Chapter 31: Chapter thirty

I was wrong in my earlier report. Darrian Rane did not know of my surveillance and was not engaged in subversive behaviour. On an unrelated note, what is the penalty for divulging state secrets? I’m asking for a friend.

• Shadow surveillance report of Darrian Rane, General in the Salitian army.

 

Darrian had been reading reports in the Shadow intelligence hub for hours. He had pored over reports on visiting dignitaries, accounts from bribed servants, and copies of intercepted letters full of rumours and courtly gossip, going back years. There was nothing substantial in any of them of course. But taken together—and looked at in light of what Ferrous had told him—they painted a damning picture. It seemed that King Hammond had done exactly what Ferrous said he had to Princess Yew, and to at least two other young noblewomen as well.

So, Ferrous was telling the truth. Which meant he had technically been within his rights as a Justice to execute even the king himself. Which meant that Darrian bringing him to Vikor to be killed for doing so wouldn’t be a case of arresting a criminal. It would be red-handed murder. And that would be distasteful in the extreme.

A tiny orange imp danced across the report in front of him making rude noises.

“Would you mind?” Darrian said aloud. He didn’t normally talk to his hallucinations as it made people uncomfortable, but his Shadow contact had cleared out and left him alone to his reading.

“Okay boss,” a small bear said sleepily, getting up from where it was dozing beside the report. It padded over to the imp, plucked it up in its jaws and took it to the corner of the table. The imp swore and spat and waved its arms, but it was dragged off anyway.

“Thanks,” Darrian said. He had learned to read past the imp’s nonsense a long time ago, but he still found it distracting when he was trying to make important decisions.

Or perhaps he was just stalling. If he was honest with himself, there wasn’t much decision to be made. Darrian didn’t want to condemn Ferrous to death for what he had done, and no oaths of loyalty bound him anymore so he could do exactly as he wished. Which meant it was time to go back and free Ferrous.

Darrian rose from his chair and went to leave. But before he could, something caught his eye through the open window. Three men were approaching on horseback. The Shadow hub was disguised as a rundown farm in the middle of nowhere. There was no reason for anyone to be out there, unless of course they were looking for him.

At the men drew closer, Darrian recognized them. They were his men, led by Angus. Of course, “his” men had been originally hired by Branton Vikor, and it seemed a few of them had been hired less to help Darrian and more to keep an eye on him. They had probably gotten suspicious when Darrian hadn’t taken Ferrous to Vikor straight away and gone after him to investigate. If they killed him away from the others, they could claim that he was the victim of some trap by Ferrous and then skip right to taking the skard to Vikor and collecting their pay.

Darrian took a candle from his pocket and lit it from one of the other candles already burning around the room. He placed it on the table next to him and then waited for Vikor’s men.

After about a minute, there was a knock on the door. Darrian opened it and greeted Angus warmly.

“Ah, come in, come in. I assume Vikor sent you to kill me. Well, there’s a few things we should discuss before you do.”

Angus and the other two, Darrian didn’t know their names, looked confused at this. But he was unarmed, where they were all wearing swords at their hips and one was carrying a crossbow, so he was hardly threatening. They came in and, once they checked that no one was hiding anywhere in the building, came to stand awkwardly by the desk Darrian had been studying at.

Darrian sat down. The tiny imp, which had apparently escaped from the bear, scurried up the leg of Darrian’s chair and came to sit on his shoulder.

“This doesn’t look so good,” it sneered.

Darrian ignored it.

“So, what did you want to discuss?” Angus asked awkwardly.

“Two things. First is price. I assume Vikor has paid you handsomely to get rid of me and cover up my death. How much?”

“Two hundred brightmarks,” one of the other men said. “Each.” He was just under average height and had a bushy moustache.

Angus shot the man a dirty look.

Darrian whistled. “Just for me? That’s a lot of money. But, as you can imagine, my life is worth more to me than money. I’ll pay you double what you’re currently getting to leave me be. You can even go back to Vikor and tell him you did me in. That way you get paid three times what you were going to. You use it right, and that’s enough money to set you all up for life.”

“That’s a lot of money,” the moustachioed man said.

The other man that Darrian didn’t know the name of—a burly fellow with thinning hair—seemed interested too, though he said nothing.

“We can’t spend it if we’re dead though,” Angus pointed out. “Which is what we will be if we double-cross Branton Vikor.”

“He doesn’t have to know,” the burly man said.

“He’s in tight with all the bigwigs from the capital,” Angus said. “He’ll find out. And when he does, he’ll come after us. You want to have a Justice hunting you for the rest of your life? At least it won’t be very long. We’re getting good money for this job. If we get greedy, we’ll get dead.”

This seemed to convince the burly man, though the one with the moustache still looked a little wistful at the thought of all that coin. Unfortunately, the burly one held the crossbow and so was in the best position to double-cross his buddies.

“What was the other thing you wanted to say?” Angus asked, his tone getting dangerous. Darrian had caught the men off-guard before, but they were adjusting to the situation quickly and this conversation would quickly come to a terminal end.

“Oh,” Darrian said, clearing some dirt from under his fingernail. “I thought you should know that I poisoned you.”

“What!” Angus said, drawing his sword. “When?”

The burly man followed Angus’s lead and levelled his crossbow at Darrian. The one with the moustache just looked scared.

“Back at camp,” Darrian said. “I poisoned everyone’s food. I find it really helps maintain loyalty when working with mercenaries.”

“You’re bluffing,” Angus said.

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“Am I?” Darrian asked. “Can you be sure of that? Well, I suppose after you’ve killed me and you start bleeding from your eyeballs, you’ll know.”

“Ah, boss,” the burly man said, lowering the crossbow. “I don’t wanna die.”

“Me neither,” the man with the moustache said. “Me neither.”

Darrian could practically see Angus’s mind racing. The man had shown himself to be annoyingly sharp so far, which was a quality Darrian appreciated in his own men but didn’t in those sent to murder him.

“There’s something you’re forgetting,” Angus said after a few tense moments.

“And what’s that?” Darrian asked.

“We don’t have to do what you say in order to get the antidote. We can just hurt you until you tell us where it is. Grab him Bern.”

“Good thinking boss,” the moustachioed man, Bern apparently, said. He moved towards Darrian, sword out.

Darrian made no move to resist or run. He just smiled. “Yes, that would be a bad plan, wouldn’t it?”

“What do you mean by that?” Angus asked once Bern had Darrian kneeling on the ground, sword held in front of his throat.

“You’re assuming that I’m holding an antidote for ransom against your cooperation. It’s a sensible assumption I suppose. That is what someone of limited imagination might do in this situation. But this isn’t that kind of poison.”

“Then wha­­—” Angus began before trailing off.

Darrian pushed Bern’s arm away from his throat. Bern gave little resistance.

“What—” Angus tried again. Then he collapsed to the ground.

Darrian got to his feet in time to see the burly man collapse too. Bern was still standing, barely, and Darrian gave him a little shove to help him on his way.

Then he extinguished the candle which made up the second part of the poison he had dosed his men with and retrieved his sword from where he had left it in the corner. He ran each of the men through to be sure they wouldn’t be getting back up again, and then he left.

It was impolite to leave bodies for his Shadow contact to clean up, but he had left him three horses and the men’s gear as well. That should more than make up for the inconvenience.

Darrian untied his own horse from behind the building and rode back to Cadersville.

 

He returned to find Ferrous out of his makeshift cell, missing a foot, and being watched over by Arnos and two more of his men.

“I see you’ve been keeping yourselves busy,” he commented to Arnos.

Arnos shrugged. “We had to do something while you were away. Stopping your prisoner from escaping seemed the thing to do.”

“Well I found some interesting information while I was gone. Looks like we might have been on the wrong side of this. Go gather up the men and tell them to stand ready. I need to talk to the prisoner alone.”

Arnos nodded and set about his business.

“I looked into your claims,” Darrian said, squatting down what he deemed to be a safe distance from Ferrous.

“And?” Ferrous asked, seemingly blasé about his missing foot.

“I believe you.”

“Does that mean you won’t be having me executed?”

“It does. And you have my apologies for capturing you and chopping off your foot. Though if you had just stayed where you were until I returned, I’m sure that wouldn’t have happened.”

Ferrous fixed him with an annoyed look. “Did you just tell me that if I had stayed kidnapped, my kidnappers wouldn’t have had to cut off my foot?”

“I take your point,” Darrian said. “I’m sorry. Are you able to regrow it?”

“Already did,” Ferrous said. “Just didn’t want to make your men jumpy while they had weapons on me.” As he spoke there was a wet, squidgy noise and a fully formed foot sprouted from the stump at the end of his leg.

 “Well that’s something at least. Still, I owe you. What were you doing in town before we took you? Perhaps I could help by way of an apology.”

“Well,” Ferrous said. “Now that you mention it…”

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