Captain's Fury (10 page)

There was a loud, sharp sound of impact—a hand being slammed down onto the surface of Tavi's desk, Isana judged. There was a rustling, sliding sound of a neat stack of pages slithering off the edge of the desk and onto the floor.

"You are not funny," said the cold voice. "And I will cut your throat before I tolerate any more of it. Do you understand me?"

Isana shifted position slightly. She couldn't see the woman Tavi was talking to, but she could see his face in profile. He sat in his chair, hands on his desk, and regarded the speaker with a calm, remote expression. There was no mockery to it. There wasn't
anything
to it, despite the fact that his life had just been threatened, and it chilled Isana a little to see that expression on his face. He appeared to be relaxed and confident, and she couldn't catch even a hint of his true emotions.

"I understand," Tavi said quietly, "that if you continue to show disrespect unbecoming a soldier, ignoring even basic military courtesy—such as knocking on a commanding officer's door before entering—and speaking to me in that tone, I'll have you bound to a flogging post until the ants can crawl up your hair to get at your eyes."

Tavi's expression never flickered, but this time Isana sensed a pulse of surprised recognition, and then a low current of tightly controlled fear.

Tavi leaned forward, and said in a congenial murmur, "It's possible that playing
singulare
for the Senator has not brought you the fame you had hoped it would. Never heard of you." His eyes stayed steady for another strained, silent moment. "Well, Navaris. When you first walked in, I assumed you were here for the decor and the charming company. Now, though, I'm thinking that you might have had something else in mind."

Tavi sighed and sat back in his chair. "Navaris, this will go a lot faster if I don't have to play guessing games." His voice went flat. "Tell me what you want."

There was another long silence, and Isana realized with a sudden flash of panic that as Tavi had sat back in his chair, his hand had slipped around behind it, and his fingers were on the hilt of a dagger that had been secured to the chair's back.

There was something thick, even drunken, about Navaris's voice when she finally answered. "Senator Arnos sent me to gather up your intelligence reports on recent activity in the occupied territory. You are to turn over to me every record, every copy, and every list of information sources for the Senator's personal review."

Tavi shrugged his shoulders. "I'm afraid I can't help you."

"These are
orders
," Navaris replied. "If you refuse to obey them, it's treason."

"I don't think so," Tavi said. "You see, Navaris, I'm afraid you don't have a leg to stand on, legally speaking. You're a
singulare
. You aren't an officer. You sure as the crows aren't
my
commanding officer. In fact, you aren't in my chain of command at all."

Navaris's voice came out as if through clenched teeth. "These are the Senator's orders."

"Oh," Tavi said, nodding as though at a sudden revelation. "Then they're in writing. Let me see them, and the papers are all yours." He lifted both eyebrows. "You
do
have legal orders, do you not?"

After a brief pause, Navaris said, "You saw him. He resisted arrest."

There were several harsh, masculine mutters.

"Get your fingers off that sword,
singulare
," Tavi said, his voice an abrupt whip crack of authority. "Draw that weapon against me, and I'll gut you with it."

There was the sound of several blades slithering from their sheaths, and Isana leapt to her feet in sudden terror.

A new voice broke into the conversation. "If I were you," Araris said in a level tone, "I would do as he says."

"Or not," said a bluff, cheerful voice that was laced with a desire for violence—Antillar Maximus. "If you all want to dance, I'm game."

"None of them got to draw steel before we did," said a third voice, that of a young man Isana didn't recognize. "If things start up now, they won't even get their weapons clear of their sheaths. That doesn't seem fair."

"Right you are, Crassus," Max said. "Right you are."

Isana felt a surge of murderous fury from the room—Navaris, she felt certain. It was a white-hot anger, something that seethed with malice and hate so intense that it almost seemed a separate entity. It was an irrational, bloodthirsty thing, a kind of madness that Isana had only encountered twice in her entire life.

For a moment, Isana felt sure that Navaris would attack in any case. But then that raging fire suddenly died into stillness, snuffed out as quickly as a candle dropped into a pond.

"You think you've accomplished something here," Navaris said quietly. "You haven't. You'll see that in time."

Tavi looked at her as if she hadn't spoken at all. "Please convey my apologies to the Senator that I could not act without confirming his orders. Regulations can be inconvenient at times, but they are, after all, what holds a Legion together. Thank you for your visit."

"Fool," Navaris said.

"
Captain
Fool," Tavi responded. "Good day,
singulare
. Araris, Crassus, please escort the good
singulare
and her helpers to the door."

For a second, nothing happened. Then there was a shuffling of feet, and then the shutting of a door, then silence.

Isana leaned against a wall and closed her eyes, her heart racing, slightly dizzy at the sudden relief, both of her own fears and of the intense emotions that had crowded the little office.

"It saves me the time of going back to finish later." Tavi rose from the chair and came to the door. "And speaking of Calderon."

Isana opened it, aware that her hands were trembling in reaction to the tension of the past several moments. The room was now empty, but for Tavi and Maximus.

Max lifted his eyebrows at Isana, and his surprise was palpable. "Oh. Good morning, Steadholder."

"Good morning, Maximus," she replied. At least her voice was steady, she thought. She looked at Tavi. "That woman is dangerous?"

Tavi nodded. "One of the top ten or twelve swords in Alera."

"More like one of the top six or seven," Maximus said, his tone serious. "And she's done more actual killing than any two blades on the list."

Isana shook her head. "What were you thinking, insulting her like that?"

"I was thinking that I needed to buy time for Max and his brother to get here," Tavi said. He gave her a boyish grin. "Relax, Auntie. I had it under control."

Tavi sighed and began gathering up the fallen pages. "The papers are going to tell Arnos something he doesn't want to hear. I think he was planning on making them vanish." He straightened them and turned to Maximus. "Get these to Ehren. I want copies for Sir Cyril, the Senator, and the Tribunes Strategica of all three Legions, as well as to the militia command in town."

Tavi raked his fingers through his short-cut hair. "From what we've been able to put together, I think I have a good idea of what the Canim are doing. I think if we handle it right, we might be able to call a halt to this war."

Maximus stared at him, then shook his head and gave Isana an apologetic glance. "This is pretty important information. I know she's family… but she's also a client of Lady Aquitaine's. It's probably better not to discuss it in front of her." He glanced at Isana again, and said, "It's mostly the principle of the thing, ma'am."

"Crows," Tavi snorted. "Max, she's my family. If you can't trust your family, who
can
you trust?"

A lance of pure guilt hit Isana in her midsection. The comment was so typically Tavi. He'd grown up close to her, to Bernard, and in the rough frontier country they lived in, toil and hazard built up trust in one another to a much greater degree than in the more settled regions of Alera. As far as Tavi was concerned, in the Calderon Valley, family always supported, always defended, always helped… and always told the truth. He believed it.

Oh, it was going to hurt when Isana shattered that belief. It was going to hurt both of them unbearably.

"That's all right," she said quickly. "It was an inappropriate question in any case. Of course, it's better to be careful."

Tavi suddenly blinked. "Oh," he said. "I can make a couple of minutes right now, if you like. What was it you wanted to talk about?"

She couldn't do it. She couldn't bring herself to hurt him like that.
If you can't trust your family, who
can
you trust
? "Nothing important," she lied quietly. "It can wait."

Chapter 6

"All right, Captain," Sir Cyril said. He grimaced a little and shifted slightly on his seat, finding a more comfortable angle at which to rest the metal leg that had replaced his own from the knee down. "If you're ready, why don't you lay out what you've learned."

Tavi nodded and stepped up onto the raised platform at the head of the conference room. Though the visiting dignitaries had departed, the room was still crowded, this time with the officers of both Legions of the Senatorial Guard and the First Aleran. Except for Max, Crassus, and one or two of the other Tribunes in the First Aleran, Tavi was by far the youngest man in the room.

"Thank you, Sir Cyril," Tavi said. "The First Aleran has been engaged in active operations against the Canim forces to the south for almost two years, ever since the Night of the Red Stars. We repulsed their initial and secondary efforts to take the bridge. Once additional pressure was brought against their eastern flank by the forces of High Lord Placidus, they were forced to divert much of their infantry to the east, and we drove their garrison out of their position at Founderport. The Founderport militia holds the city, and we stand ready to reinforce it should they need it. It's our only stronghold south of the Tiber, but the Canim don't dare assault it for fear of being pinned between the First Aleran and the city walls."

"We're aware of this, Captain," came Arnos's voice. The Senator, resplendent in formal Senatorial robes of blue-and-red silk, sat in the first row. The two Senatorial Guard captains sat at his left hand, and Navaris and one of her fellow
singulares
sat at his right. "You needn't continue reminding us of your accomplishments. Everyone here acknowledges that you've had some success in your efforts here."

Tavi felt like grinding his teeth together but kept himself from actually doing it. Crows take him if he'd let this silk-robed dandy rattle him so easily. Besides, his instincts warned him that it would be a mistake to let Navaris see his self-control slide.

Navaris. The woman was a legend among the Cursors, the single most successful and highly paid cutter in Alera. She'd killed seventy-three opponents in legal duels, another sixty or seventy in fights that were allegedly cases of self-defense, and rumor had it that another hundred mysterious murders could be laid at her feet with reasonable accuracy—and if she was anywhere near as good at covering up her crimes as she was at dodging the legal consequences of her swordplay, Tavi figured that she might have killed who knew how many more, successfully disposing of the corpses afterward.

Navaris didn't look as dangerous as she was. She was an inch or two under six feet tall and made of whipcord and rawhide. She had colorless grey eyes and wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a short Legion cut that did nearly as much to massacre any sense of femininity about her as her lean, hard build. She wore black riding leathers and a long, dueling sword at her hip. Her eyes were flat, and they looked at the world as if everyone in it was simply one more practice target set up in a swordmaster's training hall. If she'd drawn on Tavi in the office, he doubted he could have lasted more than a second or two against her.