Chapter 5 - finale

 Colm passed a hand over his face. What had he gotten himself into?

This time when he put his hand over his face, it didn't smart as it had before. Must be the brandy taking the edge off...

He sat down before the magician.

“These women-folk!” Leni said, with a forced laugh.

Colm thought of his own wife; then he looked at the dismembered mermaid on his desk. Unfortunately, Leni hadn't worked any magic to make that whole again.

“Won't you tell me now your account of how you were implicated as your woman says you were, in the affair of the Abbey, and the scandal of the Salt.”

“It is not a very complicated story,” Leni said with another shrug. “Amos has already told you that her family has long been plagued by a most notorious Baron.”

“Rinz,” Colm said, remembering her story.

“The very same,” Leni said. “A loathsome man, a creature whose ambition is wide, but whose view is quite narrow. He is the sort you see stepping on ants for the pleasure of watching them pop under his heel. Most cannot fathom that he can be as conniving as he is; but lucky for me, I am a master of trickery myself, and so I'm not so easily duped.”

“You're saying he tried to frame you?”

“With a most shoddy construct, too. He placed some of my beakers and potions, which he had purloined from my workshop, about the broken buttress of the Salt Gate. By this, the investigators were were meant to deduce that I had blown up the foundation of the Gate with some type of chemical bomb. Honestly, I don't know what he'd been thinking. Either he doesn't give the honourable red-coats enough credit, and thinks them all idiots from the hindmost to the top of the Hive – or it could be that he is just extremely stupid himself.”

“Don't call us that!”

“What – idiots?”

“No, red-coats! We aren't insects, you know! This is no Hive where we slave away from some despotic Queen! We are the Guardians, and the Protectors! We are the ones who apprehend the villains, and we alone avert all atrocity!”

“Well, in this case, Commander, you did neither. The Salt Gate came down, and the real perpetrators got away clean. Despite all your labours, and the labour force at your command, you caught not a single man red-handed. Or in this case, white-handed.”

Colm felt shamed. Why had he erupted like that? The magician had been calling him a red-coat all afternoon – and while it surely bothered him, the Commander usually prided himself on his self-restraint. Was Leni pushing all of his buttons in all the right order?

He vowed not to let Leni get the better of him again, and to watch himself more closely.

Leni went on:

“I spoke with some of the Archers,” Leni stressed the word. “During a very brief investigation. I can give you their names, if you like. I was able to disprove any of the claims that I had anything to do with the Salt Gate coming down. It wasn't hard. All of those beakers that the bumbling Baron had taken had only mixtures for helping plants to grow – liquid fertilizer that I had been commissioned to create by the Society of High Horticulture, whose gardens were growing to include a most delicate shrubbery of Ispanian plants, which normally cannot flourish in temperatures such as these. Your men were convinced without a doubt of my innocence.”

“You didn't convince your man out there,” Colm blurted out. Why couldn't he keep his mouth shut? This was not the way to handle the magician!

“Indeed not,” Leni said with a sigh. “Veon has a good heart, but he also had blinders on. He is very much like a beast of burden, Commander. He takes the whip, and he plods on, carrying his sister as is his duty. Or at least, it used to be. He wishes to see me as a culprit, because that is how he perceives me. I am not only stealing his sister from him, you see; I am also taking away the crucial and critical part of his identity. And what beast that fears being put out to pasture will not fight for its survival?”

“He is a bit mindless,” Colm concurred. He was speaking now without any thought of censure, nor of censoring his words. He completed the story out loud: “You were able to prove also that these potions of yours had been stolen, but you found no evidence that led you to Rinz.”

“He is not entirely stupid, so it appears. I conducted a most thorough search, but I found no trace that could lead conclusively to his culpability. He were both let off the hook, although from that day I never took my eye off him. He is a small-minded man, but those can often be the most dangerous.”

“I suppose that is true,” Colm agreed rather amiably. He poured himself some more brandy, swirled it about the snifter, and tasted some. It now was much flatter, and this disappointed the Commander.

“Anyway,” Leni said in closing, “I think that even though I was not tried for that atrocity, Rinz was quite pleased with the result of his mischief.”

“What do you mean? Surely his aim was to have you arrested.”

“I think so, but since then I have reconsidered the matter many times. It's possible he simply wished to cast aspirsions on me. I don't think he expected to outwit me; but observe what has happened here today: Veon, who wants nothing more than to keep me from usurping him, planted the seed of doubt in your mind, and you already distrust me – is that not so, Commander?”

“Distrust you?” Colm said with a snort. “I wouldn't give you my gun to shoot a viper about to strike my beloved's bum!”

Leni snorted now, but in laughter. Colm's words were too ridiculous and unexpected. The Commander, feeling rather loopy, realized what he'd just said, and started laughing, himself.

“Where did that nonsense come from?” Colm chortled, laughing now harder and harder.

Leni, too, was bent over. Tears appeared in his eyes. The two men couldn't stop themselves.

“That-that's not even an expression!” Colm said breathlessly, between gasps and laughs. This just made them both laugh even more.

As he composed himself, Leni said to the Commander, “Won't you tell me something, now that I have shared with you my secret about the Salt Gate?”

“What is it?”

“What happened to your eye?”

“It met with somebody's fist.”

“But whose? And why?”

Colm passed his hand over his face, remembering the incident, but forgetting once again its result. He pulled his hand away from his face, expecting the same pain as before; but there was no more pain. He poked at the most sensitive parts of his bruised face, but it seemed as if the brandy had cut all discomfort.

“I was two nights ago in the Drift,” Colm began. “And as you know, there are only three reasons why any man goes there.” He waited for the magician to oblige him with the response; he did immediately:

“To drink, or to drive, or to take a dip.”

“Or all three, as it all too often happens!” Colm said with earnest regret.

“Lord Commander,” Leni said, using the man's official title for the first time, “are you telling me that the Paragon of the Law was presiding over illegal races?”

“I know it would thrill you to hear me say that it was so, but I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. I was there following a lead with several of my top investigators. I cannot tell you too many details-”

“I'm sure you can spare a few, Commander,” Leni said with a smirk. “No one goes Adrift without coming across an eyeful.”

Colm smiled at the memory, and said with real enthusiasm, “There was this one lassie – beautiful tits like you'd never believe! And an arse like two halves of moon-butter melon!”

Leni smiled and slapped the desk to encourage the Commander, who went on to talk at length about some of these other girls that he'd seen down in the seediest parts of Caza – but when Leni pressed to know if  the lawful Archer shot his arrow most faithlessly, he was assured once more that the answer would be most disappointing.

Colm became a bit more reserved after that; his eye fell once again on the decapitated mermaid and he remembered his wife – a woman he'd never cheated on, but who would still be shamed to hear her husband speak in such libidinous terms of the tarts and harlots of the Drift.

“So then you're a brawler,” Leni went on. “No doubt why you and Veon have such an affinity! You started a fight with some surly low-lives?”

“Once again-” Colm began.

“Disappointed, yes,” Leni cut him off. “But you misunderstand me, Commander. I would be disappointed only if you answered any differently than you have. I have a strict code which I keep, and I admire your adherence to your own covenant.”

Colm held up his glass, and Leni leaned forward to meet the toast. As their glasses touched, Leni flicked a gob of gray ooze into the Commander's glass. They both sipped from their respective cups, then set them down once more on the wooden desk.

“Will you tell me then, who gave you the black eye? If it wasn't a drunk, nor a driver, nor a drake – who then would have the nerve to assault the Lord Commander?”

“I'll tell you,” Colm said, “If you tell me what you've been putting into my drink. Don't think that you've concealed your movements as easily as that. That last move of yours was downright overt!”

Leni nodded. “It was meant to be,” he said. “Because, you see, you passed the test.”

“What test?”

“I wanted to see what kind of man you were, Commander. Whether we could see eye to eye.”

Colm reflected on this, and everything that had been going on since he returned from the latrine. “You mixed a serum for me,” he muttered. “A sooth-saying serum.”

“That is one of the effects,” Leni agreed. “Your mood has also improved noticeably. You'll remember that I imbibed just as much as you did.”

Colm looked at the magician with disdain, then glanced at his witch's pot with disgust. Its contents floated in a sludge on the surface of the water.

“I'm going to have you frogged for this offense.”

“You mean flogged, Lord Commander? Unless you plan to lash me with reptiles?”

“Amphibians,” Colm corrected. “Frogs aren't reptiles.”

“No, but you might find a good, sturdy asp would be far more apt to function as a whip. Just not on your beloved.”

Colm snickered at that, then felt guilty. He wanted to like Leni at this instant, but he knew what his duty was. He stood up, still laughing, and rang the bell for his assistant.

“It was the felon we were following,” Colm said at last. “We cornered him, under Drake Bridge, but he got the better of me, and got away.”

At that instant, the lanky lad came in to see to the Commander's bidding; but when he beheld Colm standing perfunctorily at his desk, the boy's jaw dropped.

“Y-yes, sir?”

“What are you gaping at?” Colm barked.

“Your eye,” the lad said, flabbergasted.

Colm put a hand to his face, where his cheekbone had been fractured and all the skin around his eye had been bruised, black, and ugly. There was no more swelling, no pain, nothing.

Colm opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a hand-held mirror gilded in gold and pearl. He saw then that his face was unmarred; the bruising was healed; by some devilry, the black eye had vanished.