11. ELEVEN #2
The stars moved across the sky, and the night darkened.
An hour passed, then another. Twenty conversations later, Niklaus had learned nothing beyond how to tie a half-dozen different knots from an over-enthusiastic ex-dockhand.
Nothing of Thyatira. Everyone in the recruitment was a Groundling, firm in the belief that they had three options: work for Thyatira, work for the Shadewalker, or starve in the streets.
What sane man wouldn’t opt to join Thyatira?
Thyatira was a Groundling icon. A revolutionary…
With no past to stand upon, Niklaus’s inner skeptic whispered.
A man who had your reputation marred when you suggested he might not be Nelfinden.
He sounded like a lunatic, even to himself. But all revolutions started as whispered words—ludicrous musings—before they made their way through lips.
The mute and Dex leaned against a barrel, watching him.
Dex ought to have retired by this point; nothing kept him tethered to Niklaus.
But he seemed especially keen on playing the part of noisy shadow to the mute.
Niklaus couldn’t blame him. What Azadonian boy wouldn’t want to stick to the largest person who wouldn’t throw things at him?
Niklaus ordered a round of drinks and moved over to the pair, plopping the wooden mugs before them. “A solid cheers is in order.”
Dex raised his mug and hesitantly clacked it against Niklaus’s. The mute took a pointed sip from the canteen at his waist. How charming.
Niklaus turned to Dex. “So… ah.” Might as well make use of the resources at hand. “What are you doing in the Red Wing?”
Dex looked for a moment like he wasn’t sure if Niklaus was talking to him. Then he wrinkled his nose. Niklaus remembered that he’d already asked the boy that same question when they first met.
“Receiving redundant lectures on Nelfinden patriotism from a burnt-out patrician.” Dex took a sip and made a face that displayed a lack of experience with intoxicants.
“Ah. That.” Niklaus turned to the mute. “What about you?”
Niklaus frowned. “I’m taking note that you are not, in fact, a conversationalist.”
Across the sands, a voice cut through the night like a blade through aether. “You.”
It was the same way people often addressed Niklaus, followed up with some sort of remark a governess might reprimand a respectable maiden for, but it was directed at the mute.
The voice belonged to a young recruit, perhaps only a few years older than the Azadonian.
A patchy dark beard cloaked his chin as well as any threadbare scarf; his nose hooked at an angle that might trim pottery.
He rounded the barrel and pointed a finger at the mute’s chest. “We need to have a conversation.”
“What timing!” Niklaus said, glad for the intervention. “Have a drink. You can have his.” He gestured toward the mute’s untended mug.
The recruit did not pair the glare he served Niklaus with any disparaging remark. He didn’t need to. Silence could be a weapon. Niklaus should know well enough; it had wounded him for years.
“You.” He faced the mute. “I knew your papers were forgery.”
The mute only stared at him, unblinking. Fates, if awkwardness were a sparring match, they’d both have taken the crown.
The recruit waved the air between them and leaned in closely.
“It’s fine. Listen, I’ve been looking for you since we left Chira’na.
I was investigating Thacklore at the same time as you.
Knew he had people coming in from the outside.
We share a common enemy, and I need your help.
” He turned back to Niklaus. “You.” It was said with more disgust than accusation this time—amazing, that a single world could be so versatile.
“You can understand him. Help me talk with him.”
Niklaus’s gratitude evaporated. Conversation? Fine. Demands? Not. He gave the recruit a smile that he hoped might blind the stars overhead. “I’d like to help you out. Now, just where was it that you came in?”
The young man’s overgrown brows formed a full caterpillar over his narrowed eyes. “Mind the company you keep, eah?” he said to the mute.
Dex drained his drink. Then the mute’s.
Nameless looked determinedly out into the desert.
The recruit scowled. “Perhaps another time. I’ll make it worth your while. When you need me, ask around. You’ll find me.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper and slapped it on the table before making off. Niklaus leaned forward to see what he had written. A name. Chevek Balfida.
Balfida. Shit. As in related to Covern Balfida, Latouda’s betrothed, the leader of the Groundling movement, Balfida?
Every pleasant moment of the night was suddenly extinguished.
“How’d you two meet?” Niklaus grumbled.
Yet the mute’s nails dug into his crossed arms. Why would he disclose information to someone who was evading his end of a deal?
Perhaps Niklaus was just coming down from a moss canopy, or perhaps the name Balfida had hit him too hard where it hurt, but something in the interaction made him itch.
Nameless was a criminal. Why should Niklaus care if he was making him wait a few extra minutes?
“Let’s get you what you’ve been waiting for.”
Half an hour later, they stood outside the wagons which housed Aetech’s defensive plates. Niklaus used his master key to open the door. He was so afflicted with the moss descent—a full tab had been too much—that it took him three tries to get the key into the hole.
This was wrong. So wrong. He shouldn’t be delivering this restricted man anything, let alone technology held under a privacy contract by his own corporation.
“You only need one?”
Niklaus withdrew the device from the wagon and handed it to him.
It was a sleek plate of metal the size of a small notebook: featherlight and affixed to a steel grip.
An activator switch glistened at its side.
The mute examined it and flipped the switch.
A blue light shone from within, extending into a translucent ring nearly as tall as him that distorted the air between them. He deactivated it.
Niklaus wasn’t entirely sure what the plate did. His board had informed him of its engineering, moons back. They’d said it was a shield. A stupid investment, considering Nelfindar wasn’t fighting any wars, but that hadn’t been an opinion worth sharing. At least, not at the time.
“Why are you giving him that?” Dex asked, words slurring and eyes crossing, before he emptied the contents of his stomach in the sand.
Well. He was small, and the drinks had not been. But that left Niklaus with the problem of getting the boy to his tent.
He looked at the mute.
The mute’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s a long walk.”
The mute sighed, the sound as heavy as Niklaus felt, and pulled Dex over his shoulder as easily as lifting a sack of rice.
“I’m fine. Really, I am,” Dex muttered.
Niklaus cleared his throat. “Right this way.”
They wound through the tents and wagons in silence, but it was a different silence now. Not amicable, no—but without the knifing, screaming unease of before. They laid the Azadonian in his tent, pitched beside Niklaus’s in front of the mess supply wagon.
Niklaus hesitated before blurting out, “This worked out.”
The mute nodded.
Niklaus had bought enough moss to last him through to the end. Just enough. Things came at ten times the expense out here in the desert, after all. But what if it went missing, like before? Security funds would be helpful.
But the mute already had what he wanted. What else could Niklaus possibly offer?
“We should do this again,” he tested. “Next month?”
The mute lifted his chin.
Thank the Fates. “They issued you a tent, eah? Didn’t take you as a finicky type.”
The mute shifted like the soles of his feet were especially uncomfortable.
Back to pragmatics. “Yeah. But I can come and go as I please.”
The man’s stare was so cold that it burned.