Death's Avenger

Chapter Two-2

Secondly, Nanda’s demeanour was decidedly not pleased. But Konrad did not think it was merely the displeasure of having no attendant. In fact, she was contrary enough to resent such solicitude if it was offered. She stood in silence before the fire, with no news to share and no enquiries to make of Konrad. Her pale eyebrows were furrowed in a deep frown, and her thoughts appeared to be elsewhere.

‘Are you well, Nan?’ he said, some small part of his earlier worries unfurling once again.

She refocused her ice-blue eyes upon his face, vaguely, as though she had forgotten his presence. ‘There was some trouble,’ she replied. ‘I was deciding whether or not to inform you of it.’

He blinked. ‘Why would you hide it from me?’

She sighed, and ran her hands through her white-blonde hair. The gesture arrested Konrad’s attention, for she was not usually prone to such fidgets. ‘Because it concerns Danil, whom I am well aware you do not like.’

Danil Dubin. Konrad sighed inwardly, and put aside any fond hopes he might have been harbouring that he would not have to think about that young man again for a while. ‘What has gone awry with him? He may not be a prime favourite with me, but I would not wish harm upon any friend of yours.’ He spoke the words with total sincerity, only belatedly remembering that he had, only the day before, been cheerfully wishing death upon the man.

He put this inconvenient recollection firmly aside.

Nanda hesitated, her face sad and grim, and a horrible thought occurred to Konrad.

‘He… is alive, yes?’

Nanda arched one brow. ‘Of course.’

Konrad let out a quick sigh of relief, and mentally blessed Ootapi. The serpent had not been fool enough to carry through his cheery offer of murdering the poison trader, then; for an instant, Konrad had been heart-poundingly afraid.

But his relief was short-lived, for Nanda added: ‘For now.’

‘Um.’ Konrad took a moment to absorb these words. ‘You mean he is alive… for now?’

‘Yes. It cannot last long, I am afraid.’

‘He fell ill on the road. Oh, Nanda, I am sorry.’ Konrad realised, to his own surprise, that he really was sorry. For all his vicious, gloomy wishes of the day before, he did not truly feel that the man deserved to die, and Nanda’s pain always cut him.

But Nanda shook her head again. Finally she turned away from the fire and set about making tea and a meal. Konrad assisted her in silence, aware that she needed to gather her thoughts.

Halfway through their silent repast, Nanda finally spoke.

‘Danil killed someone.’

Konrad choked upon a mouthful of hot tea. ‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Danil,’ Nanda repeated with slow emphasis, ‘killed somebody.’ She swallowed half of her tea in one go, not appearing to notice its heat, and set down her cup. ‘A few hours ago. We travelled home a little early, hoping to avoid the worst of the weather, and reached the outskirts of Ekamet early this morning. But as we came through the gates, Danil saw someone he knew. A man called Kovalev. And he… snapped, somehow. He took a knife out of somewhere — and I have never before known him to carry a weapon, Konrad — and stabbed Kovalev seven times before he was hauled off him, and subdued.’

Konrad heard all this in utter disbelief, and did not interrupt.

‘Kovalev died, of course, and Danil is taken into custody. But, Konrad… he cannot explain to me what he has done, or why. He doesn’t appear to know. He talks of Kovalev as some kind of rival for a girl he once courted, and appears to hold him in contempt. But not murderous contempt! And he cannot remember having killed the man! He sees the blood on his clothes and frets, because he does not know how it came to be there, and he will not believe anybody when he is told how he came to be in police custody.’

Konrad felt colder and colder as he listened, his mind making too many chilling connections for his comfort. Between Dubin’s fate and that of Sokol, for a start — no reassuring pattern, that. And Dubin’s relationship to Kovalev struck him as far too similar to his own relationship to Dubin. That realisation could not enhance his tranquillity either.

Nanda applied herself to her food, and at last it struck Konrad that her composure was strained, her apparent calm only a semblance of it.

‘There can be no doubt that he is guilty of the crime,’ she said in a low voice.

Konrad was late to arrive at the conclusion poor Nanda had probably been tormenting herself over for hours.

Dubin had murdered someone, in plain sight of many witnesses. Whether he knew what he had done or not, whether he remembered, whether he could explain it: he was a killer.

And that meant it would be Konrad’s unhappy duty to kill him.

Konrad’s heart smote him at the idea, and he swallowed sudden bile. He had never imagined that his deplorable duty would someday oblige him to dispense with somebody Nanda cared for.

‘Nanda,’ he said. ‘Nan. I promise you: I will do nothing… permanent… until we have unravelled this mystery and learned the truth of Dubin’s behaviour. There is more to this story you do not yet know.’

She kept her eyes upon her food for the first part of this speech, but raised them to his face at last with the news that there was more for her to hear. ‘Tell me,’ she said, and he detected a flicker of hope in her eyes that had not been there before.

He related everything Nuritov had said about Sokol. She was as quick to recognise the similarities between the two cases as he, and she visibly revived with every word.

‘Where is Dubin now?’ Konrad asked in conclusion, filled with a restless energy to begin upon the case at once.

‘The police have taken him somewhere. They said he is a danger to the public, which may very well be true, for if he could kill under such conditions once, might he not do so again? I am glad he is safely away. Oh, but Konrad, he knows his life is forfeit. He knows he waits for the Malykant. He is in a sad way.’

She did not quite meet his eyes as she said this, and Konrad realised the answer to a question that had been bothering him. Why had she not come to him right away? Why had she sent no word? If he had not been here awaiting her, he would still be oblivious to Dubin’s fate — or he would have heard of it from some other source.

‘You do not believe me, Nan? You think I will have Dubin dispatched by tea-time.’

Nanda sighed, and rubbed at her eyes. ‘I do not know what to think. I know you would not lightly destroy anything of mine, but I am also aware that your duty is all that you live for. Can you say that you have ever hesitated to deliver The Malykt’s Justice, in the past?’

Never for long, certainly. But most of the cases Konrad had lived through had been fairly clear-cut. Murders had been committed by those of questionable morals (or sanity), for reasons that clearly benefited themselves at the expense of their victims. In such cases as that, Konrad felt no compunction about ushering them out of the world. He did not have to question either his right to deliver such a punishment, or the rightness of his doing so.

But that did not mean that he killed without thought, without judgement or without consideration. At his secret heart, he was petrified of the day that he committed a mistake — killed someone who did not deserve that fate, whatever reason they might have to claim exoneration. He always took great care.

He had thought that Nanda had come to accept him fully, at long last, as her friend, irrespective of the horrific things he often had to do. That she trusted his humanity, and accepted that he was not all horror. But his status as the Malykant could still override any other impression he might give, it seemed, and her fear of the brutal side of his nature could still overwhelm her affection for his finer characteristics.

The realisation cost him a pang, but he set it aside. He would just have to prove himself to her — again.

It did not matter. If he had to prove himself worthy of her friendship a hundred times over, so be it.

‘I swear,’ he said to Nanda, making sure that she met his eyes. ‘I will do nothing to harm Dubin until, or unless, we are both fully satisfied of his full guilt in this matter.’

She winced a little when he said until, and he sighed inwardly. She wanted a promise that he would never harm Dubin, but that he could not give. If the little poison trader lied, and had killed the man Kovalev in cold blood, then he merited the usual consequences. And Konrad would be forced to deliver them, however he personally felt about the matter.

He had given the best reassurance he was able to offer. All that remained was to investigate, and to fervently hope that Dubin was as essentially innocent of wrongdoing as he claimed to be.

Nanda pulled herself together, and when Konrad rose from her little kitchen table she followed suit. ‘I will come with you,’ she announced.

She meant to do so in order to keep an eye on him, obviously, but Konrad was happy to accept the offer. ‘Have you Read Dubin yet?’

‘I have not had the opportunity,’ Nanda replied. ‘He was kept from me, while he remained armed, and soon afterwards taken away by the police. Nobody would let me near him.’

Her tone was bitter; she obviously resented that interference. But Konrad could picture the scene all too well in his mind, and privately applauded whichever passersby had contrived to keep trusting Nanda away from an apparently mad, homicidal maniac, armed with a knife and covered in the blood of the man he had just stabbed to death in the street.

‘We will do that first,’ Konrad decided. ‘Afterwards I would be grateful if you would do the same for Sokol. It seems likely that both speak the truth, when they claim no memory of the event: it would be odd, and too much of a coincidence, for two unconnected men to commit similar crimes almost at the same time, and both claim forgetfulness. But I would like to be certain.’

Nanda nodded once, and set about readying herself to depart. Konrad regained his own cloak and hat, his thoughts turning busily upon the conundrum.

The matter of Sokol had been in the papers, of course, but Dubin had only just returned from Marja. The chances that he had read of the case, and been motivated to mimic Sokol’s response to his own crime, did not seem high. Besides, there was the apparently random nature of the meeting — happening to bump into Kovalev at the gates, just as Dubin was passing through himself, would be a difficult thing to arrange ahead of time, supposing the murder both intentional and premeditated.

But then why had the peaceful Dubin carried a knife?

The matter was complex, and Konrad blessed Nanda and her abilities now more than ever.

As they left the house, a stray thought drifted into Konrad’s mind: Tasha. She had told him today would be momentous, and she could not possibly have been referring to anything other than the very problem he now faced. How had she found out about Dubin’s crime before he had?

The only possible explanation was that she was watching Nanda, too — she or some colleague of hers. The thought angered him, and he made a mental note to interrogate the interfering little lamaeni at his earliest convenience.