SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”We may as well go and ask where they actually are,” Rhosyn said, once the Ancients’ wall was behind them. ”Technically they’re in both rings. They work down in the second, since that’s where the transport channels run, so the warehouses and the customs offices and the leased stretches are all at that level. The third is where they’d live.”

”At this hour I doubt anyone’s still standing behind a counter, though I wouldn’t swear to it when they have slaves.” Trafalgar turned toward the tunnel entrance. ”The third ring, then. If they live there, somebody there knows where she sleeps.”

The crossing took longer than the distance deserved. Two checkpoints, one on each end, and a guard at the second who read Trafalgar’s seal, read it again, and then read the name on it a third time as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something less inconvenient.

The third ring announced itself before they were fully out of the tunnel.

Everything sat farther apart here. The buildings had room to breathe and used it, the walkways were wide and clean, and water ran between whole districts in channels lined with worked stone instead of the raw concrete of the docks. Private compounds pushed out into the open space with their own small domes over their own gardens, and the lamps had been chosen to look expensive rather than to help anybody see.

The people matched it. Myrrhvale by blood in some cases, scales and colouring giving it away, and in others the sort of person who worked for that blood and had been paid enough to start dressing like it.

’You can smell the money down here,’ Trafalgar thought. ’Two rings up they were hauling crates off a submarine at nine at night, and here somebody’s watering a garden under the sea.’

The soldier they stopped had no trouble with the question.

”Lady Sorrel? She’ll be at her business, my lord, this time of the evening.” He pointed along the curve of the ring. ”Take the main street. You’ll hear it before you get there. Look for the building that’s trying harder than the ones beside it.”

He was right about hearing it.

The main street ran wide and bright and did not appear to have any intention of sleeping. Businesses stood shoulder to shoulder down both sides of it, though very few of them were the sort that put goods in a window. Trafalgar counted three houses selling drink in the first hundred paces, two doors with a queue outside and no sign above them, and one wide sunken hall where a crowd had gathered around a pit and was making a great deal of noise about whatever was happening in it.

He looked long enough to work out that the two figures in the pit had collars on, and then he stopped looking.

Farther along came the casinos, and those did have signs, because a casino has never once in history needed to hide.

”So that’s how the Myrrhvale pay for all of this,” Trafalgar said.

”It surprises me how different the Eight all are, though. The Morgains keep everything behind their own doors. Your family sits up in that castle with distance between them and every single person they rule, and they seem to like it that way.”

”Every house has its own habits.” Trafalgar watched a group spill out of one of the drinking halls ahead of them, laughing at something. ”The Myrrhvale aren’t cut off from their own people. They’re cut off from everyone else. Down here they live on top of each other and think nothing of it, and then the entire race pulls the hatch shut behind them and forgets the rest of the world exists.”

Rhosyn had already stopped listening. Her attention had gone farther up the street, and Trafalgar followed it.

The building stood four storeys where its neighbours managed two, and every one of those storeys had been paid for by somebody who wanted it noticed. Pale stone, silver worked along the balconies, warm light pouring out of windows that had been made deliberately large. It carried itself the way a person carries themselves when they have never in their life had to wait in a queue.

”I think that’s the one the soldier meant,” Rhosyn said.

”That would be my guess as well.” Trafalgar took it in from the pavement. ”They do enjoy standing out, this family. I suppose that’s where we’re going in.”

From the outside there was no telling what kind of establishment it actually was.

That lasted until the door, where a guard the size of a cargo crate moved half a step and closed the gap without any particular hurry. He didn’t put a hand on anything. He simply arrived, and the doorway stopped being a doorway.

”Names, please.”

”Trafalgar du Morgain, and Rhosyn.” Trafalgar produced the seal without being asked for it. ”We’re observers for the succession. We’d like to know whether Lady Sorrel is here tonight, and whether she’d be willing to meet us.”

The guard’s eyes went to the seal, and then, briefly, back up to Trafalgar’s face.

”I’ll let her know. If you wouldn’t mind waiting a moment.”

He stepped inside, and in stepping aside he gave them a clear view through the doors, which answered the question about the establishment thoroughly.

Drink, first. Then money, laid out on tables in a room off the main floor where nobody was troubling to be quiet about how much of it was moving. And beyond both of those, arranged along the walls and the stairs and every soft piece of furniture in the place, the men and women who were there for whoever had enough of the second thing.

Two of them found Trafalgar within about four seconds and made it obvious.

He looked back at them with the expression of a man reading a shipping manifest, and after a moment they gave up and went to work on somebody more promising. Rhosyn drew her own share of attention and dealt with it the same way, which was to say she gave no sign of having noticed a single person in the building.

The guard came back.

”Please follow me. Lady Sorrel has a private room upstairs and she says she’ll see you now.”

The stairs went up through three floors, and the walk gave Trafalgar a fuller education than he had asked for. Doors stood open along every landing. Nobody closed them, nobody appeared to consider closing them, and the people behind them seemed to regard being watched as one more thing included in the price.

’Not a single lock in the building above the ground floor,’ he thought. ’They have some curious fetishes in here…’

The guard stopped at a door on the fourth floor, knocked once, and opened it.

”Your guests are here, Lady Maela.”

Trafalgar went in with Rhosyn a step behind him.

Maela Sorrel was on a low couch at the far end of the room with a glass in one hand and a young man on either side of her, and she was not remotely embarrassed about any part of it. She said something quiet to the one on her left, and both of them were up and moving toward the door before Trafalgar had finished crossing the threshold.

”I’ll admit the timing could have been better,” Maela said, unfolding herself and reaching for the decanter. ”Please, both of you, make yourselves comfortable.”e