Face Off

Synopsis

Rheem was caught coming back into the inn in Ashanti’s face at an hour that made the question unavoidable. She had spent the night in a crowd near Beltran and skimmed his lieutenants’ minds across the table. Of the four, one alone craves the Wraithblade Khopesh: Rainan Marr, the fixer, whose scheming reads to her like a spiderweb. The hobgoblin Zarif seemed untouched by the sword altogether; Tazrih plainly wished to be elsewhere; and Davi Solt wrote everything down. She had brushed Zarif in passing and can now wear him.

They sketched a plan: take a lieutenant off the board, put Rheem in his place, join Marr’s theft as a fellow conspirator, and steer it into a lead-lined box of their own making. The complication came at the end of her report: a man at the edge of the room, bald, mid-forties, slate-eyed, whose stare was enough to make her leave rather than press her luck.

That evening Aldo went into a guard tavern disguised as Vestra (an off-duty guardswoman whose form Rheem had taken, and from which Aldo built the face he wore himself), and bought drinks for the loose-tongued Malaric until they gave up why Zarif is loyal: he killed a visiting diplomat’s son in a duel, and Beltran buried it. Then the bald man found him across the bar and the air went wrong. Aldo made the door on nerve alone; the man came after him and said something in the street (a moment) that stopped his legs until he shook it off. He won the chase over the rooftops by dropping half a wall behind him.

Mikhail found Dwayne sleepless and jumpy enough to nearly put an arrow in him, and cast the dream-shielding spell he had been building for months, burning one of the dream catchers out of Gwen’s house as its fuel; Dwayne slept properly for the first time in weeks. Somebody else came through Mikhail’s window in the small hours and turned out to be Casper, avoiding the inn’s per-head charge.

By the river next morning the party warned both men about the bald one, and Casper supplied a name and a species: Venros, a Dhel, taken into Beltran’s service about a fortnight ago. Whether he reads minds the way Rheem does, Casper could not say. The party decided he was too large a variable to leave standing while the rest of the plan ran.

Casper’s account of the city ran long. The Valiant Few are believed dead and have become a call and response: the few tried to save us, Beltran let the quarter burn. Shrines have gone up in the burned districts, offerings left to Krelene for the fire and to Isara for the hurt. The bank has stopped paying out without a council writ and doubled its guard; the guards are gambling for coppers because they are not being paid, which is where the shakedowns come from. Dwayne added the piece he had been sitting on: the support the few mutual-aid movement is a front, and the people behind it are armed. He can arrange an introduction.

The rest of the day was errands. They collected the lead-lined box built to hold the Khopesh, twenty pounds of it, and Koa argued the shop out of its surcharge by citing the walking tax. They bought oil, smoke and invisibility; Ashanti pressed prototype arrowheads and noise-makers on them.

At midnight they put Ashanti through the wine-cellar window into the keep, flushed the ooze with the brick puzzle and went down the tunnel, and she took the measure of what she is to destroy. They drew five crystals out of the braziers for her heat, one chipped past mending. The crystals float because the keep sits where the boundary between planes is thin, and a tuned crystal is a key to that door.

Nancáro met them stronger than they had ever seen him: visible to all three at once, and able to hear Aldo speak. The curse, he told them, is a prison in both directions: it keeps the patron goddess out as surely as it keeps him in. He will say what he knows about Gwen and the Queen, but only once it is broken. Until then, destroy a conservative share of the ooze and no more, because past some threshold the break comes early and the curse tries to repair itself, which is worse. Do it at dawn, and expect the keep to send everything it has. Electrum is the right answer and there is nowhere near enough within reach. And Al-Sāmiyah’s eggs are close to hatching, with wyverns circling.