Wicked Bronze Ambition

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.