1 4 u, 2 u me

Synopsis

The Color Stay’s glamour closed over them again in the night, and only Aldo still saw the rot under the gilt. He had taken the dead man’s stripped room and dreamed of Galderia: a boy who tried to walk off a border watchtower, caught by his own townsfolk and left to grow old in a cell. He woke unrested and stayed that way.

The inn keeps a hole in its floor. It is roped and boarded, there is a faint light a long way down it, and the staff step across the gaps on nothing at all and do not fall. Katalia, visited at home, repeated what she had been told: the illusion holds inside the building and nowhere beyond it, and the gnome who owns the place (an Arcane Congress man paying for the glamour out of his own purse) calls the hole the reason any of them have work, and tells his people not to ask. She gave Mikhail something else besides. Haudh-Gwenn had a plague of nightmares once, and it ended about the time the Slumbering Queen first walked the streets. He has begun to suspect it is returning.

Venros had left a horse in those stables. It was good stock, patiently schooled, and Koa read the schooling as Peredhel military work, a hand from outside Idir somewhere in Beltran’s affairs.

Mikhail slipped a heavy watch to reach Orvayne, who was worse than when they cured him. The nightmares of what he had done under the sword had all come back at once, and he would not go near it again. What he could tell them was how the thing is administered: the craving is the hook, and those who wanted the blade too openly were kept close and then removed, often by their own hands. A dozen at least. He confirmed, too, that the sword had come to Beltran by a hobgoblin mercenary, Oshuun Karral, who was killed the hour he delivered it.

So Orvayne was leaving. Aldo spent the day building the dead man’s face out of the dead man’s own wardrobe; Koa spent it ruining dream catchers. In the afternoon Rheem arrived wearing the captured lieutenant Zarif, with the reason for the hurry: when Orvayne was cured the spirits riding him went home to Beltran, who felt them arrive and is now summoning everyone he owns to be looked in the face, and demanding that Venros, of all people, investigate.

The lie went out at dusk. Orvayne fled north through the unwalled edge of the city where anyone could see him; ten minutes later Venros rode up, told the guards to stand aside (tell Beltran I will deal with his problem) and went after him. Ten miles on they swapped horses; Aldo peeled the face off, left it with the rider, and walked back, reaching the gate so spent that a guard took three copper off him for the trouble.

That left three of the four lieutenants: Tazrih in Ashtara Walnut’s old house, the withdrawn Rainan Marr, and the clerk Davi Solt. Word came through Dwayne (whose own room had been turned over by guards while he was out) that Lady Talia could put names on the guest list for a gathering at Councilwoman Johanka Materai’s house the following night, councilors and money and Davi Solt among them. The personas they had been wearing were spent, so Aldo began two more.

Then Rheem produced a round crystal she had lifted off a crew, pleased with it, and Mikhail recognized the stone the Gemsmith had cut for Koa’s blade. The crew had taken it from an upstart hobgoblin woman they had jailed on arrival: Hinta. Rheem was sent to get her out without ever letting her learn who had.

The rest of the night was the argument. Koa had watched her show off stolen spoons and a locket and enjoy it, and said so badly, and then said worse. Mikhail and Aldo held that she has to live inside the role or die in it, and that his conscience keeps arriving at the moment speed matters. Koa held that the Valiant Few is a name they are supposed to earn. Later, alone, Aldo admitted that killing Venros had not troubled him at all, and that this was the part he did not like.