Vlora saw the bullet holes in her wall the same moment she heard the shot. Her heart suddenly beating hard at the close miss, she gathered her things as quickly as possible and left her room, trying not to sprint. Nohan had found her, and he was out there taking potshots at her room like it was some sort of game. It was a damned good thing he was a bad shot. She tried to find him, reaching out with her senses, but at this range and without the rising powder smoke to guide her, it was an impossible task.
She left her horse in the hotel stable and crossed the city by foot. There was still plenty of noise at this time of night, with dozens of brothels and bars open for business to miners celebrating a good day or lamenting a bad one. Brown Bear Burt’s brothel was one such establishment, and she slipped inside and looked up to the second level, where she could see Burt sitting at his desk in a robe and pajamas, cigar in hand.
“I need to see your boss,” she told the Palo woman standing guard at the bottom of Burt’s staircase.
The woman held up a hand. “It’s after hours.”
“He’s right there,” Vlora said in frustration.
“He doesn’t take visitors this time of night.”
Vlora thought about shoving her way past. Instead, she shouted his name. Burt looked up from a book and blinked at her. “Bella,” he said to the guard, “let her up!”
Bella glared daggers at Vlora but let her pass. Vlora jogged up the stairs and joined Burt in his office, where he offered her a cigar. Something about his demeanor had changed since they’d last spoke, and he looked more cautious, eyeing her thoughtfully.
“Good morning, Verundish,” he said.
Vlora didn’t return his smile. “I’m here to offer you my services.”
This seemed to catch him off guard. “Oh? At this hour?” He rubbed his chin. “What makes you think I still need them?”
“Because everyone is panicking over that army headed this way, and Jezzy still has that other powder mage on her payroll.”
“True, true,” Burt admitted. He puffed on the stub of his cigar and put it out, then leaned forward at his desk and began to fiddle with a new cigar, running it thoughtfully under his nose and breathing deeply as he watched her. “About that army,” he said slowly. “What do you know about it?”
“Absolutely nothing,” she said in a tone that she hoped would discourage any more questions. He obviously suspected something—with several powder mages in town, Nohan couldn’t have been the only one to make the logical leap that they were related to Lady Flint’s army camped nearby.
“Nothing?” he echoed.
“I know they’re not here for your gold,” she said, hoping that shut him up.
“Oh.” Burt fell back in his chair, an obvious look of relief on his face. “Well, then. What sort of services are you offering?”
“I’m offering to kill that other powder mage for you. I want to duel him. Public, private, I don’t care. Set up a fight, and dangle a wager in front of Jezzy. The powder mage will come—I know he will.” Vlora chewed on her lip, hoping that Burt would take her up on the offer. Nohan was no longer a nuisance. He had almost killed her tonight, and she wanted him out of the picture completely before she and Taniel went after Prime Lektor.
Burt cut the tip off the new cigar with a boz knife he pulled out of a drawer, his eyes staring at the middle distance between them. Slowly, he began to nod. “What do you want in exchange?”
“I want you to tell your men to stand down when the Riflejack army marches through. They aren’t here for you. I don’t want roadblocks or fighting or any such thing.” She was taking an awful risk admitting she was with the Riflejacks—any fool who had read her description in the paper would be able to figure out who she really was. But she had to take that risk. She was out of time, and she needed to simplify the conclusion of this mission as much as possible.
“You’re confident you can kill him despite your wounds?” Burt asked, lighting his cigar. “Those hands look pretty banged up.”
“Nohan and I have already crossed paths once. He came away worse for it than I did.”
He tapped one fingernail against the blade of the knife. “I have no interest in getting in anyone’s way,” he said. “If the Riflejacks aren’t after my gold, I have no problem with them.”
“You know that Lady Flint has a price on her head.”
“And an army of riflemen out there,” Burt replied. “I’m not stupid enough to tangle with Adran soldiers. Besides, the bounty is nothing compared to what this valley makes me every week. I’ll offer Jezzy a wager and a duel. You do some killing, and I think we’ll part friends.”
“I would like that,” Vlora said. She felt herself relax, knowing that the end of this damned mission was almost upon her. She was probably going to get all her soldiers killed in a confrontation with an ancient sorcerer, she reasoned, but at least she wasn’t going to have to rub shoulders with these people anymore.
CHAPTER 46
What have you been doing in here the last couple of days?”
Michel looked up from his studies, taking a moment to pull his head out of long lists of family, Household, and regiment names and blink across the empty room to where Ichtracia lounged on a divan in the sunlight. He thought, for the hundredth time, of a cat playing with a mouse before the final kill, and forced a distracted smile onto his face. “Do you mind if I call you Tricia?” he asked.
Ichtracia raised one eyebrow. “Only if I can call you Mick.”
“I’d rather not … oh, I see your point. That’s fair.” Michel looked back down at the book laid out on the table in front of him. He was in a dusty room on the second floor of the capitol building where Yaret’s people had stashed most of the records they had brought with them from Dynize. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were packed with ledgers, and thousands more sat in crates or piled up in the corners. Very little of it was organized in any useful way and Michel had spent far too long just doing that. He considered Ichtracia’s still-raised eyebrow and remembered that she’d asked him a question. “I’m cataloging everyone that Forgula has worked with since the beginning of the invasion.”
“That seems like an awful lot of work.”
Michel squinted at her. She was right, of course. It was mind-numbingly boring; something that he would prefer to leave to a small army of clerks. But he couldn’t just tell her that he was combing the army regimental records for someone named Mara. “This is something we’d do in the Blackhats,” he told her. “We had a file on just about every enemy of the state, and it included all their contacts and family members. It helped us unwind conspiracies and root out cells of dissidents.”
Michel had his own opinions on how useful those files actually were, but he needed the excuse to be up here, combing through all of these names.
“You should have someone else do that,” Ichtracia said. She stretched on the divan, a casual smile on her face, watching Michel in a way that made it very clear what she thought he should be doing. He’d spent the last two nights at her townhouse and learned firsthand how that particular rumor about Privilegeds happened to be true. It had been a welcome bit of relaxation, for sure, but it had also been incredibly distracting.
She was damned distracting. She’d been lounging on that divan for twenty minutes, and Michel had read the same regimental record over and over again since she arrived. He couldn’t stop glancing up at her, watching her face when she wasn’t paying attention.
He caught himself watching her again, and rubbed his eyes. This search wasn’t going anywhere. He’d looked through at least twenty thousand names and not a single Mara had popped up—not among the civilians nor the military. As Emerald had suggested, it wasn’t even a Dynize name. He felt like his hands were tied; his whole purpose here was to find and extract this Mara, but he’d run out of places to look.
“There was another bombing this afternoon.”
“I heard,” Michel answered. “I imagine the Blackhats won’t stop their bombings just because their Dynize patron has been cut off.”
“Sedial is just biding his time, by the way.”