Garik

He carried for Tazrih through the tunnel that runs from a tavern cellar to her house, and he had done it long enough that the route had a shape everyone recognized. Hood up. Straight in, straight through. He stopped for nobody and spoke to nobody, and got a nod from the bar at most. Tazrih’s watchers made the front of the house too dangerous to try, so the company went at it through the tunnel instead, and that routine was what made him worth copying: Koa went in wearing his face and got the same nod.

Two nights later Beltran Grayeras was informed that Garik had walked into an interrogation room and taken a prisoner out of it alive. He had been posted elsewhere and said so, and the men he had been posted with said the same. It made no difference. He was one of seven strapped into a reclining chair in the town-hall square with a rat-box over the belly, waiting for the box to be lit, when the company cut the whole row of them free without knowing whom they were freeing.

He came out of it injured and went straight back to work. Taking that prisoner out of the interrogation room had exposed the whole cell, and Tazrih meant to be gone from the city before the day was over. When crossbow bolts took the guards outside the house he ran over to the one still wheezing on the ground and kicked him unconscious rather than finish him. He fielded his employer’s orders in front of the room, took her outside for an argument loud enough to come through the wall, and pushed her to keep moving when she was plainly among the people who did not want to go. She was the one in charge and everybody knew it, which did not stop him shaking his head at her in front of witnesses until she closed her mouth.

He was the only one who ever said where that cell went. Vigil, over the river, and he was blunt about the crossing: deep at the point they had picked precisely so it would not be obvious, and tall boots would not help, so better to take them off. Always hate crossing the damn river. Of the people he had decided not to bring, he said they were probably dead weight anyway, and that getting the ones they had in was being called a favor as it was.

What he did with Mikhail did not fit the rest of him. He handed over a pouch of coin unprompted, taking care to be seen showing that it had been given to him rather than stolen. Then he said his piece to Mikhail alone, gave Koa no more than a glance, and stepped outside to hand over a single pinch of the powder that briefly quiets the Wraithblade’s pull, which he had been carrying to ease Tazrih’s own craving and could not spare. Take it in drink, he said, never in water, because the taste of it had to be covered. Save it for the end, for the moment the decision actually has to be made. Have a beer before you go. Talk to him a couple of minutes into the beer. Asked how long it would hold he shrugged and said: not long enough. Asked why he was giving it away at all: I don’t know what it is, but I wasn’t going to slap an aiding hand when it came.

He was last seen walking a farmhouse room on the north edge of the city, looking around for Tazrih, not finding her and not yet thinking anything of it. He gave Mikhail a knowing look at the excuse offered for the far door and went back to what he was doing. Whether he reached Vigil, and whether he ever found her gone, was never written down.