Chapter 4 #2
Emery unfolds the paper. It contains a name, a location, and a price. He refolds it and puts it in his pocket and picks up a spoon and looks at the porridge in front of him and decides he is not hungry.
Doss looks as though he wants to say something personal but thinks better of it. He sticks to business. "The informant might help. She's not cheap, but she knows things."
"I'll see what she knows," Emery says, and stands.
The informant's name is Brynn. She is short and red-haired and she conducts her business from a rented room above a pawnshop in the mid-levels, that transitional zone between the lamp-lit upper corridors and the darker, quieter passages that descend toward the Depths.
The mid-levels are where people go when they want to be found by the right people and not found by the wrong ones.
The buildings here are a patchwork of stone and timber, bolted to the gorge wall at angles that defy architectural logic, connected by narrow walkways and rope bridges that sway when the air moves through the gorge.
The pawnshop is wedged between a tattoo parlor and a locksmith, and the staircase to the room above is so narrow that Emery has to turn sideways to climb it.
Brynn is waiting for him. She is sitting on a stool beside a window that looks out onto the gorge wall, which is to say it looks at rock, and she is cleaning her nails with a small knife.
Her red hair is cut short and her eyes are quick and she carries the wary energy of years spent looking over her shoulder, sharpened by practice into something close to instinct.
"You're the one Doss sent," she says.
"You must be Brynn."
"Sit down." She nods at the only other seat in the room, a chair with a broken back. "And before we start, the price is twenty silvers. Up front. I don't do credit and I don't do favors and I definitely don't do refunds if you don't like what I have to say."
Emery puts the coins on the table. She counts them, pockets them, and leans back on her stool.
"You want to know about Bastian Kane."
"I want to know how to get to him."
Brynn laughs. It is short and humorless and tells Emery everything he needs to know about her opinion of his chances.
"You don't get to him," she says. "That's the point.
That's the entire structure of his operation.
Nobody knows where the compound is unless he wants them to know.
Nobody gets inside unless he brings them in.
Nobody knows his schedule, his safe routes, his suppliers, his contacts, none of it.
He runs his crew on a need-to-know basis and the only person who needs to know everything is Hask, and Hask would sooner die than talk. "
"You were on his crew."
"I was on his crew." She puts the knife down. "And I left. And the fact that I'm still breathing tells you something about how small a fish I am, because Bastian Kane does not leave loose ends unless the loose end is too insignificant to bother with. I'm alive because I don't matter."
She says it flatly, without self-pity, a statement of weather, a statement of fact. Emery recognizes the tone. He's used it himself.
"What about his weaknesses?"
"He doesn't have any."
"Everyone has weaknesses."
"Everyone has weaknesses," Brynn agrees.
"But most people's weaknesses are things you can exploit.
A lover, a vice, a debt, a secret. Kane doesn't owe anyone anything.
He doesn't drink too much. He doesn't gamble with money he can't afford to lose.
He doesn't keep a lover." She pauses, and something moves in her expression that might be regret or might be relief. "I would know."
Emery files that away. Briefly his lover.
Doss's intel was good. He wonders how long it lasted.
He wonders if Bastian touched her with that same careful, deliberate warmth, and then he buries the thought because it is irrelevant and petty and he does not have the right to feel possessive about a man he is being paid to murder.
"His compound is impenetrable," Brynn continues.
"I lived there for eight months and I still couldn't draw you a map.
He changes the access routes every few weeks.
The entrances are guarded by people who would die for him and a few who aren't entirely people.
And even if you could get inside, it wouldn't matter.
He doesn't need bodyguards. He doesn't need walls. He is the wall."
"So what do you suggest?"
"Get an army together. Get the man who hired you, if he's got the resources for it.
Hit Kane when he's out in the open with enough bodies to overwhelm whatever his crew can throw back at you.
" She tilts her head. "Though I wouldn't bet on your chances even then.
I've seen what happens when he opens his mouth. "
"You don't sound certain."
"I'm not. I've never met anyone who could take Bastian Kane in a fair fight. And I've never met anyone stupid enough to try an unfair one twice."
Emery leaves with a sour taste in his mouth.
The information is worth exactly what he expected, which is not much.
There is no secret passage, no hidden vulnerability, no clever angle that will let him put a blade in Bastian Kane without getting close enough to touch him.
And getting close enough to touch him is, as last night demonstrated with devastating clarity, a strategy that collapses the moment Bastian touches him back.
He starts back toward the guild through the mid-level corridors, turning the problem over in his head.
The gorge is alive around him: voices echoing off stone, the creak of timber platforms, the distant sound of water where the Grith surfaces in a basement or a tunnel somewhere below.
A bridge connects the two sides of the gorge at this level, a wide stone arch with vendors set up along both railings, selling everything from fried dough to enchanted trinkets.
People cross in both directions, human and otherwise, and the bridge functions as it always has: artery, social space, message board.
Notes are pinned to the railings, wanted posters and job listings and love letters and prayers, a collage of desperation and commerce fluttering in the updraft from the gorge floor.
Emery is halfway across the bridge when Doss appears at the other end, moving fast. His face is tight. His hands are shoved in his pockets, trying to look casual and failing at it.
"Don't go back," he says, before Emery can speak.
Emery stops. "What?"
"Don't go back to the guild. Don't go to your room. Turn around and go somewhere else."
"Doss."
Doss grabs his arm and pulls him to the railing, away from the foot traffic, and leans close.
His voice is low and fast and stripped of its usual energy.
"The client who hired you to kill Kane. He came to the guild.
He came personally. He trashed your room looking for you.
Your stuff, your clothes, your things." His eyes are apologetic.
"Everything. He's furious about the delay. He thinks you've been compromised."
Emery's stomach goes cold.
His room. His cot and his blanket and his washbasin and his chest with the broken clasp. His three books, the romance with the worn cover and the cracked spine, the poetry that smelled of smoke, the knight's tale stolen from a dead man's shelf. All of it gone.
"He thinks you're a loose end," Doss says. "His words. He told Greaves he wants you found and he wants the contract reassigned and he doesn't care what happens to you in between."
"I'm not done with the contract." The words come out hard. "I did not fail. I am still working on it."
"He doesn't see it that way. He thinks you've been bought."
The flush that rises in Emery's neck is anger.
At being reduced. At some faceless client he has never met deciding that Emery's professional judgment is subordinate to whatever conclusions the man has drawn from him asking for more time.
He has never in his life been a loose end.
He is both insulted and annoyed that the client is being so impatient about a contract that everyone in the briefing room agreed was practically suicide.
But the insult is less important than the math, and the math is bad.
He is one man. The client, whoever he is, has resources.
He has people. He sent men to the guild house, which means he knows where Emery lives, which means the guild house is no longer safe.
The guild itself provides a measure of protection, certain rules about not attacking operatives in guild territory, but those rules have limits and a client with enough money can find the cracks in any structure.
"I can't go back," Emery says.
Doss shakes his head. "Not until this settles. And I don't think it's going to settle."
"Do you know who the client is?"
"No. Nobody does. Greaves doesn't even know. The contract came through a broker."
Emery grips the bridge railing and looks down into the gorge.
The Grith is visible from here, a ribbon of black water far below, winding through the lowest levels.
Things move in it, dark shapes that surface and submerge without pattern.
Above, the gorge walls rise toward the sunlit upper layers, the stone honeycombed with dwellings and shops and the glittering crystal extensions of fae architecture that scatter light downward into the gloom.
The Maw, a city that wasn't planned, wasn't built, wasn't governed with any consistency, and yet here it is: a thousand years of stubbornness and survival carved into the earth.
Emery has lived in it his entire life. He has never felt safe in it, but he has always understood its rules. The rules are changing.
"Thank you," he tells Doss. He means it. Doss is taking a risk by telling him this.