There’s a pressure point in his temple that’s been threatening to turn into a headache for what feels like a week, though it’s really only been since he woke up.
Quiet-cursed Naevia Kleios, he thinks, and not for the first time today.
“Have fun last night?” asks Claudia Oha, and he winces at the thud when she drops a stack of files on his desk. He gets the distinct impression she’s done it on purpose.
“Oodles. What’s this?”
“A list of every merchant in the city authorized to sell water hemlock, blueprints of the Imperial Archives, and an invoice for reparations on a morning of my life that I will never get back.”
“If you want a raise for doing the bare minimum of your job, take it up with the Chief.”
It’s not his fault Agent Oha is still a junior grunt, and not a very good one at that. He knows her gripes well enough, taking orders from someone a decade her junior with a name she considers beneath her. They aren’t his problem. His attention’s needed on the case in front of him instead, tracking down the Revenants, not least because it’s their mandate from Consul Palmar. But while Darius isn’t averse to the idea of being the one to finally eradicate a centuries-old terrorist cell, there’s something about the case that doesn’t sit right with him.
Alexander Kleios was murdered, there’s no disputing that, but it’s the manner in which he was murdered that presents more questions than answers. Why use parcae, a notoriously slow-acting poison distilled from water hemlock, when a blade to the throat could have ended things so much more efficiently? The only conclusion: The assassin wanted to draw it out. Wanted him to suffer. Wanted him to know that he was dying.
The methodology, the bizarre and savage blood ritual left behind at the scene . . . all of this, when combined with the simple fact that there’s no obvious motive, points to an incentive more personal than political. Not assassination, but murder.
And now there’s Naevia Kleios.
It’s a distasteful thought, one that Darius hadn’t wanted to entertain. It goes against every belief he holds, everything he knows about duty to familia and to the Imperium at large. But Naevia Kleios had wanted to know where the investigation was taking them without the Chief General knowing, and Darius can’t quiet the voice in the back of his mind that wonders if there’s more to it than the simple nagging curiosity of a widow who’s suffered a terrible shock.
He has no idea how to broach this with Kopitar. The idea is horrendous. It leaves a disgusting taste in his mouth. It’s far from the behavior of a patrician lady. But then again, Naevia Dya’ogo Kleios is hardly really Sargassan.
Claudia coughs. He looks up from his desk.
“Was there something else?”
“Yes.” She turns back toward the door. “Tiago-Laith’s husband is back in the city. Stakeout clocked him entering his apartment this morning. Kopitar said for you to meet him out front.”
“When?”
She glances at the clock. “Five minutes ago.”
Cunt.
• • •
Leks Tiago-Laith is handsome in a generic kind of way, soft brown hair and a self-deprecating smile. The sort of extremely tall man who seems perpetually confused by his own height. Or has, at the very least, shrunk back into himself at the sight of two Intelligentia agents standing in his tastefully furnished, if rather small, Ecclesmur apartment. Darius glimpses a corner of the made-up bed through a door to the bedroom, and quickly looks away.
That bed. The matching set of blue ceramic mugs. The wedding sketch framed in pride of place. Darius’s skin itches.
The man’s husband Avis, he remembers, had been slight. Nervous. A junior undersecretary in the Ministerium of Records, just the kind of easily ignored paper-pusher who makes the perfect mole. Except, of course, that he’d fed the Intelligentia bad information, that day of the hurricane two weeks ago, sending them to the Senate instead of the Archives where they might have prevented this murder happening at all. Tiago-Laith himself had been found rotting in a back alley three days later, taking with him the mystery of where his loyalties really lay.
“I’ve got no idea where he is,” Leks is saying now, hands shaking slightly as he busies himself with the kettle of tazine. “When he didn’t come home . . . I figured that was it, he’d finally left me. Suspected for a while Avis was seeing someone else, but I thought he’d at least give me the chance to fight for us.”
“So you had to get out of the city for a time.” Kopitar nods along. “Cool off, clear your head, that sort of thing?”
“Yeah. Went to see my sister . . . Is Avis in trouble?”
“Why don’t you just answer a few more questions,” Darius cuts in, and tries not to let the man’s fingers touch his as he accepts a cup of tazine. Kopitar wants names, locations, any trail that might lead them to the Revenants now that their informant’s too dead to do it himself. Darius, for his own part, just wants to get the Quiet out of here. “You thought he was having an affair,” he goes on. “Has he been unfaithful before?”
Tiago-Laith shakes his head, but there’s a growing frown on his face despite his nerves. “No,” he says. “But we weren’t . . . happy. Terra, that’s the cliché, isn’t it? Stressed about—well, everything, really. Money. Work. He’d been passed over for promotion at Records twice and, well . . . I mean, actors don’t make much money even when we’re working.”
He pauses, a little embarrassed. “I don’t know, it just got to be that we were snapping at each other all the time. Hadn’t, you know, really . . . been with each other in months. And then he started staying out all the time, not coming home after work. It seemed pretty obvious to me at that point that Avis had gone and tried to find happiness with someone else, because Terra knows he wasn’t finding it with me.”
Darius glances at Kopitar, who gives the most imperceptible shake of the head. He’s inclined to agree. The man’s too skittish, too earnest, wears his thoughts too openly on his face. Darius can’t help but hope he’s never subjected to a play in which Leks Tiago-Laith is performing. In any case, it seems unlikely he knows that his husband is dead. Or that Avis was a double agent in the employ of both the Revenants and the Intelligentia. That doesn’t mean he can’t still be useful.
“Did you ever ask him about it? Did he ever make excuses, give reasons for why he was staying out so much?”
Tiago-Laith shrugs, clearly bewildered by the line of questioning but not withholding. People rarely are, when faced with the Intelligentia uniform. “The sort of thing you’d expect, I guess. He had to work late, he was meeting up with some friends—”
“What friends?”
“Coworkers, mainly. Sometimes he said he was going to Neptune’s Folly, but I know that was a lie. Showed up to surprise him once, when I still thought I could save our marriage, only he wasn’t there.”
“Neptune’s Folly?”
“Bar down by the docks. It’s an absolute dive, but Terra, their deep-fried clams. We found it on our third date.”
Kopitar tears a piece of paper from his notebook, sets it on the table. “Where else?”
• • •
“Shouldn’t we have told him his husband’s dead?” Darius asks fifteen minutes later, when they step back out onto the streets of the exasperatingly aspirational Ecclesmur neighborhood and, for the first time in half an hour, he feels like he can breathe.
“No,” Kopitar answers, taking the reins of his horse from the waiting attendant. “A fresh widower’s a liability, and we may need to question him again. We need his thoughts as clear as possible, not mired and unfocused by grief.”
“Not to mention,” Darius says, sweeping his gaze across the street, “he could be a better actor than he wants us to believe. Might run to warn his Rev friends the second we’re gone.”
Kopitar swings his leg over the horse. “Good thinking. Put two plainclothes agents on this apartment day and night. In the meantime, start knocking on doors.”
“Sir?”
“Every establishment Tiago-Laith mentioned. We’ll sniff out the Revs, one way or another.”
It’s a good plan. A solid lead. Despite himself, Darius hesitates anyway.
“What is it, Miranda?”
He wasn’t going to tell him. He’d decided that last night, after he’d extracted himself from Naevia Kleios and found his superior again in the crowd. He wasn’t going to say anything. If Kopitar and she really did go as far back as the senator suggested, there was no point in sullying the Chief General’s good opinion of her. Not when the matter had been so thoroughly laid to rest. Not when Kopitar has been such an important mentor to him for going on ten years and doesn’t deserve unnecessary suspicion planted in his mind as thanks.
And yet.
There’s that voice again. The one in the back of his mind that won’t stay quiet. The one that says there is a reason why Darius has managed to work his way into the office he has, and that it’s only halfway to do with hard work and duty. Those can be learned. But a sense for danger, a nose for when something’s out of place? That’s sheer instinct. It can’t be taught. And what he smells right now is rancid.
So he says, low, “I may have a different lead.”
The furrow of Kopitar’s brow divots hard. “And you’re only mentioning this now?”
“The lead only showed up last night. And I wanted to be sure. . . . It’s delicate.” Darius swings his leg over his own horse, a roan beauty he’s become particularly fond of from the Intelligentia stables. He places a hand to the beast’s neck, as though he might subsume her quiet strength, and presses on. “Senator Kleios made a request last night. She asked me to report on the details of this case. What leads we’re pursuing. She asked me to keep it from you.”
If he’d expected shock, he doesn’t get it. Not shock, nor outrage, nor the sort of blank stare he might have anticipated at the news of such an underhanded move. Instead, Kopitar actually laughs.
It’s short, practically a bark, but unmistakable. Kopitar shakes his head in baffling amusement, strong jaw dimpling in a rueful grin. “I presume you turned her down.”
“Of course. I would never—”
“That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Miranda,” he says, and doesn’t bother keeping his voice down. “I’m surprised it took her so long, to be honest. Naevia’s office knows better by now than to test the loyalty of my men. You, though, you were a new and unknown variable. I’m sure she was thrilled at the prospect of making you her creature. Oh, no, but you’ve got integrity. Good man.”
“But,” Darius insists, because the Chief clearly doesn’t understand the real weight of what he’s just said, “if she’s asking for intel on this case, specifically, then don’t you think it’s at least worth taking a closer look—”
“Her husband’s died, man, of course she has an interest.”
“Or she wants to stay a step ahead of us.”
A long moment passes then, and Kopitar isn’t laughing anymore. “I hope,” he says at last, “that you aren’t implying what I think you are.”
Darius takes the Chief’s horse’s bridle in hand, as if the act alone could impress upon him how very serious he is. “Alexander Kleios was poisoned,” he says, low again. “Parcae. That’s intimate. Planned. A person needs access for that. And yes, of course, the Revs hardly need a reason for their senseless chaos, but isn’t it at least worth considering a personal motive?” He breathes in hard. “I’m not suggesting the senator herself is at fault, but she could be protecting someone. Making sure we stay off the scent. Even if it’s only to protect her familia’s reputation. A disgruntled client, maybe, or the Historian’s verna bastard—for Terra’s sake, her own daughter gained—”
“Enough.”
It’s glacial. A hiss. And for the first time in the ten years he’s known him, one look in Kopitar’s eyes and Darius’s blood runs cold.
“That is enough,” Kopitar says again, hand clenched around the roan mare’s bridle now, so close Darius can feel his breath on his cheek. “I like you, Deputy, so I’ll forget about it this once. But if I ever hear so much as a whisper of you slandering a good familia’s name again—never mind that of the Imperial Historian—I swear I’ll have you packed up and shipped back to that hovel in Ithaca so fast you won’t even have a chance to dismount your horse.”
He releases the bridle.
Darius sits frozen in place, heart pounding furious against his chest. Casework and common sense has never been met with this sort of ice-cold stone wall before. It goes against everything he’s ever known. And Ithaca . . . his lucid mind can barely comprehend the threat as real. Kopitar has never once spoken to him like this.
“Consul Palmar wants us to focus our attentions on the Revenants,” the Chief General goes on then, easy, like nothing of the last minute happened at all, “and I’m inclined to agree. Start knocking on those doors, Deputy. We’re on their tail now.”