Sarton and Maurisk had left shortly thereafter, the former to whatever he did in his free time-nobody seemed to know-and the latter to bash out a broadsheet about how the bankruptcy of the Second Pennysworth proved the essential bankruptcy of Borelgai-style finance. Back in the suite, Ben and Faro were playing some kind of game that involved dice and many, many glasses of wine. Cora was dozing on the sofa, curled up like a cat. Raesinia found herself wandering out of the living room and into the little anteroom, where doors led to the pair of bedrooms and the tiny private kitchen.
One of the bedroom doors was open a few inches, and a wan light shone from within. Raesinia went over and found Danton sitting on a neatly made bed, still wearing his hat and boots. He looked up, his face splitting into a broad, childlike grin.
“Hello, Princess!”
Raesinia slipped into the room and eased the door closed. “Hello, Danton. What are you doing in here?”
“Thinking,” Danton said.
“Thinking about what?”
He blinked at her, as though that question made no sense. After a moment, he nodded at a half-full glass flute on the nightstand. “Faro gave me some stuff to drink, but I didn’t like it.”
“No?”
“Too many bubbles. They went up my nose.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Is there any beer?”
God Almighty. A surge of guilt broke across Raesinia like a tidal wave. Look at him. He doesn’t understand any of this. He didn’t choose this. We’re just using him, and we’re going to end up getting him killed before it’s all over.
You’re just using all of them, her conscience taunted her. Danton is no different from Ben, or Faro, or Cora. They’re just tools to get what you want. If one or two of them get broken along the way, what’s the difference?
They all chose this, though. Maurisk, Sarton, Ben, even Faro. They have their own reasons for being here.
And Cora? She doesn’t have any idea what she’s getting into.
Raesinia swallowed hard. Danton was still smiling at her. It was hard to reconcile this childlike expression with the man he’d been-or appeared to be-standing on the column in Farus’ Triumph. Does he know what he’s doing?
“Danton,” she said, “that was a good. . story you told this afternoon.”
“Did you like it, Princess?” His joyful tone made her heart lurch sickeningly. “There were a lot of people listening.”
“There certainly were.” She hesitated. “Did you understand it? The story, I mean. Do you know what it means?”
Again the look of incomprehension, as though what she’d said was a contradiction in terms. “It’s a story, Princess.”
“But. . the people listening. What did they think it meant?”
“People like stories. They like to shout, but it’s good shouting.”
Raesinia’s binding, the demon in the pit of her soul, gave an odd little twist, as though it were turning over in its sleep. Probably getting rid of the last of the alcohol, she thought regretfully. It would have been nice to let her consciousness dissolve in bubbly white wine for a while, like the rest of the cabal. Or even to be able to put my head down and take a nap.
“I’ll see if Faro brought any beer,” she said.
“Thank you, Princess!”
She’d only opened the door a fraction when she heard the knocking. Someone was rapping at the outer door of the suite, only a few feet away. But nobody is supposed to know we’re here.
Probably just the hotel staff. She fought off incipient panic and smiled at Danton. “I’ll be right back. You just stay here and. . think, all right?”
“All right!”
He settled himself on the bed, and Raesinia went back into the hall and shut the door behind her. Loud voices were coming from the sitting room, where Ben and Faro were still at their gaming. She didn’t think anyone else had heard the knocking.
The outer door had no convenient peephole, as a lower-class hotel might have. Raesinia frowned, then settled her weight against the door, bracing her legs against any attempt to force it open.
“Yes?” she said, barely loud enough to be audible. “Who is it?”
“Raesinia? Is that you?”
“Sothe?” Her maidservant/bodyguard had been adamant about keeping herself hidden from the other members of the cabal. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you alone?”
“For the moment. Everyone’s out by the balcony.”
“Good. Open the door.”
Raesinia took her weight off the door and thumbed the latch, letting it open a few inches. She kept her boot wedged against the base so that a sudden push from the outside wouldn’t throw it wide open. Sothe was visible through the resulting crack, and Raesinia relaxed and opened the door the rest of the way.
“Good,” Sothe said. “Voices are easy to fake. Now help me with her.”
The open door revealed that Sothe was standing beside a young woman in the smart gray-and-black livery of the hotel. The woman’s head was resting on Sothe’s shoulder, and it was obvious that Sothe’s arm around her waist was the only thing keeping her up. At first Raesinia thought she was stumbling drunk, but as Sothe shuffled into the suite her limp, dangling limbs made it clear she was completely unconscious.
Raesinia stood aside and pressed the door closed behind them.
Sothe, surveying the suite, nodded toward the bedrooms. “Are those empty?”
“Danton’s in one of them.”
Sothe’s expression tightened into a frown.
“The other one should be.”
“Good. Get her legs.”
Raesinia grabbed the mystery woman about the ankles and lifted her feet off the floor. Together they manhandled her into the second bedroom, and Sothe maneuvered her onto the bed and let her fall. Her head thumped heavily onto the covers.
“Sothe,” Raesinia said, “who is this? And what’s wrong with her?”
Sothe glanced back out into the suite and shut the door behind them. “What’s wrong with her is that she’s dead.” She indicated a detail Raesinia had missed: the leather-wrapped hilt of a long-bladed stiletto, sticking out of the woman’s left side just below her armpit. “As for who she was, I can’t tell you precisely”-Sothe made another knife appear in her hand, as if by magic-“but she was definitely Concordat.”
Raesinia was silent for a moment. Sothe immediately set to work, sawing through the waistband of the dead woman’s skirt and then slitting it in two down the length of her leg, peeling her clothes off like a University savant removing the skin from a new specimen.
“You’re sure she was-” Raesinia began.
Sothe sighed. She tore the skirt aside with a rip of fabric, revealing a leather strap around the corpse’s thigh, which held several thin blades in cunningly designed sheathes. Sothe pulled one of these out and sent it humming across the room to bury itself in the wall with a tick a few inches from Raesinia’s ear.
“Throwing knives are not a common accessory for hotel maids, even in Oldtown,” Sothe said, “much less maids at the Grand. She was Concordat.”
“All right,” Raesinia said. The knife in the wall was still buzzing slightly. “Did you kill her?”
“Of course I killed her.”
“Can I ask why you’re stripping her naked?” Sothe had started slitting the woman’s blouse up toward her collar.