Ooops

Synopsis

They went to Talia Salahaudhi’s as they had said they would, and found Beltran’s men already at her door.

What followed was the cleanest piece of work the Valiant Few have managed in a long while. The front hall was finished almost before it started; the noise upstairs was reached while there was still time to reach it. Nobody in the household was killed. Nobody in the household was even cut. Talia’s elderly steward (the old hobgoblin who had received the party the last time they called and found her out) was knocked about and no worse, which at his age was as much as anyone had a right to ask. Whether the men had come for the coordinator of the resistance or whether the riot had simply found a rich door is not settled, and those who could have said were past saying.

With the house secure they went looking for others to help, and the day’s arithmetic asserted itself. At the first address there was no one left to save. The second was an inferno, and the inferno was Johanka Materai’s estate, the same opulent house they had walked into in costume, and walked out of with her loyalty ledger in Aldo’s coat. There was nothing left inside it they wanted. They went in anyway, for the people still in it.

Accounts of the next hour differ in their particulars. Aldo went up the outside of the building rather than through it, a potion on his hands and feet and the sheer wall taken like a floor (the same trick he had first turned to this same purpose in the slum fires), and brought the councilwoman down off the third floor with very little time left in her. Koa went in at ground level, was caught under a collapse, and came back out of it carrying a hobgoblin boy of her household. Both of them were burned for it, and neither was thanked at the time, because the street was busy.

The cost was not only skin. Koa took fire while he was still wearing another man’s face, and the face did not survive it. People saw what was underneath. Haudh-Gwenn has spent this whole season certain the Valiant Few were dead, certain enough to have made a rallying myth of it. By that evening a thread of talk had started up that said otherwise: thin enough still to be laughed off, and arriving two days early for the announcement they had meant to make in their own time and their own way.

The wounded went to the Chantry’s hospital, theirs and Materai’s together, and were put back together there; Koa, who had come off worst, longest. Baku was in the masked order’s wards as she always is, and the standing bargain between her and the party was said over in plain words: fetch her what she has asked for, and two trained physicians come to the raid when the raid comes. What it is she wants fetched was never written down. Neither side had moved on it yet.

Then back through the tunnel to the keep and the Elder. Nancáro had a little more to give them on the curse: a little, and not enough. The larger thing was what they asked of him. They handed over the black crystal Mikhail had pried out of the death-tree in the Twisted Grove, the one kept back all this time for a use that has not come yet, and he charged it. It very nearly finished him. A ghost ought not to be a thing that can be worn down, and by the end of it he was withered and guttering, dimmer than any of them had seen him. They carried the charged crystal out with them.

Then he laid a curse in Aldo’s hand. Only Koa can see or hear him now, so the working had to be passed along through the pair of them. Koa took Aldo’s hand and held it while it was done, one of them the channel and the other the vessel. What Aldo came away with is a single thing made for a single man: Beltran, and no other, carried in the palm, spent on contact, and cut after the pattern of the Idiran curses themselves. It went unused. Aldo spent what was left of the night chasing Koa around the keep with it, and Koa (who had just spent himself putting the thing there) wanted nothing whatever to do with the bad touch.