Bared Blade (22 page)

“
That’s
reassuring,” grumbled Stel. “Do you have any other happy thoughts to share?”

“Well, I think it’s a sage bet that your little Reyna’s still got the ring, at least if she ever had it to begin with …and if she’s still alive, of course.” That was a tough call. I no longer believed that she might have been Fei’s corpse, but a lot of people had a lot of reasons to ghost her. “If she’s not, it’s probably lost. Maybe for a good many years.”

“What makes you think that?” Both Dyad heads swiveled to give me a pointed look. “Or that the Durkoth don’t have it for that matter? It seems to me the cleanup operation we just stumbled on is the sort of thing the Durkoth would do once they found the ring.”

The rare dual scrutiny gave me an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Because of what she’s got. The Kothmerk’s pretty much impossible to fence properly, and the scene we just left illustrates that. Touching it can seriously get you dead. If Reyna hopes to get even a tiny fraction of what it’s really worth, she needs a buyer who knows what it is. But anyone who knows what it is will also know it’s hot death on a platter to handle the thing.”

“I’m with you so far,” said VoS.

“Assuming she’s not a sort of master mage-thief who had everything planned out, that poses a major problem for her.”

“But how can you make that assumption?”

I frowned at them. “Isn’t it obvious? The only sane way to steal something like the Kothmerk is to do it on commission for a specific buyer who already has a plan for what they’re going to do with it. Make the lift, deliver the goods, get the hell out of town. Maybe change your name and learn a new language. What happened to Coalshovel suggests rather strongly that he was involved, which means it wasn’t that kind of deal. But there’s another piece as well, and that’s the Elite.”

“Now I’m lost.”

Triss said, “The Kothmerk is too big a headache for anyone in Tien to hold onto short of King Thauvik wanting it for something political. Thauvik would be a great choice for a villain in this piece except for one thing. If
he
was the buyer, the Elite wouldn’t be running around making a lot of noise and drawing attention to the fact that the ring’s in Tien like they did with that raid on the Gryphon.” Which was further evidence against the dead girl being Reyna—more likely someone hired to deliver information and then ghosted for her troubles. “They’d be quieter than the neighbors of your average graveyard on the night of the hungry dead.”

“What about someone other than Thauvik?” asked Stel. “Surely there are a few rich collectors around who’d want the thing.”

“Not if they have even a shred of sanity.” Triss turned to face her. “If you fail, is the Archon of Kodamia going to let it go? Or the King of the North?”

“Of course not,” replied VoS. “The King of the North might well send an army after it.”

“Exactly.” I nodded. “Whoever gets a hold of this thing has to know that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder. No collector with even a shred of sanity is going to sign up for that. For that matter, no sane thief would take such a commission for pretty much the
same reasons. The payback’s going to be eight kinds of hell on this one.”

“Now,” I continued, “you can never completely rule out an insane motive on someone’s part, but it’s such a wild card that you pretty much have to throw it out when you’re placing your bets. No, what I think is much more likely is that Reyna is mostly what she looks like, a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time who saw an opportunity and didn’t think about the consequences.”

“But how could an ordinary kid have done what she’s done?” demanded Stel. “I just can’t buy that.”

“I didn’t say anything about ordinary,” I replied. “At a guess, she’s a mage of some sort, and a powerful one, but not properly trained. She couldn’t be, not as young as she is. Probably she’s a Natural.”

“Or a Founder,” added Triss. “If she’s summoned up a brand new type of familiar, she could have resources no one else has even imagined yet.”

That was an ugly thought, but it might fit the circumstances. Mostly the mage and familiar-gifted get nosed out early and routed into one or another of the existing mage-schools, but every so often one slipped through the cracks. At that point what you have is a magical accident waiting to happen. Talent is going to come out eventually, and if it’s a big talent, it’s going to come out in a big way, especially under stress.

If it’s a big mage gift, what you end up with is a Natural—powerful magic bonded to whatever familiar-receptive creature is closest to hand. A cat, say, or a lesser air spirit. Some creature from a line that’s got established ties to some school of magery, in any case. But if it’s a big familiar-gift you might get a Founder. Someone who cries out for help and is answered where no one has ever been answered before.

That’s how the Blade association with Shades began, before the school was co-opted by Namara, back in the days of Dain. Really, it’s how most of the mage-schools started, with one previously unbound familiar forming a bond with a budding mage in a moment of need.

“All right,” conceded Stel. “Maybe she’s a wild talent who did just get lucky. That doesn’t explain why you think she’s still got the ring.”

“Or that it’s lost,” I said. “Don’t forget that possibility. She may not know exactly what she’s got, though I wouldn’t bet against her knowing a lot more than she was supposed to. Anyone who can sneak into a Durkoth krith and lift the ring in the first place is more than capable of listening in on any discussions your Dagger in Waiting had with his underofficers. And she certainly has to know that it’s incredibly dangerous to touch; look at the trail of dead Durkoth she left behind.”

“True enough,” said Stel.

“So, she’s talented, smart, and knows a bit about what she’s got. If she’s not on commission, and we’ve got good reasons to think she wasn’t—in the shape of those dead sellcinders—then she needs to find a buyer and not get dead in the process. We know from Fivegoats that she didn’t just offer it up on the open market. We can infer from the raid on Coalshovel that she found out who she should talk to and went to them. That means she does her homework.”

“Still with you.” Vala was looking more interested and less angry, which I took as a win.

“Given all that, there’s no way she just waltzed into Zheng’s place and offered up the ring. That’d be the same thing as handing herself over on a platter. So, she sets up a meet somewhere she can control and shows the goods. Zheng’s not stupid either, so she’s not carrying anything like enough cash to make the deal. Neither one of them wants to be there long, so they set another meet where they can talk things over. Someplace public with neither of them carrying the goods.”

I got up and started to pace. “Zheng either recognizes the item, or looks it up after the first meet. In either case, she runs straight to her Durkoth connections and they have collective conniptions. At that point, if they were thinking straight they’d have quietly bought the thing from Reyna.
But I don’t think that’s what happened. I think they tried to grab the girl at the meet and it went bad.” Which would be another way to explain the dead girl—a decoy hired by Reyna. “Either she got away—good chance, given what we know about her—or they killed her and found out she’d stashed the ring in whereabouts unknown. That’s when they started leaning on the Elite and all hell broke loose.”

“But why kill Zheng’s people? Isn’t she on their side?”

“She might be,” said Triss. “But they know there are other players interested in the Kothmerk, the Elite for example, and they know she can be bought. If they want to make absolutely sure that no one else can find out what they do or don’t know, they need to cut down on the number of potential leaks.”

“That’s why I think the ring’s still out there on the loose somewhere,” I said. “If they had it, they’d be halfway to the mountains with it by now and they wouldn’t need to get rid of past allies who might come in handy in the future. That kind of thing’ll cost you on the street later when you’re trying to find fresh partners.”

“Alternatively,” said Triss, “Coalshovel was ghosted by a different faction among the Durkoth to cut off Zheng’s friends from potential allies.”

“That’s possible, too. The main thing is that there’s still too much happening aboveground for me to believe the ring’s in Durkoth hands yet. That means Reyna, or her tuckaside.”

Stel turned and climbed up to join us on the widow’s walk. “I’m still not entirely sure that makes sense, but the whole reason we went looking for local help in the first place was because we were out of our depth here. I’m going to vote that we trust you on this one and move on to the next important question on the agenda.”

“Where do we look next?” asked Triss.

“That’s an important one, too, but I’m more focused on an even shorter term goal, getting something to eat. We’ve had nothing but aging trail rations and rotgut this side of
the day before yesterday and it’s really starting to catch up with me. I want to get some real food into my stomach. Is there anywhere around here we can get a good meal?”

I smiled; the client wants dinner, the client pays for dinner. “I know just the place. It’s a tavern called the Spinnerfish and it’s only a couple of blocks from here. Dinner’s on you.”

Stel frowned. Then VoS nodded her head for her.

The
Spinnerfish was one of the city’s better restaurants in one of its worse neighborhoods. Smuggler’s Rest brought a lot of money into Tien through the night market. That ready cash explained part of the success of the Spinnerfish. The rest belonged to the cook, Manny Three Fingers—who could turn fresh fish into heaven on a platter—and to his boss.

Erk Endfast used to make his living as a shadow captain in Oen in the magelands. Before that he was a black jack, or an underworld assassin, if you prefer bluntness. He’d ended up in Tien after the Magearch of Oen ordered his execution. When he arrived, he’d bought up a burned-out lot lying at the intersection of three of the city’s shadowside territories and built the Spinnerfish. Now he ran it as the ultimate in neutral ground and enforced that by the threat of sudden death. He’d been a very very good black jack in his day.

Anyone, shadowside or sunside, could come in and have a great meal knowing that no one sane would try to cause them any trouble. Even the Elite would be reluctant to take a shot at us there. Great food and neutral ground made the Spinnerfish
the
place for meets of all kinds. It also meant Erk could charge an arm and a leg for the fancier dishes and no one so much as blinked. I normally had the special, but with the government of Kodamia picking up the tab I figured I’d splurge this time.

We approached the front door carefully, picking a roost in the chimney forest and surveying the entrance before
descending to street level. Enforced neutrality inside did not equal enforced neutrality on the street out front, though Erk had been known to make exceptions. It had been years since the last time anyone got ghosted within sight of the front door, though I’d come pretty close to breaking that rule on a previous job. Fortunately, it was a dark night and raining at the time, so visibility sucked.

Tonight there was a fair pile of muscle hanging around outside dicing and drinking while they waited for their various bosses, liege lords, and owners, but no watch and no Elite. I was reminded again that summer was the hunting Blade’s ally as it meant all the windows and doors were propped open, showing the tavern to be equally devoid of the forces of Tienese officialdom.

I took a moment to refresh my memories of sight lines, with an eye for sitting someplace where a bounty hunter with a crossbow and a copy of my wanted poster would have more trouble making his shot. I didn’t think they’d survive Erk’s response to that kind of violation, but it’d be hard to appreciate the payback from the bottom of the lime pits where Tien dropped the corpses of its criminals and paupers.

Once we hit the street I took Vala in on my arm with Stel loitering along nearly a block behind and playing the loner. Normally I like to get to the Spinnerfish early because that’s the only way to get a good table, or, in this case, any table. A lot of heads turned when we came in the door. They always do at the Spinnerfish. What was instructive was how many of them turned back around just as fast. Especially among the faces I knew. Nobody likes to play with poison.

Erk himself appeared from the back within a minute of my placing an order for our drinks, a bottle of expensive white wine for Vala, and a tucker of Kyle’s twenty year for me. I wasn’t about to drink out of anything but a sealed container anytime soon. Not even at the Spinnerfish.

“Aral,” Erk whispered when he got close, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“
I
’m
just looking for a fish dinner,” I told Erk, “and yours are the best in town.”

The owner of the Spinnerfish looked less than happy to see me, which came as no surprise. If the price on my jack’s face was high enough to buy a house for the bounty hunter that brought me in, the price on my Blade’s face would cover a grand old country estate with all the trimmings. And Erk was one of the half dozen people in the city who knew what I really was. Though he’d made it very clear that he valued his neutrality much higher than the price of my head, having me around always made him a little nervous. Present circumstances would compound the hell out of that sentiment.