If someone had asked the Darius Miranda of a week ago, he’d have called this career suicide. Even just the thought of going over his direct superior’s head would have been unthinkable, but the simple fact is that, if Kopitar gets his way, Darius’s career has already come to an abrupt and screeching halt. So there’s nothing for it. Nothing left to lose, and everything to gain, because whether the Chief General wants to hear it or not, there are at least three terrorists at large who have conspired to kill before, and will likely kill again.
So he brushes off the protests of the overbearing medic, and he ignores the pounding nausea and searing pain slicing through his head as he pulls on the black uniform of the Cohort Intelligentia for what could very well be the last time. He tries not to think about that. Instead, he holds his shoulders back and his head high, never mind the mess of blood and bandage. Kopitar’s damnation or no, this is what he joined the Cohort to do. This is what it means to be an officer of the Intelligentia.
Except that Cato Palmar isn’t at his office in the Senate. He isn’t at his home in Belamar, either, and Darius thinks his guts are about to revolt at the thought of getting back on his roan horse when the young serva boy who answered the door says, “He’s gone down, sir.”
“Down?”
“Yes. To . . . you know.”
Darius most certainly does not know. He raises an expectant brow, but the boy—strikingly beautiful, it has to be said, almost feminine even—just flushes and fetches a sentry to answer for him instead. “Ask for him at the Leontine Club,” the sentry tells him, before providing an address.
It isn’t the done thing, showing up at a private social club without an escort or an invitation. But by now Darius is so far past the done thing that he hardly stops to think about it, too intent on working through the unsteadiness of his own body and the hundred thousand acts of chaos and violence that Theo and her ilk could have already committed in the time since he saw them last. He bangs on the door to the Leontine Club, a townhouse in the Financial Quarter, and barely waits for the door to open before he’s barging in.
The uniform, thank Terra, actually does wonders in a place like this.
“Oh, he’s already gone down,” says the majordomo when he asks again for Cato Palmar, and Darius is so ready to strangle these inarticulate fragging servae for their vague insinuations. Furthermore, he’s aware he must look half insane. He’s made a cursory attempt to slick back his hair, but his head is shaved where the stitches went in, and a trail of blood crusts dry down the high neck of his velvet uniform collar. So whether it’s that or the fact that he isn’t bothering to mask how Quietdamn impatient he is anymore—or maybe some combination of the two—Darius doesn’t have to say another word before the domo signals for another serva to, apparently, take him down.
Down, it turns out, means underground.
Down, it turns out, means something he never could have imagined.
Screaming plebs and a jostling crowd and ceres dropping into palms and near-naked whores plying their wares and down there, down in the carved-out guts of this forsaken place, two bloody men slamming into one another with nothing more than their fists. It’s not the head wound this time, but still, Darius is almost positive he’s about to be sick.
This can’t be right. This can’t be down. This can’t be where Cato Palmar, the Consul of Roma Sargassa herself, is well known to be. Plebs in the press of crowd go ashen quiet at the sight of him, and that’s as it should fragging be. This place, this pit. This is the height of illegal, the height of disorder and mayhem. The serva must have gotten it wrong. That, or he misunderstood in the throes of his head wound, and took a wrong turn somewhere, because this can’t possibly be where he’ll find Palmar.
Then he sees it. The raised platform pavilion at the top of the fighting pits’ makeshift amphitheater. Gleaming tiled tables heavy with wine and oysters. Fine wooden chairs and lush velvet chaises on which to recline. Soft carpet, a far cry from the rock floor below, sticky with hops and blood and Quiet knows what else. Darius launches himself through the crowd toward the stairs, up into the mingling chatter. Men and women he knows by name, some only by face. Patricians all. Helen Briago clinging to her suitor of the week, a few men and women he recognizes vaguely from the Horace College. And then he sees him. Cato Palmar, holding court near the pavilion’s edge.
Darius’s stomach doubles.
A mistake. This was such a mistake.
He’s never spoken to Cato Palmar before, never had an introduction. He doesn’t know him. And the Consul, it turns out, is even more corrupt than any of the lesser politicos he holds domain over. His very presence in this place attests to that, his ease in reclining back to watch the bloodsport, laughing and jeering as one of the fighters’ arm breaks with a horrible snap.
Darius can still leave, still turn away and slip back into the crowd. Still . . . but no. No, that’s no good, because if he does that, then his life is well and truly over. Never mind Theo Nix and the Revenants, there’ll be nothing left of Darius but a putrid corpse still somehow living, left to rot in a drafty Ithaca manor house. This is the only option left.
How in the savage Quiet has his life so quickly come to this?
Dazed, Darius moves forward to make himself known.
At the sight of the uniform, Palmar’s eyes go wide. “What in Terra’s name—” the Consul blusters, cheeks turning red as he stands to pull Darius aside. “Explain yourself, officer.”
“I—”
“How dare you wear that uniform down here? Do you want to start a riot?”
“No, sir, I only—”
But then the fury’s melting away, replaced in an instant by a broad smile across the old man’s face. “I’m just messing with you, officer. Your name?”
“Deputy Chief Miranda, sir.” It’s not a complete lie. He hasn’t yet been officially stripped of rank.
“Well, I’ll be having a word with Kopitar, Deputy—I’ve told him his men are to come in plainclothes if they want to join the fun.”
“Kopitar . . . the Chief knows about all this?”
“You’re funny, Deputy. Why don’t you pour yourself a—” The Consul frowns, evidently only just noticing the extent of the injuries he’s looking at. “What in Terra’s name happened to you, man?”
But Darius is still trying to catch up. Still reeling. The Consul, here . . . these pits . . . and it’s not only Kopitar who knows about this place but the rest of the Intelligentia, apparently, and. . . . He slams his eyes shut, does his level best to pull his thoughts together.
Kopitar, who he had trusted as a father. Kopitar, who is a good man. Kopitar, who enables this kind of corruption and threw Darius away like a used-up mutt without a second thought.
“The Revenants.” He finds his voice, somehow. “The Revenants happened to me.”
The effect is immediate. Color draining from the Consul’s face. “Why haven’t you gone to your Chief?” he demands.
“I tried. He didn’t want to hear it.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“I don’t like to . . .” But that’s no good. He’s here, isn’t he? Going over Kopitar to Palmar himself. He breathes through the pain. “That’s why I came to you. There’s a serva in the Kleios familia, a Revenant creature called Una. She confessed to the murder of Alexander Kleios, although of course she claimed to be acting under different orders.”
“Whose?”
“Yours, sir.”
A lie. It had to be a lie. That’s what Darius had thought, at least, in the clear air of the Breakwater grounds, so maybe it’s just the haze of concussion that’s curdling his thoughts. But the stink of corruption is everywhere in this pit. Palmar stares at him for a long moment, face utterly unreadable, and it isn’t hard to wonder. It isn’t hard to think it. And that, more than anything, makes Darius want to crack open then and there.
It shouldn’t be easy. The Consul is the Imperium. The Consul is Sargassa. Nothing about the thought that Una could actually have been telling the truth should be easy.
Then the Consul laughs. A snide, predatory thing that doesn’t meet his eyes, a shot of ugly disquiet through Darius’s gut. “I can see why Kopitar turned you away,” he says, and Darius freezes at that. “A desperate lie told by a crim savage looking at a death sentence, obvious to any child with half a brain. You’re better than this, man. I’ll put this slip-up down to that head wound.” And then—“Where is the girl now?”
“She . . . got away.”
“She got away.” The Consul’s lip curls.
Darius bristles. “I didn’t have backup. She did. That’s how I ended up with these.” He gestures to the stitches in his shaved head, and he is not going to mention Theodora Arlot—or Theo Nix, whatever the Quiet-damned woman’s name is. Guilty or not, corrupt or not, Palmar is his only chance to keep his life here, and the most he can do now is try to claw back some of Palmar’s fleeting esteem, for whatever that filth is worth. “But her accomplice. Sir, I recognized him. Turns out the Kleios familia is a nest of Revs.”
“Another serva?”
“No. Alexander Kleios’s son. The freedman, Arran. He was present to overhear the woman’s . . . delusions.” Had Theodora Nix radicalized him, or had Arran Alexander been the one to radicalize her? It’s a nasty thought, the idea of the two of them laughing behind his back.
Cato Palmar, however, keeps perfectly calm. “He heard me accused of collusion?” he asks, with an air of almost academic interest.
“Yes, sir.”
“Interesting,” he says. “Thank you for letting me know, Deputy. You did the right thing.” Then he’s turning toward the staircase that descends down into the packed rabble surrounding the ring, calling for someone called Wieler, and that’s no good. Darius stumbles forward.
“Sir,” he starts, because he needs him. It grates, disgust and fury at this man who may or may not be guilty of murder but most certainly is guilty of allowing and, even worse, presiding over all that Darius knows to be wrong. This man, who should be setting the highest of examples and spits on them instead. Who holds the power over Darius’s future, crumbling fast to dust even when Darius has always done the right thing.
“I don’t suppose,” he tries again, “you could put a word in with Kopitar for me? He wasn’t happy with how I came by all this, he—”
“As it happens,” Palmar says, turning back from the stone-faced handler below, “Kopitar has mentioned you to me, Miranda. I hesitate to say Deputy, as I’m given to understand that’s no longer your proper rank. You should know that the order to keep away from the Kleios familia came down to your Chief from me, so no, I actually don’t think I’ll be putting in a word for you. Now, I’d see about getting yourself back to the hospitium. I have to say, you do look terrible.”
Palmar waves him away, finished with the conversation, and Darius feels the world around him fall away, crumbling to dust.