The Bridge of Bones (Trouble and Riel's Story) (Patreon)

[EXTREME CONTENT WARNING: This story is an attempt at a police procedural murder mystery, and contains all of the elements included in that genre, including extensive discussion and investigation of murder and death. In particular, this story involves the kidnapping, physical beating, and violent murder of an adolescent, as well as dealing with the corruption surrounding wealth and privilege, psychological manipulation and interrogation, and implications of bullying and physical abuse. This chapter also contains descriptions of violence, mild gore, death, and murder. Please protect yourself and read only at your own risk!]

Part I: A Whole Lotta Eyes

Part II: Connective Tissue

Part III: Skeletons in the Closet

Part IV: Darkness in the Blood 

Part V: Madness of Two

Trouble wakes up in darkness.

For a moment, he experiences a bizarre disorientation, almost a double-vision: he almost convinces himself he’s sixteen again, and it’s the night after a big fight down at the panton-keras arena by the docks. The warehouse around him is dark and still, and it smells faintly of wood shavings and sawdust. His eye is nearly swollen shut, and his entire body aches fiercely, almost as if he has a fever in his bones. He feels like shit. He closes his eyes and nearly drifts off to sleep again—and then he jolts. No. He’s not sixteen, he’s an adult, he’s Vice-Commander of the Shepherds, and he was chasing someone, chasing that Mage—

And then he got hit by a spell. Blacked out. And now he’s here.

Instantly, Trouble tries to surge upwards, but he’s tied to a sturdy oaken chair, his wrists bound behind him and his ankles strapped to the chair’s legs with thick rope. Someone’s stuffed a gag in his mouth—a clean handkerchief, he thinks, not the dirty rags or torn strips of cotton that are typical of kidnappings (he’s an old hand at getting captured by enemies, at this point). He struggles in futile silence for several moments, his muffled groans and curses barely loud enough to be heard from the next room, let alone by anyone outside of this vast, empty warehouse—and God damn it, didn’t Raven say that Calum was killed in a warehouse?—before he gives up and realizes the ropes are too soundly tied for him to wriggle free. He tries to stand, but nearly tips himself over, almost sending himself crashing to the floor with nothing to catch him but his chin.

The bastard took his weapons. And his sun medallion, the knife in his boot—anything that could help him, anything that could identify his body. His heart thunders; he feels the blood thumping hotly in his head. It’s hard to think: he might have a concussion. Shit, shit.

He tries to get a good look at his surroundings, dark though they are. He could be in Smoketown or Ashtown, judging by the size of this warehouse: but he’s seen hundreds of ones just like this before, there’s nothing specific about it that helps him. No branding, no names on the walls. Only one exit in what he thinks is the western wall, presumably leading to a loading dock or another depot, since there are no windows showing the light from outside. Just blank stone and mortar. He doesn’t even know what time it is. There are big wooden crates scattered everywhere, but they could contain anything, and he’d never be able to pry them open with his bare hands. And some sort of worktable tucked far in the corner—could there be tools on there? Could he drag his chair all the way across the room, worm out of the gag, grab something useful with his teeth, try to drop it in his hand behind him, and then cut himself free—?

Somewhere in the next room, he hears a door open. Hears two voices, arguing in low, vicious tones.

“You fool. Don’t you understand what you’ve done? He’s the Vice-Commander of the Shepherds.”

The first voice is so quiet and cold that he has trouble placing it, for a moment. Trouble cranes his neck back, straining to hear more over the sounds of his heavy breathing through the gag.

The second voice is surly, rebellious… young. He feels a little prickle of shock go through him when he recognizes it. Could that be Vaughn Sulia, Calum’s cousin?

“You said we needed to learn more about how to use the gauntlet. You said we needed to find one of the Equalists’ past specimens…” Trouble doesn’t catch this next part. “…Now we can learn how to make it work better. You said, after Calum…”

A crash in the other room—someone has hurled a crate on the ground. “Idiot! I meant one of the children, the ones they’re keeping locked away at the Shepherds’ hideout! Not their second-in-command! What on earth possessed you—”

“I thought you’d think I was clever. I tricked him, didn’t I? And got him here without anyone noticing? And he’s stronger than some stupid kids, you said yourself he’s probably the only successful experiment alive. We can get what we need from him, then get rid of him.”

“As if it’s so easy.” The other voice is laced with cruel contempt, and Trouble recognizes it now: Edric Alden. The Inquisitor. He and Vaughn are working together. And what is all of this about the Equalists? “If he goes missing, they’ll look for him.”

“And they’ll be looking for a Mage with a purple cloak: the same man who killed Calum. And they won’t ever find him, and then they’ll forget. Besides, you said it yourself—he’s a Norm. They don’t give a kak about him. He’s not one of them.”

“Neither is Riel Syndran. He won’t buy the story.”

“And what is he going to do? I saw him. I could break him like a twig. Especially now that I have this.” Vaughn Sulia’s voice drops into a lower register, one full of quiet menace and meaning.

After a long pause, Edric says softly, “Don’t you dare point that thing at me, Vaughn. I’m the one who gave it to you. I’m the one who showed you how to wield it. You need me.”

“And you’re too afraid to put it on yourself,” Vaughn taunts back. “I’m your grand experiment, your watchdog. If you didn’t have me to sic on your enemies, you’d never do a damn thing. So maybe you should think about who really needs who.”

There’s a short, frosty silence. Then a scuffle, as if Edric has summarily pushed past Vaughn—his cousin, Trouble thinks, they’re cousins with each other as well as Calum—and the door in the west wall slams open. The Inquisitor marches in, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes as cold and sharp as a reptile’s; he comes to a standing parade rest in front of Trouble’s chair, assessing him with the blank, flat appraisal of a butcher looking at a trussed chicken.

“Vice-Commander Alder,” he drawls. “I take it you remember me.”

Trouble wishes his hands weren’t tied behind his back, so he could make a rude gesture. Vaughn comes slinking into the room after another moment, shoulders hunched, jaw set and sullen—but he spares a moment to shoot Trouble a brief, knowing smirk. He moves to one of the crates just on the edge of Trouble’s periphery—a calculated move, Trouble thinks, designed to unnerve him and make him turn his head to keep Vaughn in his field of vision, like a stalked deer—and slumps down onto it. There’s an odd contraption on his arm, something that looks like a spiky brass gauntlet with black-tipped, pointed fingers, almost talons. Looking at it for too long makes Trouble faintly nauseous, though he can’t say why.

Edric snaps his fingers to redirect Trouble’s attention back to him. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asks. “We’ve met once before—before today, I mean. But you were quite distracted, then, and a lot of people were milling around.”

Trouble doesn’t care. He tries to tell Edric with his eyes, I am going to kill you, but the pale-haired Inquisitor looks utterly unfazed. “It was when you and your little Hero of Haven dug those children out of the Equalists’ compound,” he says. “In the crypts. I was one of the responding officers on the scene. You very nearly gave the children to us, and this whole mess could have been avoided. Do you remember now?”

Trouble goes very, very still.

His eyes go to Edric’s face, searching the arrogant, imperious features, the perpetual grimace of dislike and distaste. Again, he feels that spark of uncertain recognition, not strong enough to ignite a clear memory but enough to give him that faint press of instinct—he’d thought he’d recognized Edric from somewhere, when he’d first appeared in Calum’s bedroom. But he couldn’t be sure. All Inquisitors look like that, to an extent: as if they’d rather step in animal droppings than have anything to do with you. But…

All at once, the meteoric knowledge smashes into him, and he surges against his bindings again, snarling and hurling obscenities Edric can’t hear. Vaughn actually laughs and claps his hands like a child, delighted by the display. Trouble wants to tear both of their faces off.

Of course. Of course. They’d always been puzzled by how magic had killed Calum, when he had no discernible ties to magic or any Mages at all. But it hadn’t been magic. Not the kind they were looking for. It’d been… some Equalist tool, that gauntlet on Vaughn’s hand; Trouble gets that same queasy feeling about it that he’d gotten about that black orb down in the cultists’ hideout. Edric must have gained access to the Equalist artifacts, must have been the one assigned to oversee their transportation and storage. And somewhere along the way, he’d gotten it into his head that he could continue the occultists’ work, somehow. It’d be just like him to think to use them as weapons, to think that Norms deserved to level the playing field by gaining their own magical powers, however illicitly and at whatever risk… What had Riel called him? Obsessed with power and power differentials, and loathing the Diminished for their perceived power over him. So why not dispense with the need for them at all, and arm every Norm soldier with magic of his own making?

But he’d needed a test subject—Edric wasn’t the kind to stick his own neck out, certainly not the type of person to risk experimenting on himself. So he’d chosen his younger cousin, Vaughn: equally hateful, equally hungry for power, equally eager to do anything he could to bolster himself and sense of self-worth, his dominance over others. But Vaughn is hard to control, even Trouble can see that: he has a rebel’s personality a little like Trouble’s, but five times more malicious and ten times more dangerous. He hates being told what to do, made to feel small and weak. And now they’re both walking a fine line with each other: Edric, the brains of the operation, and Vaughn, the leashed dog, but the dog is beginning to snap at its lead and the master is beginning to wonder if keeping it around is more trouble than it’s worth.

But they need each other. And need him, for some reason. Maybe kidnapping him was an act of recklessness on Vaughn’s part, an impulse of an unraveling mind… maybe he provoked the little muti too much, and Vaughn just couldn’t stand being made to feel beneath him.

But they know about his history with the Equalists. So maybe it’s more that they need a model to examine, some standard of success that they can poke and prod and emulate. And they’re looking at him like an anatomical model they want to dissect.

Trouble’s stomach sinks. Oh. He is in a shitload of trouble.

Edric watches him put all of the pieces together, impassive, cool as a marble statue. In his corner, Vaughn chuckles to himself, running his bare left finger over the talon of his gauntlet—a child wearing his father’s military grays and pretending to be a soldier, Trouble imagines, a novice playacting the part of a great hero or villain.

But there’s Riel, he thinks. The little dogshits aren’t factoring in Riel. He was never fooled by them, either of them, by their false stories or their lies about nonsense leads…

…and God fucking damn it, Riel isn’t going to come looking for him, because Trouble just had to pick a fight with him and storm off. Damn it. He probably thinks Trouble is sulking in some bar somewhere, and won’t dispatch anyone to fetch him back for at least a day.

Well. His temper’s landed him in some bad spots before. Now he has to see if his luck will hold out, or if this is finally the end of the road.

Trouble makes a sharp gesture with his head, indicating for Edric to take out the gag.

For a moment, the Inquisitor casts a wary glance at Vaughn, as if contemplating instructing the youth to undo it; both of them are accustomed to their own lackeys, it seems like. But he apparently decides not to push his luck, because ultimately it’s Edric who steps forward and unties the strip holding the wadded handkerchief in place.

Trouble spits the gag out. “My partner’s going to come looking,” he rasps, trying not to wince; his jaw hurts from being clamped around the handkerchief for so long, and whatever the purple-cloaked Mage—no, Vaughn—did to him makes his head sting from the effort of talking. “And he’s smarter than you, Alden. You and I both know it. It’s only a matter of time before he storms in here with five-score Shepherds ready to fill your guts with lead and magefire.”

Edric sighs and circles back to stand in front of his chair, looking as if he’s already regretting taking off the gag. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to kill you and dispose of your body before then,” he deadpans, clasping his hands neatly behind him. “He can’t ‘fill our guts with lead and magefire’ if there’s no proof we had anything to do with your disappearance.”

“Everyone back at headquarters knows I went looking for the Mage beggar at Vaughn’s word—and at that specific alleyway, too. They’re going to start there, and someone definitely saw your little lapdog dragging me away, unconscious. It’s not going to be hard to find us from there.”

“Oh, I was far too smart for that,” Vaughn says then, smiling with all of his teeth. “After I knocked you out cold, I put you in a luggage trunk and carried you out on my shoulder. No one ever saw a thing besides some blond thug cutting through an alley, and a young man exiting the same alley a little while later, carrying an empty traveling case. They’re never going to find you, even if they do begin to suspect the Mage beggar doesn’t really exist. Which they won’t. Beggars up and leave the city all the time, don’t they? There’s never any hard proof that they were or weren’t there.”

Trouble opens his mouth, about to scoff at the idea that Vaughn could have carried him out in a trunk on his shoulder—but then he looks at the adolescent’s dark-gleaming gauntlet and thinks better of it. If he managed to kill Calum with that thing, what else has he learned to do? Briony could carry him out on her shoulder. So could Blade.

God, he thinks, his heart throbbing in his throat. If something like this gets out, the whole world’s doomed. I have to destroy that gauntlet, and anything like it.

He decides to switch tactics; nods at the gauntlet. “Impressive. Are you the only one who can use that thing? How does it work?”

“Don’t say a word,” Edric snaps at Vaughn. The younger man sends him a mutinous look, but only answers the first part of Trouble’s question, his chest puffing out slightly as he replies, “I’m the only one, yeah. The user’s got to be strong enough to master it, see. He’s got to be tough, resilient, and disciplined. Otherwise it gets out of control.”

“That what happened to Calum?” Trouble switches his gaze back and forth between the two of them, searching for any hint of remorse, of softness. He finds nothing but mild annoyance, on both faces—as if he’s touched on the subject of a sore argument, and not their murder of their young cousin. “You decided to practice your new tricks on him, but things got out of control?”

Vaughn scowls and hunches his shoulders. “We needed a live test subject. Dead fish and things on meathooks weren’t enough: I needed to test my limits, push for more. See what I could really do. I wanted to use the gauntlet for a fight down by the docks, but he—” He jerks his head at Edric, the gesture both disrespectful and dismissive. “—said it would be too public, draw too much attention.”

“So you brought Calum here instead,” Edric drawls, contemptuous. “As if the disappearance of a noble boy—one who spent most of his time in yourcompany—wouldn’t draw even more attention.”

Vaughn’s scowl deepens, and he looks to Trouble, half-conspiratorially, as if he’s the mediator in a debate. “I wasn’t going to kill him,” he says. He actually sounds like he means it—not earnest, not regretful, just indignant, as if some carefully laid-out plan simply hadn’t come to pass the way he thought it would. “I was just going to—practice on him. And then afterward, I’d let him go home, and he’d be too scared of me to tell anyone. But he was weaker than I thought, so he ended up dying. And that made a whole mess.”

Trouble knows everything that comes after: the decision to dump his body, pin the blame on a Diminished, and attempt to conceal anything that could have lead the investigators back to Vaughn or Edric. It explains the immaculate clothes—Edric’s doing, his inability to be sloppy or coarse even when staging a murder scene—and the dropped watch: Vaughn’s doing, probably, and likely the source of endless fury for his partner in crime. If not for that, their plan might have even worked. Edric, using his pull as an Inquisitor, could have monitored the subsequent investigation and directed it down more convenient avenues, pinning the blame on the phantom Mage killer or whomever he wanted. Better than simply making Calum disappear, embroiling the entire city in a search that might have unearthed some very inconvenient hidey holes and secrets. All in all, an admittedly-neat solution, if Vaughn hadn’t bungled things up… or if Trouble hadn’t been the one to stumble across the body, and the watch. Or if Riel hadn’t been the one to partner up with him, recognizing Edric and growing suspicious of Vaughn.

That’s the hope, anyway—that any of those things will be enough to save Trouble’s neck. He looks up just as Edric says, “And I’m tired of cleaning up your messes. This was your last chance, Vaughn. Once we’ve made him disappear, that’s the end of this sorry story.” And he pulls out a handgun, the same one he held them at gunpoint with earlier, black and coldly-gleaming. Standard-issue service pistol, the Griffon Lariat. Trouble sets his teeth. If this is it, he’s going to go down fighting.

Vaughn jumps to his feet, eyes wide and outraged. “What? But—I went through all the trouble to get him here alive! Didn’t you say we could learn from him, perfect my abilities?”

“It’s too risky,” Edric returns coldly. “You should have waited for me to procure one of the children they took from us: it would have been far easier. But his absence is too conspicuous. We need to kill him and get rid of him—let them think your fanciful Mage spirited him away when he went sniffing, and they’ll go chasing their own tails. But if we drag our feet, it might give them time to track us. Every wasted minute is another moment they could stumble across us, with him tied up and in our possession. There will be no explaining away that.”

“What about his partner?” Vaughn says, his brow wrinkling—now he’s beginning to look a little worried. “What if he doesn’t buy the story? You said he’s relentless; that he never gives up.”

Edric smiles a little. “The Mage killer will have to get rid of him, too.”

And after that, the leads will dry up, Trouble thinks. If they’re careful, if they do it right, once Trouble and Riel are gone, there will be no one left with enough knowledge of this case to put the pieces together. The Shepherds will grieve; they’ll do their damnedest to avenge them. But by then they’ll be too many steps behind, too easily mislead by all of the tangled accounts and false witnesses being bribed or planted by this Inquisitor and his rich, noble cousin. Vaughn and Edric will get away.

And then they’ll unleash this Equalist weapon on the whole world.

His tongue feels too swollen for his mouth; his head feels heavy and waterlogged. Through the sluggish fog of his thoughts, he runs through a list of potential strategies he can try. Think, think. They’ve stripped him of his weapons; this isn’t a situation where he can use his guns or his fists. He’s only got his words. What would Riel do? Think, you bastard! Be like him!

Threatening them into letting him go obviously won’t work; telling them that Riel is on the search (which he probably isn’t) just moves up their timetable on killing him. Trying to provoke their guilt over Calum does nothing—he was an inconvenience to them, a difficulty only because of his status and the attention it drew.

So. They’re going to kill him, and maybe cut him up and look at his Equalist-augmented insides, and there’s not a lot he can do about it. Unless he can make them think he’s worth more to them alive than he is dead… or if he can turn them against each other.

Or both.

“You know, I’ve seen that gauntlet before,” he says, bluffing desperately. He keeps his tone casual, hoping they won’t see the sweat on his face. “So you’ve learned superstrength with it, and, what, astral blasts? Got a kind of Battle-Mage thing going on?”

Vaughn’s face lights up greedily. “That’s right,” he says proudly, eager to show off even in these circumstances. Edric throws him a disgusted look. “But I think I could do loads more things, if only I could practice, test things out properly…”

“A kid I knew wore that very same gauntlet, when I was with the Equalists,” Trouble lies, his thoughts racing. “I remember it, clear as day. He wasn’t as strong as you, but they got him doing all sorts of spells within a year. Levitating, making force fields. At some point they were even going to teach him how to fly.”

“He’s lying,” Edric says to Vaughn instantly, but Trouble doesn’t flinch and barrels on. “Only—like with all Equalist experiments—the whole project was doomed to fail from the start. You know magic’s always got to have a price, don’t you? When Mages use it, it saps their energy, their mental strength, and they’ve got to rest before they can use it again. You want to know what the price was for that boy, the one who wore that gauntlet before you? I bet hehasn’t told you.” He glances meaningfully at Edric.

“Be quiet,” the Inquisitor says, his eyes aflame with anger now; he raises the pistol and points it square at Trouble’s forehead. Trouble keeps talking.

“It was horrible,” he says. “But then, everything they did to us kids was horrible. But that kid—his name was Timo, something like that—I remember first his fingertips went a bit numb. They thought he’d been overusing the gauntlet, so they gave him a break for a few days. But then the numbness started to spread, every time he used it again after that. And then his nails turned black, and his fingers went stiff and brittle, and then the affliction started creeping up his wrist—”

“Be quiet,” Edric says again, taking a step closer. The gun in his hand wavers, ever so slightly.

“—and by the time they figured it out, it was too late for the poor kid, and the blight reached his heart and he died right after. You see, the gauntlet’s made of demon-magic, all of the Equalists’ things are, and it was eating him, eating his hand—”

Edric Alden steps forward and shoves the point of his gun into the soft tissue under Trouble’s chin. Well, he hasn’t killed me yet,Trouble thinks, and Vaughn is staring at him as if transfixed, so he continues blindly, “And I bet this sorry bastard’s never told you about that, did he? Well. You’re just another experiment for him, so I’m sure he doesn’t care what happens to you. You’re like his Calum, you know: expendable. Just a footnote for when he moves on to the next test subject. Luckily, by the time the Equalists got to me, they’d ironed out the whole demon-eating-your-flesh problem, so I know how—”

Edric smashes the gun across Trouble’s face, with enough brutal force to send his head snapping back. Pain explodes across his vision; he feels the trickle of something warm sliding down his cheek. Salt fills his mouth. He’s bitten his tongue. He’s blinded by agony for a moment—but he doesn’t say a word, swallows his howl of pain.

“I told you to be silent,” Edric says icily, looming over him like a reaper, his eyes blue and blank and utterly mad. “If you open your mouth again, I will kill you.”

Trouble looks up at him and sees that he’s serious. He sees what Trouble is trying to do—well, it’s not as if Trouble was trying to be subtle about it. He rolls the blood in his mouth and then spits, almost gently, on Edric’s shoe, then shrugs, as if to say, Fair enough.

Edric says to Vaughn, his voice like a cold snap, “Pick that up and gag him again.”

Surprisingly, the youth moves to do as his older cousin commands, moving wordlessly behind Trouble and picking up the discarded gag, stuffing it into his bloodied mouth again. Trouble tries to catch his eye, tries to impart some desperate meaning, some last-minute connection, but Vaughn keeps his eyes down and backs away without looking at him again.

Shit. Well, there goes that.

“Knock him out again,” Edric says to Vaughn, stepping away and kneeling to wipe at his shoe with another handkerchief. “But don’t kill him. I want him alive in case I have trouble catching Syndran and need this one’s knowledge of the Shepherds. After that, we’ll take them both to the killing ground, and you can practice on them there.”

Vaughn perks up hopefully. “You’re not going to just shoot them?”

“We can’t build a pyre big enough to burn their bodies without drawing attention,” Edric answers, throwing the handkerchief away, “so we’ll have to bury them. And though we’ll hide them well, there will always be the chance that someone might unbury them, sometime in the future. If that ever happens, it will behoove us to make it seem as if they were both killed by magic—not bullets.” He makes a little disdainful gesture, a flick of his wrist. “And this way you’ll get to practice. It’s not often you’ll have two live subjects to test your powers on. But after this, that’s it. You’re done running your own experiments.”

“Fine,” Vaughn says, his eyes bright and sly and calculating—he’s too preoccupied by his own excitement to take issue with Edric’s commanding tone. Trouble shifts uneasily and feels an odd looseness at the back of his head: at first, horribly and irrationally, he thinks part of his skull is sliding off, but then he realizes that the knot on the gag is slack. Vaughn did a clumsy job of retying it. Good. He can use that… if he wakes up again.

Good thing he grew up fighting, Trouble thinks as Vaughn steps forward and raises his gauntlet. There’s a strange black jewel glowing in its palm, staring at Trouble like a dead eye. If there’s one thing he’s good at besides shooting, it’s being tough enough to take his knocks.

Vaughn speaks a garbled word, and the whole world goes dark again.

#

Riel is trying very hard not to think about Trouble’s funeral costs.

It’s the last thing he should be thinking about, he knows, but his mind is usually thinking about a dozen things at once, and one part—a minuscule part, a tiny stream of thought-particles slipping through a crack in his proverbial mental walls—keeps muttering pessimistically about how surely Trouble is already dead, his urgency is all in vain, he should be preparing for Edric and Vaughn’s next move, because surely if he can’t rescue Trouble in time (dead, dead already), then at least he can ensure he has fireproof evidence to trap his kidnappers before they can abscond.

But Shery’s with him, pale and tense and frightened, and he cannot abandon hope now—as irrational and illogical as hope is. It’s not the way he usually strategizes. Usually he treats these things like a chess match, dispassionate, ruthless, able to make the necessary sacrifices in order to corner his opponent and force a victory. Hope gets you nowhere, in chess—you cannot hope to defeat your adversary, you must plan to, and focus on creating every scenario and defense without relying on luck or the other side’s potential mistakes… which is really all hope boils down to. Faith in luck or others’ stupidity, and not in oneself.

But this isn’t chess, he tells himself. This isn’t a game. This is Trouble’s life, and he cannot afford to be arrogant.

He tells Shery everything, not that she hasn’t already pieced it together herself—otherwise she wouldn’t have come running to find him. Then he gets out of the coach at Avon-on-Gameau. No time to return with Shery to headquarters, to gather reinforcements and come back—every second could mean life or death, and he needs to use every precious beat to determine where the two killers might have taken their blond sniper (a thousand warehouses, for surely they took him to the same place they used to kill Calum—but if he knew where that was, they wouldn’t be in this damned crisis in the first place). He tells Shery to fetch as many Lunar Corps squads as are available and send them to him—if he leaves the area, he’ll pay a street courier to stay behind and tell them where he went next.

“Meanwhile, look through the paperwork again,” he tells her. “Or go directly to the Inquisitors and tell them our suspicions. Make them turn over more files, all of the ones they have on that raid on the Equalists’ hideout. There must be a record of where those artifacts are stored. Even if Edric moved them secretly, they were originally in the possession of the Order of the Inquisitors. He couldn’t have just made them vanish into thin air. That’s where we’ll find them: Edric, Vaughn, and Trouble.” Or at least the next piece of evidence, he thinks. The next breadcrumb. If it’s not already too late…

His head is throbbing horribly. Shery catches the edge of his fine coat just as he turns away from the carriage door.

“Riel,” she breathes, her eyes wide with concern. “You don’t have a weapon—I should have brought one!”

He should have been carrying one this entire time, Riel thinks grimly. But he’d always thought he’d be safe, in Trouble’s company—a mistake he’ll never make again. “There’s no time,” he says, pushing her back gently into the safety of the coach. “I’ll buy one at the blacksmith’s.”

To the carriage driver, he tosses a pouch full of coin and commands, “Take her back to the Shepherds’ compound in Ashtown at full-speed. Don’t stop for anything or anyone until you get there, not even if they flash you a medallion. If you have to run them over, I’ll pay for your bail and legal fees.”

The man throws him an odd look, then smiles uncertainly, as if Riel is telling him a strange joke. “Of course, sir.” Tipping his hat, he nudges his horses into a full canter and takes off, the carriage rattling and bouncing behind him. Riel winces. He hopes Shery doesn’t get road-sick.

He turns his coat collar up against the frigid wind and crosses the street towards the darkened alleyway. The cold is bracing, reviving; the freezing air dulls the throbbing in his head. He can see a spangled circle growing in his left eye that warns of a migraine—of all the damned times to get one. He’s no good to Trouble if he can’t think. His mind narrows down to a wicked point of light that makes some things gleam with clarity and leaves everything else in darkness.

They won’t kill him right away, he guesses as he steps smartly into the pitch-black alleyway, which smells faintly of garbage-sweetness and snow. He doesn’t bother with finding a blacksmith or a gunsmith—he knows there are none open at this time of night, they’ve all gone home to their families. And anyway, he has his walking stick, which has a thin stiletto blade concealed inside it, placed there after an attempted assassination on the guildmaster two generations before him. Not that Riel can do much with it—but it’s not as if he can fire a gun, either, so at least it’s something.

No, they won’t kill Trouble, not immediately. Edric is too prudent to be hasty: he knows he needs to get rid of Trouble, fast, or risk being caught with him in their clutches, but Trouble’s knowledge of the Shepherds is also too valuable—Edric will keep him as a trump card, just for a little while. Edric Alden always operates with a backup plan, always has a fallback in case things go awry.

And he and Vaughn are likely interested in Trouble’s biology: they will never get another chance to study a successful Equalist experiment in the flesh, so they’ll use all the time they can to pry the sniper’s secrets out of him before disposing of him. It’s what Riel would do.

He catches sight of a soiled purple cloak stuffed into a nearby trashcan, and for some reason, in the same moment, his mind flashes back to a conversation he had with Trouble one night during St. Balthazar’s Feast. Everyone was a little drunk and loud that night—some had gone off to carouse at the local tavern, The Wolf’s Den, while the rest milled crazily around one of the captains’ lounges, bracing themselves to venture out into the cold for more drinks.

He was pressing Trouble for details about his history with the Equalists, he remembers; Riel had heard about it from other Shepherds, and he’d looked into certain files while organizing the Order’s bureaucratic and administrative systems. Trouble had been very waspish about it all.

“It’s all in the past,” he complained. His eyes were bleary with drink, his hair mussed from when he’d carried Shery around on his shoulders earlier in the evening. “Why prod sleeping dogs? I don’t bother dredging it all up.”

“But consider,” Riel had pressed—he’d had a few glasses of wine himself— “you have been gifted a remarkable thing, Trouble. You could be the first Norm in history to have been artificially granted magical powers. Haven’t you ever considered testing the limits of that?”

“I don’t have magical powers,” Trouble slurred back. “I’m just really, really, really good at shooting a gun.” He made the requisite pantomime with his hands, sighting down his pointed thumb and forefinger and pretending to fire. “And sure, maybe, like, my luck or something got enhanced—”

“Trouble…”

“But I wouldn’t say—I’m not—it’s not magic. At least, I’m pretty sure it isn’t. And if it is, it’s like the—” He pinches his thumb and forefinger together so that there’s the tiniest gap separating them, and squints theatrically through the gap. “The tiniest dribble of something. Again, hardly even magic. And it’s only to do with guns and shit. Very weird.”

“Why don’t we definitively see? If you would just allow me—or Red, if you’re not comfortable—to run some experiments…”

“Oh, fuck no. You’re only going to make me do it over and over, and I only use it when I absolutely have to. No telling what effect it has on me. What if it shaves a year off my life each time, or—I dunno, uses up some of my life force? It’s not natural, Riel, and I don’t want to—burn out my wick, y’know.”

“You’ll never know for sure, unless we try and find out.” But he could see that he was fighting a losing battle. Still, seeing that Trouble was unconvinced, he tried another tactic: they could both be equally stubborn when they wanted to be. “What if this could be replicated? Or what if your abilities extend beyond just ‘shooting a gun very well’? What if you could—just for example—stop others’ guns, redirect bullets, become impervious to gunfire…?”

Trouble took another quaff of his beer. “Look, Riel, I appreciate the interest—no, actually, it sort of creeps me out when you and Red look at me like I’m some sort of rat in a cage—but you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’m not—okay, okay.” Setting down his glass, he turned so that he was facing Riel fully, swaying a little unsteadily on his feet. He held up both hands to illustrate his point. “It’s like climbing the Eye of the World, you know? It’s like—if you put a blindfold on me and tell me to march, I’m probably going to get decently far up the mountain, without even realizing it, because I’ll keep pushing myself until I can’t go anymore. But if you make me stand at the bottom and look up at the top, and you point and say, ‘Climb that,’ I’m going to be like, ‘You crazy bastard, that’s impossible!’ and I’ll probably only get a sixth of the way up before giving up and turning back. I’m going to get farther blindfolded, you know? Just point me in the right direction and tell me to march without me thinking about it or seeing what’s at the top.”

Riel stared at him, feeling dumbfounded for one of the few times in his life. “What?”

“Oh, forget it, I’m piss-drunk!”

And they’d never spoken about it again. But now and then Riel had—even on this very case—ruminated on the issue, as was his wont, and sometimes he would cast his eyes contemplatively over to Trouble, whether they were seated at the big table for dinner or in the same room during a casual card game. And each time, Trouble would catch his look, scowl as if he knew exactly what Riel was thinking, and growl, “Forget it. You can study me when I’m dead.”

Riel feels a strident grief pluck at his heart, then. It’s not even that the miraculous survivor of the Equalists, a fascinating amalgamation of magic and science, will be lost to the world. It’s that the idea of the peculiar paradox that is Trouble Alder—to Hael with it, his friend—being gone makes the night feel colder and darker and smaller than it ever has before. Something burns in the back of Riel’s brain.

And then he picks up the purple cloak, balled carelessly and discarded in its trashcan, and he sees how clumsy and stupid and arrogant Vaughn Sulia has been, thinking such a simple scheme would work on them—for surely he meant to capture Riel, too, he could not have known they would argue and separate—and then fury, plain and fortifying, replaces the grief. No. No. He is not going to let something so inane as an argument, the lie of a teenaged boy, be the thing that ends Trouble Alder’s career and life. It is unseemly. It does not bear thinking about. He will simply not allow it.

He looks around the alley some more, but there’s nothing else to find. It’s clear that Vaughn concealed himself here in this alcove, waiting for them to come, sitting in this newly-purchased purple cloak in disguise. When Trouble arrived, he must have used some sort of spell on him—he couldn’t have outshot him or outfought him, so it had to have been whatever Equalist magic he had at his disposal. And how did he get him away? Trouble’s a big man, and heavy. Either Vaughn’s magic augments his strength—not good news for either of their chances—or he smuggled him out somehow. Perhaps he was stupid enough to have a carriage waiting at one end of the alley, dragged Trouble inside, and rode away. That means there was likely a driver, and if not that, then someone who loaned or sold Vaughn a horse and carriage. Or there could be witnesses. He needs to ask around, though this area of Whitestone is mostly shops, and those shops will have closed for the day. The street is still full of passersby, but those will be high-born citizens hustling to and from restaurants, bars, social clubs, theaters, shows at the opera. No one who would have been here during the day.

Riel stands still, looking hard at the purple cloak lying crumpled on the ground, at the indifferent gaze of the chilly moons, at the snow threatening to fall. Could the answer be somewhere in what he knows about Edric and Vaughn? He’s already cobbled most of the pieces together: Edric seeking out his cousin Vaughn as an apprentice and willing test subject for the Equalist artifacts that came into his possession; the difficulties he would have had in controlling Vaughn; Vaughn’s proclivities and lack of restraint spinning out of control and culminating in Calum’s death. The mad scramble to cover it all up and blame it on a boogeyman of their creation. But given how eager Edric was to arrest them earlier and get them off of his tail—a hastiness that belied desperation, in Riel’s opinion—he knows Edric must be feeling the pressure of the whole affair. Riel’s already bested him once, and knowing he’s on the case must have made Edric very nervous indeed.

And now you’ve got a real problem on your hands, don’t you, Riel thinks spitefully. If he were the type of man who paced, he would be pacing right now. And he would bet a large sum of money that Edric did not sanction Vaughn’s kidnapping of Trouble, his whole cockamamie lie about the beggar to lure them to this very alleyway. It’s too… clumsy, too improvised, to have been anything Edric was involved with. And now Edric is facing a spectacular conundrum: he’s created a monster, and given that monster a magical weapon to point at his enemies—only to find that the monster has broken loose and is now pointing the weapon straight at him.

So, he thinks, what would he do if he were Edric? He’d dispose of Trouble as quick as he could, rid himself of the evidence before the cavalry came breaking down the doors; but he’d know Riel would look straight to him and Vaughn in the event of the sniper’s disappearance. Riel is the one person in the world best positioned to point the finger at the two of them, possessing both an intimate knowledge of Edric’s problematic history and being the only living witness of Vaughn’s damning lie. Riel’s also the only one smart enough to gather the correct evidence and use it to bring the authorities straight to their door.

So, he thinks; if he were Edric, he would know that the only course of action is to also get rid of Riel.

Riel hears a step behind him and feels his heart lift a little, as if pulled gently by a string; he feels the chilly touch of prescience, of death, and he takes a breath of the freezing air and falls still. Abruptly, his vision contracts; everything in his eyesight clarifies and magnifies as a curious calm falls over him. Everything glows and shimmers brilliantly, as if illuminated by sharp, drastic moonlight.

There’s the click of a gun behind him; something metal and pointed touches the small of his back.

Riel doesn’t turn around. “Edric,” he says pleasantly.

“Riel,” the Inquisitor returns, even, if not quite polite. The gun presses just a little harder. “Don’t move. Hand over your walking stick. Slowly.”

Riel’s heart is no longer thumping; in fact, it’s gone so quiet and still he’s not even sure if it’s still beating at all. His chest feels like an empty cavity—but curiously, he feels light and loose-limbed. Edric can’t kill him here, he thinks. The gunshot would attract too much attention—and getting rid of a bloody corpse would be infinitely harder than forcing a living body to move to a separate location. No, he’s not going to kill him. Not now.

He says lightly, “This walking stick is a symbol of my guild membership as well as my walking aid. I’d appreciate it if I could keep it, wherever we’re going.”

Edric laughs, a quiet, bitter sound. “And give you a truncheon within easy reach? No, I know not to underestimate you—no matter how spindly and weak you might seem. For all I know, you have a blade hidden in that thing.”

Well. It’s not as if one had to be a genius to guess that one. Riel reminds himself that he can’t underestimate Edric, either. He passes the walking stick behind him.

Edric takes it, deliberately, then simply stands there for a moment, waiting to see if Riel will do anything reckless. Riel does not. So Edric allows him to turn around and face him, and for a moment, the two of them simply stand there, looking at each other. Appraising, like two gunmen before a duel. Except only Edric is holding the gun, which he eventually conceals inside his coat: still pointed straight at Riel, but hidden from public view. He says, “I’m surprised that I caught you out here alone. I have a feeling that you have reinforcements on the way within the hour.”

There’s no point in lying. “I do.”

Edric smiles thinly. “They’ll have no way of finding you after you leave, though. My. It does feel as though luck is on my side.”

“Is it, though?” Riel smiles back, the insomniac, vampiric smile that has so often unnerved his business rivals. “I don’t think it’s very lucky that you chose a maniac to be your little specimen. In fact, I would call it the opposite of lucky that he killed Calum like that, bringing all manner of Haelfire down on your heads. Nor was it lucky that he botched everything so badly: dropping the pocketwatch, drawing attention to himself by concocting that clumsy lie. And now, kidnapping Trouble—none of that seems lucky to me. Is he alive, by the way?”

He watches Edric’s face—wants to laugh a little as he watches the cocksure smile vanish, only to be replaced by the familiar look of cold and silent hatred. But he reads no lie in Edric’s countenance when the Inquisitor replies, “He is.” Then he motions with the hidden gun for Riel to start walking.

Something in Riel relaxes at the news. He turns in the direction that Edric indicates, but keeps talking over his shoulder as they move towards the opposite entrance of the alleyway—the one that opens out onto Alchemia Street.

“It seems,” he begins in conversational tones, scanning the busy street without giving any indication of turning his head, “it seems to me that you chose the wrong cousin, Edric. Better to have selected young Calum, I think. He was weaker, more impressionable, desperate for approval and acceptance, and therefore easier to control. Why you chose a headstrong brute like Vaughn, I’ll never know.”

Edric doesn’t answer, but Riel feels the acid touch of his regard—and the invisible press of the gun—just as surely as a physical hand between his shoulderblades. They walk together, Riel a step in front, Edric just behind, to the end of the street. The entire time, Riel looks for some way to turn the situation to his advantage. He could shout, yell for help, but then Edric will either shoot him anyway and flee—and he hates Riel, so he may just do it purely out of spite—or perhaps some kind soul will intervene, and they’ll get hurt; or, in the best-case scenario, they overpower Edric together, and he’s hauled away in chains, but he never reveals Trouble’s location. And if Edric is smart, he will have told Vaughn to kill and dispose of Trouble himself if Edric hasn’t returned by a certain time.

So it’s in his best interest to go quietly, Riel decides as Edric directs him to a horse and buggy waiting placidly in the street: a very simple two-seater open carriage with a kind of folding top to protect its passengers (and their identities) against the icy wind. Edric motions for Riel to climb up into the left seat—the driver’s seat—and hands him the reins. “You drive.”

For a moment, Riel contemplates saying that he can’t, that he never needed to learn how—but then he remembers that Edric used to ridicule him at university for not owning a carriage and being gauche enough to ride a horse to campus. He’s amazed by the slights that had seemed important then. He never imagined it would all lead to kidnapping and murder.

He accepts the reins without comment, and Edric slides into the right seat, still keeping the gun pointed at Riel and placing the walking stick on his right side, where Riel can’t reach it. Riel is almost flattered by his obvious caution.

“Where to?” the merchant leader asks, spurring the horse into motion.

“I’ll tell you when to turn,” is all Edric says in clipped response.

They ride in silence for a while, and Riel’s mind is still curiously tranquil, almost meditative: it feels as if things are moving very slowly. He thinks about the gun in Edric’s hand, where they’re going. What’s awaiting them at the end of this long, quiet road. He says, after several minutes, “This isn’t like you, Edric. Cleaning up after someone else’s messes, scrambling in response to someone else’s actions. You were always out for yourself, first and foremost. Those were always things I admired about you, in a perverse, begrudging kind of way. Your self-preservation. And your sense of control.” He keeps his expression neutral. “And look at you now.”

Edric sends him a viper-clear look of loathing. “Be quiet.”

Riel keeps his eyes straight ahead, watching the blur of happy, oblivious faces and flashes of elegant scarves pass by. “What happens when you kill us? You bury us somewhere safe, I presume, somewhere you think no one will find us. And that’s all well and good. But there’s a trail of lies all over the city, now. You know Vaughn strongarmed his friends into covering for him, providing him with an alibi for the night of Calum’s death? So now they must suspect something, because if he already had an alibi, why would he need them? And I went to interview them earlier tonight, so perhaps now their families know the truth. Will you kill them, too?”

Edric is dead silent in the seat beside him.

Riel continues, “And even if this all goes away, and you do succeed in pinning this all on some imaginary, violet-cloaked foe, and the Shepherds somehow give up the investigation and the Inquisitors somehownever think to check on that store of priceless arcane artifacts they entrusted to you… what’s going to happen the next time Vaughn makes a mistake? His impulses are like an animal’s; he has a bloodlust in him, an aggression that he can’t tame. He’s going to end up hurting someone else, and you can’t watch him all the time. Are you going to risk yourself to cover his tracks then, as well? When will it end?”

No answer. The buggy clacks and sways comfortingly through the night; the winter wind kicks up a mournful howl.

Riel says, almost meaning it: “I feel sorry for you. He’s a loose cannon, and if you don’t get the problem under control, he’s going to end up burning you to the ground.”

Edric brings the gun out of his coat; concealed by the hooded cover of the carriage, no one can see him pointing it at Riel’s neck. “Shut up and drive.”

Riel keeps his eyes forward and focuses on guiding the horse out of the city. Silently, like weightless tears, snow finally begins to fall.

#

Trouble wakes up again to find Vaughn watching him. Not much time seems to have passed—everything looks the same, except that Edric is gone and only Vaughn remains, sitting on a crate with his legs dangling, looking bored. When Trouble picks up his sagging head, groaning—red and silver hells, all saints and fucking martyrs, he feels awful, like a hangover and a fever got together and decided to beat the shit out of him, what does that gauntlet even fire, pain magic?—Vaughn straightens a little, but makes no move to stop him. He looks alert, but also more than a little intrigued.

Trouble rolls his neck experimentally, finds that the knot on the gag is still loose, and, after some painful maneuvering, manages to spit it out again. “Ngh,” he says eloquently. “Wow, kid, you really pack a punch with that thing.”

“I’m not a kid,” Vaughn answers, without much rancor; his expression of intrigue increases. “You’re much stronger than Calum was. Every time I tried that particular spell on him, he was out for hours.”

“How long have I been out?”

“About forty minutes.”

“Well. Good to know I’m stronger than a fourteen-year-old boy.” Trouble eyes him warily, acutely aware of the position he’s in; without Edric around to stop him, Vaughn could very well decide to ‘practice’ on Trouble to his heart’s desire, using him as a magical punching bag—or, worse, Trouble could accidentally provoke him into losing his temper and just killing him outright. Vaughn sees what he’s thinking and gives him that same smirk from before: a leering, taunting expression. He’s still wearing the gauntlet, of course. Trouble takes a breath and closes his eyes.

What would Riel do?

He’d appeal to the boy’s sense of power, Trouble thinks. Make him feel as if he’s in charge. Get his walls down that way. “I know you’re going to kill me in a while,” he says finally, keeping his voice calm and his demeanor humble and submissive. “So if you wouldn’t mind—could you pass me some water? I’m dying for a drink, and I’d rather go to my grave with some measure of comfort. Please?”

For a moment, he sees Vaughn contemplating denying him the water, of making him beg for it, just for the pleasure of seeing him suffer a little more. But, eventually, the youth’s desire to bring Trouble to heel wins out over his sadism, and he silently rises from his crate and goes to fetch a cup of water from somewhere. He even holds it to Trouble’s lips as Trouble drinks thirstily, heedless of the risk of tampering. When he’s done, Trouble lets his head fall back and closes his eyes again. “Thanks.”

“Uh-huh.” Vaughn folds his arms and leans back against a stack of crates, still watchful, but more relaxed. Then he says, his voice surprisingly flat, “You were lying earlier, about the kid who wore this gauntlet before me. There never was any kid, was there?”

Trouble opens his eyes and regards him for another moment, debating what to do. The slightest mistake could end very badly for him, and he curses his well-known heavy-handedness with words. But in the end he decides to trust his instincts and cracks a rueful smile, feeling a cut on his lip stretch and sting with the effort. “You’re a smart guy,” he says dryly. “Yeah. I should have figured you wouldn’t fall for such a stupid lie—but I panicked. I would have said anything to get that gun out of my face.”

Vaughn smiles a little, clearly pleased to have his intellect recognized. “Only an idiot would fall for that kid’s story.”

Trouble snorts and shrugs, a wry, expressive gesture between equals. “Yeah, I suppose so. I’m not the brightest when it comes to thinking on my feet, I know that. Only thing anyone ever needed me for was my power.”

Vaughn’s eyes brighten a little, and he shifts on his feet, leaning forward while still feigning nonchalance. “Which is what, exactly? Edric always wanted to find out, but he never could without arousing suspicion.”

“It’s not much,” Trouble lies. “The first generation of the Equalists weren’t that successful. Probably ninety-percent of the kids they kidnapped died, and the other nine percent never showed any change. As for me, I’m…” Think, think. He’s not good at lying, never has been, has always been honest to a fault— “…immune to a lot of types of magic. Not invincible, exactly, but way less susceptible than most other Norms. Comes in handy when they’ve got to send someone into a place full of spell-traps and curses. I usually just absorb the stuff. Like building an immunity to poison.”

Vaughn frowns suspiciously, and Trouble shrugs. “That’s probably why I woke up after than Calum did, honestly. Who knows? Maybe if you hit me with that spell again, it won’t hit as hard, and maybe the time after that—it won’t work at all.”

His heart is thumping dully somewhere in the region of his stomach. He hardly knows what he’s doing—his head is still swimming, and he feels like a blind man, groping in the dark and stumbling across a spool of twine, following it even though he has no idea where it’s leading him. But from the way Vaughn hesitates, he thinks he’s done something right. The more he lessens his appeal as a practice dummy, the safer he becomes. Hopefully.

“Is that how you became Vice-Commander of the Shepherds?” Vaughn asks. “Because of that power? It doesn’t seem all that great.”

Trouble shrugs again. “Didn’t have a ton of competition,” he says dryly. “Most people aren’t that extraordinary. You know that. Hael, I bet if you tried out, you’d make it to Captain in just a few weeks. There aren’t a lot of people like you, not with your strength, especially at your age.”

He worries that he’s laying it on too thick, but Vaughn smiles a little at that. “That’s true.”

For a moment they just look at each other, and Trouble takes in the youth’s features again. He’s so different from Caine, Timo, even all of the other street urchins and gang-kids and thugs that Trouble grew up with, the big coarse sullen boys who would make a coin a day hauling cargo by the docks, the confident, wiry street-fighters proudly sporting their black eyes and cauliflower ears, the mouthy little miscreants who served as pickpockets and errand-boys and couriers and beggars. Compared to them, Vaughn is like a trespasser from another world, an intruder caught between liminal spaces: he has the wily, underhanded face of a schemer, the manner and demeanor of an aristocrat used to getting his way, the top-heavy bulk of a boy growing into a man’s body at an unnatural rate. There is something primeval and atavistic about him, like a sculpture only half-formed out of clay. A hulking, skulking presence, lurking on the fringes of society, staring with hungry, rapacious eyes. Where did he come from? How did such a personality form, within the cradle of the wealthy and the elite? And if he feels this dangerous now—what’s he going to be like when he grows up?

Never looking away from Vaughn’s surly gray eyes, Trouble speaks up again. “Can I ask you something? No lies, no trickery this time. From one man who dallied with Equalist magic to the next.”

After a moment, Vaughn nods.

Trouble takes a breath. “Did Edric test these artifacts out on anybody before you? Did he find any other wielders?”

“No,” Vaughn replies instantly. “I was the only one he knew who’d be willing to do it, who was strong enough to withstand the effects. And who was smart enough to keep the whole thing a secret.”

Trouble nods. “And did you try out multiple instruments, or just this one? Because—and this is the truth—most of this shit is very, very dangerous. The Equalists were working with all sorts of cursed energies. They didn’t care about the wellbeing of their test subjects. Some of these things dodeal with demons, and dark magic, and all manner of heinous prices. And if they haven’t been treated properly…”

Vaughn frowns. “We tried almost everything in this warehouse, but the other Inquisitors or the Court Mages had deactivated a lot of it already. Edric was only able to save a few crates and keep it hidden from them. And even of those things, only the gauntlet reacted to me.”

Trouble blows out an internal breath. That’s something, at least. “He make any copies of it, or anything?”

Vaughn shakes his head. “No. We need to fine-tune it first before we start building other models.” Then he narrows his eyes. “Why?”

Trouble looks at his shoes, thinking for a moment, before he sighs and says, “Look, Vaughn, I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, but if there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I care about my job. I’m a Shepherd officer: it’s not in me to let a kid come to harm if I can help it. Even one who wants to hurt me.” He meets Vaughn’s eye. “You can’t trust Edric. I saw it in his face: he’s done with you. He said it himself. ‘After this, the whole sorry story’s over. You’re done experimenting.’” He shakes his head. “You fucked up one too many times. Now he’s decided you’re more trouble than you’re worth, and he’s going to get rid of you.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Vaughn says, frowning. “He needs me. I’m the only one who can use the gauntlet.”

Trouble chuckles a little, the sound dry and humorless. “Did he tell you that? I don’t know if you’re just really vain, or if he’s been feeding you lies to make you feel more comfortable, but I promise you: he can find others who can use that thing. Maybe not as good as you, but at least they’ll follow his orders—they won’t kill people without meaning to, they won’t kidnap others without his say-so. Trust me. I saw it all the time with the Equalists. They’d find some kid who they made progress with; that kid would die; they’d have a new kid to replace him within a few days, and usually the second kid outpaced the first in record time, because they knew more about the process each time. You’re not special, not in that regard.”

“But the gauntlet only respects me,” Vaughn insists, his voice getting a bit louder now. “Forget what Edric says—the gauntlet itself won’t obey another master. It told me so.”

Trouble feels a little pinprick of fear in his heart. “It?”

He gestures emphatically with the gauntlet. “It. The gauntlet itself. It says it will kill anyone else who puts the gauntlet on.” He smiles slightly, his eyes wide and simmering. “So you see. Edric has no choice, no matter what I do. He has to protect me, or else all of his work will have been for nothing.”

O-kay. Trouble is stumped with questions for a moment: is Vaughn certifiably insane, or is it demon magic, after all? That Faceless Lord Blapho-whatever did get into everything, he has to assume, and even though the Inquisitors would check for that kind of thing while processing magical contraband, if Edric hid the gauntlet from their inspections…

Is he even talking to Vaughn, or a demon wearing the boy’s skin?

No, no—Vaughn is still too human, even if he is a murderer. Trouble has to believe that, because he can still trick a human. He doesn’t think he has it in him to fool an Endarkened.

Trouble says, keeping his voice low and earnest, “Look, Vaughn, I don’t know a thing about all of that. What I do know is the look of a man who’s planning on betraying his partner. Once he gets rid of me and Riel, you’re the only loose end, and then he can start this whole thing over with a clean slate—no risk of you acting out or drawing more fire onto him. It’s the only logical answer, in his mind. And even if you know he can’t replace you—he might not think that.”

“He’d never manage it,” Vaughn persists stubbornly, folding his arms and scowling. “I’m stronger than he is; I have magic.”

“You can’t rely on that,” Trouble answers, feeling his heart beginning to beat very fast again. This is it, this is his one chance. “He’s smart, Edric; you know that. You don’t think he planned for countermeasures, in case you ever turned on him or got out of control? He probably has a way of disarming that thing that he hasn’t told you about. That’s what Inquisitors do; they neutralize illegal magic. He has more resources available to him than you would think. And he knows that if you ever attacked him, you’d use the gauntlet. So he must have a way of counteracting it that you don’t know about.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Vaughn demands, angry now; his voice, strident and harsh, breaks against the empty walls of the warehouse, and he pushes himself off of the crates and begins to pace. Careful, Trouble thinks. If he pushes too hard, he could send the youth into a spiral of irrational emotion, and he’ll never be able to get his focus back.

“I could help you,” Trouble says gently. “You’re just a kid. You let me go, I arrest Edric before he can hurt you—hurt both of us—and then we say he manipulated you. You’re just a kid. No one’s going to want to send you to prison when Edric’s clearly the mastermind behind it all. He’s the adult, the Inquisitor—he forced you into using the gauntlet, just like he forced you to kill Calum. Listen—no, hear me out—I’ll even let you keep the gauntlet. I don’t give a shit. I just wanted to find out who murdered Calum, and why. Now I have my answer. Edric Alden. And I trust you to keep it, and use it responsibly, and Hael, if you have it, then at least it’s not out there, liable to hurt someone else it doesn’t respect. And then you can go off and do whatever you want, I get the credit for solving Calum’s case, we never have to interact again. But if we do this, we’ve got to act now, before Edric comes back. If he comes back with my partner, and my partner sees that you set me free and helped me, then that’s all the more crucial for you getting out of this unscathed. Otherwise, once Edric gets rid of me, you’re left to face him by yourself, and you have no idea what he could have in store for you. He’s probably planning a contingency for you since the very start, and you’re leagues behind. You need backup.”

He tries to not let his voice break on this part, tries not to let desperation and fear and urgency bleed through. He watches Vaughn run over all of the possibilities in his head. The boy’s eyes are thoughtful, calculating. He chews his lip, and the fist within the gauntlet clenches, unclenches, over and over again. Trouble holds his breath…

Vaughn laughs, the sound both pitying and cruel. Instantly, the thoughtful look drops away: a theater mask, after all. “Do you take me for a fucking idiot? I’m not going to let you go. Nice try, though. It was fun watching you jump through those hoops.”

Trouble feels the knife-twist of despair in his gut; he feels as if someone has yanked something vital and beating out of him, thrown it on the floor. He actually gasps with the shock of it. Slumps back into his chair. Closes his eyes while Vaughn laughs.

Vaughn checks his pocketwatch, then moves towards him, clearly intending to gag Trouble again. “Time’s wasting. I’m going to put you back in the trunk and take us to meet Edric now. With any luck, he’ll have your partner with him.”

“Wait,” Trouble says as he moves behind his chair. He hears the surety in his voice, feels Vaughn pause momentarily at the command in it.

Trouble looks at him from out of the corner of his eye. From this angle, the youth is folded in shadow, as large and formless as if he’d stepped out of the darkness himself. “If you’re not going to let me go,” Trouble says steadily, “at least bring your own backup with you. You know my gun, the one you took off of me? The pistol. Tuck it in the back of your waistband, where Edric can’t see it. This is just in case, you hear? But I don’t want him to catch you unawares.”

After another second, Vaughn scoffs and picks up the gag again. “Why are you trying to help me?”

“You wouldn’t get it,” Trouble answers, and then he can say nothing more, because Vaughn stuffs the gag in his mouth again. But he watches as the boy moves to the worktable in the corner of the room and slips Trouble’s pistol into the back of his waistband.

Trouble smiles grimly to himself. He doesn’t know if that’s going to help him, but sometimes a player has to set up his pieces even if he doesn’t know exactly what they’ll do. At least it’s something. He thinks Riel would be proud.

#

Riel and Edric leave the city and ride out into the Sun’s Embrace. Riel always thought that leaving the city late at night was somewhat eerie. Even when most people are asleep, Haven is still humming with the warm, gentle press of life. The streetlights still burn on, and there is always some late-night soul around to keep one company, even in the quietest of neighborhoods.

But as the glow of the city fades behind them, the world becomes unnervingly silent and still. Snow still falls in ponderous drifts, moving so slowly that it almost seems as if the flakes are frozen in the air. Here and there, the clusters of farms and fields peter out into darkened single houses and sheds—and then into crowded forest, the black trees as tall and imposing as the legs of sleeping giants. It becomes so quiet that Riel can hear the glide of an owl’s wings overhead: the mournful cry of some fox or rodent.

Once or twice, they pass another cart or rider heading towards Haven. Edric presses the gun against Riel’s side, and when Riel tries to meet the other riders’ gazes, they always have their caps pulled down low over their eyes, or their hoods up to shelter themselves from the snow. If they notice a two-seater buggy leaving Haven in the middle of the night, they likely don’t make any note of it, and they certainly never look inside.

Riel is beginning to grow uneasy. He normally never lets fear or anxiety crowd him, but the gravity of the situation is beginning to sink in. Edric has him at gunpoint, and Riel has no weapons, no reinforcements, and no real way out of the situation. Coin or flattery won’t help him here. All of the usual tools in his arsenal seem—well, not useless, never useless, but they at least need to be repurposed to suit the situation. He can’t recall the last time he ever thought he could be in danger—real danger—of dying. He always surrounded himself with the appropriate defenses, legal or hired muscle or otherwise.

Here, now, he feels very unshielded. But at least Trouble is still alive. So things have not culminated in a total nightmare.

He says to Edric, “What is this place? Some killing ground for the Inquisitors, I assume—some place you can bring the victims that you need to make disappear.”

“No,” Edric returns evenly. “That would be the Chrysalis. And the Inquisitors keep incinerators there in case they need to get rid of the bodies.”

“Charming. Of course.”

“This is a place of my own finding,” Edric continues, smiling a small, tight smile. “So far, it’s never been discovered… and I have been using it since my university days.”

Riel feels a little chill at that. “You never killed anyone when you were a student.” Riel had him investigated, had his every crime exposed to the scrutiny of the high courts: he would know.

Edric continues to smile. “Contrary to what you’d believe, you don’t know everything in the world, Riel.”

In the next minute, he directs Riel off of the main road and down a very hidden, narrow, bumpy trail, something that winds and twists unexpectedly through the dark bristle of the forest. Riel has trouble urging the horse forward—even it seems confused, disorientated by the unexpected turns and unmarked side paths—and once it rears slightly, and Riel thinks that the entire buggy will overturn, and he will have to claw and snatch for the gun if the fall doesn’t break his neck first. But then the horse settles, and they ride on, each of them loosing a quiet breath.

Riel realizes where they are when they catch sight of a low-ceilinged building in the distance, with another horse and buggy already tied in front. A cabin. Too humble and small to be any second home of Edric’s or Vaughn’s family—it looks like the summer cottage of a huntsman or a groundskeeper. Maybe a servant of theirs, or historical land that their family owned to lease to servants and never did anything more with?

Whatever it is, it’s remote and tucked away, perfect for hiding a mass grave of bodies. They bump over a verge and onto the track that leads to the cabin, and Riel strains to hear or spot any sign of Trouble or Vaughn. Nothing: both the buggy and cabin lay dark and utterly silent.

Edric slides out of the cart and ties the horse to the riding post in front of the cabin; the horse bumps noses with the other one, as if they’re old friends who are surprised to run into each other here, of all places. The gun swings towards Riel again like a weathervane. “Walk.”

So he gets out and walks. They round the back of the house, and Riel is surprised to find nothing there, either. No dead Trouble, no triumphant Vaughn. But there’s some sort of walking trail, stretching up the slope, the snow glowing and pearly from the pale, milky light of the moons.

They walk in silence for a mile, more or less. Riel grows tired quickly and thinks with annoyance, Why didn’t we just bring the horse? But the path is far too broken and narrow to bring up a cart, and they ease down ravines and ledges and rocky shelves. Edric keeps up an unwavering, ruthless pace. Fitful snow touches Riel’s face in icy dabs. He tries not to huff and sweat, not with Edric eyeing him, but he has to mop the hair out of his eyes and his heart takes on a thrumming, irritating flutter. He really needs to exercise more.

Finally, over the sound of his suppressed, ragged pants, he catches the sound of something a little ways away: a tapping, almost like the sound of a woodpecker, but slow and halting and nocturnal.

Anxiety rises like bile in his throat when he realizes what it is. Digging.

He glances at Edric, whose eyes are like slate again. “Move.”

The smell of pine begins to be laced with something sourer. He really has been bringing them here all along, Riel thinks. The dead and soon-to-be-dead. He is the ferryman and this is the realm of corpses and bones.

The regular crunch of a shovel biting into hard, frozen earth grows louder as he walks on, nearly slipping down the steep hill. There’s light ahead. A strange, eerie sound kicks up, as if someone is whistling, but not a melody—just one flat note and then another, and then back again. It makes Riel’s skin crawl.

They move forward, breaking the cover of the trees to walk into a clearing covered with light, glittering snow. In the center of the clearing, Vaughn Sulia is standing in a small trench about waist-high, a lantern flickering brightly on the ground beside him. When he hears their approach, he stops whistling and straightens, setting his shovel on his shoulder and wiping his brow, staring at Edric expectantly, almost cautiously. There’s a curious expression, almost a hooded resentment, deep within his eyes before he looks away. Standing in the pit with him is Trouble, his hands bound behind his back and his face a bloodied rainbow of bruises. There’s a gag in his mouth. When he spots Riel, he doesn’t smile, but his expression lightens slightly, and he nods. Riel nods back.

Peace descends on him again, and with it, gratitude and clarity. He can make this work. Death, that final silencer, has not claimed either of them yet. He can reverse any situation except that. He can turn any odds in their favor so long as they’re both alive.

Vaughn calls out, “You took your time getting here. I don’t know why I should be the one who has to dig—”

Edric raises his pistol and shoots him in the head.

Vaughn drops, and Trouble actually jumps up, exclaiming loudly even through the gag; his eyes are furious and shocked as he turns to Edric, but before he can hurl himself out of the pit, Edric points the gun at him.

“I was going to wait until he’d killed you both,” he says mildly, “but I could already see in his face that he’d turned against me, and that he was planning on doing something stupid once he thought my back was turned. Your doing, I suppose.” Trouble looks like he wishes he could set Edric on fire, tear him to pieces with his teeth. “Well. All that’s changed is that someone else will have to dig the rest of the grave. You.” He looks to Riel.

Riel’s thoughts are whirring; he could swear smoke might start pouring out of his ears, he’s thinking so fast. He says, trying to control his breathing, trying to keep his voice steady and calm, “You flatter me, Edric, but I could barely walk up the hill without collapsing. I highly doubt I’ll be able to dig a hole big enough to fit the three of us. I don’t think I’ve ever held a shovel in my life.”

Edric eyes him in contempt; then Riel sees something change in his face. He says in a clipped voice, “Fine. Get in the trench and untie your friend, then.”

Lightning leaps through Riel’s brain; his synapses spark and flash in a blinding display. Once he gets in that pit and unties Trouble, Edric will shoot and kill him, then make Trouble do the rest of the digging. If he did it now, Trouble could try and run while Edric is preoccupied with dragging Riel’s body the rest of the way, and letting Trouble out to do it with free hands would be far riskier. Vaughn wants them both on lower ground, in a pit, so that they can’t do anything without his having plenty of time to react. Once they’re both in there, it’s over—so if Riel is going to make a move, he has to do it now.

His eyes fall on Vaughn, the youth half-sprawled and bent backwards across the ledge of the trench, his legs askew and his head thrown back, a great darkness spreading ink-like beneath his skull. His eyes are open and uncaring, staring upwards at the sky: like an animal that doesn’t even realize it’s dead. He has some sort of strange metal contraption fixed to his right arm. The Equalist weapon?

Riel catches Trouble’s eyes, and even though Trouble doesn’t move, his expression tells him everything; it’s as if he’s shaking his head minutely. No. Then his eyes dart down, and Riel reads his thoughts as if he’d shouted them: Look there. At his waistband.

Riel feels a great clamoring in his heart. Very faintly, he thinks he can make out the faint outline of something, poking out of the side of Vaughn’s belt. A gun.

Feeling as if he’s in a dream, he moves towards the pit. He keeps his eyes on Vaughn’s gauntlet, and Edric, following his gaze, says in a dead voice, “No.”

Riel clambers slowly down into the trench, avoiding Vaughn’s corpse, still warm and steaming, feeling his gloves slip on the hard, frozen earth. His heart is beating wildly. Trouble shifts subtly to place himself between Riel and the inevitable bullet as Riel slips around him; Riel moves to untie his hands, going at a glacial pace and pretending to fumble. He does not allow himself to look again at Vaughn’s gun, afraid of giving himself away.

He scrabbles at the heavy, swollen rope and thinks, His hands have been bound for hours. They’ll be numb and sore. He’ll never be able to move quickly enough. It will have to be me. To Edric he says, “What are you going to do with the gauntlet? Will you keep it and start over again with a different subject? Or is it as dispensable to you as Vaughn?”

“That,” Edric says, moving to stand at the edge of the pit, watching them, “is no longer of any concern to you.”

The rope falls away from Trouble’s hands. Still gagged, he moves stiffly, rubbing and flexing his wrists, before reaching carefully to grab the dropped shovel, still angled so that he’s partially in front of Riel. As he bends and his gloved fingers wrap around the shovel’s handle, Riel murmurs, “I think it’s time to climb the Eye of the World, my friend.”

Trouble gives no indication that he hears, except by tensing imperceptibly. Edric is still watching them, looming, perfectly positioned to shoot them in their hole like they’re fish in a barrel. He must hear Riel saying it, but he dismisses it as a goodbye, some sort of poetic farewell between friends. When Trouble doesn’t move, the hand holding the gun jerks insistently.

“What are you waiting for?” Edric demands. “Dig.”

Trouble hurls the shovel at him with all of his might.

Riel explodes into motion; he feels as if his muscles have turned to liquid, as if he has flowed into some other, more powerful being. He hears a curse and a gunshot, hears the thud of the bullet somewhere behind him, cannot look, cannot see if it’s struck Trouble in the stomach or him in the leg, everything is heat and motion and brightness and pain—

He dives for Vaughn’s gun, fumbles for it, feels it nearly slip out of his hand, and in that split-second, he feels death close its white hands around his throat more acutely than he ever has before. But then he hits the ground, rolls; his hand pops up of its own volition, like a spring-loaded toy soldier’s—and he fires. He doesn’t even look to aim.

The bullet strikes Edric in the throat, and he staggers back, his hand flying to grasp at the fount of red that springs there. Riel fires, again, again; the second bullet strikes Edric’s heart, the last shatters his cheekbone, his face exploding in a crater of blood and brain and shards of bone. Behind Riel, Vaughn’s body slides and slumps over his shoulder, dead weight, but Riel doesn’t care. He fires and fires until nothing comes out of the gun but air. Edric disappears from sight—gurgles—expires. Just like that, his old enemy is dead.

“Riel! Riel! He’s dead, mate, he’s already dead—you killed him, he’s fucking dead!”

Someone wrenches the gun out of his hand. Riel looks up, and Trouble is there, having torn off the gag, his eyes wild and his clothes reeking of earth, blood, and sweat. He shoves Vaughn’s corpse off of him and helps Riel up: he even tries to brush the mud off of his coat, knowing Riel would hate it if he had the wherewithal to complain.

Riel looks at the dark tangle of Edric’s legs, dangling half into the pit, and says, “Did I do it, or did you?”

Trouble is looking back at him in wonder. “I have no idea.”

#

Afterwards, after they’ve left the mass grave and commandeered the horse and buggy, after they’ve made it back to the safety of Haven and its bright lights, after they see the familiar hulking shape of the Shepherds’ tower rising above the rooftops of Ashtown, Trouble turns wearily to Riel and says, “We’re burning down that entire warehouse, right? We can agree on that, at least?”

For a moment, Riel contemplates debating with him. But then he decides he’s very tired of arguing with Trouble, and that it’s never gotten them anywhere good, so he only returns, “Fine. But only if you let me run tests on you in their stead.”

Trouble snorts—and then he begins to laugh, impossibly loud, the sound almost hysterical with relief and gladness. His voice is hoarse and raspy with strain and disuse, but he is still unmistakably Trouble, vibrant with life. He wipes tears of mirth out of his eyes. “You cutthroat little bastard. Fine. As thanks for you coming to save my arse.” Then he sighs and collapses back into his seat, closing his eyes. “But first I’ve got to get a drink.”

Riel eyes his disheveled, bloodied appearance critically. “You don’t want to get cleaned up first?” He’s already thinking of all of the things they’ll have to do when they get back: medical treatment, of course, but then tracking down the warehouse, seizing its contents, issuing the required notices to the Inquisitors and the Vice Guard and the Autarch’s people and Calum’s family, all of the paperwork and headaches that are about to come, the dead bodies in the Sun’s Embrace behind them and seeing if there are any more, untangling the network of murder and corruption and sin that has stretched back years and years…

Trouble nudges him with his foot lightly, his eyes still closed. “Drinks first,” he insists again, as if he knows exactly where Riel’s mind is going. “The rest after.” He opens his eyes again and grins. “Beer at the Wolf’s Den?”

Riel turns back to his driving and sniffs. “I would prefer a glass of wine.”

Trouble laughs and claps him fondly on the shoulder. “Good man.”