Spreads like wildfire

Synopsis

They came in half a day out of The Crack, everybody in one of Aldo’s faces; Rheem brushed a passer-by on the bridge and wore him past the guard.

The city read wrong from the first street. Fear of the guard, once scattered and private, was now collective and nearly organized; people cut through alleys to avoid patrols. In the burned district the party once fought fires in, ash-writing said let the ashes speak, and a woman muttered the few fought, we remember as she went past.

Gwen’s block had gone quiet, her shop shuttered along with its neighbors. Her house had been forced and squatted: a bedroll, food scraps, tufts of coarse fur. To turn the street’s eyes away from the door, Rheem and Koa staged a shouting match in the open while the rest let themselves in with a key.

Six hours of searching turned up what was left of her medicines, a merchant’s ledger of every supplier she used, and, in a crawl space, the things she keeps for the other occupant of her body: pale robes, several masks, bandages, and three dream catchers. Wrapped in her Amultan finery was a heavy latched book whose cover crawled with runes under a conjured light. Aldo carried it off unopened, on the chance that runes set out like that were meant to burst. Her shop, entered by the roof, had not been touched, and gave up the alchemical stock Ashanti needed; Ashanti took a moment at the back of it.

On the way back Rheem spotted the memorial (plaques, scratched tablets, when the guards fled, the few stood up a wall) and a work gang scrubbing it away. Three streets later, guards stopped Mikhail and Aldo for a walking tax of two silver a head. Aldo palmed the rest of his coin out of sight so as to look poorer than he was; they paid, and were talked out of an escort.

A hooded hobgoblin waved them into an alley afterwards; he had been shadowing them as backup. Beltran, he said, had made an arrangement with Orsugo and let the gnolls burn the quarter; the Valiant Few had fought both; and people are disappearing: shopkeepers, innkeepers, tavern-keepers. He taught them the countersign and told them to dress poorer, since anyone who looked worth taxing was worth robbing after. The innkeeper filled in the rest: there is no curfew and never was. The walking tax began as a rumor the Valiant Few themselves once put about. The guard heard it, liked it, and started collecting.

The Chantry was worse than empty: seven people in fifty beds, three of them guards, and a member who sent a robed stranger toward a basement nobody had mentioned before, then caught himself. Baku received Mikhail upstairs, threatened his tendons, and made tea. She had been released, she said, during Shahid.

She was glad the town thought them dead; their disappearance had lit a fire. It was not the only one. Healers sent to tend Beltran’s army after the fighting had heard whispers there, turned, robbed the Chantry of its supplies and gone over to Orsugo. The one who came back had her robes burned into her flesh. The rest call themselves the Chantry of Purification now, under a Burning Duchess, and hold that there is no healing without fire. As for the Queen, the Chantry does not want her imprisoned; it wants her fuel gone, and has nothing better to offer. That feud waits until Beltran is finished; common enemies, Baku said, not friends.

She would not let Mikhail cast anything in a hall full of witnesses. She sent him instead to an address to collect old supplies, and to leave the robes at home. The address was a decrepit shop with a barn behind it, a young man at the door asking about medicine, and inside a second Chantry entirely: plain-clothed healers treating ordinary people out of the Duke’s sight, because the Duke has given two thirds of the hospital’s beds to Beltran’s guard. There were no supplies. The errand was the message.

The night ended badly and then comically. Koa and Mikhail argued the whole way back: could the Chantry turn them the way Orsugo turned its healers, and might the Queen be ended by anything short of killing her? Koa will not hear it. Aldo, who had been listening, remarked that he felt a strange pull toward the Chantry, and Koa, believing every word, tried to knock him unconscious in the street to save him. Guards came running at the shouting and were talked down. At the inn, bandaged head to foot and entirely straight-faced, Aldo held the lie, and left Koa certain of nothing.