far. It doesn’t seem to have changed in a hundred years.
Huh.
The talk had turned to other complaints when a new man joined them, and Pen had to keep himself from sitting bolt upright. He was a younger fellow, broad and brawny, and had the sunburned brick-colored skin of most of the men here, but his face was strained and ghastly, drained to a sallow tinge. Wide-eyed and breathless, he fell into a seat on the bench, where his comrades obligingly shifted to give him room, and said, “Five gods, give me a drink.” Not waiting, he seized one from a comrade, who yielded it up with a surprised eyebrow-lift. “I just heard—” He tipped back the tankard, and his mouth worked, but he couldn’t seem to swallow. He had to struggle for a moment before he could choke it down.
“Arisaydia,” he gasped out. “Yesterday noon in secret at the municipal prison. Imperial order.”
“Released?” said a man hopefully, then faltered.
“Executed?” growled the grizzled captain, voice grim as iron.
The new man shook his head. “They blinded him with boiling vinegar.”
Shocked silence. Bitten lips.
Pen bent on his stool and swallowed back vomit.
Don’t you dare, said Des. Don’t give a sign.
“Princely,” observed the gray captain, in a weird sardonic lilt that might be rage, or grief, or swallowed curses. “Thought us army mules usually got hot irons through our eyes.”
“Not an honor I’d care for,” muttered another.
The other captain leaned back and sighed. “Well, that’s done him. What a gods-forsaken waste.”
“Is he still in the prison?”
The new man shook his head. “No. They gave him over to his twin sister, what’s-her-name, I heard.”
So what is her name…?!
The men were easing back as they took this in, scowling but not, apparently, moved to leap up and start a military mutiny at the news this afternoon. Someone secured the messenger his own tankard, and he gulped deep. Some moved their food aside, but kept their clutches on their drinks.
“Hope she’s a good nurse,” said a lieutenant.
“Or will help him to a good knife,” said another. “Either one.”
Pen panted in horror, so, so grateful for the straw hat, its brim now down to his chin.
“Are they really twins?”
“Who knows? Story I heard was that he was the son of old General Arisaydia’s highborn wife, and she was the daughter of his concubine, whelped on the same day. Unless the midwife swapped them in secret, to give the old man an heir.”