Брайан Макклеллан - Sins of Empire

“That’s right, sir. It’s not easy, but I can do it.”

“Tell me if there’s any sorcery here.”

“Sir?” the Knacked asked, looking confused.

“Just look!”

The Knacked took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and then opened them halfway with an intent gaze on the corpse. He held it there for almost twenty seconds before shaking his head and blinking away a few tears. “No, sir. Can’t see any sign of sorcery.”

Michel circled the body one more time. This was definitely not Taniel. It definitely was Gregious Tampo. The height and weight looked right; the face was definitely his. Michel wanted to know exactly how this had been done – was that some other poor fool there, or had Taniel killed himself to give Michel an edge? It seemed impossibly unlikely. And besides, wondering wasn’t Michel’s job. His job was to get a Gold Rose.

“Did we find anything else?” Michel asked.

“No, sir.”

“Do another sweep.”

Michel let them search for almost an hour, tearing the printshop apart, before meeting Warsim outside next to a pile of everything of value they had found. The pile consisted of eighteen crates of Sins of Empire , eleven muskets, five pistols, ammunition, receipts from news distributors in Landfall, a whole library of antigovernment propaganda distributed by other revolutionaries throughout the last ten years, and a single handwritten diary belonging, apparently, to Gregious Tampo.

Down the street of the warehouse complex Michel spotted Palo faces in windows and peering around corners, no doubt curious as to what was going on. He ignored them, flipping through the diary while his Blackhats waited in silence. “I don’t know if a corpse is going to be enough to get me my Gold Rose,” he whispered to himself.

“Then you better have a damned good story to go along with it,” he answered.

He read the last page of the diary and then flipped it shut, putting it in his back pocket and looking up at Warsim and the assembled Blackhats. “Take all of this to the Millinery,” he said. “Inventory it and sell it.”

“Even the pamphlets and propaganda?” Warsim asked.

Michel wondered how long it had taken Taniel to create the persona of Gregious Tampo – all the work that had gone into a false human being with an entire history. Tampo had written, published, and distributed a pamphlet that had, despite all the work, accomplished very little. Michel was sure it was not his only scheme, but it seemed like such a waste.

“No,” he said. “Take the books and pamphlets outside the city and burn them. Gregious Tampo is dead, and this whole affair with him. Bring me his old secretary and landlord from the office building to identify the body.”

“Right, sir. Anything else?”

“Yes. Let Fidelis Jes know I need to see him.”

“You’ve brought me a body,” Fidelis Jes said, his tone flat.

The grand master was having lunch at his desk, a napkin tucked into his pressed shirt, a bite of roast pheasant halfway to his mouth, orange sauce dripping onto the desk. He noticed the drip, swore and finished the bite, then wiped the desk with his napkin before tossing it on the half-finished meal and pushing his plate to one side. Jes did not look well – his eyes were bloodshot, his hair unkempt, and his shirt wrinkled. Michel, in the times he’d seen Jes around the Millinery, had never witnessed him so out of sorts.

Michel cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. That’s right.”

“What good is a corpse?” Fidelis Jes asked in a quiet voice. “What can I do with a body? I can’t torture a body, can I? I can’t squeeze it for secrets!” His voice rose in pitch until he finished by slamming a fist down on the desk, making Michel jump. Michel noticed a ring on his thumb – a heavy, silver ring with a lance through a skull. Had Jes worn that before today? Michel had not noticed, but Jes’s fidgeting drew attention to it.

Michel grasped for something to say. “It’s definitely him, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said…”

“I heard what you said,” Jes snapped. “I want to know what you mean. How is that supposed to reassure me? It’s definitely him. Bah! I’d rather it was a double, so I could send someone more competent out to bring the bastard in.”

Michel was careful to let nothing show in his face. Not his rising certainty that Taniel was still out there, not his fear – and certainly not the deep loathing he felt for Fidelis Jes and everything he stood for. “Sir,” he said in a reasonable tone, “that means it’s over.” He slipped the diary from his pocket and set it on Jes’s desk. “With Tampo dead, it leaves no loose ends. Remember how careful Tampo was about bank records and rental agreements and witnesses? Well, he didn’t have a perfect memory. He had to keep it straight somewhere, and it’s right there.”

Fidelis Jes looked at the diary with a vague air of disgust, as if Michel had plopped a dead groundhog on his desk. “You mean we have his organization?”

“Everything,” Michel emphasized. “There was no organization. There was only Tampo. He masterminded the entire Sins of Empire affair, using hired help every step of the way, most of which didn’t even know his real name. He thought that he could overthrow the Lady Chancellor’s regime through a sort of bloodless coup – by turning the populace against her and forcing her to step down.”

“That’s awfully shortsighted for someone so careful.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I checked with several of our propagandists and they said the theory is sound. Tampo wasn’t going to stop with Sins of Empire . He planned dozens more pamphlets over the next few years. It’s all in his diary. This was just the beginning, but we’ve managed to cut the head off the snake before it could multiply.”

Michel leaned forward slightly as he spoke, putting excitement behind his words that he didn’t feel. Jes had to feel this victory, understand its importance. The grand master had to be convinced that Tampo’s suicide was not a fluke. Michel snatched up the diary, turning to the last few pages. “Look, sir. Tampo writes about the close calls he had with our Blackhats. We were right behind him, dogging him every step for the last week. He killed himself because he feared what we would do when we caught him. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have him, because all he worked toward was for naught.”

Jes leaned back in his chair. He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t look irate anymore, either. “I suppose you want to take credit for that, do you?”

“I was the one who dogged him.”

Jes’s eyes narrowed, and he watched Michel for a silence that stretched nerve-rackingly long before he got up, rounded the desk, and took the diary from Michel’s hands. He paced the room, flipping through the pages. Michel stood at attention the whole time, sweat trickling down the small of his back while he waited for Jes to find some sort of mistake that would give away the entire game.

Michel had to admire Taniel’s foresight. The journal was impeccable. It had been written in every week for almost three years, and illustrated the downfall of a disenfranchised Adran nobleman who’d escaped Field Marshal Tamas’s coup in Adro ten years ago and come to Fatrasta, only to lose what remained of his family fortune on speculations. He had no friends or family to question, and this writing illustrated a paranoid mind that was convinced he could remove Lindet from power and then step into a role in whatever government rose from the ashes of hers.

The journal had not been written last night. It was a long, thoughtful work. Likely something Taniel had been keeping as some sort of kill switch for the whole persona of Tampo for the eventuality of being caught by the Blackhats.