It's a Pun der Stone!!

Synopsis

At The Crack, Mikhail spent the Barren-Lands charm he had been carrying: grave-dirt, bone dust, and a cracked bone set between a dead man’s teeth. The body of Beltran’s lieutenant Rainan Marr sat up. None of them had raised a corpse before, and the lolling wrongness of it frightened all three, Koa worst, who holds the passage between living and dying to be nobody’s business to interrupt. Mikhail’s answer was that nothing had returned but a shadow of memories, no true soul. Ashanti watched, said little, and was afterwards less sure of what her Chantry had taught her about it.

The dead man answered three questions and no more. Asked how the Wraithblade was to have been taken, he described a guard rotation switched behind a forged audit and a servants’ passage left unbarred, and an instruction he recited rather than explained: a blade meant to harm the love of someone… dare to spare him. But take the hate. Asked who had gone into it willingly: the clerk Solt. Tessa put her best on it. I was to deliver the blow, but stay the tip of the blade at his mother’s command. That was the Silver Web bought, and it was Alyphe who had held the killing stroke back so her son would live. Asked what Beltran had got out of him under torture: blood, screams, but no answers. Then it convulsed, folded up, and was finished.

Tazrih, Beltran’s spymaster, had not been named at all. The party decided to name her anyway. A framing pulled his paranoia onto her, kept his eye off Solt and off the Web, whose help they still needed to run the theft again, and took a loyal lieutenant off his board.

The morning after was gentler. Under the radiance-crystal tree Hinta set out what the great clans had been before there was a Mól empire: separate nations with separate laws, joined on the argument that together is stronger, each keep the heartbeat of one clan. She had grown up a few miles from Wraithblade Keep and never known it was there. She can seat the radiance crystal in Koa’s sword, which she built to hold such stones. That fixed the plan (Mikhail holds the stone, Koa and Hinta break the blade) against the knowledge that it has been broken once already and put itself back together.

Then Haudh-Gwenn, in disguise: Koa as a Veren horse-merchant named Garrett, Aldo and Mikhail as his hired muscle. They called at Lady Talia Salahaudhi’s estate to arrange a meeting with Solt; she was out, and Koa greeted her steward so warmly that Mikhail had to salvage it by improvising a lesson in manners for his own hireling. Going on toward the town-hall offices they found a crowd instead: seven people strapped into reclined chairs with rat-filled boxes bound over their bellies, waiting to be lit. Tazrih presided. Koa knew two of the faces (guards whose shapes he and Rheem had worn) and understood that Beltran was making examples of the very men who had plotted against his sword.

They broke it. A thunderstone drowned the speech, Aldo shouted Orsugo into the crowd, a second stone and smoke turned it, and Koa bulled toward the platform. Mikhail put the torch-bearer to flight and two guards to sleep; Koa persuaded Tazrih he was a horrified nobleman on her side, and killed a guardsman who charged him. The prisoners were cut free and the rats scattered harmlessly. They finished the afternoon having saved the spymaster they came to ruin, and she trusts Garrett now.

Circling the back, Aldo saw Beltran on the town-hall balcony, painfully calm, the Wraithblade on his hip. From ninety feet he put a grappling bolt at it, meaning to tear the sword off him. The shot was perfectly true and failed by a hair: a flash of light at Beltran’s neck, some hidden thing turning it aside. Beltran sent a wave of the blade’s rage across the gap that left Aldo reeling, then stepped off the balcony into a fall too slow to be natural, drew, and turned the flat of the sword to him with something like amusement. Aldo said till next time and was not there.

That night the city took light: word ran that Beltran had rat-boxed his own servants and that someone had shot at him, and Haudh-Gwenn went up in a riot.