SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”My brother asked me to.”

Zafira said it the way you say a thing you’ve already said to yourself a few times and stopped being annoyed about.

”Malrik and Vaelis have been friends for years. Everyone knows it, and neither of them has ever bothered pretending otherwise, so when Myrrhvale opened the observer seats my brother came to me and asked me to take it as a favour.”

”With what purpose, though?” Trafalgar asked.

”That’s the whole of the purpose. Malrik couldn’t come himself, his friend was in the middle of the worst two years of his life, and he wanted somebody down here who’d tell him honestly whether Vaelis was still standing.” Zafira turned the glass a quarter turn without drinking from it. ”He didn’t ask me to protect anybody or push anything through. He asked me to come and see if things were all right.”

Trafalgar turned that over.

’It’s small. It’s exactly the size a real reason usually is.’ He watched her hands rather than her face, because her face had never once given him anything she didn’t want it to. ’And nobody sends a daughter of Malakar du Zar’khael into a succession as a courtesy without knowing what it looks like from the outside.’

”Does your father know what it looks like?”

”My father decided it was worth what it looked like.” She let a beat go by. ”You’d have to ask him why. I stopped getting answers to that sort of question a long time ago.”

”So did I.”

That got the corner of her mouth, briefly.

”Your turn,” Zafira said. ”You’re not down here counting ballots. What are you actually doing?”

Trafalgar looked at Rhosyn. Rhosyn moved one shoulder, which from her amounted to a full recommendation.

”Lyren brought me in,” he said. ”Officially I’m here to witness the succession and make sure none of the other Great Houses puts a thumb on it. Unofficially he thinks somebody already has. He believes one of his siblings is being backed from outside Myrrhvale, and he can’t go looking himself without every faction in this city closing ranks on him the same afternoon.”

”So he imported someone who could.”

”That’s the shape of it.”

Zafira sat with that for a moment.

”Then I’ll tell you what I’ve got, which isn’t much.” She leaned forward and rested her forearms on the table. ”I’ve been watching Vaelis for months, and I’ve seen nothing. He goes to the sealed chambers, he goes back to his rooms, and he lets people call him a matricide to his face without opening his mouth. If somebody’s feeding that man from outside, he’s the worst-fed candidate I’ve ever seen.”

”Nothing at all?”

”One thing, and it’s not what you want.” She thought about how to put it. ”He’s close to the youngest. Ilyra, the fifth. She’s thirteen and half this castle treats her like furniture, and he’s the only one of them who actually sits with her. Everyone reads it as the killer keeping the child sweet.”

”And you don’t?”

”I’ve watched them together. He’s not managing her.” Zafira shrugged it off. ”It’s the only warm thing in that entire family and it doesn’t lead anywhere. I only mention it because you asked for everything.”

Trafalgar filed it and moved on. ’A man everyone hates who spends his time with a child nobody looks at. That’s a habit, not a strategy.’

”Then work with us,” he said.

Zafira answered before he’d finished the sentence, and then had to slow down to make the rest of it sound considered.

”That depends on what you mean by with.”

”I mean you tell me what you see, and I tell you what I see, and neither of us asks the other to break their oath.” Trafalgar spread one hand flat on the table. ”You’re a Vaelis observer. I’m not going to ask you what Vaelis says behind a closed door, and I’d think less of you if you told me. But you’ve been down here for months and we’ve been here few days, you know this city in a way we won’t for another two.”

”That’s fair.” She said it a little too quickly again. ”And if you turn something up that puts my house on a list, you’re still going to put my house on the list.”

”Yes.”

”Good.” Zafira sat back. ”I’d have walked out if you’d said anything else.”

Rhosyn had been letting them get there in their own time. She spoke once it was done.

”Then here’s what we have. The man in that channel didn’t die there.”

Zafira’s attention snapped to her.

”I couldn’t tell you what killed him. No wound I could find, nothing obvious on him at all, and I had about four minutes down there.” Rhosyn laid it out flat, one thing after another. ”What I can tell you is that he was somewhere else first. The blood’s pooled along his back in a solid band, and he was lying on his side when I got to him. He was flat on something hard for hours before anybody put him where he ended up. His coat’s dry except the hem, and there’s no salt crust on his boots when every stone down there is white with it.”

”He died somewhere else,” Zafira said.

”And carried. His pockets were emptied by somebody who knew what they were looking for. No collar, no collar scar, so he wasn’t anyone’s property. Ink under the nails and a shine on the heel of his hand from working a seal. He stamped paper for a living.”

The room stayed quiet for a moment. Down through the window the channel water kept moving.

”Then that’s two different stories,” Trafalgar said. ”Either the man saw something in whatever he was stamping and somebody closed him down for it, in which case he’s a thread and we pull him. Or he was put in that channel on purpose.”

”On purpose meaning what?” Zafira asked.

”Meaning it’s for us.” He kept his voice level. ”I arrived three days ago. You’ve been here months and nothing happened. A body turns up in a drained stretch on the outer edge of the ring, in the open, in daylight, on a rope line half the docks can stand at. That’s not a place you hide a corpse. That’s a place you leave one.”

”And the two aren’t exclusive,” Rhosyn said. ”He could be both. Kill the man because of what he saw, then put him somewhere the new arrivals will hear about it by lunch. One body, two jobs.”

Zafira didn’t disagree, which meant she’d already got there.

”Moving him is the part that bothers me most,” Trafalgar said. ”This city isn’t a place you carry a dead man across. Gates, tunnels, a guard post at every level change. Whoever moved that man had clearance to cross, and used it.”