Her name was Electra, and she was a sve. But not for much longer. She’d been making money, saving up bronze by doing favors for the local businesspeople whenever her mistress sent her out on errands, as well as by staying up te at night weaving cloth. When she became one of the first people in all of Chrysopolis to find out that General Eteocles was dead, her freedom was about a year away.

  She was on another errand for her mistress, delivering a letter to a gentleman who she admired. As her mistress was rich enough to have a very loose conceptualization of time, Electra stopped along the way to search for opportunities. It was there, while she had a hurried conversation with another sve about shipments of rope being delivered to the docks, that she saw it. Half a dozen burly men in foreign garb walked solemnly down the street, carrying between them a mutited corpse. The corpse’s face looked familiar.

  “By the gods,” muttered the stranger.

  “Who is that? I feel as though I’ve seen him before.”

  The other sve turned to her in a state of wide-eyed shock. “Don’t you remember the victory parade against the Trabakondai? That’s Eteocles, the Emperor’s right-hand man!”

  Electra’s jaw fell open. “You’re right! And aren’t those the Emperor’s guards, too?”

  “I think so. He must have had the man killed. I wonder why…”

  “I don’t know,” said Electra. “But I don’t like it. I think I should go.”

  And go she did, moving swiftly and putting aside all thoughts of profit. She delivered the letter, and at a jogging pace, returned home. Electra’s mistress, who was named Laphria, immediately interrogated her about how the letter was received, but Electra had little to say, for the man had shooed her out of the room almost the moment the papyrus touched his fingers. She instead reid what she had seen, the corpse being carried through the streets to an unknown destination.

  Once Laphria had sent Electra off to go help with the linens, she had some time to think about that. Laphria was a sensible woman, not prone to flights of fancy like believing that the second most powerful man in the city had been sin; yet at the same time, she had come to know Electra as quite reliable. She concluded that the sve must have misheard.

  Until, at least, that afternoon, when Laphria hosted a small dinner party at her home. Many of her wealthy, respectable friends were there to eat and drink and, especially, to talk. It was there, in the midst of all that talk, that Laphria heard someone else mention the news of Eteocles’s death; Laphria interrogated him immediately about where he’d heard it, and the man said it had come directly from one of his business contacts, who had attempted to visit Eteocles only to discover him dead and his household in disarray. This truly shocked Laphria. If Electra the sve had been right about Eteocles’s body being carried out, then that meant she was probably also right about the identities of the ones doing the carrying. The Emperor was behind it!

  As the evening wore on, the conversation came more and more to be consumed by the topic of the murder. How severe had the Emperor’s madness become that he would kill his own chosen successor? Who would be the new successor? What would this all mean for city politics? Laphria kept herself out of the most intense parts of the conversation—that was for men—but the more she heard the more unsettled she became. When night fell and the guests either hurried off to their estates or asked to stay the night, Laphria was alight with anxieties. Only the drink allowed her to sleep.

  The next morning, severely hungover and frazzled from bad dreams, Laphria remembered that there was an errand she needed to be doing. She delegated. Her daughter, the lovely Alke, was an eccentric who loved to ride and be out and about, so Laphria kindly requested that she be the one to ask their good friend Pandion for a small loan. Pandion was soft on young women, anyways.

  Alke was, suffice to say, ecstatic for the chance to stretch her legs. No sooner had her mother given her the order than she was out the door and around the corner, ordering the stable-sves to ready a horse for her. Alke was on the mare’s back and away almost before the animal was ready. Pandion, a good family friend of Laphra’s and Alke’s family, owned a massive swathe of farmnd only a couple of miles from the walls of Chrysopolis, which he used to grow wine-grapes and raise pigs and cattle. He was a very wealthy man, if rather impious and zy, spending most of his days sucking up the sun’s rays and sampling the wine of his own vineyard.

  Still, it was not hard for Alke to find an audience with the man once she had arrived. The matter of the loan was retively easy; Laphria’s husband had not repaid the st loan he had taken from Pandion, but previous loans taken before that had been repaid, so he was retively open to the prospect of lending more coin, especially when Alke made a pretty face at him. She was not ready to spend all the hours riding back to Chrysopolis just yet, so the pair fell to casual talk.

  “Have you heard about Eteocles?” said Alke.

  “No,” Pandion replied. “Did he get drunk and wind up in a ditch again? That was a good ugh.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Impossible,” Pandion said with a snort. “That man was as strong as an ox.”

  Alke shook her head. “Even an ox can die from getting its throat slit. It was murder. Execution, maybe, considering it was Emperor Peleus who did it.”

  Pandion’s face went pale. “You’re certain? Where did you hear about this?”

  “There was a dinner party at our home st night,” Alke said. “Everyone was talking about it. The Trabakondai Guard dragged his cut-up body out of his house the other day.”

  Immediately, Pandion rushed off, running around his patio as quickly as he could from table to table until he found one that still held wine. Then he drank. When he was done drinking, he returned to Alke, pitcher in hand.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody seems to. But considering how the Emperor’s been acting, there’s all sorts of reasons.” Alke chuckled. “Maybe Eteocles didn’t like his tunic. Thought he had bad taste in music.”

  “This is no ughing matter, girl,” Pandion said with a scowl. “The Emperor has gone mad, executed his own greatest general! The Senate, the city council, the exarchs, everyone needs to hear about this immediately!”

  “I… I suppose, yes. I’ll go back to my mother, then.”

  “And see that you do!”

  While Alke left morosely to begin the long ride back to Chrysopolis, Pandion was in a frenzy of activity. He had business dealings and acquaintances all across Macaria, and every single one of them needed to know what had just happened, so that they might be prepared for the instability that was sure to come. Investments would have to be safe kept, old debts drawn upon. By that afternoon, a score of messengers were flying out from Pandit’s estate, rushing to destinations that, for some, were several days of travel away.

  There was one person, however, who Pandion definitely did not intend to inform of all the news. His name was Darwishi, and he was a thief. He had been doing thievery for many years, and as he was quite clever, he had a favored method which he always used, and which had never gotten him caught. He would hide by one of the roads out of Chrysopolis, and wait until he heard the approach of a single horseman. Then he would hurl out a freshly-killed cat into the road, fresh enough that it still smelled of predator, and quickly enough to make the horse balk and throw its rider. When the rider was on the ground, Darwishi himself would rush forth, knife in hand, and rob the bastard for everything he had.

  Sadly, on that particur day, his chosen target didn’t have much at all. He was a messenger, not a courier, so in the end the most valuable thing that could be stolen was the saddle, which would at least sell for a few bronzes. He did get a kick out of the message being delivered, though, a message about how Peleus the Paranoid had finally snapped and killed his own chosen successor.

  Still, trying for a second target on the same day was a good way to get yourself killed, so Darwishi slunk back into Chrysopolis. His fence took the saddle in exchange for a handful of nummi. Darwishi would make sure he didn’t have that coin come morning. He went down to the tavern, loading himself up on meat and bread and good Kemtryai beer, then set about finding a girl cheap enough for the spare change. He didn’t find one. Who he did find was a girl named Megara, who was about five-fold too expensive for him, but who would stay by his side and look bosomy while he pretended to be more willing to pay than he actually was.

  Eventually Darwishi got drunk enough that he wouldn’t have been able to do anything even if he did have the coin, but Megara was rather desperate, her coffers low. She stayed by his side, egging him on, even as he stopped talking about his own sexual prowess and started rambling about whatever came to mind. That was how, nearly a day and a half after it had happened, Megara first learned of the death of Eteocles, in the form of a drunken joke comparing Darwishi’s member to Peleus’s sword, and Megara herself to the te general.

  By the time Darwishi had drunk himself into unconsciousness and Megara realized she would have to find her money elsewhere, the night was almost over and the tavern was almost empty, aside from those slowly sleeping off alcohol. Megara found a man willing to pay, though not for much, and went home feeling faintly self-disgusted.

  The next morning, Megara decided to take a risk. Normally she sat passively in the presence of willing customers and hoped, but her finances were in a poor enough state that she was willing to take that risk. And so, once she had prettied herself, Megara walked for the better part of an hour, to a market far outside of her usual stomping grounds, but one which she happened to know was frequented by a wealthy client of hers. For a while she merely patrolled, buying little nothings and praying to the Golden Lord that nobody would realize the truth of her profession. Then, as the sun warmed the city and as Megara began to seriously question the wisdom of her actions, she spotted Rhea.

  Rhea was the wife of a wealthy merchant, in her te forties, about the time when a husband grew increasingly bored of his wife’s existence. It had caused her tastes to veer into the unbecoming; not that Megara didn’t find her quite attractive, of course. But even if she were ugly, she would still have been rich, and considering the price Rhea pced on Megara’s company, she was a very lucrative source of income. Megara maneuvered her way through the crowd, pretending to be absorbed in her own business right up until she bumped into Rhea.

  They talked for a long time. Accusations were made and skillfully parried, subtly-coded flirtations initiated and accepted. Megara continued to pretend that this was all a coincidence, spinning a story about a stall selling this one pigment she couldn’t find anywhere else, all the while leaning close to Rhea and letting her voice become breathy and soft. Eventually, the richer woman broke.

  “You know, I could perhaps spend a few hours…” Rhea said. “I can tell my husband I had to spend the time looking for the good-quality silks, which isn’t even entirely a lie. Half the shops have closed up, and the other half are selling at twice the usual price.”

  “Well,” Megara let slip, “There has been an assassination recently.”

  Rhea’s eyes went wide. “What? Whose?”

  “Eteocles, apparently. General Eteocles, and it was the Emperor holding the sword.”

  Rhea stood stunned for a moment, blinking at the crowd. “Yes, I think I do deserve some time for myself, then. Do you have a pce in mind?”

  “I think I do,” said Megara.

  They found a pce. It was small and quiet and the bed wasn’t quite as luxurious as what Rhea was used to, but it certainly wasn’t the bed that she spent the next two hours thinking about. The only shame was that it eventually had to come to an end. She spent the entirety of the walk home concocting fanciful schemes whereby she could convince her husband to let her out of his sight for a day or two or three or four, perhaps accompanied only by a male sve who she could bribe to stay silent. That would be wonderful, but there was no way he would ever believe whatever lie she came up with.

  There was a brief argument when Rhea arrived home. It started more or less exactly as she had expected: her husband berated her for being te, she expined that it was a miracle she returned at all considering there had been an assassination tely. Normally, this was where he would threaten violence but not actually carry through, and she would make a sad expression and rub his shoulder and ask why he was so angry, and that would be that. But that is not what happened.

  Instead, her husband went pale, and his eyes went wide, and he asked what she had meant about an assassination, and she expined what she knew. Immediately, he flew into a rage. Thankfully it was not aimed at her, but at the Emperor; a coward and a murderer who had given in to the foul influence of the Trabakondai witch. She allowed him to rant and rave at his pleasure, for it meant that he was no longer thinking about her tardiness.

  And outside the door of the chamber, a spy listened in. Her name was Sverrin, and she had been spying upon this household for over a month. Rhea’s husband, you see, was an influential man with ambitions of establishing himself to the degree that he earned a position in the Senate; ambition naturally earned attention. So it was that Ancaeus sought the aid of a mercenary, one who could observe without being noted. And who better to go unnoticed than a mere girl, an ordinary tailor? Nobody would assume that the girl who repaired and adjusted Rhea’s dresses was secretly working for the enemy.

  Sverrin had learned two things: firstly, that Eteocles had been murdered by his own Emperor. And second, that Rhea’s husband was furious, fully of the belief that this represented Trabakondai corruption of the Emperor, a pernicious conspiracy that had dogged the man for months. Ancaeus would wish to know about both of these things as soon as possible.

  Sverrin had a list of dates in her mind, almost a hundred of them, memorized over the course of hours of effort; all of the times and pces at which she was allowed to make contact with Ancaeus. The next one was the next morning, during the regur meeting of the Senate in its grand chamber. So she slipped away from the chamber door, back to the room where Rhea kept her dresses. That night, she returned to her own home, and in the morning, she made for the Senate.

  Earning entry to the Senate building was nigh-impossible for anyone who could not dispy a great deal of wealth, and that was when the Senate wasn’t in session. In the middle of a meeting, even rich men were often turned away. Three times Sverrin tried to obtain entrance, and three times she was hurled out. Only on the fourth attempt did she find a guard who, when Sverrin showed him Ancaeus’s symbol on a small medallion hidden under her dress, believed her.

  A giddy sensation overtook Sverrin as she approached the Senate chamber. She was paid for each secret individually, and so great a piece of knowledge about her target, and about the order of the city, would be worth a substantial quantity of bronze indeed. But as Sverrin slipped through one of the small doorways in the corner of the Senate chamber, all of that anticipation vanished. She would be lucky if what she had was worth any money at all. She would be lucky if Ancaeus would even listen to her. One man stood before the Senate, speechifying with every single eye in the chamber locked fully upon him. Sverrin recognized the man as Bellerophon, young upstart leader of the anti-Peleus faction.

  “Who is the Emperor? Is he a god? Is he a hero? No! He is a man! One man, who holds the reins of Macaria and its Empire, a man who is just as fallible as you or I. And in his fallibility, he has forgotten who he is, and who it is who has given him the reins of rule. For the st eight years we have accimed him, we have granted him accodes, we have granted him the title of Emperor! I say that it is about time for us to look, with crity and honesty, upon the man we have chosen to accode.

  “Peleus is a madman and a murderer. If he can sy his own chosen successor without consequence, then who will be next? The Patriarch of the Church? The city council? Us? I, for one, cannot allow this. And by the looks of rage in your eyes, my fellow senators, I believe that you have come to think the same thing. I say we hold it to a vote, here and now: rescind every accode, withdraw every title. Let Peleus know that the fine men of the Senate will not stand for this!”

  SaffronDragon