Chương 155: Chapter 152. Morning - Part II

"What do you mean, missing?" Cass said. Jorik was still staring into the case.

"There was another one. I know there was, I packed them myself." He held his hands a little apart, trying to shape it from memory.

"Smaller than the orbs. Flat, like a… like a coin, but thicker. Dark metal, with a green stone set into the middle of it, and lines coming off the stone, branching, like…" He faltered.

"Like roots." Adom knew it before Jorik finished. He'd made three of those. A field anchor; the piece that let a disruptor hold its null-zone in place instead of bleeding out across a room. On its own it looked like nothing, a paperweight. But paired with one of the orbs, it was the difference between a few seconds of dead magic and several minutes of it; long enough, exactly, to keep a lutin bank from fleeing into the fae realm while you robbed it. He looked through the cases again.

Orbs, band, stone, plates, cylinder, but no anchor. So the three of them turned, more or less together, to Verrin. Whatever good humour had been on the man's face was entirely gone. He set down his glass and rose, and for the first time that night he looked his age, and something colder than it.

"That is not supposed to happen," he said quietly. He didn't argue, and didn't ask them to prove it.

"A lot is not split. Not in my house. Items come in together, they go out together, or they go back to their owner together. That is the entire point of my house." He was already moving toward the door.

"Forgive me. This is a most unfortunate mistake, it is mine, and I will see to it personally and at once. Wait here. Please. Eat something." And then it was Verrin who left through the far door, leaving his guests behind in his own room; which, Adom suspected, did not happen often. The door shut while the music played on into the quiet. Adom waited until the attendants had drifted back out of earshot, then turned to Cass and kept his voice low.

"Can we trust him? Completely?"

"No," Cass said, without hesitation.

"Nobody can be trusted completely. That's not a thing that exists." She watched the door Verrin had gone through.

"But I trust him reasonably. And by my standards, that's a great deal — you've no idea how short the list is." She then picked an olive off the board.

"It's most likely what it looks like. A piece slipped a lot, a clerk got greedy or careless, something small. He'd gain nothing by crossing Wangara over one item, and he knows exactly what it would cost him." She ate the olive.

"Wait. Let him bring it back." Just like that, a minute passed. Then two. By the fifth Adom had stopped pretending to look at the food. By the eighth he was on his feet, pacing the length of the room and back, and by the tenth he'd decided that if Verrin didn't come through that door soon, he'd go and find him, wards or no wards. Fortunately for the man, the door opened a moment later, but one look at Verrin's face told Adom the news was bad.

"One of your pieces was stolen tonight," Verrin said without preamble, crossing to them but not sitting.

"I've confirmed it, and I owe you an apology before anything else. This happened under my roof."

"Tell me what happened." His voice was calm; so calm that, without the vein throbbing at his temple and the furious red creeping into his face, one might have mistaken him for the same man as before.

"When my people logged the lots, one of my clerks recognized your work — that they were holding artifacts made by Magus Sylla himself. He had a buyer in mind. A man named Sorel Vance." At that, Cass let out a long sigh through her nose. Both Adom and Verrin looked at her, then realizing she was being stared at, she straightened, and opened her mouth to apologize for the interruption.

"No need, Guildmaster Drake," Verrin said mildly.

"I understand entirely." Adom looked between the two of them.

"... Who's Sorel Vance?"

"Someone whose name people in my trade try not to say at the dinner table." Verrin turned back to him.

"He acquires magical contraband for the Third Sector. Weapons, mostly. He isn't from Arkhos, he came all this way on word that something of yours might surface, which should tell you how good his information is. My clerk had dealt with him before, so a price was promised." His voice stayed level.

"Then the order came down to pull the lots. That almost never happens here; there was no way for the clerk to see it coming. He panicked. He was more frightened of Vance than of me, so he took one of your pieces off the table before it reached the case and handed it over to be rid of it."

"And the clerk?"

"Caught. He's being held now, and he'll be dealt with. As for Vance…" Verrin spread his hands.

"I'll have people after him tonight, with my apologies attached, for what they're worth at this hour."

"How far is he?"

"He left perhaps twenty minutes ago. By carriage." Verrin considered it.

"Which means he's still on Arkhos, in the city proper, most like, unless his driver is very good. Making for the port, I'd wager. A man like that doesn't linger where he's just stolen something." Adom was already reaching for his cloak.

"Then call your people off," he said.

"I'll take care of this one myself." That stopped Verrin.

"... Yourself, Magus? You're certain?"

"I am." Adom settled the cloak on his shoulders.

"And don't take this the wrong way; your people are surely capable. I'd just rather be in control of it. I don't sit and wait well. If I'm handling it, I'm not anxious. If I'm anxious, I'm insufferable. Everyone's better off this way." Verrin's expression eased at that, though he tried not to show it.

"Very well. Then I'll be honest with you, since you've offered. Vance is not a small man. He holds the underworld of Hogg, the whole of it. One of the great cities of men, and one of the rougher ones. The people I'd have sent after him tonight are good, but they'd have been going to Hogg, eventually, to do it. I won't pretend I'm sorry to have that taken off my hands." He inclined his head, and this time the apology was unmistakable.

"Consider the two hundred thousand void. You'll hear nothing more of it. And you have my sincerest regrets that your evening was spent this way at all."

"It's no trouble," Adom said, and mostly meant it.

"These things happen. Thank you for being straight with me." And he went.

The port never fully slept, but it came close in the small hours, and the part of it Adom wanted was the quietest of all. He came in by flight, and let himself down onto the flat roof of a customs shed at the edge of the commercial moorings. Below and to his right lay the working harbor: the big berths, the cranes, the bonded warehouses, all of it dead at this hour. To his left was the other part. The discreet part.

A cluster of smaller jetties and private slips where boats came and went without troubling the harbor master's ledger, and where a man in a hurry, with cargo he'd rather not declare, would go if he wanted to be off Arkhos before dawn. That was where Adom watched. On his way out, Cass had given him Vance to look for: heavyset, well-dressed, a greying beard kept close, and a habit of travelling with more guards than the job ever seemed to need.

And Verrin had described the cart as dark wood, iron-banded, and curtained windows. Between the two of them, Adom knew what he was waiting for. It came after about fifteen minutes. The cart turned onto the quayside road and rolled toward the private slips at a hurried pace, pushed by two well-groomed horses. Mounted men flanking it, four that Adom counted, riding in loose disciplined formation. There were iron bands on dark wood, and curtains drawn. That was it.

Adom dropped off the back of the shed into the shadow of the road, settled the mask Verrin had pressed on him over his face — it sat cool against his skin, and when he breathed out he felt the small thrum of the enchantment that would take his voice and give back a stranger's — and stepped out into the middle of the road. Then he simply stood there, and waited for them to come to him.

"Hey, you! Off the road!" one of the outriders called.

"Move!" He didn't move. The cart slowed. The driver hauled the team down to a walk, then a stop, perhaps twenty feet off, and for a moment nobody did anything but look at the lone hooded figure standing in their way. Six riders, Adom counted now that they'd bunched. More than the job needed. Vance liked his numbers. Then quietly, under it all, Adom reached out to the horses. Easy. He conveyed. Whatever happens now, you stay. You don't bolt, you don't rear, you don't run. None of this is yours to carry.

The two cart horses felt it land and went calm in their traces, and the riders' mounts with them.

"I said move!" the outrider snapped. Then, to the driver: "Run him down." The driver shook the reins.

"Hyah!" Nothing happened. He shook them again, slapping leather across the team's backs, and the horses didn't so much as lean into the harness. Adom watched the exact moment the men understood it was being done to them, that the figure in the road had reached out and stopped the animals cold without lifting a hand.

"... Druid, it's a druid!" one started. They came off their indecision all at once, blades clearing scabbards in a ragged chorus, six of them dropping from the saddle and closing. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Adom raised one hand, palm up, and lifted it a few inches. [Float] He weaved, and all six left the ground. It was not a violent thing. There was no slam, nor scatter.

They simply rose; boots leaving the cobbles, swords still in their fists, every one of them hauled up to hang at a man's height in the night air with nothing whatsoever beneath them. For a moment none of them grasped it. Then they did, all together, and began to do the only things available to a man suspended in empty air: kicking, swinging at nothing, twisting to find some surface that wasn't there, swearing in three accents. One threw his sword at Adom out of pure principle.

It stopped a foot from the mask, hung there a moment, and dropped to the stones with a clang. Adom looked up at them. It had been, by any reasonable accounting, a long and stupid night. The ceremony, the bank, the changeling, the tower, the auction, the meeting, the missing piece, and now a midnight ride to the docks instead of the beach, his friends and an unhurried frosty he'd more than earned. He felt he was owed a small, petty thing, and he decided to take it.

So he let them hang there a moment longer than he strictly needed to. Six grown men, professional and well paid, paddling in the air over a quayside like cats dropped into a bath, going slowly hoarse.

"Comfortable?" he asked. The mask gave the word back in a voice that wasn't his and he found he rather liked it. He thought about cracking them all together over the cobbles and being done with it. But on reflection, leaving them hanging was more satisfying. It pleased him enormously that he was no longer the only one having a bad night. He even considered, briefly, just leaving them up there until morning, for someone to find at dawn.

That wasn't ruled out, he supposed, as he turned and walked toward the cart, leaving the men hung in the air.

"Hey— hey!"

"Put me down!"

"What the— what is this, what are you—" "Stop! Turn around!" Aah, how delightful, but alas, he had a job to do. There was a mage in the cart. He'd felt him preparing a spell waiting for Adom to simply open the cart's door. Verrin had mentioned this part, almost in passing: Vance kept a sellspell on retainer, a personal mage bodyguard of sort.

The driver was still on the far side of the box, frozen now rather than fleeing, plastered against the cart wheel and staring at the masked figure crossing toward him with his whole body trembling. Adom passed him without a word and noticed the cart horses had started to fret, though not from him but from the noise of the men screaming.

So he stopped and laid a hand on the nearer one's neck, comforting them for a second, then he turned to the cart door, behind which a mage was very nearly finished with whatever he'd been so patiently making. Adom opened the door." AAAARGH—!" A scream came first and the fireball came with it, already filling the doorway like a fist of compressed flame the size of a man's chest.

The heat hit Adom a breath before the thing itself did, a hard dry wall of it that pulled the moisture off his eyes and curled the hair on the back of the hand he'd put to the latch. It roared. That close, a fireball had a sound, a low tearing howl as it ate the air it needed to keep burning, and he could see the structure turning inside it, the spin that held it tight, the white seething core where the real heat lived.

Another quarter-second and it would have gone off in his face and taken the front of the cart with it. It was good work. The sellspell had spent the whole ride building it exactly right. Anyway, Adom wove [Dissipate] and the fireball came apart.

The roar cut off mid-breath, the spin stuttered and lost its grip, and the whole churning mass folded back down through itself, thinned to a shimmer, and was gone, until there was only the doorway and the faint warmth where a small sun had been a moment before, and a few motes drifting like the ghost of heat-haze. It was a vicious little spell, [Dissipate], for all that it looked gentle. Every spell was mana that had been argued into being something: heat, weight, light, a held shape, and so on.

To unmake one you ran the argument backwards, took the structure apart at the seams and let the mana drop back into the ambient hum it had come from. The catch was the cost: unmaking a spell ran you at least twice the mana that went into making it, often more, which made it a fool's trade in a real fight. You'd empty your core erasing things while your enemy spent half as much throwing them. Adom did it anyway, for two reasons. The first was instructive.

Nothing told a mage he was outclassed faster than watching his best work taken apart by someone who could afford to overpay for the privilege and not feel it. It tended to end the argument before it cost anyone a hand. The second was that it looked cool. Put two mages in a room and within five minutes they'd be trading spells like boys comparing card collections, each trying to prove he had the better one. So, yes. Partly he did it to flex. He wasn't above admitting that.

The sellspell stared at the empty air where his masterpiece had been. Then at the masked figure standing unbothered in the doorway. His chest was still heaving from the scream, hands half-raised and beginning to shake, and Adom watched him do the math: Best spell gone. Masked thing still there. Me not strong enough, but maybe me smart enough to stop. And sure enough, the sellspell lowered his hands. Sat back, and went very still, declining, with what dignity he had left, to test the matter further. Good man.

Vance had no dignity left to spend. He was crushed back into the corner of the seat, beard and rings and all, one hand up in front of his face as if it would help.

"D-don't— please— I didn't— look, I didn't know, I swear to you, I didn't know it was— whatever it was, I didn't know, I'd never have— please —" His voice kept breaking and starting over, climbing.

"Look, I have money, I — anything, you can have anything, just don't, please don't kill me, I've got people who'd pay, I can get you anything you want!" Adom pointed past him to the flat dark case on the seat. Vance flinched at the movement like he'd been struck. His eyes darted to where the finger pointed, found the case, then came back.

"... Th-this?" He asked.

"You want this?" Adom nodded.

"Take it! Take it, take it, take it!" He scrabbled it across the seat with both hands, nearly dropping it.

"It's yours, it's yours, have it, have whatever you want!" Adom took it, and flipped the lid. The anchor lay in its cloth where it should be: flat, dark, the green stone at the center with its veins of inlay branching out like roots. It was whole and untouched. He shut the case, tucked it under his arm, and decided there was nothing left to say that the mask wouldn't say better by saying nothing. So he gave the two of them a small, encouraging thumbs-up. Naturally, they stared at him.

Both of them bearing the same confusion on their faces. Adom didn't much care what they made of it, so he turned and left. The six riders were still up in the air over the road where he'd left them, hoarse now and slack, all the fight long since paddled out of them. He snapped his fingers as he passed beneath, and they dropped, landed hard, and scrambled up off the cobbles. He didn't slow to see whether they'd come at him. They didn't.

20 minutes later... Adom slipped through the back entrance of their building, footsteps silent on the worn floors. Cass was waiting in the main room, still masked, arms crossed against the wall.

"How did it go?" she asked, straightening when she saw him.

"It went fine. Got it back."

"That was faster than I expected." He was already moving toward the stairs.

"The changeling?"

"At Valiant's. Safe." She watched him a moment.

"Don't take this wrong, but you look half-dead. Go to sleep." Adom chuckled.

"Yeah. In a bit." He paused at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the rail.

"Something I have to do first."

A few minutes before dawn… The waves came in steady, foam spreading up the wet sand and drawing back with a soft hiss as salt and seaweed were on the air, clean and cold in the dark before dawn. Adom walked the water's edge barefoot, boots slung over one shoulder, the case with the anchor safe in his inventory and everything that had been wrong with the night finally behind him. Bennu hopped along beside him, talons printing the sand.

"The sand feels different than I imagined," he reported, stopping to dig his claws in.

"And the waves just keep coming. How do they know to do that?"

"They don't. They just do."

"But something has to tell them. Like how I know to make fire."

"The moon pulls them. It's far away, but far isn't the same as weak." Bennu tilted his head, processing this.

"The moon? But it's so far away."

"Far doesn't always mean weak." The phoenix absorbed this wisdom while pecking at a piece of driftwood, and moved on to the next wonder, which was kelp, and then the next, which was the way the rocks down the shore changed the sound of the water. Everything was the best thing he'd ever seen, right up until the thing after it.

"Adom, why does the air taste different here than in the city?"

"Less smoke. More salt."

"I like it." Bennu spread his wings and flapped them experimentally, stirring up a small cloud of sand.

"It makes me want to fly higher."

"Don't get too far ahead."

"I won't! I promise!" Adom chuckled. The eastern sky was going from black to deep blue. They were late, and Adom knew it. The others would already be there. The spot was a curve of beach where the rocks made a kind of natural seat facing east, and the lot of them had been coming to it for two years now, more or less whenever they could all be in the same place at the same hour, which, lately, was rare enough that the coming mattered more than the sunrise did.

Frosties, whatever food anyone had dragged along, the sky doing its trick over the water. That was the whole of it. It had never needed to be more. He saw them before they saw him. Four shapes on the rocks. Sam, unmistakable even as a silhouette. Eren beside him. Karion sprawled with his boots up on a lower rock, and Damus a little apart from the rest. There would have been five, once. Gus was off in the eastern reaches somewhere, chasing whatever rare beast had caught his attention this season.

He was forever somewhere new, sending back letters full of creatures none of them had heard of and sketches that were enthusiastic rather than accurate. His seat on the rock had been empty often enough lately that they'd stopped commenting on it. They just left the room for him anyway, out of habit. It was Karion who spotted Adom first." There he is." He said it to the others, not to Adom.

"I told you. Pay up."

"Nobody bet anything," Sam said.

"We bet in spirit."

"We thought you'd bailed," Eren said, twisting around. Though, there was no accusation in it.

"Sam had your frosty earmarked."

"I was going to drink it for you," Sam admitted.

"Out of respect."

"Touching." Adom came up the sand toward them, and four pairs of eyes went, one after another, to the small blue shape hopping at his heel, and stopped there.

"Everyone," Adom said.

"This is Bennu."" Hello!" Bennu announced, delighted, hopping forward into the middle of them.

"I'm Bennu! I know all of you already, a little. You're Sam, and Eren, and you must be Karion, because Adom said you'd be the loudest, and—" his head swung to the figure sitting apart "—you're Damus. He didn't say much about you. Only that you don't say much either, so I think it works out." For a moment nobody said anything at all. Then Damus, who said nothing for anyone, looked at the week-old phoenix who'd just summed him up correctly, and chuckled.

"A phoenix," Sam breathed, like saying it too loud might undo it.

"Oh, Gus would have loved this."

"Last one I saw was in a book," Karion said, already shifting over and making room on the rock without being asked.

"Sit. Both of you. You're letting the cold in just standing there." Adom sat as someone put a frosty in his hand, cold and beaded with damp. Eren passed down a bundle of his mother's cookies, still faintly warm. Sam was trying to offer Bennu a cookie and getting redirected toward the meat pies instead — " he likes salty," Adom said. Sam swapped without comment, and Bennu took half a pie in one bite and made a sound of pure astonishment that set Karion laughing. Nobody asked Adom where he'd been.

They could see the night on him. It would keep, or it wouldn't come up at all, and either was fine.

"Almost time," Sam said, settling back.

"Time for what?" Bennu asked, around the pie.

"Watch." The sun came up over the rim of the water, and the light caught the high cloud the way it did, bending into bands of red and gold and a violet that looked solid enough to touch, stretched across the whole eastern sky. Bennu went completely still, the pie forgotten in his beak, his small head tipped all the way back.

"What is that," he said. Not really a question.

"Morning," Eren said. The display lasted exactly as long as it always did. Eight minutes of pure ethereal beauty, and then the sun climbed higher and the clouds shifted and it was just a regular sunrise again. Bennu was still staring at the sky, his feathers practically glowing in the early light.

"That was... I don't have words for that."

"Good thing it happens regularly," Sam said, offering him the rest of the meat pie. Maybe this wasn't so bad after all, Adom thought, taking a sip of his frosty and breathing in the salt air. The cool bottle felt good in his hands. The sand was warm where the sun hit it. His friends were here, Bennu was happy, and for the first time in today, nothing was trying to kill him or steal from him or complicate his life. He could get used to mornings like this.