The Meeting... finally...

Synopsis

He came late, in deep forest green cut to a Peredhel officer’s pattern, the only person in the building openly armed, his eyes faintly hollowed. The Khopesh at his hip did not need drawing to be felt: it reached for Mikhail and got back a swell of covetous fury he barely held, and for Koa, who turned the wanting into hatred of the man carrying it and remembered friends he had held down while the same thing rode them.

Mikhail crossed the floor to introduce himself and was refused with great courtesy: no hand, a pause left just long enough to be noticed, charmed, and past.

So he went back to Naevora and took her up to the study. She listened at parties because nobody addressed her; addressed, she talked. The bank had been Sarro Rashid’s, run fairly, built into the city’s Peredhel trade, and taken from him when the council tired of its voice of reason. They gave it to Beltran. His tenure was short and disastrous, and it is exactly the window in which the party’s accounts were emptied as defunct to pay for the operation at The Crack; for the debacle he was promoted to captain of the guard, and Materai got the bank.

She named the rest of the council: Asiya Azrak, a hobgoblin who commanded in eastern Peredhel and is said to have eaten the chieftains she killed; her daughter Khadija Dalzen, kind and out of her depth; Elren Amin, a Peren who adventured for a living and now delegates; and Dalvaar Rashaa, an old Hobbin who would smell a Grayeras fart and call the air sweet. Sarro, she noted, was absent.

Koa held a stare too long, talked his way out of it, and confirmed Beltran was fixed on Rainan Marr; on his way out he overheard two guests discussing an incoming shipment. Aldo, the book already in his coat, left without goodbyes, and saw Beltran abandon a conversation mid-sentence and walk at Rainan; the two went into a back room and a third person came out of it fast. Mikhail, shut out of it, smoked keif on the porch and learned its Peren name (parin, near enough sorcerer of sleep). A smoker joked about the sword, the wanting came straight back up in him, and he shoved the man and went home.

At the keep the tally was bad: Rheem had not come back, and Tazrih had never come to the party. Fearing Rheem had been taken, they went to look at Ashtara Walnut’s old house, which is Tazrih’s now, and found it watched, in time for Aldo to see Beltran come out of it wiping his hands on a rag, hand the rag to Tazrih, and walk east with four guards.

The watchers made the front impossible, so they went in through the tavern next door, whose cellar still connects and whose barkeep still knows it. Koa wore the face of Tazrih’s hooded courier Garik, which bought a nod at the bar. At the far end of the tunnel a Hobbin with a carpenter’s toolkit stood over Rainan Marr, tied to a chair and nearly gone. They killed the Hobbin. Footsteps came down the stairs; Aldo would not let Mikhail spend a potion on the dying man, because this could not look like them. They cut him loose, Koa carried him, Aldo latched the door and shot the first man through it, then emptied the taproom by shouting guard business and the stocks. Rainan was dead before they lost the pursuit in the alleys. They kept the body, so the man who had ordered him opened would go on believing he ran.

Rheem was at the keep after all, opened along the gut. Cornered while they were at the party, she had escaped the only way she knows: by wearing somebody. The somebody was Rainan. She would not be touched, and Aldo told her not to play the hero next time in the voice of a frightened man. Ashanti packed the dead lieutenant’s mouth with grave dirt and bone dust, and Mikhail cracked Yara’s bone over him. The corpse drew breath with a sound nobody wanted to hear and opened its eyes. It was the body remembering, not the man. The rite wants a skull. They had three questions to settle on, and until morning.