Calm in the Storm · Aurôrum

A fire taken apart from the back door forward, the last of the sellswords run down, and a room at Talia's where four councilors stop pretending they are not allies

TL;DR

They reached the town hall minutes after it was lit. Koa hauled the burning barricade off the back door and carried four people out of the smoke, one of them Councilor Elren Amin, who had stayed inside with a sword drawn so that somebody would answer for it, while Mikhail shouted the watching crowd into a bucket line. The dog ran the arsonists to a stolen rowhouse, where one died in a hallway and Kaji surrendered through a closed door. His list named Traxian Grayeras as a target nobody had written down, and that evening four councilors met at Talia’s and agreed to stop voting as individuals.

First seen

Kaji: the arsonist who lived, and would not believe his employer was dead.
“Tar”: his brother, the alchemist of the pair, dead in a hallway.
Nahr: a fortified trade town in Peredhel, three hundred miles off.

What changed

The town hall stands, gutted by smoke, and nobody died in it.
Beltran’s sellswords are accounted for but one: only the thief is still loose.
Four of the eight councilors are a bloc, working the city for a fifth vote.
Traxian Grayeras was on his own son’s arsonists’ list, house and all.
Two of the effigies are off their owners and in Koa’s hands to be destroyed.

Left open

What burned first: the brothers’ ledger counts two jobs done and Kaji admits to one.
Whether Elren Amin holds to the law or to the four.
Where the line falls that Koa will not cross, which he can so far draw only once.
What the thief has already carried out of councilors’ houses.

Synopsis

The trail ran toward the smoke, into a plaza where the town hall was alight and a ring of onlookers watched it go, some cheering, none of them doing anything. Mikhail read the building: accelerant down the front face, lit less than five minutes before, the fire nowhere near the bones of it, and burning barrels against the back door, the one anyone still inside would come out by. Koa drank the company’s firebelly potion, got low, heaved the barricade clear in one go and kicked the door off its latch. Behind it was lightless choking smoke and no fire at all.

He found an old man down on one knee, propped on a drawn sword and too smoke-wrecked to answer a shout, and carried him out. He went back for three more in the first room off the main chamber, and found nobody at all upstairs, living or dead. Mikhail had the gawkers working by then, dirt here and water from the pump there, a bucket line that held the fire off the rest of the building. Coming back down, Koa found the old man at the top of the stairs with the sword out, angled at the floor but between them. Why were you doing everything you’ve done? To save it, you fool. The sword came down.

Outside he gave his name: Councilor Elren Amin. He had stayed in the building to learn whether he would have to keep whoever came in there with him to end it. I don’t appreciate your methods, but I can’t say I don’t appreciate what you’ve been trying to do.

Khudan’s dog ran the arsonists to ground in a periwinkle rowhouse taken from owners who never came home. Aldo found no trap on the front door and pushed it into a sack of dried pepper hung above it, which left him retching through the fight. Mikhail slid a lit pebble under the back door and a voice swore inside, giving Koa his direction. One brother threw an alchemist’s fire at him and missed; Koa turned on him and dropped him with a single raging blow, and he bled out unnoticed. Mikhail called through the closed door to ask whether the other wanted to be taken alive or get what his brother had got, and a sword came down the kitchen stairs ahead of him.

Kaji would not believe Beltran was dead, called it a filthy rumor even when told who had put a blade through his heart, and wanted to know who was paying now. Then he gave up the rest. The list ran to the town hall, prominent houses and councilors to be removed, with Johanka Materai’s house already crossed off. One target had been kept off the page in case the page was found: Beltran’s own father’s house, with his father inside it. The brothers’ ledger counted two jobs completed, the earlier one far larger. Kaji swore the town hall was their only work.

In Talia’s basement afterward, Koa learned the other two had been ready to kill the prisoner, and could name only one line he was sure of: you cannot kill a man who has surrendered.

Four of the eight councilors met that evening, with Talia present and not voting: Materai, half carried in and refusing to be spoken for, Asiya Azrak, her daughter Khadija Dalzen, and Amin. The effigies came out first. Asiya was wearing one on a pendant believing it a gift from her daughter, called it hideous and threw it on the floor; Amin dug a second out of his own baggage and said perhaps that was why he had been bested by a small door of fire. Koa took both to destroy.

Materai proposed the rest of it outright: the four to vote as one and work the market and the city until they had a fifth, because the arithmetic gives eight seats nine votes and lets the High Councilman break every tie. Beltran, she said, had been the symptom. She oversees the city’s banks herself, and offered to rewrite their rules to strip the leverage out of them at the price of one hard winter. Amin would say only that he would think on it, but the fifth vote had a road to it: Khudan would hand Sarro Rashid’s son back for passage to Deadport, where only military ships now sail, and Asiya would buy the charter with favors called in and favors owed.

Asked whether the Valiant Few meant to be the council’s partners or its opposition, Koa answered neither. On the trial, Aldo named the farce precisely: Koa alone was to stand it, and the men judging him included a household holding three votes. Koa gave the reason plainly: Traxian Grayeras wanted him to suffer for killing his son. Amin would carve out an exception for nobody, but granted that the singling out was the injustice. Trial for all three or none, and he would vote against Koa standing alone to prove consequences exist. Koa had already agreed to face it and would. Outside, Asiya swore the old oath to Khudan in G’lin rather than give him a promise, and he named the place at last, Nahr, three hundred miles off, and went.