Chapter 51: The Merchant of Death
I MUST LINGER A moment on Forum as we sailed away. Our course charted, for once I slept, unwilling to endure the sense of mingled anticipation and hope. For the first time in decades, I felt joy’s warm light fill my chest and stretch my heart wide. I had left Delos to join the scholiasts. I was sailing to an athenaeum at last. Not to meager Teukros, but to the Imperial Library on Colchis itself. To Nov Belgaer, in whose dusty halls I sit even now and record this account.
But as I say, I linger and recount a tale heard from men I dare not name.
Three years after the Tamerlane’s departure, three years after the assassin’s sword could not cut the Halfmortal down in the Colosseum, Lord Augustin Bourbon clambered aboard his shuttle for a ferry ride from the Sun King’s Hall to the palatial apartments kept by House Bourbon in the Eternal City. He was alone but for his guards, and seated himself on his couch in the rear carriage amidst azure hangings and gold leaf to await takeoff. There he waited.
And waited.
In time, the Minister of War grew impatient. “Pilot!” he called in his bass rumble. “Pilot!”
No answer came.
The large minister rose, groaning I do not doubt, and pressed through the hangings to the cockpit where—so my nameless men tell me—he found his pilot. Dead as my own had been. Blood for blood. The great lord cried aloud, tapped his terminal to summon his guards, but no guards came. No signal went out. The jamming device affixed to the ventral hull of the shuttle saw to that. Returning to the rear compartment, Lord Augustin tried the hatch, but the ramp would not deploy, and the door was shut. The Minister of War pounded against the bulkhead, slapped the door with his soft, damp hands. No one answered him.
No one came.
The nameless men tell me he panicked, just as they knew he would. The War Minister tore the cushions from the benches in a frenzied effort to locate the missing emergency kit.
That was how he found it, precisely as it looked when he’d given it to Irshan three years before, mere days before my fateful hour in the arena.
A highmatter sword. The very sword that had failed to cut me down. The very sword I had clutched in my bleeding hands as I staggered from the Colosseum. The very sword I had given to Crim after Valka had visited me in medica, after I reassured myself that Siran was alive. It was no Jaddian weapon, though what hubris had possessed Augustin to arm his assassin with his own blade I will never know. Perhaps he too had been only a pawn in the Empress’s scheme to rid her daughter of me. Perhaps his hatred of me ran so deep. Perhaps he thought himself above reprisal—scion of so ancient a house as he was.
“I want you to kill a man,” I’d said to Crim. “Make the arrangements for it after we’re gone.”
The Lord Minister tried to use the sword to cut his way out. He squeezed the trigger, squeezed it again. No good.
I’d had the weapon’s highmatter core removed.
No one ever learned who did it. Who planted the bomb on the landing pad. Some blamed the Extrasolarians. Still others blamed the Mandari, angry over some unfair arms contract. There were whispers of a feud between Bourbon and Habsburg, but nothing ever came of it. There was no one to bury, nothing for the canopic jars. Prince Charles Bourbon mourned his cousin and in time another man was named to the War Ministry.
No one blamed Lord Hadrian Marlowe.