The past couple of days had been rather uneventful after the initial confrontation that we’d had on the first outing. Sure, there was the occasional spell tossed our way and there were a number of shadowy figures that had appeared on rooftops, throwing knife or pistol in hand, but none of them had done much more than give the nobles a fright. Green had had the opportunity early on to demonstrate his power when he threw up a shield to block a hidden sniper’s bullet—he claimed to have some form of danger sense—and after that incident, not a single shot came anywhere close to hitting us, the jester and I tossing shields up whenever Green shouted a warning. Even though we bodyguards only numbered three with Samar’s departure and Manasi’s death, nobody tried to directly force a confrontation with us, and that meant that I was largely unoccupied for the better part of the day.
With nothing better to do, I had begun trying the exercises that the mysteriously powerful oathholder—Nishi, he’d called himself—had told me to practice. As little as I trusted a stranger that apparently enjoyed pulling fellow oathholders into godly domains, he was powerful, and I was pretty sure that there was no harm associated with what was essentially meditating.
While our adventuring group stood just outside taverns and eateries, manors and designer stores, waiting for the nobles to get their investigation sorted out, I pulled from the magic weave to form a fist-sized sphere of magic power in my hand.
Nishi hadn’t been all too specific with what I was supposed to do. Something about sustaining my magic and examining its properties, feeling it out. He hadn’t given any directions that actually quantified what feeling magic meant, and so I stood there, focusing on a small sphere of power that could’ve easily annihilated any living person if let loose.
I had an intrinsic sense of my magic, like every oathholder did, but according to Nishi this sense was nowhere near developed enough to speak like the divinity that powered us. There didn’t seem to be an easy way to expand it, unfortunately. My sense of magic was ingrained as deep as my sense of my own limbs—seeking to expand its capacity felt like I was trying to convince my own two legs that they could fly.
Still, even with no results so far, I had been maintaining the spell, manipulating it in every which way: expanding it, compressing it, flying the orb around me in lazy circles, tossing it behind a building and having it loop around, anything I could think of. After the first full day spent doing it, I hadn’t felt any different, but now I thought I could feel a little bit of a change. The sphere was a little more responsive, now, quicker to respond to my will.
I didn’t feel any notable change with my perception of my own magic, but I supposed that was to be expected. The other oathholder had been truly world-class in terms of their power. I’d never even heard of a person being able to not only take themself but also others into a god’s domain, and he’d done it almost effortlessly. Even with that in mind, it had taken him decades to perfect the technique and a few weeks afterwards to actually execute it. While I was strong, I was nowhere near his strength, so I could probably expect progress to be slow.
We were nearing the end of the second day, now. The sun was still high in the sky, but the nobles had called an early end to the day, citing a ‘formal event’ in the evening that required their attention. The Alzaqs had been invited to the ball as well, it seemed.
“It has to be the Tempets,” Sarah was saying, gesticulating wildly at the other nobles. “All the evidence points towards it.”
“I agree,” Chrysanthemum said haughtily, a frown on his face. “To think that they would be capable of assassinating Kiri…”
“It is not with certainty that we know this,” Orchid warned. “Please do not accuse House Tempet to their face.”
“An incident would be more mess than it is worth,” Camellia agreed. “Let us bide our time. Tonight, we shall be able to investigate them further.”
She glanced over at the adventurer group as she said that, for some reason. The noble looked away just as quickly, but it left me a little confused. Apart from Orchid, none of the nobles had even deigned to acknowledge our existence beyond expressing annoyance, let alone look to us almost like they were looking for assurance about something.
I dismissed the feeling. If the noble wanted to be uncertain about her decisions, that was her choice.
“Speaking of tonight,” Orchid said, turning to us, “Would you like to attend?”
“Attend what?” the jester asked.
“A ball, beginning in six hours,” Orchid said. “House Alzaq has been invited to a royal ball, and as is custom we are permitted to bring our guards with us.”
“Surely you cannot be implying that we bring commoners into a formal event,” Chrysanthemum said in disbelief.
“Much as we might dislike it, it is not unprecedented,” Camellia said. “Commoners have been brought in before, and they will after, especially as guards.”
“We may get into a situation where guards are necessary,” Orchid explained. “Father told me that if we do not provide our own guards, he will take the household servants, and I wish not to burden them.”
“Your heart is too soft,” Sarah groused. “They are servants. This is what they are for.”
“I dislike it nonetheless,” Orchid said, turning back to address us. “My offer is this: attend the ball with us, guard us while we investigate, and—“
“And stay out of our way,” Chrysanthemum said, shooting us a glare that was probably meant to be intimidating but just looked like a child trying to seem serious.
“—and we will ensure that you are fairly compensated,” Orchid finished with a sigh.
“Sure,” Kyle said, straightening at the mention. “I can stay out of the way, long as you pay me alright at the end.”
“I would prefer not to,” Green admitted.
“Your danger sense would be invaluable,” Orchid said. “I assure you, compensation will be generous.”
“Talk to me more about payment, and then maybe I’ll think about it,” Green said.
“Lily?” Orchid asked. “What about you?”
“I have obligations, sorry,” I said, not sounding very sorry. “Nothing I can abandon to guard you. Will two be enough?”
“Of this quality, yes,” Orchid said. “Alright then. Kyle and… ugh, Green, I can talk to you about payment once we return to the manor. Lily, you’re excused for the day. I hope to see you tomorrow.”
I nodded and walked away from the group, dipping off into an alleyway. Camellia glanced at me again as I left, and I marked it down in my mind. If she was looking around at people that her upbringing had taught her to treat as lesser, she was either like Orchid or nervous about something, and a bit of time around her had confirmed that it was definitively not the former.
There was something about that woman that rubbed me the wrong way, something beyond the base dislike I held for most nobles. It might’ve been worth investigating, but I had better things to do with my day.
Six hours to the ball, Orchid had said, and Jasmine had told me to meet her at the Rayes manor at three hours until. That left me with a fair amount of time alone.
There wasn’t much to do in Dakheng, so I resolved to find a secluded alleyway and use this time to truly focus on the pseudo-meditation that was supposed to eventually allow me to communicate on a level above our own.
I didn’t have any illusions of being able to master this quickly. Nishi had pointed me in the general direction of what to do, which did help quite a bit, but he hadn’t given me detailed directions, so it was going to be quite a bit of trial and error.
Finding a secluded corner wasn’t too hard. Dakheng’s civilian side wasn’t the most lively, a bastardization of a city that had sprouted up in the decades after the capital had been established, and much of it was still rarely travelled even by the locals.
I sat in a poorly lit alleyway, thankful that it was dry and relatively free of garbage. There must have once been an establishment in the building next to me, judging by the faded signs on the walls, but it looked like it had closed long ago, the door leading inside dusty from lack of use.
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Shutting the outside world out, I drew magic into my hands, and I held it there, not forcing it into a specific form but controlling it enough to prevent it from destroying my surroundings. I sensed the flow of Inome’s power, directionless but hungry for material to destroy. It didn’t want to take on a specific shape, the formless magic creating an amorphous blob. There was an aspect of Inome in there, I was certain of that. Reading countless texts both ancient and modern as well as my recent experience with Nishi had done more than enough to educate me on the nature of magic. There was a god’s will in there, I just had to figure out how to interface with it.
I spent a good half hour sitting there with my eyes closed, playing around with the blob of magic. It changed shape and size as I moved it around, but it didn’t seem to do so completely randomly. There was a hidden method to the madness, I was beginning to notice, but it was one that I could not understand yet.
Unfortunately, after half an hour I could hear the sounds of people nearby. At first, it was just the sound of one or two people’s steps, and they faded quickly but when those same footsteps returned, accompanied by more, and I heard the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of something large and wooden being dragged across cobblestone, I realized that this distraction wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.
I stepped out of the alleyway, shielding my face from the sun. Even with my hand, I had to squint through the afternoon sunlight to fully make out what was happening.
Halfway down the street, a group of commoners seven or eight strong had gathered around a center point. A man, thirty years old or so, standing atop an upturned crate. His beard was scraggly and unkempt and his clothes were a mess, accentuating the wild fervor that punctuated his body.
There were more people streaming in, passersby from a nearby street that apparently recognized this man and gradually made their way to the group. I supposed it might have been a planned event, given that I hadn’t heard many people for a while before this but there were now a fair number of them. A minute or two passed without him saying anything, but the growing crowd stayed nonetheless. By the time the unkempt commoner finally opened his mouth, his following had grown to a group of twenty or more people.
My interest was piqued, if somewhat tempered by the annoyance of such a large disruption. I recalled Jasmine telling me about bloodthirsty commoners in the streets before she’d left for Dakheng. Now that I thought about it, it was a little odd that we’d run into none of them while investigating. I had to admit it was weird that after not seeing any while investigating, I’d just so happened to run into one the moment I was alone. Then again, we hadn't been on this street before and I’d heard there were quite a number of these commoner groups—perhaps there were enough of this type of meeting that I had a decent shot of running into one in these less-travelled streets. Were all their gatherings like this, moderately secretive and held in out-of-the-way side streets that they knew no noble would ever visit?
Maybe they had some sense to them after all. I joined the crowd, staying more towards the back to avoid attracting attention.
“Friends and countrymen,” the man began, his voice just as feral as the rest of him. “You all know the news by now. The Crown Prince is…”
He gestured towards the crowd, beckoning them to give him the answer.
“Dead!” a boy’s voice cried. From the timbre of it, he was maybe sixteen at most. “He’s dead!”
“That’s exactly correct, my boy,” the haggard speaker said. “Now, the nobles are up in their golden castles crying themselves to sleep in silken sheets. They call this a tragedy!”
The speaker had shouted the last word. He wasn’t a very talented orator, but what he lacked in tonal delivery he more than made up for in volume. At the very least, he was getting his message across.
“A tragedy!” he repeated, snarling the words. “But what have they done, in the wake of such a bad tragedy?”
“Nothing!” a woman shouted. “They’ve done nothing!”
“Nothing!” someone repeated after her. Another voice joined, then another, and soon enough the entire mob was chanting the word, a discordant symphony of frustration and rage.
“Nothing!” the speaker shouted, louder than even his entire following, and the group quieted down almost instantly, hanging on his words. “They do worse than nothing! They ignore us, and they let us die in the streets like rats! Do you know what they do tonight, just a week after their precious Crown Prince kicked the bucket?”
“What do they do, Seb?” the same boy that had spoken earlier asked. “What do they do?”
“Tonight, they party,” the vagrant—Seb, apparently—said, waving his hands in the air. “They party! They say they care, then they drink and eat and grow fat while we suffer.”
“Fuck them!” someone shouted. The crowd was faster to join in this time, the second vocalization of the phrase one that the majority of the people here participated in.
“Fuck them,” Seb agreed. “For them, we mean nothing. One noble’s death is a tragedy, but a hundred of us dying from hunger and plague is a number.”
“My poor little girl almost wasted away from sickness this week,” a man spoke up. “I had to use half my life’s savings to get her care.”
“I went hungry yesterday, and the day before that.”
“Rent increased again.”
Any number of grievances were aired out, overlapping each other and creating a buzz of discontent.
“Fuck the nobles,” Seb said once the hubbub had calmed down. “But even if the situation is dark, there is hope. You know this. I know this.”
“Our patrons,” someone said. A general murmur of agreement passed through the group.
“Our patrons,” Seb agreed. “The one group of pigs in human skin smart enough to know their rightful place.”
The tone of his voice had shifted, and with it so had the atmosphere. He sounded more put together now than he had before, more of a planner than a chaotic mess.
“We must prepare,” Seb said, his eyes roving the crowd. “There will be blood in the streets soon.”
He locked eyes with me. His gaze was nowhere near as animalistic as it had been earlier. The vagrant’s eyes were cold, calculating. Nothing like the man he’d been moments ago.
“I notice a new face today,” Seb drawled. “One that wasn’t invited and hasn’t spoken.”
The man was still looking at me, gaze boring straight through me, and slowly the mob began to follow his eyes. A mass of people turned towards me, each of them taking me in. Looking at the clean, classy shirt and pants that Jasmine had lent me, at my body, at my well-combed hair.
“A noble brat,” someone spat. “A spy.”
“Hang her,” someone else said. “Rip her to pieces.”
“Peace,” Seb said, holding a hand up. “We don’t know who she is, but that doesn’t mean she ain’t one of us. Girl. Speak. Why are you here?”
“I—I was passing by,” I said, trying to inject a realistic amount of panic into the lie. “I heard you begin to speak, and I was interested. I thought I… I thought I could just stop by.”
Seb looked at me with suspicion. “A girl like you, wandering this part of the city alone?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s quiet, and it’s faster than the main roads.”
“You don’t sound too noble to me,” Seb said. “Who are you?”
“I’m from Syashan,” I said, frantically searching for a lie that would justify my words. “I was brought here by a noble who took their pick of our village and never let us go.”
“You’re close to a noble?” Seb asked, a note of curiosity entering his voice.
“No, fuck that,” I said, pulling on very real feelings of hatred to reinforce my voice. Would a panicked girl that particularly hated nobles feel more confident now? I wasn’t sure, but I went with it anyway. “I want him to eat shit and die. Nobles killed my mother and my father. They took my family from me.”
Not technically a lie, that last part.
“One of us, then,” Seb said with a grim smile.
“One of us,” someone else said, the anger from just moments ago totally forgotten.
“She’s with us,” a third man said. The voice sounded familiar. Had he been one of the ones calling for my death?
“Are you with us?” Seb asked. “If you are, then it’s fate. You’re exactly who we need.”
“Yes,” I said immediately. This commoner movement was no ordinary one, I could tell, and whatever was going on, it had ties to a noble House. “I am.”
“Good,” Seb said. “You’re a servant, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “I must be at the ball tonight.”
“Then go,” Seb said. “But be ready to be with us again. You have a role to play. But not quite yet.”
“A role?” I asked. “And if I say no?”
“Then we’ll kill you,” Seb said mildly. “Can’t have information spreading, you know?”
“When you phrase it like that, I suppose I’ll join up,” I said. To be fair, he had seemed overly trusting up until this point, and that did tend to get people killed. “You said something about not yet?”
“Tonight, you handle the nobles, and tomorrow, we meet here again. Tomorrow, you begin your real job.” Seb gave me a smile. Some of his teeth were missing, and he looked like he’d forgotten how to express joy with the expression. “Come. Walk with me, for a minute, and I’ll give you your first instructions.”
“What, we can’t hear?” a woman complained. “Why does this brat get special treatment?”
“Maurice, I have saved your life more times than I can count on one hand,” Seb said off-handedly. “Do not question me.”
The woman shut up.
Seb gestured for me to leave the street, and I did, him following.
The man moved closer to me, offering me his arm. I was a little hesitant to take it, given his general uncleanliness, but this really was an intriguing development and I wanted to at least observe it, if not partake in it.
As soon as I stretched my arm out, he gripped it in one hand, deceptively strong. His fingers pressed against me hard enough that I was sure there would be marks there afterwards, and it took all I had in me to keep myself from wincing.
“Tough girl,” Seb complimented me, his voice even. “You’ll serve us well.”
“Let me go,” I said.
“Then don’t lie to me,” he hissed. “I’ll let you off the hook this one time, because the important parts were yet true. But I know that you didn’t come here with a noble, and you were not just passing by.”
Fuck. I was more than a little experienced at lying, and I knew that I generally could control my reactions. Still, even the smallest reaction seemed to give him something, because he grinned fiercely as he said that.
“I know things,” he said. “Not enough, or I’d trust you right now, but stop lying. You seem to be a good sort. I’d hate for you to turn on us.”
“It would take a lot for me to,” I said, putting active effort in maintaining the facade. “I would never.”
He didn’t pick up on that lie, at least. Instead, he squeezed harder before letting go, going far enough that I was worried that he might’ve fractured something.
“Go and enjoy yourself tonight, servant girl,” Seb said. “Don’t tell anybody about us. Come back here tomorrow.”
“I will,” I promised.
With that, he released me and gave me a wave. “You have places to be, don’t you?”
I could recognize a dismissal for what it was, and so I left. As I did, I caught snippets of conversation from behind me.
They were actively trying to keep me from listening in, I was pretty sure, their voices dropping to low whispers, but sound carried in this street. I caught fragments of sentences.
House Tempet.
The day after tomorrow.
I started walking faster, irrationally worried that one of them would start following me. I’d wasted enough time.
I had a ball to get to and a freshly-made promise to break.