Aaron walked down the center of the street and, as he passed the shop, turned abruptly and walked to it. The moment he entered the shop, walls lined with general goods, he felt a hand on his back. “Mario says welcome. Go straight into the back,” the man said, words rushed. As Aaron passed the rows of goods, the shop owner hustled past him to help the man in the snakeskin hat lock the door. The shop owner’s wife held open a curtain separating the front of the store from a narrow and dark back area. Aaron entered. She followed, her husband and the man with the snakeskin hat right behind her. The shop owner pushed past the group into the tight quarters and knelt down, rolling back a small area rug to reveal a trapdoor, which he opened hastily. The hinges had been oiled and made no sound. He gestured to the snakeskin hat man, who quickly descended into the trapdoor. Aaron watched him climb down the short ladder into a tunnel, ceiling just high enough so he could stand. He continued forward. Aaron followed him down the ladder. When Aaron turned to help close the trapdoor, the shop owner waved him forward. The wife was entering the trapdoor, followed by the shop owner. Aaron, surprised, moved farther down the tunnel and met the man in the snakeskin hat coming back from a brief check of the tunnel ahead of them.
“We’re all going?” Aaron quietly asked, gesturing to the couple behind them.
“Corvale, you’ve stepped into a war zone. They won’t be happy about losing you. That shop will be in flames in a few minutes. Maybe the whole block. NEST runs this town now. These folk will be leaving it.”
The last thing Aaron heard as the trapdoor shut behind them, leaving them in darkness, was the distant sound of breaking glass from the front of the shop. The man in the snakeskin hat led their small party deeper into the tunnel.
Chapter 4. The Problem with Shareholders
Trevor was taking his turn watching the western NEST landing from the roof of a nearby six-story building when Jardere caught up with him. He nearly went for his sword as Jardere’s head popped up through the trapdoor. Trevor wasn’t used to seeing him without his trademark hat. Jardere’s long red-gold hair lay flat against his head. He looked uncomfortable at being so exposed.
“Mario says I take this watch,” Jardere reported. “He wants you with Lorne tomorrow. Says get some sleep.”
“So the extraction went okay?”
“Yeah. Lorne had a serious tail on him, but it got shook. He’s with Representative Muller now. They got him set up over there, that place in Gestlin Gardens. Guess that’s where you meet him, tomorrow early. Anything happening over there?”
Jardere gestured to the landing, well-lit against the night sky. NEST worked around the clock these days, skirting local regulations with bribes. Men scurried around pulling dragons to and from the long ramps that wound their way up to the landing site.
Even though their silhouettes were visible above the parapet, Trevor and Jardere were not nervous about being discovered watching the site. They were not the only ones monitoring NEST activity. At any given time, there might be as many as ten watchers recording the comings and goings of NEST dragons. Some were rival trade groups, some government watchdogs, some just dragon enthusiasts. NEST had tried to stamp out that behavior early, but their watchers just kept finding new ways to see what they wanted. Eventually they gave up. Trying to actually get onto NEST property was one thing, but they couldn’t stop people watching from other buildings.
“A lot of dragons left about an hour ago. Maybe thirty minutes after Lorne landed. I’d guess the word spread.”
Jardere nodded.
“There’s also a fire near the Bondsman Quarters. You can see it over the buildings there. And another near the east landing. So what’s he like?” Trevor asked as he began collecting his things.
“The east landing fire will be tied to Lorne’s tail. Haven’t heard anything about the other one. Lorne’s hard to read. Quiet. Maybe a little cocky. But he was helpful. Wasn’t one of those types where the protection job was all on you. Had his eyes in the right places. Knew the tails, signaled to me with them.”
“Are we on the right side of this war?”
Jardere shrugged. He wasn’t one to think big picture. “Couldn’t say. He certainly seems one step ahead of them right now. Course this is his play. Time will tell if it works. Once Hideon Bray gets involved, who knows? I wouldn’t bet a lot of money against NEST these days. But,” Jardere shrugged again, “it’s at least a good start.”
Trevor nodded. “I thought you’d be more upset about the hat.”
Jardere swore. “Fuck yeah, I am. Mario told me he was gonna find a way to get rid of it. Making me wear it as part of an operation. Son of a bitch. I can’t ever wear that thing in Ellis again. Lorne better win this war. I already miss that hat.”
Trevor hid a smile and climbed down through the trapdoor.
…
Eostre State Representative Quin Muller was hosting the gathering, so he passed out the drinks. Following Eostre custom, he determined the order based on importance. In Eostre, blood was often shed over the order drinks were passed out, though that was unlikely tonight. Muller first handed Aaron Lorne a whiskey with ice. As the out-of-state guest who had traveled the farthest Aaron was able to skip to the front of the order. He sat on an emerald-colored armchair, black shirtsleeves rolled up, elbows on his knees.
The second drink, a vintage wine from northern Garen, worth more than the apartment they met in, went to Marquis Korrell. He had a large white puff of hair that narrowed into sharp sideburns. The Marquis was a vocal leader of the nobility who generally opposed the expansion of NEST. He had taken the greatest risk by coming to tonight’s meeting, aside from perhaps Aaron.
The next drink went to Bayle Johan, representing Ellis’ merchant class. Bayle was the Vice Chair of the Ellis Merchant Enterprise. The EME was an organization which blended elements of a political lobbyist group, an exclusive club, and a discretely effective price-fixing operation. Bayle scorned the pretensions of the wealthy and instead adopted the pretensions of one who is wealthy but acts as though they aren’t. He had beer.
The third drink went to Marquis Korrell’s son Kade. Kade was a late addition to the invitation list. The others were unsure what he had to offer. He had a reputation for disinterest in politics and business. But he was here, either of his own volition or under orders from his father. Aaron was careful to not dismiss nobleman’s sons who had not yet made their name. For one thing, they tended to divide their time between two things. The first was swordplay, which led to them gaining the familiarity and loyalty of their house’s troops, not to mention skill with a blade. The second was gambling and socializing, which helped them establish a network of other young noble bloods. Such a network was all too often dismissed by their elders who were slow to see them as adults of consequence. He couldn’t yet be trusted, but he was worth watching. Kade had whiskey.
The fourth drink went to a man who gave his name as Matt James. Matt sat quietly on the sofa, eyes flicking in all directions. He was tall and thin, bald aside from light brown hair around his ears and on the back of his head. Matt was given water, which he would decline to even sip during the meeting. He held no title. Matt James was certainly not his real name. He held strong ties to the underground Eostre Uprising, a group of rebels largely funded by the Eostre and Garen caravan drivers that had squared off with NEST.
Aaron steeled himself for what was, for all intents and purposes, another shareholder meeting. These men all had vested interests in seeing the SDC succeed, or at least continue to limit the runaway success of NEST. Splinters of government, nobility, merchants, and the rebellion. All in a single room. Aaron should be grateful to Muller for assembling it. He would pass the commendations on to SDC’s Chief Executive Officer Conners Toren, but at the moment, Aaron simply wished it were over. And it hadn’t yet begun.
Shareholder meetings, even under the best conditions, were trying for Aaron. He was expected to provide enough information to give the shareholders confidence in the future success of the SDC
. But he had to be wary of providing too much information. Shareholders were notoriously leaky. They spoke to family, friends, and newsmen. Too often they left meetings and immediately began making deals to shore up their individual investments, clearly betraying the SDC’s intentions to rivals in the process. Still, the SDC needed investors and, more importantly, people who helped them lobby for competitive regulations outside of their core territories. Since Aaron had recently been promoted to Chief Operating Officer, meetings were harder to avoid. This was far from the best conditions under which to hold a shareholder meeting. He had just begun a mission in enemy territory. War was breaking. He took another drink and lit a cigarette.
Muller sat down, finally, in a deep blue upholstered chair. They were in the study of an apartment he owned but kept off the public record. It had shelves lined with books and comfortable furniture. Any servants had been cleared out well before Aaron arrived, led here by the man in the snakeskin hat, who had eventually given his name as Jardere. One of Mario’s men.
Muller swirled his drink, raising it in the dim lamplight as though studying it. Everyone in the room was watching him. He slowly lowered his drink and turned to Aaron. “Aaron Lorne,” he said loftily. A flair for the dramatic in this one. “Chief Operating Officer of the Syndicate of Delhonne Corvale, Hero of Delhonne. Aaron Lorne comes to Eostre, to Ellis, right into the heart of operations for North Eostre Security and Transportation. This is a mere month after he started a war by ordering the death of a NEST Captain, an order which was executed immediately and publicly in Dragon’s Cove, well within the site of reputable sources that spread the news through the west. An action undertaken with no consultation of SDC’s shareholders.”
Aaron was staring at Muller, cigarette between his lips, absently rubbing his pixie eye.
Muller continued, “He doesn’t come to Ellis alone. He flies into the city with a corpse. He claims this is the corpse of Cal Mast. Cal Mast, son of the Steward of Castalan, another Hero of Delhonne. Runs an unregistered flight of dragons referred to as the Unflagged. Ten loyal dragons at last count. A man who should be standing with the SDC in this brewing conflict, but has not been seen for months. We have only Lorne’s word that this is the corpse of Cal Mast. The corpse now lies at the morgue, to which NEST no doubt has the keys. They will be able to verify whether this is an extremely short-lived and seemingly pointless ruse or if in fact the SDC has already lost a significant ally in this struggle. If it is the disappointing latter, one wonders why this information was handed to the enemy when it could have been hidden or at least delayed.
“We are told only to expect and prepare for you. To be ready to host you in a city that knows your face and hungers for your blood. At great personal expense and risk we do so. But we are not told your reasons for coming here, now, even as NEST is clearly in the process of marshalling their forces for open warfare against the SDC. The first we hear of your motivation is, upon arrival, when you provide the NEST guards with a summons for a low level court hearing and tell them you are here to present yourself to the court the day after tomorrow. A summons of this level and urgency could be answered by any representative of the SDC or, as is more often the case, completely ignored. Yet here you are, the COO of the SDC, in perhaps the worst possible place you could be on the eve of war. As someone with strong vested interests in the fate of the SDC, someone who may quite literally be dragged from my home and killed on the day NEST attains the power to dissolve the Eostre State Council, I am deeply troubled.
“My questions are three. Why did you precipitate a war with NEST? Why did you come to Ellis? And was that really Cal Mast’s body?” His voice had risen as he ended the long speech. Muller leaned back in his chair, took a first sip of his drink, and lowered it to his lap. He gave Aaron a sharp look, honed on the edge of a lifelong political career. He was surrendering the floor but not the reins of the conversation. Now was the time for Aaron to speak.
The bells signifying the change of the evening watch rang through the quiet evening. As they stilled, Aaron leaned forward in his chair to respond. “Thank you all for coming. I know you make great personal risk to host me here. I thank you for that. I can answer most of your questions, tonight, I think. But before I do, I have to ask you one of my own. What do you know of Hideon Bray?”
The question hung in the air for a minute. Muller’s expression was icy at the change in subject. Finally, Bayle Johan spoke. “Hideon Bray just became the public face of NEST a few months ago. Before then we thought it was run by a group of investors that had hired a few Vylass. Since Bray came on the scene though, seems pretty clear he’s in charge. Big guy, warrior type. Longish blond beard, braided blond hair. Maybe fifty, but carries himself like a younger man. Wears a sword, always shows his big shoulders, bronze marks all over. Most of the merchants are more than a little intimidated by him. He doesn’t take many meetings, but the ones he does… He’s the type to smile big and pat you on the back as he guts you. Pretty good socially, not that he makes much effort. Rules NEST with an iron fist. They seem to be just as afraid of him as the people outside the organization. I’ve certainly found myself wishing NEST had a weaker lead, the way I thought it was before Bray. Their old CEO was seen as weak and indecisive, which always was a little inconsistent with their actions. They were always bold and cutthroat. Seems now the prior leadership was just a front. It’s been Bray pulling the strings all along.”
Kade spoke up. He had longish hair which fell off of his ears to hang in front of his face. He restlessly pushed it back into place as he talked. “Word is Bray rewards strength, cunning. A lot of the younger nobility have flocked to NEST. He’s got the kind of system in place where you can get a jump on common soldiers, but still need to prove yourself. So he attracts a lot of, like, second sons, bastards. Men with training and education who feel they were denied an appropriate role in their families. They want to ride dragons, have adventures, get laid. And the SDC is all but closed to non-Corvale, so they flock to NEST.”
Kade looked at Aaron with sharp eyes, studying his reaction. Aaron nodded, well aware that NEST had a massive recruiting advantage. The SDC spent a lot of time explaining how and why they were closed to outsiders. They made few friends that way.
“I haven’t been targeted for recruitment,” Kade continued. “They know joining would cut me out of my family. But I’ve seen the way they target others. It’s relentless, focused. They’ve got the right intelligence and pull the right levers. A little stronger every day. Bray has a good reputation among the NEST men, both the uniformed soldiers and the dragon riders, the ones you call falsemarked. They hold him in awe.”
Mike James jumped in. “We hold him in awe too, but not for his prowess. He is ruthless. There are mass graves outside the city filled to the brims with dissenters. We’ve known Hideon Bray has been in charge for more than a year.” His eyes darted around the room, making him appear to be in motion though every other part of him was still. “The blood of thousands is on his hands, and yet he walks with immunity into the highest chambers of government, the highest courts, and the most elite business societies in Ellis. He is a monster.”
Aaron looked to Muller and the Marquis. Neither appeared to have anything to add. “The name Hideon Bray,” Aaron said, drawing all eyes back to him, “is adopted. The true name of the man in charge of NEST is long erased from history. He was a Vylass, one of their finest warriors. He killed more Chalk than anyone in the east.”
It felt strange to just hand away the information he’d taken so many steps to conceal in the past few months. But one of the many inevitabilities of life as a spy was that what is valuable today is worthless tomorrow.
“But it wasn’t enough. He raided my people, the Corvale, relentlessly. Kicked off the closest thing to a war the Corvale and Vylass ever had. Eventually cooler heads prevailed and a truce was agreed upon. Hideon Bray, as he calls himself now, did not agree with the truce. He turned on his own people. Began killing the leaders, then the warriors, even
tually slaughtering large parts of the population. Dissenters. He left no mass graves in the east, just villages burned down to grass, bodies taken by the wolves.
“He continued marking himself, giving himself credit for the deaths of the Vylass. In the far east, this is the ultimate blasphemy. It is considered a great shame to kill your people. It is never something to be proud of. It happens, but it is never marked. Bray didn’t care, to him a kill was a kill. Many of the Vylass followed him, eager to grow, to settle the ongoing rivalry with the Corvale. Eventually Bray was betrayed himself, captured by those Vylass that remained true to the old ways.
“They didn’t know what to do with him. Executing him would make him a martyr, divide their people, maybe forever. They couldn’t keep him as a prisoner, his followers would rally to free him. So they took the only option they saw. They handed him over to the Corvale.
“I don’t know all that the Corvale did with him. I had only just been born when this happened. No one speaks of him, they simply call him the Prisoner. And anyone with any knowledge of it is now dead. I can only assume he was tortured during the year he spent in captivity to the Corvale. Paraded from Corvale camp to Corvale camp, made into a show of the consequences of waging war against the Corvale. Then, after exactly one year of imprisonment, the Corvale did the worst possible thing they could think of. They gave him to the Chalk.
“You all know the Chalk, or you should.” Aaron rubbed at his arm, some of the old scars he’d gotten at the hands of the Chalk. “Many in the west don’t believe they are real. Or at least didn’t before Delhonne. They run the Ashlands. They hunger to destroy everything that isn’t part of their twisted society. I’ve been a prisoner of the Chalk. It is…unpleasant. When they care to, they break the spirits of men just as they’ve broken the spirits of dragons. Turn them into little more than drooling slaves, little more than beasts of labor. But eventually rumors surfaced that the Prisoner had escaped after many years of imprisonment by the Chalk.
Rise of the Falsemarked (Spies of Dragon and Chalk Book 2) Page 4
