Aftermath Pt 2

Synopsis

Baku’s clinic had stopped smuggling anyone in. The queue ran into the street with neighbors standing over it holding pitchforks, and when Koa thanked them they straightened, astonished he was alive. Inside he was in the way. Johanka Materai, two days out of her burning estate, heard that Beltran was dead and gave him the council’s fallback points. Not the barracks, because Beltran had changed what it was for. The people had a right to whoever was responsible, she said, so long as it stayed justice and not massacre.

She named Omar Zokner first, who speaks for the city to the rest of Idir and was on nobody’s list, undefended. Then Elren Amin, gone to the chamber to keep Dalvaar Rashaa in check, and Khadija Dalzen, whom she could not place at all. Baku had nobody to spare; the clinic would hold against anything short of an army, and her correction was grimmer. The wounded filling her floor were not the guard’s work but looters, shopkeepers and old grudges, the city doing it to itself.

Aldo, boxed into an alley at both ends, talked his way through four people who turned out to be Talia’s own. They walked him to a tavern near the town hall, wood laid over Mól bones, where she was losing an argument with faction leaders whose people would not go where they were sent. She took him down to the wine cellar and cleared it in G’lin.

Beltran had sent for his army when Rainan was sprung rather than when the attack came, which put it a day nearer than anyone had planned for, and its officers were hired Peredhel men of reputation. The guard station had cracked so fast it stood abandoned to a few holdouts; the rest of the guard had fallen back on the riverside garrison, which fires the tenements around it whenever anyone comes close. And the Silver Web, which had promised to come over the moment Beltran fell, was robbing the crowds she was massing in the ruins.

Aldo found no soldier in her and none in the room above, only neighborhood organizers running a war, which he recognized in himself. The choice was the guard station or the ruins. They took the ruins, largely because Aldo wanted the Web answered for, and he asked for a few hours before she sent anyone in. If the ruins stayed dangerous, she said, there would be no second attempt.

Mikhail’s day had been spent on a door. Beltran’s wounded guards came begging sanctuary and one was let in, on a Chantry member’s word about the man’s character rather than about his injuries, and the ones turned away came back armed. Hand out the dogs, or we come in for them. Mikhail agreed with every word of it and turned them anyway, on civility, on the higher road, on Isara, and finished with an arm around a man’s shoulders and a word about keeping his own family safe.

Koa found Khadija Dalzen cornered in the open by four looters with her necklace already off her throat. Everyone step away. I am Koa Attila of the Valiant Few and I will not be denied. The last of them to go held the necklace up and argued that the councilors were the crime; Koa put a hand on his hilt and said being wealthy was not one. Walking her to the hospital he learned her mother Asiya Azrak had gone to the Grayeras with condolences, that Khadija doubted that family’s hands, and that Zokner had not been seen in some time. She would not be hidden.

They went to the Web by the sewer, past a gate sentry taken quietly. Below, the seep Koa once plugged with a rag was still weeping ooze into the water, and Mikhail caught it pulsing with a faint light. It had never done that before. Only the part still in the wall did it, and nothing they carried or did changed it.

Then the den, for the third time. Most of the Web was out in the ruins and nobody got clear of the house to say otherwise. They took coin, two wands, more books from the sealed room only Mikhail can open, and a framed landscape too heavy to carry, which went back into the room to wait. Their information broker went to Talia’s cellar tied and unquestioned, and the rest were swept out of the ruins on the way home.

In the morning Talia’s scouts had the army in sight at daybreak and inside the city before noon, with the garrison all but taken at a price the hospitals were paying. Her plan was to leave it looking untaken, her own people in dead men’s uniforms, and draw the army’s scouts into it. The party would not help storm it, because that victory should belong to the city. What they argued about instead was whether the woman whose son they had killed would hear a word they said.