Yaret didn’t answer him. Somewhere in the bank, Michel thought he heard a scream. He tried to ignore it. He was completely certain of this conspiracy now. It made too much sense, and it was clear from Yaret’s body language that he wouldn’t be hard to convince. Not with the evidence Michel had just put in front of him.
Yaret meditated in silence for several minutes, his eyes half-lidded in thought while his lieutenants avoided Michel’s gaze. When the quiet had almost become unbearable, the door opened and Tenik returned just as suddenly as he left. He held a leather pocketbook—Forgula’s—in one hand. He plucked the bloodstained address list off the table and compared the two, then nodded. “The handwriting is a match.”
“And Marhoush?” Yaret asked.
“He’s changed his story.”
Michel perked up at this. “Marhoush is here?”
“You can tell him,” Yaret said to Tenik.
Tenik nodded, then turned to Michel. “We brought Marhoush in the evening after the bombing and handed him over to our own Household questioners. His story has corroborated the story Forgula told us—that you are still a loyal Blackhat, spying on the Dynize—but I just went to him with the story you told us and he broke down. He said that Forgula has been funneling the Blackhats supplies in exchange for conducting bombings at the addresses and dates she gave him. He even told me where to find a copy of that list you brought us.”
Michel allowed himself to close his eyes and let out a sigh of relief. When he looked up, Yaret was smiling at him thoughtfully. “I’m glad you’re still one of us,” Yaret said.
Michel swallowed his guilt, pushing his real self deeper into the back of his head. “I’m glad I had evidence that Forgula is a lying sack of shit. What do we do now? Is this enough evidence to accuse Sedial?”
“I think it is,” Yaret replied.
Tenik raised his eyebrows. “That will be dangerous.”
“Dangerous or not,” Yaret said with a shake of his head, “Sedial must be brought to heel.”
Michel was hit with a sudden sense of foreboding. “Perhaps Tenik is right,” he said.
“In what way?”
“That it’s damned dangerous. Too dangerous. Sedial is the emperor’s man, right? And he commands the armies and the Privileged? If we go after him openly—if we force him into the light—he may just crush us underfoot. It would be his only option.”
“He tried to kill me,” Yaret said quietly. “He tried to kill my Household. I will not let this stand.”
“We won’t,” Michel assured him. “But I think I know of a way we can punish him without forcing a more deadly confrontation.”
“I’m listening.”
Michel took a deep breath. This idea would lessen the ugliness, but it would also make Michel another very powerful enemy. “When is the next public event where both Sedial and Forgula will be present?”
CHAPTER 42
Vlora did as she’d promised Taniel and changed hotels. She rushed a new order of clothes from a local tailor and changed her look, and generally kept her head down so that she could gamble her week on the only real chance she felt she had to find the stones: reconnoitering Nighttime Vale.
Flerring’s description had been spot-on. The Vale was approached by a steep hill on the northern edge of town and entered through a narrow valley between two great pillars of stone. Because the Vale was entirely the property of Jezzy’s Shovel gang, the valley was closed to outsiders and guarded by eight armed men at all times.
Vlora watched them for two days and nights, attempting to find some kind of chink in their routine that would let her slip into the Vale and back out again without being noticed. She grew more and more frustrated at the situation—the approach was out in the open, the guards were rotated in shifts without a gap, and every wagon that entered and left the Vale was guarded to and from the destination. According to a few old prospectors she asked, climbing around the other side of the Vale would take her four or five days.
She began to wonder if maybe Jezzy was in on the recovery of the stone—or if it was just that gold mines were more thoroughly guarded than some military armories. Bad luck either way.
On the third day she picked up a copy of the Yellow Creek Caller to find a surprising bit of information on the front page. The headline read MERCENARY ARMY MARCHES ON YELLOW CREEK. Below was a snappy story on the Riflejacks that said they were spotted in the region marching toward Yellow Creek. She returned to the newsie boy who’d sold her the paper and pointed at the headline. “Is this from this morning?”
“Yes, ma’am. Fresh information.”
“Do you know anything else about this?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Vlora fished a coin from her pocket and flicked it off her thumb. The boy caught it, looked over his shoulder, and took two steps closer. He spoke in a conspiratorial tone.
“Rumor has it the big bosses are frantic with worry. Each of them thinks the other hired a whole mercenary army to take their gold, and both of them are denying it. I heard that it was Jezzy who hired them. Supposedly the army’s led by that Flint lady—you know, the one that the Lady Chancellor has put a bounty on?”
“I’ve heard of her,” Vlora said cautiously.
“Well, everyone is arming up to protect their claims. The big bosses are forcing a production increase and offering huge amounts to anyone who carries a weapon. The guards are doubling. The mayor wants to close all the roads, but Jezzy and Brown Bear Burt want to keep them open to get their gold out. They say it’s chaos in the mayor’s office, and no one knows what to do.”
Vlora left the newsie with an extra coin and strode off swearing under her breath. This was exactly why she’d come ahead of the army—exactly why she’d given herself an extra couple of weeks to try to find the stone before they were forced to bring in a few thousand soldiers and dig it up with violence. She originally thought that the town’s defenses would be little more than an inconvenience, but now she wasn’t so sure. Roadblocks in the harsh terrain could keep the Riflejacks from approaching the city for days or weeks, and when they finally arrived, they would have to deal with street-to-street fighting with people who thought they were there to steal the gold.
Vlora headed to the main street and checked in with the messenger service that she’d used to try to find Olem. The man behind the desk recognized her immediately and went to a locked box in the corner of the room, returning a moment later with a letter.
“It came yesterday,” the clerk said apologetically. “We checked with your hotel, but they said you had left and not given them a forwarding address.”
Vlora tipped the man and took the letter to the corner. She recognized Olem’s writing immediately.
Progress has been slow. Took a circuitous route to approach from the east. News from Landfall. We are five days out. I fear word has gone ahead of us. Expect panic. We will hold at six miles and wait for orders.
“A little damned late,” she said, lighting the edge of the letter with a match and letting it burn down to her fingertips. She did some quick mental math and decided that they were probably getting close to that six miles. Making camp six miles out could be good, though—it would give the city residents longer to worry about why they were here and who had hired them, which in turn would give Vlora more time to find the stone.
If the Picks and Shovels began fighting among themselves, the Riflejacks might have an easier time of mopping things up.
But none of this, she decided, was ideal.
CHAPTER 43
Michel sat in the hallway outside of the war game arena in the capitol building, listening as the cheering came to a great crescendo before tapering off into the general cacophony of loud conversation that he normally associated with the period at the end of a boxing match. He wondered briefly who won, before reminding himself that he didn’t know who either of the players were, or most of the rules of the game.
Maybe if he stuck around here long enough, he would learn how to play.