Lady DeHany stepped out onto the hovercar platform at 4:58 a.m., just as the first lights of dawn touched the top of her Tower. James, her chauffer, handed her graciously into the hovercar, smiling into her spectacle-shaded eyes. She nodded at him regally, looking more tired than usual, and settled into her seat in her accustomed position, black-gloved hands gently clasped in her lap.
“Where to, ma’am?” he asked.
“Old City.”
Another man might have questioned why a lady of Casidea DeHany’s standing would be going to Old City when it was just barely morning, but those closest to her had either learned the answers long ago, or learned to stop asking question. James was of the later variety. He dropped the car down through the light traffic and began working his way to where the roads constricted. He was a happy many, and what the Lady wanted, the Lady was perfectly capable of handling herself.
Conor Doversigh had only barely fallen asleep at 6:08 a.m. when someone tried to break down his door and woke him. Still half a sleep and less than half clothed he rolled off the couch, grabbed the foot-long knife by the side on the way up and barreled toward the door. He opened it without warning, caught the enemy disturbing his sleep in a chokehold and brought the knife to within an inch of the intruder’s eye.
He recognized James the chauffer about five seconds after he had reached this position. If the younger man had even noticed the negative reaction, it hadn’t slowed his panicked babbling. The semi-incoherent explanations continued unabated while Conor stared into the other man’s face with tired, expressionless green eyes.
Conor had never functioned well immediately after waking, especially not when he had only received two and half hours of sleep and had put in a hard day of running the city behind the scenes the day before. But at the same time, he knew James, and the chauffer was reliable, and if he was bothering Conor before noon, without an appointment, this was hardly going to be a social call.
Conor kicked the door closed and slammed the chauffer into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him. In the temporary silence, he tried to phrase the question as civilly as he could with his limited, early-morning patience. He kept the knife poised at the other man’s throat. “What the hell are you doing here?”
James dragged in a breath. “The Lady,” he said. “Assassination attempt.”
Conor dropped him and turned back to the couch. “You brought the car?” he asked, pulling on the first pair of pants he saw, rooting in the couch cushions for a shirt that wasn’t too battered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is she?”
“Back at the Towers.”
Not James’s fault that he couldn’t read the other man’s mind, couldn’t provide him with the information that he needed to deal with this kind of mess. Conor found a shirt with a hole. He remembered planning to repair it. He pushed one hand through the hole and ripped the shirt into two neat halves, which he continued to divide. “What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. We were in Old City, and I was helping her out of the car, and the next thing I know this bastard screaming about the glory of God is pushing me aside, and he’s bringing this weapon over on her and I tackled him but she kind of shrieked and—“
“I assume you called the CityPolice.”
“No. I—”
Conor found a shirt that would do. He had a spare suit at the Towers, usually for times when he was on the front lines getting damaged. He could change there before meeting with the very important people that would either be gleeful or panicked about an assassination attempt on the Lady. “Just get me to the Towers as fast as possible.”
James saluted, and Conor followed him to the hovercar landing in his building. He kept the words assassination attempt fixed in his mind. People survived attempts.
And then he had to latch his seatbelt quickly because James hardly waited a beat before taking off with the car and falling into traffic.
Conor entered the sick room and stopped six feet from the bed. The Lady looked paler and thinner than he had ever seen her, eyes closed, hair a grey and brown wave of frizz curling down her shoulders. It looked like the servants had tried to take her usual bun out, and panicked half way through. He would have a word with them.
Then she opened her eyes, and he could forget anything else. One eye was blue sapphire, and one was green as emeralds, and, even glazed with pain, they burned like twin torches in the dark room. She licked her lips. “Took you long enough.”
Conor tugged on his neat grey suit. After the doctor assured him she was unconscious, he’d briefed the CityPolice commander, ensured the magical wards on the tower were operating at peak efficiency, notified all the Knights in key positions of what had happened to their First Knight, and grilled James about the exact events of the morning. He’d downed a cup of coffee, shredded the Lady’s bodyguard, who had not been with her that morning (more for form’s sake than because he believed the man was truly at fault), and made a call so that someone else would be managing the Lady’s accounts for the foreseeable future while he tried to manage fraction her normal activities. And all the time he had tried very hard not to consider which of the senior Knights would be the new First Knight if the Lady didn’t come out of her unconsciousness. As Conor was downing a second cup of coffee, just to have something there to burn, the doctor had come to tell him that the Lady wanted visitors. And Conor had come, like a dog to his master.
He smiled, a tightlipped, casual smile, making sure she couldn’t see his left hand, which wouldn’t stop clenching, no matter how hard he thought about it. “They told me it missed the lung, so I figured it was nothing to worry about.”
She laughed. It sounded more like a cough. “Why did you even come at all?”
“Well, I realized, you do pay my salary.” He took a couple steps forward. “And thus, I reluctantly left my bed to be at your side. They’re going to start rumors about us again.”
“Rumors that you rape old women with knives sticking out of their guts.”
“Nonsense. I’m sure everyone thinks you’re dead by now.”
She snorted. “Necrophiliac. That will certainly enhance your reputation. Demonian, genius, gold-digger, killer, corpse-kisser. What will you try next?”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” he assured her. He sat carefully on the edge of the bed, not looking at her. “What happened?”
“I’m sure they told you.”
“If I have a choice between you, pain-hazed and drugged to gills though you are, and James in a panic, I am forced to chose you if I want any kind of coherency at all. He told me at least three different versions, each more interesting than the last, provided you wish to write a dramatic play. And if you could hurry it up, that would be marvelous. I have a few small chores to do today. I thought I’d clean the apartment. Dad hasn’t been by for weeks, and I haven’t had any reason to put away my shirts.”
The Lady took a deep breath. It obviously hurt. “We stopped at Old City, because I had to have word with Williams about the most recent information-flow problem. Or rather, about the lack of information flowing out of Old City into my records. I’m getting better information about it from you than from him, and he’s the commander there.”
“I live there.”
“So does Williams, hypothetically. We stopped at the Golden Gander. James left the hovercar in park and came out to hand me down.”
“No bodyguards?”
She gave him a look. Message received, he nodded. She was going to make a stop after Williams’ place where the bodyguards shouldn’t go. “Why didn’t you take me?”
“Conor, when was the last time you slept?”
“I had two and a half hours just this morning.”
“And before that?”
He tilted his head up and thought. To be honest the last couple days had been blurring together. “I got at least two the night before.”
“And before that?”
“You should have warned me if there was going to be a quiz. I would have taken better notes.”
“You haven’t been in the Academy for years. You were running on nothing. And you’re not supposed to be seen down there anyway. I will not have you slipping up and cracking open what I have spent my life building.”
He let that pass. She still should have taken him. “What happened after he handed you down?”
“The man with the knife knocked him aside and began screaming ‘Whore against the Way of Grace’ ‘God damns you to hell’ ‘the end is falling upon us like the Shield!’ Things like that.”
Conor was very still. “I was hoping James made that part up. He was Way of Grace, then?”
She coughed and the movements shook her entire body with the pain. He moved closer, held her up, felt her thin frame against his shoulders. She never felt that tiny. As the shaking subsided, she rested a hand on his arm. “Do you really think that I would send you against your own people?”
He smiled down at her without showing any teeth. “My people are smart enough to stay the hell away from assassination attempts. Or do them right.”
“You know what I mean.”
“The Knights have purged the Wayfarer communities before. The Knights under your control have slaughtered hundreds of Wayfarers before I started working for you. Dozens die every week because of this same old issue, and honestly, if I had just gotten stabbed, I might go around killing a few Knights, just to prove to them that I noticed. And as your right hand, what you do, so do I. So, yes, my Lady, I do believe that you would send me against my own people, if only by giving me the orders for Williams and Kavlar and Lord Merchance to go out and slaughter those who attacked you.”
She leaned back. “You read everything I give you. It would be stupid to give you the orders. But don’t fret; he wasn’t Way of Grace, just trying to sound like one. Though I have no idea where he learned the phrases he used. They were the stupidest things I’ve heard in my life. I’ve never met a Wayfarer who went around shouting such inanities.”
“I’m sure the Catfain do it sometimes,” Conor said.
“What about you, do you ever have an overwhelming urge to shout, ‘the end of the world is coming? The Lord damns you to hell!’?”
“I don’t make those decisions. But if the opportunity comes up, I know exactly who to say it to.”
She smiled, but it glided away just as quickly as it came. She closed her luminous eyes. “The bastard was a professional, paid to make it look messy. Did they catch him?”
“Not yet. Do you have a description I can give them? James has been fluctuating between tall, thin, blond, brunette, bald and bulky, so I wasn’t exactly sure. I have Keith the Magician working on a tracking spell using your blood, but if your attacker was a professional, he won’t have anything that could have been contaminated still on his person.”
“Grey eyes. He’d never met me. I didn’t know him. Empire, so the darker skin. Dark hair. Built like your father, muscled but not heavy or tall. Human or mild demonian. Waterworks work clothes, but that doesn’t really matter, he’d have dumped those.”
“I’ll get them searching anyway. Where he dumped the stuff might tell us how he operates. And I’ll get your non-Knight contacts working on this as well.”
She opened one eye. “Conor, don’t you dare.”
He grinned. “Okay, I’ll get my non-Knight contacts working on this. But don’t you think that the Harlequin would be interested in knowing who’s put Lady Casidea DeHany in bed and off the negotiating table for a while?”
“The Harlequin would toast my death, but I don’t particularly think she would care who handed it to me. Leave it alone, Conor.” The Lady stopped and struggled for breath.
Conor watched her for a moment, and then brought up the big issue. “We have another problem, you know. The Council meeting is tonight.”
“Proxy for me.”
He rubbed his face, scraping his fingernails over the smooth, hard scales that speckled his cheeks. “They’re not going to like that. Are you sure you don’t want to give it to Kavlar?”
“Kavlar is a good man, but he has no idea what is going on, and I have no intention of telling him. You’re my proxy, not my replacement. They’ll deal with that or they’ll deal with me. It’s about time I scared the hell out of those old bastards.”
“I’m sure you’ll scare them enough when you rise from your deathbed with fire in your eyes.”
She laughed again, a weak cackling croak, and then choked on it. Her breaths came more desperately, until she had fought down the pain. Eyes still closed, she gestured him closer with small movements of her hands.
Conor scooted forward on the huge bed.
Her bony hand clenched around his left fist and she opened flashed open her eyes wide as they would go, two lamps blinding him. “You were worried,” she said.
He twisted his hand around hers. “Never.”
“Liar.”
“Almost always, when I’m not going to be caught.”
She struggled to maintain focus. “I don’t know who would be sending assassins at this point. There are no great votes coming up, I haven’t been corrupting their youth, lately. There are no youth worth corrupting. And the commoners . . . It’s just so Shielding sudden.” She flared her eyes open again and the jewel-tones caught the light. They almost looked like two bright, polished stones where her eyes should be. “I’ve lost track of my enemies, Conor, I can’t even guess anymore. I’m worried. Every time I breath, and it stops, I think that maybe that knife went deeper than the doctor thinks and this is it, and the plans aren’t laid, and there are no backups. It all falls apart without me, doesn’t it, Conor? It’ll collapse, and they’ll never know why.”
“But you’re not gone, and you will live to shake them in their beds and have the city once more at your feet.”
She laughed, and it hurt him to hear the sound. “I can’t even count my enemies, Conor. And I feel old.”
He leaned so close a stranger would think he planned to kiss her like a lover. “The number of your enemies is less only than the number of enemies you have destroyed. Don’t count what is gone tomorrow.” He stood and adjusted his suit. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Lady, I have some things to deal with before I attend the Council this evening.”
He bowed slightly, and then strode toward the door.
Her voice, with a hint of the old steel in it, stopped him at the threshold. “Conor. Don’t try to cheer me up. You’re only supposed to give me bad news.”
Conor turned and grinned at her. The expression dropped five years from his face. “A few hour so of sleep, and I could probably whip up a riot or something. Nothing special. Would that do, Casidea?”
She sniffed. “I could probably settle for a riot.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“And send that doctor in after you. I think that these drugs aren’t working any more.”
“You’ll not want me to vote for stricter drug controls then?”
“Get out!”
Conor slipped out the door and closed it quietly. And then he sagged against the wall and to the floor, head resting, knees bent. She looked like death warmed over. But not even death could defeat Lady Casidea DeHany, First Knight of the Blood, great-granddaughter of Davis DeHany, last of her line.
He had to believe that, or he would have to start planning for a future that he never wanted to see.
