Tomorrow, the Killing (14 page)

I pocketed the money pouch and stood. ‘I’m counting the hours.’

There were ways back to the Earl that didn’t require me to swing past the Queen’s Palace. I should have taken one. I wasn’t planning on a visit – as far as I was concerned I was done with the Montgomerys. I’d told her father that. I’d been telling myself the same.

I could see the crowd about a block away, a small knot of people, growing fast. A handful of hoax had a loose cordon bottling up the mouth of the alley. At some point they’d figure out whose child they had lying under a sheet, and once they did the ice would be down here double-time, but it hadn’t happened yet. The ranking officer was a fiend for the dice, in my pocket on top of what I spread around to his bosses, and I gave him a nod and he let me through without saying anything.

There was no reason to look. I knew what was under there, had known since I’d seen the herd, known since I’d left her room the night before. I looked anyway.

You think, being strangled, how bad could that be? Hold your breath for a while, the lights go dim. But it’s not like that at all. Calloused hands around the soft of your neck, the beaming eyes of a man willing you to death, trying to scream and failing. The white rings around Rhaine’s sky blues were punctured, blossoms of blood leaking in. A thick patch of her scarlet hair had been torn out, either in the struggle or afterward, as a trophy. Her nose was broken back into her face. Her throat was discolored, green and black.

I threw the sheet over her and moved to stand, but the heat, I say the heat, set me back on one knee. The guards turned away, embarrassed at my weakness and not wanting to cause offense. They knew who buttered their bread. I pulled myself back to my feet, managing to make it out of sight before reaching for the vial of breath I had in my satchel. I was very proud of my restraint.

T
here is a corner of every man’s soul that would prefer him dead. That whispers poison in his ear in the still hours of the evening, puts spurs to his side when he stands atop a ledge. For the weak and the misbegotten, the suggestion alone proves sufficient, and the unfortunate runs himself a hot bath and adds his life-blood to it, or drinks a few pints of backyard whiskey and goes swimming in the canal. But most of us are too stubborn or cowardly to make a clean go of it, and this bit that hates us has to start thinking sly. Have another drink, it says, and maybe one more on top. Polish it off with a hit of breath, and ain’t that man at the end of the bar been giving you the eye all night, all fucking night, and what’s his problem exactly, and why don’t you go over and ask?

After finding Rhaine’s body I went back to the Earl, poured myself a tall draft and went to work wrestling that suicidal quarter of my consciousness into submission, or at least silence.

I had been aware of the youngest Montgomery’s existence for a grand total of three days, had spent perhaps forty minutes in her presence. In that time she had struck me as spoiled, self-indulgent and foolish, and her unfortunate outcome eminently predictable. The world is happy enough to distribute cruelties to the undeserving – best to save sympathy for those souls brought low through no fault of their own.

She had been nothing to me, not a lover, not a friend even. Contemptuous and acerbic even when she wasn’t trying. A spoonfed cunt from Kor’s Heights that had gotten what she’d asked for.

I was alone in the bar, so I had to get up from my perch to refill my beer.

She had heart though, you had to give that to her. That last time I’d seen her she’d known what she was up against, seen the odds and stuck it out anyway. At first I’d thought her bravery petulance, the whole escapade a ‘fuck you’ to her old man. But I’d been wrong, it was more than that. You could call it rank sentimentality, and I did, but you couldn’t dismiss it. She had wanted justice for her brother, and died looking for it.

And the fact that I’d known the truth, that I might have set her straight but hadn’t – well, you couldn’t very well pretend that didn’t mean something.

I was empty again. A trip to the tap rectified the situation.

The general had heard the news by this point. It might kill him – the Lost One knew he hadn’t been the picture of health that morning. If it didn’t then he’d have the misfortune of adding a daughter to the son he’d buried. The Daevas were cruel, to repay his years of service with such misfortune.

Course the Daevas hadn’t killed her – I knew where that honor rested.

But then again what I’d told Rhaine that first day was true: there’s no such thing as justice, only revenge, and once you get it you realize how little it means. Edwin Montgomery’s son rotted in the ground, and his daughter would soon join him. Giving them company wouldn’t change that. I did the best I could for Rhaine while she was alive. It hadn’t been enough, but there was no point compounding failure with catastrophe.

It made sense, when you looked at it like that. When you lined it up. The wise thing to do was forget it. Have a few drinks, then go upstairs and sleep them off. Wake up and have a few more. Repeat until it didn’t seem necessary.

I am not a wise man. Clever, on occasion, but never wise.

Adolphus came in through the back, trying to take up less than his usual amount of space. ‘You hear?’

‘Yeah.’ I pulled myself up from my seat, stretching my arms over my head, trying to shake loose three pints of booze.

‘Where are you headed?’

‘I’m gonna go pay a visit to the man who killed Rhaine Montgomery.’

‘Who was that?’

‘The same person who killed her brother, I suspect.’

T
he wooden platform outside of the Veterans’ Association Headquarters was in use, a decent-sized crowd of onlookers watching a one-legged veteran howl his way through a stock speech. That is to say I assumed he was a veteran, though half the beggars in Low Town claim an honorable wound and a few coin on top of it, liars with bound legs spinning sob stories for fools. He looked the part at least, and he was making a fine go of it, rolling himself up to a good boil despite the heat.

‘When the Throne called, we stood back to back, back to back against the enemies of our nation! When the blood roiled like the tides, when our brothers-in-arms fell like wheat at the harvest, still we kept faith, still we stood strong against the Dren menace!’

Some menace, an ocean and half a world away – you travel a thousand miles to kick a hornets’ nest you ought not moan so over being stung. The rest of the crowd seemed to remember it differently, however, muttering along in agreement.

‘Whatever was required of us, we gave! Gave without asking for compensation, gave till we had nothing left! We didn’t do it for pay, and we didn’t do it for medals! We did it so that our children would know a world without the fear of foreign enslavement. That they might grow up free and strong, proud subjects of the Rigun Empire!’

Oh, the children, the children, always with the children. Real bloodthirsty motherfuckers, our hypothetical progeny. More men have died on behalf of future generations than through disease, famine and drink.

‘And after all our sacrifices, all our struggle – this is how the Crown thanks us! The Private’s Silver is ours, brothers, ours by right of blood!’

Noble sentiments were all well and good, but it was money that drove my ex-comrades into a frenzy. We’d gained numbers since I’d come in, or at least we’d lost space, the beefy veteran behind me climbing my heels for a better view.

‘Roland Montgomery had a dream – that those men who fought to save the country might have a hand in running it. Though he was taken from us—’

A voice yelled, ‘Murdered by Black House!’

‘Though he was taken from us,’ the speaker continued smoothly, sharp enough not to slander the government outright though happy enough to inspire it, ‘still we hold the faith! As we held it at Beneharnum, and at Sarlaut! As we held it at Aunis, and Darlaux, and Sulmne! As we hold it to this very day, firm in the face of any man who seeks to strip us of our rights and honors! Next week, brothers, I hope you’ll join us on our march to the palace – to remind the Queen of what her people have done for her, and to demand just recompense for our efforts!’

The crowd erupted. I slipped away, running the gauntlet of back-slapping buffoons and teary-eyed nostalgics.

I found Hroudland standing stiff-necked near the entrance, his face beatific though he must have heard the sermon before. He was a true believer, it seemed, though I wouldn’t have credited him as such. I filed the information away happily – zealots are easy to play.

Something of the speech had stayed with him, because he greeted me with a friendly smile despite my history of disrespect. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said.

‘Hroudland. I need to see the commander.’

It took a moment for that to sink in. Hroudland was one of those rarest of military men, an individual whose rank had not outdistanced his talents and, as the main requirement of the middle ranks is attention to detail and a lack of imagination, he was having trouble dealing with this new development. ‘The commander’s busy.’

‘I’m not here to waste his time.’

A longer moment still, then he nodded and walked me inside. I took a seat against the wall and watched him disappear through the back.

The entrance hall wasn’t packed, but it was damn full for a weekday afternoon, dozens of men preparing for the march. The whole place was animated with an energy that hadn’t been there the last time I’d come through, that probably hadn’t been there for years, since before the Association had legitimized itself. The Crown’s ill-considered attempt to decrease their rapidly expanding debt was bearing sour fruit, turning the apolitical into fanatics, reminding an untapped army of long-standing grievances. Still, they weren’t sharpening knives or threatening to murder city officials, which I took to mean the news of Rhaine’s murder was as yet unknown to them. Except, of course, for those members of the assemblage who had been detailed to kill her.

I sat mostly unnoticed in the corner, one more unkempt, middle-aged man in a small sea of them. One of my compatriots, a thuggish-looking sort with a head of white hair, kept staring over at me through crossed eyes, but he blinked away when I fixed my attention towards him. Instead I turned it on the portrait of Roland that stood above the fireplace. I didn’t like it, I decided. The stern line of his face didn’t match my memory of his upbeat grin, solid in the heat of battle or a crowded taproom.

Three-quarters of an hour sauntered past until an orderly waved me through the public area and into the hallway beyond. Inside I waited silently while a pair of guards removed my dagger and gave me a thorough once over. They’d upped security since yesterday, or else they just wanted to fuck with me. Afterward one of them escorted me to Pretories, knocking on the door and waiting for an affirmation before allowing me entry.

Joachim sat behind his desk, a thick bundle of papers evenly separated in front of him. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘As you can see, we’ve got a lot going on at the moment.’ He pointed at the seat across from him, but I remained standing.

‘Rhaine’s dead.’ I kept my voice flat, and low. It could have been accusing, or despondent.

‘What?’

‘Rhaine Montgomery is a corpse in the Low Town muck.’

Pretories gave a credible impression of being shocked: he slumped back into his chair, squeezed his forehead with one hand, and allowed an appropriate interval to pass without speaking. ‘You’re certain?’

‘I saw her body.’

‘By the Firstborn,’ he said. ‘I’ve failed him again.’

I took the seat he’d offered. ‘I think we both know where the blame lies, Commander.’

If you were watching close enough, you could have seen a break in the façade, an angry crack in his false surface of regret. But then in fairness, I knew what I was looking for.

‘Sons of bitches at Black House,’ I spat out this last with sudden and honest venom, the first display of emotion I’d allowed myself. ‘How long are we gonna let them do it? Roland wasn’t enough – they had to send someone after his little sister too?’ I slammed my fist down on Pretories’ table, sending sheets of paper floating to the ground.

‘Black House,’ Pretories agreed after a moment. ‘Sons of bitches.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Commander,’ I said, adopting his mournful pose. ‘It was mine. I was too slow in getting to her, and too slow in coming to you.’

‘As you said, Lieutenant. We both know where the blame lies.’

‘I’ve been no friend to the Association these last years, I know that, and I’m sorry. I was . . . I was afraid,’ I said slowly, drawing it out. ‘I have people to protect. You know I used to wear the gray. I’m in their books, a loose end they’d be happy to tie shut. I’ve got to be careful – I can’t stretch my neck out.’

‘And now?’

‘Seeing Rhaine’s body . . .’ I shook my head bitterly. ‘Same as her brother. Twelve years and nothing’s changed – we’re still nothing to them. They take everything we got and step on us if we make a noise. Someone needs to answer for her, for her and for Roland.’ Strictly speaking, that last wasn’t even a lie. ‘I’m with you from now on, wherever it takes me.’

I wasn’t sure how far Pretories was swallowing my sudden shift in allegiance. It didn’t exactly fit with my reputation as a man whose sole concern was his own back. But of course, the less he trusted me the wiser he would be to fake it. Better to have me close, where he could keep an eye on me. ‘With the Throne threatening our future, we need the support of every veteran we can muster. The march isn’t for a couple of days, but of course there are ways to get involved before then. Check with one of the men at the front desk, they’ll direct you as needed.’

That was the end of the conversation, but I stayed where I was.

After a moment, Joachim clarified his dismissal. ‘If there’s nothing else then, Lieutenant . . .’

‘I’m afraid there is something else, Commander.’ I swallowed hard and looked at my lap. If I had a cap I’d have taken it off my head and worried it between my hands. As it was I just tried to give that impression. ‘There’s something I should have told you the last time I was here. I should have told you, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry.’