Chapter 25: News from Aethelgard
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 15-28, Month IV: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 15th to 28th day of the 4th Month
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A Letter of That Fateful Night
Director Valerian Thrace was not a man who left promises unfinished.
Three years had passed since August Finn stood in front of the Emperor and said, in so many words, that he wanted to know what had actually happened to his village. Not what the official record said. Not the sanitized version that put the blame on the general chaos of war and moved on. The truth. Who gave the orders and who carried them out? What was done to the people of old Maya Village beyond the simple fact of their deaths.
Emperor Janus had made a commitment that the matter would be investigated. Director Thrace had been given the task. And in the particular way that imperial intelligence worked — methodically, without urgency but without rest either — the investigation had proceeded in parallel with everything else that demanded the Director's attention. The suppression of Fresco's Revenge. The dismantling of the seven syndicates. The long administrative work of consolidating what had been won in the final campaigns. Thrace had files open on dozens of matters at any given time, and the Maya Village inquiry had sat in its folder, accruing evidence, for three years before he was satisfied enough to write his conclusions.
He was satisfied now.
The preliminary finding had taken only weeks to establish and had come as genuine relief: no Imperial soldier had ordered or directly participated in the atrocities committed at Maya Village. The killings themselves, the execution of those found in an unauthorized forest settlement during an active military campaign, fell within the scope of what the Emperor had commanded. Hard. Brutal. But within the order. What happened beyond the killings, the violations, the degradation, the treatment of those who should have been spared, that was different. That was not the work of the disciplined Imperial soldiers. That was the work of people wearing borrowed authority.
The seven syndicates had been thorough in their infiltration. Not merely of criminal networks and noble houses and trade guilds, Thrace had known about all of that for some time, but also of their allied armies. Their allied kingdoms for this final campaign, which meant vassals, auxiliary forces, contracted mercenaries who marched under different banners but answered to different masters entirely. The syndicates had embedded their operatives throughout the allied military apparatus, wearing the uniforms of their host organizations and committing acts that would be attributed to those hosts. It was a specific kind of evil that Thrace had particular contempt for: the kind that used legitimacy as camouflage.
He had traced the chain through interrogation records from captured syndicate members, through financial records recovered from destroyed front organizations, through witness accounts that survivors of the campaign had given without fully understanding what they were describing. The threads converged, again and again, on a name.
Brutus Ripp.
The file on Brutus Ripp was the kind of document that Thrace's investigators produced without comment and delivered without lingering. They were professionals. They documented what they found and moved on. But even among professionals there was a particular flatness to the language in this report, the careful neutral tone of people who had read things they would have preferred not to read and were doing their job anyway.
Brutus Ripp had been, on paper, a retired soldier of the Kingdom of Ogind. Master-ranked combat capability. A loan shark by primary trade in his later career, a man who operated in the grey edges of the underworld where money moved between people who could not afford to lose it and people who had no intention of giving them fair terms. His name appeared in connection with at least two of the seven syndicates that the Empire had since destroyed, both as a contractor and as an affiliate. He was not leadership material. He was a weapon that criminal organizations rented when they needed something done that required a certain combination of legal authority and absolute personal depravity.
The account of what he had done to the household of a nobleman named Sam — a debtor who had made the catastrophic error of defaulting on a loan from a man who had no concept of proportion — was documented in the file because it established pattern. Brutus Ripp did not simply collect debts. He made examples. He had been a servant boy once, he and his mother both, in the household of a nobleman who used his guests and his staff as interchangeable objects during parties that Thrace's report declined to describe in further detail. What had been done to young Brutus Ripp in that house had not only broken him in the way it might have broken someone else. It had instead produced something that wore the shape of a person but had been hollowed out and refilled with a cold, precise, and very particular kind of hatred.
He had arrived at Maya Village as the operational commander of Ogind's forces when he was still an active duty soldier during the raid. The imperial order or rather the decree they have manipulated and twisted to their own advantage has basically authorized the settlement's destruction. Brutus Ripp had interpreted that authorization the way he interpreted everything: as permission to do whatever he wanted, to whoever was present, for as long as he chose to. The evidence suggested he had been thorough.
Thrace closed that section of the file. He had read it twice. Once was enough to have the facts; twice was enough to ensure he had not missed anything. He did not intend to read it a third time.
The question of whether Brutus Ripp was still alive had taken longer to answer than Thrace would have liked. The purge of the seven syndicates had been comprehensive within Imperial territory, but the empire's reach, though vast, had limits. The central and eastern subcontinent specially with their allied kingdoms beyond it functioned under different jurisdictions, and a man who understood that the western subcontinent had become permanently hostile to his continued existence had every reason to have relocated before the hammer came down.
And indeed he had.
The confirmation came through a chain of informants and field reports that stretched across two subcontinents. Brutus Ripp was alive. He was operating in the eastern subcontinent, in the shadow markets of kingdoms that maintained loose diplomatic relations with the empire but did not answer to it. His name was spoken in whispers in the underworld there, the way names are spoken when the person behind them has done enough to earn that particular kind of notoriety. Not admiration. Not fear, exactly. The specific acknowledgment that someone has gone so far beyond ordinary evil that ordinary people don't quite know how to categorize them.
He was out there. He was out of imperial reach for the moment. And he was apparently aware that reaching back into the empire's sphere would be inadvisable, because he had not done so.
Director Thrace compiled the final report over three days, writing it himself rather than delegating. This was not a document he wanted passing through too many hands before it reached its intended audience. He documented every finding: the syndicate involvement, the separation of Imperial orders from the specific atrocities, the pattern of Ripp's conduct, the confirmation of his survival and current location to the extent that it was known, and the list of other individuals identified as having participated in the events at Maya Village who were either dead as a result of the syndicate purge or whose current status was still under investigation.
He was honest about what the investigation had not found. There were gaps. There were witnesses he had not been able to locate. There were accounts that conflicted and could not be reconciled without access to people who were no longer accessible. He noted all of it. A report that claimed to answer everything would not have been credible, and Director Thrace had not survived this long by being careless with his credibility.
He sealed the report in the manner reserved for documents of imperial sensitivity: four seals, three of which required specific knowledge to authenticate and brought it to the Emperor personally.
Emperor Janus read it in the same way he read everything: completely, without apparent reaction, giving no indication of what he made of the contents until he had finished. Then he set it down on the surface beside him and was quiet for a moment.
"Is the investigation complete?" he asked.
"To the extent possible given current access limitations," Thrace replied. "Ripp's precise location is approximate. We know the region but not the specific settlement. Dedicated effort could narrow it further."
"And what do you recommend should be done with it Director?"
"That the report be forwarded to August Finn as the Emperor promised, and that the question of how to proceed regarding Ripp be left to further discussion or rather August's discretion. He is currently beyond our jurisdictional reach without diplomatic complications. He is also not currently operating in a way that directly threatens imperial interests."
The Emperor's expression gave away nothing. "You are not recommending action on our side then."
"I am recommending patience and documentation. If Ripp moves within reach, we could act on it. If he does not, the matter is one for the affected party to determine whether they wish to pursue through whatever means are available to them."
The Emperor looked at the sealed report for another moment. Then he picked it up and handed it to an aide with instructions for its forwarding, it was resealed, routed through the diplomatic channels that connected the capital to the central territories, and it was addressed to Maya Village under the same classification that all Imperial communication with that settlement now carried.
"I am curious," the Emperor said, with the tone of someone who had waited three years to say something and had decided now was the appropriate moment, "how he responds to this."
Thrace allowed himself a small nod. "As am I, Your Majesty."
The aide departed with the report. By the time it traveled the distance from Aethelgard to the deep forest of the Northern Lonelywoods, it would have passed through three relay stations and the hands of six people who were authorized to carry it and not to open it. The journey would take time. Some letters did.
But it was moving now, through imperial teleportation stations from the capital, toward a village that had been built by the only person who had been there to bury the dead when everyone else was gone.