The Tunnel Whent Where?

Synopsis

They left the city in three directions. Koa and Dwayne took the bound, thrashing Whent, and Gerald, who was set down safely in Westwood with a little coin and sent on toward Durwyn. Aldo rode to the Crack to report, and talked a near-mutinous Edrick down from a rage about rationed drink; the venting did more for the camp’s mood than the drink would have. Leon heard the news of the sickened army as fortune. Aldo recruited Yara, who said she would need silver. Mikhail stayed behind to clear the ruins hideout (where a concussed Silver Web man was loitering, checking on their plans) and to collect Kithul from the Chantry, who remembered on the way out something he had not thought worth saying: Whent had questioned him closely about Wraithblade Keep, its river gate, and whether it could quietly hold a great many people. And that one of its goblins carried a strange hooked sword.

The rite was Yara’s, and older than anyone at the tunnel mouth. Her people use it on the Barren Lands’ shadows, soul-stealing things that pass through armor and flesh, and move in surges until they are burned out or spent. It needs a fire, a pot, silver, and the blood of those close to Vroga. Koa gave first, then Mikhail, Yara and Dwayne; Aldo, intending to give nothing, made a great performance of blessing the water instead and was roasted for it. Two coins were not enough silver, so the party pooled fifty and shaved the lot in. Yara spoke over the flames in a harsh eastern tongue, Koa pinned the thrashing man, Mikhail opened his chest, and Aldo ladled the boiling blood into the cut until Whent passed out from it. By morning Dwayne counted three spirits, then two, then one, then none.

Whent woke burned and coherent and remembered nothing of the possession. What came out of him over the following hours was the shape of the thing. He had hired a crew to go to Wraithblade Keep; two came back, and one of those, a Peren spearwoman, died of her wounds in Ridh. The other was the hobgoblin Oshuun Karral, who choked the goblin carrying the hooked sword, took it, and brought it to Beltran. Whent has since seen Beltran wearing it. He also gave up the rest of his employer’s household work: the Crimson Shroud, reached through a woman called Dusk and a boy called Cricket, was paid to make Sarro Rashid’s family disappear, tucked away rather than killed; a bird-handler named Joey has been hired to carry messages, and it was he who reported the party had left town; and Beltran was made captain of the guard largely out of boredom, once the slave ring collapsed and his father told him to grow up.

The loyalty underneath it never moved. The Grayeras have been kind to me for over thirty years. Pressed hard, he let out that Beltran’s sister Naevora writes down everything that happens in that house, and then spent the rest of the interrogation insisting she was innocent and not to be touched. Aldo read his hatred of the party as borrowed (recited, not felt), and concluded he had learned what the Ten Lashes really was only after it fell.

It cost the party something. Koa preached at him, refused to have him executed and believed his guilt; Mikhail prodded a burn to make him talk; and the three had it out afterwards over how far any of them will go, with Koa admitting he needed the other two aligned precisely so that he could resist himself.

They rode Whent back to the Crack overland (the tunnel is still unfinished), and jailed him beside the three mercenaries who had already tried to sell them. The war-council took the whole of it: possession, keep, and a blade that infects by handling and long looking rather than by presence, which means lead will hold it. Elliot wanted the histories, Ashanti suggested simply breaking the thing, and what they settled on was a lead-lined box and a smith good enough to draw Beltran to her.

Gwen was worse. She was tired, her rash burned, and her own magical aura, which the Mól-blooded see without being taught, was going dim. Koa asked her to leave the Crack, in case the place itself was what was drinking her.