Fragmentary Record · No Chronicle Survives
Assembled from the letters of guests, the complaints of servants, and one page of a seating chart used to wrap fish.
It is agreed by every surviving account that the invitation came aboard their ship in the hands of a masked courier who stepped out of nowhere and, having delivered it, was never seen again. It is agreed that the occasion was a ball of Cardinal Esteban Verdugo, Protector of Castille, and that the foreign company arrived as guests of honour without one of them knowing why.
The guest lists differ, but certain names recur: the Inquisitor Cardinals Mejía, Campos, and Moreno de Zapata. Nagore Loyola, who never left the Cardinal's elbow. The mother of the King, whose entrance silenced the room and who sat all evening in black and said nearly nothing. A Montaigne ambassador who found the foreign lady's company delightful. An Eisen countess, Roswitha von Wirsche, who drew the Eisen lord aside for a private conversation.
[ — of what passed between them, no account survives — ]
One letter mentions, as a curiosity, that the great northern bear brought by the Ussuran giant took a singular interest in one of the Inquisitor Cardinals, and would not be persuaded to look elsewhere.
At dinner there was gunfire. Assassins — six, by the magistrate's count — made an attempt on the Cardinal's life, and a stray ball struck the Inquisitor Emilio Crespo, who was carried out with his condition unknown. That the ball was stray is the official account. The official account is repeated here in the interest of completeness.
Before morning, a priest — Father Aldana in most accounts — went from an upper balcony to the courtyard below. Fell, says the official account, which by now the reader knows how to weigh. What became of the body is a matter for a later, better-documented night: it went into the sewers, and the company went in after it.
Of the days that followed — a note, a tavern, a small man in a red fez, and an audience with a woman the underworld called only the Yellow Lady, who set a price on a certain sword — the accounts thin to nothing. The company surrendered their weapons at a door watched by eight blunderbusses, and what was said inside was said to no chronicler.
[ — the record ends here — ]
The Chronicle Resumes