All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  Myreon climbed to her feet. “Your brother is the one who framed me? I thought he told you to turn Andolon in at your trial!”

  Tyvian felt dizzy. “Of course he did! Of course! I’ve never done anything Xahlven has asked me to do! Not since we were children! He was just playing me. Gods, he’s been playing us both!”

  Myreon grabbed his arm. “Tyvian, listen to me: I am going to stop Xahlven. Alone if I have to. I can’t let this pass.”

  Tyvian looked down at Myreon’s hand wrapped around his forearm. Her touch—­so soft after the regeneration of her skin, post-­petrification—­tingled through his whole body, like his own bones were singing with excitement. When she moved to take it away, he laid his hand over hers and held it in place. “Xahlven is too dangerous to take on alone.”

  Myreon nodded, staring him in the eye, their faces so close that he could smell the faint touch of wine on her breath. “That’s why I need your help.”

  Tyvian felt pinned in place by her eyes, her touch, the smell of her in the stale air of the saferoom. He felt short of breath. “I should warn you, Ms. Alafarr, my consulting fees are quite steep.”

  Myreon smirked. “Really? Is my credit good?”

  Tyvian smiled. “Well, you are a felon.”

  She pushed him away. “I’m serious.”

  “I am, too.” He shrugged. “I always help a felon in need. Even the crazy ones.”

  Myreon’s face broke into that rarest of expressions—­the full, ear-­to-­ear grin. She opened her mouth to speak—­

  There was a banging on the wall—­the savage, angry banging of a man too drunk or too angry to understand his own strength. A muffled voice shouted from the corridor beyond the saferoom. “I know you’re in there somewhere, Tyvian Reldamar! Come out! Come out now or, so help me, I’ll start cutting throats!”

  It was Gethrey Andolon.

  Tyvian turned to tell Myreon where she could hide, but she had a trunk open and was rifling through clothing, searching for something to wear. “What are you doing?”

  She scowled at him. “Sneaking out the window. You coming?”

  Out in the hall, Tyvian heard a bellow that had to be Maude. “There’s nobody here, you blue-­haired bastard! Leave her be! Just leave her—­ Oooh!”

  The ring clamped down on him as Tyvian heard Maude cry out. It couldn’t have been Gethrey doing that—­the skinny fop probably couldn’t throw a punch hard enough to make Maude giggle. That meant one thing: Quiet Men. “No,” he said to Myreon. “I’m not coming.”

  She frowned. “You can’t seriously want to go out there? He’ll kill you!”

  “Five minutes, Tyv! Understand?” Gethrey shouted.

  “What are you going to do?” Myreon hissed, staring at the secret door.

  “The only thing I can do.” Tyvian waggled his ring hand. “Play hero. Again.”

  CHAPTER 24

  DRINKS WITH DAGGERS

  Tyvian kept his back turned as Myreon dressed, but only partially because he was a gentleman—­he also didn’t want to look away from the saferoom’s secret door.

  Myreon took a deep breath. “Any last minute advice?”

  Tyvian didn’t look back. “Do not confront Xahlven directly.”

  The rustle of clothing stopped. Myreon’s voice had that old edge of suspicion. “Why?”

  Tyvian tried to think of a good way to explain, but nothing came to him at that moment. “Just . . . trust me.”

  Myreon was quiet for a moment. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  Tyvian grunted. He might have lied, but for some reason he did not—­he found himself telling her one of the first things Carlo diCarlo had told him when he asked the old pirate the same question fifteen years ago in this very dive bar. “You don’t. You cannot know this; this is life.”

  He heard Myreon go to the window. “Good luck, Mr. Reldamar.” Tyvian gave her a smile over his shoulder. She smiled back, but with less certainty. Then she squeezed through the window; Tyvian went out the door.

  He hadn’t been out of the saferoom five seconds before he felt a knife at his back from a corner he had originally thought empty. “Ah,” he said. “Didn’t see you there.”

  The Quiet Man said nothing. He prodded Tyvian in the direction of the bar, so Tyvian went. The common room of the Cauldron was bustling, as ever, an equal mix of the powder-­wigged or dyed nobility and the hat-­wearing, greasy-­haired common folk. A Verisi with a concertina was playing some kind of nautical dancing tune, and a collection of young bravos were dancing unevenly with a variety of half-­drunk women, only some of whom were Claudia’s employees. Tyvian, though, did his best not to notice this. He focused, instead, on that which would ordinarily be unnoticeable.

  Seeing the Quiet Men themselves in a crowd like this was nearly impossible, but he could pick out ­people who were frightened. This turned out to be easy: the employees were terrified. Not so much the whores—­they didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on—­but the barstaff, the serving girls, and Maude herself had the ashen expressions of ­people contemplating their own mortality. A little staring and a little concentration, and Tyvian got a glimpse of why: Quiet Men, scattered throughout the room, their blades drawn. One of them stood right behind Maude, a knife to her throat. Nobody noticed but Tyvian. That meant they wanted him to notice. He had never seen so many of them in one place before—­the Prophets were pulling out all the stops, it seemed. The whole group of them would work as one coherent unit, sharing thoughts and feelings as intimately as if they were the same being. There was quite literally no way to get the drop on them this way, no way to take them down one by one—­nothing he could do.

  His own Quiet Man piloted him to a corner table, where bloody-­faced Claudia sat with Gethrey on her right and a featureless individual who had to be a Quiet Man to her left, also with a drawn blade. Its dirty, jagged point was laid against the pale flesh of Claudia’s long, elegant neck.

  The Quiet Man turned the last chair around so Tyvian would have to straddle the back and leave his kidneys easily exposed to a blade from behind. Tyvian sat and folded his arms. “Well well well—­you always did have a way with the ladies, Gethrey.”

  “Oh, indeed. Perhaps next time I will try cutting off someone’s testicles—­that always worked for you.” Gethrey was dressed in his usual finery, his blue hair fetchingly restrained by a diamond-­studded clip to form a ponytail, and just a hint of rogue on his cheeks. His hat was on the table in front of him, a sorcerous tableau of clocks and hourglasses.

  Tyvian caught the eye of one of the terrified serving girls. “My dear, how about a bottle of chleurie for the table, eh?” He met Gethrey’s eye. “On Mr. Andolon’s tab, naturally.”

  Gethrey half smiled, half snarled. “You had to come back, didn’t you?”

  “Had I realized my presence was such an imposition upon your petty criminal activities, I certainly would have reconsidered.” Tyvian shrugged. “Yet here we are.”

  “Don’t pretend like you didn’t know,” Gethrey sneered. “You knew. You knew perfectly well, but you came anyway. Why? Haven’t you done enough to me?”

  Tyvian blinked at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He looked at Claudia. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

  Claudia’s voice was icy. “Your misplaced sense of chivalry.”

  The chleurie arrived in a crystal decanter and three glasses. Tyvian poured. “If I misplaced it, I certainly had no intention of finding it.”

  Gethrey shook his head. “You know what the big difference is between me and you, Tyvian? You could leave places like this behind you—­anytime you want, just trot back to Glamourvine and live a charmed life—­but you choose to associate with this rabble of your own free will. I, meanwhile, am trapped here, forced to look my shame in the eye every damned collection day, when all I want to do is brush these ­people
off, once and for all.”

  Tyvian took a sip of the Akrallian brandy and pointed at Claudia’s bruised and bloodied face. “Is that what ‘brushing off’ looks like? Seems strenuous. You likely broke a nail.”

  “I used to think you had it all figured out, do you know that?” Gethrey picked up his brandy and drank deeply. “To hell with all the high-­class twits and their pointless dinner parties, right? Life was on the fringes, you used to say—­here, in New Crosstown, where the slime of humanity ruts and vomits its way through life. I rolled around in it with you, and then you . . .” Gethrey struggled for the word. Eventually he blew on his hand as though scattering dandelion seeds. “ . . . vanished. I stayed; I fell in love with . . . this.” He gestured toward Claudia. “I got stuck, Tyv. For all my wealth, I wound up stuck here, living in the muck.”

  “How awful.” Tyvian rolled his eyes. “Think of all those dinner parties you’ve missed now.”

  Gethrey slammed his drink on the table. “That’s just it, Tyvian! You were wrong! I was wrong! The dinner parties are life—­a good life! A successful life! You know what the friends we grew up with are doing now? They’ve got families and land and dignity. They take vacations to Eretheria on the spirit engine, they charter cruises through the Ihynish Archipelagoes. They have mistresses and hunting engagements and on and on and on. That could have been us, Tyvian! That could have been me! All our friends are there, living it—­they’ve surpassed us!”

  “Friends?” Tyvian stared into the crystal of his glass. “I didn’t have friends, Geth. I was the bastard son of a woman everyone was too scared to hate openly, so you know what they did? The hated me. You know why I wound up killing Ryndal Gathren? Because the Kroth-­spawned arse wouldn’t leave me alone. He was two years older than me, thirty pounds heavier, and he thought his miserable swordsmanship would be a good way to push me around. He was wrong. Don’t tell me about friends, Geth—­you were the one with friends. Don’t blame me for throwing your own life away either. You did that when I wasn’t even here.”

  Claudia snorted at that. “Please. It was three years before your little crowd stopped coming around, asking after you. You set a fire under those boys’ arses, Tyvian Reldamar. You were their very own Perwynnon. You—­”

  “Shut up!” Gethrey backhanded Claudia across the mouth, his signet ring cutting her cheek deeply. She didn’t so much as squeak. She looked steadily at Tyvian with those shimmering brown eyes, her expression unreadable.

  Tyvian forced a smile. “So, what now, Geth? Do the Quiet Men drag me into a sewer and murder me? Will that solve your problems?”

  Gethrey smiled. “No, I had something more interesting in mind.” His eyes traveled up past Tyvian to someone else in the bar—­someone who had been expecting this very summons. Tyvian turned.

  There, perched on a barstool in fashionable maroon riding leathers and gold embroidery, was none other than Marcom DeVauntnesse, nephew of whore-­beating eunuch Faring DeVauntnesse, and proud owner of a wine-­bottle-­shaped bruise that covered much of the right side of his face. Marcom’s drinking buddies—­a veritable who’s-­who of beardless Saldorian dandies, with the pastel hair coloring and feathery hats to match—­got to their feet along with their boy-­liege as he sauntered across the floor to stand in front of Tyvian. None of them, Tyvian wagered, noticed the Quiet Men standing right there, knives drawn. Tyvian could barely notice them himself.

  “Hello, Marcom.” Tyvian grinned. “How’s the skull?”

  Marcom DeVauntnesse took off his glove one finger at a time and then slapped it hard across Tyvian’s cheek. “To the yield, Reldamar.” His dim-­witted goons spread out around Tyvian in a half circle around him, one of them actually jostling a Quiet Man aside. “There’s no window for you to jump out of this time.”

  Tyvian shrugged. “Alas, I haven’t got a sword, so . . .”

  Gethrey laid his rapier on the table. “Oh, by all means use mine, Tyvian.”

  Tyvian, grimacing, reached over to take the blade. When he did, Gethrey grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him close. Whispering in his ear, he said, “You lose this duel, Tyv. You let DeVauntnesse here cut off your balls and gut you in front of everybody, or all the girls have their throats cut right here, right now. Understand?”

  Tyvian nodded. “How very theatrical of you, Gethrey.”

  Gethrey raised his glass of chleurie to him in salute. “I learned from the very best, didn’t I?”

  Myreon channeled the Fey into a feyleap that brought her up behind the chimney of a restaurant and paused for a moment, listening. Somewhere in the distance she heard the shouts of a Sergeant Defender bringing a platoon on the march—­the third such she had encountered since she left the Cauldron. They were closing in on Tyvian and, possibly, on her. The augurs of the Gray Tower were no doubt directing the whole weight of the Defenders in her direction. Bridges would be blocked, major intersections would be watched, and patrols would be frequent. She only hoped it was Tyvian they were really after and not her.

  With one finger she drew the Sigil of Danger on the bricks of the chimney, warm with the smoke of a night of good food and the good cheer it brought. It was enough of a Lumenal ley to give the Sigil life, and Myreon watched it intently as it glowed and flickered, counting in her head. One, two, three, four, five . . .

  It vanished with a sudden pop. Danger was close—­too close to be the Defenders at the moment. That meant the only other group who might want to catch her: the Quiet Men. The Mute Prophets didn’t earn their title for nothing—­they could see the future almost as well as the Defenders could, and they would know she was on her way to stop them from winning more riches than even they could have foreseen ever having. She took a deep breath and erected a variety of guards and wards around herself—­bladewards, bow-­wards, telekinetic guards, a Dweomeric enchantment to strengthen her clothing to the hardness and tensile strength of chain mail.

  She really could have used a second pair of eyes, but her only ally (ally?) had just sacrificed himself to the Mute Prophets in order to protect a bunch of whores and drunks. On some level, Myreon still couldn’t believe Tyvian had done it, ring or no ring. It was . . . well . . . it was one of the most selfless things she had ever seen anybody do. Part of her wanted to rush back and help him—­every step away engendered a little pang of guilt in her stomach. How would she feel if he died?

  Myreon pushed all that away and focused on making it to the Old City. Besides the Defenders everywhere, the streets were strangely quiet—­even without their own augurs, the ­people were cagey enough to know trouble was afoot. This made things complicated. Had there been a crowd to hide in, she would have stuck to the streets, using any tail’s own cover to thwart them. The second option would be the sewers—­very difficult to scry, but slow going and Myreon didn’t know them well enough to not get lost.

  That left the rooftops, and at that Myreon excelled. Once she was atop the nearest building, much of the rest of her journey simply involved watching her step—­the buildings in New Crosstown were close enough together so she could skip from roof to roof with barely more than a short running start, and for anything farther apart, she could feyleap. She got winded quickly, though—­a side effect of being petrified for several months, she wagered—­and had to stop to rest frequently.

  During those rests, she would stop to consider her next move. Tyvian didn’t want her to confront Xahlven directly, which, to her mind, was all the more reason to do so. He might have saved her and he might—­might—­have changed, but that didn’t mean she was going to listen to the man. She’d fallen for his tricks too often before, frankly. No, she was going to find Xahlven Reldamar, and she was going to force him to save the West from its own greed.

  As for how this was to be accomplished, well . . . she still had a city to run across to think about it. Oh, and a probable ambush by Quiet Men to negotiate. That, too.

  The Quiet Men were
men without identity, somehow—­stripped of individuality and voice by a sorcerous process as undoubtedly illegal and unethical as it was unknown to the Defenders. What they did left no sorcerous mark on the ley of an area, and no augury or scry could seek them out. Only general things—­like the Sigil of Danger—­could detect them, and then only indirectly.

  So, the plan—­the only plan she had—­was this: since you couldn’t see a Quiet Man coming, you couldn’t help but be ambushed. The only choice one had in the matter was where the ambush would take place, and so she had determined the one spot where the Mute Prophets knew she would have to be in order to find Xahlven, and therefore where she would be ambushed: outside the Venerable Society of Famuli.

  Myreon just had to get there before the Mute Prophets figured out what she already knew. For a full mage, that shouldn’t be much of a problem, but she would have to pick up the pace. She smiled and made another feyleap that covered half a city block. For once she was the one making the plans that the other person was struggling to unravel. That felt good.

  She leapt again, pushing herself, pulling as much of the Fey from the summer evening as she could. There was a lot of it—­too much, even for a big, chaotic place like Saldor. It made her think of Daer Trondor and Sahand’s systematic manipulation of the Trondor sink, only somewhat less intense. Chaos was brewing, that much was clear—­she didn’t need to be an augur to figure that out. Andolon’s plan was about to bear fruit, and the brilliance of it was starting to become clear to her. Keeper’s Court aflame, the Defenders swarming the streets, Tyvian Reldamar on the loose—­it was a perfect storm of the chaotic and unpredictable. How the hell did a low-­rate nobleman know this would happen when all the rest of the augurs in Saldor did not? Was his pet Verisi that good?

  Or had it been Xahlven the whole time, just like Tyvian said?

  Myreon made it to the Old City in record time, coasting on a ley of Fey energy that drove her feyleaps into the realm of the legendary—­she cleared both the West Mouth and the Narrow Mouth each with one bound, and the walls of the Old City had scarcely been a challenge. The Defenders, it seemed, were not looking for her at all.