“Is this Thornscar again? I though you said he would still be incapacitated.”
“I very much doubt it is Thornscar, but our enemy has many resources.”
“And we don’t?”
Kantelvar ignored that barb. “I had my men search every room in every building along the parade route. I can only surmise the assassin moved the mirror into the room after it was searched, possibly as recently as this morning. He then entered and departed the building by way of the mirror, leaving no trace of himself behind.”
Isabelle forced her anger and disappointment back into its cage. Let it snarl in the background, but she had to think. “That’s not entirely true. He left a bullet. It embedded itself in the back of the coach, and I recovered it.”
There was a muddy gurgle from the hump under Kantelvar’s cloak, and his bent back stiffened in surprise. “What did you do with it? Do you still have it?” His voice was rough, eager.
“It’s in my coin purse. Darcy.” She gestured to her junior handmaiden, who fetched the purse and handed it to Kantelvar.
Kantelvar accepted the pouch with his mechanical hand. He considered the silken purse for a moment, as if it were a puzzle box, then turned and shuffled to a small table flanking the doors and began worrying the strings. “My apologies, Highness, but my fingers are not as clever as they once were.”
Isabelle nodded to him to go ahead; every day, she strove to prevent people’s noticing how one-handed she was.
Kantelvar rummaged through the purse and then upended it. A few coins buzzed as they spun on the table. “There is no bullet here.”
Isabelle stiffened. “What? Oh damn, it was an espejismo. It must have faded, like Jean-Claude’s hat.” Alas, the wound it caused was not so ephemeral. Still, the timing was strange. “But Jean-Claude said his hat disappeared immediately after falling off his head, while this bullet was embedded in the wood for much longer, a quarter of an hour at least.”
“Metal lasts longer than cloth does, and an object to which significant emotion is attached will last longer than an object taken for granted. If this assassin is driven by hate, he may have spent weeks obsessing about that bullet, imagining the path it would tear through flesh, imbuing it with his obsession. I doubt your musketeer was so attached to his hat.”
Isabelle subsided into frustration. Up until now, the horrors of her life had been known and familiar. They had been dread certainties of abuse and humiliation, killing her slowly. Survival had been a matter of coping with what she could not hope to combat. These attacks were different, knife-quick flashes of terror and chaos, here and gone, leaving blood in their wake before she could even grapple with them. She needed some way to slow them down. She pressed her wrists to her eyes and forced herself to think.
She said, “I think the killer may have been working for the Temple.”
An angry boiling noise came from Kantelvar’s hump and his posture stiffened. “What? What makes you think that?”
“An accurate musket that could punch through alchemetal and ironwood. A bullet made of hard metal with strange grooves. That was a quondam device, and the Temple takes a dim view of anyone but itself having possession of the Builder’s gifts.” She gave a pointed look to Kantelvar’s artificial limbs. “Also, there were three sagaxes down at the harbor who spoke of rising up against me … and you.”
Kantelvar’s tension subsided and his voice came out a metallic monotone. “I know those three. They are partisans of Príncipe Alejandro, probably sent down by his wife, Xaviera, as something of a clumsy snub. No one would employ them as conspirators, though. As you noticed, they tend to leak—the tongues of warriors and the spines of jelly-floaters, though I suppose they might be useful for disseminating misinformation.”
“They claimed that you are obsessed with the Reckoning and the coming of the Savior.”
Kantelvar stilled into one of his thoughtful silences, then rapped his staff on the ground and said, “The Temple’s whole business is preparation for the end of these degenerate times. We are instructed not to wait for the Savior, but to prepare the way. Any cleric of any rank who is not working toward that end has failed his most fundamental duty.”
There was little in theology of interest to Isabelle so she turned back to the subject at hand. “Then how do you explain the musket? It could not have been an ordinary weapon.”
“The Temple certainly has the only legitimate collection of quondam devices, but not all collections are legitimate. Greedy, stupid men seek to circumvent the Builder’s law and usurp His power as Iav of old did. This is especially true in Aragoth, where many Temple warehouses were raided and many artifacts stolen during the Skaladin occupation. Xaviera’s father had a large collection of quondam relics that he seized from the invaders. He handed a great deal of it over to the Temple, and such was the nature of the time that no questions were asked concerning any pieces he might have kept for himself. He was, after all, defending the border from a heathen horde.”
Isabelle stilled her expression. That was twice in less than a minute Kantelvar had tried to direct her suspicions at Xaviera from two entirely different angles. As someone raised by Jean-Claude, Isabelle’s first thought was, I should talk to her.
The outer door opened and Olivia bustled in, her face flushed with as much excitement and alarm as if there had just been another assassination—with at least one person dead it hardly seemed fitting to think of it as just an attempt—and curtsied before Isabelle.
Isabelle gestured for her to speak, and Olivia said breathlessly, “Your Highness, His Imperial Majesty Leon XIV, le Roi de Tonnerre, arrives via his emissary.”
Isabelle was nonplussed. Over the past few weeks, she had been so caught up researching particulars of the Aragothic court that she had mostly failed to consider the Célestial presence in San Augustus. But of course Grand Leon kept an embassy here, complete with a full diplomatic staff—the ambassador’s name was Hugo du Blain, though she knew nothing else about him—and an emissary, a bloodhollow le roi maintained in San Augustus for those occasions when he needed to project his presence here in person.
Her breathing came too quick and her head felt light. She’d never been given to fits of the vapors, but this was Grand Leon. His word was more like a divine proclamation than mere law. By an act of the Builder’s grace he had given her birth his blessing and bestowed on her Jean-Claude’s protection.