Book 4 Chapter 50.5: Making Use of Assets

++Isabel seems to have been getting on well with her new siblings and cousins. Too well. Investigate that at once, one or all of them are probably planning something.++

- An order given from Aravon Voret to one of his manservants shortly before the official wedding ceremony of his grandson and Isabel Vornholt.

Backry didn’t like how Isabel was smiling. She looked far too smug and far too victorious, like something was falling into place that she could see clearly and he could not. Was she smarter than him?

Maybe. Women weren’t thought of as much in most places, but Backry knew from growing up under his grandmother’s iron fist that the rare freaks among them could be as scary as any man.

Just as scary, and infinitely meaner. Inside every woman there was a vicious streak a mile wide. Sugar, they were. And much like sugar, if you applied too much heat, they turned molten and burned you worse than any scalding water could.

“I…did say I’d help,” Backry croaked. He felt like he was watching this conversation from somewhere else.

“If you do, I might well consider your insult forgotten,” Isabel told him. “And that would very much be in your best interests. I do not forget insults on their own, not ever. I tend to remember them for a very long time indeed. Did you hear about what happened to the men who insulted me by trying to kidnap Victoria in Laugrey?”

Backry had heard about them, everyone in Garamon seemed to by now. He’d heard more than most thanks to the Voret family’s proximity and interest in the crime, and their general ability to acquire whatever sort of knowledge they wanted.

He had heard, for instance, that the corpses which had actually been recovered were all bereft of their skin. That the coroners thought they’d been flayed alive by the boiling water, like lobsters in a pot.

He’d also heard that the general forensic hypothesis about those bodies that were never recovered, not even at the bottom of the river, was that they’d been reduced to little more than mist.

Isabel had gotten away with that, like she’d gotten away with so much else. And she was bringing it up to him now. Why?

The answer didn’t take Backry long to come up with, and when his brain finally formulated it he was left to tremble with dawning horror all over again.

She was letting him know that she could kill him just as easily.

Backry found it hard to think suddenly. He found his thoughts scattered and slipping from his grip, he found it hard to even remember anything at all except for the presence of the woman seated opposite him, and the looming bodyguard tucked silently away in one corner. That man might not even wait for the order to kill him.

Better talk fast then.

“You must have something in mind, right?” Backry asked. “I mean, a woman like you—of your ambition, I mean, there has to be something you need doing. I’m good with magic. I’m powerful. You know this, maybe I don’t hold a candle to your talent but you’d have to search pretty hard to find a magician stronger than me.” He winced. “Uh…you know, when you’re not near one of the world’s greatest Institutes I mean.” Backry got the terrible feeling he was talking himself to death.

Isabel certainly didn’t seem to be any less dangerous now than she’d been before he opened his fat mouth again.

She remained silent for a while, and Backry had to try very hard to keep himself from barking out something stupid, like words, or noises, or anything at all besides a continuation of this long, inoffensive silence. She made it hard. It wasn’t anything particular about Isabel, he decided, but rather a vague and holistic quality about her.

The woman just radiated lethality.

“That is quite the promise,” she murmured at last, sounding more like she was talking to herself than addressing Backry. With this in mind, he maintained his silence and let her continue.

“There may be something I could use you for,” she noted. “But…hm. No, nevermind.” She turned, not to Backry but to her bodyguard standing in the corner of the room. Backry had seen and heard enough of the man he now identified as Dave Blakely to be aware that he had all of two seconds before Isabel’s order came and his brain matter suddenly turned into a wall decoration.

“I’ll do it,” he said hastily. “And even if I can’t, you’ll lose nothing by my trying, I promise you.”

Isabel paused, holding back the order she’d been about to give. She finally turned to Backry again.

“How can I trust that you will keep your silence?” She asked him. Backry was being told to argue in favour of his own continued existence. He liked to think, given the stress inherent to such a situation, that he did so well.

“I’m a Voret,” he ended up saying. “We can keep secrets where other Vorets are concerned. You’re new to the family, so maybe you don’t know that yet, but this is our greatest quality even including the magic. I’d say to go and ask the others but…well, we can keep secrets.”

He had nothing. Backry didn’t know Isabel enough to persuade her, he was too panicked to think of anything smart or convincing, he was mildly hung-over and even at the best of times he was far from possessing a silver-tongue.

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But he knew that his family’s name had gotten him out of other pinches, and he knew that they damned well could do everything he was saying and more. Whatever it happened to be, whatever the offence, if one Voret did something and another saw it, there were no witnesses.

Backry had made use of this fact himself plenty of times over his life, and now it seemed he’d be benefitting from it more indirectly.

There was one problem with this gambit though, and it wasn’t a small one. As Backry had said, Isabel was new to the Vorets. A lot of women were more innocent than men, even the nasty ones. Not in a natural sort of way, though he didn’t doubt that was a factor, but more just because…well, people didn’t tend to tell them about all the nasty things being done behind the scenes.

If Isabel doubted what he was saying, then he had nothing to bargain with.

But Isabel didn’t look like she was doubting anything. In fact, she didn’t look even slightly sceptical.

“Magicians don’t change, do they?” she sighed. “We always have our little secrets. Always holding onto them with fists tight enough to crush stone. Even unto death.”

Backry didn’t like that last word. He didn’t like it at all. In fact, on the long list of words he’d rather not have heard Isabel end a sentence with right now, it was hard to think of any that exceeded that one. “Fire”, perhaps. Or “sodomy” maybe.

But she wasn’t building up mana for an attack, nor looking her bodyguard’s way. Backry sent a few furtive glances at the man and saw that he was just tucked away in the corner still, statuesque and unmoving. His eyes were on Backry though. It felt like he was being stared at by a stone gargoyle, a big one. Precipitously balanced on a ledge. Like he was waiting to see whether it would fall, and all with a drastically more powerful magician at his back who’d doubtless strike the moment Backry’s magic built up to defend himself.

Isabel interrupted this latest round of panic.

“Very well then Backry, I will accept your help.”

He actually moaned with relief as she said that, sinking several inches down into his chair as every joint in his body seemed to decompress at once. Backry realised only after a few moments of helplessness that she might’ve been lowering his guard for a less messy kill.

But no, she wasn’t. He was not, after all, messily killed.

“So…that’s it then?” Backry grinned. “I’m off the hook?”

Isabel eyed him like he’d just drooled on his shirt.

“Most certainly not, if you think it is an easy task you are being given, then you will be most surprised.”

Backry straightened up and got serious. This was Isabel he was talking about, he knew just enough to realise that if she was giving him a task it would probably be one of the more horrific experiences of his life.

“Right,” he said hurriedly. “Of course. What…uh, what needs doing?”

And Isabel gave him the details. She did so clinically and calmly, conveying the information as might a doctor the results of some routine check-up. Except there was nothing routine about this at all, and Isabel’s nature and skills were rather in the opposite direction of most doctors. Backry found himself suddenly rather desperate for a drink as she spoke.

“May I, uh, may I have a glass of that?” he asked, nodding to a decanter by the desk.

“No,” Isabel told him. “Will you do the job?”

Backry still didn’t see that he had any choice, and nodded. Isabel let him go with no more than his word.

Of course she did. Whatever else the Voret family were, they were, as Isabel had said, magicians at their core. His damned word was probably the one binding that could actually drag Backry to the grave.

***

I watched my idiotic brother in law lumber out of the room with no small amount of satisfaction. The meeting had been even more fun than I had anticipated.

“He’ll be a problem,” Blakely told me from the corner. He was sharpening a bayonet. I did not know why a bayonet of all things, but I knew that my bodyguard could be touchy about his weapons, so I left him to it.

“Of course he will be a problem,” I noted. “He is a Voret.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Blakely shot back. “He’s stupid. Impulsive. Not a good combination. If he smells your blood in the water he’ll turn on you as quick as anything.”

“You think that about everybody,” I observed.

Blakely shrugged. “I’m right here though.”

He was, to be fair. I looked back to the door Backry had left through.

“He is stupid, which is why I need him for this. The other Vorets are too smart to let me bully them into a job this absurdly risky.”

Elqarth was one of the few people in Garamon that the Vorets could not antagonize with impunity. He was hardly more powerful than them, of course, but his wealth earned him the precious position of ‘not worth the trouble’. As someone who had to actually kill several Vorets to secure that same designator, I was actually faintly jealous.

“You’d be better with a smart one,” Blakely frowned.

“Yes, I would. But I do not have the option of a smart one. A smart Voret would think for a few seconds and realise that there is no way I could possibly kill or hurt him without facing some sort of consequences.”

It really was amazing how stupid he was. There had to be some sort of observable abnormality in his brain to cause the condition. For instance, perhaps half of it was missing. Something like that. I had a hard time believing idiocy of this order could be housed in a normal one.

Still, the terminally stupid always did have their uses. Backry wore his animosity for me on his sleeve, as he did all other emotions, which meant that I had been treated to a few weeks spent overhearing second and third-hand accounts of how he had been disparaging me as, depending on his level of intoxication, anything from a whore to an actual succubus.

This was mildly annoying for the most part, but for others it was a clear challenge to me. Which meant, I hoped, that my working with him and making use of his mediocre talents would not occur to anyone who might investigate what was really about to happen at Earl Elqarth’s mansion.

And if Backry should get himself hideously killed along the way, that was fine too. After all, who would believe him claiming that a woman he publicly hated was responsible? And what magicians could sift through his drug-addled mind of sludge to find anything resembling the truth?

And besides, he had called me a whore.