Chapter 6 #3
It's not that Emery isn't used to nonhumans.
The Underground is rife with them. The Maw itself is rife with them.
He has sat in the laps of beings with bark for skin and crystal for hair and conducted business with fae and beastfolk and stone elementals and a dozen other species that regard humanity with the polite indifference reserved for particularly industrious ants.
He is used to it. He is not used to seeing beings in this tier of power demonstrate precisely why the stories about them are told in whispers.
Hask glances at him. His eyes, above the mask, have a faintly satisfied quality, a chore completed and the next one already queued.
"Are you hurt?" he asks.
Emery's voice comes back to him from wherever it had gone on vacation. "My hands are tied."
Hask sheathes his sword, crosses the distance between them in two steps, and pulls a dagger from his belt.
He grabs Emery by the wrist with a grip that is firm but not unkind and cuts the cord in a single motion.
The pressure releases and Emery's wrists scream as blood floods back into his fingers.
He brings his hands up and flexes them, feeling the raw burn of the rope marks and the pins-and-needles sting of returning circulation.
"Thank you," he says, and is being sincere, which surprises him.
Hask inclines his head. He retrieves his short sword from the second body, wipes it on the man's shirt, and starts walking. Emery follows because the alternative is standing in a corridor full of dead men and he has had enough of corridors and dead men and being vulnerable to last him a while.
Hask leads him through a series of hallways that look identical to every other hallway in this place, stone and lamps and the occasional body that he steps over with the ease of navigating furniture.
The sounds from deeper in the building are changing.
The crashes have become less frequent but more resonant, the deep structural groaning that happens when the bones of a building are being stressed past their tolerance.
Bastian is still in there. Emery can feel it, somehow, a pressure in the air, a hum beneath the stone.
They reach a door. Heavy wood, iron-banded, with a bar on this side. Hask lifts the bar and pushes through and the air changes immediately, cooler, carrying the familiar damp mineral scent of the deep levels rather than blood and dust, and Emery takes his first full breath in what feels like hours.
The alley is narrow and dark and lit by a single lamp at the far end that provides just enough light to make the shadows deeper.
Hask takes a look at Emery, a real look, not the quick assessment he'd given in the corridor but a proper examination that starts at the feet and works upward and takes inventory.
Emery knows what he sees. A young man, barefoot and shirtless, wearing dancer's pants that are smudged with dust and someone else's blood, with rope marks on his wrists and his long blond hair tangled from the bag and the fighting and the running.
He looks exactly what he is: someone who was dragged out of a brothel and carried through the dark and dumped on a floor and nearly killed, and who is now standing in an alley with nothing to his name except a pair of bangles and whatever is left of his dignity.
Hask reaches up and unclasps his cloak.
He takes it off without comment, without ceremony, without turning the act of kindness into a transaction.
He just takes it off and puts it on Emery's shoulders and pulls it closed across his bare chest, and the fabric is warm and heavier than it looks and it smells of leather and metal and something cold that Emery can't identify, something that is the opposite of the warmth that Bastian radiates, the negative space of heat.
Emery is taken aback. The kindness of it sits oddly in his chest, in the space between his ribs where feelings go when he doesn't want to look at them directly.
He has been carried and dumped and grabbed by the hair and nearly killed and now someone is putting a cloak on his shoulders because he's cold, and the contrast between these two things is so sharp it almost hurts.
He says nothing. He pulls the cloak tighter.
Hask leads him into the dark.
The sounds of Sander's stronghold being dismantled grow quieter behind them, muffled by stone and distance, but they don't stop.
They change character, becoming less frequent and more final, the cadence of a structure past the point of repair and now deciding how to fall down.
Emery thinks about the two men in the corridor who became ash.
He thinks about the man whose color drained from his face.
He thinks about Bastian standing in the hallway with blood on his hands that wasn't his and that expression on his face that Emery still can't name.
They wait in the shadows for a long time.
Hask chooses a spot where two alleys intersect, a pocket of dark behind a stack of empty crates that smells of rotting wood and stale beer.
He positions himself so he can see both approaches and settles into absolute, unnerving stillness, a creature native to the dark, his eyes above the mask the only thing that moves, tracking the mouth of each alley with a patience that does not appear to have a limit.
Emery sits against the wall, knees drawn up under the borrowed cloak, and tries to make sense of the last hour.
He fails. The pieces don't fit together the way they should.
Sander, the one-armed man he'd never heard of who somehow has the resources and the audacity to target Bastian Kane.
The men who grabbed him outside the Hollow, who knew the name he'd given Bastian that first night, the fake one, Desi, which means Sander had people watching the Hollow, watching Emery, and had been watching long enough to learn the name Bastian used for him.
And then Bastian, appearing in a corridor in Sander's stronghold, knowing exactly where Emery would be and exactly when he'd be running and positioning himself at the precise intersection of those two facts.
Which wasn't possible, or shouldn't have been, except that nothing about Bastian Kane has been what it should have been since the moment Emery first saw him.
How had he known?
How had he known where Sander's stronghold was when the whole point of Sander was that no one knew where he operated? How had he known Emery was inside? How had he known to come?
Emery pulls the cloak tighter and does not ask Hask any of these questions because Hask does not seem the type who answers questions he hasn't been asked to answer, and because Emery is not sure he wants to hear the answers right now.
Right now he wants to sit in the dark and breathe and not think about the way Bastian grabbed his arm and pulled him behind him, fluid and instinctive, his body deciding before his mind that the first thing to do upon seeing Emery was put itself between him and harm.
No one has ever done that before.
No one has ever put themselves between Emery and anything.
He has been on his own since he was old enough to understand what on his own meant, and he has built his entire life around the principle that the only person who will ever protect him is himself, and this principle has served him well and kept him alive and kept him sharp and kept him alone, and tonight a man who could unmake him with a word chose instead to stand in front of him and unmake someone else.
He doesn't think about this. He refuses to think about this. He thinks about it anyway.
Bastian's crew begins to filter in.
They arrive one by one, appearing from the dark, born from it, which given what Emery has seen tonight is not entirely a metaphor.
Four of them total, including Hask. Emery watches them assemble and does the math and arrives at a number that seems absurd: four.
Four people to dismantle an entire stronghold full of Sander's soldiers.
He thinks about the ash on the corridor floor.
He thinks about the shadows reaching from the walls.
He revises his assessment of what four people means when one of them is Bastian Kane and another is whatever Hask is.
The crew is efficient and quiet and none of them look at Emery with anything more than mild curiosity, which is either professionalism or the disinterest of people who have seen their boss do stranger things than rescue a half-dressed assassin from a rival's stronghold.
The copper haired woman from the Hollow is cleaning blood from beneath her nails with a small knife.
The half-giant from before has a gash on his forearm that he is ignoring with the calm of treating open wounds as a scheduling inconvenience.
A shorter figure with black hair in a ponytail is already scanning the alleys behind them, on watch before anyone had to ask.
These are Bastian's people. His crew. The ones he trusts enough to bring on a job that involves dismantling a rival's operation.
Emery counts them and studies them and files every detail away because that is what he does, that is what he has always done, and the fact that he is wrapped in a borrowed cloak and sitting on the ground and technically still their boss's assassination target does not change the fundamental nature of how his brain works.
Bastian dismisses them with a nod and a few quiet words that Emery can't hear. They disperse into the dark, quick and professional, and within seconds the alley is empty except for Emery, Bastian, and Hask.
Hask lingers. He stands at the mouth of the alley with his arms crossed, his masked face turned toward the corridor they came from, and waits.
Bastian inclines his head at him, a small motion, and Hask reads it instantly and moves to the far end of the alley and takes up position there with his back to them, not gone, not leaving, just giving them the privacy of a turned back.