I was “invited” to attend negotiations the next day, if invited were to mean the same thing as ordered to show up on pain of possible execution. Rufais didn’t sound particularly happy in the letter he had sent, not that I had expected any differently.
I had resolved myself to behave this time, as well as I could, at least when it came to Rufais. I was trying to play nice, I reminded myself as I made my way back up the staircase to the appropriate chamber.
Dahl was there.
It was the first thing I noticed when the servants opened the door, and I fought to keep a neutral expression as I looked at the rest of the room. I wasn’t entirely sure why I hadn’t expected him, but I hadn’t. I’d figured he had had better things to do involving his church work and hunting down heretics and all that fun stuff, but here he was.
Playing nice was going to be harder than I had realized.
Still, I walked inside and took my seat next to Callian, tossing him a brief smile as a fairly obvious solution to my problem suddenly flitted into my mind.
Callian liked me just fine. I could always just see to it that Rufais had an unfortunate accident.
The problem was, of course, that I liked Callian back, and didn’t particularly want to make him an orphan. If only other people had the kind of relationship with their parents that I had, then I could solve the problem that way with Callian’s permission!
Soon, the conversations were underway. Rufais, I soon realized, was neither there nor would he be attending, though there was a more significant presence of the Guildmasters there than last time. Ennis seemed surprised to see me there– most of them did, honestly, but Ennis was the only one I cared about– so I shrugged slightly when he walked in the room. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there either.
The Aeron Ambassador hadn’t learned to be any more straight forward or direct since the last time I had spent any time in his vicinity, though I was going to add stubborn to the list of attributes that I knew about the man. The Guildmasters had honestly given up a better deal than I had thought would even be on the table, yet he was still disputing practically every point on the paper, even the ridiculous ones. I read the agreement while they talked, mostly out of boredom, and began to wonder just how much leverage they thought they had. It was a good deal.
He wasn’t declining it though, I supposed, he was just trying to nudge every single point in his direction, which I guessed was what this kind of person was hired to do in the first place. It definitely made for boring theater though.
After a few hours of simply sitting there, still not sure why I had even been invited, the group took a break from negotiations for some snacks, heading over to a small buffet table set against the inner wall with a spread of light finger foods, such as danishes or fruit. I went over and felt a strong urge to grab some grapes, nearly rolling my eyes when I realized why, before giving in and eating a few.
“Hey, Leon,” Callian greeted me, coming up from behind with a strawberry in his hands. “Don’t take this the wrong way but… why are you here?”
“Oh, you don’t know either?” I said mildly, though that was actually somewhat concerning. “I got a letter from your dad that sounded like I had been show up on pain of death, so here I am. I assumed there was a reason, but if you don’t know….”
Callian and I both thought about it for a short moment, coming to the same conclusion and looking at one another. Callian eventually voiced it, “Do you think he just wanted to inconvenience you?”
“And waste my time! Yes. Yes, I do.” I made a deeply annoyed noise. “Your father is a petty man.”
“On occasion,” Callain conceded, though he seemed to be hiding a smile.
“You think it’s funny.”
“It is a little funny.”
“I thought you were my friend, but I see now where your loyalties lie,” I said teasingly, a bit of a smile crossing my face as well. We probably shouldn’t have been talking like this in front of Dahl, but I couldn’t be bothered to care right this second.
I should have bothered, as it turned out, for Dahl came upon us just then. “With the gods and his people, I should hope,” Dahl said flatly.
“I thought you knew how to take a joke,” I said before Callian could respond, the kid looking thrown and nervous in the Inquisitor’s presence. “Do you have some kind of condition that causes mood-swings?” My mouth was running off without me to some extent, and I was suddenly glad Rufais wasn’t there so I couldn’t make things worse between us. My patience had been incredibly worn during these negotiations between such dull people.
Dahl’s expression darkened for a moment to such an extent that I realized I had apparently actually hit on something with that.
I valiantly resisted the urge to start snickering.
“Leon, maybe you should,” Callian started, voice pitched low in warning.
“If your father were here, I might be playing nice,” I cut him off, “but this horse-faced lunatic tried to get me to commit apostasy against my gods yesterday, so any shadow of respect I had for him is long gone.”
“You do run your mouth, don’t you?” Dahl half-growled, and I felt a sliver of satisfaction that I had finally gotten under his skin.
“Some have said it’s one of my most notable talents.”
Dahl paused for a moment, and I could see it in his eyes, the insult, the implication that he would like to watch me have my tongue removed with burning pincers or something similar, but then he stopped. He took a short breath, straightened somewhat, and put that slimy smile back on his self-righteous face. “Is that so.”
It wasn’t a question, despite the phrasing, just a statement of doubt. I shrugged. “Do you want something? Callian and I were having a conversation.”
“The two of you seem very familiar.”
“We’ve met,” I responded shortly. It was probably too late to distance myself from him, but I felt like the least I could do was try.
“We fought together,” Callian said, somewhat sharply. “It encourages rapid familiarity.”
I gave Callain a bit of a look, and he looked me back dead in the eyes.
Had to give the kid credit– he was no coward. He had proved that in battle, and he was proving it now. It wasn’t smart to stand with me, but we were friends. He wasn’t going to turn his back. The action spread a bit of warmth through me, and I calmed down a little.
“I see,” Dahl said, and the “s” seemed to stretch out, as though he were saying it with a serpent’s tongue. “And how does your father feel about that friendship?”
“My father is a good man whom I respect,” Callian said some words that I definitively did not agree with or really think that he should feel, “but I am well over the age to make my own decisions on such matters.”
Dahl narrowed his eyes slightly and then turned to me, putting a significant part of his back to Callian in a rude and dismissive gesture that made the prince recoil slightly in surprise. “Have you had a chance to consider my offer?” he asked with that slimy smile, though it seemed a bit more strained than normal.
I looked at him for a moment before smiling charmingly. “I apologize, High Inquisitor. I had thought I made my opinion on your offer quite clear, but since it was evidently unsatisfactory, let me put this in the simplest terms possible: the answer is no. It will never happen. If you were to send someone to murder me and resurrect my corpse with dark magics that compelled me to serve you, my mindless body would still reject the offer you made me. The answer is unquestionably and unequivocally no. Is that clear enough, or should I paint you a picture?”
Callain’s eyes widened slightly.
Dahl snarled. “You should take some more ti–”
A hand landed on his shoulder. “The man said no. Perhaps you should ponder that rejection over in the corner. Away from here.”
I hadn’t expected that, and the phrasing and the way that Dahl’s face turned purple with rage suddenly made it extraordinarily difficult for me not to burst out laughing.
“You will regret this,” Dahl promised me, though he did indeed storm away from the conversation.
Right that second, I couldn’t be bothered to care.
“Your timing is the best,” I said fondly to Ennis. “Although you probably shouldn’t have done that.”
“You shouldn’t have either, nor should Callian have stayed,” Ennis pointed out with a nod towards the prince. “It appears to be a day for bad decisions. How viciously do you think he will come after you?”
I shrugged. “I expect he’ll try to have me killed a few times. Which will be fine so long as the threat of war’s on the horizon. I figure I have until that’s resolved to try to make some kind of truce with Rufais.”
“You’re interested in a truce?” Callian said in surprise.
“When Dahl comes after me, he may not be able to get me killed, but he only has to get my position revoked for my team to go back to jail,” I said quietly. “I’m interested in taking steps to prevent that.”
“What are you willing to give towards that end?” Ennis said softly. “He’s not going to just accept your apology.”
“I was thinking about becoming his general.”
Callian and Ennis both blinked at me, and I shrugged after a moment.
“Unless you can think of some other overture.”
“No, that’s…. I don’t think there’s anything that would work better than that,” Callian said softly. “I’ll talk to my dad, just casually, see if I can get him to be a bit more receptive to the idea.”
“Becoming a general won’t lose you your team?” Ennis asked.
“It will lose me them, but I can pick another Captain for them. I’ll find someone they’ll get along with. They won’t go back to prison.” I was already hating it, even while we spoke. I hadn’t come here to be a general; it wasn’t what I wanted. Generals sat up on the hill, strategizing. But I could do it for a little while, six months, maybe a year, long enough that I could get the bad blood between Rufais and I mostly out of the way, long enough that I could ask him to sign those pardons for my team, and then I’d be gone.
“You’re that worried about Dahl?” Ennis asked.
I looked over to where the High Inquisitor had already recovered from his fuming and was talking with the Aeron Ambassador on the other side of the room, smiling that slimy smile. “He has a lot of power, and he knows how to use it.” I turned back to my conversation partners. “And now it’s personal.”
“Because you didn’t take his offer?” Callian said blankly. “In what world would you have taken–”
“Because I mocked him for it,” I interrupted. “I didn’t just decline. I spat in his face while I did it.”
“He asked you to reject everything you believe.”
“He offered what he views as a better life to someone he considers his lesser.” And it was tempting. “But mostly, I don’t think he’s used to being told ‘no’. Particularly not by someone like me.” I turned to Callian. “Thank you, by the way. I appreciate it. All of it.”
Callian smiled. “What are friends for?”
I grinned back at him.
“I should probably go mingle though. Make sure Dahl doesn’t get too much time alone talking to the Ambassador.” Callain inclined his head to us both and then headed over to the other side of the room.
“Thank you, too,” I added to Ennis, moving further away from the food table where we had been congregating and more towards one of the walls.
“I don’t think I have done much for you yet,” Ennis said. “But I assure you that I will, if you need it.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
I knew what he was saying– if I needed the political pressure– and I greatly appreciated that too. “Thank you,” I repeated. “I know you don’t like to butt heads with the Highlord.”
“Bah, the man is unstable. Everyone butts heads with him,” Ennis shrugged off my concerns.
I smiled faintly, looking around the room. “How many of them would stand with me, if you had to guess?”
Ennis followed my gaze to the Guildmasters. “The practical ones know how valuable you are. Faolain, Whelan, they will probably stand with you. Durnin and Berne will most definitely not; they don’t like your influence or your attitude. As for the others, the minor guilds… who can say?”
“Not bad.”
“Not at all. You are well-liked, Elyon.”
“I’m never sure how that happens.”
Ennis breathed a laugh. “People like honesty. Until they don’t. But honesty directed at others? That, they definitely like.”
“You think I’m honest?” I said in surprise.
“You get slippery sometimes,” Ennis admitted, “but I don’t think I have ever heard you lie. If you do, you do it extraordinarily well.”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I didn’t expect people to notice. Do they think I wouldn’t be honest with them?”
“The smarter ones would appreciate it. The stupider ones don’t think about it.”
I laughed. “I think I’m going to sneak out. I don’t need to be here.”
Ennis nodded. “I’ll see if I can’t make us some more allies then.”
“Terrance, thank you. I haven’t even found your man yet.” I felt a prickle of guilt; not only had I not found him, I might very well have lost him forever.
Sorrow crossed Ennis’ face for a moment before he looked at me again. “But you’re going to keep trying, which is more than most would do. Now go.” He gestured with his head towards the exit.
I smiled at him and took his advice.
Fresh air felt very nice after spending so long cooped up inside, and I took a few deep breaths upon my escape from the negotiations. Time to get back to work.
I thought about heading for the Peacekeeper station, but in the end there wasn’t much point. Hector would have been there this morning, and if there was any news about our particular case, he would tell me later. All I would get from showing up there now would likely be a lecture on how I didn’t show up enough.
Where to go then?
I wasn’t sure where anyone would be, hadn’t made plans to meet up with them as I had anticipated to be stuck in negotiations all day playing nice. I looked up above the courtyard and found the familiar raven flying in circles high overhead. I recalled the command to be nicer to him.
You have any opinion on what I should do with my unexpected freedom?
It took Teris several seconds to respond. You’re asking me? My opinion?
I’ll take it back if you’re going to be all dramatic about it.
I felt amusement through our mental link and then another short pause as he considered the question. Ehud is in the outer ring doing some clean up and investigation after your run-in with the now-corpses two nights ago.
I blinked, not having expected such a useful response. Thanks. I really should be nicer to you.
I would really just take the acknowledgement of my existence more than twice a week.
I’m not that bad.
You’re pretty bad.
I breathed a very faint laugh. Alright, well. I’ll try to do better. Thanks, Teris.
I felt a bit of satisfaction from the bird before he fell silent again. It was so familiar, having him there, maybe I had become neglectful. He’d certainly never failed to be helpful in a pinch.
With a destination in mind, I started to head for the outer ring. The Crusader– Sryes– that I had met in the library was outside of the Cathedral, directing some lumber offloads from the tank that was still parked outside, though, I realized, it hadn’t been there when I had gone to visit Dahl– it must’ve been a new shipment, which explained the offloading.
I waved to her as I passed by, and she waved back, smiling at me pleasantly.
For perhaps one of the first times since I had met the man, Ehud was not difficult to find once I reached the outer ring of the city. He was just standing a few feet away from the gate, leaning against the wall and looking morose as he finished what looked to be the last of his lunch.
“Ehud!” I greeted as I walked up to him. “I assume no news?”
“Captain,” Ehud returned the greeting with his mouth half-full and then took a moment to swallow before continuing. “Oh, no, there’s news.”
My expression fell.
“Four more missing.”
“Four?” I exclaimed, loud enough that I drew some irritated looks from passersby. “But we stopped– we stopped two– they were planning for six? In one week?”
“It gets worse,” Ehud said. “Apparently the reports were lagged maybe a month behind. There’s been ten more this month, not counting the two unfortunate souls we lost. Not even just this month, just in the last two weeks, really. The rate has ratcheted up severely, and killing one group didn’t put a dent in it.”
“How? We had guards watching the cemetery, didn’t we? Last night?”
Ehud nodded. “Yeah, there’s a twenty-four hour watch there now, but we think the other ones were taken before our stakeout, not after. Still, with that many, it’s foolhardy to think this is just one team.”
“No, this is a concerted effort,” I agreed, looking at the ground. Who benefitted from this? “Why would someone need so many bodies? If they’re keeping them alive, that’s a lot of mouths to feed, even if they’re doing the minimum. And if they’re not, why… why go through so much effort? What’s the point?”
“The only thing that makes sense is some kind of slave labor or trafficking, but there’s no hubs of that here. The Chantry basically eradicated the slave trade.”
That wasn’t necessarily true; I knew of several places that still thrived on the business, and the Akuma Empire in the West was taking great strides towards reinstituting it there too, but all the places were too far away to make it sensible to start here. There had to be a reason it was happening here, in Ildanach. The biggest slave center in the North was in Morrigan Houslends, and he would have no reason to ship people from the slums here.
“Not to mention, we have no idea what they’re doing with the bodies,” I repeated one of the most frustrating factors of the case.
“Unless….” Ehud paused. “We have no idea who they dumped out of those coffins, do we? Or where they put them?”
I thought about what we had seen a few nights previously. “The guards did a sweep of the area, didn’t they? Were they never found?”
Ehud shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, no one knows this area like you do. Let’s do something about that.”
Ehud smiled at me grimly, and we went to work.
It wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t fun, but we scavenged in the dirt and the grime all around the graveyard to the best of our abilities. Taking a cursory glance wasn’t going to get us any further than the other guards had gotten, but they couldn’t have gone too far from the graveyard either, considering the amount of time spent, so we kept the radius small and our searches thorough.
It had been a while since I had had cause to root around a slum area like this, and I had put out of my mind just how much stuff could be in a small area when people were living outside of generalized society. There was trash everywhere; there was mud; there was worse than mud that we were both trying not to think too hard about as we dug through it with our gloved hands. To make matters worse, the graveyard seemed to border some kind of almost marshy, swamp area created mainly by the irrigation system for the trees. It seemed one of the lines had been leaking for some time and no one had bothered to say anything, slowly creating its own little disgusting swamp.
And in that disgusting swamp, we found something.
The bodies were horrible, rotted, covered in muck and half-buried in dirt, but they were here. Not a ton of them, not like this had been a common dumping ground, but as we continued to look, we found more than the two we had seen them move from the coffins.
“You’ll get some guards out here to do a full sweep?” Ehud asked me.
I nodded, breathing somewhat heavily from the physical labor and the digging. “Yeah. Help me get one of them out all the way first though, would you? I want to get a better look, see if we can tell how they died.”
“They’re pretty old, even the newer ones seem….”
“Yeah, but we have to try.” I had to try.
The body we recovered was desiccated, the flesh falling off of it and dripping onto the ground as freely as the muck, but underneath….
“It’s burnt,” I said, voice inflectionless. I hadn’t really been expecting anything, but that was a surprise anyway.
“To cover the tracks?” Ehud said, sounding as surprised as I felt.
“These aren’t amateurs,” I said quietly, the last hope I had of this being something easy, something– it felt wrong to apply the word “normal” to a number of disappearances in the city, but nevertheless, if such a thing could be called “normal”, it was what I had hoped. This was something else, and that always meant it was worse. I tried to look a little closer at the corpse, but the stench was turning my stomach already and I knew there was only so much that a person could take before their body inevitably rebelled.
“Get the guards?” Ehud prompted me.
“One more. I thought I saw a coat on one of these.”
Ehud frowned at me, but he swallowed his questions and distaste and went to help me pull another body I had noticed earlier out of the muck.
This one wasn’t burnt; his throat was cut– even with the level of desiccation, that was easy enough to see. Furthermore, my fears had been correct, and as I brushed away a particular bit of mud from his jacket, it revealed the emblem of Ennis’ House. This was the servant, not a victim of kidnapping, but rather a witness of whom they had been forced to dispose.
“It’s Ennis’ man,” Ehud said unnecessarily as we both looked at the corpse.
“Yeah.” I took a breath and, with unfortunately nothing else to do with the body, simply let it fall back into the dirt. “While I’m getting the guards, will you ask around as to how many corpses have been found in this area and brought for burial in the last few months?”
Ehud’s expression somehow got even more grim as he realized what I was implying. “You think half of them have actually been buried. They recycle the corpses to get more victims, dump them here, and then some of the ones here get found and buried, and some of them get found and used to abduct more victims.”
“It’s a horrible cycle, but it’s smart. We’ve been underestimating them from the beginning– I’ve been underestimating them from the beginning. Thought it was one guy on a killing spree in the back of my head, this whole time.” I cursed my own arrogance, thinking I had seen it from the start. Cursed the fact that I had started to look at the inhabitants of the slums as “other”, that I had started to become the elite that I had once preyed upon to survive.
“We couldn’t have known,” Ehud said quietly.
“Maybe if I had bothered to have relationships with anyone in the area where I lived, I would have,” I snapped.
“Leon,” Ehud said, a bit sharply, and I blinked, because Ehud rarely called me by my name– none of the team did. “I do know these people. It didn’t matter. We had to find them at the graveyard, and then we had to come here. There wasn’t going to be another way to piece it together. No one could have been fast enough to take one of them alive.”
I took a moment and thought about it. My first instinct was that I could have– I could have cheated, and then I could have made it. But the truth was, I still had to be able to think about it to cheat, and it hadn’t crossed my mind that they would commit suicide. Kidnappers didn’t do that–
“Cultists do. Zealots do,” I said suddenly, and Ehud looked at me a bit like I was mad, as he had no context. I had thought it before, when I had watched them do it, but now…. “Ehud, the High Inquisitor would have told the Church here that he was coming in advance, wouldn’t he have?”
Ehud frowned at me. “I would think he would have had to?”
“Maybe a week in advance?” I said, voice growing sharper, colder.
“That seems… reasonable. Captain, what–”
“Four gone the week he arrives. Six in the week or two before that. When we first started this, you said they were happening in the vicinity of the Chantry Outreach program.”
“Leon,” he was using my name again, maybe he really thought I was going mad, “it wasn’t a correlation. I told you that.”
“It wasn’t then. It is now. Kidnappers don’t kill themselves, Ehud. Zealots do. Religious men do. People with faith do that. Why is Dahl even here? It wasn’t for me; I’m a side project at best. The tank,” I said suddenly, more realizations coming to light as I thought harder about it, harder about the Church. I’d been trying so hard to keep my prejudices from impacting the case that I had missed what was right in front of me. “There’s been a tank sitting outside of the Cathedral for weeks now, on and off, but I was inside the Chantry yesterday. I walked through the whole building. There’s no construction, there are no repairs. They’re not using lumber for anything. Ennis’ man died because he caught them using the tank. That’s how they’re moving the victims.”
“Okay, okay,” Ehud held up his hand. “Say you’re right. The Chantry is doing all of this, using the outreach missions to scout, sending out teams of abductors to take them and use this system of switching and dumping bodies, transporting them using one of Ennis’ tanks without him knowing the contents have been switched. Say that the disappearances have increased because the High Inquisitor is here, that this is why he’s here, even. Why? What’s the motive? What could be worth this? The Chantry already has everything it could possibly want! They have riches, technology, respect, authority– some priests have more power than Highlords, and probably twice as much money too! Why would they be doing this?”
It was a good point. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But can you give me another theory that works with what we know?”
“Not right this second,” Ehud admitted.
I reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “If we find something that exonerates them or points in another direction, I promise you I will let it go. I will not turn this into an attempt for revenge against the Chantry. But right now, I’m going to follow where the evidence leads.”
“How are you going to do that without getting executed for accusing the High Inquisitor of murder?”
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” I took a breath. “In the meantime, I’ll go get those guards to dredge the rest of the swamp. Thank you, Ehud.”
Ehud half smiled at me. “Any time, Captain.”