Page 57 of Sword Dance

Nione nodded. “Two men have been killed. Gelon stabbed Tionikos, and one of the fishermen pushed Demos down the stairs. Neither of them had a weapon.” She spoke bitterly.

“I wish I had been there,” said Aradne.

“I’m glad you weren’t.”

Damiskos turned to Varazda. “Let’s get everyone inside the warehouse,” he said. “Sit them down and pass around wine.”

“Good thought.”

To Aradne he said, “You know these women. I’ll take my lead from you. I think the first thing to do is keep everyone calm.”

“Uh. Yes.” She wasn’t looking particularly calm herself. “That is very important.”

Varazda began helping gently to lead the women and children toward the shelter of the warehouse, where Aradne brought out an amphora of the villa’s best wine, and they handed around cups of it. Someone else went to the cove with the beach houses, where there was a freshwater spring, and brought back water to drink as well.

By speaking to Nione and several other women, Damiskos pieced together an account of what had happened at the house. Nione had decided to tell Eurydemos what his students were accused of doing in Boukos, and Eurydemos had then rashly confronted Helenos and the others about it. That was what had pushed them into action.

They had shut Eurydemos in his room, gone looking for the mistress of the house, encountered resistance from some of the slaves, and violence had broken out. Nione, warned by Tyra of the students’ intentions, had been able to get away with most of her women—all her women, in fact, once the ones who had already been down on the beach were accounted for. She downplayed her own role, of course, but from what the others said, it was clear she had placed herself in considerable danger—been seized and threatened with a weapon and nearly pushed down the stairs herself—in making sure as many of her slaves as possible could flee the house. She bitterly regretted that she had not been able to save all of them.

The fishermen were still up at the house, being whipped into a frenzy by the students. Some of the household men had been suborned, either with threats or rhetoric. Looting seemed imminent, if not already in progress.

“I think I have a good grasp of the situation now,” Damiskos said to Varazda after summarizing all this. “Except for one thing. The documents the students stole from the Zashian embassy. When you told me about it before, you were pretending to be Aristokles’s servant, and I took it for granted you didn’t know what the documents were. But you were never Aristokles’s servant.”

Varazda nodded. “And in fact I know all about it. Yes.”

Chapter 14

“Varazda has told you that Eurydemos’s students planned and carried out an assassination in Boukos,” said Damiskos.

Nione nodded. Aradne shook her head but did not look surprised. They stood together with Damiskos and Varazda on the beach outside the warehouse, having left the rest of the women inside. Damiskos had almost forgotten to be tired; the old, familiar feeling of pushing himself past his body’s limits to plan the next phase of the campaign returned to him, and it felt something like joy.

“The murdered man was a diplomat from Zash, carrying details of troop deployment and fortifications on the Deshan Coast,” Damiskos said. “Those documents were stolen after his death.”

Aradne gave a low whistle. “That sounds bad. I take it that’s bad.”

“Yes,” said Varazda, “it is bad.”

“The Deshan Coast is a mess,” Damiskos explained. “There’s been a tenuous peace for the last couple of years, but it’s been heating up again recently.”

“But it’s civil war there, isn’t it?” said Nione. “It’s Zashians against Zashians.”

“It is now,” said Damiskos. “But for anyone who wanted Pheme to go to war with Zash again, it would be an ideal spot to strike—the power of the king is already weak in the region.”

“But no one wants Pheme to go to war with Zash again,” Aradne protested. “Do they?”

“Plenty of people do. Helenos has told me himself he thinks the republic needs war to be great, or some nonsense, and there are men in the military—men in high places—who would agree with him. I don’t know that any of them would do business with murderous philosophy students hawking state secrets, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

“I had a feeling, when I put the pieces together, that Helenos must have some information like this. In fact, it’s more dangerous than I’ve explained. Officially, Zash keeps no secrets from us on the Deshan Coast, because we’re there—we have legions permanently stationed in the colonies and collaborating with the Zashian crown in the region.

“But of course the king of Zash does have secrets—so do we. Whatever’s in these documents, there is bound to be something we don’t already know, something politicians and power-hungry officers in the legions can point to and claim Zash has been lying to us and breaking the peace of the colonies. It’ll be all the pretext they need to start another war.”

“That’s why,” Varazda added, “it doesn’t matter whether the king of Zash knows about the theft or not—it won’t help just to rearrange the troops so the documents are no longer accurate. That’s not the real danger. So we persuaded the embassy staff to delay reporting the theft until we’d tried to recover the documents.”

“You mean you’re lying to your king?” Aradne looked impressed.

“No, because he’s not my king. I’m a Boukossian citizen. I don’t work for the embassy—I’m here on behalf of the Basileon of Boukos.”

“And you’ve looked for these documents?” said Nione.