Long time planning

Synopsis

Dwayne led them disguised through a poor quarter to a house falling down over bones far older than itself. An aged hobgoblin retainer whose mind is going let them in; Dwayne lit the hearth, and Mikhail read the crest built into it: two great rivers meeting, the mark of Clan Salahaudhi, a lesser mercantile Mól house local to the city.

Lady Talia Salahaudhi came in tall and unsmiling, and had not believed the Valiant Few alive until they took their faces off. She coordinates the resistance and will not be seen to. She founded nothing, she was careful to say: the groups formed themselves in the party’s name after the party disappeared, and she only joined them up. They can be moved by one signal across the whole city, in one of three senses: act out, act up, hold back.

Her politics are longer than theirs. Kill Beltran badly and he becomes a martyr and his people inherit him; paint him and the councilors who have gone along with him first, and when he falls they fall with him. She serves, she admitted, under one of those councilors, Johanka Materai, who controls the bank. Materai keeps a ledger she rarely opens, a private accounting of every councilor’s dealings and loyalties. Talia will consider opening a door, on the condition that it goes so cleanly nobody notices; an obvious burglary would bring a scorched-earth answer down on all of it.

Two other things came out of that room. Talia’s own ambition, once the war is done, is to break the Idiran curses: Materai believes in the Shattered Throne and has shown her enough to convince a skeptic. Koa received that with a face Mikhail had to talk over. And the bald man has a name in her language: a yalwī al-ʿaql, out of Mól children’s stories, a thing that reads and bends minds rather than merely charms them.

There was no time for the long political route; they resolved to take the ledger anyway, for what it would say about the lieutenants and for the mistrust it would sow among the councilors when the chaos came. The order of removal was set: Venros first, because he can see through everything else; then Zarif and Tazrih in quick succession, with Rheem and Aldo wearing two of them so nobody appears to go missing.

First, though, Orvayne. Aldo scouted his house by day (one door, a cellar hatch, too many windows, a patrol every quarter hour), and that night they picked the lock and waited inside. What they found was worse than the plan allowed for: three volumes of a Mól Encyclopædia, Beltran’s written instructions setting him to spy on his own colleagues, and the bedroom walls covered in his own handwriting. Martyr, please. Must hurt me.

He came home, checked his lock, knew, and went for them feral. Mikhail put him down asleep mid-charge and Koa poured the remove-curse potion into him. He woke lucid and refused to believe it, convinced he was dead and being punished; it took a long argument to persuade him he was neither in hell nor beyond saving. Then he wept. His intel, given freely: Venros lodges at the Color Stay, he is Dhel, and he is not a hire; he was sent, by an interest outside Beltran’s, and sits in on Beltran’s interrogations. And Zarif drinks heavily twice a week, and Orvayne carries him home. Orvayne will help, but not fight.

So Rheem read him, took his shape and his armor, and went out to run his escort duty. She lured the drunk Zarif into an abandoned building after Casper, and Mikhail put him to sleep, and they had him bound and gagged before he understood what had happened. There was a long argument about killing him. They kept him for what he could still be made to tell them: rolled in a barrel to the keep for Ashanti to watch, and thence to The Crack and the cell that holds Whent. Rheem read him too, and went off to sleep in Orvayne’s house wearing Orvayne’s face.

The flaw was plain: Rheem will be walking about as Zarif inside a day, and Venros reads minds. Disguised as guards they woke Katalia at home (she nearly stabbed Mikhail, then slapped him for being dead, then dressed and helped), and she carried the proposal to the Color Stay’s gnome owner. His price: either an introduction to Gwen’s supplier, or a public revelation that the Valiant Few are alive and have been hiding under his roof, plus his inn kept whole and a small favor owed. They took the second. Koa would not agree to killing a sleeping man and held out for a fight the man could see coming. They took the back-door key and went as dawn came up.