The Penitent Damned by Django Wexler

The Penitent Damned
     
    Duke Mallus Kengire Orlanko, Royal Minister of Information—sometimes called the Last Duke, though not in his hearing—did not look particularly dangerous. He was short, balding, and tended toward the portly, a roly-poly little man with an unfortunate taste for rich purples that gave him the look of a ripe plum.
    Nevertheless, it was widely agreed that the Duke was the most dangerous man in Vordan, if not beyond. This was not simply because he was the inheritor of the most powerful fiefdom in the kingdom (though he was), or even because as Minister of Information his secret police, the all-seeing, all-knowing Concordat, had an informer in every shadow (though they did). What gave Orlanko his aura of terror was the certain knowledge that he had merely to crook a finger, and grim-faced men in long black coats would go to the home of the object of his displeasure in the middle of the night and haul the unfortunate away; and more importantly that no one would ever say a word about it , whether the prisoner was a beggar or a peer of the realm. Even the other Ministers of the Cabinet walked with care around the Last Duke.
    The most unusual thing about his appearance was his spectacles, made for him specially by the Doctor-Professors of the University. They had wide, thick lenses, and from most angles they obliterated the upper half of the Duke's face into a vaguely flesh-colored blur. Every so often, though, they'd slip by chance into a perfect alignment, and the startled subject of that level glare would find the Duke's eyes bearing down on him, magnified to five times their normal size.
    Currently, this unsettling stare was being directed at a thin sheaf of paper, which lacked the capacity for terror or unhappiness with its lot. In this, the Duke reflected, it had something in common with his visitor.
    "The third item," Andreas said, helpfully.
    The Duke tapped his finger on the paragraph in question, read it again, and sighed. He leaned back in his chair — custom made by the most cunning artisan in Hamvelt, it reclined gently under his weight with an almost subliminal whirring of gears and springs — and looked up across the vast expanse of his polished ironwood desk at his assassin.
    It wasn't that Orlanko didn't like Andreas, or that he had ever given unsatisfactory service. Rather, the Duke didn't care for what Andreas represented. Not the fact he was a killer — there were plenty of killers in the service of the Concordat, though fewer than the man on the street might have assumed. But Andreas was unique . He didn't fit into the carefully-coordinated hierarchy of the Ministry of Information, standing off to one side of Orlanko's organizational charts like an awkward party guest. He, and a handful of others like him, were the Duke's concession to the messiness of the world, the fact that not every problem could be slotted into an appropriately labeled box and taken care of in the normal course of business. For all Andreas' efficiency, Orlanko hated to be reminded that he was still necessary.
    Physically, there wasn't much to distinguish Andreas from any other Concordat agent. He was of medium height and medium build, with fair skin, sandy brown hair, and a face that was easy to forget. He wore the black leather greatcoat that served the secret police in place of a uniform, hands in his pockets, the fringe hanging behind him like a cape. The important differences were inside the man's skull. Andreas, Orlanko had found, thought in a different way. Not a normal way, to be sure, but there were times when the twisted path was the most effective, in the same way that a corkscrew can be the most effective tool for a job.
    In this case, though, Orlanko wondered if the assassin's unusual perspective had led him astray. He frowned.
    "Someone has obviously gotten desperate," the Duke said. "Desperate enough to hire a thief to try to steal from us , and I may say without false modesty that this is very