'I have a suggestion that I believe will solve all our problems,' Brasti said. He slung his quiver over his shoulder and picked up his bow. 'How about I go and put an arrow through Quentis Maren's heart?'

'Do you have any actual evidence against this man?' Mateo asked.

'Absolutely!' Brasti held out a hand and started tapping each finger in turn. 'First, he's a damned Inquisitor, so that should be enough of a reason. Second, he keeps trying to get control of Ethalia, supposedly for her own safety, but I think we can toss out that notion. Third, he and his men are too well armed for religious zealots. Fourth, he's cleverer than Falcio, so he has the mind for it, and fifth . . .' He paused, apparently having run out of reasons.

'You do realise that Quentis has handled himself honourably until this point,' Kest said.

Brasti jumped on that, tapping on his little finger. 'Ah, exactly! I knew I'd forgotten one.'

Tommer stared up at him. 'So behaving innocently is evidence of guilt?'

'Of course it is,' he replied. When no one spoke, he looked around at the rest of us as if we were idiots. 'Am I really the only person who remembers Shuran? Strong? Smart? Capable?' Brasti looked at Kest and me. 'And so righteous the two of you were ready to duel over who got to marry him first.'

Aline, who'd been sitting quietly for some time, rose from the sofa. 'So your proposed strategy, Brasti Goodbow, is that we should go out and kill anyone in a position of power who isn't obviously corrupt?'

'Exactly. Any man with power in this country who shows a shred of integrity is almost certainly a violent lunatic.' He bowed theatrically. 'Thus ends the only lesson in Tristian politics you'll ever need as Queen.'

Aline looked over to me. 'Why exactly did my father choose him to be a Greatcoat?'

'Every village needs an idiot,' I replied.

'Fine,' Brasti said, 'mock me ignore me. But when it turns out that the Inquisitor is secretly bedding Trin and that the two of them hatched this whole plot during a particularly rousing session of lovemaking, don't expect me to save the day.'

The sound of Valiana banging her fist on the arm of the sofa caused us all to turn. 'It's all right,' I said, going to her and trying to take hold of her arm. At first I feared the madness might be returning, but then she began gesturing with her hand, her thumb and two fingers pinched together.

'I think she wants something to write with,' Kest said after a moment, and started looking around the room for writing implements. Mateo eventually found what we needed inside an elaborate silver box that I suspected had been intended only for use during the signing of highly important treaties.

I dipped the pen in the small bottle of ink and then placed it in Valiana's hand and guided it towards the sheaf of paper I'd balanced on the arm of the sofa. Immediately she began to write, the words coming out as a tangle of scrawled lines.

'It's unreadable,' Brasti said. 'I think you have to be able to see in order to write.'

Aline took the paper and studied it. 'No, I think I can make it out. It's . . . There, you see? That part says "Realm's Protector overrides decree".'

The rest of us peered down at it. 'It looks more to me like she was trying to draw a drunken snake being eaten by fleas,' Brasti said. 'Even if you're right, though, what does that mean?'

'It's a legal interpretation,' Kest replied, 'and a rather dangerous one.'

Tristia has a hornet's nest of laws, ancient and modern, secular and clerical, overlapping jurisdictions and incompatible dictates. Apart from King Paelis, no one had spent as much time trying to unravel their disparate meanings as Kest had.

'You have to understand,' he went on, 'a Realm's Protector isn't like a Ducal one. They can't simply be voted out by a council. The position has no legal limits on its authority. The Dukes might have chosen to put Valiana in power, but once they did that, their own roles reverted to that of advisors. They can write all the decrees they want but in theory, she can override them all.'

None of us bothered mentioning the obvious: that such broad powers had the effect of making the Realm's Protector irremovable if she chose not to step down. The hells for it, I thought. She may be a dictator, but she's our dictator.

'If all that's true,' Brasti asked, 'then why does she keep letting them make her life hell?'

'Because Valiana knows the history of those who frustrated the Dukes' desires one too many times,' Aline replied. 'She knows what they did to my father.'

Once again Valiana began scrawling on the paper. We'd all been speaking so loudly practically shouting at each other that she must have heard what we'd said. She wrote something short and then scratched two sharp lines underneath. I went to her and took up the piece of paper. It said, Not Afraid.

Of course you aren't, I thought. That's why I need to be afraid for you.

Kest walked over to me and spoke quietly. 'Falcio, no matter what laws we invoke, if Valiana stays locked behind this mask, the Dukes will argue that she is incapable of fulfilling her duties. They will claim that Tristia has no Realm's Protector any more.'

Everything we'd worked for, everything Valiana had accomplished these last months, would unravel.

'We may not know who the enemy is,' Kest said, 'but we can be sure that removing the Realm's Protector is a key part of his plan.'

'We need a cure for her,' I said.

He looked doubtful. 'We don't even know what poison runs through her veins. How can w-?'

I cut him off, both because I was tired of my failures being given voice and because I had an idea not a particularly good one, I confess, but it was all I had. The enemy kept shaping the world to his liking because I couldn't work out his methods. I was a man of laws and swords and this was poison and torture and conspiracy.

Who do I know who happens to be an expert in those things?

I turned to Tommer. 'I need a favour,' I said.

He looked back at me with that unbreakable admiration of his. 'Command me, First Cantor.'

I was keenly aware of the irony of my words when I replied, 'I need a message delivered, Tommer. Something I can't trust to anyone else.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.

The Bodies

For the second time in as many days, I found myself inside the palace's death house, the well-dressed figure of Jillard, Duke of Rijou, leaning casually against one of the examining tables. He'd placed a goblet of wine on Sedge's chest. 'I confess I was surprised to hear from you so soon, Falcio. If you were a better man I'd almost say it was an honour.'

'If you were a better man, it might be.'

He stared at me quizzically for a moment. 'You know, I have no idea what that meant.'

Neither did I. I'd just thought it sounded clever at the time.

The Duke gestured to the rapiers that were now sheathed at my side. 'Found your old friends, I see. I do hope you didn't ask for this meeting just so you could murder me. That would be terribly gauche for a magistrate.'

I wondered briefly whether the jibe was a test to see if I already knew about the Ducal decree handing authority over to the Inquisitors. Not wanting to give him the satisfaction, I kept my expression neutral and joined him at the examining tables. 'Actually, your Grace, I was hoping you could tell me how these men died.'

Jillard reached over and picked up the goblet sitting atop Sedge's chest. 'I'm fairly sure this one died from you breaking his neck.' He gestured with the goblet at Beltran. 'This one . . . well, you made quite a sculpture out of his skull.'

'That part I already knew, your Grace.'

He narrowed his eyes and the corners of his mouth crept up. I'd piqued his curiosity. 'Then what is your real question?'

Tell me how Valiana was poisoned. Tell me how to save her and then tell me where I can find the man who arranged it all.

I couldn't ask him what I wanted, not directly, anyway. If he knew the suspicions I was harbouring about how the God's Needles got their abilities, it might prejudice his examination of the body. Also, I don't discount the possibility that Jillard himself is behind all of this. 'I was wondering if there might be something else that contributed to these men's deaths. Something attuned to your family's more . . . toxic interests.'

Jillard stared at me, then raised an eyebrow. 'I swear, Falcio, I'm considered to have a reasonably serpentine mind but even I can't discern what you're saying.'

I pointed to the corpses on the tables. 'Just . . . pretend these men had no wounds. What could you tell me about their deaths?'

Jillard's eyes narrowed, but he nonetheless reached past me for a thin, flat metal instrument sitting on the wooden tray. He lifted one of Sedge's hands and began probing at his fingernails. After a moment, he put down the hand and then pried open the dead man's mouth, pressing the instrument against the tongue. 'Ah . . .'

'Could you elaborate?'

Jillard pressed the instrument down, forcing the jaw open wider, and used his other hand to tilt the hanging lantern overhead to illuminate the inside of the assassin's mouth. 'There. You see that?'

The man's tongue was a mixture of every shade of black and red. 'It looks like a dead man's tongue.'

'Almost. But it's actually a little too red. Given the manner of his death, it should be more grey by now. How well do you know your poisons, Falcio?'

'A little better than I'd like, thanks to Duchess Patriana.' I leaned down to get a better look, but I still couldn't see what Jillard was seeing. 'Not well enough to know what you're talking about.'

'There are three toxins that leave the inside of a man's tongue with this sort of reddish residue. All of them are fatal.' Jillard put down the instrument and left the table to go and search through the large wooden cabinets on the wall behind us. He rummaged through them all, paying no mind to the chaos he was creating. After a minute he returned with a small package wrapped in plain white cloth. 'Most poorly organised death house I've ever seen,' he muttered, and removed the cloth to reveal a rough, rectangular block that could have been carved from soap or chalk. 'Halcite,' he said, waving the lump beneath my nostrils.

I nearly gagged from the scent. 'Hells, that smells worse than death itself.'

Jillard picked up another instrument from the wooden tray, this one a thin metal stick with a tiny flat spoon at the end. He dug at the surface of the halcite and then scraped the white powder it yielded onto Sedge's tongue, leaving a white stain against the red and black.

'And?' I asked, after a moment.

'Patience,' Jillard said.

The white patch began to smoulder and hiss and I half-expected smoke to start roiling from the man's mouth. 'It's changing colour,' I said.

Jillard held up a hand. 'A few seconds more . . . ah, there it is . . .'

I leaned in to see that the white residue had now taken on a glistening, coppery colour. 'It looks almost metallic.'

'That's the Halcite reacting with the toxins. Adoracia fidelis would be my guess.'

'Adoracia?' I asked. The name wasn't amongst the rather long list of things I'd been poisoned with thus far in my life.

Jillard carefully tapped the tiny spoon against the edge of the table and placed it back on the tray. 'Comes from the plant of the same name. You grind it up into a brown powder and then inhale. It's said to numb pain, keep you awake, lend strength to your muscles.' He smiled at me. 'Oh, and it tends to give one rather pronounced religious hallucinations.'

I was careful not to react to this confirmation of my suspicions. Terrific, I thought, because what was really missing from Tristia was droves of psychotic zealots who ignore fatal wounds whilst imagining the Gods are speaking to them. 'And where might one find this Adoracia fidelis?'

'Where do you think? Churches, mostly in the middle lands of Domaris. In the old days, before Adoracia was banned, less scrupulous clerics would cultivate it in their herb gardens.' Jillard mimed dropping grains of powder onto his palm. 'They'd rub a little on their hands and when the congregants lined up to kiss the palm they'd get just enough Adoracia in them to feel a touch of that old-time religious devotion. I believe it also helped to liberate the gullible from their coins.'

The implications of Jillard's words were more than troublesome. Could the clerics, fearful and angry over the murder of their Saints and the desecration of their holy places, have turned to this poison to to what? Turn their congregants into assassins?

'I can see the wheels turning in your mind, Falcio,' Jillard said, leaning back against the table and crossing his arms over his chest, 'but these men couldn't have got their abilities by inhaling Adoracia.'

'But you just said-'

'Oh, for Saints' sake, man! If it was that easy to make nigh-on unkillable warriors, don't you think I'd already have an army of them? It's as I told you: Adoracia is a poison. The adverse effects on a man's mind are a dozen times more powerful than the physical benefits.' He pointed at Sedge's corpse. 'The quantity of Adoracia required for what this man did would have shattered his mind instantly.'

Damn it all. My believable explanation had just turned into another dead end. 'Then we're back to this being' I can't believe I'm saying this 'magic that comes from drinking a Saint's blood.'

'Don't be a fool!' Jillard snapped.

I stared at the Duke, and noticed lines on his forehead, a slight pinching at the corners of his eyes. 'You know something you aren't telling me,' I said. 'This isn't the first time you've encountered Adoracia.'

He hesitated a moment, and when he did speak, his voice was hushed, as if he were suddenly afraid someone else might hear. 'Patriana had a certain passion for . . . I suppose you might call it improving on the human condition.'

'I make things useful,' she had told me in the dungeons of Rijou. The memory of her smile, of the clear-eyed determination and her utter conviction that what she was doing was right and just had made me shudder; now I discovered time hadn't dulled my reaction. 'She was insane,' I said.

'That would depend on your perspective, I suppose, but you can't deny she was a rigorous investigator into these matters.'

She had killed twenty Greathorses trying to create one obedient warhorse. I wondered whether Monster resented me for having killed Patriana before she could get to the Duchess herself.

'She uncovered a treatise on an esoteric mode of torture,' Jillard explained. 'I thought it was rubbish, just supernatural claptrap, but Patriana always did have a keen scientific mind and she thought there might be some use in distilling the ritual down to its more fundamental, chemical procedures.' He picked up his goblet and swirled the wine within, then breathed in the aroma before sipping. 'The problem with substances such as Adoracia,' he continued after he'd swallowed, 'is that you can't simply drink them in any significant quantity. Patriana uncovered a rather unusual delivery mechanism.' He held the goblet over Sedge's mouth and allowed a slow drip of wine down his throat. 'She forced the poison into one subject.' He set down the goblet back down and lifted Sedge's arm. 'Then she cut him open to let another drink the blood.'

Images of Birgid and Saint Anlas, the shallow cuts on their bodies, filled my head. 'That's . . . How can that even work?'

Jillard let go of Sedge's arm and it fell lifelessly to the table.' 'It's a depth of biology that goes beyond my understanding. Somehow by circulating it in the bloodstream of one victim and then using their blood as the serum for another, you could manage to impart the necessary properties without killing the recipient.'

'But if Patriana found a way to deliver the drug, then-?'

He cut me off. 'It didn't work, at least, not in any usable way. The victims' minds were destroyed so quickly the terrors were so profound that every one of them died within minutes. The blood-serum only appeared to work when it was fresh, sucked up in careful doses over time.' He looked away as he admitted, 'It's really quite disgusting to watch.'

Apparently we've finally found a depth of depravity that bothers even the man who brought the Blood Week to Rijou. The memory of Saint Gan-who-laughs-with-dice, his body covered in bloated red fluttering insects, took away any smug satisfaction I might have found in Jillard's reaction. Why the moths? They must serve as some sort of . . . storage vessel for the blood, keeping it usable so it could be parcelled out in precise doses . . .

'Of course,' Jillard said, 'none of it would help unless you had a mind so strong it could resist the insanity from the Adoracia long enough for it to circulate into the bloodstream.' He reached inside his coat and pulled out a partially broken iron mask the one Birgid had been wearing. He held it so the inside was facing me, that metal funnel sticking out. 'Ingenious, don't you think? To use the only beings we know of whose focus is so perfect, whose minds are so disciplined by . . . whatever spiritual nonsense drives such people . . . that they can withstand the madness the poison inflicts.'

'Except most of the Saints have some form of Awe that would make it difficult to hold them,' I said.

Jillard flipped the mask around and set it down on Sedge's face. 'It would appear the mask's magical properties include preventing the Saints from using their Awe. I suspect it also holds back the effects of the madness somewhat.'

'But Birgid was wearing the mask when she came into the courtroom at Baern, and her Awe nearly dropped all of us-'

'Nearly,' Jillard said. He pointed to the broken side of the mask. 'This was quite damaged by the time you took it off her, was it not?'

I didn't bother to answer; I was too busy fitting all the pieces together in my head. Someone was capturing Saints, locking them inside the masks so they couldn't escape, and then feeding them the Adoracia so that their followers could drink from the blood and turn into 'God's Needles': perfect, fearless, devoted killers, unable to feel pain, and just crazy enough to do exactly what you commanded them to do. I whispered, 'But how could anyone-?'