23 Khordak, Night
Dastrux City
Gerald opened that bottle of ’09 with the lads.
Annais delivered the ransom note to Amélie, who wept with joy at the news that Felix was alive. Annais promised that the Pink Unicorn crew would help rescue him. In conversation, she asked who the nobles support, and the answer was Griseke Arnoltz; they support the most powerful example of their own class. Amélie also mentioned a safe house that one of her house’s rivals had been receiving shipments from.
Back in the city, Gerald heard that most of the soldiers, at least the career soldiers and officers, support granting emergency powers in perpetuo to the Supreme Legionary Command.
Oskraks very successfully composed a song already glorifying Calloway’s march and put it about to prepare the people for the parade. He heard that most of the common people believe a cock-and-bull about how the Kaiser will marry a Saladuran princess who will give him a child.
He also became reacquainted with an old conquest who now works as a chambermaid at the Hôtel Capital. She provided him with a wax pressing of her master key, and told him that all kinds of strange travelers had been in and out of the hotel, and that the Imperial Suite was empty but reserved by a large and secretive party.
The Pink Unicorn crew reconvened and decided to hit the safe house that Annais had heard about.
The building was guarded by some well-armed and moderately skilled mercenaries. It was a modest stone house built with its back against the retaining wall of one of the Oldmarket terraces. The house that stood a level up on that terrace was hosting some kind of garden party, so the crew decided to infiltrate that gathering and use it to approach the safe house from above.
It fell to Oskraks to open a way, and he led them graciously through the party. The song he had composed was already being played here. In the house, he distracted a young heiress as the others made a rope fast to the retaining wall. But his charms backfired this once, as the heiress made clear that she was looking to settle down and planned to tame him of his dalliances. He extricated himself posthaste.
The crew gathered around a dormer through which they saw an office with sundry inviting documents to steal. A clerk, however, was working late inside. He had left the window open a crack in the spring heat.
Annais and Oskraks eased the window open and tried to knock the clerk out with a blow to the head. But when they lifted him from his papers, they found they had knocked him stone dead instead.
They stuffed the body into a wardrobe while Gerald glanced at the headings of the papers as he gathered them up. The operation seemed to be a shadow patronage network run by Viceroy von Stettin, funneling money to lower nobles in exchange for favors. It was also running weapons, particularly poison. Gerald found that this completely soured his support for the Viceroy.
Annais tried to get into a safe in the wall, but was stymied. She noticed that it had been roughly plastered into a hole cut in the wall, and she and Oskraks ripped it free. They escaped with the unopened safe just as a mercenary in the bedroom on the other side of the wall began to stir.
On their way out through the garden party, a young bravo asked their names. He believed the false ones they gave, but Oskraks claimed to know the real Oskraks. The bravo asked Oskraks to deliver something to Oskraks; Oskraks was taken aback when the bravo struck him across the face with a glove and told him to call Oskraks “a cad and a womanizer” (for the crime, Oskraks reflected, of refusing the heiress) and call him to a duel. Oskraks promised to deliver the message to Oskraks and darted away.
24 Khordak
Calloway’s army marched through the city. The streets were lined with cheering throngs that grew silent as the cart with the dead veteran was drawn past. Many in the crowd showed that they were dedicated supporters by wearing blue half-capes on the right shoulder, in the same position as the blue figure in the canton of Calloway’s arms. Smaller groups of protesters waved poles bearing the image of the Kaiser and cried, “Treason!”
At the top of Collosea, before the gate of the Knightswall, the procession was halted by a cordon of the Palatine Guard. Calloway halted the march, climbed onto a cart, and began a speech. For the first time she bared the horrors the men had faced in Khavandri-Shethya, and their dismal march home. Their supply lines cut off, they had spent their war chest in buying food as they moved, been turned away from many of the cities where they tried to take shelter, and, at the last extremity, forcibly requisitioned supplies from the country they marched over.
A workman leaned a ladder against a tower. He cut the straps that had disguised an arquebus as the ladder’s right pole.
Gliding through the crowd on the lookout for trouble, the Pink Unicorn crew saw him slip into the tower.
Gerald grabbed the nearest woad-cloaked civilian and told him to warn Calloway of a sniper. The crew pursued the would-be assassin, but took three tries to break through the door he had barred behind him. As they reached the foot of the bell tower, they smelled brimstone. They rang the bell, stunning him. But, preferring to fight with their full numbers, they abandoned the bell and all climbed the tower together. Though they deftly skated over the marbles he had left on the treacherous staircase, a shot rang out just before they reached the top.
Oskraks grabbed the assassin and tried to pin his arms behind his back, while Annais tried to pummel him into submission. Gerald looked over the railing and saw an unexpected tableau.
The civilian he had warned was standing before Calloway, his arms out, shielding her. It was Bruno who lay dead on the ground in a spreading pool of blood.
The assassin slipped Oskraks’ grasp and tried his chances climbing down the tower. Annais mantled the railing and divekicked, riding him to the ground. Still he rose and turned into the crowd; but he was blocked by Calloway, who delivered a crisp three-blow boxing combination that laid out the assassin. Barking, “He is not permitted to die,” she tossed him to a centurion.
Oskraks grabbed the weapon and bag that had been left at the top of the tower. He followed Calloway to bear witness to Momentous Events. Gerald fell into his old soldierly place in the serried ranks of the marchers.
Calloway bore Bruno’s body to the fore and demanded entry to the Grand Chapel in Citadel Dastrux, the only place in the city where the dead can be raised. A second line of Palatines joined the existing cordon. The marchers stepped forward until their chests were pressed against the breastplates of the Guard.
A Palatine captain tried to take custody of the assassin from Calloway’s centurion. Gerald and Annais moved to intercept him. After arguing, Gerald suggested the assassin be held in sanctuary at a nearby shrine of Akhaventh.
Oskraks led the marchers, and the spectators joined, in a chant of “Justice and life for Bruno!” The Palatine held, then quavered and broke. The march proceeded into the avenues of Knightswall.
Gerald, Annais, the centurion, and the captain ensconced the assassin in a cell beneath the shrine of Akhaventh: as a place of healing, the temple was often called upon to hold brawlers and such disturbers of the peace. Centurion and captain departed to their respective factions, each to tell his own side that they had scored the victory.
Gerald retreated to study his spellbook. For the same hour, Oskraks marched with Calloway to the base of Citadel Dastrux, and Annais questioned the prisoner.
The assassin told her that it didn’t matter what happened to him, because he had killed Bruno and the political situation would not allow him to be raised. Bruno’s army on the return march had eaten the man’s family out of house and home; as he was foraging for food, a gang of deserters (for whom the assassin blamed Bruno personally) had caught and, in the strange blood-madness of the age, tortured and killed his family.
A full legion of the Palatine Guard was drawn up outside the Citadel. Calloway’s army outnumbered them two to one, let alone the crowd of civilians that had surged along with them, but they were unarmed for the peaceful march.
Gerald returned to the cell and cast fast friends on the assassin, an undetectable mind-trick of a spell. The assassin seemed to recognize him for the first time. Gerald claimed to be another member of their vaguely-stated organization, and sent Annais out of the room so they could converse more freely.
A Palatine captain told Calloway, with genuine regret, that they were under exacting orders to treat any attempt to gain entrance to the Citadel as an act of open war.
Through various circumlocutions, Gerald prised from the assassin that he worked for a figure called the Raven and received his orders in a rain barrel in Claytown. All the assassin wanted was to get free, but Gerald would not allow it, so the conversation stalemated. Finally, the assassin asked Gerald to get him a healing potion from the shrine above.
The marchers held their ground just ahead of the Palatine Guard, but this time the Guard had naked weapons readied. Oskraks joined the steadying voices calling for courage and cool-headedness.
Gerald left the dungeon and received a potion from one of the acolytes. He told Annais to bang on the door after a few minutes to give him the appearance of time pressure, so he could make a noncommittal exit if he came to a stalemate again.
Finally, the discipline of Calloway’s troops wavered. After hours of abject dread, they were exhausted, and began to yawn, slouch, and creep backward, spoiling their formation. Seeing the wind turn, Calloway withdrew them in good order.
Gerald flashed the healing potion before the assassin, who told him to come very close. He had a useful note in his pocket, and, with his hands tied behind his back, Gerald would need to extract it and pass the potion at the same time, as if they were performing a handoff in the street.
Annais began banging on the door. Gerald rushed forward as though afraid of being caught.
But the assassin was not bound. He had slipped the centurion’s hasty knots while Gerald left him alone to get the potion and conspire with Annais. As Gerald pressed against the bars, the assassin wrapped the rope around his neck.
Thirty seconds later, Annais’s Gerald-senses tingled and she barged into the dungeon against his instructions.
There, she saw a dropped healing potion dripping into the gutter; Gerald’s body, the face blue and the neck unnaturally askew; and the assassin in the final, fatal moments of removing his own jaw with Gerald’s claw hammer.
