The conversation in the tavern seemed to grow louder with each step Baern took. He could barely hear himself think.
A man drew his arm back, almost conking Baern in the chin, and punched his palm. “I fookin’ told him I’d smash his skull in with a hammer, is what I told ’im!”
“You still oughta,” said another. “I’d do it. Take that little bugger’s eyes right out o’ his sockets too. Make him know he fucked with the wrong bastard.”
“I ain’t no bastard.”
“Everyone’s a bastard to me. You bastard.”
Baern shuffled by, dodging flailing limbs and erratic dancers who, frankly, had no business dancing—ever.
He took a one-seater beside a support beam. Plenty of folks to talk to in here, but the crowd and noise were all a little overwhelming. He’d need to relax first, fill his belly and wet his throat.
Bar hands and maids were bouncing around, faces red and sweaty. He managed to grab one, asked for black ale if they had any—they did—and requested a bowl of soup. The soup was a no-go; the barmaid looked at him as if he’d inquired about fried cat liver. She said they had roasted lentils.
“Roasted lentils it is,” he said sadly. He had been looking forward to soup since he’d left Valios. What kind of tavern didn’t have soup?
A mug of overfilled ale black as ink arrived a while later, and a wooden bowl of lentils followed shortly after. Baern leaned back, snacked and drank. He got halfway through his ale when he saw a man in a midnight-blue tunic stroll past in as nonchalant a manner as Baern had ever seen.
The man epitomized ordinary. He had a crop of hair that hung midway down his neck, a little oily, a little curly. Had old, broken-in and broken-down boots on his feet, some stains on his tunic. His posture was far from perfect; he hunched a little too much, just as every hard-working laborer did.
Not a single perceptible aspect of his dress, his mannerisms, or his appearance would identify him as anything but the most common of commoners. The only reason Baern even took notice was because he’d seen him nearly every day for the past thirty years.
Baern grabbed his mug, got up, and took one step. He stopped, turned back, and grabbed his bowl of lentils. He had ordered and paid for them, after all.
Baern set his food and drink on the man’s table and pulled up a seat from a nearby table. The two ladies sitting there glared at him, but there were three chairs and only two of them, so they’d have to deal with it.
The man in the blue tunic looked up, expressionless.
Goodness, is he bloody talented in hiding his emotions, Baern thought. “Horace. How do you do?”
Horace Dewn rubbed his mouth. “Why are you still here?”
That was possibly the most confusing question Horace could have asked. “Pardon?”
“Olyssi will have your head if she knows a lackey of Maren’s is still here. She disposed of his personal guard this morning.”
Baern tried to make sense of those words but could not. “Well, firstly, I am not one of Maren O’Keefe’s lackeys, and secondly—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Horace said, his voice hushed. “You’re a Valiosian. She’ll put you under the guillotine all the same.”
Baern hefted his elbows onto the table. “This is all quite confusing, Horace. Allow me to outline my life for the past month. Lavery and I were captured by mercenaries who later encountered and stabbed Olyssi Gravendeer and—”
For the first time in his life, Baern witnessed emotion wrinkle throughout Horace’s face. The surprised, shocked, utterly baffled sort of emotion.
“You were with—you’re right, Baern. This is confusing. I assumed you’d accompanied Maren here. But… tell me, where is Lavery?”
“Out there, trying to save the world. It’s a long story.”
He snorted in a goop of snot. “I’ve got some time.”
“Ah, goodness,” Baern said, sighing and taking a drink. “Where do I start? Well—did you say Olyssi executed Maren’s guards?”
Horace nodded.
“Why?”
“He killed—”
“Wait. Before you answer that question, answer this one. Is Olyssi the queen?”
Horace lifted his brows in a yes-if-you-can-believe-that kind of way. “Raegon was poisoned at the feast last night. Olyssi accused Maren. A click later and Maren’s brains were outside his head, courtesy of a crossbow.”
“Why the hell was Maren even here?”
Horace told him everything, from the plot to disband the Council and blame Lavery’s disappearance on Bastion to Aven Klouth’s betrayal and usurping.
Baern had intended to set his mug down at some point during the conversation, but found that he could not. He stared straight ahead, felt like a fist had slammed into his chest and briefly stopped his heart.
He wanted to make sense of everything, but it was all—well, unbelievable. “You’re working with Bastion, then?”
Horace grimaced, tracing a finger along his jawline. “I hesitate to say yes. At the moment, I am. But if his plans unhinge Avestas, then I’ll move on to my next ally. I fear that time may be coming soon.”
“We need him, Horace. We need Avestas to be united.” He set his mug down. “That scale you showed me—I can do you one better. I’ve got an entire dragon sitting a couple miles outside this kingdom, in Oriana Gravendeer’s estate.”
“Dead?”
“Dead. We were right, old boy. They are coming.”
Horace folded his lips in. “You said Lavery would save the world. I don’t know how, but I do hope that wasn’t a lie. Because Avestas, I assure you, will not save itself.”
Curiosity subtly twisted Baern’s head.
“We’re on the precipice of war,” Horace said. “Olyssi Gravendeer wants to flatten Valios and make the West bend their knee. Bastion has promised his help, but only if she assists him in dismantling the Torbinens. He desires their port and access to the sea and all the trade that comes with it. But he’s not marching on their walls. We… discussed strategy this morning.”
“Well, my, my. Consider me surprised that he trusts you enough to hear your counsel.”
“He not only heard it, he also heeded it.”
Baern threw a handful of lentils into his mouth. “What’d you tell him? That this is madness and peace is a better alternative?”
Horace cocked his eyebrow. “I want him to listen, not laugh. Torbinen is no anemic kingdom, and they’ve the support of nearly the whole South. Bastion would suffer enormous losses even if he managed a successful siege. So I offered him my spy work. Sow a bit of distrust and paranoia and conspiracies inside Torbinen, among the people and the Council. Force the collapse of Farris Torbinen’s reign, prop up a puppet whose strings Bastion could pull whenever he wanted. It’s a long process. It buys us time.”
“Oh, buggers,” Baern spat as spilled ale dripped onto his shirt. He cleared his throat. “Sorry. You forgot the but.”
“What?”
“The but. You left it out. It buys us time… but something something it doesn’t matter in the end. You were so cynical only a moment ago, talking of Avestas being unable to save itself.”
Horace shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll need all of Avestas—capital kingdoms and lesser ones—to unify, or the clutches will sweep across this world.”
You need more than what’s on the surface of Avestas, Baern thought.
“You won’t ally the Rooks and Torbinens, much less sandwich the Gravendeers in there. Not even if you lasso a dragon and haul it up to them. They might believe you that the winged bastards are coming, but the divide is too deep. The hatred too strong. And you’ve got Aven Klouth in the West looking to solidify his kingship; he intends to march on the Wrokklens to display his power and leadership. He thinks he has a friend in Bastion should a claim be made on Valios’s throne, but the Raven cares only about himself.
“You can see how this might get messy should you request full cooperation from all parties.”
Ba
ern closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he tilted back and drank. I suppose, he thought soberly, Avestas’s sole hope lies not with the living, but the dead. How unfortunate. How sad. How unlikely. The risen were meant to augment the forces of Avestas, not serve as her only defense.
He’d come here hoping to convince the Gravendeer heiress to lend her might against the dragons. He’d come here hoping to spark an alliance between the capital kingdoms. But people, it seemed, no longer wanted to live on this world.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Elaya hated the idea, but it needed to be done. Even saying that—it needed to be done—made her feel dirty. You start using that phrase to swing around your hammer of justice and as a means to break your beliefs and values, and you begin stumbling over that imaginary line, into the darker side of life.
She and Tig walked the gardens for a second time. She enjoyed the sweet smells of roses and honey flowers, and the unwieldiness of purple hearts climbing up small berried bushes and drooping across the footpaths from branches above. Sadly, daylight dimmed and took with it the heavenly glow of reds and whites, oranges and pinks. The Pious Gardens of Haeglin were said to have birthed rainbows into existence.
Elaya doubted this, but the place sure was serene. She wasn’t here for a lovely repose, though. She and the Eyes had work to do. They hadn’t climbed through an old, abandoned sewer for nothing. Strangely enough, it was mostly free of cobwebs and spiders, as if someone had passed through recently.
Jocklun had told them of the sewer’s existence. He said it used to be the prime trade route for smuggling illegalities into and out of the city. And then one day, news had gotten back to Raegon, and he’d ordered the Jackals to bring him every smuggler who came through. Long story short, an apothecary had cooked up some fantastically lethal—but slow-acting—poison that Raegon had used as punishment. Such was the end of the sewer smuggling route. For a while, anyhow.
“Is that ’im?” Tig asked.
Elaya peered through a hibiscus’s baring branches. “Fat, terribly groomed, and walking straight toward the brothel with two Jackals. Yes, I’d say so.”
Master of coin, Gruppus Miren, was a man of tastes. Often debaucherous, deviant tastes, but tastes nonetheless. Jocklun had told the Eyes that Gruppus was neither well kept nor well mannered, and he had a sick perversion of snipping off the toenails of whores and keeping them in his pockets, but he was the best damn purser this side of the Gape. And the other side, for that matter.
Since the day Raegon had tapped him to seize control of Haeglin’s finances, the kingdom hadn’t faced a deficit once. And it’d become the de facto bank in all of Avestas, with outstanding loans to five of the six capital kingdoms, Torbinen notwithstanding.
Gruppus carried with him the keys to the vault, always. He had an obsession of staring at, auditing and even sleeping with the gold inside—usually after sleeping with as many big-breasted women as he could in Lord Kuss’s brothel.
“Inside he goes,” Elaya said. She slipped a penknife Jocklun had given her into her hand. It fit snug and concealed in her palm so long as she kept a loose fist. “Let’s just hope that Kuss character doesn’t show.”
“Or Olyssi. That’d be an awkward one, huh? Think she prefers a bulge, or no? I’m leaning toward no.”
Elaya blinked at him several times.
“No reason, really,” he explained. “Just a hunch. Maybe both, eh? Maybe she’s a twofer. I’d probably be a twofer if I was an heiress. Best of both worlds, they say.”
“Tig,” Elaya said patiently, “we’re about to kill a man. Not fuck him. Get your head on straight, will you?”
Tig made a gag face. “Even if I were a twofer, that oily-skinned creep ain’t my—wouldn’t be—my type. Has it been five minutes yet?”
“Close enough. Let’s go.”
Elaya and Tig took the winding cobblestone path out of the Pious Gardens and headed toward the dome-shaped brothel which lay snug at the edge of Haeglin’s third disc, flirting with the sheer face of the cliff.
Frequent patrons of the brothel believed one day all the slamming and screaming and slapping of flesh on flesh would scoot the brothel too far past the edge and it’d plunge two hundred feet below. And everyone inside at the time would get to bed Taria, the goddess of sex, for eternity. How they all planned to fit inside her hadn’t been discussed.
From the outside, Lord Kuss’s brothel looked tame and uninteresting. No windows, no gems embedded in and gussying up the door frame, no statues of naked men and women in communion. Just a wooden dome with a wooden door and water stains streaking the walls.
But the magic happened inside. Elaya and Tig walked in and were greeted with an abundance of smells and sights. Incense burned away the tension in her shoulders, and she forgot all about the tightness in her jaw as she inhaled creamy sandalwood and exotic jasmine. Low burbling candles flickered throughout the dimly lit room.
Also, there were plenty of grunts and joyful squeals from deeper inside the brothel.
“Ah, madam and sir,” said a man walking out from behind a curtained doorway. He wore silk robes and slippers and large, looped earrings. “Will we be enjoying ourselves together or separate?”
Elaya tucked her chin against her shoulder and looked deeply into Tig’s eyes. “The more the merrier.”
“Of course,” the man said, smiling. He unclasped his hands and gestured toward a wall of chests. “Weapons are not permitted beyond this point, I’m afraid. But Lord Kuss believes you’ll find his newly crafted chests to be quite accommodating to your needs. They’re larger than they look, and I promise you very secure.”
Elaya shrugged at Tig, and the two of them found a pair of empty chests beside one another. She unsheathed both her blades and withdrew a concealed dagger from her pant leg, kneeling and placing them all inside the chest.
She could feel the presence of the brothel host behind her, watching, inspecting. With a turn of her shoulder, she bought herself a brief moment of privacy and opened her hand, freeing the penknife.
“I can’t seem to get it to lock,” Elaya complained, fiddling with the provided lock and key.
“Allow me,” said the man, getting on one knee and taking the key from Elaya.
As he stabbed the key into the lock, she grabbed a fistful of his hair. In one motion, she wrenched his head back and sidled the knife edge against the lump in his throat.
“You’re going to take us to Lord Gruppus,” Elaya whispered. “Now.”
The man’s bottom lip trembled. “He—he’s… back there. In the Diamond Room. You can’t miss him.”
“Good, then you won’t have any trouble showing us.” She tapped his shoulder and told him to get up.
Tig rearmed himself, then reached into the chest and handed Elaya back her weapons. He kept the knife pressed firmly against the man’s throat as she sheathed her swords.
Elaya swiped the curtained door aside and went through, into a circular chamber with doors around the perimeter. The grunts and slaps and groans became louder.
“Which room?” she asked, voice hushed.
“He’s—”
She threw a vertical finger against his lips. “Quietly.”
Fear drenched him as he closed his eyes as if to pray. “Th-there’s—” He swallowed. “There’s a door at the end.”
“I see it,” Tig said.
“I—I—in there, there’s stairs.”
Tig gave him a shake. “And?”
“U-up—up—up—”
Another shake, this one violent enough it snapped the man’s head forward so far that his chin drove into his chest. “Spit it the fook out.”
“Up there. You go up there. That’s the Diamond Room. The man you’re—you’re looking for, he’ll be in there.”
Elaya nodded at Tig. “Keep him, I’ll knock.”
Phase One of Sack the Gravendeer Vault had been executed. Now came Phase Two, the simplest part, so long as Adom and Kaun weren’t so deep in ecstasy that they’d mi
ss their call.
Elaya gave a three-knuckled knock to each door, moving to the next as soon as she pulled her fist back. From every room came a pause in the low hum of sweet-talking voices and enthusiastic moans and rasping breath.
Where are you going? droned a nasally woman.
I’ll be right back. Stay here, all right?
The salacious noises picked right back up in all the rooms except two. Like synchronized performers, Adom and Kaun walked out from behind their respective doors.
Elaya crossed her arms. “Have your fun?”
Adom pinched a miniature volume of air between his fingers. “If I could buy myself a teensy-weensy bit more time…”
“No,” Elaya said. “Let’s go.”
Kaun flicked a droplet of sweat off his brow. “Got our steel?”
Elaya withdrew her extra sword, as did Tig. They held them out for Adom and Kaun to take.
“You think I look the part of a mercenary still?” Adom asked. “It was rough in there. Intense. Lots of—”
Elaya threw up a hand. “Details are neither needed nor wanted. What happened to your chest hair?”
Adom looked down at his half-unbuttoned shirt. “Huh? Oh. Have you ever known the joy of wax?” His face lit up. “Hevla does. Boy, does she ever…”
“Who’s—” Elaya stopped herself. “You know what, I don’t care.” She faced the brothel host. “Which room’s empty?”
“Um. Er.” His eyes wandered around the circular room as if they were roped to a swivel that perpetually looped around. “Th-that one, I believe.”
“Put him in there,” Elaya ordered. She pinched his chin, put her nose against his. “If you make a sound, it’ll be your last. If you move, you’ll never move again. Yes?”
With erratic breaths and flaring nostrils, he nodded. “Y-yes. Yes. Of c—”
“Get him in there.”
Elaya hated playing this part. Threatening innocents didn’t jibe with her morals. But the cruelty of experience had taught her that while it’s easy to uphold your ideals when faced with a black-and-white decision, the grays of life force you to make hard, unromantic choices.
She would kill the man if she had to. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but right now her future—the Eyes’ future—was most important.
The Dragon Thief (Sorcery and Sin Book 1) Page 27