Aftermath Pt 5

Synopsis

They walked the erratic woman across Haudh-Gwenn bound, gagged and roped to a lead, meaning to lodge her with Talia before reporting the council’s vote. She was alive because she had screamed I give, I give as Koa came at her, and he had pulled the swing without knowing why. He answered her now in Bhaasha, fluently, and could account for none of it: no tutor, no childhood among the Hafuwë.

Some way on, Aldo picked out a man matching a description Leon had given them: a well-kept breastplate, a bastard sword, a studied lack of interest. They steered the prisoner at him. He dropped the pretense at twenty feet, and nodded when Aldo named the obligation he served under, In Ikhtar. He worked the same contracts as the woman, he said, and they would be wise to unbind her. He held a contract he could not describe, and saying more “would be problematic.” Dropping a dead employer’s job was no easier: he had dues to the guild, and reneging would not go well.

Then Aldo caught someone looking over a roofline, and Koa pulled the gag to ask her in Bhaasha why the man could not speak. She laughed. He can’t. Mikhail saw her hair moving against the direction of her turn, gathering to strike, and got in first with a scream that left her reeling. A furred shape came around the roof pitch with an arrow already nocked, and the shaft that answered Aldo’s bolt was longer than any of them had seen. The breastplate man watched it begin, shook his head and withdrew without ever drawing. Koa had gone for the hilt again, as he always did; the second broadhead into his ribs turned it. Under attack, with one man walking away and a caster he judged dangerous even tied, he raged and cut her in half, then looked down at the blood on himself and shook his head.

The chase went over the rooftops, through an incendiary bolt in the archer’s fur, a jump Koa missed and a wall he climbed instead, and a flask of grease thrown to deny him the next one. What ended it was one word of Mikhail’s carried across the roofs, surrender, and it landed. He set down bow, quiver and short sword, called down in Tanjun and then G’lin that they had him beaten, and proved to be a bugbear they already had a name for. Khudan. His orders had been to kill them, and Beltran had paid him not in coin but in his own hounds, seized and shut in a vault at Meshtes.

Mikhail took the bow off him anyway, an unstrung stave of fused bone backed with sinew, and Koa lifted it out of his hands at Mikhail’s word. It gained them nothing and it changed the man: beforehand you were just a contract, there are feelings now. Koa was exempt. Aldo was exempt. It was Mikhail.

At Talia’s they reported the vote that stood Beltran’s army down and Koa’s open agreement to stand trial for the killing. Talia appreciated the sacrifice, hated the position, and would not advise on the spot. The bow went back as an apology and bought nothing; the terms held anyway, everything Khudan knew about the other four and Idir left permanently, against the order on the Meshtes vault.

What he sold them was the whole payroll. The woman had been hired to find, hold and distract them, and to put small figures into councilors’ hands that he believed were cursed. She had also convinced the duller of her colleagues that she had cursed them silent, which was why the breastplate man could not name an employer. That man’s own job was a woman of importance, removed a few weeks and returned unharmed: Khadija Dalzen, gone from the safehouse half an hour before. Durat stole leverage out of named houses and would defend but not attack. The last two were brothers, hired to burn the places the city met in, and he gestured at Talia’s own walls and named the town hall. He volunteered his own next job on top of it: he was to have carried Sarro Rashid’s stolen son onward, and would bring the boy back instead if the party could buy him river passage east.

Thirty gold bought his tracking, Durat alone excepted, and a stray dog was bought with meat. It ran them not to the hospital but to a warehouse under Asiya Azrak’s sigil, and Aldo got the drop on the breastplate man waiting inside for Khadija’s second cartload. He asked for release, no attribution and six gold to get home, and gave up what the brothers had told him: that Traxian Grayeras would be settling the accounts now. Khadija walked up mid negotiation with a supply cart, and they told her plainly what she had been worth to a dead man. Then the dog took the brothers’ scent and ran, and halfway along the trail there was smoke standing over the district.