Delve into The Crack

Synopsis

Eleven weeks went by with armor and a greatsword on order and no money to speak of: the bank had mislaid the party’s deposits, and the family that owns the bank owns the man they are against. On the road south Mikhail cracked one of the looted scroll cases: Mól schematics for the cleaving of stones, which cuts suit which gem, set out well enough to put back into modern words. The cut fills a stone with nothing. It readies it, so that something can be put in later. One rare kind of stone, the sort that hung in the keep’s wind-chamber, takes every cut there is.

They traveled down with Gwenivere, Ashanti, Elliot, Yara and Leon: eight people, four horses and a mule, timed to reach the Crack at dusk to keep the arrival unseen, with the tracks dusted off the road behind them. They tripped the alarm door on purpose rather than be mistaken for anyone else, and the guards behind it knew them on sight.

More than thirty people are sheltering in the cave now, which is more than anyone had reckoned on. A celebration broke out inside a quarter of an hour, the party played the song about Dan, and even Ashanti finally connected the tune to the men she had been traveling with. Edrick embraced each of them and nursed one drink all night. Jaden was easier in herself than she has ever been. And Koa learned a phrase for something he had been carrying without a name for it: the spark of Vroga, the mark of the god’s eye falling on a fighter mid-battle. Jaden carries it too.

The council met in Edrick’s cask room. Beltran has taken nearly every trained man he has east to Ostrad; he is on the road now and the city behind him is thin. Orvayne, the guard-captain who was passed over so that Beltran could have the post, passes along what he hears and will go no further than that. Edrick, who used to rob roads for a living, argued that the road is exactly when you take a guarded man. The counter-argument was worse than the argument: if Beltran comes home from Ostrad with grain behind him, he becomes the man who fed Haudh-Gwenn, and after that nobody touches him.

Leon, fetched from the torture room where he had been standing quietly, turned the question over. Beltran is a piece and not the hand that moves it. Kill him and you make a martyr and leave the hand free; take him alive and you have a lure, a witness, and a way to show the city who gives the orders. He laid the whole thing out: bandits’ clothes, a stretch of road drowned by the spring melt to bring the horses down, quarter offered so the men have something to accept, the man himself stripped and held where nobody would look, and what he knows let out slowly. He had watched that army: hired trainers, poor equipment, two or three men genuinely loyal and the rest available to whoever paid next. Then he was asked whether he would do it now, in their position, and said no. Measure your enemy first. It took the wind out of Edrick entirely.

The night went badly for most of them. Aldo shut himself in the pool-chamber and paced it, telling himself aloud to stay in character, to be Aldo, and felt for the first time that something was listening; the pull toward Lord Rickard, god of masks and false faces, is not only his. Mikhail stood in the torture room over the place where he had put a knife into a man and could not work out why it had been so easy. Jaden, drunk, opened the cage-hall and named her dead off the sarcophagi. Koa and Gwenivere slept out under the stars in the cart, and he gave her the warm bedroll and shivered all night for it.

In the morning all three voted to wait. They would supply the refugees, train them, sell the cave’s silks and their spare Mól volumes at Harad, and route the Draazstone deal under Loshev’s name rather than Leon’s own, a Peredhel general being a riskier thing to have on a contract than a town. Leon made it his fight aloud: training, contacts, suppliers, mercenaries who would not turn coat. Asked plainly why he cared, he said it was between him and the gods. The scholars stayed behind to work, Mikhail having concluded that he could add nothing in that lab which Gwenivere, Ashanti and Elliot could not. Beltran would keep.