Chương 181: Chapter 202 : Clues

"I beg the fuck out of your pardon?" I hissed in disbelief. I stared at the scissors in my hands. Sigiled. I don't know what they would do, but I knew who to ask. I've got someone for this. I opened a palm-sized portal and pushed them through. I looked back up at my brother with a sharp glare, and I flexed the air around us for some privacy, a sound-muffling vacuum layer.

"Nathan, why did this dipshit just try to cut my hair with magic scissors?"

"If I had to guess, for sympathetic magic," he said tersely, glancing around at the inside of the bubble of wind I had built around us. Through it the rest of the room was slightly distorted. Gharie's sleeping body seemed to waver as if underwater, the crowd rippled like seaweed.

"It's when you take someone's blood, or ground-up bits of their hair or fingernails-""I know what sympathetic magic is," I snapped. It came up in the easy-mage run, the scrivener. Using a drop of blood in the ink of a sigil could customize a spell to work only on a specific person.

"But why do you know anything about sympathetic magic?" He had never, ever shown any interest in magic of any type. So why is he suddenly knowledgeable about this one subject, right now, right here? My suspicions flared hard. He was already giving me a slightly disappointed look, like I was not being as smart as I should be.

"Because I know absolutely everything about stationery, pens, writing desks, and ink," he reminded me.

"I can't write their script but I have at least an academic understanding of the subject." Shit. Yeah, I should have seen that coming. He's put more work into understanding ink than I have, and I've got a 100% affinity at a spiritual level. Nathan ran his hand through his hair, and the perfectly coiffed and gelled shape was tousled.

"I knew that not just any blood or hair would do, but didn't know why. I didn't really pursue that subject. But it stands to reason that you need magical means to acquire them. The sigils on the scissors. Very well. You've got those, I'll take Gharie. He'll respond better to me than to you, and we'll need answers. You've got a rather limited toolkit for getting answers from people, and I know very little about magic, so this is the smart division." Suspicions lit up anew.

Why does he want to grab the guy and get out of my line of sight as fast as possible? Why is he even here tonight? Is his answer about stationery and sympathetic magic just a little too pat? My eyes narrowed a bit.

"Maybe someone should help guard him, just in case." My twin brother rolled his eyes at me.

"Fine. Pick someone you trust. But not Yheta." Offended to my core!

"You think my list of people I trust starts with Yheta?" Nathan's eyes gave me back nothing. His face, neutral and impassive. Shit, he really did think that. Fine.

"Nathan, we've only got a few more minutes before they come back and this scene devolves. First: is there anything else here at the crime scene we need?"

"No."

"Good. Next: you said you didn't think he's working alone. Some of the evidence here might suggest that, but you were too fast on it. You already had suspicions. So what gives?" He froze, just a little sliver of panic showed in his eyes. And then, resigned, he nodded. He was caught and there was no sense pretending otherwise.

"I thought there would be an attempt. I wasn't sure who it would come from. There's been chatter on the grapevines, enough for me to follow up. A certain node of businesses that I've kept an eye on, making certain innocuous moves that I've come to recognize. The timing was suspect."

"What kind of businesses?" My tone was chilly.

"The kind that lost a lot of money in Broghton, and lost revenue in Byeview," he said, meeting my eyes straight-on. Mother fucker. Kralcit. Nathan glanced out through the wall of distorted air.

"They'll be here in seconds. I don't have much, but I'll get you started. Their money is moving to Byeview again, that would be the place to follow up." He stepped out through the wall of sound-distorting air, and I let the bubble pop. I stood, shocked and dumbstruck. If someone had come at me with another knife right then I'd have been flatfooted. I had a lot to process. I did my thinking while Nathan and Yheta caught the stout designer under the knees and armpits and carried him to the door.

"Bruce. Stay with them," I said.

"I need to know what he says, and I need it from you. Don't let him separate you from Gharie during the interrogation." My cousin tipped a bare sketch of a salute and strode after them, his walking-stick tapping along casually. It's weird that this is the first time I've seen them so close together, Bruce really does look like an identical twin to Nathan, which is really weird to me, his non-identical twin. So, Nathan has been keeping an eye on Kralcit's businesses.

Through grapevines, tracing the money, listening to chatter. Spy stuff. Like his class. And he's been doing it well enough to get ahead of an attempt against me, before I ever had any indication at all. He knows how Kudder relates, and the bank heist. If he knows the connection is Grade Kralcit, he's probably also aware of the Glorious Curmudgeon and my work in Port Noit. The courts and the Guard are not aware of that connection, they had my evidence but never recognized Kralcit as the common thread.

I wasn't even expecting to find her again for a while, she would be deep underground right now, hiding from the authorities, not to mention me. She's definitely going to turn up in the spring, she's got a part to play in the Revolt, a fixed point in time. After that I can murder her with impunity. But if I know where she is, then I can defend myself better against moves like this. I can push back against her, I can hurt her before I kill her. I can do a lot of damage to her businesses.

After all, she's the one that funds the scriveners that break open the palace's defenses. Fixed point in time. So the more of her network I ruin before then, the more that loss is going to hurt her. The less bodyguards she can afford, the less secrecy she can afford. I can't kill her right now... but I've got a plan now where I didn't before. The crowd parted for them and closed behind them, everyone staring after the young men carrying my attacker away. A pawn in Kralcit's hands, to get a piece of me.

She's probably gotten tired of me escaping from assassins and is looking for something sneakier and less overt, something that bulletproof skin won't protect against. Or, she's got something more hideous and insidious in mind, like using sigils to control me for her own ends. And now I've got another idea. If I know where to find Kralcit, that's a big step towards finding her associates. Including her main guy for casting magic against my family: Duke Meadwhite.

I've been agonizing how to find that guy, I didn't want to just wait for him to come after me but that was my best plan for a while. After all, the only link I had to follow and find him was Grade Kralcit, and she's even better at hiding traces than he is- it would have been easier to find her through him than the other way around. So now I should be able to find him, and to wreck her businesses, and set everything up to kill her as soon as I don't need her anymore. Best of all, they didn't get my hair.

Wait a minute. Would I have even noticed Gharie coming behind me with blades if Nathan had not been sitting just a couple rows behind me? Would I have been on high alert during the show without my sneaky, mysterious and duplicitous brother hanging around? That pulled a frown to my face, and I looked around a bit more sharply. I tried to reconstruct the events in my mind. Where was I, where were they?

Nathan had said that he expected there to be some sort of attempt on me, but he did not say that he knew what kind, or by whom. How vague, or how exact, was his information? Did he know just enough to be present when a stroke of good luck came along? Did he know that I could handle it if I was a little more alert than usual? Did he know exactly what was happening and what exactly he could do to fix it? Did he have a plan that went bad but we got a decent outcome anyway? Or was there a lot more than I was seeing?

For a minute all I could see was some endless depth of his machinations and secrets, some vast conspiracy that he was navigating, cutting just enough threads that I would be able to power through on my own. But I was sure as hell not going to find out tonight because Yheta was walking back alone, Nathan had arranged to leave with the patient. I shook myself out of my thoughtful funk.

"Where did they go?" I asked Yheta. He started to move to take my arm, but he remembered himself and put his hands back before I had to intervene.

"I couldn't say," Yheta admitted.

"I was busy getting the man and the healer settled inside while he was talking to the driver. But Bruce was with them, he should report in later." I am already convinced that was no accident either, that nobody knew where they were headed for now. Nathan is either trying to pull one over, or he's just still so habitually secretive that he can't help himself at this point. But that was a solvable problem. I shook my head.

"Whatever. We're going to see my brother on Oneday morning anyway, and Bruce whenever he checks in. But I guess Fashion Week is pretty much done for, this season."

"I think most of the after-parties are getting started early," he said.

"And everyone's talking about their appointments with their dressmakers, so I guess the designers were successful anyway." No, everyone's going straight to their vendeuse because the next few months are going to be a hotbed of preparation. Old grudges are about to be dragged out into the light. Debts will be settled or buried. And everyone who thinks they deserve more than what they've gotten is going to have a knife in one hand and someone else's wallet in the other.

A conflict of greed and ambition, striking when the moment seems opportune. A pressure has been seething under the surface for decades already, too long since the last time that someone rose up against the throne and became an object lesson. The further something is pushed into history, the fewer people read of it. And the more inevitable that history will repeat. The heat and fuel were there, it just needed a match. A blight. All they needed: a single scandal to coalesce around, a tragedy to exploit.

My homeland was it, that was the pretext that the pretenders needed, a scribbled banner to hold up as they charged into a war they had been looking for anyway. Nhullit, Ebonder, Aumerje, Snairlin. Yheta shifted his stance. I had been quiet too long.

"Ah, I can call on some people, and see who he's connected to. I heard Nathan, he said there might be more people involved. If you'd like I can-" I cut him off with a gesture.

"I appreciate the offer, but I've got a lead I can follow. What I need you to do is to get your top people together, anyone that can make it to a meeting. Next Sixthday, you pick the place. There's big moves to make and we're going to make a lot of money."

"How are we going to do that?"

"We're going to build a railroad." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Well, the show did not go on but the gala isn't over just because someone got ragdolled across the room. The announcer took the stage after way too long to announce that the remainder of the show could be seen in the overflow annex, for those interested, and I don't think anyone moved.

The stage and the textiles were always just set dressing, the real work is in the subtle shifts of the balance of power. Nobody else here had seen the scissors and nobody here knew about the link to sympathetic magic. As far as they were concerned, a disgruntled or perhaps obsessed fashion designer tried to cut my hair either for revenge or a creepy keepsake, and got whammed for his trouble. That's the version everyone already has, so there's no need for me to say anything to reinforce that narrative.

Petunia bracketed me from the side, with our backs to the corner. We made it look nonchalant. This part of the room is as good as any other, someone's gonna be closest to the corner, that's all. We did not crouch like a trapped animal at the mercy of hunters. We stood easy, unworried, but we did not allow anyone at our blind side. No weakness, no vulnerability, no fear.

"Always exciting when you're around," she said.

"It's not usually," I had to defend myself.

"Most of the social events I go to are very formulaic. I arrive, I mingle, I chat with people, I enjoy the food and the drinks. Some people mention some situation they need help with, and I offer help how I can. I wear a fashionable but not extravagant dress, there's a mix of people I know and people I meet. And there's no violence, shouting, royalty, town guard, arrests, monsters, or explosions!"

"So, it's just Fashion Week that brings out the worst in you?" Petunia said, teasing. Traitor. Normally Bruce is the one taking shots at me while she stands stoically and/or judgmentally. I sighed.

"I wish I could put the blame there. Nah, all this last five or six weeks has been like that. Anytime I leave campus it seems like some kind of disaster pops up. And that's a real problem because next weekend I've got a dungeon to defeat."

"Too bad that won't be as easy as the fashion designer," Petunia monotoned, crooking a thumb at the empty patch of the room where it had all gone down. The chairs had been righted but nobody went near them.

"I'm surprised you restrained yourself enough to let him live. If someone came up behind me with scissors, I don't think I'd have that much control, I'd just go all-out."

"Ha ha," I tried to laugh with her. But this is another thing that is bothering me. I did go all out. I threw my best shot, and I hit him dead-on at point-blank. He's a no-stat NPC, a noncombatant, my full wrath should have killed him three times over, with no exaggeration. I don't come wired with a "take prisoners" setting. So was he lucky that Nathan was doing the perfect thing to cushion his impact and keep him from breaking his neck with a bad fall?

Or did my brother already know exactly what I was going to do and exactly what his best move was? I get that I didn't hit him with the void itself, but the hits he took should not leave a sedentary unenhanced man unconscious but breathing unless the perfect conditions were prepared. Maybe we just got lucky. But I'd rather believe in my suspicions than in good luck. I looked over at my cousin.

"Hey, what do you say we get out of here? I suppose you know a place that's serving food this time of night?"