Dorner leapt forward, sword flashing, his companion on his heels. Taniel thrust once, pivoted, and pushed before either man could take two steps. The movement was so quick that Vlora could barely follow it. The two men twitched and tumbled, stuck together by Taniel’s sword like chickens on a skewer, dead before they hit the floor.
The room was deathly silent, all eyes on Taniel. “So much for keeping things quiet,” Vlora muttered under her breath.
The sheriff approached, pistol in hand, circling the two bodies and leaning over to put her fingers to their necks one at a time. “Dead,” she proclaimed.
Slowly, Taniel pulled his sword out of the two and faced the sheriff. Vlora could see the fight in his stance, the tension in his legs like a snake coiled to strike. She had no doubt that he could wipe out the whole room before anyone made it to the door, and the thought frightened her.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to disarm yourself,” the sheriff said.
“It was self-defense, ma’am,” Taniel said.
“I saw that,” she replied, “but we’re gonna have to put it in front of a judge. You need to disarm and come with me.” The sheriff’s voice wavered. She could see that same tension in his legs that Vlora could, and she was scared.
Vlora waited for him to move. Whatever he did, she would have no choice but to back him up. Things had panned out about as badly as was possible and she couldn’t think of a way to turn it around.
“Tan,” she said quietly.
“I know.” Taniel took a deep breath and bent to wipe his sword on Dorner’s body before handing it and his pistol to Vlora. “Get my rifle and pack out of my room,” he said to her. He showed his empty hands and belt to the sheriff and looked down at the bodies, dismayed. “I guess I am a smug prick. And you’re on your own until we can get this sorted out.”
The sheriff slowly put up her pistol. “You two are just a load of trouble, aren’t you?”
“Just trying to live our lives, ma’am,” Vlora said.
“We’ll get this sorted out before a judge,” the sheriff repeated, “and then I’ll ask you kindly to live those lives somewhere else. Understand?”
Vlora swore to herself, meeting Taniel’s gaze. This was going to be a problem, and both of them knew it. “How long will this take?” Taniel asked.
“Couple weeks.” The sheriff sniffed. “We’ve got just one judge and a damned lot of violence.”
Vlora could see in Taniel’s eyes that he was reconsidering his offer to go quietly. But the options were slim: Either he could sit in a cell for two weeks while Vlora searched on her own, or they could cut their way out through a lot of innocent people and end up being run out of town. She looked meaningfully at the sheriff and nodded.
“So be it,” Taniel said coldly.
The sheriff escorted Taniel out of the building, leaving Vlora alone with two corpses and a whole bunch of eyes staring at her. She left the rest of her wine and took Taniel’s weapons upstairs, then fetched his pack and stowed it in her own room.
She slipped out the back of the building, hoping to avoid any more unwanted attention. Halfway down the street she stopped and swore to herself, realizing that without that damned magical compass in Taniel’s head, she didn’t have a chance of finding anything. She muttered and swore to herself and continued on, trying to formulate a plan.
She found a secluded street in the Gurlish quarter and sat down in an alley to try and focus. She closed her eyes, and took a deep sniff of powder to enhance her senses and focus her mind. Once she was in a deep trance, she opened her third eye.
The world became a hazy, colorless place. Buildings and people seemed almost translucent, and she swept her gaze all around her looking for color. There was a little of it—small flames, like candles burning in windows, that she knew belonged to Knacked throughout the city. There were a few dozen of them, which was unsurprising considering the amount of money involved in such a town. Knacked, after all, were useful people.
There was nothing else, though. No bright flames of a Privileged, and none of the customary pastel smudges that indicated leftover sorcery. She tried to remember what the godstone in Landfall looked like in the Else, and realized that she’d never bothered to check. In the chaos of the battle and subsequent retreat, it had never even crossed her mind.
She cursed herself for her foolishness, and closed her third eye.
“I can’t do this on my own,” she said quietly to herself.
She returned to the main street and walked along, eyes on the signs above the storefronts. It wasn’t long until she found one that said EXPRESS MESSENGERS: YOUR LETTERS, CONFIDENTIAL AND GUARANTEED.
It was a company that she’d seen in Landfall, and she had made use of their services before. She went inside, where a single clerk waited behind a dusty desk, half-asleep with his chin resting on his fist. He roused himself as Vlora entered.
“Paper,” Vlora demanded.
She sat in the corner and penned a letter in Adran military code. She sprinkled the wet ink with black powder and then sealed it in wax with a signet ring she kept in her pocket. It was marked with the old symbol of the Riflejacks—a chevron over a powder horn. She gave the letter to the clerk.
“Where to?” he asked.
“That,” Vlora said, placing several coins on his desk, “might be difficult.”
She gave the clerk her hotel and room number in case of an answer and stepped out into the midmorning air, breathing in the stench. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bottle until Olem arrived with the army, but that didn’t seem like a very good use of her time. She needed a plan—any plan—that would keep her moving and looking.
Without Taniel’s sorcerous compass, she was going to have to depend on footwork. Luckily, she’d already done some thinking on the matter. She would walk each valley and examine each mine, combing the landscape under the pretense of looking for an employer who wasn’t the two big-boss fools here in town. It would be slow going, and there was a very real risk of attracting attention, but it was the best plan she had.
She would look for anything suspicious in this world and in the Else.
“Ma’am?”
Vlora was pulled out of her thoughts by a voice at her elbow. She turned and immediately stiffened, her hand falling to her sword arm. There was a Palo woman by her side, wearing a duster and tricorn, and the tight pants and loose shirt of a duelist. She was accompanied by seven men and women, most of them Palo, all wearing similar outfits and also armed with small swords.
Vlora ordered them in her mind, body prepared to work through the motions as she cut her way free of imminent violence. The process took her mere seconds, but it was interrupted by a friendly clearing of the woman’s throat.
She looked at Vlora’s sword hand. “No need for that, ma’am,” she said. “We’re here to talk.”
“About what?”
“Our boss wants to meet you.”
“And who is your boss?” She thought she had a pretty good idea.
“His name is Burt.”
Brown Bear Burt. Jezzy’s competition. Vlora considered her options. Eight against one were steep odds in a fair fight. She still had a buzz from her earlier sniff of powder, so she could probably take them without too much risk. But if even one was a skilled swordsman, she could be in trouble.
Her eyes narrowed as she realized that not one of them was carrying an ounce of powder. Odd, that. A coincidence? Or something else?
She thought of Taniel sitting in a cell in the Yellow Creek sheriff’s office, and decided that the mission had already taken a big enough hit. “When?” she asked.
“Right now, if that’s convenient.”
Vlora took her hand off her sword. “Then let’s get this over with.”