“Your father wants you to remain on task. At the moment, only Capric has been called out and blamed, and so we will pretend that we are all still friends. Proceed in good faith. The answers Demir wants are answers that your father wants as well. Beyond the task he’s already given you, Father Vorcien wants you to remain uncompromised in Demir’s eyes.”
She raised an eyebrow. How could Demir possibly trust her now? If Demir now saw Capric as his enemy, he would see all Vorcien as enemies. “How the piss am I supposed to do that?” she asked.
“As I said – proceed in good faith. Do what you can to maintain Demir’s trust. Remember what you’ve been promised.” Diaguni stood up suddenly and gave her an almost fatherly smile. “The Glass Knife is attempting to sow discord among the great guild-families. It is even more important that we root them all out. Find answers. Bring your father evidence of their involvement in Adriana’s murder.” Diaguni left the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Kizzie waited until he’d been gone for some time before letting out a little gasp and checking to make sure she hadn’t inadvertently pissed herself. “Damn you, Demir,” she whispered. “You weren’t supposed to attack Capric directly.” Damn Capric, damn Demir, and damn herself.
She paced around the room. Sowing discord indeed. She had done exactly what their enemies would have wanted.
Something prodded at the back of her mind, and she turned her attention back to the spymaster report. Something Diaguni said had grabbed her attention and now she couldn’t tell what. She thought back over the conversation carefully, considering every word, until she realized what it was: discord.
This whole damned thing was organized chaos. The Grent agent was the thrust of it: a fall guy who was meant to be caught so that the murder was pinned on the Grent. War was declared, destabilizing the entire region. But to what end? War was bad for trade; bad for Grent; bad for Ossa. If Adriana’s death was meant to cause all of this, then why?
Kizzie paced around the small bedroom, thinking furiously. The Glass Knife had no doubt planned on Demir returning to conduct the investigation directly. They hadn’t planned on Kizzie. That was their mistake. A mistake that, at some point, they were going to try and rectify. The Tall Man had, she knew, seen her face. She no longer just had to solve this conspiracy to placate Father Vorcien and vindicate Demir. She had to do it to save her own skin before a powerful Ossan Fulgurist Society could put a knife in her back.
A knock on the door nearly made her leap out of her boots, and Kizzie whirled toward the door, stiletto drawn before she even knew what she was doing. She hid the stiletto behind her back and prayed that Diaguni hadn’t returned to poke holes in her earlier excuse. “Come!”
To her relief, it was one of the Vorcien maids. She bowed to Kizzie and held out a note. “This just came for you, ma’am.”
Kizzie waited until she was gone before opening it. She immediately recognized Gorian’s blocky writing. It said,
I’ve found your Tall Man. Meet me at the watchhouse at ten in the morning.
Kizzie pumped her fist victoriously. Now she was getting somewhere. Find the Tall Man, confirm that either he or his masters were working for the Glass Knife, and then take them all down. She might damn well get out of this whole thing yet!
44
Idrian stood over a washbasin, splashing cold water onto his face as he stared into his reflection by flickering gaslight in the officers’ guest quarters of Fort Alameda. He could see the gray in his hair, and the tiny iridescent splotches of purple and yellow permanent glassrot on his cheeks and neck that were visible only from the right angle. Light reflected off his witglass eye as if from a child’s glass bauble, showing the imperfect depths of the glass. Sometimes he fancied he could see through his eye, all the way into his brain, and witness the rot growing within that caused his madness.
He finished shaving and splashed more cold water across his neck and chin, then wiped it all away with a rag. Someone off in the courtyard of the fort was singing along with Braileer’s fiddle – the beginning of what everyone hoped would be a long night of hard-earned relaxation. Demir was off in Ossa. Kerite was not an immediate threat. Food and beer had been brought in by the cartload to reward the Ironhorns and their cuirassier counterparts for the maneuver that everyone was calling the Grappo Torrent.
The Grappo Torrent. Idrian chuckled at that and wondered how many commanders over the next hundred years would stupidly try to blow up dams and divert rivers at their enemies without doing the kind of calculations that Demir had carefully prepared.
He pulled on his dress uniform jacket and adjusted the collar in the mirror. He was getting older. Stiffness crept into his skin and bones all over from glassrot. He wasn’t far from retirement, and while he yearned for peace, part of him feared having to spend the rest of his life alone on an officer’s pension, waiting for glassrot cancers to kill him.
He wanted nothing more than to go out into the courtyard with the enlisted men. Drink beer all night. Maybe spend the night in a cuirassier’s arms. Instead he had to attend a formal dinner with the garrison commander, whose name he couldn’t even remember.
“Shit and piss,” he said to the mirror, pressing on his godglass eye gently, “I’d say getting old is the pits, but every year is a gift for a breacher like me.”
He slowly became aware of the sound of feet running in the hallway of the barracks. They came to a stop just outside his door; then came a knock and, without waiting for permission, Squeaks pushed the door open and looked up at him.
He waved her off. “I know, I know. I’m late for dinner, I–”
“Sir!” Squeaks cut him off in a low voice. “It’s not about dinner.”
Most of the enlisted soldiers called Idrian by his given name. He’d never cared, since he felt more like them than an officer. “Then what’s this about?” he asked, turning toward her with a frown.
“There’s a problem.”
“Then say it quick!”
“I’m a minor talent as a glassdancer.”
Idrian peered at Squeaks. “That’s your problem?”
“Of course not! It’s a secret, not a problem. Only Major Grappo knows and he’s been telling me for years not to mention it to anyone. Says it might come in handy one day.”
It was an odd thing to keep a secret. Minor talents might have some use in a few occupations, but the military wasn’t one of them. If people knew she was a minor talent she might be able to command a few ozzo more per month from her contract, but it made no more difference than that. “So why tell me now?”
“Because General Grappo pulled me aside and gave me a task – to be on alert at all times. He didn’t want what happened to General Stavri to happen to him.”
Idrian was still thinking about having to wear this stiff-collared dress uniform all night. “The general has gone to Ossa. We don’t expect him back until late tonight, and assassins aren’t going to attack us inside a damned fort. At ease, soldier.”
“Uh, sir. I think the assassin might be here.”
Idrian looked at the mirror, adjusting his collar once more. Several moments passed before what Squeaks had just said sank in. He whirled back toward her, the hair on his neck standing on end. He looked at her – really looked – and could see from the fear in her eyes that this was no joke. Within moments he was striding down the mostly empty barracks hall, every spare piece of godglass threaded through his piercings. Squeaks ran to keep up, talking in a hushed tone as she did.