Meeting of the Minds

Synopsis

They came to the Color Stay late, through a service door its owner had left unlocked, and the illusion that makes the place famous does not reach the back of the house. Behind it the inn is water-damaged and moldering, its grand staircase worn through. A serving-woman came to investigate the noise Koa made and did not see three people crouched at her feet; the owner had arranged that part too. Aldo went up the rotten stairs in silence; Koa clattered up behind him in armor, entirely satisfied with his own stealth.

The door to Venros’s room had no lock they could find and would not move, until somebody remembered the key, which made the lock exist. Aldo threw a thunderstone in ahead of them and slammed the door on it, meaning to leave whoever was inside deaf. When Koa opened it, Venros was standing in plain clothes with his hands over his ears. Then he looked at Koa, and without a word or a gesture or anything in his hands, took the air out of his lungs. Koa spent everything he had not to drown standing up.

Then Venros struck a potion at his arm and went to vapor, and sank through the floorboards, and the night turned into farce. Mikhail vaulted the staircase rail down into the grand hall, a ruin of propped tables and patched boards, with a naked gnome drinking at his own bar and a deep hole in the floor glowing many colors. The cloud hid between floor and ceiling and faked rushing wind somewhere else; Mikhail, who misdirects for a living, did not follow it. Aldo announced loudly that he was stealing the mage’s crystals, which drew him out far enough to solidify, take the breath out of Aldo too, and dissolve again.

There is no hitting a cloud that will not stay. Mikhail stood still and exposed for a long stretch of the fight to work a scroll he had been hoarding, and got a single small elemental out of it, a dust devil, which went through walls until it found the vapor and held it spinning in a guest room. Venros put a sound into Mikhail’s head like a whip cracking, and Mikhail lost a moment to it. Koa charged the pinned cloud with his greatsword freshly oiled, and as the blade went in the room filled with the smell of honeysuckle, which he knows from years on the Idiran plains. The second cut severed it. What fell onto the bed was a man in three pieces, missing an arm and a leg.

Out of the fight, Mikhail worked out what he had watched. Venros had cast without voice, without hands and without materials: three disciplines that are punishing individually and together leave a caster able to manage only the simplest work. He had been doing all three while killing people with a spell that empties lungs. Mikhail said plainly that this made him more frightening than Beltran.

Aldo forced himself to see past the returning illusion and searched the room. There was no writing anywhere in the dead man’s own hand. There were, however, Beltran’s: a few short orders signed only B, instructing Venros to keep close watch on Tazrih, to test whether subordinates meant their loyalty, and (at the bottom of one) I’m watching you while you watch the others. The body gave up a potion armband with one dose left, coin, and one crystal that was not worthless at all: a library shard, an Arcane Congress thing that stores written knowledge whole, readable only by a mind strong enough to work its way inside. Nothing about it said whether this one held a hundred tomes or three sentences.

A well-dressed man knocked to say the paperwork was cleared. He treated the blood and the pieces as noise from a rehearsal for an upcoming performance, and gave them the vacated room and the one across the hall for the night. The coin, when they counted it, was freshly minted Peredhel currency from several mints at once, which says either that Beltran pays his outside men in it or that there is a press nearer than anyone would like.

That left a gap in Beltran’s household none of them could fill. Orvayne had to go back to his post, Rheem was already covering one man, and none of them could be Venros. Aldo’s suggestion was to wear him out of the city in daylight, so that it looks as though the mage walked away from Beltran. Then Tazrih, who keeps her office in Ashtara Walnut’s old house. They went to bed (Koa untroubled by the sheets, the others less so) and left the glow alone, since by morning none of them could see it.