Retribution (Drakenfeld 2) (35 page)

Lydia Marinus may well have been one of the richest people in Koton, but unlike someone in Detrata she didn’t flaunt it.

‘It seems a large house for someone who doesn’t spend much time in the city,’ I commented to the guard.

‘Her country place is much bigger,’ he muttered. ‘This was small to her.’

‘But still, there’s a lot of unused space here.’

‘It wasn’t just a house, like.’ An uneasiness grew about his manner and he started shifting his weight from foot to foot, glancing at the floor.

‘Tell me more,’ I demanded.

‘Now and then she’d bring poor children in for classes. Even owned one of the orphanages. Gave a lot of money to help out. Not just the poor, but those kids who might otherwise find themselves picking pockets in the marketplaces. She wanted to reform them. Give them an opportunity in life. Use her money for good. It ain’t common knowledge and that’s the way she wanted it.’

‘Why keep a nice thing quiet?’

‘She said it would make her look soft to the men she dealt with. Said they were all former military types who loved posturing. Said they’d use the knowledge against her. Make her weak in business deals, like.’

‘Understandable . . . Where would the children stay?’

‘There’s a dormitory on the other side of the garden, and a large room where they’d take their lessons. She’d pay for one of the speakers from the nice schools to come here and talk history or rhetoric, though she was hardly here to see it all. Like to think I learned a bit while I was on duty, heh.’

Sulma Tan wore a puzzled expression.

‘Is something the matter?’ I asked.

‘There was no declaration of this in the records,’ she said. ‘This is one of the biggest buildings in the city and it is registered as a dwelling not a school.’

‘She didn’t want folk to know,’ the guard stressed once again. ‘Though I never got to speak with her privately, since she was a bit of a recluse, from talking with the other guards who’ve heard her, they say she felt guilty about her good fortune in life and wanted to help others. Maybe she felt guilty about her own family, I dunno. But she didn’t want folk knowing about it, certainly not any competitors. They’d say it was a weakness of character, something like that. I’m not the sort who gets involved in business.’

‘How long had the house been used this way?’ Sulma Tan asked.

The man shrugged. ‘At least as long as I’ve been here, and that’s six summers. That wasn’t all she did. She would go out into the city in disguise, giving alms to the poor. Used to have us guards shadow her from a distance to make sure she came to no harm.’

Yet again the murder victim was someone who did good work for the community of Koton, though this time it was someone whose kind acts were done in private. A private act for a private woman. Just how much did she keep to herself?

‘Were there ever any gatherings here apart from that?’ I asked. ‘Celebrations, business meetings, that sort of thing.’

The guard smiled dryly. ‘Never. You hear of some guards elsewhere getting lucky at things like parties. Lady of good standing wants someone a bit rough when their husband is out of the city. Sometimes they get with someone like me at a gathering.’ His face soured a little and he smiled grimly. ‘Not a chance here, though. No one ever came to visit. No fine ladies. Most of our time was spent staring at the herbs or listening to the sound of children’s voices echoing along the corridors.’

‘That’s not a bad way of passing time,’ I said. ‘Did you ever have any trouble here while you were on duty? Thieves looking to take some trinket in the middle of the night? Strange people loitering in the gardens?’

He shook his head. ‘What trinkets? You’ve seen the place. There’s not much to steal unless you know what you’re looking for, and thieves are rarely that discerning. Nah, we never had any trouble. The walls are high enough to stop most people from getting into the gardens anyway. This was a quiet patch and I liked it that way. A lot of private guards get rough deals, but I suppose this was a good job all right.’

I turned to Sulma Tan. ‘How common is private protection in Koton?’

‘Very,’ she replied. ‘There is a thriving industry for those who used to be in the military. We ask our soldiers to commit to ten years before they are free to do as they please – a tradition of sorts. It is not a national service, however. Without wars, there are many soldiers who get to the end of that decade as trained warriors and are looking for work. There’s enough money from trade to pay for such luxuries, too.’

‘And people like Lydia Marinus would be happy to oblige.’

Contemplating the limited findings so far, I tried to build a coherent picture of the person who perpetrated these crimes. Yet
another
member of the highest level of Kotonese society had been murdered. Whoever had perpetrated these crimes had a good working knowledge of the movement of the victims in high social circles. In the case of Lydia, they knew how to get her into the city when she did not often spend time here.

Grendor and Lydia were close to the queen. Had they been conspiring in a plot? Sulma Tan had already shown some attempts at influence by Lydia over the census. I put that question to her.

‘It is . . . certainly possible. Though I confess, I do not know of any such plots. They were on good terms with the queen, so why would they seek to remove her?’

‘Other clans or family leaders might have put them up to it.’

‘Lydia is too wealthy to have her favours bought.’

‘She might have sought the crown herself. The woman had everything but that.’

Her expression, once again, gave nothing away. If the queen had been killing off rivals, it was unlikely that Sulma Tan would accompany me on the case – unless it was to ensure I knew too little.

‘It is just as likely,’ Sulma Tan speculated, ‘that Detratan spies might have put Lydia and Grendor up to corrupting the throne somehow. But you might know more about that than I do.’

‘Let us leave a coup as a potential theory, but one with little evidence.’

Nothing about this sat right in my mind. What’s more, the lack of clear purpose or motive behind the killings was becoming increasingly frustrating – not that I would ever show this to Sulma Tan.

‘One object, at the moment, connects at least two of the victims. So would it perhaps connect the third?’

‘Evum,’ Sulma Tan confirmed.

‘Lydia Marinus could possess evum at any of her properties, if it is not upon her body. We must organize a systematic search to find out.’

A clamour came from somewhere outside – the sound of hooves on cobbles, soon followed by voices calling through the long corridors.

‘That’ll be the others.’ The guard hastily led us back the way we had come.

Presently we were confronted by seven men, each one wearing a similar leather breastplate with a scaled leaf pattern, and a long green cloak. They were of mixed ages, but a thickset man in his late forties, with a few scars on his face and two-day-long stubble, came forward demanding to know who we were.

Sulma Tan stopped him in his tracks and revealed her title, before introducing me as the man investigating the murder of Lydia Marinus.

He grimaced and looked towards the wall of the corridor. There was a sudden sense of shame about the men and they couldn’t seem to look anywhere but their own feet. One of them made a circular movement around his chest, and then reversed the direction of his hand – a gesture I believe was associated with the two gods Astran and Nastra.

‘And,’ Sulma Tan finished, ‘we will require a full account of Lydia’s final movements. You should have been protecting her, should you not?’

‘Yeah,’ he sighed loudly. There was nothing but abject failure in his expression. He had failed to protect his mistress. He had failed at his one duty, and he knew it. ‘Yeah, we should have done better. We should have. But we weren’t to know she was heading off, were we? She never goes anywhere without us. Never.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Santhan Brak, formerly Captain of the Horse Guards.’

‘How long have you worked for Lydia?’

‘Nine years, head of her personal protection for the past two.’

‘Tell us what happened then, Santhan.’

‘A messenger came bearing a tube from the city,’ he began in a measured and precise manner. ‘Actually, he had three messages. Nothing new there, of course, it happens all the time. Lady Marinus is –
was
– a busy lady, and she would often be sending letters to various people about business details. This time there was a different message. Don’t know what was in it, but it was different. I remember the occasion very distinctly – as sometimes I’m permitted in her private quarters. When she read the letter, this look came over her face . . .’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘She turned white. Had a distant look. For a moment I thought someone in her family had died, but then I realized that she’s got no one left, so it couldn’t have been. Then I thought maybe a business failure, one of the mines had collapsed or something, but it wasn’t that.’

‘So what was it?’

‘She didn’t tell me. Didn’t tell anyone. When I asked she merely rolled up the message and put it up her sleeve. She maintained a sense of dignity though – made out that there was nothing amiss. Did a lot of that. Hid her feelings.’ Santhan paused for a moment, searching for the right thing to tell me. ‘You know, I served her for all those years and got to see her more than anyone else. There was no family, of course. Despite that, despite my familiarity, sometimes I felt as if I barely knew her.’

There was no reason to dispute what he was saying. ‘But you have no idea what that message could have been, or where it came from?’

‘Well, it came from the city. You see the messenger brought it in a bundle and said he’d come directly from Kuvash.’

‘The messenger has gone?’

‘Oh yeah, long left. Headed up along the coast with more deliveries to make – chap like that could be gone for days before he returns, not that I’d got his name at the time – they only show their medal of identification.’

‘Did he look like the other messengers? There was nothing unusual about him?’

‘Seemed fairly standard to me.’

‘There’s a good chance Lydia might have brought the message back with her to the city,’ I muttered to Sulma Tan.

As if reading my thoughts she replied, ‘There wasn’t a note found on her body or anywhere nearby. There were no private possessions at all, come to think of it, merely the clothes that covered her wounds.’

That was frustrating, but at least the fact of the message’s existence and its origins confirmed to me that the killers were still operating in Kuvash. They had not fled. That led to the speculation of how many more people would end up being killed before we found the persons responsible.

‘Precisely when was the last time you saw Lydia?’

‘Lady Marinus?’ Santhan puffed up his cheeks and let out a long sigh. His fellow soldiers remained rigid by his side. ‘Two days ago,’ he said at last. ‘In the morning.’

‘It took you this long to get here,’ Sulma Tan commented. ‘And you were her
protection
?’

Santhan shot her an angry glare and snapped, ‘I’ll not take comments on soldiering from a woman, especially one who sits behind a desk all day.’

Sulma Tan curled up her lips and leant into him, uttering the words quietly. ‘
This
woman would have placed a report on your performance into the hands of the queen.
That
woman would, if she thought it appropriate, have you and your men executed for betraying a good friend, or whatever reason took her fancy. So keep your tongue firmly in your head, before you lose the latter.’

Though his expression was full of anger, Santhan lowered his head. ‘Aye, lady. I forget my station.’

Sulma Tan remained impassive and for a moment nobody spoke, as if waiting for the tension to drift out of the open doors.

It struck me how Sulma Tan did not get visibly angry about such things – but spoke in a cool, if somewhat vicious manner in reply. But there was the slip of the tongue:
whatever reason took her fancy
could get a person executed. It reaffirmed the suspicion I had had since I’d arrived in Koton. That the queen possibly ruled in some royal dictatorship, without any real assistance from a council or senate, without any accountability to her people. If there was a political coup in the making, it was easy to see where the motivation lay. Royals were meant to rule along with democratically elected officials in exchange for the benefits of trade from being in the Vispasian Royal Union. It was a two-hundred-year-old agreement that did not appear to be fulfilled. I would remember to mention this in a report to the Sun Chamber later on. And, in the event that some of my messages were being read, I would write that information in code.

‘It was two mornings ago,’ I said, bringing the conversation back on track. ‘How did she leave you if she normally has you by her side all the time?’

‘She asked me to bring our horses around the front and to wait for her in the dining room, before she headed to her private baths. That is the one moment of the day where she remains alone. She has no bath attendants, nothing like that. I think she liked the privacy – it was just her and the water.’