In Constellated Wars - Part Four
I spent an awesome couple of hours writing in various bookstores today. I did not buy any books, though, and this saddens me. (I did buy stuff from the cafe's, though, to justify my presence in them. If you haven't yet tried the Caramel Apple Spice that Borders does, I recommend it. It's like the one froufy decaf drink I like. And, coincidentally, one of the few things the Borders cafe does not screw up.)
I am still way behind, but whatever. I have written for NaNo, pinned a quilt, and scribbled a few more paragraphs of my cheating-on-NaNo!story, so I'm counting today as a win.
Aubrey’s shoulders tensed just before he opened the Guardhouse door. Thierry felt his own tensing in response - he trusted Aubrey’s instincts.
The shouting hit them a moment later, and if it had been anyone but the Erelim and Ophanim Orseolo doing it, their voices would have been audible from half the street away.
The Ophanim existed to find truth at the Helion’s orders. They were his eyes and ears, his hands, equal in rank to the upper echelon of each country’s nobility and treated as such, regardless of what class they’d been born to. There were too many of them now for the Ophanim to be made landed nobility the way they had in the past, but they were paid very, very well, which most of the would-be Ophanim considered reason enough to apply - Thierry included.
Rumor had it that the Helion inspected each Ophanim applicant, to see whether or not it was a desire for truth or a love of money that drove them to the Accademia Ophania, but surely that couldn’t be true. There were hundreds of applicants each year, and the Helion was a busy man. There was no way he could meet with each applicant personally. It was far more likely that the red-robed priests who served as Solariel’s Holy Rays were the ones who performed the inspections, testing each applicant for the truth of what was in their hearts as well assessing whether or not they would be able to sense the difference between strange magics and real miracles.
None of the countries that emerged from the remains of the Altagracian empire practiced any sort of magic. Solariel’s worship forbade such things. Magic was a tool of the Night, too often used for ill and therefore not to be trusted. It was the duty of the Ophanim to combat it, and to do so effectively they were first taught how to use the very same abilities the rest of the Holy Solarien Empire feared. Only the Ophanim and Solariel’s Rays and the Helion himself could use magic with Solariel’s blessing. It made the Ophanim people to be feared. They still told stories of Ophanim Verducci, who called lightning down on an entire battalion of enemy soldiers to save the city of Helios, and lost his own life in the process.
The Ophanim practiced small magics, too - little things like charms for silence, which kept the noise of a particularly violent argument from spreading beyond a room or a building, in order not to disturb the people who lived and worked in the area, or to cause them undue fear.
That was the spell Ophanim Orseolo was using now. It kept Thierry and Aubrey from hearing his argument with the Erelim from half the street away. Judging from the expression on Orseolo’s face, though, Thierry had to wonder whether or not he’d be seeing the Ophanim cast lightning before the night was out.
“Sachiel’s tears,” Aubrey breathed. “What the hell’s going on here?”
Ophelia shook her head. “I’ve no idea,” she said, so low Thierry had to strain to hear her over the Ophanim’s shouting. He didn’t blame her for trying to be quiet - he didn’t want to draw any attention to the other Guardsmen either.
“They were civil for the first five minutes or so,” Ophelia’s partner Bartolomeo offered. “And then all hell broke loose.”
“Sun have mercy,” Thierry muttered. “How long have they been at it, then?”
Ophelia consulted the clock on the wall. “Twenty minutes, maybe?”
“Feels like hours,” Bartolomeo muttered.
“Sun have mercy,” Thierry said again. He wouldn’t have wanted to stand witness for this kind of rage for that long for all the saffron in the Floating Market. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stand witness to it now, but he had little enough reason to flee. And he was only on the outskirts of it, not tensely sitting near the epicenter, like poor Valeray. Valeray hunched in on himself, like a turtle drawing back into its shell, trying to avoid drawing their attention.
He probably needn’t have bothered. The two men were entirely wrapped up in each other. Thierry doubted that anyone else in the room even existed for them, they were that angry.
D’Adamo said something low and vicious. He was using Carelian, so Thierry had no idea what he said, but whatever it was made Orseolo’s eyes narrow.
D’Adamo smirked and added something else, his voice rough with shouting. It was obvious that he was taunting the Ophanim.
Whatever he said had the desired effect. Orseolo snarled what was probably a curse in reply and struck the Erelim in the face.
D’Adamo roared and threw himself at Orseolo, knocking the Ophanim into the desk that Diego and Antonia shared when they were on duty.
“That is enough!” Valeray shouted. He’d moved when Orseolo threw the first punch, retreating into the Erelim’s office and re-emerging with d’Adamo’s ancient clay teapot. He dumped the remains of a pot of willow bark tea over the furious combatants, looking for all the world as though he wished the tea were scalding hot rather than stale and cold.
The shock of being drenched in tea seemed to draw the Erelim and the Ophanim back to themselves. Orseolo released his grip on d’Adamo’s shirt and lowered his fist, a flicker of shame crossing his face, quickly masked behind an expression of bland neutrality.
D’Adamo rolled into a sitting position, ignoring his bleeding lip with the same magnificent unconcern that Orseolo was on his own bloody nose. He was wearing an expression Thierry had never seen on him before, politely blank and empty, no trace of his thoughts behind it. It was very nearly the same expression Orseolo was wearing.
It made d’Adamo look very much like the Ophanim, Thierry thought. Sitting side by side like that, drenched in tea and ignoring their bruises, they looked more alike than their shared nationality accounted for.
Valeray set the teapot down on the desk and regarded both of them with the same expression Thierry used on the rare occasions Alais and Yvaine disagreed, or on the more frequent ones when Élisabeth and Charlotte did. Thierry suspected that if Valeray thought he could get away with it, he’d have beaten the pair of them to stripes with a willow switch.
Fortunately for everyone involved, Valeray couldn’t, and he knew it.
“I think it might be best if you left, my lord,” Valeray said, very quietly. The look on his face was a mixture of frustration and anger, a sharp contrast with the two men on the floor.
“I think perhaps you are right,” Ophanim Orseolo replied.
“Yes,” d’Adamo agreed. “He is."
Orseolo picked himself up off the floor, offering his hand to d’Adamo, who took it. Orseolo hauled d’Adamo to his feet, and they regarded one another silently.
“Until next time,” Orseolo murmured.
“Until next time,” d’Adamo replied.
The Ophanim turned on his heel and walked out the door, ignoring the Guardsmen as though they didn’t exist. The unnatural silence dissolved as soon as he closed the door behind him, and sounds Thierry hadn’t even realized were missing filtered in from the street.
D’Adamo dabbed at his bleeding lip, his blank expression giving way to irritation.
“Sir,” Valeray said tightly, betraying his annoyance. “This may be behavior unbecoming of a Guardsman, but what the hell was that?”
“Nothing,” d’Adamo said.
“Oh, bullshit it was,” Valeray snapped.
Thierry blinked. He’d never heard Valeray use that kind of language before. Valeray was the closest thing the Ravensgate Guardhouse had to nobility, if they didn’t count the Erelim, which Thierry didn’t. The Erelim was so far above them in ability and rank that he couldn’t be counted as one of them, most of the time.
Valeray, though. Valeray was, for all that he’d been born the second son of a minor lord. The Laroux lands and fortune - such as they were - would go to Valeray’s older brother, which Thierry had always thought was the reason that Valeray had joined the Guard in the first place. Valeray was good at what he did, though. He’d been with the Ravensgate Guard for two years now, and according to Aubrey he still had all the fancy, over-polished mannerisms he’d come to them with.
D’Adamo looked just as startled by Valeray’s language as the rest of them. He surprised them all by smiling slowly, heedless of his bleeding lip. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “You do know the words after all.”
“Of course I do,” Valeray snapped. “Answer the question, please.”
“It was behavior unbecoming of a Guardsman,” d’Adamo said, his smile fading. “I’ve been told that the Ophanim and I have that effect on one another.”
“Empirical evidence suggests that whoever told you that had the right of it,” said Valeray, whose irritation had faded into his habitual mother-hennish disgruntlement. “I suppose you’re not going to say anything other than that, are you?”
“I hadn’t planned on it, no.”
“Right,” Valeray muttered. He shoved the teapot into the Erelim’s hands and added, “You have tea leaves in your hair. Sir.” He managed to make sir sound like jackass. Thierry was impressed.
“Ah,” said d’Adamo. “Thank you.”
Valeray waved this aside and began righting Diego and Antonia’s desk. After a moment, he glowered over at the corner where Thierry and the others were clustered and said, “Don’t the rest of you have work you could be doing?”
“I hate it when Mother and Father fight,” Bartolomeo muttered, sotto voce.
“Careful,” Aubrey muttered back. “Or Mother will send you to bed without supper.”
“Laugh it up while you can,” Valeray announced to no one in particular. “Just you remember who draws up the patrol schedules.”
Thierry glowered at Aubrey, not particularly enamored of the idea of drawing the worst possible shifts for the foreseeable future. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ophelia giving the same look to Bartolomeo.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to swap partners, would you?” Ophelia asked.
“I can’t,” Thierry said, regretful. “I’m still in training.” Junior Guardsmen on their six month probationary period weren’t allowed to swap partners, unless the senior Guardsmen assigned as their mentor proved unsuited to the task.
“Ah, well,” Ophelia said, not looking particularly upset by Thierry’s rejection. “I’ll make due with what I’ve got then.”
“What do you mean, you’ll make due?” demanded Bartolomeo. “You should be giving thanks to Solariel and the Seven that d’Adamo assigned me as your partner.”
“Oh, should I?” Ophelia inquired, her tone too sweet to be anything but a warning sign.
“Absolutely,” Bartolomeo assured her. “After all, think of the alternatives.”
“Ah,” said Ophelia. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It could be worse. You could be Aubrey.”
“Hey!” Aubrey protested.
“Don’t make me get the teapot,” Valeray said warningly.
“Er,” said Bartolomeo.
“You could grovel,” Ophelia murmured.
“I don’t want to grovel,” Bartolomeo murmured back.
“Yes, well, I don’t want to take the dawn shift for the next month. Grovel.”
“Er,” Bartolomeo said again, caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
“You could consider doing the same thing,” Thierry told Aubrey.
Aubrey grinned, unrepentant. “Val wouldn’t believe me, would you?”
“No,” Valeray said flatly.
“See?”
Thierry sighed and resigned himself to the dawn shift for the next month. “Let’s just get back to work, please.”
“Du Prideaux,” d’Adamo called from inside his office, not looking up from the paper he was reading. “Mèrault. A word, if you please.”
Valeray gave them a curious look as they passed. What have you done now? that look wanted to know.
Aubrey shrugged. Nothing, that I know of, he lied.
“Shut the door,” d’Adamo said quietly.
Thierry did, standing in front of it while Aubrey leaned against the wall with easy nonchalance.
D’Adamo set the papers down his desk with exaggerated care. It was almost as if he didn’t trust himself with them, which made no sense at all until Thierry noticed the Ophanim’s seal at the bottom of the first page.
“Another body has been found,” d’Adamo announced without preamble.
“Did Madame Savita send for you again?” Aubrey asked, though it was clear from his tone that he already knew the answer to that question was no.
“Orseolo was kind enough to bring it to my attention when I informed him of the murder at the Oyster Shell,” d’Adamo said. His tone betrayed nothing, but Thierry would have bet good money that Ophanim Orseolo hadn’t wanted to inform the Erelim of the second murder at all.
“Someone from Ravensgate went to the Ophanim before they came to us?” Aubrey asked. His tone suggested that he thought this was odd. Thierry supposed that it was. The people of Ravensgate seemed to like the Erelim and the Ravensgate Guard almost as much as they liked Madame Savita. It had seemed odd to Thierry, who had expected the same sort of cool reception the Guard cadets in Helios were given, but most things about Altera were odd so he’d dismissed that as a pleasant surprise and thought nothing of it.
“No,” d’Adamo said grimly. “They didn’t. The body was found in Redwater.”
“Midnight and Shadowfall,” Aubrey swore.
The Redwater district was on the northern side of the city, so named for the deadly coral reefs that made it impossible for ships to access the harbor there. It was possible to navigate the reef, if you knew the waters, and there was a competition every year to prove just that. And every year, the family that knew the secret of the reef collected the prize while their competitors stained the water red. Or so the stories said. Thierry suspected that the name had more to do with the fact that the Redwater district was where people went to watch the fighting rings that flourished there, despite the fact that fighting for sport had been outlawed in the days of the dark departing, after the Altagracian empire had fallen apart. Violence flourished in Redwater, and those too weak to survive it generally disappeared for a time and reappeared floating in the harbor.
“The body was identified as Phillip Mercier,” d’Adamo continued.
“The Black Hand?” Aubrey interrupted, startled. “They found the Black Hand floating in the harbor?”
“No,” d’Adamo said. “Cathal Verducci found him in the House of Night Wanderers.”
Aubrey whistled, low and impressed. Cathal Verducci’s House of Night Wanderers was just as infamous as Savita Sirèneus’ Oyster Shell in its own way. Verducci specialized in fighters the way Savita specialized in whores - his were the best of the best in Altera, ranging from self-taught street-fighters to decorated ex-military, all of them too in love with the fight to die peaceful deaths. Verducci honed their abilities to a razor edge, pitting them against each other until they had learned how to counter the various fighting styles that they might encounter in the ring, and then he turned them loose in very expensive and very illegal matches against all comers. His Wanderers rarely lost, but that didn’t stop people from other fighting rings from taking up the challenge.
“Arriortua must have loved that,” Aubrey observed, naming the Erelim of the Redwater Guardhouse.
“Verducci didn’t go to Arriortua,” d’Adamo said. “He knows better. He went straight to Orseolo.”
“This just keeps getting better and better,” muttered Aubrey. “Arriortua knows by now, I take it?”
“Unfortunately,” said d’Adamo. “The body was given into the Ophanim’s care before Arriortua could do overmuch. Orseolo had it cleansed and burned nearly a week ago.”
“A week ago?” Thierry repeated, exchanging a look with Aubrey. “Mercier was killed before Mistress Elanore was?”
“Yes,” d’Adamo said. He looked down at the papers on his desk again. “Since the first body was found in Arriortua’s district, he has a prior claim to the case.”
“Oh,” said Aubrey. “Fuck no.”
“Yes,” said d’Adamo. “Quite.”
“Sir,” Aubrey said. “You can’t really expect me to believe that the Ophanim wants that - that blood-mad landlubber investigating this.”
D’Adamo greeted this statement with a disapproving scowl. “Of course not,” the Erelim said. “Orseolo’s many things, but he’s not an idiot. He’s no more pleased that Arriortua has prior claim than we are, but the rules are what they are.”
“Do the rules account for the fact that Arriortua’s a complete idiot?” Aubrey demanded.
“Du Prideaux,” d’Adamo said.
“Well, it’s true,” Aubrey said, subsiding into something very like a sulk.
“He’s also your superior officer,” d’Adamo reminded him. “Which means you will treat him with the same respect with which you treat me.”
Aubrey stared at him, aghast. “You can’t mean for me to work with him.”
“The both of you will,” d’Adamo said, looking no happier about it than Aubrey was. “I suggest you let Mèrault do the talking, since you seem incapable of keeping a civil tongue in your head.”
“But sir -”
“You have your orders, du Prideaux,” d’Adamo snapped. “I don’t care if you like them, but you will obey them, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Thierry said, when Aubrey stubbornly said nothing.
“Good,” said d’Adamo. “You’re dismissed.”
Thierry turned to go, but d’Adamo’s stopped them at the door. “Du Prideaux,” he said.
Aubrey went tense, but he didn’t turn around. Thiery had never seen Aubrey this angry before. Aubrey was usually easy-going to the point of obnoxiousness, and it was obvious that he, like the rest of the Ravensgate Guardsmen, all but worshipped the ground the Erelim walked on.
“It occurs to me that Mèrault is still new to the city,” d’Adamo continued, very casually. “You probably haven’t seen many of the wonders each district has to offer, have you Mèrault?”
“No, sir,” Thierry said warily. He only had an inkling about what d’Adamo was getting at, but it was obvious that no was the only appropriate answer.
“You might show him around Redwater, while you’re there,” d’Adamo said. “No sense wasting the opportunity.”
The tension in Aubrey’s shoulders drained away. “No, sir,” he said, sounding much more like his normal self. “Come, Thierry. We’ve work to do.”
15556 / 50000
(31.11%)
You know, it occurs to me that "Ophanim" should be the plural and not the singular. Damn it. Liguistic!fail FTW, apparently.
I am still way behind, but whatever. I have written for NaNo, pinned a quilt, and scribbled a few more paragraphs of my cheating-on-NaNo!story, so I'm counting today as a win.
Aubrey’s shoulders tensed just before he opened the Guardhouse door. Thierry felt his own tensing in response - he trusted Aubrey’s instincts.
The shouting hit them a moment later, and if it had been anyone but the Erelim and Ophanim Orseolo doing it, their voices would have been audible from half the street away.
The Ophanim existed to find truth at the Helion’s orders. They were his eyes and ears, his hands, equal in rank to the upper echelon of each country’s nobility and treated as such, regardless of what class they’d been born to. There were too many of them now for the Ophanim to be made landed nobility the way they had in the past, but they were paid very, very well, which most of the would-be Ophanim considered reason enough to apply - Thierry included.
Rumor had it that the Helion inspected each Ophanim applicant, to see whether or not it was a desire for truth or a love of money that drove them to the Accademia Ophania, but surely that couldn’t be true. There were hundreds of applicants each year, and the Helion was a busy man. There was no way he could meet with each applicant personally. It was far more likely that the red-robed priests who served as Solariel’s Holy Rays were the ones who performed the inspections, testing each applicant for the truth of what was in their hearts as well assessing whether or not they would be able to sense the difference between strange magics and real miracles.
None of the countries that emerged from the remains of the Altagracian empire practiced any sort of magic. Solariel’s worship forbade such things. Magic was a tool of the Night, too often used for ill and therefore not to be trusted. It was the duty of the Ophanim to combat it, and to do so effectively they were first taught how to use the very same abilities the rest of the Holy Solarien Empire feared. Only the Ophanim and Solariel’s Rays and the Helion himself could use magic with Solariel’s blessing. It made the Ophanim people to be feared. They still told stories of Ophanim Verducci, who called lightning down on an entire battalion of enemy soldiers to save the city of Helios, and lost his own life in the process.
The Ophanim practiced small magics, too - little things like charms for silence, which kept the noise of a particularly violent argument from spreading beyond a room or a building, in order not to disturb the people who lived and worked in the area, or to cause them undue fear.
That was the spell Ophanim Orseolo was using now. It kept Thierry and Aubrey from hearing his argument with the Erelim from half the street away. Judging from the expression on Orseolo’s face, though, Thierry had to wonder whether or not he’d be seeing the Ophanim cast lightning before the night was out.
“Sachiel’s tears,” Aubrey breathed. “What the hell’s going on here?”
Ophelia shook her head. “I’ve no idea,” she said, so low Thierry had to strain to hear her over the Ophanim’s shouting. He didn’t blame her for trying to be quiet - he didn’t want to draw any attention to the other Guardsmen either.
“They were civil for the first five minutes or so,” Ophelia’s partner Bartolomeo offered. “And then all hell broke loose.”
“Sun have mercy,” Thierry muttered. “How long have they been at it, then?”
Ophelia consulted the clock on the wall. “Twenty minutes, maybe?”
“Feels like hours,” Bartolomeo muttered.
“Sun have mercy,” Thierry said again. He wouldn’t have wanted to stand witness for this kind of rage for that long for all the saffron in the Floating Market. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stand witness to it now, but he had little enough reason to flee. And he was only on the outskirts of it, not tensely sitting near the epicenter, like poor Valeray. Valeray hunched in on himself, like a turtle drawing back into its shell, trying to avoid drawing their attention.
He probably needn’t have bothered. The two men were entirely wrapped up in each other. Thierry doubted that anyone else in the room even existed for them, they were that angry.
D’Adamo said something low and vicious. He was using Carelian, so Thierry had no idea what he said, but whatever it was made Orseolo’s eyes narrow.
D’Adamo smirked and added something else, his voice rough with shouting. It was obvious that he was taunting the Ophanim.
Whatever he said had the desired effect. Orseolo snarled what was probably a curse in reply and struck the Erelim in the face.
D’Adamo roared and threw himself at Orseolo, knocking the Ophanim into the desk that Diego and Antonia shared when they were on duty.
“That is enough!” Valeray shouted. He’d moved when Orseolo threw the first punch, retreating into the Erelim’s office and re-emerging with d’Adamo’s ancient clay teapot. He dumped the remains of a pot of willow bark tea over the furious combatants, looking for all the world as though he wished the tea were scalding hot rather than stale and cold.
The shock of being drenched in tea seemed to draw the Erelim and the Ophanim back to themselves. Orseolo released his grip on d’Adamo’s shirt and lowered his fist, a flicker of shame crossing his face, quickly masked behind an expression of bland neutrality.
D’Adamo rolled into a sitting position, ignoring his bleeding lip with the same magnificent unconcern that Orseolo was on his own bloody nose. He was wearing an expression Thierry had never seen on him before, politely blank and empty, no trace of his thoughts behind it. It was very nearly the same expression Orseolo was wearing.
It made d’Adamo look very much like the Ophanim, Thierry thought. Sitting side by side like that, drenched in tea and ignoring their bruises, they looked more alike than their shared nationality accounted for.
Valeray set the teapot down on the desk and regarded both of them with the same expression Thierry used on the rare occasions Alais and Yvaine disagreed, or on the more frequent ones when Élisabeth and Charlotte did. Thierry suspected that if Valeray thought he could get away with it, he’d have beaten the pair of them to stripes with a willow switch.
Fortunately for everyone involved, Valeray couldn’t, and he knew it.
“I think it might be best if you left, my lord,” Valeray said, very quietly. The look on his face was a mixture of frustration and anger, a sharp contrast with the two men on the floor.
“I think perhaps you are right,” Ophanim Orseolo replied.
“Yes,” d’Adamo agreed. “He is."
Orseolo picked himself up off the floor, offering his hand to d’Adamo, who took it. Orseolo hauled d’Adamo to his feet, and they regarded one another silently.
“Until next time,” Orseolo murmured.
“Until next time,” d’Adamo replied.
The Ophanim turned on his heel and walked out the door, ignoring the Guardsmen as though they didn’t exist. The unnatural silence dissolved as soon as he closed the door behind him, and sounds Thierry hadn’t even realized were missing filtered in from the street.
D’Adamo dabbed at his bleeding lip, his blank expression giving way to irritation.
“Sir,” Valeray said tightly, betraying his annoyance. “This may be behavior unbecoming of a Guardsman, but what the hell was that?”
“Nothing,” d’Adamo said.
“Oh, bullshit it was,” Valeray snapped.
Thierry blinked. He’d never heard Valeray use that kind of language before. Valeray was the closest thing the Ravensgate Guardhouse had to nobility, if they didn’t count the Erelim, which Thierry didn’t. The Erelim was so far above them in ability and rank that he couldn’t be counted as one of them, most of the time.
Valeray, though. Valeray was, for all that he’d been born the second son of a minor lord. The Laroux lands and fortune - such as they were - would go to Valeray’s older brother, which Thierry had always thought was the reason that Valeray had joined the Guard in the first place. Valeray was good at what he did, though. He’d been with the Ravensgate Guard for two years now, and according to Aubrey he still had all the fancy, over-polished mannerisms he’d come to them with.
D’Adamo looked just as startled by Valeray’s language as the rest of them. He surprised them all by smiling slowly, heedless of his bleeding lip. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “You do know the words after all.”
“Of course I do,” Valeray snapped. “Answer the question, please.”
“It was behavior unbecoming of a Guardsman,” d’Adamo said, his smile fading. “I’ve been told that the Ophanim and I have that effect on one another.”
“Empirical evidence suggests that whoever told you that had the right of it,” said Valeray, whose irritation had faded into his habitual mother-hennish disgruntlement. “I suppose you’re not going to say anything other than that, are you?”
“I hadn’t planned on it, no.”
“Right,” Valeray muttered. He shoved the teapot into the Erelim’s hands and added, “You have tea leaves in your hair. Sir.” He managed to make sir sound like jackass. Thierry was impressed.
“Ah,” said d’Adamo. “Thank you.”
Valeray waved this aside and began righting Diego and Antonia’s desk. After a moment, he glowered over at the corner where Thierry and the others were clustered and said, “Don’t the rest of you have work you could be doing?”
“I hate it when Mother and Father fight,” Bartolomeo muttered, sotto voce.
“Careful,” Aubrey muttered back. “Or Mother will send you to bed without supper.”
“Laugh it up while you can,” Valeray announced to no one in particular. “Just you remember who draws up the patrol schedules.”
Thierry glowered at Aubrey, not particularly enamored of the idea of drawing the worst possible shifts for the foreseeable future. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ophelia giving the same look to Bartolomeo.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to swap partners, would you?” Ophelia asked.
“I can’t,” Thierry said, regretful. “I’m still in training.” Junior Guardsmen on their six month probationary period weren’t allowed to swap partners, unless the senior Guardsmen assigned as their mentor proved unsuited to the task.
“Ah, well,” Ophelia said, not looking particularly upset by Thierry’s rejection. “I’ll make due with what I’ve got then.”
“What do you mean, you’ll make due?” demanded Bartolomeo. “You should be giving thanks to Solariel and the Seven that d’Adamo assigned me as your partner.”
“Oh, should I?” Ophelia inquired, her tone too sweet to be anything but a warning sign.
“Absolutely,” Bartolomeo assured her. “After all, think of the alternatives.”
“Ah,” said Ophelia. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It could be worse. You could be Aubrey.”
“Hey!” Aubrey protested.
“Don’t make me get the teapot,” Valeray said warningly.
“Er,” said Bartolomeo.
“You could grovel,” Ophelia murmured.
“I don’t want to grovel,” Bartolomeo murmured back.
“Yes, well, I don’t want to take the dawn shift for the next month. Grovel.”
“Er,” Bartolomeo said again, caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
“You could consider doing the same thing,” Thierry told Aubrey.
Aubrey grinned, unrepentant. “Val wouldn’t believe me, would you?”
“No,” Valeray said flatly.
“See?”
Thierry sighed and resigned himself to the dawn shift for the next month. “Let’s just get back to work, please.”
“Du Prideaux,” d’Adamo called from inside his office, not looking up from the paper he was reading. “Mèrault. A word, if you please.”
Valeray gave them a curious look as they passed. What have you done now? that look wanted to know.
Aubrey shrugged. Nothing, that I know of, he lied.
“Shut the door,” d’Adamo said quietly.
Thierry did, standing in front of it while Aubrey leaned against the wall with easy nonchalance.
D’Adamo set the papers down his desk with exaggerated care. It was almost as if he didn’t trust himself with them, which made no sense at all until Thierry noticed the Ophanim’s seal at the bottom of the first page.
“Another body has been found,” d’Adamo announced without preamble.
“Did Madame Savita send for you again?” Aubrey asked, though it was clear from his tone that he already knew the answer to that question was no.
“Orseolo was kind enough to bring it to my attention when I informed him of the murder at the Oyster Shell,” d’Adamo said. His tone betrayed nothing, but Thierry would have bet good money that Ophanim Orseolo hadn’t wanted to inform the Erelim of the second murder at all.
“Someone from Ravensgate went to the Ophanim before they came to us?” Aubrey asked. His tone suggested that he thought this was odd. Thierry supposed that it was. The people of Ravensgate seemed to like the Erelim and the Ravensgate Guard almost as much as they liked Madame Savita. It had seemed odd to Thierry, who had expected the same sort of cool reception the Guard cadets in Helios were given, but most things about Altera were odd so he’d dismissed that as a pleasant surprise and thought nothing of it.
“No,” d’Adamo said grimly. “They didn’t. The body was found in Redwater.”
“Midnight and Shadowfall,” Aubrey swore.
The Redwater district was on the northern side of the city, so named for the deadly coral reefs that made it impossible for ships to access the harbor there. It was possible to navigate the reef, if you knew the waters, and there was a competition every year to prove just that. And every year, the family that knew the secret of the reef collected the prize while their competitors stained the water red. Or so the stories said. Thierry suspected that the name had more to do with the fact that the Redwater district was where people went to watch the fighting rings that flourished there, despite the fact that fighting for sport had been outlawed in the days of the dark departing, after the Altagracian empire had fallen apart. Violence flourished in Redwater, and those too weak to survive it generally disappeared for a time and reappeared floating in the harbor.
“The body was identified as Phillip Mercier,” d’Adamo continued.
“The Black Hand?” Aubrey interrupted, startled. “They found the Black Hand floating in the harbor?”
“No,” d’Adamo said. “Cathal Verducci found him in the House of Night Wanderers.”
Aubrey whistled, low and impressed. Cathal Verducci’s House of Night Wanderers was just as infamous as Savita Sirèneus’ Oyster Shell in its own way. Verducci specialized in fighters the way Savita specialized in whores - his were the best of the best in Altera, ranging from self-taught street-fighters to decorated ex-military, all of them too in love with the fight to die peaceful deaths. Verducci honed their abilities to a razor edge, pitting them against each other until they had learned how to counter the various fighting styles that they might encounter in the ring, and then he turned them loose in very expensive and very illegal matches against all comers. His Wanderers rarely lost, but that didn’t stop people from other fighting rings from taking up the challenge.
“Arriortua must have loved that,” Aubrey observed, naming the Erelim of the Redwater Guardhouse.
“Verducci didn’t go to Arriortua,” d’Adamo said. “He knows better. He went straight to Orseolo.”
“This just keeps getting better and better,” muttered Aubrey. “Arriortua knows by now, I take it?”
“Unfortunately,” said d’Adamo. “The body was given into the Ophanim’s care before Arriortua could do overmuch. Orseolo had it cleansed and burned nearly a week ago.”
“A week ago?” Thierry repeated, exchanging a look with Aubrey. “Mercier was killed before Mistress Elanore was?”
“Yes,” d’Adamo said. He looked down at the papers on his desk again. “Since the first body was found in Arriortua’s district, he has a prior claim to the case.”
“Oh,” said Aubrey. “Fuck no.”
“Yes,” said d’Adamo. “Quite.”
“Sir,” Aubrey said. “You can’t really expect me to believe that the Ophanim wants that - that blood-mad landlubber investigating this.”
D’Adamo greeted this statement with a disapproving scowl. “Of course not,” the Erelim said. “Orseolo’s many things, but he’s not an idiot. He’s no more pleased that Arriortua has prior claim than we are, but the rules are what they are.”
“Do the rules account for the fact that Arriortua’s a complete idiot?” Aubrey demanded.
“Du Prideaux,” d’Adamo said.
“Well, it’s true,” Aubrey said, subsiding into something very like a sulk.
“He’s also your superior officer,” d’Adamo reminded him. “Which means you will treat him with the same respect with which you treat me.”
Aubrey stared at him, aghast. “You can’t mean for me to work with him.”
“The both of you will,” d’Adamo said, looking no happier about it than Aubrey was. “I suggest you let Mèrault do the talking, since you seem incapable of keeping a civil tongue in your head.”
“But sir -”
“You have your orders, du Prideaux,” d’Adamo snapped. “I don’t care if you like them, but you will obey them, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Thierry said, when Aubrey stubbornly said nothing.
“Good,” said d’Adamo. “You’re dismissed.”
Thierry turned to go, but d’Adamo’s stopped them at the door. “Du Prideaux,” he said.
Aubrey went tense, but he didn’t turn around. Thiery had never seen Aubrey this angry before. Aubrey was usually easy-going to the point of obnoxiousness, and it was obvious that he, like the rest of the Ravensgate Guardsmen, all but worshipped the ground the Erelim walked on.
“It occurs to me that Mèrault is still new to the city,” d’Adamo continued, very casually. “You probably haven’t seen many of the wonders each district has to offer, have you Mèrault?”
“No, sir,” Thierry said warily. He only had an inkling about what d’Adamo was getting at, but it was obvious that no was the only appropriate answer.
“You might show him around Redwater, while you’re there,” d’Adamo said. “No sense wasting the opportunity.”
The tension in Aubrey’s shoulders drained away. “No, sir,” he said, sounding much more like his normal self. “Come, Thierry. We’ve work to do.”
15556 / 50000
(31.11%)
You know, it occurs to me that "Ophanim" should be the plural and not the singular. Damn it. Liguistic!fail FTW, apparently.