Chaos in the Streets

Synopsis

The riot was already running when the day began, and the party spent it in character. Koa and Mikhail were still the horse-merchant and his hired man, and rather than lead a frightened crowd toward their own bolt-hole they stayed with Tazrih, Garik, and the prisoners cut loose the night before. Aldo, unseen, threaded back to the Color Stay to watch the streets from a window and pack for a fast exit; he had been seen the night before, and changed his clothes.

Tazrih took her people back to Ashtara Walnut’s old house, where her crossbows finished the town-guards posted outside, and then ordered it burned: papers first, weapons handed to the freed. Sent down to help with the barrels, Koa found and killed a Beltran informer in the cellar, salvaged a few ancient Mól trinkets and a still-warded Congress spellbook from the Silver Web’s old interrogation den, and laid the alcohol-trail that lit the tunnel. Mikhail, listening at doors, learned the cell had been exposed when Garik pulled a man out of interrogation, and that Tazrih meant one more hideout and then the road.

She also, plainly, still wanted the sword. Mikhail marked the contradiction and the two of them went to work on it from opposite sides. Koa played to her craving (the pull they had both felt, the argument that she should strike at Beltran before she ran) until she pulled a dagger, clumsily, and told him to go find Rainan and otherwise shut up and keep walking. Mikhail worked Garik, who warmed to him, named Vigil as their destination, and gave him a coin-pouch and something rarer: one pinch of a fine salt-like powder that briefly quiets the blade’s compulsion, taken in drink, at the price of a violently unhappy stomach.

Before that, the thing that shocked Koa. Two of the prisoners they had risked themselves to free were taken aside and killed (no hard feelings, falsely accused, but a trail is a trail), and against ten or twelve he could do nothing about it. At a farmhouse on the north edge of town he kept muttering reasons to delay until Tazrih walked out the far door on an excuse and did not come back. They let her go and left.

At the Color Stay, Katalia had been asking Aldo after Mikhail, worried, and Aldo had enjoyed reassuring her. When the three were together again he told the balcony properly: the bolt turned aside by something he never saw, Beltran holding him still with nothing but a look, then going off the roof in a fall that slowed itself. Ranged work is wasted on the man; he must be taken at arm’s length, and that he cushioned his own fall says he can still be hurt.

So the Valiant Few decided to stop being dead. They would announce themselves at the Color Stay, claim the gutting of Beltran’s network out loud, and let his pride bring him to them while a roused city and Talia’s people occupied his guard, his trained army still sick and quarantined north of the walls. Voler Bria was delighted to stage it and to make it carry. Rheem would ride for The Crack to bring Leon and the army down.

That left the clerk. They crossed a wealthy district where the crowds had begun marking well-dressed strangers as the thing to be angry at (the resistance countersign bought a pause and no more), and reached Davi Solt’s door behind a thunder-pellet and a false noise elsewhere. Rainan sent us went white through him and he came. He had already moved his family and burned every ledger and scrap of Beltran’s leverage rather than be found holding it; he was a man for money and schedules and knew nothing of any contingency about the sword. Looters jumped them on the riverbank and put him down, and Aldo got him breathing again.

At the keep entrance Koa frightened off civilians drifting toward the quiet riverfront, and Aldo went in for Rheem. She agreed to wear Rainan Marr’s face (Mikhail cleaned and mended the dead man’s clothes for it) and take Solt out: him peeling away toward Westwood, her going on to summon Leon. She said plainly that walking a dead lieutenant past Beltran was a risk on a risk. They were still in transit when the night ended, with Talia to see next and a reveal to stage the day after tomorrow.