Chapter 15 - The Accounting

I woke up with Kaniz's hair in my mouth and the Tome critiquing my performance from the nightstand.

"...and the ANGLE, Samuel. I have been thinking about the angle. In the Third Crimson Court, there were attendants whose SOLE PURPOSE was to ensure optimal positioning, and even the least competent among them would have wept at what I witnessed last night. You have the raw enthusiasm of a young bull and approximately the same spatial awareness. The girl was doing MOST of the work and you didn't even NOTICE, which is frankly..."

"What time is it," I said.

"Dawn. Approximately. I lack the capacity to observe the sun from my current position, which is FACE DOWN on a NIGHTSTAND, but the light patterns on the ceiling suggest early morning. You have been asleep for approximately four hours. Your partner has been asleep for five. She sleeps like someone who has not felt safe in a very long time, which makes YOUR snoring all the more INCONSIDERATE."

I looked at Kaniz. She was curled on her side, one hand tucked under her chin, the other resting on the egg between us. The thin shift had ridden up past her hips in the night and the sheets weren't doing much to cover the rest. Dark skin, dark hair fanned across the pillow, the lean curve of her waist dipping into the kind of ass that made you forget you were in a borrowed bed in a village full of people you'd rescued from a blood warlock yesterday. At some point she'd pulled the egg into the bed and it was glowing softly against her stomach, warm enough that I could feel it from where I lay. Her face was slack and peaceful and the collar sat against her throat like it had always been there.

I stared longer than I needed to. In my defense, I'd had about four hours of sleep and the view was spectacular.

I got up without waking her, which took actual willpower. I found the basin, splashed water on my face, and caught my reflection in the metal. I looked like shit. Tired shit. The borrowed clothes were on the chair where I'd left them and my body was doing that thing where every muscle reminds you it exists because you used all of them last night in ways Ashara never trained you for. My mind was already moving, though. Couldn't help it.

I kept thinking about the headman's list.

I'd seen it on the wall of his house when he'd shown me to the room. A sheet of paper pinned to the timber, names in shaky handwriting, some crossed out where women had returned. I needed to see that list.

Kaniz stirred when I reached the door.

"Where are you going?" she said. She sounded wide awake. Instant. Alert. Eight months in a blood warlock's fortress had trained the drowsiness out of her mornings.

"Downstairs. I need to talk to the headman."

She was already swinging her legs off the bed. The shift was still bunched around her waist and she didn't bother fixing it before standing, which meant I got the full view of everything I'd had my hands on a few hours ago. Tits, hips, the whole dark-skinned, red-cheeked, completely unselfconscious package. She caught me looking and her mouth did that thing where the corner twitched up like she'd won something.

"You don't have to come."

She pulled the shift down over her hips and was at the door before I'd finished putting on my boots. She didn't even look back. She knew I was watching.

"You're not going to stop doing that, are you," I said.

"No, master."

---

The headman's name was Aldric. I learned this because he told me four times over breakfast, each time as if we hadn't met. The man was still shaking. He had the kind of shake that comes from relief so intense it forgets to stop. I felt bad for him, honestly. He'd spent months watching girls disappear and not being able to do a damn thing about it, and now some nineteen-year-old rogue with a cursed book and a tentacle monster had solved his problem overnight and he didn't know whether to thank me or throw up.

His house was the largest in Oakhaven, which meant it had three rooms instead of two and a kitchen that could seat six. He put bread and cheese and cold meat on the table and poured me ale that was slightly better than last night's cask and sat across from me with his hands around his cup and waited for me to tell him why I was there.

The list was on the wall behind him. I'd counted the names before sitting down.

Twenty.

Twenty fucking names. Twenty girls reported missing over the course of Malkor's operation.

I'd brought back seventeen alive. Two were dead in the cells. That was nineteen.

One name left. And here's the thing about being a rogue: Ashara always said the numbers tell you more than the people do. People lie. Numbers don't. Nineteen out of twenty is a hell of a rescue. It's also one short.

"Aldric," I said. "I need to go through the list with you."

He went pale. The color drained out of him like ale out of a cracked mug, slow and impossible to stop.

"The girls are back," he said. "Most of them. You brought them back. It's..."

"Twenty names on your list. I brought back seventeen. Two died in the cells. That's nineteen." I took a drink of the ale. It was not good ale. "Who's the twentieth?"

His hands tightened around his cup. The knuckles went white.

"Her name is Belia. Belia Lemas. She was..." He stopped. Swallowed. "She was reported missing six months ago. Her father came to me. I wrote the name. I sent word to the next town. I did everything I was supposed to do."

"She wasn't in the cells, Aldric. She wasn't among the dead. I searched every room in that fortress that wasn't actively trying to kill me, and a few that were. No Belia."

He put his cup down. He picked it up. Put it down again.

"Maybe she escaped," he said. "Maybe she's..."

"She didn't escape. Nobody escaped. The fortress was sealed. The only way out was the front gate and Malkor's guards knew every face. You know this."

Kaniz was sitting beside me. She hadn't touched her food. She was watching Aldric with the focused attention of someone who had spent eight months reading the faces of people who were lying about what they intended to do to her.

"He knows," she said to me, quiet.

I looked at Aldric. He knew. He'd known the whole time, and the knowing was eating him alive right there at his own kitchen table over bread and bad ale.

"Where's the mayor?" I said.

I didn't know exactly what I was going to do when I got there. I'm not a Marshal. I'm not the law. I'm a rogue who's good with locks and bad with plans and I had a girl in a collar following me around calling me master. But the number was wrong, and I couldn't leave with the number wrong.

---

The mayor's house was the nicest building in Oakhaven, which was like being the tallest man in a room full of children. Two stories, painted shutters, a garden with actual flowers instead of turnips. The kind of house that screams "I have money and I'd like you to know about it."

His name was Hargrove. Mayor Hargrove. He opened the door himself, which meant he didn't have servants, which meant the money came from somewhere else. I filed that away. Ashara would've been proud. Or she would've said I was slow. Probably both.

He was dressed. Fully dressed, green coat buttoned, hair combed, at barely past dawn. The man had been expecting me. That's the thing about guilty people: they're always ready for the knock.

"Samuel," he said. Warm. First name. Like we were friends. "Come in. I was hoping we'd have a chance to talk before you left."

I came in. Kaniz came in behind me. The Tome was under my arm, eye open, watching.

The mayor's study was on the ground floor. It had bookshelves, a desk, two chairs, and a window that looked out onto the garden. He gestured to the chairs. I sat. Kaniz stood behind me. The Tome I set on the desk, propped against a candlestick, eye facing the room.

"What is that?" Hargrove said, looking at the Tome.

"A book."

"It has an eye."

"It's a special book."

The eye blinked at him. He decided not to pursue it.

"So," he said. He sat behind his desk. Folded his hands. Smiled. "I imagine you're here about the reward. Oakhaven isn't wealthy, but we've put together what we can. Thirty silver, a horse for the road, and our eternal..."

"Twenty names," I said.

The smile stayed. It was a good smile. It didn't flicker.

"I'm sorry?"

"The headman has a list. Twenty names. Twenty girls reported missing. I brought back seventeen alive. Two dead. Nineteen." I leaned back in the chair. "Belia Lemas makes twenty."

The smile was still there. But the eyes weren't smiling anymore.

"Belia," he said. "Yes. Tragic. She was taken months before the others. We assumed..."

"You assumed nothing. You knew exactly what happened to her because you're the one who gave her to Malkor."

The room went quiet in the way a room gets when someone has said the thing that was always going to be said and now everyone has to decide what happens next.

Hargrove's smile finally fell. What replaced it was interesting. Calculation. Pure, cold calculation.

"That's a serious accusation," he said. "From a man with no evidence."

"It's not an accusation. It's arithmetic." I held up a finger and hoped he couldn't tell my hand was steady mostly because I was clenching my fist under the desk with the other one. "Twenty names. Nineteen accounted for. One missing. The missing girl was reported six months ago, which means she was taken before the pattern was established, before anyone was tracking, before the headman started his list. Someone had to point Malkor at a target. Someone who knew the village, knew which girls wouldn't be missed immediately, knew which families didn't have the pull to raise a fuss."

I held up another finger. I was making this up as I went, by the way. The pieces had clicked together over bad ale and I was presenting them like I'd spent a week on the case instead of about fifteen minutes, but that's the rogue life. Confidence is ninety percent of the con. "Last night you gave a toast. 'You've given us back our daughters.' You didn't ask how many I brought back. You didn't ask for names. The headman has a list pinned to his wall and you never asked to see it. A man who lost twenty girls doesn't ask how many came home because he already knows the answer." I paused. "Or because he already knew the arrangement."

Hargrove looked at me for a long time. He was putting himself back together. I could see it happening, piece by piece, the way a man who's used to being the smartest person in a small room reassembles the mask when someone's cracked it. I'd seen Ashara do the same thing. The difference was that Ashara was actually the smartest person in every room she walked into. This guy was a mayor of a turnip village who'd sold a girl to a warlock. He just thought he was smart.

"You're very clever," he said. "For a rogue."

"Thank you."

"But clever isn't enough. You have no proof. You have no Guild authority here. You have no weapon worth mentioning." He glanced at the ritual knife on my belt. "You have a book with an eye and a girl in a collar and an interesting theory. That's not going to hold up in front of the village council."

He was right. About all of it. I had no writ, no weapon, no witnesses. I had a ritual knife that was mostly decorative, a sentient book that was currently propped against a candlestick judging both of us, and a girl in a slave collar who'd known me for about thirty-six hours. In Ashbourne, Blackthorn could have sent Marshals. Out here, in a mountain village half a day from the nearest road, the mayor's word was worth more than mine. He knew it. I knew it. My asshole was clenching and my brain was scrambling for a plan B and I didn't have one.

"So here's what I think happens," Hargrove said. He was comfortable now. Confident. He was back in his element, the way a man who's talked his way out of worse gets comfortable when he thinks he sees the exit. "You take the thirty silver. You take the horse. You ride back to Ashbourne and tell the Guild that the warlock is dead and the girls are rescued and the mission is complete. Because it is. The contract didn't mention a twentieth girl. The contract didn't mention me."

He smiled again. The practiced one. "Nobody needs to know what you think you know. It doesn't change what you did. You're still the hero. The village still gets its daughters back. Everyone wins."

"Except Belia Lemas," I said.

"Belia Lemas is dead. She was dead the moment she walked through that gate. Nothing you or I or anyone else does changes that."

He was calm. He was rational. He was a man who had traded one girl's life for the safety of an entire village and he'd made peace with it the way people make peace with monstrous shit: by calling it practical.

I almost admired it. Almost. The way you almost admire a guy who cheats at cards and never gets caught. There's a skill there. It's just a skill that makes you want to break his fingers.

"I think you should finish your thought carefully," I said.

He frowned. "What?"

I wasn't looking at the window behind him. I didn't need to. I'd felt it the moment we sat down: a warmth below my sternum, low and steady, like a coal banked behind my ribs. I was starting to recognize it. Every time Ripple was close, there it was. That same heat in the same spot, different from the bond with Kaniz, different from magic or nerves or the fact that my heart was hammering because I'd just accused a man of selling a girl to a warlock and had absolutely no plan for what came next. Something patient and large and watching was outside that window, and it had been there since before I'd opened my mouth.

Kaniz was already moving. Easy, unhurried, like she was getting up to refill a cup. She took two steps back from the desk toward the door. She didn't look at the window. She didn't need to. The girl had spent eight months in a fortress full of things that could kill you and she'd learned when to be somewhere else. I was starting to think she was better at reading a room than I was, and I was supposed to be the rogue.

"What are you..." Hargrove started.

He stopped. Because the light in the room changed. The window behind him, the one that looked out onto the garden with the actual flowers, went dark. Something blocked it entirely. Something large and pink and pressed against the glass with a patience that had nothing to do with time.

Holy shit.

I'd known Ripple was close. I'd felt the warmth. But knowing something is outside and watching it fill an entire window frame are two very different things, and my stomach did a slow roll that had nothing to do with the bad ale.

Hargrove turned around.

I don't know exactly what he saw. I know what I would have seen if I'd looked too long. A mass of luminescent pink filling the window, tentacles pressed flat against the glass like fingers on a pane, and behind them the ancient, absolute calm of something that had been eating people in a pit for centuries and had opinions about who deserved it.

He made a sound, small, barely a word. I recognized the sound. I'd made it myself, in the dark, when I'd fallen into Ripple's pit and felt the first tentacle wrap around my ankle. The difference was I'd held out my hand. Hargrove didn't have that option.

"I told you to finish your thought carefully," I said.

The window came in.

Glass and wood and something pink and enormous and I was already at the door because my legs had made the decision before my brain caught up. Kaniz was already through it. The Tome was under my arm, its eye wide open and dilated to the size of a coin, drinking in every detail with the focused glee of something that had been waiting eight hundred years for a moment this entertaining.

The sounds behind us were brief and wet and final. My stomach lurched. I'm squeamish about blood. I've always been squeamish about blood. The wet sounds were the worst part.

I pulled the door closed and leaned against it and breathed.

---

We stood in the street in the early morning light. Birds were calling. The distant sound of someone chopping wood. Oakhaven was waking up the way small villages do, slowly and without urgency, completely unaware that the mayor had just been eaten by a giant pink tentacle creature through his own study window.

I should probably process that. I should probably sit down somewhere and have a long think about the fact that I'd walked into a man's house and accused him of selling a girl and then an ancient eldritch horror that I'd befriended in a pit had come through his window and killed him while I grabbed my book and ran. That's a thing that happened. In my life. Just now.

I hadn't planned it. I hadn't ordered it. I hadn't even decided what I was going to do if the mayor called my bluff, because it was a bluff, and he'd been right about all of it. I had no writ, no weapon, no authority. My entire plan had been "accuse him and see what happens," which is, I'm realizing, my plan for most things.

Ripple had decided for me.

I waited for the horror. The guilt. The big moral reckoning that should follow watching a man get devoured because he'd sold a girl to a blood warlock. I waited for the part where I feel sick and question everything and stare at my hands like some tragic hero in a bard's tale.

It didn't come. What came instead was a weird, buzzing clarity, like the feeling after a really good orgasm when everything is simple and obvious and you can see exactly what matters.

I looked at Kaniz. She looked at me. Her face was calm and steady and her dark eyes were exactly as untroubled as mine, which was either reassuring or deeply concerning. Probably both.

"He sold her," she said. Matter of fact. The way you'd say "it's raining."

"Yeah."

"Then he tried to buy his way out with thirty silver."

"Yeah."

She looked at the mayor's door. Looked at me. The corner of her mouth twitched up.

The Tome spoke from under my arm. Its voice was different. Quieter. The theatrical bluster was gone and what replaced it was something I'd never heard from the book before. Something closer to satisfaction. Maybe even respect, though I'm sure it would deny it.

"Efficient," it said.

I stood in the street outside the mayor's house with the morning light on my face and a spent grimoire under my arm and a girl in a collar half a step behind me and somewhere inside that house something pink and ancient was finishing what it had started, and I was way less troubled by any of this than a normal person should be. Like, significantly less troubled. Concerningly less troubled.

I mentioned this to the Tome.

"You extended your hand," it said. "In the dark, in the Pit, when every other person who fell in there fought or screamed or died. You extended your hand."

I waited.

"It remembers." A pause. Long enough that I thought it was done. Then: "So do I."

I didn't know what to say to that. The Tome had just said something genuinely sincere and I had no framework for dealing with a sincere Tome. It was like finding out your asshole cat actually loves you. You don't know what to do with the information so you just stand there like an idiot.

I adjusted the Tome under my arm and looked at Kaniz and she looked back and neither of us said a word about what had happened.

"We should leave before the village wakes," she said.

"Yeah."

"The horse."

I'd forgotten. The mayor had mentioned a horse. Thirty silver and a horse for the road.

The silver was in the house. With what was left of the mayor. With what Ripple was finishing.

I looked at the door. Looked at Kaniz. Looked at the door again. My brain was doing the thing where it has a terrible idea and my body is already on board before the sensible part catches up.

"Wait here," I said.

"You're going back in."

She'd read my face the way she read everything, instantly and without commentary. Her eyes flicked down to my hands and back up and I could swear the corner of her mouth twitched again.

I went back in.

Look. I'm a rogue. Ashara trained me. You don't leave thirty silver on a dead man's desk when the dead man got it by selling girls to a blood warlock. That's not theft. That's redistribution. That's justice with a profit margin. The moral calculus was simple: he'd earned it wrong and I'd earned it right and the fact that a tentacle creature was currently occupying the study didn't change the arithmetic. If anything it simplified it. Hard to file a complaint when you've been digested.

The study door was ajar. I didn't look at the window. I didn't look at most of the room. I especially didn't look at the floor near the window, where there were sounds I was choosing to classify as "ambient" and smells I was choosing to classify as "not my problem." I looked at the desk, where a leather purse sat next to a ledger and a half-finished cup of tea. Thirty silver. I counted it by weight, the way Ashara taught me. Thirty-two, actually. The mayor had been planning to skim two for himself. Even dead, the man was a prick.

I pocketed the purse and then I did what Ashara trained me to do. I searched the room.

I skipped the part of the room where the wet sounds had happened. Focused on the rest. The desk drawers, the bookshelves, the floorboards. A man like Hargrove, a man who sold girls and lived in the nicest house in a village of turnip farmers, didn't keep his real money where people could see it.

It took me forty seconds. Ashara would have found it in twenty. False bottom in the lower desk drawer, sloppy work, the wood grain didn't match. Inside: a lockbox. Iron, simple mechanism, two pins. I had it open in the time it took the Tome to say "WHAT are you doing in there" from the street.

Gold. Real gold. The heavy kind that doesn't come from selling goat cheese at market. These were Malkor's coins, stamped with a seal I didn't recognize, old and weighty in my palm. I counted eight gold pieces and a handful of silver besides. Eight gold is more money than I've ever held at one time. My hands were shaking and I told myself it was the adrenaline.

Next to the coins, a pendant on a chain. Dark metal, warm to the touch, a stone in the center that caught light it shouldn't have been able to catch in a room with a smashed window and a dead man. It pulsed against my fingers like a second heartbeat. I didn't know what it was. I knew it was worth finding out. I also knew the Tome was going to lose its mind when it saw this thing, and honestly, that was half the reason I took it.

Something warm and pink and soft brushed my ankle. Every hair on my body stood up. I didn't look down. I absolutely, categorically, did not look down.

"Thank you," I said to the room. I didn't know if I meant it for the gold or for the mayor or for whatever fucked-up arrangement we'd apparently settled into where an ancient tentacle creature ate my problems and I said thanks afterward. I took everything and left before I had time to think about any of it too hard.

Kaniz was where I'd left her. Half a step from the door, arms at her sides, the metal cuffs on her wrists catching the early light. She looked at the bulging purse, the pendant dangling from my fist, and then at me, and her dark eyes did a quick inventory that felt uncomfortably like being appraised by a professional.

"He had a lockbox," I said. "Eight gold. Malkor's coins. And this." I held up the pendant. The stone caught the early light and did something with it that stones aren't supposed to do, a kind of internal pulse that made the air around it shimmer.

She looked at it. Her eyes narrowed. She had the look of someone who'd spent eight months watching a blood warlock do horrible things with glowing objects and had filed away exactly which ones to be afraid of.

"Malkor's," she said. Flat. Certain.

"Probably."

"The Tome will know."

"Probably."

The corner of her mouth twitched up. That look. The one that said she knew exactly what I was thinking and approved and was also somehow half a step ahead of me. It was infuriating and attractive in equal measure.

"Can you ride?" I asked her.

"I've never tried."

"You're going to learn today."

She almost smiled. "Yes, master."

We found the stable. The horse was a brown mare, nothing special, but fed and shod and saddled. I led her out and helped Kaniz up, which involved putting my hands on her waist and lifting, and the shift rode up again and I got a generous view of her thighs clamping down on the saddle. She sat the horse the way she did everything: absolute focus, zero experience, and the unshakable conviction that she would figure it out because she'd decided to. Her back was straight, her chin was up, and the collar glinted at her throat, and for a second I forgot we were fleeing a crime scene and just thought, Fuck, she's something.

The egg was in a cloth bag she'd fashioned from a pillowcase. It hung from the saddle, glowing faintly. The Tome went in the saddlebag of Bertha, who I'd found at the village hitching post where someone had been feeding her oats. She looked better than I did.

Oakhaven was still waking up. Smoke curled from morning fires and a rooster was losing its mind somewhere behind the bakery. The headman would find the mayor eventually. Or what was left of him. I didn't leave a note. What was I going to write? "Dear Oakhaven, your mayor sold a girl to a warlock and my pet tentacle monster ate him. Best regards, Samuel Thornwood, Rogue." The people who needed to understand would understand when they opened that door.

We rode out. Bertha first, me in the saddle, the Tome shouting observations about the morning fog from the saddlebag. ("The HUMIDITY, Samuel. In the Crimson Empire we had dedicated fog READERS who could predict the weather from dew patterns alone, and you're just RIDING through it like some common FARMER.") Kaniz behind on the brown mare, gripping the reins like they might betray her, sitting straight-backed and rigid with the egg swinging gently at her side. She looked good on a horse. She looked good everywhere. I was starting to think she could've been covered in mud standing in a ditch and I'd still be staring.

In the trees, parallel to the road, something pink moved at a comfortable distance.

I stopped trying to look at it directly. That was the arrangement. I didn't stare at it. It didn't eat my friends. So far the deal was working out pretty well.

Kaniz rode without comment. The Tome hummed something tuneless from the saddlebag. The road stretched ahead of us, winding through the mountains toward Ashbourne, and behind us a village was about to wake up and find out their mayor was gone and their daughters were home and the world was messier than they thought.

And we went home.

---