Wicked Bronze Ambition gp-14 Read online

  “Oh. Yeah. I didn’t think about that. Where was she? Never mind. I don’t want to know. I’d hate it if it was somewhere even worse than where I was. She never talked about it. Not even once.”

  “Do you talk about it?”

  “No.” Since I never see any of the guys I was down there with anymore.

  “Case closed. You worry too much about stuff that doesn’t matter.”

  “You aren’t the first to notice.”

  “I don’t think our man is going to come out to us. Let’s go find him. We do have other stuff to do.”

  60

  We took the steps in stages. I was uncomfortable leaving our four-legged associates unsupervised. Horses can be counted on to do whatever is evilest, while dogs are easily influenced by those who are dedicated to doing evil-although, honestly, I was more concerned about rustling than I was about critter misbehavior.

  I wasn’t sure why.

  Tara Chayne was probably right when she insisted that our Civil Guard shadows would take care of any problems. They needed us as stalking horses.

  They might even defend the dogs against the sort of refugee retards who thought pups belonged in the communal pot.

  We ran into an old priest coming out of the cathedral, long, lean, and tired looking. He would have gone to the old priests’ home by now if there were any young blood taking the cassock. The lack was surprising considering the state of the economy.

  Most of the traffic consisted of religious personnel. It was the middle of a workday in the middle of a week. Honest parishioners ought to be occupied elsewhere-unless somehow involved in preparations for the upcoming holy days, Day of the Dead and All Hallows’.

  This old boy had one foot in the next world and was thinking on the wonders ahead. He nearly jumped out of his frock when Tara Chayne asked, “Father, can you help us?”

  Rheumy gray eyes focused. His gaze darted, assessing us instantly and possibly too accurately.

  He opined, “I suspect that I don’t have enough time left. I do have an assignment. But helping is the mission that God has given me, so I must do what I can.” Meaning he would go through the motions, though he would be wasting time on spiritual deadbeats.

  Old people can be scary the way they read you, and this one was old even to Tara Chayne Machtkess, who said, “We’re looking for my father’s cousin, Brooklin Urp. Which was his name before he took orders. My father is dying. He had a big fight with his cousin when they were young. I don’t know what they fought about. A girl, probably. I just care about getting it all settled so there aren’t any problems with the probate.”

  She lied smoothly, with conviction, sounding like a complete weasel, which I noted and would not forget.

  Unskilled liars focus on details and try to put a shine on their own part in whatever they’re trying to pull together.

  The priest said, “I don’t know a Brooklin Urp, madame. I’ve been at Chattaree forty-nine years.” And now began to show more interest in me than she. Frowning. “I’ve seen you before.”

  “I’m no regular but I do come to services.” The absolute truth. Only God Himself could fault me.

  I didn’t remember him, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t collided at some point. My most recent visit to Chattaree had been full of excitement and had taken place under cover of darkness.

  Tara Chayne pulled it back to her. “He changed his name after he turned into a priest.” Which was not unusual. New priests often want to break with their pasts. “Dad says he should be easy to find because he has this big thing on his head, over his eye.” She touched her hairline, indicating the wrong side.

  “Bezma? I didn’t think. .” He shut up. His face shut down. “That doesn’t sound like anyone here. I’m sorry. Now I do have to get on along to my shut-ins.”

  We let him go. He had given us something. And I could pick him out of a gaggle of old priests if I had to drag him off for tea with the Dead Man.

  Tara Chayne said, “Bezma must be important.”

  “Maybe scary some, too.”

  “We maybe ought to look into that. Why scary, I mean. He didn’t scare me.”

  “But you’re you.”

  She agreed. “There is that.”

  I grunted, said, “I guarantee, some of the people here, back in the shadows, are very scary. Was there a connection between the tournaments and the Church before?”

  “Not obviously. But we never got the angle on the Operators. The ones we saw were dead. Those who weren’t dead made the bodies disappear before we could use them or identify them.”

  Shadowslinger, I recalled, had been accused of being a necromancer. Of course, there was little that hadn’t been laid on her at some point.

  Might the Operators not have a last-man-standing game of their own going?

  61

  Once inside we approached a lay brother near the confessionals. His task seemed to be to control traffic and to provide information. Cynical me, I suspected that his real function was to separate the faithful from those who came looking for the truth-whatever that might be in any given case. He might be skilled in estimating the depths of pockets, too.

  Tara Chayne repeated the truth she had created for the elderly priest out front, so convincingly that I was halfway ready to believe that she had a cousin lurking here.

  I don’t know what the lay brother thought. He nodded and delivered the occasional friendly smile that did not synch up with anything being said.

  “There is no Brooklin Urp here, ma’am. But I am sure that you want to see Leading General Select Secretary for Finance Izi Bezma. I didn’t know he had family outside. The consensus here always has been that he must be a virgin conception hatched out of a gargoyle’s egg.”

  There was an inside joke involved, for sure. It seemed some Chattaree people were not enamored of Izi Bezma. “What kind of name is Izi Bezma? Is he some kind of foreigner?”

  Moonblight hit me with a ferocious look. The man was supposed to be family!

  But he was Brooklin Urp when he was one of us.

  “Don’t know.” He did not miss our exchange of looks. “His ancestors came to TunFaire before the war.”

  That would’ve been a ways back. Maybe far enough to coincide with the start of the tournaments.

  Maybe we had lucked onto something.

  Maybe this mess wouldn’t be all that hard to pick apart after all.

  “I’ll just go see if Magister Bezma is in.” He snickered.

  Tara Chayne asked, “Is that funny?” with a compelling quality in her voice.

  “It is. He’s famous for never leaving Chattaree. He hardly ever leaves his office suite. He has his meals brought in. You can expect the Hammer of God to fall if the Leading General Select Secretary for Finance visits you on your patch.” Then he explained, for the uninitiated, “The joke is, he’s never not in. But that doesn’t mean he’ll see you. Back in a flash, folks. Anybody wanders in with a question, tell them I’m on my way. They need to confess, the confessionals on the ends are manned and neither priest is busy.”

  “Got it.” I gave him a thumbs-up. He went. I reminded Tara Chayne, “He never leaves the premises.”

  “As far as our new friend knows. There can’t be many hundred-year-old priests with the same disfigurement.”

  Couldn’t be many people at all anymore, outside the blisteringly poor. Cosmetic sorcery has become a competitive field. You can get subcutaneous cysts, small scars, and the like eliminated for the cost of a meal now that there is no demand for sorcery in the Cantard.

  I thought back to my Chattaree-related case. The villain then had not tried to disguise what he was, but he had laid on layers of misdirection. Shouldn’t I expect the same this time? Or more since the tournament scheme involved legally unsanctioned violent death?

  A thought out of nowhere. “Don’t know why I haven’t asked this before. What was all the excitement on the other side of the Hill last night?”

  The humor fled her face. “It was what we
guessed. Two young people from the Hedley-Farfoul family-fraternal twins-lost their lives, quite nastily. The little blonde you described, and her companion, were in the neighborhood but not involved-though Chase found one witness who said that they had attacked the attackers, too late to help the Farfoul kids.” Chase would be her man Denvers.

  “A thing that might have been a wolf-demon, its ties indeterminate, got torn up as badly as the twins. It escaped lacking an ear, some scalp, its tail, and its right forepaw up to whatever a wolf’s fetlock is called. The patrol collected the pieces but had to give them up to the Civil Guard. The corpses, too. The forensics sorcerers are still working the area. They wouldn’t cooperate with Chase or Orchidia Hedley-Farfoul.”

  “Don’t know that name.”

  “It would be strange if you did. The twins’ mother. She keeps a low profile. She was an assassin-mage during the recent unpleasantness. The best there ever was.”

  “The Black Orchid?”

  “Her.”

  “Bless me.” Nothing would express my amazement any better. “I thought the Black Orchid was like an urban legend of the combat zone.”

  “At least nineteen people on the Venageti side wish she was made up. Not to mention all the unknowns who got between her and her targets.”

  “So, basically, the Operators didn’t think things through and maybe screwed the pooch.”

  “They did that when they killed Strafa. But yes. Orchidia was never more than a rumor here. No one who hadn’t worked with her knew much about her. Once her obligation was fulfilled, she hung up her blades and became a housewife who did consulting work for the Crown. And I don’t mean consulting as a euphemism. So. Last night’s events will definitely bring the Black Orchid out of retirement. We may be in a race to avenge Strafa before she avenges Dane and Deanne.”

  I vaguely recalled an odd girl the kids called Deanne Head running with the Faction. She hadn’t found what she wanted there and had moved on. “I might’ve met the girl.”

  “She and Kevans were acquainted. I don’t think they were friends. Deanne may have had her eye on Kip Prose, too, for a while.”

  I sighed. “So the stupid tournament really has started.”

  “It’s started. It’ll get uglier if we can’t abort it. The Guards who cleaned up weren’t Specials or Runners. Could that mean anything?”

  It meant she had a fine paranoid mind tuned to sniff out wicked possibilities.

  Suppose those first red tops weren’t the real thing? Suppose they were agents of the Operators cleaning up so no useful evidence would be left for the real tin whistles? That might be why the forensics sorcerers were working the scene now.

  Clever, maybe, but foolishly lethal to try-unless you got away with it. But till some mob found themselves drowning in a pond of their own blood, showing the world the full price of stupid, it was sure to happen eventually, probably sooner than later.

  I didn’t think any professional bad guys would be dim enough to yank the Director’s beard that blatantly. They tried to get along. Even Relway knows when to pretend not to see. It would take an amateur convinced of his own brilliance to try, one with a built-in case of supreme upper-class arrogance and disdain. Or maybe someone who had spent his whole life isolated inside a cathedral, never getting any true flavor of the real world.

  62

  Tara Chayne said, “It occurs to me that it wouldn’t be bright of me to challenge anyone as powerful as this one might be, here in the seat of his power.”

  “And he would recognize you, wouldn’t he?”

  “He would. And that greeter called him Magister.”

  “He did, didn’t he? That isn’t good.”

  The title indicated that, in addition to the job with the long-winded title, our man had been accredited as a magic user inside a denomination that doesn’t like wizards or sorcerers much.

  Moonblight said, “I’d better go check on the horses.”

  “Good idea. Brownie might not be able to hold off a determined band of rustlers. I’ll stay here. It’s been a while since I’ve confessed.”

  The confessionals remained unused. Only the end two showed signs admitting that a priest was available.

  “Excellent thinking.” She took hold of my right ear, tugged. I tried to yank away, not knowing what game she was playing. She held on. “Hold still. You want to be able to hear.” She muttered something harshly melodic, tugged again, then slipped a little finger in. I am nothing if not the consummate professional. I endured.

  “This will be good for about a quarter hour.”

  The hearing in my right ear became ten times as acute, difficult to believe and hardly comfortable since it now seemed I could hear the tiniest scratch or creak within a dozen miles, including Brownie’s fleas farting. I’d have to get used to it fast or not be able to take advantage.

  I started to ask for advice.

  Advice was not available. Tara Chayne was gone.

  She’d been on my left. I hadn’t heard her go.

  Intriguing.

  Murmuring voices approached from the direction Greeter Man had gone. Feet scuffed limestone. I wondered why the builders hadn’t used a more durable stone where there would be heavy foot traffic. And I got myself into the priestly side of a confessional booth several doors from either one that was supposed to be in use. Seeing in would be tough. Seeing out was almost as feeble. The booth reeked of cheap wine and urine.

  Every priest might not be at ease with the filth that he had to hear, so ugly, yet, ultimately, banal.

  Few sins are unique.

  Not a time to philosophize, Garrett. Time to act. To eavesdrop.

  The greeter said, “And they’re gone.”

  “It is quite impossible to deceive your sharp eye, Niea.”

  “There is no need to mock me, sir.”

  “No need, but. . Apologies. You are correct. You were doing your job. It seems that these people offered no cause for more suspicion than is normal with street people. Street people are, after all, why we’re here.”

  I thought it sounded like somebody was being sarcastic.

  I found an angle where the seeing out was better. I saw enough of the newcomer to understand that he wasn’t the man we’d hoped to find. He was younger, browner, and had no huge blemish growing out of wild, curly black locks just starting to go salt-and-pepper. He turned slowly, all the way round, frowning. His gaze did not linger on the confessionals.

  “Curious, Niea. Very curious. I wonder who they were.” Not what we might have wanted.

  The greeter offered descriptions that Old Bones would have applauded, and a surprising analysis. “The woman was older than she pretended and thought she was important but wanted to hide that.”

  “Nobility?”

  “Not quite that feel, but there was that level of self-assurance.”

  “The Hill, then?”

  “Probably. It wasn’t as obvious as usual, though.”

  “And the man?”

  “A cipher. Not what she was. A hard case. Not a bodyguard, though. He dressed badly and was poorly groomed.”

  “So. That would make him single. Was he her Jodie?”

  “No. He was the senior partner despite pretending that he was dim and darkish. He paid closer attention than he let on.”

  “Civil Guard snoop? A Special, maybe?”

  “Maybe. But why would they be interested in Magister Bezma?”

  “Why indeed?”

  I tried to get a better look. The guy expressed himself by tone quite well. He had made that sound like the query was rhetorical to him but a real question to the gatekeeper.

  I tried to recall the description of the man who had traveled with the old boy who owned the wen-Magister Bezma-to Flubber Ducky’s and Trivias Smith’s. No one had done well delivering one. The wen had been a huge distraction to people not much interested in the first place.

  I reached back for images passed on by the Dead Man. Even people not paying attention might have noted something
useful.

  Yes. They had. But not enough. Just enough to make me suspect that this character hadn’t been with Bezma.

  He told Niea, “Go out and see if you can’t find some trace of them.” His tone said he thought there was a good chance we wouldn’t be making a run for it. “Wear your cap. I want Almaz able to spot you.”

  “You think they were spies?”

  “We should find out if we can.”

  “Of course. The more I think about that guy, the creepier he feels. His eyes were like a wolf’s. Like back behind the dull and friendly was somebody really looking forward to hurting somebody.”

  “You’re known for your discerning eye, Niea. It’s why we have you working here. You’re probably right. So I have to wonder why this man and his beard would be interested in Magister Bezma.”

  Niea wanted to speculate. The other guy wasn’t interested. “Put your hat on and get out there, Niea.”

  “Uh, yes, sir. On my way, sir.”

  He never named a name. I’d been hoping to hear one.

  He shuffled to where he greeted visitors, produced a yellow flop hat so bright that it ought to glow in the dark. You had to admire the genius who came up with the dye. For several seconds I lost interest in anything but curiosity about that. Whence had it come? How had it been applied?

  Niea left the cathedral.

  I didn’t doubt that he would spot Tara Chayne quickly. She had no reason to try for anonymity. She’d probably returned to that bench. There was no good reason not to have.

  Niea’s boss paced. He held a brisk conversation with himself but too softly for me to catch a word in five even using my enhanced hearing.

  He wasn’t fussing in vernacular Karentine, anyway. He was using either the liturgical tongue or something foreign. Probably the former. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  When you’re a kid you know damned well you’ll never use any dead languages, or any of that dull religious stuff, once you’re dealing with the real world.