Chapter 70
Four twenty-seven. Tristan closed the brass face of the watch.
It was easy, that was the worst part. Tristan had always hated the way some philosophers wept at the difficulty of taking a life. Killing was easy, if you did it right, and often cheap. Death was nothing special: thousands died every day in the most mundane of ways without there being a plot afoot. Gods, a man could die eating soup if they were careless about it. Existence was a candle in the wind and the act of killing was nothing special, often no more complicated or demanding than hammering a nail.
Even those who wrote such words thinking of the moral implications, the scars on the soul… Had there ever been a time where mankind did not make a trade of soldiering? If you lined up men on a field and told them to thrust a spear or to pull a trigger, that they would get paid for it, most would do it. The sacred existence of one’s fellows did not weigh as much as the poets thought, when on the other side of the scales was the need to pay the rent.
No, it wasn’t hard to kill. It was easy, so fucking easy sometimes, and that was what made it dangerous because once you’d hammered in that first nail you started looking around and wonder what else in your life could be held up by judicious application of a hammer blow. And there wasalways something, wasn’t there? A nail. A score to settle, a loose end to tie up.
The Nineteenth Brigade was a little of both.
Tristan had spent days putting together their death, back before he tripped headfirst into his stint as a hostage. Multiple identical deaths, that was the trick he’d figured out. Tozi’s contract told her the most likely reason for her death over the following three hours and in a sense the perception was absolute: indirect means did not fool it, nor could it be gotten around by killing her in her sleep when she was not conscious to perceive.
Trying would wake her, as Tristan’s first attempt had proved.
What wasn’t absolute was that the contract could only warn her about one threat at a time and the details she got about her death were somewhat limited. That was the gap Tristan had realized he could slip through: multiple instances of the same poison. In the water, in the meal, in her gloves. Tozi Poloko’s contract was absolute but it was not precise. It’d warn her of arsenic, but it wouldn’t be able to warn her about all the different arsenics.
Not that Tristan would be caught dead using arsenic, anyway. The infamous inheritance powder could pass for a bad case of cholera, but the entire Nineteenth Brigade developing a sudden mortal bout of that disease right after sharing a supper would perhaps strain credulity a bit when the bodies were found. Hetun venom was a sure and quick killer, but also very expensive, so if he was to kill with an extract he preferred hemlock. Slower than venom but quieter, and easy to obtain on every shore of the Trebian Sea.