Wrath of Empire

Chapter 31

“There’s been another bombing.”

Michel tucked Forgula’s address book underneath his menu and sat back in his chair in the café of the hotel lobby as Tenik slipped into the chair across from him. Tenik wore a grave expression, and Michel could instantly tell that something was different about this one. “Where?” he asked.

“The northern rim of Greenfire Depths. The bomb killed seven local Palo leaders and the minister of rations.”

Michel didn’t know the name of the minister of rations, but he did know the title. It was the woman in charge of making sure that everyone got fed – from the army, to the occupying civilians, to the Fatrastan and Palo citizens of Landfall. When Michel had asked who the most important people in Landfall were, Tenik had listed her title among the top ten – and based on what Michel had heard, she was good at her job. But that wasn’t, Michel sensed, what was bothering Tenik. “She was an ally of Yaret, wasn’t she?”

“A close ally,” Tenik confirmed. “Our Households have been friends for two hundred years. We were on the same side of the civil war.”

“Shit.”

“What’s worse, her successor is her nephew. He’s a capable young man, but he’s back in Dynize. The fourth-in-command of the Household will have to step in, and she has never gotten along with Yaret.”

Michel wondered how that would change the power dynamic. Clearly it was on Tenik’s mind as well – though Tenik obviously had a better grasp of what this would mean. The fact that he was so gray-faced didn’t bode well. “Does this have any effect on me?” Michel asked bluntly. It wasn’t a question with any tact, but he’d found that Tenik responded better to directness than to dancing around a topic.

“I don’t think so,” Tenik said. “If anything, it just makes it more important that we find and stop whoever is conducting these bombings. Rumor has it that Sedial will free up some of his own Household to help with the search and give us more resources.”

Michel quelled his natural suspicion. If Sedial was offering a hand, it meant that this had gotten serious. “No strings attached?”

“The minister of rations was well liked by everyone. Her Household will continue her work under her cupbearer, but efficiency will be lost.” Tenik frowned. “No one wants ministers to die, not when we’re in such a precarious position. Landfall is the hub of our invasion – Lindet has three field armies within a hundred miles. Our own armies are more than a match, but to guarantee victory, everything in the city must go smoothly.”

Michel wondered, not for the first time, if Lindet had secret communications with the Blackhats here. Everything seemed just a tad too coordinated for the workings of a single Gold Rose and a skeleton crew of subordinates completely untrained for guerrilla warfare. “We know it’s je Tura,” Michel said.

“Knowing doesn’t help us at all if we don’t find him.”

“Knowing will help us find him,” Michel said with assurance. In addition to trying to discover Forgula’s connection to Marhoush, he’d spent the last few days coordinating almost a hundred people in a counterespionage effort. Yaret’s Household had rooted out dozens of Blackhat safe houses, turned a small number of Blackhats, and imprisoned hundreds more. But the bombings only seemed to intensify.

The only blessing, as Michel saw it, was that the occupied citizens wanted nothing to do with these bombings. Aside from a few radicals, most of the local leaders were decrying any violence that included civilians – and je Tura had made it very clear that he didn’t give a shit who his bombs killed.

“I have to go,” Tenik said. “I’ll be in touch, but you might not see me for a couple of days.”

Michel hid his surprise. Despite giving him quite a lot of power to hunt down his former compatriots, Yaret had left Michel with a leash – namely Tenik – that had been present for most of his time with the Dynize. Tenik disappearing for a couple of days would be the most freedom Michel had had since before the invasion. “What will you be doing?”

“Coordinating with the interim minister of rations,” Tenik said unhappily. “And trying to convince her that it’s best for her Household to remain close friends with the minister of scrolls. I have no doubt that at least one of Sedial’s cupbearers will be attempting to convince her that a friendship with the Sedial Household would be of more benefit. Forgula might even be there.”

A woman dead by enemy hands, and the dogs just fighting over the scraps. It reminded Michel why he considered spying a more noble profession than politics. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Find je Tura. Put an end to the bombings.”

Tenik took his leave with those words, and Michel was once again alone at his little table in the hotel lobby. He glanced around at the few others in the lobby. He was the only non-Dynize in this hotel, and ever since he moved in, people openly stared at him as they walked past – something he put up with just to get out of his room. From what Tenik told him, there were all sorts of rumors floating around: that Michel was a double agent who’d been working for Yaret for years, or that he was still a spy and taking advantage of Yaret’s good nature, or even that he was half Dynize, half Palo – descended from some banished nobleman.

Michel did his best to ignore the rumors. Beyond punching Forgula in the face, he had little interest in Dynize politics. Results were what he needed.

He considered Tenik’s mention of Forgula before fetching her address book from beneath his menu and heading upstairs to his room, where he found her calendar sitting on his bed. He flipped through the calendar to today’s date. It was full of meetings and tasks without a single moment of free time. Between her old schedule and this new disruption, Michel very much doubted that she’d be returning home any time today.

There were all sorts of things Michel could do while Tenik was out of his hair, but he decided to do the most dangerous of them first.

Forgula’s personal address was in a small strip of workers’ homes in the Industrial Quarter. Unlike most of the Dynize bureaucracy, she had moved into an abandoned home in Lower Landfall, in a poorer area where many of the buildings were still occupied by their Fatrastan owners.

Michel scouted out the street for a few moments, checking for anyone who seemed particularly curious about his presence. At this time of day things were mostly quiet – a few old ladies hanging out the laundry in the street, a handful of children playing beside one of the industrial canals, but otherwise empty. The strip of homes where Forgula had chosen to live was a single building about eight homes long, each of them two stories tall, the whitewashed exteriors turned gray from the soot from nearby factories. Michel had been an informant in this part of town years ago, and he was quite familiar with this sort of block housing. It was mostly occupied by factory foremen – lower-class workers who needed to be near their work and could afford a little more space for a large family.

Michel walked up and down the street a few times before circling to the narrow alley behind the strip of houses. There was a gutter and rubbish pile back there, reeking of shit and rotten food, but there was also a raised brick walkway that accessed the barred doors of each of the houses.

The alley was abandoned, and Michel counted the back doors until he reached the address that coincided with the one written in the front of Forgula’s address book. Standing on his tiptoes, he looked through the rear window. The place certainly seemed empty. Clearing his throat, he knocked loudly, waited sixty seconds, and knocked again.

Nothing.

He looked both directions, stepped up to the iron-barred door, and slipped a set of picklocks out of his pocket.

It took him three minutes to get through the iron barred door, another four to get through the actual door beyond that. He stepped into a well-lit rear hallway, the floor creaking beneath his feet. “Forgula!” he called.

There was no answer, so Michel began his search.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he was searching for, but that had often been the case when he’d done this in the past. The house itself was rather nicely furnished; the furniture was fairly new, it had quality wallpaper, and there were small luxuries scattered through the rooms, such as books, mirrors, and nicer clothing that was definitely Fatrastan in origin. Most likely it had belonged to the mistress of a mill owner, someone who could afford the nicer things in life but wanted to stay near the factories.

Furniture askew, clothing lying out, and the occasional bit of jewelry lying discarded on a table told the story of someone who’d packed hastily to flee town. Only two rooms had been tidied: the sitting room and one of the bedrooms upstairs, and these, Michel decided, was where Forgula was living.

There were Dynize books on the nightstand, and uniforms and extra clothes in the closet that looked about Forgula’s size. There were several notepads, and it only took a moment to compare the writing on them with the writing in Forgula’s address book to confirm their likeness.

Once he’d done that, he checked each room with a steady, thoughtful eye. He looked for hidden nooks and crannies, disrupted dust, mismatched wallpaper – anything that would indicate a hiding spot for Forgula’s valuables. He checked under shelves and sought gaps in the floorboards. Nothing seemed out of order, so he moved on to the more mundane: the bed, the wardrobe, and Forgula’s sea chest.

He was careful to handle everything as little as possible. He memorized the locations of every item before moving something, then putting it back exactly as it was found. The goal was to be as thorough as possible without letting Forgula know that he’d been here at all.

The search took him less than half an hour, and it revealed almost nothing useful – though he did learn a great deal about Forgula. Letters from her father and little sister had come with her from Dynize, as well as tokens of affection and a stack of unsigned love notes that looked to be a few years old. Michel always struggled with this part of his job. Looking through the private parts of a person’s life often revealed a more human side that he had to coldly ignore.

Only one item caught Michel’s interest. It was a list of addresses filed away with a bundle of other papers in a hidden compartment of Forgula’s sea chest. The addresses were most definitely in Landfall, and the paper looked fairly new. A brief check against the addresses in her booklet told him that this was not her standard list of contacts.

Michel returned the bundle of papers to the sea chest – sans the list of addresses – and made sure everything was in its proper place. One more quick search of the house, and he locked the back doors and slipped out through a window, closing it carefully behind him.

He couldn’t help but be mildly disappointed as he left the Industrial Quarter on foot and climbed up the switchbacks to head back to the Merryweather Hotel. The list of addresses in his pocket might turn up something interesting, but it seemed that there would be no easy answers for Forgula’s meetings with Marhoush. He couldn’t help but decide that she was attempting to turn him – perhaps to get her own pet Blackhat and curry favor with her master, Sedial. If there was nothing sinister going on, he’d angered Forgula for very little reason.

He was getting near the Hadshaw Gorge when he got the sense that he was being followed.

Michel switched directions, heading down a couple of side streets before reaching the main avenue that ran alongside the gorge. He was careful not to look directly behind him – only stopping from time to time to check his pocket watch or look in a store window, trying to get some kind of look at whoever might be on his tail. If anyone was there, they managed to elude him.

His mood went from curious to uneasy, and he wondered if perhaps one of the Sedial Household or even Forgula herself had spotted him leaving Forgula’s house. He’d wanted to spend the afternoon catching up with a few old contacts – the type of people Tenik would disapprove of him meeting – but he couldn’t risk leading any Dynize to anyone who would raise suspicions. Perhaps he should head straight back to the hotel.

If Forgula had spotted him, though, Michel couldn’t hole himself up with other Dynize. He took a sudden turn into an alley off the busy street and stepped up against the wall, waiting for anyone he recognized to pass him by. He slipped both hands into his pockets and fingers into his knuckle-dusters.

He waited for five minutes, then ten. He was just beginning to think his paranoia had gotten the best of him when he heard the sound of a pistol cocking behind him.

Slowly, Michel turned to look back into the alley. Hendres stood about fifteen feet away, pistol raised, her face expressionless. How she had managed to sneak up on him, he had no idea, but he tried to put together a quick explanation for his actions – anything that might let him talk himself out of this. “Hendres,” he said.

“Michel.” She breathed his name like a swear word.

“You don’t want to fire that here,” Michel said quietly. “You’ll have soldiers down on top of you in a moment. Lower the pistol and we can talk. I’m not what you think I am.” Slowly, so as not to risk a rash action on her part, he slipped his fingers out of his knuckle-dusters and raised his hands. “We should talk.”

“No,” Hendres said, “we shouldn’t.”

Michel saw the gun jump only a split second before something slammed into his chest. He jerked backward and slumped against the alley wall, where he stayed for a few seconds while Hendres watched him through the powder smoke. She turned and ran.

Michel frowned at the lack of pain. Had she missed? Had a misfire caused the bullet to bounce off him? He touched a hand to his chest, a few inches below his heart. His fingers came back crimson. There was a burning sensation, like having a hot coal against his skin, and it took Michel’s suddenly foggy mind several moments to come to terms with the fact that he’d been shot.

And that he would probably be dead within a few moments.

He stumbled to the next street, walking along with a wall on his right, his fingers leaving crimson prints against the plaster as he tried to propel himself on. Each step felt like a thousand miles, but he barely managed to go two blocks before he fell into the rubbish beside a doorway, his eyesight cloudy and his mind confused. He thought he heard a voice somewhere behind him and wondered if Hendres had returned to finish the job.

Everything went black.