Promise of Blood

A longboat was making its way from the galley to the shore. Tamas put a looking glass to his eye and counted two dozen men. There were Wardens among them, easy to pick out for their size and their hunched, misshaped shoulders and arms.

“Ipille dares to send Wardens,” Tamas growled. “I’m tempted to blow that boat out of the water right now.”

“Of course he dares,” Sabon said. “He’s bloody king of the Kez.” Sabon coughed into his hand. “The Privileged with them likely feels the same way about you as you do of him. He knows you’ll have powder mages on the beach.”

“My Marked aren’t godless, sorcery-spawned killers.” Only the Kez had figured out how to break a man’s spirit and twist his body to create a Warden. Every other royal cabal in the Nine blanched at experimenting with human beings.

Sabon seemed amused by this. “What scares you more: a man who’s next to impossible to kill, or a man who can kill you at a league’s distance with a rifle?”

“A Warden or a powder mage? I’m not frightened of either. Wardens disgust me.” He spit on the lighthouse stones. “What’s gotten into you today? You’ve been philosophical enough lately to drive a man to tears.”

Olem gave a strangled laugh. “Breakfast,” he said.

Tamas turned on the soldier. “Breakfast?”

“He ate six bowls of porridge this morning,” Olem said. He tapped the ash from his cigarette and watched it blow off with the wind. “I’ve never seen the colonel put down so much so fast.”

The Deliv gave an embarrassed shrug. “That new cook is really something. It was like drinking milk straight from the teats of the saint herself. Where’d you get him?”

Tamas swallowed. He felt a cold sweat on his brow. “What do you mean, ‘Where’d I get him?’ I’ve not hired a new cook.”

“He said you appointed him head chef yourself,” Olem said. He put a hand out in front, miming a large belly, and took on an air of self-importance. “ ‘… to fill the hearts, minds, and souls of the soldiers and give them strength for the coming years.’ Or so he says.”

“A fat man, this tall?” Tamas gestured above his head.

Olem nodded.

“Long black hair, looks like a Rosvelean?”

“I thought he was a quarter Deliv,” Olem said. “But yes.”

“You’re mad,” Sabon said. “He’s not got a drop of Deliv in him.”

“Mihali,” Tamas said.

“Yes, that was him,” Sabon confirmed. “A devil of a cook.”

“Chef,” Tamas said distractedly. “And devil he may be. Find out who he is. Everything about him. He said his father was Moaka, the na-baron of… oh, something or another. Find out.” He would not have strange men infiltrating his headquarters with nothing more than a lamb soufflé.

“I’ll get right on that, sir,” Olem said.

“Now!”

Olem jumped. “Right away, sir.” He flicked his cigarette away and went for the stairs. Tamas watched him go, then turned back to the slowly approaching longboat. He felt Sabon’s eyes on his back.

“What?” he asked, more annoyance in his voice than he’d intended.

“What the pit was that about?” Sabon said. “A lot of fuss for just a damned cook.”

“Chef,” Tamas said.

“You think he’s a spy?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m having Olem find out.”

“What’s the good in having a bodyguard if you send him off when the Kez show up?”

Tamas ignored the question. So Mihali hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. But what about what he had said? He’d warned Tamas to investigate the Privilegeds’ dying admonition—something he should have no knowledge about.

Tamas wasn’t a religious man. If he were to ascribe to any one belief, it would probably be one most popular with upper society and philosophers these days—that Kresimir had been a timepiece god. He’d come and set the Nine in motion and had moved on, never to return.

Yet now the holy mountain itself rumbled in anger. What could this mean?

Superstitions. He couldn’t let them get the best of him. He’d have Mihali arrested this very night, and that would be the end of it.

They watched the approaching longboat for a few minutes before Sabon pointed down to the beach. “The rabble-rousers are here.”

“About damn time.”

They headed down to the docks to join Tamas’s council. With aides, assistants, bodyguards, and footmen, it seemed like all of Adopest had turned out. Tamas missed the days when secrecy demanded that they meet in person: just seven men and a woman plotting to overthrow their king.

The members of his council gathered at the front of the group to meet him on the boardwalk.

“Tamas, my dear,” Lady Winceslav said as he approached. “Be so kind as to ask His Eminence and the other gentleman”—she gestured disdainfully at the arch-diocel and the eunuch—“not to smoke so heavily around a lady.”

“You could ask them yourself,” Tamas said.

“She has,” Ricard said. “Seems His Holiness doesn’t know how to act around the ladies.”

Lady Winceslav harrumphed. “Sir, I don’t think you do either.”

Ricard removed his hat and gave her a bow. “I’m just a poor workin’ man, marm. Excuse me.”