“What’s worse, her successor is her nephew. He’s a capable young man, but he’s back in Dynize. The fourth-in-command of the Household will have to step in, and she has never gotten along with Yaret.”
Michel wondered how that would change the power dynamic. Clearly it was on Tenik’s mind as well—though Tenik obviously had a better grasp of what this would mean. The fact that he was so gray-faced didn’t bode well. “Does this have any effect on me?” Michel asked bluntly. It wasn’t a question with any tact, but he’d found that Tenik responded better to directness than to dancing around a topic.
“I don’t think so,” Tenik said. “If anything, it just makes it more important that we find and stop whoever is conducting these bombings. Rumor has it that Sedial will free up some of his own Household to help with the search and give us more resources.”
Michel quelled his natural suspicion. If Sedial was offering a hand, it meant that this had gotten serious. “No strings attached?”
“The minister of rations was well liked by everyone. Her Household will continue her work under her cupbearer, but efficiency will be lost.” Tenik frowned. “No one wants ministers to die, not when we’re in such a precarious position. Landfall is the hub of our invasion—Lindet has three field armies within a hundred miles. Our own armies are more than a match, but to guarantee victory, everything in the city must go smoothly.”
Michel wondered, not for the first time, if Lindet had secret communications with the Blackhats here. Everything seemed just a tad too coordinated for the workings of a single Gold Rose and a skeleton crew of subordinates completely untrained for guerrilla warfare. “We know it’s je Tura,” Michel said.
“Knowing doesn’t help us at all if we don’t find him.”
“Knowing will help us find him,” Michel said with assurance. In addition to trying to discover Forgula’s connection to Marhoush, he’d spent the last few days coordinating almost a hundred people in a counterespionage effort. Yaret’s Household had rooted out dozens of Blackhat safe houses, turned a small number of Blackhats, and imprisoned hundreds more. But the bombings only seemed to intensify.
The only blessing, as Michel saw it, was that the occupied citizens wanted nothing to do with these bombings. Aside from a few radicals, most of the local leaders were decrying any violence that included civilians—and je Tura had made it very clear that he didn’t give a shit who his bombs killed.
“I have to go,” Tenik said. “I’ll be in touch, but you might not see me for a couple of days.”
Michel hid his surprise. Despite giving him quite a lot of power to hunt down his former compatriots, Yaret had left Michel with a leash—namely Tenik—that had been present for most of his time with the Dynize. Tenik disappearing for a couple of days would be the most freedom Michel had had since before the invasion. “What will you be doing?”
“Coordinating with the interim minister of rations,” Tenik said unhappily. “And trying to convince her that it’s best for her Household to remain close friends with the minister of scrolls. I have no doubt that at least one of Sedial’s cupbearers will be attempting to convince her that a friendship with the Sedial Household would be of more benefit. Forgula might even be there.”
A woman dead by enemy hands, and the dogs just fighting over the scraps. It reminded Michel why he considered spying a more noble profession than politics. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Find je Tura. Put an end to the bombings.”
Tenik took his leave with those words, and Michel was once again alone at his little table in the hotel lobby. He glanced around at the few others in the lobby. He was the only non-Dynize in this hotel, and ever since he moved in, people openly stared at him as they walked past—something he put up with just to get out of his room. From what Tenik told him, there were all sorts of rumors floating around: that Michel was a double agent who’d been working for Yaret for years, or that he was still a spy and taking advantage of Yaret’s good nature, or even that he was half Dynize, half Palo—descended from some banished nobleman.
Michel did his best to ignore the rumors. Beyond punching Forgula in the face, he had little interest in Dynize politics. Results were what he needed.
He considered Tenik’s mention of Forgula before fetching her address book from beneath his menu and heading upstairs to his room, where he found her calendar sitting on his bed. He flipped through the calendar to today’s date. It was full of meetings and tasks without a single moment of free time. Between her old schedule and this new disruption, Michel very much doubted that she’d be returning home any time today.
There were all sorts of things Michel could do while Tenik was out of his hair, but he decided to do the most dangerous of them first.
Forgula’s personal address was in a small strip of workers’ homes in the Industrial Quarter. Unlike most of the Dynize bureaucracy, she had moved into an abandoned home in Lower Landfall, in a poorer area where many of the buildings were still occupied by their Fatrastan owners.
Michel scouted out the street for a few moments, checking for anyone who seemed particularly curious about his presence. At this time of day things were mostly quiet—a few old ladies hanging out the laundry in the street, a handful of children playing beside one of the industrial canals, but otherwise empty. The strip of homes where Forgula had chosen to live was a single building about eight homes long, each of them two stories tall, the whitewashed exteriors turned gray from the soot from nearby factories. Michel had been an informant in this part of town years ago, and he was quite familiar with this sort of block housing. It was mostly occupied by factory foremen—lower-class workers who needed to be near their work and could afford a little more space for a large family.
Michel walked up and down the street a few times before circling to the narrow alley behind the strip of houses. There was a gutter and rubbish pile back there, reeking of shit and rotten food, but there was also a raised brick walkway that accessed the barred doors of each of the houses.
The alley was abandoned, and Michel counted the back doors until he reached the address that coincided with the one written in the front of Forgula’s address book. Standing on his tiptoes, he looked through the rear window. The place certainly seemed empty. Clearing his throat, he knocked loudly, waited sixty seconds, and knocked again.
Nothing.
He looked both directions, stepped up to the iron-barred door, and slipped a set of picklocks out of his pocket.
It took him three minutes to get through the iron barred door, another four to get through the actual door beyond that. He stepped into a well-lit rear hallway, the floor creaking beneath his feet. “Forgula!” he called.
There was no answer, so Michel began his search.
He wasn’t entirely sure what he was searching for, but that had often been the case when he’d done this in the past. The house itself was rather nicely furnished; the furniture was fairly new, it had quality wallpaper, and there were small luxuries scattered through the rooms, such as books, mirrors, and nicer clothing that was definitely Fatrastan in origin. Most likely it had belonged to the mistress of a mill owner, someone who could afford the nicer things in life but wanted to stay near the factories.
Furniture askew, clothing lying out, and the occasional bit of jewelry lying discarded on a table told the story of someone who’d packed hastily to flee town. Only two rooms had been tidied: the sitting room and one of the bedrooms upstairs, and these, Michel decided, was where Forgula was living.