The men complied. It was not long before the table was righted, the goblet returned to its place. The pieces of fine ceramic were swept into a neat pile. The bodies were removed and the blood was mopped at, in most cases ineffectually.
Damen had never before seen half a dozen soldiers reduced to compliant housekeeping by the sheer force of one man’s personal arrogance. It was almost instructive.
Halfway through proceedings, Laurent stepped backwards to lean his shoulders against the wall.
Finally, the men were gone.
The room had been superficially righted, but had not returned to its former tranquil beauty. It had the air of a sanctuary disturbed, but it was not only the atmosphere that was disrupted; there were tangible blots on the landscape too. The men were soldiers, not house servants. They had missed more than one spot.
Damen could feel the beat of his pulse, but he could not make sense his own feelings, let alone of what had happened. The violence, the killing and the bizarre lies that followed had been too sudden. His eyes scrolled around the room, surveying the damage.
His gaze snagged on Laurent, who was watching him in return rather warily.
Asking to be left alone for the rest of the night really didn’t make much sense.
Nothing that had happened tonight made any sense, but there was one thing that while the soldiers performed their work Damen had come slowly to realise. Laurent’s posture was perhaps slightly more exaggerated than his usual insouciant lean. Damen tipped his head to one side and gave Laurent a long, scrutinising look all the way down to his boots, then back up again.
‘You’re wounded.’
‘No.’
Damen didn’t remove his gaze. Any man but Laurent would have flushed or looked away or given some sign that he was lying. Damen half expected it, even from Laurent.
Laurent returned the look, and then some. ‘If you mean excluding your attempt to break my arm.’
‘I mean excluding my attempt to break your arm,’ said Damen.
Laurent was not, as Damen had first thought, drunk. But if you looked closely, he was controlling his breathing, and there was a faint, slightly febrile look in his eyes.
Damen took a step forward. He stopped when he ran into a blue-eyed look like a wall.
‘I would prefer you to stand further away,’ said Laurent, each word finely chiselled, as though in marble.
Damen swung his gaze over to the goblet that had been knocked over during the fight, its contents spilt; the Regent’s men, unthinkingly, had righted it. When he looked back, he knew from Laurent’s expression that he was right.
‘Not wounded. Poisoned,’ said Damen.
‘You can restrain your delight. I am not going to die from it,’ said Laurent.
‘How do you know that?’
But Laurent, delivering him a killing look, refused to elaborate.
He told himself, feeling oddly detached, that it was no more than justice: Damen perfectly recalled the experience of being doused with a drug then thrown into a fight. He wondered if the drug was chalis: could it be drunk as well as inhaled? It explained why the three men had been so casually assured of their own success in tackling Laurent.
It also lay the blame all the more firmly at his own feet, Damen realised. It was sordidly believable that he would revenge himself on Laurent with the same tactics that Laurent had thrown at him.
This place sickened him. Anywhere else, you simply killed your enemy with a sword. Or poisoned him, if you had the honourless instincts of an assassin. Here, it was layer upon layer of constructed double-dealing, dark, polished and unpleasant. He would have assumed tonight the product of Laurent’s own mind, if Laurent were not so clearly the victim.
What was really going on?
Damen went over to the goblet and lifted it. A shallow slide of liquid remained in the cup. It was water, surprisingly, not wine. That was why the thin rim of pinked colour on the inside of the cup was visible. It was the distinctive mark of a drug Damen knew well.
‘It’s an Akielon drug,’ said Damen. ‘It’s given to pleasure slaves, during training. It makes them—’
‘I am aware of the effect of the drug,’ Laurent said, in a voice like cut glass.
Damen looked at Laurent with new eyes. The drug, in his own country, was infamous. He had sampled it himself, once, as a curious sixteen year old. He had taken only a fraction of a normal dose, and it had provided him with an embarrassment of virility for several hours, exhausting three cheerfully tumbled partners. He had not bothered with it since. A stronger dose led from virility to abandonment. To leave residue in the goblet the amount had been generous, even if Laurent had taken only a mouthful.