She was less than a mile away from her destination when she heard the clatter of hooves on the cobbles. It was a horse moving at a trot despite the darkness, and she put her braided godglass earrings in just long enough to make out the approaching silhouette: a military messenger in the black uniform of the Foreign Legion.
Kizzie hailed him with a shout and a wave, holding her hand out flat so he could see her silic sigil. He did not slow until he was almost upon her. When he did, he squinted hard at her hand and then gave her a respectful nod. “Good evening, Lady Vorcien,” he said.
She did not correct him. It was always amusing when people mistook her for a cousin rather than a bastard. “Any news from the war?” she asked. “My cabdriver seemed to think a battle had already taken place.” Looking closer, she could now see that the messenger was harried, his cloak askew, horse tired, head drooping.
“It’ll be in the newspaper in the morning,” he answered, his voice exhausted. “We suffered a mighty loss.”
Kizzie rocked back on her heels, genuinely shocked by the news. The Foreign Legion didn’t suffer losses often, and when they did they were on a distant continent, reported in the newspaper months after the fact. “I’m only going as far as Bingham tonight,” she told him. “Am I in danger?”
“You’re in no danger tonight, but I wouldn’t travel any farther west if I were you. The Grent and their pet mercenary hold the Copper Hills. Is there anything else? I must hurry to take news to the Assembly.”
“No, no,” Kizzie said, her thoughts suddenly filled with marching armies and roaming soldiers. If the enemy was closing in, the normal rules no longer applied; the region was no longer subject to the complicated alliances of guild-family enforcers and National Guardsmen, but to large groups of infantry. Despite his reassurance, she was tempted to turn back. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, Lady Vorcien. Oh, and just a suggestion: avoid the Bingham Brawlers Club.”
Kizzie’s breath caught in her throat. “Why?”
“I just came from there. General Stavri and his senior officers have stopped to, ahem, gird themselves with a drink before they have to report their loss to the Assembly tonight. The place is packed with angry officers right now.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Kizzie replied, waving the messenger on his way. She cringed as she listened to the sound of his horse’s hooves disappear into the darkness. Losing a battle to Grent this close to the capital was certainly more important than her mission, but it also seemed to have interfered directly. If the Bingham Brawlers Club was filled with officers trying to get very drunk very quickly, it was a bad time to go looking for alibis.
And yet … General Stavri’s little brother, Agrippo Stavri, was one of the names on her list, and was attached to General Stavri’s staff. That meant four of her fifteen suspects might all be under one roof. It was risky, but a very tempting target.
She decided to continue on, trekking through the cold evening until the street was finally lit once more with gas lamps. She was soon among the tract houses of Bingham, with proper evening traffic out on the streets. She could sense no agitation from the public. Word must have not yet gotten out about the nearby loss. Part of her felt for these people: if the Grent army pressed without opposition, Bingham could be under occupation in days.
The thought hurried her steps, and she wound through Bingham until she reached a side street with an old converted tenement whose entire second floor had been whitewashed, with the words BINGHAM BRAWLERS CLUB lit up by gas lamps. It was a quiet neighborhood, and she was surprised to hear nothing of carousing or angry shouts as she walked up to the front door. There was also no doorman. She paused outside, glancing around. Even quiet clubs had a doorman, often smoking their pipe, chatting with the locals. No doorman, no locals, no guild-family members enjoying a cigar in the crisp night air.
The hairs on the back of Kizzie’s neck stood on end. It wasn’t that she couldn’t hear carousing: she couldn’t hear anything. It was as silent as if the club were closed. She approached the well-lit doorway, one hand slipping into her jacket for her stiletto, and slowly pushed in the door. It wasn’t locked.
“What the piss is going on?” she whispered to herself. The front hall was empty, the club deathly silent. She stopped at the coatroom, glancing inside for an attendant. No one, but the coatroom was absolutely stuffed with uniform jackets and fine cloaks and dusters. She drew out her stiletto, trying to think of an explanation. Was the whole club participating in some kind of lark? Had they rushed out into the street to warn Bingham about approaching Grent soldiers? Had they fled entirely? If that were the case, she would have passed them or at least heard them. This didn’t make sense.
Perhaps everyone was on the top floor of the club watching a particularly riveting boxing match?
As it turned out, she did not need to go up to the top floor for answers. She didn’t need to proceed more than a dozen paces. She rounded the corner to where the narrow entrance hall opened up into a large, formal dining area surrounding a boxing ring only to stop dead in her tracks.
The room was filled with corpses. There were dozens of them, strewn about like confetti; splayed across tables, fallen in the aisle, slumped against walls. At a glance she could not determine what had killed them, but the amount of blood was truly horrific. There was no sound, not even a moan. The entire place was perfectly still, like a sculptor’s tableau.
The shock of it numbed her, keeping her from fleeing. She checked the nearest body: a young man in a smart dinner jacket, his throat slit. Still warm. Very warm, and the blood was still pooling around the corpses. These people had all been dead for a very short amount of time. A little further inspection showed that every piece of regular glass inside the room had shattered, and was either in or near a corpse. The work of a glassdancer. A very, very, very good glassdancer.
It didn’t seem possible. Kizzie had seen the work of the best glassdancers and it had never looked anything like this. No one had even had time to scream. The neighborhood wasn’t roused. Kizzie’s blood felt frozen in her veins and for only the second time in her life she realized she was terrified. Her feet seemed rooted to the floor and she struggled to make a decision. Shaky-handed, she fished a piece of skyglass from her pocket – almost dropping it in the process – and threaded it through one of her ear piercings.
The sorcery immediately calmed her, settling the tremble in her fingers and letting her think. She cocked her head, listening carefully. No sound from the floors above. Her glassdancer sorcery detected no glassdancers in the building. The killer – or killers – must have fled just before she arrived. This whole thing was terrifying, but it had also given her a unique opportunity.
Kizzie added her braided godglass earrings and, soaking in all four types of sorcery, launched herself into action. She hurried across the room, stepping carefully to keep from leaving footprints in the blood, looking at the face of each corpse. Over half of them were in uniform – the officers from the lost battle – and it was these she focused on.
In her search she recognized two distant Vorcien cousins and a school friend of hers from childhood. She did not give any of them a second glance. General Stavri was easy to identify, lying slumped across a table, the remnants of a shot glass embedded in the back of his skull. She found his little brother at the same table. Colonel Agrippo Stavri was still sitting, staring sightlessly and slack-jawed with a decorative, wind chime–shaped piece of chandelier lodged just above his sternum. Kizzie ransacked Agrippo’s uniform pockets. She found a pocket watch, a checkbook, a billfold, and a bundle of letters soaked in blood. She left the pocket watch and checkbook, searched the billfold, and wrapped the letters in a napkin before stuffing them in her pocket.