The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns (28 page)

Andreas spun sideways, slick as an eel, still blocking the corridor leading to the front room. Raesinia forced herself into motion, hard on Ben’s heels. She bounced off the corridor wall, faked one way, and darted the other, trying to slip past the Concordat agent’s outspread arms. He followed her easily, and as she tried to squirm by he grabbed her by the wrist, yanking her back toward him. His other hand went to her elbow, palm out, forcing her arm into a painful lock and pushing her to the floor.

At least, that’s how it would have worked on any normal human being. Raesinia let him pull her around, gritted her teeth, and kept coming. Something in her elbow went
crunch
, and then the bones of her forearm broke with an audible
snap
. The second of surprise this bought her was enough to deliver a quick kick to the back of Andreas’ knee, folding his leg up around the blow and sending him toppling to the floor. Raesinia met his jaw with one of her knees on the way down for good measure. She heard the
clack
as his teeth met, and his hands slipped off her shattered arm.

Ben was still on his feet, barely, with the other Concordat agent slumped against the wall in front of him. The front of his shirt was slick with blood, as though someone had hit him full in the chest with a bucket of red paint. She grabbed his arm with her good hand and pulled, and he stumbled into motion, but the movement sent fresh waves of red into his already sodden clothing.

The common room of the Mask was shattered and empty. By the time they reached the front door, Ben was weaving, and his legs gave out after they’d taken a few steps into the cobbled street. Raesinia tried to support him, forgetting that she had only one arm to do it with, and they both went down in a tangled, gory heap. Raesinia pushed herself up one-handed, letting Ben roll onto his back.

He gasped for air and tried to speak, but his voice was so thin she had to bend close to hear.

“Run,” he said. “Raes . . . run . . .”

Instead she shouted for help. A few eyes had already turned their way, but it took a moment for the crowd to realize what was happening. Then a woman screamed, high and shrill, and people surged forward in an effort to find out what was going on. Raesinia looked up at the Mask and thought she saw Andreas, framed in the rear door of the common room. He was gone almost at once.
They won’t dare,
she thought.
Not in the crowd, not tonight. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have listened to Sothe. Oh, Ben . . .

“A doctor!” she said, to the first young man whose attention she managed to catch. “I need a doctor. Now!”

But, turning back to Ben, she saw it was obvious that he had passed beyond the help of any earthly medicine. Blood pulsed from the hole in his chest with every heartbeat, but the stream was weakening into a trickle even as she watched. His lips moved, and she bent close to hear.

“Raes . . .” His breath was ragged. “I . . . I l . . . lov . . .”

“I know.” Her eyes were rimmed with tears. “You weren’t exactly subtle about it, Ben. Who did you think you were fooling?”

She leaned across his body, gore squishing in their clothes, and pressed her lips to his. His mouth was full of the warm, coppery taste of blood.

By the time she straightened up, even the trickle from his wound had ceased. Raesinia climbed wearily to her feet, her own shirt dripping and ruined, her face smeared with red. She straightened her arm and felt the binding going to work, broken ends of bone snapping together like a pair of magnets, the ruined joint rebuilding itself as muscles reknit around it.

She was surrounded by a ring of nervous onlookers, not wanting to get too close to the gory spectacle but pressed near by the mass of those behind who wanted to see. Raesinia touched the butterfly pin at her shoulder, leaving a smear of blood over the colors.

“This man was just murdered by a Concordat agent,” she said. Quietly at first, then again, louder. “This man was just
murdered
by a Concordat agent!”

I’m sorry, Ben.
Whether or not she’d returned his love, he’d been her friend; one of her only friends, if she was being honest. Though, in an odd way, she thought he would approve of being used as a symbol.
He would understand that we need to keep moving forward.
Later, in private, there would be time to mourn.

“Who is in charge here?” she said, shouting to be heard over the babble that had broken out. She raised one red-stained hand to point a finger, scanning round the circle. “Who’s in charge?”

“There’s a council,” someone offered. “At the Gold Sovereign.”

“They’re not really in charge,” someone else said. “They just like to argue.”

“The notion of someone being in ‘charge’ is fundamentally illegitimate,” said a third, “and indeed emblematic of a failed notion of the management of human affairs—”

“Take me there,” Raesinia said. When this failed to produce an effect, she swung her arm, spattering the first rank with thickening drops of Ben’s blood.
“Now!”

—

They took her to the council. First, though, she consented to an offer from a stout middle-aged woman who turned out to be a proprietress of a nearby boardinghouse, and went for a quick sluice-down and a change of clothes. She emerged, not exactly clean—her hair was a fright, in spite of several washes—but not looking as if she’d just stepped out of a slaughterhouse. The only clothes the woman had been able to find to fit her was a young girl’s sundress, pale green linen with foaming lace sleeves that Raesinia had torn off and thrown away. She kept the three-color butterfly pin, now filmed with crusty red.

The Gold Sovereign was an ostentatiously expensive café on the corner of the Old Road and Second Avenue, done up in a faux-baroque style complete with gilded plaster columns in the facade. Its blue-red-silver flag proclaimed it a bastion of the Monarchists, and Raesinia knew by reputation that it played host to gatherings of those University students who moved in the most elevated social circles—the children of counts and other noble relatives, with a leavening of families who had been wealthy long enough to merit a kind of quasi-nobility. Even in the current state of emergency, the place had maintained an air of reserve, and two footmen in long coats and white gloves stood beside its door, to keep out the rabble.

Faro was also standing by the door, tapping his foot and fiddling nervously with the grip of his dress sword. The crowd was thinner here, and he saw Raesinia coming up the street and hurried to meet her.

“My God,” he said. “Raes, are you all right? They told me something happened—”

“Who else is here?” Raesinia said.

“Maurisk is inside. I heard a rumor that Sarton was picked up outside his apartment, but no one seems to know for certain. I haven’t seen him. And you know they arrested Danton yesterday.”

“They snatched Cora from the Mask,” Raesinia said, her voice carefully controlled. “And Ben is dead.”

“Oh no. You’re certain?”

She wanted to scream at him,
I practically took a bath in his fucking blood—of course I’m certain!
With an effort, she kept her tone level. “I was with him. We went into the Mask to see if anyone was still there, and Orlanko’s people were waiting for us. He helped me get away, and got shot in the process.”

“Balls of the Beast,” Faro swore quietly.

“My thoughts exactly.”

“What the hell do we do now? They obviously know who we are. Maybe if we got out of the city—”

That seemed a little cold to Raesinia, but Faro had never been one to worry about others when his own skin was endangered. For all that, Raesinia felt sorry for him. In spite of his protests that he was just as serious about the cause as any of the others, he’d always treated the conspiracy like a game, and now things were in deadly earnest.

“Don’t fool yourself,” Raesinia said. “You can’t get far enough, fast enough that Orlanko won’t find you.”

“Then we might as well turn ourselves in now and save him the trouble,” Faro said. “Once all this dies down—”

“We can’t let it,” Raesinia said. “I know we planned on having more time, but this is
it
, Faro. If we can’t pull it off now, we never will.”

“But . . .” He gaped at her. “We’re not ready. We’ve barely even
started
! We were going to arrange the Deputies, and contact the Armsmen, and get Danton to talk about . . . I mean . . .”

“We’re out of
time
.” Raesinia took a deep breath. “The king is dying. Soon. Tonight, maybe.”

“Saints and martyrs. If that
girl
gets on the throne, it’s all over. Orlanko might as well put the crown on himself.”

“I think she’ll listen to us,” Raesinia said dryly. “
If
we can show her that the people won’t stand for Orlanko and his Borelgai allies running things. That means today, while they’re still angry. I don’t know what the duke thinks he’s doing with all these arrests, but he’s got half the city up in arms.”

“There’s a rumor it’s the new Minister of Justice’s doing. Apparently Orlanko didn’t want Danton arrested, but this Count Mieran overruled him.”

“That has to be a lie,” Raesinia said.
Father said I could trust him.
“I mean,
from what I’ve heard of Count Mieran, he and Orlanko hate each other. And it was definitely a Concordat team waiting for us at the Mask.”

Faro shrugged. “I’ve heard more stories tonight than I care to count. It doesn’t really matter one way or the other, though, does it? What are we actually going to
do
? We haven’t got anything prepared. We don’t even have any way to get to our money without Cora. What does that leave? Send Maurisk in to argue politics with the duke?”

“We need
them
.” Raesinia waved a hand at the street, now outlined in the soft light of the rising sun. The crowd had only grown larger since daybreak, a new wave of early risers mixing with those who’d been unable to sleep. “This mob is in the wrong place. If we could get them over to the Vendre—”

“What? We’d storm the walls?”

“We could threaten to. Pressure them into letting Danton go.”

“That’s pretty thin, Raes.”

“Look at it from their point of view. How are they going to get rid of us?”

“Canister,” Faro said promptly. “Double load at thirty paces. There’ll be arms and legs all over the square.”

“Even Orlanko wouldn’t dare. The whole city would turn on him.”

“Are you certain enough that you’d be first in line?”

“I would.”

Easy for me to say.
Though she had to admit she’d never been dismembered. She wondered what would happen.
Would my arms and legs grow back, or would I have to go around and collect them?

Faro threw up his hands. “What’s the use in talking about it? You haven’t been listening to them argue in there. I don’t think you could get this lot to agree that the sun rises in the east, and that happened not ten minutes ago.” He shook his head. “I want to help Cora, too. But we’re not going to do it by climbing the walls of the Vendre.”

“Danton could get them to do it.”

“Danton could talk them into forming a human pyramid so he could drive over the walls in a cart,” Faro said. “But we haven’t
got
Danton. That’s the whole problem.”

“Let me talk to them.”

She brushed past him, and Faro fell in behind her. He waved to the footmen, and they held the door of the Gold Sovereign open to admit her.

“Raes,” Faro said.

“What?”

“Ben. He’s . . . really dead?”

She closed her eyes. Her lips still tasted faintly of blood. “He’s dead.”

“Damn.” He repeated it under his breath, like a mantra. “Damn, damn, damn . . .”

—

The common room of the Gold Sovereign looked as if it belonged in a castle somewhere. The walls were covered with embroidered heraldry, dominated by the Orboan eagle, interspersed with polished swords, axes, and other weapons, each of which presumably boasted a storied history. There was even a suit of armor, complete with halberd, standing sentry by the stairs in the back. A huge fireplace filled one wall, dark and cold now in the summer heat, and high-backed chairs in the old medieval style were arranged in loose circles around polished marble tables. The general impression was that one had stepped into a duke’s sitting room from four hundred years ago, and the only concessions to commerce were the discreet bar in one corner hosting assorted liquor and the coffee-making paraphernalia.

The way the current occupants were carrying on made Raesinia hope that all those weapons were securely bolted down. The “council” looked as though it might dissolve into a brawl at any moment. The various factions seemed to have settled into three rough groups under the pressure of their mutual antipathy, dragging the chairs together to maintain maximum separation from one another.

The largest group, closest to the bar, was easy to identify by their expensive, fashionable costumes. These were the Monarchists and their allies, the guardians of the old order, in their natural habitat here in the Sovereign and plainly resenting the newcomers. Quite a few of them were armed, though mostly with gilt- and gem-encrusted dress swords like Faro’s. They aped the styles that were fashionable at court, but to Raesinia, who had seen the real thing, they looked too young and too uncertain in their finery, like children playing dress-up in their fathers’ wardrobe. There were, she was not surprised to find, no women among them.

Maurisk’s presence at the head of the second group identified them as the Reformers and associated sects, who wanted to tinker with the social order but not smash it entirely to pieces. They were well dressed, too, but in more sober clothing befitting their mostly commercial origins. Maurisk caught Raesinia’s eye, and she tried to smile, but his expression remained grave.

The third group, by process of elimination, was the Radicals, including the
Republicans, the Individualists, and any number of other flavors of wild-eyed freethinkers and devotees of Voulenne. They were the most varied collection, by far, looking almost like an artist’s depiction of a cross section of Vordanai society—everything from noble finery to mendicant’s rags seemed to be represented. There were women among them, too, mostly the rare female University students whose dress Raesinia had affected. Unlike the other two groups, the Radicals still wore the badges of their individual cafés, taverns, and gathering places, and their rear ranks seemed to be engaged in a continual low-grade grumble of argument.