Bargain (Heroes By Necessity Book 2)

by Riley S. Keene

  “Much bigger.” Elise squirmed in her chair. “Just to start there’s bypassing the judges, sending undocumented prisoners straight to executions, and the use of prison resources for personal projects,” Elise said. Her skin crawled as her hair stood on end. She smoothed them down with her hands. “If you get your hands on the documentation, you can dangle this information over the warden, and if anyone gets put away, your people could just walk out clean.”

  “Hm.” Wilmarr leaned back in his seat. “Might be nice. You’d have a stronger position if you had the documents already, instead of just telling me they exist.”

  “No, because then you’d just knock me out and take them,” Elise said, leaning farther forward. “I wouldn’t walk into the back of this bar in the middle of your territory if I had something that you wanted physically on my person.”

  “Awful smart of you,” Wilmarr said, the ghost of a smile playing across his features. “Alright. A free pass out of prison is a free pass out of prison, no matter the city. Tell me the details, and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  “And you expect me to trust that you won’t take my information and run away with it?” Elise leaned back, casually taking another sip from her mug. She felt like she were on a ship, rocking back and forth with the motion of the conversation. Wilmarr was good, but Elise was playing him easily. “You tell me your information first, and then I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “I could say the same to you.” Wilmarr’s eyes flashed with mirth as that ghostly smile returned. “You look capable enough that you could probably be halfway back to Khule before I could stop you.”

  “You give yourself too little credit.” Elise smiled sweetly as she wrapped a strand of hair around her index finger. “Strapping young man like you could catch me before I got out the door.” The words fell awkwardly out of her mouth. There was a moment of silence and then the two of them shared a laugh. “Alright. So I’m not very good at being coy. But besides, I have given you something, at least. Even if I get away, you still know there’s a weakness to be exploited. You might need to look a little harder for it, but knowing that it’s there means you aren’t left empty-handed.”

  “A fair point.” Wilmarr inclined his head, paused, and then waved a hand through the air in frustration. “Pah, fine. The Autumn Festival is soon. Preparations begin early next week, so the Church of Teis will be on high alert while they’re setting up. That’s when they expect the Overseers to strike. But five days later, once the celebration is in full swing and the guards are spread thin over both the temple and the fairgrounds, right when they start to relax—” Wilmarr paused and grinned in truth then, clean white teeth shining beneath the darkness of his hood. “Well, we call it a skirmish. As in ‘we have a skirmish planned.’ We have other plans elsewhere around the city, of course, but that’s the only thing we have planned against the Temple right now.”

  “Is that all? For the next month?” Elise asked, chagrined at how little information she was actually getting.

  “We like to avoid skirmishing with them too often.” Wilmarr shrugged. “The boss likes to see them panic in fear of our next move almost as much as she likes to make those moves.”

  “Fine, fine.” Elise waved a hand dismissively. “I was just hoping to get more for the information I’m offering.” She didn’t like the sulking she heard in her own voice so she cleared her throat.

  “It’s not my fault that that’s all I have to tell you.” Wilmarr took another drink from his tankard. “If your job is about the temple, that’s the only iron we have in that particular fire. If your patron wants to employ the Overseers for the job, I’m sure there’s plenty more we could offer to help.” He leaned forward over the table. “Now, you were going to tell me about some incriminating documents?”

  “There’s an execution record for three undocumented prisoners,” Elise said. That creeping feeling returned her arms, but she held herself back from smoothing the hair. It would be a tell if she let her discomfort show that easily. She was loath to give up the information for how little she received in return, but building good faith with the Overseers could help her out in the long run. “The execution happened about a month ago, and they didn’t even make up fake names for the prisoners. They just filled in the blanks with nonsense. They were held without documentation for days, never saw a judge, and were put to death.”

  Wilmarr whistled low. “That is pretty damning for someone,” the man admitted. “Anything else you can tell me to help me find these documents?”

  “The prisoner names were filled in as ‘long-haired barbarian’, ‘uncooperative warrior-priestess’ and ‘nail-biting wizard’,” Elise said, trying not to linger too long on the memory of the executioner’s block beneath her neck. “A man named Ingmar was behind the whole affair, and while he has been removed now, someone made him Deputy Warden and gave him enough reign there to get away with all that and more.”

  “I was expecting something a little more useful,” Wilmarr said with a twist of a smirk. “It doesn’t help us so much if the actual perpetrator isn’t there to lean on anymore. But I guess if anyone attached to him has a flimsy conscience, we can get something out of them.”

  “The warden traditionally has some political status with the city council,” Elise said, bristling. “The fact that such a thing happened under his oversight, whether or not he was directly attached to it, should be enough leverage against him, if you threaten to make it public.”

  “Fair enough.” The man took another deep pull of his tankard, emptying it. “Well then. Unless you wanted anything else, I would say our business is concluded.”

  “For now,” Elise said, finishing the last of her drink in one big gulp. “If my patron needs more information, I’ll be sure to seek you out.”

  The woman from the counter sidled up to the table quietly, taking the empty tankard and mug, and placing a full tankard of the same dark liquid in front of Wilmarr.

  “I didn’t order this,” he grumbled, frowning up at her.

  “You didn’t,” she said, and nodded to Elise. “She did.”

  Wilmarr’s expression brightened. “Well then.” He nodded his thanks to Elise. “Thank you for your patronage of my services.”

  “You’ve been most helpful,” Elise said as she tried to avoid grinding her teeth. It was obvious the bought drink would have gotten her a lot more goodwill if it had arrived before the exchange of information was already complete. She managed to return his smile. “If I require anything else, you will see me again.”

  “I look forward to it,” he said, with a lift of his tankard before he took his first sip of the new drink.

  Elise stood up and took her leave of the tavern. She was disappointed in how little she had learned, but chalked it up to establishing friendly contact with the Overseers. If it took Athala a few days to learn what they needed to know, it might be beneficial to have an informant with pleasant memories of her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Athala had entered the Jalova Hall of Records some time before eleventh bell but had somehow lost nearly two bells to the stacks. Entering the Hall of Records had felt like passing through a portal to a more familiar world. Every city had a Hall of Records, and since they were run by an organized continent-wide guild of archivists, they were all arranged and organized the same way. If she hadn’t spent so very much time perusing the records in Khule, she might have been convinced the buildings were exactly the same. But she could already see differences in the design and sorting system that reminded her she was in a new city, and had a job to do.

  She knew that time was a factor in their mission, but she still had allowed herself to get lost in the records. She had meant it to be quick. She wanted to get a sense for the city itself first, and to relax after the long days of travel she had just completed. The familiar feel of the spines of books passing under her fingers gave her a physical sense of calm.

  The shelves began with the city records. Acres of loosely-bound pa
pers including the minutes of every city council meeting ever held, interspersed with true books, properly bound, as records of major events within the city that corresponded to that part of the timeline.

  Past that there was an empty few shelves—space reserved for the next few years of council records—before the records of local criminal activity. The organization here was sorted by crime instead of chronological order, and Athala could easily see just by glancing at the spines of the books that the vast majority of them were investigations into the Overseers. Athala took the opportunity to skim through a few of them, and smirked at the phrasing. The records referred to crimes as “allegedly” performed by “persons connected to the Overseer’s Guild” with no legal resolution by the end of the investigation. She worried briefly for Elise to be dealing with people who had so thoroughly bested all opposition, including a few burglaries against the Temple itself. But if anyone could handle the challenge, it was Elise.

  Athala had then found her way deeper into the city records, locating a section devoted to the blueprints of the larger construction projects in the city. Piles and piles of documents carefully rolled into tubes and arranged by building and year of construction. Blueprints would be a later step, though. The Temple was the largest structure within a hundred kren, and the sheer volume of the blueprints reflected that easily. Once she knew where, exactly, they were trying to go, that’s when she’d need to figure out how to get there. And while blueprints might be helpful if she hit a dead end in her other research, she very much doubted someone had scribbled “here there be dragon” anywhere on them.

  When the thirteenth bell finally chimed through the opened windows, Athala snapped to her senses. No matter what, they had a job to do, and she didn’t have all the time in the world to do it in. The idea of Meodryt becoming irritated with her was revolting, if not terrifying. The dragon seemed a kind-hearted creature now, but Athala was certain that would change as soon as failure became reality.

  With renewed urgency, Athala made her way to the center of the building, where she knew there would be a desk where a librarian could help her find what she needed. The true need was to figure out where magic was used in the construction of the Temple. She knew the Temple of Teis was constructed near the end of the Age of Dragons, and so it seemed likely that it was built around the disabled dragon, or that the dragon would have been there when it was disabled. A spell of such power would need to be shielded, or would warp the world around it, just as the spell in Khule had warped the rats and skeletons in the catacombs. Either the construction would account for the spell to dampen the effect, or any malfunctioning magic elsewhere in the Temple could lead her right to Sirur.

  Temples were known to be very protective of the documentation of their construction, however. They liked to maintain the illusion that everything was the work of their God instead of their followers. Knowing this, Athala took a deep breath as she approached the librarians’ desk, and prepared to channel a younger version of herself. She sped up as she approached until she was almost running.

  “You have to help me!” she cried as she rushed to the desk, acting as though she was out of breath. At least, she told herself it was an act. She’d only really been running for a dozen fen, right?

  “What?!” the librarian exclaimed, nearly jumping out of their skin. He shoved away from the desk as though Athala would have vaulted over it to attack. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m from the Wizard Tower in Khule,” Athala said, panting as though she had just run all the way from there. She let her words rush out between gulps of air. “I have a paper due in a week and I need to find out as much as possible about the magic used in the construction of the Temple of Teis!”

  “Well, um, you should...” The librarian trailed off, blinking as he tried to catch up to Athala’s train of thought. “You should go to the temple. The Priests there will know everything you want to—”

  Athala threw her head down on the desk, and began to make a wailing sobbing noise. She remembered how thin she was spread during the early days of her studies. There were times before where any obstacle caused her to snap.

  “Are-are you okay?” the librarian said cautiously. He leaned as far back as he could. The thin man seemed almost as afraid as he was confused.

  “I tried that!” She sobbed louder, looking up and letting her dark hair fall over her face, hopefully hiding that she couldn’t force tears out on command. “I tried so hard and everyone just... They just...” Her chest hitched into another faux sob. Athala was trying to make up a story as she went. “They said I was a burglar! Nobody would talk to me! They said I was an Overseer and I don’t know what that is and now I’m going to fail my Magical Construction class and my dad will pull me out of classes and I’ll have to marry that awful Fischer girl and pretend that I love her cooking even though it tastes like unsalted snot and my life is over! My life is over-er-er!” She sank to the ground, sliding off of the desk to continue her sobbing on the floor.

  “Easy, easy,” the librarian said. Athala wasn’t sure if he was trying to soothe her, or trying to build his own confidence. “I’ll help you.” He peeked tentatively over the desk. “I know a few books that might have what you need.”

  “Really?” Athala sniffed loudly as she looked up at the librarian with wide eyes.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, forcing a smile. Athala wasn’t sure if he was trying to calm her for her sake, or for his own. “There’s a study area in the east wing you can use. Head over there and, um, wait and, uh, compose yourself? And I’ll bring you some starting points for your paper.”

  “You’re so nice!” Athala said, keeping her voice tinny as though she was still choked up. “No one else has been nice to me since I got here.”

  “Don’t worry,” the librarian said with a little bit of confidence. “You’re in the Hall of Records now. The books are always nice.”

  Athala sniffled and struggled back to her feet. “Thank you.”

  “No problem. Just relax,” he said, before scurrying off into the shelves.

  Athala sighed as she made her way towards the study area he had mentioned. She felt dirty. Were her acting skills that good, or were all wizard students so horrid? Perhaps it was both. She felt ashamed on behalf of all wizards studying at the tower.

  Once in the study area, she made sure to rub her eyes furiously so that they would look a little reddened when the librarian returned.

  It proved to be unnecessary. The man didn’t find her until almost a quarter of a bell later, and by that point all of Athala’s hard rubbing work had faded away.

  The books he brought her contained a lot of interesting information. Some amount of it was from external studies by wizards trying to learn from Teis’s divine magic that suffused the Temple, but the librarian kept helping her throughout her time spent studying, and together they managed to locate citations and references to works by people who worked on the construction itself, eventually leading to an esoteric volume that seemed to be almost exactly what Athala was looking for.

  While the other books talked about the Temple’s unique structural needs and the names and resumes of the wizards involved in the project, the book she eventually located was written by one of those wizards, a man Athala recognized as a teacher named Sieghard, and it seemed to go quite far out of its way to be as impenetrable as possible. However, it frequently mentioned the dome atop the Temple, with very little discussion of what purpose it served—when it didn’t explicitly avoid the subject and openly suggest the reader do the same.

  With an idea of what she was looking for, Athala turned to the blueprints. As she examined them, the dome became more and more of a curiosity.

  The dome itself was enclosed on the bottom. The interior plaza of the Temple would have enjoyed a massive vaulted ceiling hundreds of fen above, but instead the open area had a roof, giving the area directly beneath the dome a floor. The space within had no designated purpose, though its construction was made with quite
a bit of expense. The area was almost entirely open, with no walls or supports within, creating structural challenges, but not so many as to account for the budget allocated to it in the other books.

  Athala did a bit of math, trying to make some guesswork about the cost of magically shielding such a space. The numbers didn’t match up exactly, but they were the same magnitude, and that was usually enough of a clue.

  In a few hours, she had pages and pages of notes written in her scribbled handwriting, with anything that might be incriminating translated into a cipher similar to her family’s magical annotation. However, once she determined that their target was almost certainly the dome, her notes became sparse, and she buried herself in the familiar act of studying.

  It wasn’t until the librarian returned that she realized she had gotten lost in the books for another few bells, leaving a trail of notes five pages long comparing and contrasting the construction of the temple with the construction of Ydia’s temple in Khule.

  “I’m afraid we’re closing the doors here soon,” the librarian said. He seemed to have grown a bit more comfortable with her once her research had cheered her up. “I hope you got everything you needed.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Athala scrambled, gathering her notes together and trying to sort the piles of books scattered across the table. “I might return if I need more, but I should have more than enough for my paper now.”

  The librarian was pleasantly surprised when Athala began to help replace all the books she had accumulated. She had too much respect for the Hall of Records itself to walk away from a pile of unshelved books. Once she finished she was almost shocked to see that night had fallen as she left the hall. She hurried back towards the tavern, knowing she was probably the last one back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ermolt was enjoying himself immensely.