Chapter 17 #4
He picks a cloak up off one of the fallen guards, a dark, heavy garment, large enough to wrap around Avery's slender form twice over, and settles it across his shoulders, pulling it closed across his chest to hide the blood.
The cloak transforms Avery from a wounded operative into someone who might plausibly be cold, and the blood on his clothes and his skin disappears beneath the dark fabric.
"I'll stitch it up properly when we get back to the compound," Emery says.
Avery's hands find the edges of the cloak and pull it tight. His fingers are shaking. The tremor is fine and continuous and he cannot control it, and the inability to control it is clearly costing him more distress than the wound itself.
"He's going to know," Avery says.
The words are quiet and certain and carrying the despair of having already calculated the outcome and found it unacceptable but being unable to change the variables.
Emery covers Avery's hands with his own. The contact is deliberate, warm, steady, grounding. He looks at Avery and holds his gaze and waits until Avery's breathing evens and the tremor in his fingers slows by a fraction.
"No one will know," Emery says. The promise is vehement, fierce, carrying a conviction that surprises him with its intensity. He means it. He means it the way he means every blade he carries, completely, with the full weight of who he is. "I will make sure of it."
Avery looks at him. His dark eyes are bright and wet and he does not blink, and the not-blinking is the effort of holding himself together by force of will and eye contact.
He nods. Once. The nod is small and trusting.
"Secure the area for Bastian," Emery tells him. "I'm going to finish this."
***
He leaves Avery in the room and moves down the corridor toward Sander's office.
Two doors past the blue one, the young guard said, and the young guard was telling the truth because the door at the end of the corridor is heavier than the others, ironbound and slightly ajar, and lamplight bleeds through the gap.
Emery pushes the door open with the tip of his dagger and steps inside.
The office is sparse. A desk, a chair, a lamp, a shelf with ledgers. The austerity is deliberate, the room of a man who does not decorate because decoration is a permanence he cannot afford, because a man who might need to leave at a moment's notice does not invest in furnishings.
Sander is behind the desk.
He looks the same as the last time Emery saw him, gaunt face, short blond hair, the persistent scowl that sits on his features as something carved there.
His remaining hand is on the desk, beside a half-finished cup of something, and the stump of his missing left arm is covered by a sleeve pinned at the shoulder.
His sword is leaning against the wall behind him, within reach but not in hand, and the fact that it is not in hand tells Emery that Sander did not hear the fighting or, if he did, assumed his men were handling it.
Sander looks up when Emery enters. His expression goes through a rapid sequence, confusion, recognition, and then, with a speed that speaks to the reflexes of surviving this long by expecting betrayal, a cold and calculating fury.
"You," Sander says.
"Expecting someone else?" Emery asks.
He does not close the distance immediately. He stands inside the doorway with the dagger in his right hand and the needle in his left and blood on his bare chest and in his hair and on his feet, and he lets Sander look at him.
Sander does not reach for his sword. He is a pragmatist, and pragmatists know when the room has turned against them. The sword is two feet behind him. Emery is twelve feet away and closing.
Instead, Sander talks. Because dead men always talk.
Because the last thing a man with power does when he realizes the power has run out is reach for the only tool that remains, which is his mouth, and the mouth produces words reflexively, desperately, a final attempt to change the shape of the situation.
"Someone will always want him dead," Sander says.
His voice is even, controlled, carrying the forced calm of stalling and knowing he is stalling and knowing that Emery knows.
"Bastian. He's overstepping his bounds. He's been swallowing supply chains for years and the people above have had enough.
You kill me, someone else takes my place.
You kill them, someone else takes theirs.
The machine doesn't stop because you pull out a gear. "
Emery listens. All information is currency, and Sander is spending his freely, which means either he believes the information will save him or he has decided that if he is going to die he is going to die talking. Either way, the information is useful.
"Maybe you shouldn't be trading in human lives," Emery says.
Sander laughs. The sound is dry and humorless and carrying the contempt of considering moral arguments a luxury for people who have never had to make real decisions. "That's rich," he says, "coming from someone owned by a Vesper."
The word owned hits him like a slap to the face.
He is not owned. He has never been owned.
He has been used and discarded and sold in every way that a person can be sold without the formal paperwork, but he has never been owned, and the distinction matters because the distinction is the only thing that separates his life from the lives of the people Sander trades in, and Bastian, Bastian who was sold as a child, who was owned, who killed his way free, would never own anyone. The suggestion is obscene.
"You have no idea what it's like to be owned," Emery says.
His voice is quiet and cold and carrying the weight of every hand that has ever been on him without permission, every lap he has been pulled into, every night he has spent selling pieces of himself to survive.
He is not owned. He chose this. He chose Bastian, and the choosing is the most important thing he has ever done, and Sander does not get to reduce it to ownership.
He closes the distance. Sander's hand moves, reaching for the desk drawer, for a weapon, for whatever last resort a one-armed man keeps within reach for exactly this moment, and Emery is faster.
The dagger enters Sander's chest cleanly, between the ribs, angled upward, and Emery feels the resistance of muscle and the give of lung and the final, shuddering stop of heart, and Sander's hand falls from the drawer and his body settles against the back of the chair and his eyes go distant and fixed.
Emery pulls the blade free. He wipes it on Sander's shirt. He stands in the silent office and looks at the dead man in the chair and breathes, and the breathing is the slow, measured cadence of an assassin after a kill, the body resetting, the pulse returning to baseline.
He thinks about what Sander said. About someone always wanting Bastian dead.
About the machine and the gears and the people above who have had enough.
He thinks about the word above, not the upper Underground but the Upper City, the sunlit layers of the Maw where the Merchant Council governs and old money moves in currents as powerful and as hidden as the Grith.
He thinks that Sander's parting words were not idle chatter.
They were a warning, or a boast, or both, and either way the information changes the shape of what comes next.
He leaves the office. The corridor is quiet.
He moves back toward Avery's room, and on the way he pauses at a window, a narrow, unglazed opening in the stone that looks out onto the corridor leading to the building's exterior, and he takes the lamp from the wall bracket and holds it in the window, moving it in a slow arc. Once. Twice. Three times.
The signal.
He sets the lamp down and goes to find Avery.