Dragon Precinct (19 page)

“You know what the absolute worst thing is?” Danthres asked suddenly.

Everyone turned to look at her at that.

She shook her head. “After all that, I almost feel sorry for the bastard. He just wanted to get his hands on a Healing Potion that he couldn’t afford so he could save his mother’s life. Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she added quickly at the incredulous looks that all save Torin gave her, “I think he should be thrown into the worst dungeon we have until the magistrate figures out the most painful way to have him executed. But it’s not like he’s the crazed killer or the megalomaniac we were all primed for. He’s just some idiot who wanted to save his mother.”

Ubàrlig walked to Danthres and looked up at her with steely eyes. “He’s an idiot that killed four of my friends, including two of Flingaria’s greatest heroes. That’s all I care about.”

With that, he left the squad room, presumably returning to his rooms in the north wing. Genero followed soon thereafter.

Danthres stared after them, shaking her head.

“Congratulations,” Osric said after a moment. “You closed the case. And that means no more overtime. And I expect a good justification for the overtime you
did
claim.”

“Oh come now, Captain, would we falsify an overtime request?”

Osric turned his back on Torin and Danthres as he headed back into his office. “You really don’t want me to answer that question, ban Wyvald.”

Chuckling, Torin turned to Danthres. “Drinks at the Chain tonight are on me.”

Smiling, Danthres said, “That is the best offer I’ve gotten in weeks. Let’s go.”

“Y
ou should’ve
seen
the look on his face when he found out about his brother,” Iaian said after sipping some of his whiskey. “After he’d been going on for an hour about the ‘house of ill repute,’ when Amelie told him his brother still hadn’t paid for the statuette he broke…” The old lieutenant trailed off, unable to contain his laughter.

Torin joined in the laughter, as did Dru and Hawk. Danthres, for her part, did manage a halfhearted smile.

They sat at their usual table in the back of the Old Ball and Chain, Iaian, Torin, and Hawk on the bench against the wall, Danthres and Dru in the two stools.

Danthres’s lack of joviality concerned Torin. It had been a good day for all concerned. True, Dru and Hawk were still accounting for all the bootleg spells, but they had been able to stop at sundown, since the Lord and Lady weren’t about to approve
more
overtime for the detectives, and Dru and Hawk weren’t about to do extra mind-numbing work for free. But they had scored the biggest bootleg-spell bust in history, on top of nailing a serial rapist, and Iaian and Grovis had opened up yet another corruption case in Mermaid and stopped the bad glamours, and he and Danthres had closed the Brightblade murders. After all they’d been through, they had put down three major cases in the space of one day. Grovis, of course, had gone home—probably to express outrage to his brother over how his behavior was an affront to Ghandurha—but the others went straight to the Chain to celebrate.

But Danthres had not been celebratory, though she had joined in the toasts and been drinking along with the rest of them. Usually she was at her best when they put down a case.

“Honestly,” Iaian said, “I think finding out his brother was a ‘fornicator’ hit him harder than Victro’s kid did at the tavern.”

Hawk laughed. “Please, man,
don’t
be usin’ that word.”

“So Victro’s kid’s pickin’ up where Dad left off?” Dru asked.

Iaian shook his head. “Nah, looks like the new sergeant is. He’s just using Paol to get at Rai’s old contacts. Same old shit in Mermaid. I hate it down there.” He gulped down the rest of his whiskey. “I’m all for having the Brotherhood fireball the place and start over.”

“Pretty good day, all ’round,” Dru said. “We all put down our cases
and
Grovis looks like an even bigger idiot than usual.”

Hawk grinned. “I think I was almost seein’ a smile on the captain’s face today.”

“I know I saw one on mine.” Dru looked at Danthres. “For one thing, he didn’t have to fire you.”

Danthres looked up from her ale. “And that makes you happy, does it?”

“Damn right. Long as you two’re around, you’ll get the pain-in-the-ass cases like Brightblade. You get fired, we’ll get stuck with ’em.”

Leaning back against the rear wall of the Chain, Iaian regarded Danthres. “You know, you don’t
have
to go out of your way to piss people off. You could get a lot farther by just keeping your mouth shut and riding things out.”

“What, like
you?”
Danthres spoke in a most contemptuous tone. “No, thanks.”

“Danthres,” Torin said in a cautionary voice.
Dammit, she should be happy—why is she picking a fight with Iaian, of all people?

Luckily, Iaian wasn’t taking the bait. “Hey, look, you don’t want to take good advice, don’t. But in two years, I get my twenty-five, and I’m outta here with a nice pile of coins in my money pouch. I’ll be stunned if you make it to twenty the way you keep shitting in your soup.”

“When you’re already drinking shit soup, what difference does it make?” Danthres asked. She gulped down some more of her ale. “I suppose if you’re only in it for the coin, that would be good advice.”

Hawk looked at Danthres like she was insane. “What the hell other reason there be?”

Danthres gulped down more ale. Wiping the foam from her mouth, she looked around at the table. “Have any of you ever been to Treemark?”

Assorted negative answers went around the large table. Iaian muttered something about a cousin having visited there once.

Torin stared at his partner. “I’ve been there several times, as you well know. The surprise is that
you’ve
been there and haven’t told me.”

“There’s a reason for that.” Danthres did not actually look at Torin as she spoke to him, preferring to stare into her flagon of ale. “After I was forced to leave Sorlin, I went in search of my mother’s family. There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to find my father’s relations, since they’d kill me the moment they looked at me, but I thought that perhaps my mother’s people might take me in. When I was a girl, my mother told me that she had family in Treemark, so when I was—was forced to leave Sorlin as a teenager, that was where I went.

“I was surprised to find out that my mother’s sister wasn’t just a citizen of Treemark, she was an aristocrat. She lived in a huge mansion with dozens of servants. I was taken in immediately, with no question. My resemblance to my mother is fairly strong, so no one questioned that I was a member of the family. I was given my own room, my very own handservant—even some cousins who were about the same age as me.

“Not everyone was completely welcoming, of course, but my aunt Sarah gave me nothing but love, warmth, and affection—and, since she was Lady Cambri, her orders to treat me as one of the family were carried out to the letter.”

“Cambri?” Dru leaned forward. “Hang on a sec, you mean you’re related to the brick people?”

Sighing, Danthres said, “Yes, Dru, my mother’s family are the brick people. May I finish my story now?”

Dru held up his hands in a defensive gesture. “Sorry. I just didn’t think you were related to such heavy hitters.”

“They’re not heavy hitters, Dru, they’re just people. And most of them didn’t appreciate having me around. Still, they kept their tongues, because Aunt Sarah would be displeased if they didn’t. And, as I learned
very
early on, no one short of King Marcus himself dared displease my aunt.

“Still, I found myself befriending the servants more than my assorted relations. They seemed more like real people to me, somehow—they had less of the artifice that is the hallmark of upper classes everywhere.”

“That’s the nice way of putting it,” Iaian muttered from behind Torin. He looked up to see that Iaian had a fresh whiskey in his hand and was putting a flagon of ale in front of Danthres. Torin hadn’t even noticed that his fellow detective had gotten up to go to the bar. “Figured you were gonna tell a long story, you’d need more lubrication.”

Danthres looked up at the old lieutenant, and then down at his peace gesture, one that she should have offered him, not vice versa. Torin rarely saw his partner chagrined, but she looked that way now. “Thank you, Iaian. And I’m sorry, I—”

Iaian held up a hand as he sat back down. “Forget it. Just finish the story.”

“Yeah,” Dru said, “you got me hooked, too. Didn’t know you had a deep dark past as an upper.”

Snorting, Danthres said, “Hardly. Aunt Sarah
wanted
me to be part of the family, but it didn’t take long for everyone to realize that I wasn’t cut out for the aristocracy. I went through the motions, attended the dinner parties, met the important people, but mostly I stayed away from it all and talked with the servants. My own handservant was a kind young girl named Mista, and her sister Harra was the dining-room server.”

“Wait a minute,” Iaian said, putting his whiskey down after sipping it. “You were a teenager, you said?”

Danthres nodded.

“This wasn’t when—?”

“Yes.”

Torin frowned, then did the math in his head. “When they captured Bronnik.”

Hawk squinted. “What, that serial-killer guy from twenty years back? Thought they be catchin’ him in Iaron.”

“No, it was in Treemark,” Danthres said. “It was all anybody could talk about for weeks afterward. How depraved he was, just killing people without thought, and how awful it was, and how wonderful it was that he was finally captured. Which made what happened next so ironic.”

In a gentle voice, Torin asked, “Which was?”

“One night, we were having a big dinner party for another one of my cousins, Sicund. He was returning from Iaron—he ran the family brickmaking concern up there. He had come home for a visit. We’re having the party, and I’m bored out of my mind. I can’t talk to the servants because that isn’t done during dinner parties. So I’m studying the potted plants, trying to avoid eye contact with Sicund.

“So of course Aunt Sarah brought him over and introduced me to him. He was tall, skinny, supercilious, and walked with a cane for no good reason. He
did
have a limp, though how pronounced it was depended on the time of day and how much he’d had to drink. He claimed it was a war wound, but I don’t believe he was ever in any kind of combat. I suspect he just used it to get sympathy from people and as a conversation starter. Probably helped him in his business.”

Torin had a feeling he knew where this was going from the way she was telling the story. At once he both wondered and understood why she had never shared this tale with him before.

“Harra was supplying drinks. At one point she came in with fresh glasses for everyone. Sicund was declaiming about something—I wasn’t really paying attention—and gesturing like mad, that damned cane of his flying all over the place. Harra had to duck to avoid being hit in the head, and she spilled her tray of drinks.

“Some of the drinks got on Sicund’s clothes—and he was apparently wearing silk. He got furious and started beating on Harra with his cane for daring to get drinks on his outfit.”

Dru blinked. “Holy shit.”

“I tried to stop him, but he was insane with rage, and I was—a lot younger then. After he—after he hit her several times, he left the dinner party. I brought Harra up to her room and called for a healer, but there was nothing to be done. She died the next day.”

“What happened to Sicund?” Torin asked, guessing the answer.

Danthres snarled. “Nothing. Oh, he left Treemark the next morning, but there was to be no punishment for him. If anyone asked, they were to say that Harra died in an accident and that Sicund was recalled to Iaron on business. Nobody seemed to care that Harra was dead. I went to Aunt Sarah and asked her why he was being allowed to get away with it.

“I swear, she looked at me blankly and said, ‘Get away with what?’ ” Danthres looked around the table. “The idea that a servant’s life was important didn’t occur to her. She was only worried about the scandal. She used her wealth and her power to cover up the crime. After that, nobody ever even talked about Harra—not even her own sister.” She gulped down the rest of the ale Iaian had brought her. “Harra deserved justice that day—she needed someone to speak for her, and no one did. Not even my aunt, whom I had mistakenly believed was different because she took me in.” Danthres shook her head. “But she didn’t take me in because she was a good person, she took me in because I was her sister’s daughter, and I was therefore of her class and worthy of being included. Harra wasn’t fortunate enough to have aristocrats for parents, so she did not get the same consideration. I swore I would never see that happen again, which is why I joined the Guard when I arrived in Cliff’s End.
That’s
why I don’t give a shit about what people like Sir Rommett
or
the Lord and Lady think—because our job isn’t to earn overtime and score points with the aristocracy or to mark time until retirement. We all do that, yes, but our
job
is to see that justice is done in an unjust world.”

Torin gazed for many long seconds at his partner. Then he raised his flagon and spoke in a quiet voice. “To justice.”

Iaian raised his whiskey, and Hawk and Dru did the same with their flagons.

Danthres stared at Torin for a moment before raising her own flagon. “To justice.”

After Torin gulped down his ale, Iaian said, “Oh, by the way, I didn’t pay for that last flagon.”

Blinking, Danthres said, “I beg your pardon?”

The old lieutenant pointed at another table. “He did. Said it was to congratulate you on a job well done.”

Torin followed Iaian’s gesture to see that he was pointing at Manfred, the talented young guard who had found her exotic the other night.

“Him again,” Danthres said with disdain.

“I wouldn’t blow him off,” Iaian said. “He caught some kid in Unicorn who opened a portal in his parents’ backyard. Brought a hobgoblin through.”

Grinning, Torin said, “The best part is that the hobgoblin attacked the boy’s mother—Elmira Fansarri.”

Danthres made a face. “Isn’t she the one that walks around with enough paint on her face to clog a drain?”

“That’s the one.” Torin chuckled. “Young Manfred stabbed the hobgoblin as it was trying to beat Madame Fansarri to death.”

Iaian gestured expansively. “Hobgoblin blood
everywhere
. And those suckers bleed a nice slick green that takes forever to get out. Hell, only thing that really works is a Laundry Spell, and Fansarri’s notorious for hating wizards, so she’ll probably never get one.”

Torin grinned. “Seems to me that someone who did that is worth at least thanking for the drink.”

Danthres sighed. “You’re determined to put me together with that idiot, aren’t you?”

“I simply wish you to judge him fairly, and take note of his finer points. Besides, he’s making such an effort.” He leaned forward. “Would you rather I suggest you make up with Nulti?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” She turned and looked at Manfred. The youth raised his own wineglass in reply. In reply, she raised her own flagon, then looked back at Torin. “He’s not
that
bad-looking.”

Dru laughed. “See,
that’s
the spirit. Y’only live once. ’Sides, us old married guys over here need you single types to live vicariously through.”

“Yeah,” Iaian added, “it’s the only thing that gives our lives meaning.”

“I was wondering that.” Danthres actually smiled, which heartened Torin. Again she turned to look at Manfred. “Perhaps I will go over and give him my thanks.”