Kel’thar prided himself on being quite mysterious. It was the kind of act that, in most circumstances, was a terrible idea, because it attracted the kind of attention that a duplicitous schemer could not afford; however, for the kind of clients that he kept, nobody really seemed to mind. They really should have.

Kel’thar would have to work hard to think of exactly how many contracts he was fulfilling right now, but preferred instead to order them by immediacy. He worked, of course, for Lord Amon Egrethore, but that was the least important contract. He was, of course, a sometimes-informant for King Horace, but he knew that the king trusted him very little, so little that Kel’thar honestly had no idea how many spies the King had in Amon’s estate, let alone who they were. He had several open-ended contracts which he could fulfil at any time by delivering Amon’s technology or goods, or by killing or kidnapping members of the household. He had already passed along word of Roan’s suicidal outbreak, which would earn him any one of a number of different rewards, depending on how things played out.

And he was, of course, an agent of the Dark Lord. As far as he was from the Empire, anyone would think that was the least of his concerns, but that contract always managed to rank near the top. Part of it was how much he owed the Dark Lord, for healing his sister and enhancing his own magic powers, for having his wife’s previous husband assassinated and her family threatened, for not having him assassinated for… the one or two times he had less than deliberately betrayed him. Part of it was what he owed, and part of it was the simple knowledge that death could come at any time if you made the Dark Lord upset.

Right now, his many contracts had him in a bit of a mess. He sat in a hiddden room at the base of the large tower, inaccessible except to anyone who knew the house’s hidden wall-ways… or anyone willing to smash open stone walls, which of course would become more and more plausible as the investigation wore on. Or, he supposed, another wind mage, if they decided to reach in through the slits in the stone and strangle him to death, but it would take some effort to do that at a distance.

The voidling in the Order’s carriage made for a clear and present threat, not simply because he had the clarity to see Kel’thar’s sensory thread, but because he must have understood that the information he had given up was poison pill. Kel’thar had already heard that the metal was a triple-type metal; the samples alone would be worth dozens of gold to the right buyer. If as Chai had said it was more useful than it was valuable, then it must be very useful to Amon right now.

Which was very interesting, except Amon was the least important of Kel’thar’s contracts. In fact, if the Egrethore group survived this encounter, Kel’thar was more or less obliged to continue keeping up this charade and not cashing out. Kel’thar had already pushed two or three different times towards making everything collapse, most recently by helping twist Roan’s mind at a critical moment. Sticking around when those sort of things might accidentally come to light… was not really what he had in mind.

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Now that the house had four samples of this mysterious triple-blend metal, with a fifth one missing, Kel’thar really just wanted to burn everything down and run. What stopped him was the idea that the metal was useful right now. To his understanding, there were only two basic metal types that were a triple-blend, and most were assuming that the unnamed trash-human had stumbled blindly onto another lesser Starmetal. The other possibility, that he had somehow formulated Deite while enslaved, beaten, starved, corrupted, and magically tainted, was absolutely ridiculous.

But that seemed to be what the Voidling was suggesting.

Deite was perhaps the most useful thing that the Egrethore estate could possibly find. A talented mage could use it to break open space and cross directly into the next plane, to emerge at a place of their choosing; with so many samples, they might simply take everything of value and walk away from the estate, appearing who-knows-where in the country to continue their work. It would be damned-near impossible to chase them down.

If Kel’thar offered that knowledge to the Egrethores, they would set him up for life. But as long as he got his hands on at least one sample, he would find someone to sell it to. Most likely the Dark Lord, because he had to come first, in everything.

So Kel’thar had decided to keep his mouth shut about that for now, and was watching the investigators as they started prowling around the house again. This time, though, there was a difference; he felt a passing headache and found that something had slipped his mind. After a brief magical cure, he checked on them again,only to find he wasn’t sure where the male investigator had gone, and the guards didn’t seem to notice or care.

The investigator--what was his name, Wilke?--had bothered him several times, but it was only now that he remembered. He had become famous for winning a tournament, or something. Martial arts stuff, which didn’t interest Kel’thar much… normally. Except now that talented martial artist was invisible, possibly forgotten by the guards, and loose in the estate whose secrets might change the fate of the nation, and maybe the world. And right now, Kel’thar was hidden in a place where his body wouldn’t immediately be found, making him a very plausible target.

Kel’thar decided this was a fantastic time to retire his contract with Amon, and started crawling through the wall-ways towards the locked rooms where the metal ingots were stashed.

A ways away, Chai’s face lit up in a very brief smile, but he had forgotten why half a moment later.