Sworn in Steel (53 page)

“Good,” I said, letting myself lean back down on the chair. “Because if—”

“I wasn’t a White,” said Ivory haughtily. “I was a Paragon.”

A
n hour later, I stepped out of Ivory’s house and back into the darkness of the padishah’s grounds.

A thin crescent of the moon shone overhead. It felt as if it should be later, as if the sun should be rising, as if the world outside should somehow have changed since I’d crossed the
threshold and had the world inside me shift. Again.

This shit was getting old.

I moved farther into the shadows at the end of the walkway and waited for my night vision to awaken. As the world sketched itself in amber, I reached over and ran the back of my hand against the
folded piece of paper in my opposite sleeve. No more dusting guards for me: The paper was my pardon, as well as my pass in and out of the estate.

Ivory had agreed to see Degan. It hadn’t been an easy argument to make: Ivory had been avoiding his former brothers and sisters for ages, and wasn’t inclined to make an exception.
He’d still refused to tell me his side of why he’d left the Order, but he hadn’t been as shy about discussing the founding of the Order itself. Once I’d explained to him
what Degan was looking for and why I felt obliged to help him, the former degan had warmed considerably. He remembered not only what it was like to walk away with his brothers’ blood on his
hands, he’d said, but also how it felt to break his word to them as well.

“The biggest mistake I made, though,” Ivory had said, a cup of tea steaming in his hand as we sat at his study table, his sword remounted on the wall behind him, “was turning
to the imperial elites for initial membership in the Order in the first place.”

“Why’s that?” I said. I sipped at my own brew and tried not to make a face. There was a reason I preferred coffee over tea, and this particular batch of tepid, sour, soggy
leaf-water was an excellent example of why that was. Still, it’s best to be polite when you’re trying to pump a two-hundred–year-old sword master and former imperial magician for
information. I added another dollop of honey.

“Because Emperor Lucien created the Order of the Degans to stand separate from the Black Sashes of the imperial military and Gold Sashes of the house guards,” he said. “If
you’re going to do that, you probably shouldn’t recruit a bunch of Sashes into the Order. Or, at least, you’d think that, but neither I nor the emperor knew where else to turn. He
wanted people he could trust with not just his life, but the empire’s well-being. That makes for a small pool of candidates.”

“Wait,” I said, setting my cup aside. “You created the degans at the behest of the
emperors
? They know about this?”

“I was a Paragon; who else do you think would, or could, tell me to surrender my soul?”

“Well, I—”

“And it wasn’t the whole of the Eternal Triumvirate who did this: We were Lucien’s project, and his alone. He’d been growing distrustful of the Gold Sashes for a while.
Ever since the Coup of the Unborn that forced Theodoi the Sixth into exile, each incarnation has been trying to build a faction loyal to himself among the guard. By my time, the politics had
started to get ugly, and Lucien saw it. He decided to step outside the Imperial structure and create the degans.”

“By recruiting among the White Sashes?” I said. “But the Whites were put together specifically to take on Isidore and the Kin. They didn’t become personal bodyguards to
the emperor until later, I thought.”

“Yes and no,” said Ivory. “Like so many things with the emperor, there are multiple facets to the single gem that is his genius. Your so-called Dark King came along at an
excellent time and served as a convenient excuse for creating a new cadre of swords within the palace. The White Sashes were created to hunt the Kin and guard the emperor, yes, but they were also
formed to provide a recruiting ground for the Order of the Degans.”

I sat up. “Are you telling me that wiping out Isidore’s organization two hundred years ago—along with more than half of the Kin—was a distraction for the benefit of
imperial politics?”

Ivory arched an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t it be?” He took a slow sip of tea. “Believe me, the emperor, and the empire, have done far worse over the ages, often for less
commendable reasons. The blockade and resulting famine in Phykopolis, for example, can be traced to—”

“Your ‘distraction’ resulted in thousands of Kin being hung from rooftops or staked out in the streets,” I said. “And not just Kin: The Sashes butchered anyone who
knew them—neighbors and friends and family. There was open warfare in the streets of Ildrecca for almost a year.”

“Yes,” said Ivory. “There was. And most of the people who died were either criminals or those who consorted with them.” He set his cup down with a solid
clink
.
“Now compare that to the tens of thousands who died in Phykopolis simply because an anonymous clerk discovered an unlicensed trade monopoly, and that the easiest way to cover it up was to
devastate the city it was based in. As things go, the slaughtering of a comparative handful of Kin and their friends is high moral ground for the Court.”

“That doesn’t justify it.”

“You should know by now that the Imperial Court feels no need to justify itself to the likes of us.” Ivory sniffed, made the slightest hint of a sour face. “Still, good results
can sometimes come from ill actions.”

“You mean the degans?” I said.

“I mean the ideals we tried to incorporate within the Order and the Oath: the idea that a person is answerable for whatever events he puts in motion; that to receive service is to owe it
in return; that a person’s promise, no matter who he is, is something he should be held to.”

“I’ve found that ideals don’t carry a lot of weight in the real world,” I said. “At least, not with most people.”

“If I was concerned with ‘most people,’ I would have remained a Paragon instead of becoming a degan.”

I almost asked how those ideals fit with him cutting down his own brothers and sisters a couple of hundred years back, but that didn’t seem like the most constructive path to take just
now. Instead, I folded my hands on the table before me and said, “So you’re telling me none of the other incarnations of the emperor have caught on about the degans? That, because he
formed you, only Lucien knows you exist?” It didn’t seem likely, but then again, if anyone knew how to pull the cloth over the imperial eyes, who better than the emperor himself?

“I haven’t exactly been keeping in touch,” said Ivory, “but my guess is no; otherwise, the Order would have been wiped out by now.”

“What about the other Paragons?” I said. “You couldn’t have done this alone.”

“Of course not.”

“Then why didn’t they tell—?”

“There was a purging.”

“Ah,” I said. Stephen Dorminikos had done the same thing when he first had his soul shattered. The imperial policy seemed to be that it was easier to kill the casters than ask for
their silence. I wondered if the current Paragons in Markino’s service knew about the fate of their predecessors. It seemed unlikely. “That seems to be an occupational hazard with
imperial magicians.”

Ivory took a sip of tea. “Get close enough to the emperor, and everyone becomes expendable.”

I grunted agreement. It certainly seemed to be a recurring pattern.

“So why did you get to be the one who gave up his soul?” I said.

Ivory stared into his cup, took a last swallow. I got the feeling he was wishing for something stronger right about now. “I told you,” he said, pulling the iron teapot over to
himself. “I was a Paragon: Someone had to cast the incantations and make the bindings. Someone had to speak the first Oath and bind the Order and the members to its purpose. When you’re
talking about the empire and a divinely selected emperor, not to mention a secret sect of swordsmen, words often aren’t enough; you need magic.”

I chose to ignore commenting on how the emperor had founded his cult based on nothing more than a carefully planned lie, and instead said, “And your soul locked the deal?”

“Among other things, yes.” Ivory lifted the pot and poured. He frowned when only a tiny trickle of liquid, along with the dregs of the tea leaves, came out. “If it helps your
understanding, I made the sacrifice—of my soul and my magic—willingly.” He set the pot back down. “I’m not sure I would do the same today. But that’s the curse
of time, isn’t it? We get to look back and pick apart our actions, criticize our younger selves without the benefit of that self being able to offer a defense—only a
justification.”

I played with my own cup on the tabletop.

I had to ask.

“So, what’s it like living without a soul?” I said.

“That’s none of your business, Kin,” he snapped. Then he blinked and seemed to shake off his mood, as well as his memories. When he turned his eyes on me again, they held the
false cheer of a man trying to put a good face on a crappy situation.

“So,” he said, “Bronze wants the old laws, does he?”

“He seems to think finding your papers could somehow help preserve the Order.”

“He’s hoping to find something,” said Ivory. “A line or a page that will put a sword through the heart of this argument once and for all. But it isn’t there. If it
were, I would have used it when the dispute, and the Order, was young.”

“No one’s seen the laws for two hundred years,” I said. “That’s a lot of time to operate on hearsay and passed-down memories. Who’s to say how this crop of
degans will react to the original documents?”

“I think I can make a fairly accurate guess. Besides, old papers and old men rarely change minds.”

I perked up at that. “Old men?” I said. “Does that mean you’d be willing to come back to Ildrecca to make the argument?”

A melancholy smile. “Perhaps. It’s been a long time. I wouldn’t mind seeing the paths Simonis and I used to walk again, if only for the memories.” Then a harder look.
“But I’m not going to agree just on sentiment: It all depends on how Bronze makes his case. If you’re right, there’s too much idealism in his plan for my taste, but the
least I can do is hear him out.”

I could barely keep a smile from creasing my face. Between Ivory and his papers, not only did my odds of getting Degan back to Ildrecca suddenly look up; so did my chances of, if not making
things right between him and me, then at least putting him in touch with the founder of his Order. A founder that, by all rights, should be dead.

That sure as hell had to count for something.

Ivory had penned my gate pass after that, signing it in his guise as Heron. To his credit, he’d only paused momentarily when I mentioned I needed it to get me off the hook for a certain
incident at the Dog Gate as well. With a quick, elegant hand, he’d added a passage about the good of the state and the undesirability of my being delayed, and sent me on my way.

I passed back through the grove, just out of curiosity. It was empty, both of guards and assassins. I was glad for the former, sad for that latter. It would have been nice to see her one final
time.

I took one last look around to make sure I wasn’t overlooking any
neyajin
-shaped shadows, and then slipped off into the night.

“Well?” said Fowler as I sat down across from her. “Find anything?”

We were in an all-night tea shop, just outside the Imperial Quarter and just within spitting distance of the gate to the fourth ring. The place catered to mild chiba addicts and severe music
aficionados. The man seated on the small stage was said to be one of the best oud players in the central Despotate, brought in from his village in the Venatti hills for the month. All I knew was
that the music helped cover our conversation. The air was thick with smoke.

“One or two things,” I said. I picked up the pot on the table, filled the extra cup before me, and drank. Cardamom. “Turns out Heron is Ivory Degan.”

“
What?
”

Even the oud player stopped playing to stare at Fowler’s outburst. I smiled into my tea, then held up my hands and apologized to the room in Djanese while she glared at me. General
laughter all around. The music resumed.

“Ivory Degan?” she hissed once attention had shifted back to, variously, the music and the water pipes. “As in the one who started the Order of the Degans?”

“One and the same.”

“How is that even possible?”

“Long story.”

“No shit.”

I lifted my eyes until they met hers. “Longer than we have time for right now.”

“Humph.”

I poured more cardamom tea, added two strips of candied lemon from a dish on the serving tray, and stirred. “What happened at the theater?”

“You mean after you caused all hell to break loose?”

“That was the general idea, if you recall.”

“Well, then your idea worked. The performance was cut short, the Rags cleared the seats, and the pit nearly rioted until the padishah had handfuls of dharms thrown into the crowd.”
Fowler held up a small handful. “I clipped a couple coves coming out.”

I rolled my eyes. “And Fat Chair?”

“Led off in chains.”

“Any word from Mama Left Hand about that?”

“Were you expecting any?”

“Not really.” Her mention of coming to some sort of agreement about Crook Eye’s old routes had sounded good, but I’d suspected it had been meant to string me along rather
than make any real kind of offer. Like as not, she had other routes into the empire for her glimmer.

“Just as well, then,” said Fowler, “because her people wouldn’t be able to get word to us anyhow. The padishah had the troupe escorted back to the Angel’s Shadow
under guard. Half of the Rags are still there.”

I nodded. We’d expected something along those lines, Fowler and Tobin and I. You don’t unleash forbidden Dorminikan magic—even if it is just a lot of noise and show—and
not have the Imperials in the room rounded up. Which was why we’d made certain there was nothing to connect them to what happened with Fat Chair. Not that that was a guarantee—the
despot was called a despot for a reason: He could do whatever the hell he wanted when it came to us.