SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The medical entries were near the back, and there were fewer of them than there should have been for a woman who took a year to die.

Trafalgar went through them twice.

Tired. Slept poorly. Ate little. A month later, ate little, again, in the same three words, as though whoever wrote it had run out of ways to say the same thing. Weight down four pounds in the spring. Down seven by midsummer. Headaches that came in the evening and went by morning. Two entries about her hands shaking, then no more entries about her hands.

No diagnosis anywhere. Any physician’s alarm, no consultation called in from the surface, no note demanding that somebody do something. A woman who ran an entire house under the ocean grew quieter and thinner across four seasons, and the record of it read like a list of minor inconveniences.

He turned another page, and somewhere around the middle of it he stopped taking anything in.

It had been sitting in the back of his skull for two days, patient as anything, waiting for him to get tired enough to stop guarding the door.

The mine.

’No.’

He put the page down flat on the desk and sat very still.

There had been no rift under that mountain. That was the part he had never been able to leave alone. He had gone down expecting a wound in the world, some torn place bleeding rot up through the stone, because that was what a thing like that was supposed to be. He had found goats staked to iron pegs and fed on a schedule.

Somebody had kept those creatures rooted in that shaft for weeks by making the eating easy, patiently, on time, for as long as the work below needed. Nothing dramatic. Nothing anyone would notice from the town. A slow supply, arriving every day, until the thing it was feeding had done what it was there to do.

And afterwards, the floor.

Swept in patches, all down that descent, wiped to bare rock in exactly the places where the prints should have been thickest. Not a panicked scrub. The flat, unhurried tidying of somebody with all the time in the world and no fear at all of being caught at it.

Trafalgar looked at the pages in front of him.

Four seasons of a woman being quietly emptied out, on a schedule, without a single event to point at. And afterwards, a careful hand going back through the household archive and lifting out every page that said who had been in the room, leaving the salt accounts and the lamp oil untouched.

Swept in patches.

’Same craftsman,’ he thought. ’Or the same school at least.’

He got up and walked the length of the room, because sitting with it was no longer possible.

The thing about that mine had never been the monsters. It had been the tool. A tool made at a bench by a man who knew what he was making, carried down a Morgain mountain in a careful hand. Nothing about it had come out of that mountain. It had been brought.

And here was the same signature, half a world away, inside another of the Eight.

’So it works across houses.’

That was the piece that turned his stomach. Whoever this was had been inside Morgain ground, and was now inside Myrrhvale ground, and had done both jobs the same way: slowly, cheaply, and with somebody local’s hands on the actual work so that the local hands would be the ones everyone stared at afterwards.

Rivena on one mountain. Vaelis in one castle.

He stopped walking.

There was exactly one house with a body physically parked in Meraval and had been for months, invited in on paper, standing in every corridor with a legitimate reason to be there and nothing whatsoever to do.

Lucard au Vaelion.

Invited by a thirteen-year-old girl whose own sister could not explain how the child had ever met a Vaelion.

’I have nothing,’ Trafalgar thought. ’A copied ledger I can’t use, a dead man I wasn’t allowed to look at, and a feeling about a mountain.’

He knew exactly what he had. He had a direction and no proof, which was the same hand he had held in that mine, and he had walked on a great deal less than that before.

He also knew what would happen if he said it out loud.

Not to Lyren. Lyren had brought him here to find outside interference, and would take a name from him like a man taking a loaded weapon, and he could not be trusted to sit on it. Not to Nerith, who was two years past patient. He said nothing to any of them.

Zafira found him on the outer walkway the next morning, waiting for Rhosyn, watching a submarine come in through the third lock.

She had brought two cups of something warm and handed one over without asking whether he wanted it, and they stood there a while with their forearms on the rail, and it occurred to Trafalgar that this was the first hour since he had landed in this city where nobody wanted anything from him.

”You look like you didn’t sleep,” she said.

”Not much of it.”

”Was it worth staying up for?”

He turned the cup around in his hands and weighed how much of this was his to hand over.

Nerith had sat in a watched room for three weeks with a pen and told nobody. That part belonged to her, and he was not going to spend it on a walkway before breakfast, not even here.

”I’ve been going through household records,” he said. ”Nyssara’s last year. She went out slowly, and nobody wrote down why.”

Zafira waited a beat for the rest of it. For where a man three days out of the harbour had come by household records from an archive that let nothing leave.

”That lines up with what I’ve heard,” she said instead. ”People barely talk about her being sick. It’s always about how she died, who they think did it... Everything before that gets ignored.”

”Yeah.” He watched the lock gates begin to drain. ”That’s the problem. I’ve seen something like this before. Back home, and it wasn’t...”

He heard the next words waiting there, and he knew what they were going to be: a member of one Great House telling a member of another Great House that he suspected a third.

It wasn’t just a theory, or a conversation between two people who had known each other since they were children. It was an accusation between houses, spoken out loud, impossible to take back, and she would have to carry it whether she wanted to or not.

’And she’d have to decide what to do with it. Today. Standing right here.’

”...and I couldn’t prove that one either,” he finished.

The lock gates finished draining. Somebody down on the yard started shouting numbers.

Zafira didn’t look at him and didn’t ask.

She drank about half of her cup, set it on the rail, and after a moment said, ”Rhosyn’s taking her time.”

”Yeah... it’s strange that it hasn’t arrived yet.”

Neither of them said one word about the two seconds in the middle.

That was twice in one conversation that she had chosen not to make him lie to her.