Chapter 7 #2
Morning comes the way morning comes in the Underground, which is to say it doesn't. There is no sunlight.
There is no dawn. There is only the shift from sleeping to waking and the arbitrary decision that a certain hour constitutes the start of the day.
Emery has lived his entire life without a sunrise and does not miss what he's never had, but he wonders sometimes what it would be like to wake up and know, without checking a clock or listening for the shift-change bells, that the world has started over.
He opens the wardrobe.
The clothes inside are dark and simple and well-made.
Black trousers, a black tunic, a belt, boots.
Real boots, with soles that will hold on stone and leather that will keep his feet warm and dry and unbloodied.
There is a hooded cloak, heavier than the one Hask lent him, with a clasp that actually functions.
There are two spare shirts. There is, at the bottom of the wardrobe, a pair of soft trousers and a loose shirt that are clearly intended for sleeping in, and the fact that someone thought to provide him with sleepwear is so unnecessarily considerate that Emery has to close the wardrobe and stare at the wall for a moment before he can continue.
He dresses. The clothes fit, which means someone looked at him and correctly estimated his measurements, and he is not going to think about who did the looking or the estimating because that line of thought leads somewhere inconvenient.
The boots are good. Better than good. Better than anything he's owned.
He laces them and stamps his feet and feels, for the first time in twelve hours, a person rather than a problem being transported.
He sends a message to the guild.
This requires finding a runner, which requires finding the kitchen, which requires navigating the compound's corridors and hoping he turns the right direction.
He turns left, as Hask instructed, and follows the smell of bread and the sound of someone arguing with a pot, and arrives at a kitchen that is large and warm and occupied by a man built broad and solid, forearms thick as fence posts, with a voice that carries the authority of absolute sovereignty over this room and everything in it.
"New one," the man says, looking Emery up and down with the dispassionate assessment of feeding people whose backgrounds he does not ask about.
"Jivaldi. I cook. There's bread on the counter, eggs in the pan, and porridge if you're the type.
I'll leave a plate out for you if you're late to meals, but if I catch you in the larder, you and I are going to have a conversation neither of us enjoys. "
Emery takes bread and eggs and sits at the large kitchen table and eats, and the food is hot and fresh and seasoned with actual seasoning rather than the hopeful application of salt that characterized guild meals.
He writes his message to the guild between bites, on a scrap of paper Jivaldi provides with the resigned tolerance of a kitchen that has long since doubled as a message depot.
The message is short: the contract situation has changed.
He was attacked by the client, which is a violation of the guild's rules regarding intermediary protection.
He does not name Bastian. He does not name Sander.
He says enough to establish that the breach was the client's and not his, and requests time to resolve the situation.
He finds a runner through one of the compound's staff, a thin boy with quick eyes who takes his coin and his message and disappears into the corridors with the practiced ease of years spent carrying things through the Underground.
The reply comes back three hours later: Acknowledged. Lay low. Will investigate.
Lay low. He is sitting in the compound of the most notorious crime lord in the Underground wearing clothes the man provided and eating food from his kitchen and sleeping in a bed he furnished and reading books he retrieved from a room Emery can never go back to.
Laying low implies a temporary state. It implies that there is a before to return to.
Emery is beginning to suspect there isn't.
Bastian summons him mid-morning.
Summons is perhaps too strong a word. What actually happens is that Hask appears at Emery's door, knocks once, and tells him Bastian would like to see him in his study, in the same tone someone might use to mention that it's raining.
Emery follows him through the compound, paying closer attention to the layout this time.
Corridors mapped, doors counted, exits noted.
The assassin in him doesn't stop working just because the rest of him is confused and off-balance and wearing someone else's boots.
If anything, the confusion makes the mapping more urgent.
Knowing where the exits are is the difference between a guest and a prisoner, and Emery has not yet determined which one he is.
The study is at the end of a corridor on what Emery suspects is the compound's upper level, though upper and lower are relative terms this deep underground. Hask opens the door and stands aside and Emery walks in.
The room is warm and book-lined and smells of ink and the remnants of a fire.
There is a desk, heavy and dark, covered in papers and maps and a half-empty cup of something that has long since gone cold.
There are shelves along two walls, packed with volumes that range from leather-bound ledgers to what appear to be actual, proper books, the kind with titles on their spines and pages that haven't been handled by assassins with bloody thumbs.
There is a window, which is not actually a window but an enchanted panel set into the stone that mimics the quality of natural light, which means the room is bright in a way that feels almost, but not quite, above ground.
Bastian is behind the desk. He is dressed in his usual, the open-chest black tunic revealing the dark tattoos that cover his arms and chest and blend into his charcoal skin, the red sash at his waist, his white hair freshly braided and pulled over one shoulder.
He looks up when Emery enters and his expression does the thing.
The shift. The opening. The softening that exists without any visible seam alongside the rest of what he is, and Emery still cannot reconcile the two and is beginning to think that's by design.
There are others in the room. The half-giant is seated in a chair that is wider than the others and appears to have been built specifically for him.
He has a sketchpad in his lap and a piece of charcoal in his hand and is looking at Emery with mild curiosity and no hostility, which is refreshing.
The woman with the copper hair and the too many buckles is leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, and next to her, seated on a stool, is a short-haired woman who looks annoyed to be there.
And Hask, who has entered behind Emery and taken up position by the door with the ease of knowing exactly where he belongs in any given room.
Bastian gestures to the chair across from his desk. Emery does not sit in it. He stands behind it and rests his hands on the back and meets Bastian's eyes and waits, because sitting would be accepting a position in this room's hierarchy and he has not agreed to a position yet.
Something that might be amusement flickers across Bastian's face. He doesn't press it.
"You're the only person alive who knows what Sander looks like," Bastian says. His voice is low and even and fills the room without effort. "I need a description for Corvin." He nods at the large man with the sketchpad. "So we can find him."
Emery looks at Corvin. The man looks back with the patient expectancy of an artist waiting for a subject. His hands, which are enormous, hold the charcoal with a delicacy that seems at odds with the rest of him and probably isn't.
Emery looks back at Bastian.
"Yeah, I don't think so," he says.
The room goes tense. Not dramatically, not the way rooms go tense in tavern stories where swords are drawn and threats are issued.
This is subtler. A shift in posture. A held breath.
The stillness that settles over a group of people accustomed to their boss being obeyed, watching someone disobey him to his face.
The woman with the copper hair uncrosses her arms. The short-haired one on the stool goes very still.
Bastian's expression doesn't change. He regards Emery across the desk with the same steady attention he's had since Emery walked in, and waits.
"If you want to find Sander," Emery says, "you're going to have me along when you look."
He holds Bastian's gaze. This is the only leverage he has.
The only card in his hand. Sander is a ghost, a man so paranoid and so careful that no one in Bastian's network has ever seen his face, and Emery is the sole living person who can change that.
The moment he hands that information over, he becomes disposable.
A loose end, the same thing Sander called him, and Emery has decided that he is done being a loose end.
If his knowledge is the only thing keeping him valuable, then he is going to hold it with both hands and not let go until he has some guarantee that the value extends beyond the information.
"I'm not giving you a description," Emery continues. "I'm giving you me. I go where your people go. I look at the faces. And when I see the right one, I'll tell you."
It is, objectively, a terrible negotiating position.
He is standing in this man's compound wearing this man's clothes eating this man's food and sleeping in a bed this man provided, and he is telling him no.
He is watching the most dangerous person in the Underground hear the word no and he is waiting to find out if that word has consequences, because it usually does, because no is not a word that people in Bastian Kane's position hear often enough to have a healthy relationship with it.