“I will not agree to a job blindly,” Adamat said. “Tell me what you want.”
“We killed them in their sleep,” Tamas said without preamble. “There’s no easy way to kill a Privileged, but that’s the best. A mistake was made and we had a fight on our hands.” Tamas looked pained for a moment, and Adamat suspected that the fight had not gone as well as Tamas would have liked. “We prevailed. Yet upon the lips of the dying was one phrase.”
Adamat waited.
“ ‘You can’t break Kresimir’s Promise,’” Tamas said. “That’s what the dying sorcerers said to me. Does it mean anything to you?”
Adamat smoothed the front of his coat and sought to recall old memories. “No. ‘Kresimir’s Promise’… ‘Break’… ‘Broken’… Wait—‘Kresimir’s Broken Promise.’” He looked up. “It was the name of a street gang. Twenty… twenty-two years ago. Cenka couldn’t remember that?”
Tamas continued. “Cenka thought it sounded familiar. He was certain you’d remember it.”
“I don’t forget things,” Adamat said. “Kresimir’s Broken Promise was a street gang with forty-three members. They were all young, some of them no more than children, the oldest not yet twenty. We were trying to round up some of the leaders to put a stop to a string of thefts. They were an odd lot—they broke into churches and robbed priests.”
“What happened to them?”
Adamat couldn’t help but look at the blood on the stairs. “One day they disappeared, every one of them—including our informants. We found the whole lot a few days later, forty-three bodies jammed into a drain culvert like pickled pigs’ feet. They’d been massacred by powerful sorceries, with excessive brutality. The marks of the king’s royal cabal. The investigation ended there.” Adamat suppressed a shiver. He’d not once seen a thing like that, not before or since. He’d witnessed executions and riots and murder scenes that filled him with less dread.
The Deliv soldier appeared again at the top of the stairs. “We need you,” he said to Tamas.
“Find out why these mages would utter those words with their final breath,” Tamas said. “It may be connected to your street gang. Maybe not. Either way, find me an answer. I don’t like the riddles of the dead.” He got to his feet quickly, moving like a man twenty years younger, and jogged up the stairs after the Deliv. His boot splashed in the blood, leaving behind red prints. “Also,” he called over his shoulder, “keep silent about what you have seen here until the execution. It will begin at noon.”
“But…” Adamat said. “Where do I start? Can I speak with Cenka?”
Tamas paused near the top of the stairs and turned. “If you can speak with the dead, you’re welcome to.”
Adamat ground his teeth. “How did they say the words?” he said. “Was it a command, or a statement, or…?”
Tamas frowned. “An entreaty. As if the blood draining from their bodies was not their primary concern. I must go now.”
“One more thing,” Adamat said.
Tamas looked to be near the end of his patience.
“If I’m to help you, tell me why all of this?” He gestured to the blood on the stairs.
“I have things that require my attention,” Tamas warned.
Adamat felt his jaw tighten. “Did you do this for power?”
“I did this for me,” Tamas said. “And I did this for Adro. So that Manhouch wouldn’t sign us all into slavery to the Kez with the Accords. I did it because those grumbling students of philosophy at the university only play at rebellion. The age of kings is dead, Adamat, and I have killed it.”
Adamat examined Tamas’s face. The Accords was a treaty to be signed with the king of Kez that would absolve all Adran debt but impose strict tax and regulation on Adro, making it little more than a Kez vassal. The field marshal had been outspoken about the Accords. But then, that was expected. The Kez had executed Tamas’s late wife.
“It is,” Adamat said.
“Then get me some bloody answers.” The field marshal whirled and disappeared into the hallway above.
Adamat remembered the bodies of that street gang as they were being pulled from the drain in the wet and mud, remembered the horror etched upon their dead faces. The answers may very well be bloody.
Chapter 2
Lajos is dying,” Sabon said.
Tamas entered the apartments of the Privileged who’d been Zakary the Beadle. He swept through the salon and entered the bedchamber—a room bigger than most merchants’ houses. The walls were indigo and covered with colorful paintings that displayed various Beadles in the history