Chapter 2
I had expected the Armenta forces to part as we approached. Instead, they stood in a line, gazing at us with truculent indifference. Our pilot nervously tugged the reins when we could go no farther, and pulled the carriage to a halt.
“Make way, please,” I called to the Armenta men.
None of them even glanced at me.
“Make way!” I called louder. “I am Iudex and bound for the murder in the city.”
“The custodi have young Castus,” one of the Armenta men said. “We’ll not depart until he is safe.” He looked at my heralds as if they were but blots of bird shit upon my uniform. “Nor will we allow any authority to force us away.”
“I am not asking you to leave,” I said. “I am asking you to stand aside! A slight shuffling, as opposed to a grand retreat.”
“Why should we?” called another man, this one wielding a great lance. “The custodi wish to hang Castus straightaway, and we shall not let that happen.”
“They surely do not,” I said, now quite angry. “The custodi will follow imperial policy, which does not allow us to do anything straightaway, even when we wish to! And besides, it’s not their case anymore, but mine. Now stand aside!”
The men exchanged mistrustful glances.
“You can either stand aside,” I said, “or do so after a cohort of Iudexii justiciars comes to clear you out! Which is what will happen if you don’t move—for I will be forced to make you, and spill blood.”
One of them raised his nose at me. “No custodus would dare draw blade against the Armentas.”
I leapt down from the carriage and walked over to him.
Though he was a Tala fellow like myself—which was to be expected, as we were upon the Plains of Tala—I was a good four smallspan taller than he.
And even though I wore only my blue Iudex coat as my armor, my air of indifference to him put a gleam of worry in his eye.
“I am not a custodus,” I said. “I am Iudex. And we are here to set this aright. Now part.”
They began shuffling to the side. I climbed back atop the carriage, and we began to slowly trundle through, though I noted that the pilot’s hands shook with fear.
A creak as the carriage window cracked open again, and I heard Ana’s voice: “I always love it when you put on a bit of swagger, Din.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.
“Though I am sure you are aware you are not permitted to challenge citizens with swords, nor would your blood draw a cohort of justiciars here.”
“They don’t know that, ma’am.”
A low chuckle, and the shutter clapped closed again.
—
Having conducted investigations in some of the most unruly and dangerous parts of the Empire, I was quite familiar with being among armed forces. Yet as we creaked through the packed lanes of Lacanthim, I found that these folk were a very different breed from every other order of the Empire.
These forces were not outfitted for war, but for riding: their high boots had obviously been designed for stirrups, and their leather armors certainly could not withstand imperial steel.
More, they were all sour-eyed, hard-skinned men whose faces seemed only capable of squinting, like they’d spent countless days and nights in the field, exposed to the elements.
Cattle men, perhaps: field hands and drovers who shepherded the great herds of urhosi about the pastures.
They carried tremendous lances at their sides, and as I passed one bare lance I gauged that the thing could easily cut a man in half.
Whatever challenges these drovers met in the fields, they put it down with deadly force.
But far more unsettling than the drovers’ lances were their mounts, for they sat atop destriers: the great, altered steeds that were common to these cattle lands, though they were dreadfully expensive.
Each destrier stood some ten span high—high enough to be level with me atop the carriage—and were as skinny as a stork’s neck, with hardly a scrap of fat upon their haunches.
Their strange, elongated legs shimmered like springs as they walked, and their yellow, birdlike eyes had a challenging gaze, as if the beasts knew they possessed great authority and were here to put you in your place.
I had seen destriers only occasionally in my service before now.
Most were used by the Legion to run messages about the East during the wet seasons, so they were only ever glimpsed when situations were dire, and even then you only saw a flash of them.
To see so many magnificent, profoundly augmented creatures here in one place doing nothing but angrily stare at me was unsettling.
As we made our way toward the scene of the death—a tavern called the Cat’s Eye Inn, our briefing had indicated—the Armentas grew in number and density, and our progress turned to a crawl. I also noted that this lot bore a great deal more polearms and lances, and sat atop the tallest destriers.
Then there came a gap of about fifty span where no one stood at all—and there, down the lane across from that, was another group of armed, hostile-looking drovers, facing us and prepared to ward off any attack.
These drovers, however, were not arrayed in the saffron colors of the Armenta clan.
Rather, they wore a pale red, paired with a crest depicting a hawk in flight: the color and crest of the Burav gentryclan—which was, of course, the family of the slain girl.
A stalemate, then. Just as Ana had predicted.
“Go slow now,” I said softly to our pilot. “These folk here don’t know of us yet.”
We creaked across the gap between the two forces, the eye of every drover fixed upon us. There was a great muttering among the Burav ranks as we approached—the point of every lance tracked our movements—and I stood and called out to them.
“I am Signum Dinios Kol,” I said, “investigator of the Imperial Iudex, Special Division. We have been sent here by order of the high courts to ensure that justice is done, and done fairly. We ask you to step aside so—”
A voice from the back broke in: “Let them through, let them through! Part, my fellows, and let them through!”
To my surprise, the drovers and their destriers began to do so, shifting until they’d formed a corridor wide enough to permit our carriage. At the end of the corridor stood a common-looking tavern, wrought of woven fretvine with a rounded roof and a tall, rounded green door.
A man emerged from the throng to stand before the green door, facing us. He somberly waved a hand, and we approached.
Though he was dressed in the pale reds of the Burav clan, this fellow was not at all a drover.
He wore a shining, silken shirt, a linen cloak with elaborately woven collar and cuffs, and a brown bicorn hat with a single, tasteful feather tucked in the brim.
All of this spoke of tremendous wealth, but the greater indicator was how the drovers and field hands reacted to his presence: they gave him a respectful distance and, when they dared to look his way, they bowed their heads ever so slightly to show fealty.
He was very clearly high gentry, in other words—and yet his face was quite something else.
Nearly the whole of the man’s head had been augmented: his ears were purpled and slightly elongated, and his nose was swollen with abnormally wide nostrils.
Most notable were his eyes, which had been so altered that the flesh about them was deeply purpled, and the orbs themselves looked larger than normal.
I strongly suspected he was capable of perceiving lights and auras that I was blind to.
The only feature the man possessed that was not pinkened or purpled from grafts was his prodigious black beard, grown long in the Kurmini style—for he was of that folk—and tied into a set of golden rings at the tip.
All this was most unusual for the gentry: they commonly preferred to alter their bodies for aesthetic reasons, or to lengthen their age (or, as I knew, to allow greater amorous capacities). To see a gentryman whose biological powers had been so enhanced was something I’d not expected.
Our pilot pulled the horses to a stop before him, and I climbed down and bowed to the gentryman. “Good morning, sir. I am—”
“You need not introduce yourself again,” he said somberly. “I heard you well enough from where I was.”
I cringed ever so slightly. Of course he had: his ears were just as augmented as his eyes.
“Do you know of me, Signum?” he asked.
“I take it you are Burilis Burav, sir,” I said, bowing again. “Prime father of the Burav gentryclan.”
“That I am,” he said. Though his voice was calm, there was a frailty to his eyes. “And it is my daughter, Zansay, who is slain and lies within. The custodi will not permit me to enter, nor to bear her away. So! I am forced to stand here and wait.”
“I grieve your loss, sir.”
He nodded quickly, as if struggling to maintain his emotions.
“I will be speedy here, Signum. I am not hostile to you, nor the canton custodi. I served my time in the Imperial Iyalets myself, as an Apothetikal.” He gestured to his augmented face.
“Unlike the Armentas, I understand how and why the Empire does what it does. But I must insist I be given access to my daughter. We have waited far too long to give her the honors owed to her. Especially given the straightforwardness of this horror.”
At this, he glanced to his left at a boy of about eighteen, tall and skinny and solemn—and nervous, as well, unsure how to marshal his movements.
He, too, was of Kurmini folk, with a wisp of a beard about his lip and cheek, and he was unmistakably the son of Burilis Burav.
He wore a large tughra ring on his right hand, signaling that he was of gentry stock and which house he belonged to: a curiously outdated affectation, as most gentry these days hardly ever interacted with anyone who wasn’t either a relation or paid help.
The ring seemed an ungainly thing as well, with a large point in the middle forming the beak of the hawk in flight—the family crest.