Where Whent went...

Synopsis

They stayed in the ruins and worked the city at arm’s length. Aldo put rumors into the market: that people who cross the guard have begun disappearing, that the Valiant Few’s accounts were seized for doing good, that assassins were sent to meet them on the road, and that the gnolls had been let through the gates to cover a private meeting between Beltran and Orsugo. He had no evidence for the last of them. Koa spent his days among the lower town. Mikhail read.

What he read was Johanka Materai. She came onto the council years ago as the councilors’ own bookkeeper, and rose on what the books told her about the men who kept them. She has never run a bank in her life and was handed one anyway, which is not the story the Silver Web told. For years she has brought architects, archaeologists and historians into her old family estate, which suggests she has some idea what her cellar backs onto. Her weak point is her estranged spouse, Freya, who took the Materai name and has gambled the family down to gutter dice. Naevora Grayeras yielded less and stranger: a bookish woman in her thirties who wears a different scarf every day, journals constantly, and is driven in one of six family carriages to shops already closed for the evening.

Casper woke properly, remembered them, and blamed himself. A boy brought Koa word that someone was back in town. Dwayne met them at a tavern where the night’s performer turned out to be Gerald, who sang a commissioned ballad about the Valiant Few (a verse each, all of them ugly, with planted guards singing along) and then added a final verse at Beltran’s expense that nobody sang with him. He was chased off the stage and out the back door.

Dwayne’s news was better than the song. Beltran’s army marched on Ostrad, whose fields the gnolls had already burned, fought them there and took losses; a sickness broke out afterwards, and the army now sits well off the road to the north rather than carry it home. A month at least. Haudh-Gwenn, he added, has no commanders of its own. Beltran hires Peredhel adventurers to lead the fifty-odd men he has. And he had found Kithul half-dead on the road and got him to the Chantry.

Kithul’s account came the next day. After the Twisted Grove he had gone to look at Wraithblade Keep, north of Ridh; he found it intact and full of goblins and withdrew. In Haudh-Gwenn he sought help, and was sent to an unpleasant man named Whent. Days later men bound him, threw him into a pit and shoveled soil over him. He dug himself out and walked until Dwayne found him. He has no proof, and told Mikhail not to say it aloud: Whent is the guard-captain’s dog.

The address came from a purse. A thief lifted Aldo’s coin in the street, then delivered the line he had been paid to deliver (they know where Whent went: in the sewers), and Aldo let him keep the money. The way in was the gate near the Silver Web’s ground: the outer guard was talked into a daze and then into sleep, the lock came open quietly, and shouting led them the rest of the way to a locked door. Behind it, Whent and three others were beating Gerald for going off script. The fight was short, one of the guards did not survive it, and Koa took Whent alive.

Getting out took longer. Gerald was bleeding inside and had to be stabilized before he could be carried; a dead man was tipped onto the soul-ooze and hauled straight back off it, because Koa would not risk what the goo does to a soul. They went out underwater on a rope through a rusted river grate.

Whent would not stay down. He came round again and again, thrashing, biting, clawing, and the magic that should have put him under simply slid off him; his eyes were sunken and ringed dark. It was Dwayne who panicked, because Dwayne could see them: two or three specters circling the man, the same kind he saw at Wraithblade Keep, and when the bindings loosened, two went inside. He admitted, too, that the nightmares he said had stopped never had, and advised putting Whent down like a sick animal.

They split instead. Koa and Dwayne would take him to the tunnel at Westwood, the city being impossible and the Crack worse, since Whent had hired men out of that camp himself; Aldo would ride for Yara, who can smell an evil thing; Mikhail would go back to Kithul. On the road Gerald confessed he had been hired to write the bait-songs and had put the last verse in out of guilt, and mentioned, without knowing what he was giving them, that Beltran’s whole inner circle look the way Whent looks.