He gave the ex-gladiator in the corner a look. The man’s face was perfectly composed, not pale in the least. Obviously, he’d figured out what was happening long before his erstwhile master.
“I’ll want you to accompany the delegation which will be reporting this to the Council,” Demansk rasped. “I trust your testimony will be reliable.”
The former bodyguard actually managed a smile. A thin one, true, but a smile nonetheless. “Shocking, sir. Just shocking it was, the way the Governor insulted the Triumvir. And in public, too. ‘T’wasn’t a gray thing, not in the least.”
Demansk nodded. He’d have Sallivar keep an eye on the man. But he really didn’t expect any trouble from that quarter, especially after a suitably discreet bribe. And killing the man would probably cause more problems than it would solve.
Having made his decision, he turned to the next matter. “Sergeant, please see to it that the magistrates are escorted safely back to their office. And post a guard for them. There’s likely to be some tumult in the streets today.”
That was a delicate way of putting it, of course. A guard for the magistrates was just as much a guard over them. Sallivar would be leaving with the magistrates for Vanbert in the morning, and once on the road he’d make sure the magistrates never had a chance to talk to anyone until they reached the capital.
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant started to get his men moving, but Demansk held up his hand.
“One thing also. Two, actually. First”—he pointed to Willech’s head, which had rolled almost to the wall—”please take that and have it stuck on one of the spikes on the fence outside the Governor’s Palace. I imagine the crowd in Solinga will be cheered by the sight.”
“My pleasure, sir.” Two strides and the sergeant had the grisly object off the floor. It was fortunate that he was such a big man. Willech had favored very close-cropped hair, much too short to hold. But with his enormous grip, the sergeant had no difficulty holding the skull like a normal-sized man would hold a goblet.
“And the second matter, sir?”
Demansk studied him for a moment. Then, abruptly: “Come to my quarters this evening. I’d like to speak with you further. You’ll probably have to wait around a bit, I’m afraid. Things are likely to be hectic all day.”
For the first time since he’d met him that morning—Crann had recommended the sergeant and his squad—Demansk saw an actual expression on the giant’s face. He found the little smile rather interesting. It was not the rueful smile of a veteran acknowledging the army’s inevitable “hurry-up-and-wait.” There was a real gleam to the thing, as if the sergeant would enjoy whiling away a few hours watching the powers-that-were scrambling frantically out of the way of the powers-that-are.
From his accent, the man was another easterner, signed up for a twenty-five-year hitch in the army as the only alternative to poverty. Who, with no help at all from Emerald philosophers, had apparently drawn his own conclusions about the dialectic of Being and Becoming.
* * *
When he got there, Demansk’s headquarters were just as much in frenzied semi-chaos as he’d expected. By the nature of things, a coup d’etat is a messier business than a straightforward battle in the open field. Even experienced and steady officers will get a little rattled and uncertain, at such a time. Partly because the tasks involved are somewhat new and different; mostly because the penalty for failure is certain to be worse than being defeated by a foreign enemy. A foreigner, at least with noble prisoners, will want ransom. A shaken but surviving old regime will settle for nothing less than heads on spikes on official fences—and then seize all your property for good measure.
Which, of course, was exactly what Demansk was doing himself.
“We’ve got most of it,” said Ulrich Bratten as soon as the Triumvir came into the room which served as the nerve center for the coup. “The bulk of it was in the form of bullion in Willech’s own mansion. We had to torture Willech’s wife—tough bitch, that one—but we got the secret out of her.”