A Loshev load of errands

Synopsis

The servant who opened Yullen Gemsmith’s door had an arm in a sling and a new scar. Inside, under a floral scent that Aldo and Koa both read as covering something sulfurous from an unlit fireplace, Gemsmith poured a whiskey he would not normally serve, having traded off his good stock and given gems outright to the townsfolk worst hit. The raiders had taken only the stones they said belonged to them, and Koa’s stone-cleaving drawings; they had come hunting the Birdman, found a man in a costume, hurt him and let him live. As a friend rather than a councilman, Gemsmith advised refusing the hunt the council was going to ask for: these were soldiers, not bandits. What worried him more was Cleven, gone before the raid and back after it.

Upstairs, Mikhail found Maearla not ill but a month short of showing, mortified, and wanting a discreet lady doctor found without Yullen hearing it from him; he swore Koa to secrecy, told him within the hour, and found the doctor next day at the cost of half the town concluding the child was his. At the Broken Shield, Aldo cleared and doubled the tab of Tony, drinking himself blind on a ruined knee.

They were at Hinta’s forge before she opened it. Mikhail told her about the Zarkhûn forge under the keep (the fire that never goes out, the buckets that never empty) and she was rapt until he mentioned the spider, at which point real fear crossed her face. She cleaned Koa’s calipers and found the maker’s stamp: Zarkhûn again. Then Aldo noticed she did not share the town’s anger at the raiders, and said so, and she opened up. They are the Muharib: a living clan, the only one of the Mól great clans still standing, removed from the Empire before it fell, which is how they outlasted it by centuries. They take back what was looted from the Empire, not what was traded, and put it in the hands of families who can prove the line. They hunt monsters off land they hold as theirs, and train their young to fell an owl bear. Their silver-lined weapons come from Draazstone, from the forge where Hinta trained. She sparred one of them and held her own. Then she said flatly that he let her win, and that she knew him. And their leader had asked her about Gemsmith’s son, and gone to the house looking for him.

She named the two electrum rings as Mól work that clips onto an electrum-cored weapon (removable, where a set stone is permanent) and said the design implies a third; and she gave Koa back his restored Mól sword, cleaned. Then Koa, needing her, told her nearly everything: the anvil under Wraithblade Keep, the cursed sword on Beltran’s hip with its wraiths trailing after it, and, pressed, the Idiran curses themselves. She agreed to come; she would look at the blade, and if it was truly cursed she would not stand in the way, and if it frightened her she might help.

At the guard station new recruits stood about in fresh uniforms nobody had taught them to wear. Fox had paid for the equipment, the men and the trainers, and was overruling Tariq to his face: a donation that has restructured the guard over the constable’s head. Tariq returned Aldo’s ring and dagger and reported the carrier-bird spy taken: watching alone for the company’s arrival, writing loose reports to unknown recipients, one saying a storm is brewing.

The council meeting was the reckoning. Rook called on them formally; Jazelle, Fox, Gemsmith and Kurvroc pressed for a hunt, Kurvroc wanting hands and heads brought back. Aldo turned the moment into a proposal to find work for guards too maimed to serve, which Fox agreed to sponsor. Then they refused: the raiders are foreign and skilled, chasing them risks a war Loshev cannot fight, and their own commitments come first. Fox demanded something in return and got it: Haudh-Gwenn’s standing army in breach of the pact, Ostrad taken twice for its grain, and the hit squads sent through the spy in Tariq’s cells, on whose report Kurvroc’s faction had sat for weeks. Then, with Gemsmith quietly signaling restraint, the last of it: Beltran bankrolled the Ten Lashes. Fox performed a surprise he did not feel; Gemsmith’s face closed, nobody having told him who paid for his son’s kidnapping; Rook, an old friend of the Grayeras, demanded discretion. The refusal stood, and the vote for the maimed guards carried over Kurvroc, his ally and Rook.