Брайан Макклеллан - Sins of Empire

“Do you speak their language?”

“I’m a little rusty,” Styke said. “But yes. I can write it, too, in a pinch.”

“Useful,” Olem observed, a little too eagerly.

Vlora shot him a look to be quiet. “All right, Ben Styke,” she said. “I’ve got a task for you. It might sound stupid but if you can dig me up an answer you’ve got yourself a job.”

The relief was plain on Styke’s face. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You know anything about a Palo warrior wearing swamp dragon armor and fighting with bone axes?”

Styke leaned back in his chair, regarding his coffee for the first time and downing it in a single gulp before wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He snapped his fingers, ordered another coffee and some spiced chocolate for Celine, then looked at a point of empty air between Vlora and Olem, considering. “Stories,” he said.

“What kind of stories?”

“Sounds like a dragonman – Palo warriors descended from the Dynize emperors that used to rule these lands. The Kez wiped them out sixty or seventy years ago for being such a nuisance, and they haven’t been seen since. They were a fairy tale when I was a kid. ‘Eat your soup or the dragonmen will take you to the swamp.’ That kind of thing.”

Vlora felt the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. She knew all about old stories and fairy tales, and just how true they could end up being. “One of them inflicted almost forty casualties on my men at Fort Samnan,” she said. “We killed him in the end, but I’ve never seen anything like that short of a powder mage or a Privileged.”

Styke ran a hand through his short, gray hair. “Pit,” he swore gently. “I didn’t think they still existed.”

“Yeah, well it sounds like they do.” Vlora spat. The last thing she wanted was old fairy tales coming to life before she could finish her contracts and get out of this damned country. “I want to know if there are any more of them hanging out in the city. We’re about to piss off the entire Palo population of Landfall and I’d rather not have more of these blasted dragonmen show up after we do it.”

“I can take a look,” Styke said. He took his new coffee and spiced chocolate from the waiter, offering the latter to Celine, but the girl had fallen asleep. Vlora resisted the urge to shake her head at the sight. A bloody lamb and a lion.

She reached across the table, offering Styke her hand. “Welcome to the Riflejacks, Ben Styke. I look forward to seeing what you can do.”

Michel waited outside the office of Captain Blasdell – the head of the public side of his investigation – his pocket watch ticking away the minutes, and made a mental note that he needed to call upon a handyman. The cracks in his mother’s roof needed to be patched, as well as the chair fixed. He considered the fact that he’d been given an unlimited budget to find the Iron Roses and wondered if anyone was actually going to check his budget expenditures on the case, or if he could get away with paying the fixer with Blackhat money.

“Jes called me expendable. An investigation shouldn’t need an expendable investigator,” he said to himself quietly as he watched Captain Blasdell’s door.

He answered with a cynical voice. “He did threaten to kill you if you fail.”

“He did not.”

“The man murders people for a morning workout, and those final words were awfully ominous.”

“The Blackhats don’t waste resources, and a Silver Rose like me is a resource. We’re all in this shit together.”

“Maybe you’re expendable because he expects this to be dangerous.” Michel forestalled replying to himself, considering the implications. Investigations could be dangerous. Someone willing to impersonate a Blackhat had to know the risks involved. Once they were found they would be tortured and executed, their friends and family sent to the labor camps. If they were willing to chance that, then they’d be willing to resort to violence.

“Or,” he considered out loud, “expendable means that he could bury my career if this goes wrong for some reason.” He couldn’t foresee a way of this going wrong, but Michel readily admitted that Fidelis Jes was a smarter man than he. One didn’t run the Landfall Secret Police without being able to see many possibilities for the future of every decision.

Michel took a deep breath. No need to waste his energy on worrying. He needed to focus on the task at hand, and to do so he needed to talk with Captain Blasdell.

The thought had barely entered his head when the door to Captain Blasdell’s office opened. Blasdell was a thin woman in her forties, with a thoughtful, narrow face and a pair of armless spectacles balanced on the brim of her nose. A former police captain, she’d been brought into the Blackhats to help impose some sort of organization on their investigations. She was technically a Silver Rose, but everyone treated her like a Gold. She was the type of person Michel had heard referred to as the backbone of the Blackhats: incorruptible, unambitious, and competent.

She would never be promoted, yet never lose her rank. She was, in a few words, not going anywhere.

“You’re Michel Bravis?” she asked, ushering him into her office.

“I am, ma’am. Thanks for seeing me.” Michel had met the captain on several occasions but wasn’t surprised that she didn’t remember him. There were a lot of Blackhats, after all, and he was very good at blending into crowds. He could thank his late father for a face so plain most people forgot it within minutes.

“I didn’t have much choice.” Blasdell took a seat behind her desk and gestured to a few crates stacked on the corner. “Orders came straight from the grand master’s office. I understand you are to have access to any information regarding my case.”

“That’s right, ma’am.”

Blasdell drummed her fingers on the desk, fixing him with a look that said she would not be handing over information willingly. “Why?”

“I think that’s classified, ma’am.” Michel had no idea how much Blasdell had been told, and frankly he didn’t want to have to explain everything to her.

“You think?”

“Pretty sure. All that matters is I need any information you’ve dug up in the last couple of days.”

Blasdell leaned back, putting her boots up on her desk, the put-off look remaining fixed on her face. “The case is a farce,” she said. “I’ve only got a skeleton crew working it, and in a few days we’re going to trot out a scapegoat and put the whole thing to bed. Why do you need our information?”

Blasdell had an odd relationship with the Blackhats. She was one of them, and well regarded within the Millinery, but she never seemed to actually trust the people she worked with. Rumor had it Fidelis Jes found it amusing, but also that it made her difficult to work with. Michel didn’t have time to deal with her mistrust. “Because, ma’am, the grand master is letting you do your job up until the scapegoat comes into play. Knowing your reputation, the skeleton crew has been working around the clock to come up with leads in the hope you’ll solve this before Fidelis Jes makes the whole thing go away. Am I correct?”

She took her boots off the desk, eyes narrowed. “You are.”

“Good. So what have you come up with in eighty hours?”

“The facts are,” Blasdell said, drawing herself up and adopting a professional tone, “nine days ago fifteen messengers delivered fifteen orders to fifteen different printing companies. Each of them ordered ten thousand copies of Sins of Empire and swore the printer to secrecy by presenting an Iron Rose. The printers filled the order, and about eighty hours ago the first copy of the pamphlet hit the street. So far my investigation has cleared the actual printers of any wrongdoing. We’re using descriptions of the messengers to try to round up some suspects, but so far we’ve got nothing promising.”