SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

On the third night, Doran Skeff didn’t go home.

Rhosyn had his route down to the minute by then. Out of the manifest office at the tenth hour, left along the canal wall, across the lower bridge, four streets through the workers’ blocks, in through a green door with a bent number plate. Eleven years of the same walk, and even frightened he hadn’t varied it once.

That night he came out of the side entrance instead, the one the cleaners used, and turned right.

She lost forty seconds getting off a roofline she’d chosen for a man going left. By the time she had him again he was three streets into the wrong part of the ring, moving quickly for a man his size, and she stayed further back than she wanted to because the streets were empty enough that her footsteps would have been a second set.

He went into a storage building with no lamp over the door. Rhosyn gave it a count of ten, which was the discipline, and then another six, which she would go back over afterwards more times than was useful.

She was on the stairs when she heard the door on the upper landing.

It was still moving when she reached it, swinging back on its hinge with the slow weight of a heavy door that somebody had pushed rather than closed. Below her, at the far end of the building, a set of footsteps went down and away at a walking pace, unhurried, and a lower door opened and shut.

Skeff was on the floor between two rows of crating, and there was no fight anywhere in the room. Nothing knocked over or scattered, his jug upright by the wall where he’d set it down himself. Whoever it was had been waiting in here for him.

She got a hand to his neck and there was nothing under it, and he was still warm, and the blood under him was still spreading at the edges.

Twenty seconds. Maybe less.

His right hand was out from his body, and there was a pencil stub an inch from his fingers, and he had written on the back of a crate label in a hand that started careful and came apart halfway.

the one who brought it up every

The line dragged off the edge of the card. Whatever he had come here to collect was not in the room, and neither was anything else worth taking.

Rhosyn stayed exactly where she was for the length of one breath. Then she went through the building properly, both floors, every row, the lower door, the street outside, and knew it was pointless while she was doing it.

She went back up and did the upper floor again.

…

Trafalgar took the card from her and read it twice.

’Shit. All he asked for was three days of protection before he gave me what he knew. He made it through two and a half, then broke his routine once to go and get it. That was enough.’

He knew exactly where it had gone wrong, and it had not gone wrong in that building. It had gone wrong two nights ago in a room above a canal, when a woman had offered him four people who were good at this and he had explained to her, at some length and very reasonably, why one was better.

”Say it,” Zafira said.

Trafalgar looked at her. ”There’s nothing to say.”

”There is.” She folded her arms. ”And if neither of us says it now, we’re going to spend the next week pretending it isn’t there.”

He didn’t answer, so she continued.

”We could’ve done what I suggested. I could’ve had two people on that street tonight, and Skeff would probably be sitting in his own kitchen right now.”

”And you could’ve been dead.”

That stopped her.

Trafalgar set the card down on the table before his fingers closed any tighter around it.

”Think about what would’ve happened if anyone caught them, Zafira. Zar’khael operating inside a Myrrhvale succession isn’t something your father gets embarrassed over and pays a fine for.”

His voice stayed level, but there was less patience in it now.

”It would be another Great House acting inside their territory, during their succession, with half the others already watching. You know exactly how Myrrhvale could’ve answered that.”

Zafira’s mouth tightened.

”You’re too smart not to have thought about it.”

”I was trying to help you.”

”I know.”

Some of the edge left his voice.

”That’s what bothers me. If I’d let you keep talking that night, you might’ve done it anyway and told me afterward.” He glanced down at the card. ”I’m not risking your life just to keep one witness alive. Especially for a succession that isn’t even yours.”

Zafira looked away for a moment.

”Sorry.”

”Don’t be.” Trafalgar pushed the card a little farther across the table. ”We’ll find another way. We still have time, and we’re not where we were a month ago.”

His eyes returned to the unfinished words Skeff had left behind.

”He gave us something before they reached him. Maybe not what he meant to give us, but it’s something.”

Trafalgar had weighed a man’s life against his own standing in this city, and he had chosen his standing, and he had been right to. Every step of that reasoning still held, he would make the same call again tomorrow with the same information, and Doran Skeff was still lying in a storage building with a pencil stub by his hand.

Rhosyn had said almost nothing since she came in.

”I’m going back,” she said.

”There’s nothing there.”

”I went through it three times. I’ll go through it again in daylight.”

”Rhosyn.” He waited until she looked at him. ”There’s nothing there.”

She didn’t argue, which was not the same as agreeing, and she was gone a minute later.

Trafalgar sat with the card in front of him for a long time after that.

Zafira put food in front of him at some point and he ate about a third of it. When one of the castle staff came in to ask whether the lamps should be lit, he answered her with a shortness she hadn’t earned, heard himself do it, and said nothing to fix it.

the one who brought it up every

He read it perhaps forty times that night.