Spending Time Down in HG

Synopsis

They burned the free rooms at the Color Stay on purpose: arrive somewhere conspicuous, then move somewhere plain and let the watchers wear themselves out. Yara and Elliot had come down by boat; Elliot took a room with a desk for the books and reported that the bank’s terms had changed since autumn, and, more quietly, who now commands the guard.

The meeting they wanted took a coded drink to arrange. A spear-carrying barkeep walked them down to the wine cellar, where Edrick was being kept by two publicans out of gratitude: one of them has a friend the party cut out of a slaver’s coffle. His account of the city was flat and awful. Beltran dismissed or jailed a great many guardsmen the week he was made captain, is roughing up merchants who displease him and taking a cut of the docks, and has good men behind the bars they used to keep. The refugees Edrick is moving are housed at the Crack, supplied by a genuinely reformed Casper. And the barracks is training roughly a hundred men under hired mercenaries.

Edrick had one thing worth more: a great estate whose cellar holds a door of Mól stone, opening on a passage of the same make as the ruins: a second way in, if the owners were not the sort who dine with the captain. On the way out he pried the iced grate off a basement window to show it could be done, and put it back.

Then eight weeks of winter. Mikhail tried to learn medicine at the Chantry hospital and was bad enough at it early on to be barred from the rooms. Koa put on muscle and tried to learn to carry a room, and mostly succeeded in getting himself noticed by the guard. Aldo did the work that mattered: a fence, a set of disguises, and (patiently, in pieces) the name on the estate. It belongs to Johanka Materai, youngest of the council, seat and house both inherited when her parents died in an accident, fond of good wine, guarded by six private men who rotate their watch around a dice game that leaves a window at the change.

Leon Yaegar walked with Koa and defended the servitude his country runs on: a tax of years, paid for courts and schooling and food through a drought. He gave them his old rank (High Commander, one step below the nine Masters of War who stand beside the princes), and then his support: what they need is information, reinforcement, supply and somewhere to hold. They did not tell him about the curse, not until they had something specific to ask him for.

Gwen could not break the alchemy volume’s cipher because she does not read Taal, so Mikhail read it to her; she began an incantation to speed the work and stopped herself before it left her mouth. She is exhausted all the time now, and her shop is the tether to what she used to be, and Koa held her and promised to comb the country for whatever undoes it. She referred them to an archaeologist wintering in town, Ashanti, who knows alchemy. A well-dressed man with a limp came in for something against pain, Yovance in his accent and Westwood his home, and gave Aldo a name, Landor de Bellun, and an accent watered down on purpose.

The bank had eleven guards in it and swords already drawn. Koa’s account was closed: declared defunct, the gold taken, a dozen others done the same way, Edrick’s among them. Mikhail’s was empty too. What survived was the gems, because Yullen Gemsmith had lodged them under his own name out of an old man’s habit, and Koa emptied the vault of them. The teller, Celic, was frightened and apologetic and forbidden to say who owns the place. There was a long moment where killing every guard in the room was on the table; Koa took one step forward and then simply kept walking. What they settled on instead was slower: take Beltran and the whole Grayeras family down the right way, famous and not infamous, once the ruins are done.

Aldo, dressed as somebody’s heir, sold Koa’s opal to a traveling merchant for a hundred and forty-three gold and handed over every coin but the one he kept. A homeless man badgered Koa into finding his voice. And the masked head of the hospital, who had watched Mikhail fail at every lesson he was given, came to him herself and offered to teach him.