doors, given over to premature mourning.
Taskin, short of sleep, weighed out his next options. He dreaded to face another interview with the king, with nothing conclusive in hand. The prospect of forcing a house-to-house search raised his temper to an edge that his officers knew not to cross. They shouldered the orders he saw fit to dispatch, and assigned men to the tasks without grumbling.
Jussoud sensed the subdued atmosphere in the palace wardroom upon his delayed return from his morning call at the garrison. The commander, he learned, had sent the day sergeant to grill the gate watch for the third time.
‘Bright powers, they saw nothing,’ the wizened old servant who polished the parade armour confided. Evidently the gallery above was not occupied, which loosened his garrulous tongue. He spat on his rag, dipped up more grit, and talked, while the helm in his hands acquired the high shine expected of guards in the palace precinct. ‘Last night was a botch-up. All those carriages, coming and going, filled with greatfolk, and each one with their grooms and footmen and lackeys? Can’t keep tight security on the occasion of a royal feast. Anybody forewarned and determined could have slipped in through Highgate unremarked.’
Jussoud set down his burden of remedies, hot and out of sorts from his uphill trek through unusually crowded streets. ‘Where can I find the commander?’
‘Himself?’ The servant returned a glance, bird-bright with sympathy. ‘He’s up the east tower with Dedorth’s seeing glass. You think you’re going up there?’ The oldster pursed his lips in a silent whistle. ‘Brave man. Tread softly, you hear? Last I saw, our commander was in a fit state to spit nails.’
Dedorth’s glass, at that moment, was trained on the fine figures cut by two princes, descending the steep avenue of stairs leading down from the Sanctuary Taskin addressed the officer who stood in attendance without shifting his eye from his vantage. ‘I want a watch set to guard Lady Shai. Also get two more reliable men and assign them to stay with the crown prince. Right now, soldier! As you go, tell the sergeant at large in the wardroom I plan to be down directly’
‘My lord.’ The officer strode off down the steep, spiralled stair, armour scraping the stone wall as he gripped the worn handrail. His footsteps, descending, faded with distance, then subsided to a whisper of echoes.
Alone in the observatory’s stifling heat, as the noon sun beat on the bronze cupola, Taskin swung the seeing glass on its tripod stand. Its cut circle of view swooped over the alpine meadows, then the scrub forests that clothed the rock pinnacles under the glare of the snow line. He scanned the folds of the glens, then the deep, tumbled dells with the leaping, white streamers of waterfalls. Deer moved at their browsing, tails switching flies; hunting peregrines traced their lazy spirals on outstretched slate wings. A mother bear drowsed near her gambolling cubs. Of human activity, he found none.
The trade road, repeatedly quartered, had yielded nothing out of the ordinary, and Dedorth, closely questioned, had been little use, immersed through the night in his vacuous habit of stargazing. The old scholar had not learned of the upset at court until his sleepy servant had fetched up his breakfast at sunrise.
By then, Princess Anja had been over ten hours gone.
Taskin laced frustrated fingers over the bronze tube of the glass. His circling thoughts yielded no fresh ideas; only rammed headlong against his enraging helplessness. Accustomed to direct action, and to successes accomplished through competence, the Commander of the Guard chafed himself raw. Scores of men at his fingertips, and an open note on the king’s treasury, and yet, he could find no lead, no clear-cut outlet to pursue.
King Isendon’s anguish tore at the heart. Taskin fumed, empty-handed, stung to empathy each time he encountered his own daughter, secure with his grandchild at home. Never before this had the quiet realm of Sessalie been rocked to the frightening rim of instability. The very foundation underpinning his life seemed transformed overnight to the tremulous fragility of cobwebs. Nor had the gossip of merchants and farmwives ever carried such a poisonous overtone of potentially treasonous threat.
The bitter sense gnawed him that he dispatched the king’s horsemen over black ice, with no point of access to plumb the deep current that endangered the firm ground under their feet.
‘Powers!’ Taskin whispered, prisoned by the close air, with its bookish must of dried ink and unswept cobwebs, ‘let me not fail in my duty to Isendon, to keep his two offspring from harm.’
Far below, the latch on the outer door clanged. A deliberate tread entered the stairwell. Taskin marked the step as Jussoud’s, the muted slap of woven rush sandals distinct from the hobnailed soles of his guardsmen.
Loath to be caught in maudlin vulnerability, the commander spun the glass and reviewed the vigilance of the garrison watch on the crenels of the lower battlements. He found no man slack at his post, under Mykkael, which lent him no target upon which to vent his trapped anger when Jussoud reached the observatory.
Unmoving, his attention still trained through the glass, Taskin opened at once with a reprimand. ‘You are late, by two hours.’
Jussoud leaned on the door jamb, his empty hands clasped. His reply held slight breathlessness from his climb, but no surprised note of rancour. ‘If you’ve been at the glass since the midday gong, you’ll have seen the press, above Middlegate.’
‘I need not see, to imagine,’ Taskin answered, now stubbornly combing the warren of streets by the Falls Gate. ‘The seneschal’s been very busy, all morning, setting stamps upon royal requisitions.’
‘So I observed,’ said Jussoud. ‘Every man with a grandsire’s rusty sword is abroad, seeking reward gold and adventure. They’ll be clouding your evidence.’
‘If we had any,’ Taskin snapped, suddenly tired of watching the anthill seethe of the commons. ‘Two leads, both of them slipped through our fingers. A dead drudge and a drowned seeress. The loose talk claims Mysh kael killed them. Did you listen?’
‘To what purpose?’ Jussoud sighed. ‘Could his talents enable a sorcerer’s work? I don’t know. Logic argues the desert-bred’s not such a fool. Capable of setting a death bane, or not, why should a man with his training strike to kill in a way that would cause a sensation? As for the seeress, he had been in the moat. I saw his damp clothes cast off on the floor where he left them. For a murderer who supposedly drowned an old woman, he had taken no trouble to hide the incriminating evidence.’
Taskin lifted his head, his regard no less ruthlessly focused as he abandoned the seeing glass. ‘Mysh kael’s true to his oath to the crown, you believe.’
‘If I had to set trust in surface appearances,’ Jussoud admitted, reluctant, ‘the debate could be carried both ways.’
‘I sent down a lancer to bring the man in. He is also delayed, by now well beyond the grace of a plausible excuse.’ Taskin straightened, all business. ‘Do you know what became of him?’
Jussoud stared back, his grey eyes unblinking. ‘He waylaid Mykkael in a darkened stairwell.’
‘Fool.’ The commander’s long fingers tightened on the seeing glass, sole sign of his inward distress. ‘He’s alive to regret?’
The healer nodded. ‘Unharmed, and unmarked, in fact. Mykkael stopped him cold with a blow that stunned the nerves that govern involuntary reflex. Then he used direct pressure and cut off the blood flow through the arteries to the brain only long enough to drop your guardsman unconscious. I find that sort of efficiency chilling, a precision far beyond any nightmare I could imagine.’
‘Barqui’ino drill alters the synapses of the mind.’ Taskin stepped back, leaned against the stone wall, while the pigeons cooed in liquid murmurs from their roosts in the eaves overhead. ‘Then you’ve seen this desertman use skills that can kill, and leave no telltale bruise on the corpse.’
Jussoud said nothing. His sallow skin shone with sweat in the spilled glare of sun off the sills of the casements.
‘Where is my guardsman?’ Taskin said, his