“That was last time. Different mission. Different parameters.”
“And this mission, beyond chatting with a dead man?”
“Under normal circumstances,” I said slowly, “I wouldn’t tell you.”
“When are the circumstances ever normal?”
“A valid point,” I conceded.
“Let me see if I can guess the rest,” he said, appraising me with that unfairly green gaze.
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“You’re Kettral, or so you claim. You’re here in Dombang because the city’s sedition seems to be rolling to a boil all over again. Annur put me in charge of the Greenshirts, loaned me a few legions to keep the peace, but something happened back in the capital, and someone there doesn’t trust me as much as they used to. So they sent you to watch me.” He raised an eyebrow. “How’s my narrative sense now?”
“Improving.” I patted him on the cheek. “We’re here to watch you. If your loyalties haven’t shifted, we stay in the shadows, let you do your work, then we clean up whatever mess you leave behind.”
“So, I’m either a traitor or an idiot.”
“I assured them you weren’t either.”
He eyed me. “And yet, here you are.”
I shrugged. “I go where I’m told.”
“Why you?”
I pursed my lips. “Maybe you are an idiot after all.”
“Fine,” he snorted. “You’re from Dombang. You know the city.…”
“… And I know you.”
He tapped absently at the handle of his belt knife. “Is that it? You’re supposed to drag me to bed, fuck the suspicion out of me, get at all my secrets?”
I frowned, put my hands on my hips. “Did we not just discuss some of the ways in which my skills extend beyond the spreading of my legs?”
Ruc ran his eyes the length of my body, but I couldn’t read his gaze. Was that a sliver of lust? Or just the steel glint of a fighter sizing up another fighter?
I tried to imagine I was Ela, a woman well versed in the ways of the world, as comfortable moving from one man to the next as she was changing her dresses. I pictured her brown eyes as she raised her wineglass, the way they brimmed with lamplight, seeming to laugh even when she didn’t move. I leaned back against the wooden wall, trying to find something like her languid pose, that way her limbs fell that whispered readiness and relaxation at the same time.
Maybe I managed it. It was impossible to tell from Ruc’s face. In truth, my palms were damp, my mouth dry.
“Of course,” I went on, reaching for Ela’s easy, throaty voice, “Kettral need to be prepared for all contingencies. I’m certain, if it becomes absolutely necessary, that I could find the willingness to bed you for the sake of our great empire.”
The line was supposed to be coy, enticing. Ruc didn’t look enticed. In fact, he looked as though he hadn’t heard me at all. Instead, he was gazing past my shoulder, down the length of the narrow room. He’d barely moved, just a small shift of his weight, a slight dropping and angling of the shoulders, but I recognized the posture at once. I’d seen it dozens of times in Sia, and each time it meant the same thing—he was about to hurt someone, probably quite badly.
*
“The woman in the gray is the Asp,” he murmured as we stepped out of the bathhouse into the hot Dombang night.
It took me a moment to find her again—a short, middle-aged woman with a pockmarked face and a slight limp. No one I would have looked at twice. She made her way slowly through the dozens of people crowding the wide bathhouse steps, moving aside for knots of revelers, bowing almost reflexively when someone jostled her, eyes downcast the entire time.
“Doesn’t look like the kind of person to name herself after a venomous snake,” I said.
“She didn’t. It’s the name we’ve been using for her.”
“Her own wasn’t exciting enough?”
Ruc shook his head grimly. “I haven’t been able to learn it.”
He started down the steps, slicing fluidly through the crowd as I followed half a step behind.
“Why are we so excited to see her?”
“Not just her,” Ruc said, “but the person she’s with.”
I squinted. Dozens of red-scale lanterns flanked the steps, but they cast shifting, inconsistent shadows as they swayed with the night breeze.
“I don’t see anyone.”
“Not there,” Ruc muttered, increasing the pace. “Down at the canal. Third boat back, the one with the black awning. The man approaching it.”
It took me a moment to find him, a tall, slender figure in a calf-length noc and black vest. He glanced over his shoulder before stepping into the vessel; I was able to catch a glimpse of a long face, high forehead, hatchet nose.
“They don’t seem to be together,” I observed.
Ruc nodded. “That’s the point. There’s a reason I haven’t been able to dig out the roots of this priesthood, even after five years.”
“So they’re priests.”
“The one in black is. The Asp works for Lady Quen, although we didn’t know that until a few months ago.”
“Is Quen a name that should have been in my briefing?”
“Depends on how good your briefing was. She’s one of the richest people in the city, an outspoken critic of Annurian policy, but so far I haven’t been able to tie her to anything that might survive a trial.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got hundreds of Greenshirts and I don’t know how many legions under your command. Who needs a trial?”
“You don’t understand Dombang,” Ruc replied. “This city’s balanced on a blade. Most of the citizens appreciate Annur—the empire’s laws, her trade, her prosperity—but the quarter that don’t could turn the place upside down in half a day. Whenever I take a person down I need proof, I need bodies, I need piles of stolen loot, and even then there’s a risk that the whole thing turns into a riot.”
“Maybe you should have stuck with the boxing after all.”
“You have no idea how often I think that.”
The man in black—the priest—had disappeared beneath the boat’s canopy. The Asp paused at one of the stalls lining the bottom of the bathhouse steps, spent a few copper flames on a leaf filled with crushed ice and honey, then crossed to the edge of the canal where she picked at the dessert with a bamboo spoon while looking out over the water.
“If they’re trying to keep secret,” I asked, “what are they doing meeting here, in the largest bathhouse in Dombang?”
“It’s harder to keep track of them that way. We watch Lady Quen’s mansion day and night, but she knows that. She’d gut any priest who came within a hundred paces of her doors or docks. So they do it this way: surrogates, discreet signs, public places. Could be here, any of the markets, the harbors, the taverns. Different priests have different circuits. It’s always changing.”
“What is the it?” I asked, although a sick dread churning in my stomach suggested I already knew.