The Past
It was raining where they were, and the rented carriage slid past the barred and unlit windows of cautious jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-clad figures on the sidewalks turning to stare at them. It looked as though it had once been a prosperous neighborhood, but it had gone downhill.
"The hotel is on Republic Street," Ava said, leaning back into the gray velvet seat.
This iota of information stuck in his mind. It helped him calibrate what he knew despite the slurry of substances swimming through his veins to help him cope with the fast and furious runic initiations, his own addictions, and the ghostwine. The only real Republic he knew was Cathena. They were in Silfanore, but the section allotted to those who were not Hytori. He said as much. Ava grunted.
"Why does Galeas travel alone?" Oren asked. He had a headache.
"Because you piss him off. You're starting to piss me off too."
He wanted to tell her the Ostry story, but decided against it. He had taken something to sleep on the ship, and something for the roil of his stomach. The road from the port had been straight when the land allowed, but climbing up into the mountains was a different story. Perhaps Galeas had a budget that didn't include taking them through the portal with him, as well.
The Phergus, in a new Hytori suit in black, was waiting sourly for them in the hotel lobby, marooned on a beautifully carved wooden armchair on a pale blue rug that blended into the marble below.
"Mists," Ava said. "Rat in elven finery."
They crossed the lobby.
"How much you get paid to come over here, Pherg?" Ava lowered her bag beside the armchair. "Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit, huh?"
The Phergus' lips drew back. "Not enough, sweetmeat." He handed her a steel key inlaid with elegant golden pictographs. "You're registered already. Bossman is upstairs." He looked around. "This place sucks."
"You get agoraphobic, they take you out of your haunts. Just pretend you redecorated the place." She twirled the key around her finger. "You here as valet or what?"
"I've got to check out some guy's implants," the Pherg said.
"How about my gear?" Oren asked.
The Phergus winced even as Oren shivered at the thought of implants. "Observe the protocol. Ask the boss."
Ava's fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of cant. The Phergus watched, then nodded.
"Yeah," she said, "I know who that is." She jerked her head toward the elevators, a contraption of clockwork and magic to Oren's enhanced, if unpredictable new senses. "Come on, blackguard." Oren picked up both bags and followed her.
*~*~*
Their room might have been the one in Cathena where he had first seen Galeas again. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see the river. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, protecting their precious parchment to take down notes in Common or Mythrasi to be delivered for a fee. It was a sluggish city in the rain. He watched a dull black sedan float down the street and disgorge five haughty-looking Hytori officers in pristine uniforms. They entered the hotel across the street.
He glanced back at Ava on her bed; her paleness struck him. She had left the plaster cast on the bed besider next to the little saw she had used to remove it. Her spectacles reflected part of the room's lantern.
A trinket around his wrist vibrated and he squeezed it.
"Glad you are awake." Galeas' voice resonated from the silver charm. Oren hunched around it, trying to muffle the noise from his sleeping mother.
"I'm just," he murmured softly. "Your lady's still asleep. Listen, boss. I think it's maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I'm doing."
Silence. Oren bit his lip.
"You know as much as you need to. Maybe more."
"You think so?"
"Get dressed, Oren. Get her up. You will have a caller in about fifteen minuts. His name is Zebasteos." The bauble vibrated once more. Galeas was gone.
"Wake up, Ma." He kneed her foot. "Business."
"I've been awake an hour already." The gleam of her spectacles turned on him.
"We've got a Zebasteos coming up."
"That's the eye Galeas has had on Ambal Len'Falas. Help me up."
Zebasteos proved to be a young-seeming Hytori dressed in layered robes of white and gray. He carried a black enamel tray with three tiny, fragrant cups of coffee and three sticky, straw-colored sweets.
"Welcome to Silfanore," he said in heavily-accented Common. "We must, as you say in Common, take this one very easy." He seemed to stare pointedly at Ava with eyes dark as his hair, which was goldshot brown. He smiled. "It is better this way, yes? Else we make the infinity mirror... You particularly," he said to her, "must take care." Eyes that saw too much flicked hither and thither upon her, apparently marking things she was carrying. "In Sol'Valen there is disapproval for some of these things."
Ava bit one of the pastries in half. "It's my show, Fílos." The way she used the Mythrasi word for friend made it mean the opposite. So did speaking with her mouth full. She chewed, swallowed, and licked her lips. "I know about you. Informant for the military, right?" Her hand slid lazily into the front of her jacket and came out with a short wand; the dragonshard now touching the elf's chest was full of chaotic light. Oren hadn't known she had it.
"Very easy, please," Zebasteos said, his porcelain thimble frozen just short of his lips.
She pushed the tip of the dragonshard harder agasint him. "Maybe you explode. Maybe you get the Withering. One blast, shitface. You won't feel it for months."
"Please. You call this in Common making me very tight..."
"I call it a bad morning. Now tell us about your man and get your ass out of here." She put the wand away.
"He is living in Phanarion," he said, following with the exact address as if they were familiar with the non-elven district of the Hytori capital. "I have his route, nightly to the Xenosagora. He performs most recently at the Neapoli Palace Hotel, a modern palace in the... hm, tourist style. But it has been arranged that the Skuthoi... hm, how you say in Common... police. They have been arranged to show a certain interest in these shows. The Neapoli management has grown nervous." He smiled. He smelled of some metallic perfume.
"I want to know about his magic tricks," she said, massaging her thigh. "I want to know exactly what he can do."
Zebasteos nodded. "Worst is... how you say in Common... the subliminal?" He carefully measured out the syllables of the word to see if it made sense.
*~*~*
"On our left," said Zebasteos as their floating sedan steered through a maze of rainy streets, "is the Xenosagora... the foreign bazaar."
Beside Oren, the Phergus made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street was storage for building materials. Bars of steel lay alongside lengths of fluted marble. There were marble statues stacked like firewood.
"Homesick?" Oren asked.
"Place sucks," the Phergus said. His black silk cravat was starting to resemble a worn ribbon. There were medallions of gravy and egg on the lapels of his new robe.
"Hey, Zebasteos," Oren said to the elf, who sat behind them, "where did this guy get his... implants?" His face twisted at the word. He had some things implanted in him now, and he wanted to know more about them. The problem was, he knew next to nothing about magic in general, let alone high-end necromancy.
"The same place as you," the Hytori replied, surprising Oren. Apparently this informant was well-informed about things beyond the borders of Sol'Valen. He didn't like that. He didn't like that at all. "He is missing one lung. Filled with various things. The other is... hm, augmented?" He rattled off a few of the talents the things inhabiting half his chest gave him, then, "Anyone might buy these implants if they know where to look. You should worry about his Runes. Masquerade and Semblance." Oren froze. The sedan swerved to avoid someone on horseback. Zebasteos glanced out the sedan window, then frowned. "I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen riders thrown, near him, in a day. Find the rider in the hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion on the boot..."
"Glamour's gonna get you," the Phergus put in. "Yeah. I know more about his implants. The ones to worry about... they augment his runic tricks, yeah. But they also make 'em more dangerous. Any good illusionist can make you see what he sees. I figure, if he really wanted to, he could make that aether dirty... sharp... blind you permanently."
"You have told this to your woman friend?" Zebasteos leaned forward between their seats. "In Sol'Valen, some of her equipment is... hm..."
The Phergus snorted. "Go ahead and tell her so. She'd have you wearing your balls for a bolo tie if you looked at her wrong."
"I do not understand this idiom."
"That's fine," Oren said. "It means shut the fuck up."
The elf sat back, leaving a metallic taste in the air. He murmured to himself in Mythrasi. The sedan swung smoothly around a corner. "The spice agora, sometimes called the Ecithian agora," he continued, "was erected on the site of an earlier agora by the Phoenix King Taegan Sol'Eilran in the Age of Sundering. This is the tourist quarter's central market for spices, magical artifacts, perfumes, drugs—"
"Drugs," Oren said, watching a furtive human pull up his hood and glance all over the place before stepping out into the drizzle. "What's that you said before, Zebasteos, about this Len'Falas being high?"
"A proprietary mixture of opium, Ecithian coca—"
The Phergus barked a laugh. "Mixing uppers and downers. Funny sort of people you're mixing with, Oren."
"Never mind," Oren said, turning up the collar of his jacket in anticipation of debarking into the rain. "We'll get the poor fucker a new liver or something."
Once they entered the agora on foot, the Phergus brightened noticeably, as though he was comforted by the crowd density and the sense of enclosure. They walked with the Hytori along a broad concourse, beneath delicate stone arches detailed with carefully aged iron filigree. A thousand paper advertisements were suspended from them, tattered foliage trailing from the perfected natural elements of ancient Hytori geomancers and metallomancers.
"Hey, Mists," the Phergus said, taking Oren's arm, "look at that." He pointed at a taxidermied horse. "The fuck... who did that? Who would buy that?"
Their Hytori companion's perfect nose wrinkled in distaste. Oren glanced at the embalmed animal and shook his head. It was displayed on a pedestal, near the entrance to a place that sold animals as pets. The thing's legs were worn black and hairless by decades of passing hands. The animal's brown glass eyes seemed to follow them as they passed. Zebasteos led them into a café near the core of the agora, a low-ceilinged room that looked as though it had been in continuous operation for centuries. Skinny kids in soiled white coats dodged between the crowded tables, balancing steel trays with bottles of Hytori mead and tiny glasses of tea.
Oren bought a packet of pre-rolled cigarillos from a vendor by the door. The Hytori was muttering to himself. "Come," he said finally to the two humans. "He is moving. Each night he rides a sedan to the agora to purchase his mixture from Aeli. Your woman is close. Come."
Oren didn't feel like explaining that 'his woman' was actually his mother, and had been, if she wasn't still, Galeas' woman.
The Present
"You're fucking kidding me," Aurin said, then immediately corrected course. "Sorry. Of course you aren't. My apologies."
"My lord made it quite clear," the middle-aged woman managed through renewed tears, "that upon his death, we were to evacuate with his body, lock the doors, and hand you the key." She handed him a heavy, ornate key. He could feel the magic thrumming through it. "I should warn you, though. My lord was quite... eccentric, a collector of magical artifacts. You may be in some danger."
"I assure you, madame, I know exactly what to do. That is why my lord requested that I be given the key."
"Quite," she managed, though it seemed as though she was trying to articulate some hesitency. "Quite."
She didn't articulate it fast enough, and beflore long, Aurin had escorted her to the door of his office and bade his secretary to call her a hansom to wherever she was staying now. The younger man stood up with alacrity to offer the woman his arm and his condolences, and guide her even further away from Aurin's door. He was a good boy. Aurin Kavafis didn't have a bracelet with a magic charm on it like Oren Cavafy had had; instead, he fished a pendant from around his neck, activated it, and sent his voice through the pinhole at its center to one of his specialists.
"I have a job for you," he said. "You will need to drop by my office for information and a key. I will leave the balcony door unlocked for you."
Soon enough, the enterprising Lysanrin would arrive and he would give him a test of his skills.
