I pause at the door and turn to Makri.
“Where did you get the dwa?”
“I stole it from the dealer.”
“Very moral behaviour. At least he was selling it at a fair price.”
Outside it’s bitterly cold. I haven’t had time to recharge my warm cloak. Snow is falling in thick sheets and there’s not a soul in sight. It takes me a while to get a horse saddled up and fitted on to a wagon, and longer to retrieve the now frozen body of Darius. I sling it in the cart, cover it with a blanket and set off. My mood is grim. It wasn’t helped by the difficulty I had removing Makri’s knife from the corpse.
The Sorcerers Guild is not going to give up easily on this one. It might take them one day or three months but I have no doubt that some time in the future they will be staring at a picture of me riding in a cart with Darius’s body. That’s going to be hard to explain and it’s not going to do much for Lisutaris’s chances in the election.
Almost worse is the realisation that I’m going to have to report all this to Cicerius. He’s my client. I’ve withheld information from Cicerius before but there is no way I can keep this from him. For all I know the death of the Abelasian Sorcerer might lead Turai into war. I can’t let that happen without warning the Deputy Consul. I dread to think what the man is going to say, and try as I might, I can’t think of a means of explaining the situation that doesn’t put me in a bad light. Thinking it over while I’m looking for a suitable snowdrift in which to dump Darius, I don’t come up with anything I like.
[Contents]
Chapter Eight
I’m used to being abused by officials. Often on a case I end up being told by a Prefect or Captain of the Guard how much better Turai would be without me. I’ve been lectured by the best of them, but nothing compares to the lecture Cicerius gives me when I wake him up at three in the morning to inform him that Lisutaris, Mistress of the Sky, has just got herself mixed up with the mysterious death of Darius Cloud Walker.
This man is noted for the power of his rhetoric. In the courts he regularly tears his opponents to shreds. Some of his speeches have become so famous that copies of them are used in schools to teach students how to construct an argument. Cicerius’s argument on this occasion demonstrates mainly that as a protector of Turanian interests I am as much use as a one-legged gladiator, if that.
“I hired you to help Turai, not plunge us into war with the Abelasian confederacy! Never in my most fevered imaginings could I have dreamed of the chaos that would result from involving you in this affair!”
“Steady on, Cicerius,” I protest. “I’m not to blame. It wasn’t me that got stoned in Twelve Seas with Darius. It was Lisutaris.”
“You were meant to be looking after her. And what were you doing? Drinking beer and trading jokes with these degenerate Sorcerers from Juval! Did I not specifically warn you not to do that?”
“Very probably. I wasn’t expecting things to go wrong so quickly.”
Even as I speak I know this sounds feeble.
“You yourself warned of some involvement by an Assassin. Did you expect him to wait until you were ready?”
Once again I am subjected to Cicerius’s invective. I have to raise my voice to stop him.
“Okay, it’s bad. I thought that having Makri as a bodyguard would keep Lisutaris out of trouble, and that turned out to be a mistake.”
At the mention of Makri’s name Cicerius fulminates some more about the foolishness of placing trust in a woman with Orcish blood. I find myself defending her, which I don’t feel much like doing.
“Makri’s had a few distractions. But if an attempt is made on Lisutaris’s life, you’ll still be pleased she’s got Makri to protect her. And it’s all very well coming down on me like a bad spell for messing things up, but if it wasn’t for me we’d be in a lot worse position. If I hadn’t got rid of the body the Brotherhood would have found Darius lying there with Lisutaris and Direeva, and what would have happened then? At the very least you’d be paying blackmail money to the Brotherhood till the King’s vaults were empty. And there were seven Brotherhood men, they wouldn’t have all kept quiet about it. The news would be all over the city by now. At least I’ve bought us some time.”
Cicerius is aware that the respite is temporary. He knows as well as I do that when the Sorcerers start looking they’ll eventually find out the truth.
“You have bought us time? For what?”
“For me to find the killer.”
“And if that turns out to be Lisutaris? Or your companion?”
“It won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m not sure. But I’ve talked to them both and my intuition tells me they’re innocent. As for Princess Direeva, I’m not so certain.”
“If an unknown assailant did enter your office and kill Darius, have you not made everything worse by moving the body and hiding the crime?”
“There was no time to work things out when the Brotherhood were beating on the door. As far as I knew, either Direeva or Lisutaris had stabbed Darius, and I couldn’t let that be discovered. Anyway, no matter who did kill him, would you really have wanted that scene to be made public? It would have ended Lisutaris’s chances of election.”
Cicerius shakes his head.
“Had she been taking dwa?”
“I don’t think so. Direeva had.”
“This curse is going to destroy us.”
Cicerius’s son was involved in a dwa scandal last year, and when we were on Avula, the Deputy Consul was badly shaken to discover that the drug had now taken root on the Elvish Isles.
“If things carry on like this the Orcs will sweep us away. What do you propose doing to rescue Turai from this calamity?”
“Lisutaris and Direeva are making a hiding spell.”
“Can we trust Direeva?”
“I don’t know. Ask Tilupasis, she’s been working on her. We have to take the risk, it’ll cover our tracks for a while. The spell would be a lot stronger if they got some help from Old Hasius.”
“You mean involve the Chief Sorcerer at the Abode of Justice in covering up a murder?”
Cicerius is a stickler for the law. He’s been known to go against his own party to uphold the constitution. And yet such is the seriousness of the matter for Turai that he doesn’t immediately dismiss my suggestion.
“To save the city I might even be prepared to sanction such an illegal action. But I doubt if it could be kept secret. Hasius’s apprentice is a supporter of Senator Lodius. If Lodius learns of this we’re finished.”
Senator Lodius leads the opposition party, the Populares. They’re fierce opponents of Cicerius and would leap at the opportunity to catch him out in such an illicit plan.
“All right, Hasius is out. And Gorsius is too unreliable. But Melus the Fair is a friend of Lisutaris. She might be able to help, and you could trust her. She wouldn’t sell out Lisutaris because they’re companions in the Association of Gentlewomen.”
“Kindly do not bring that organisation into the picture,” says Cicerius acidly. “They are nothing but trouble.”
“As you wish. But I think Lisutaris could do with her help. Anyway, with the hiding spell working I’ve got some time to investigate.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. It depends on the alignments of the moons at the time of the murder. If they’re unfavourable it might take the Sorcerers Guild a week or so to break through. Lisutaris is going back to her villa to check her books. Which is where I’m heading right now. She is going to try and look at the events herself before she starts hiding them. If she can get a good picture of the murder we’ll be a step ahead of everyone else and I might be able to clear things up before everything goes to hell.”