The Half-Cocked Plan

Synopsis

Aldo took the whole night’s watch in the slavers’ basement so the other two could rest properly, and paid for it all the next day. Casper came back at daybreak, which settled the question of whether he would. Then he said why: what he had seen in Koa (a man invoking Vroga Waruk, the breaker of chains) had made his own trade unbearable, and he was done with it.

Then he gave them the map. Five crews work Haudh-Gwenn: the Broken Daggers, which is his, the Black and Coined, the Silent Veil, the Crimson Shroud that does the dirtier work, and the Silver Web, which is the largest, stands over the others, and gathers everyone taken into a single place. Three ways at it presented themselves: find the site, force its location out of someone who has it, or take Ashtara Walnut, lately seen in the town beside a well-dressed stranger with white hair. The auction was two days off.

Gwenivere keeps a small, immaculately ordered herbalist’s shop near the hospital. She is Amultan, in her twenties; she dressed the wound in Koa’s side for two silver, and the pair of them flirted through the whole procedure. Then Koa caught sight of a purpling mark on her arm. She covered it fast, and then told him: there is a disease in her country, rare and perhaps carried in the blood, that eats a mage’s ability to cast and does not give it back. Stopping magic slows it. Nothing cures it. She named a Lady Arcium, who oversees magic in Amulta, as perhaps the one person alive who might know better.

Mikhail meanwhile tipped the doorman of the Color Stay and gave a name that was not his. The grandest inn in the town charges a copper simply to walk in, and he worked out why: the whole building sits inside a permanent illusion of sight, sound and smell that makes everyone in it look like somebody who belongs there. The illusion is ruinously expensive, and flatly illegal. Its proprietor, a gnome called Voler Bria, said goodbye to him in Gnomish, which Mikhail answered fluently and thereby told him more than he meant to.

The white-haired man came down after twenty-five minutes, was asked for an introduction to Ashtara, offered a duel instead, and changed his mind entirely when Mikhail named the lash tattoo and the trade. In the alley behind the inn Malik proved to be a bystander in genuine terror of ending up headless in a street: Ashtara had taken him to see the cages, on a date, as something impressive. He is a rare human who has taken the mette-hina rite, which strips a last-born of name, family and fortune at twenty until he earns a new surname by some deed worth recording, and he passes himself off as an archaeologist. He also had what nobody else did: arcane marks left on the wagon and on trees along the route, a patch of woods southwest of the town, and the trick of finding those marks glowing in the dark.

Out at the ruins he committed to the business with a grandeur that swore it on more gods than were strictly required, and confirmed that Ashtara holds Cleven Gemsmith and is pleased with herself about it. The argument that followed was between striking before the auction (fewer guards, but no buyers to catch) and striking at it. They chose before. Aldo’s proposal to go in disguised as Ashtara was what Malik called a half-cocked plan, and it became instead the better idea of arriving as a returning buyer.

The rest was money they did not have. Casper was sent for horses and asked few questions about how. Edrick (the broker from the wealthy quarter, who turns out to hire out as muscle and quietly wants the trade stopped) brought four men for a gold and a share of the take. Lady Grayeras swept past his door while they haggled, a councilwoman whose family holds two of the town’s eight seats, and did not look at any of them. A cart cost fifteen silver, and nine people left by the west gate with the sun going down.

On the road Malik described what they were riding at. A cave in the woods. A tunnel into a chamber split by a chasm nobody has found the bottom of. Then a barred door of worked stone, and behind it the hall where the captives are kept, sorted and sold. Ashtara carries the key. Koa has a key too, taken off a dead man in the ruins, and no way to know whether it fits until he is standing at the door with it.