CHAPTER TWENTY - THE SUMMIT

The leaders' chamber deep within the Brothers' Pass looked nothing like the gilded council halls of the Capital. This was the very heart of a smoke-choked den—hewn out of a single massive, jagged rock—that reeked of damp, spilled cheap wine, sweat, and roasted meat.

In one corner, a half-naked slave woman struggled to fill cups from a barrel. When Talon shoved her aside by the shoulder as he passed, the woman dropped to the floor. No one looked back.

The huge oak table at the center of the room was covered not with maps but with bloody casualty reports, rusted daggers, and drinking cups filled to the brim. The wine, the cups, the soldiers—in the end every coin traced back to the same coffer. Like everything in the Pass.

Standing at the head of the table, Talon slammed the heavy metal cup in his hand against the wood so hard that the wine inside it splashed across the parchments.

"Thirty-two elite men! One Herbalist! A whole crate of Putridglass!" Talon roared, the thick veins in his neck swelling.

He drew the sword off his back in a single motion and drove it into the table, burying the tip dead center in the parchment in front of Devdan. The ink scattered. Devdan didn't so much as twitch an eyelid. Every one of these men had been watching knives bite into this table for years.

"That squad literally gutted thirty-two of my men in the middle of the forest!" Talon let go of the sword and leveled his finger at the three of them, one by one. "And now you're telling me to take the Sanctified Bloodlines' two-bit bounty and keep my mouth shut? No. That freak and the boy are our property now. And I set the price."

At the other end of the table, seated among the shadows, Devdan let out a weary sigh. He brought his hands to his face and rubbed his temples. He wore no rough armor like the others, only a leather vest that carried the dust of the trade roads.

"We gave our word, Talon," Devdan said, and there was no diplomacy in his voice—only weariness and anger. "Deals struck with the Capital aren't tavern brawls. The consequences are heavy. We told the Inquisition we'd hand those prisoners over safe and sound. If we break the rules now—"

Devdan rapped his fist lightly against the table. His voice came out harder than the blow. With the irritation of a man forced to state the obvious, he cut his own words short.

"For the gods' sake, every single time it falls to my logistics network to clean up after your reckless decisions, to patch up the relationships you wreck with gold and bribes. I'm the one who has your food, your weapons, and those damned wines hauled all the way up here. I can't let greed drown us."

"We won't drown, Devdan," Talon snarled, bracing his hands on the table and leaning forward. "Drop the cowardice. If the Capital wanted to be rid of us, they'd have done it years ago. The Brothers' Pass can't be besieged. Those fancy armies of theirs don't have the nerve to climb up through those narrow ravines."

Talon wrenched the sword from the table. "I'll send word to the Inquisition and the Guild and put the boy and the giant up for auction. We'll start a bidding war. And the lion's share—to the ones who spilled blood in that forest, meaning me, to cover my losses—comes to me."

A shrill, mocking laugh rose from the corner of the room.

Morrow had come, leaving his work in the workshop half-finished. Wiping his hands on a white cloth, he walked toward the table. He wore a silk shirt. His clothes were clean to a degree that set him in sharp contrast with everyone else in the room.

When he reached the table, he took a polite sip from Voss's beer tankard, then set it back down. Voss raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

"The lion's share?" Morrow said, flinging the dirty cloth into the middle of the table. It landed on Devdan's parchments. Devdan pushed it aside with a single finger, never taking his eyes off Morrow.

"You overestimate your brute force, Talon. You think a few of your hired killers dying earns you the biggest slice?"

Morrow braced his hands on the table and grinned. That sickly, arrogant glint was in his eyes.

"I agree the Capital won't make a move, Devdan."

"Whose slaves do you think raise those thick, fancy walls of theirs? They depend on us. And whose modified girls do you think slip into those lords' silk-sheeted beds? Without the playthings I shape with my own hands—whose bones I remake from scratch and break in through pain—the nobles of the Capital would drown in their own boredom."

Morrow drew a fresh cloth from his pocket. He turned it over between his fingers.

"Without my workshop, you're nothing."

He swept his hand across the table, pointing in turn at the wine cups, the brazier, the table itself.

"This wine, Talon. I had it brought up from the Capital last month. Did you pay for it? No, I paid. Voss's mine ran out of spare iron supports last winter. Who had them brought in? Me. When Devdan's caravans came back empty, who covered the shortfall? Me."

Morrow leaned against the table and dropped his voice a little.

"The workshop doesn't talk. The workshop pays. Who pays his share, who takes one—you all know. So I'm in on this plan to sell them. But I won't leave it to men who don't know how to sell. I'll run the bidding."

Talon's brow furrowed. "You sell Attiv, Morrow. Modified girls, tamed beasts. This is different merchandise."

"Different," Morrow said, smiling. "Bigger. Don't go confusing brawling in a forest with standing in a marketplace. Do you know who'll want the giant's head? The Guild, yes—the reward's good. The Inquisition, yes—but only ever cold coin. The real money's with the private collectors, the ones pulling even their strings."

Morrow laid the clean cloth down in the middle of the table. Like a display.

"For years I've been selling those men mutable flesh. They know me, they trust me. The crier knows my voice. If you lot tell the Guild 'buy this,' you'll be stopped at the door. When I say it, the vault opens. If you want to turn the blood of thirty-two men into gold, the man who speaks the language should do the talking here."

Devdan lifted his head, looked as though he might say something, then thought better of it. Morrow was right, and no one could deny it.

Talon dropped his hand to the hilt of his sword. "You're just a butcher, Morrow. Nothing more."

Morrow turned slowly and set the cloth in his hand down on the floor. The smile didn't leave his face, but his eyes had frozen over.

"Cut the whining."

The blunt, hoarse voice, hard as stone, came from the darkest corner of the table—from Voss. The hulking man slowly set his enormous beer tankard down on the table. He was caked in stone dust and dirt. He hated political intrigue, wars of ego, and the nobles of the Capital.

Voss leaned forward.

"I don't care who you cut deals with or whose head you take. My concern is the mines."

Voss glanced at Morrow for a moment. Then he turned his head away sharply.

"This auction nonsense of yours—if it brings the Inquisition's dogs or the Guild's mages down on our heads, the slaves take fright. A revolt breaks out, production stops. The risk is big, Morrow. This'll sour on us in the end. Let's take the gold we're offered and get back to work."

Voss lifted the tankard again.

"I don't deny your contribution, Morrow. But while your products were still being grown, it was the mines that kept us from starving. If the mine stops, not a single sip of wine goes down any of your throats. What you do makes no difference to me—but the mines can't stop either."

Talon looked at Voss, then at Morrow, then at the sword on the table. A bold grin settled onto his face. He had already decided.

"Your mine won't stop, Voss," Talon said. He turned his eyes to Devdan and then to Morrow. "Send word. To the Guild and to the Sanctified Bloodlines both. The giant and the boy are in the Brothers' Pass. Whoever offers the most gold takes them."

Morrow inclined his head—not the way a hound acknowledges its master, but the way a merchant seals a deal. "The dealmaking's mine. The giant to the Guild, the boy to the Inquisition. Or the other way around—whoever's got the most gold. You hold security, I'll drive up the price."

"Fine," said Talon, treating it as a trivial detail.

Devdan rose to his feet.

For a moment he looked at the table, weighing each of the three men in turn. He said nothing. Because talking was no use. A politician speaks once he's made his decision. A merchant keeps the accounts once he's made his. Devdan was the latter. What mattered was not what he said but what he signed. And right now he faced something he could not sign.

As he headed for the door, Talon shouted after him: "Where are you going, Devdan? The meeting isn't over."

Devdan stopped. He turned before he reached the door.

"The meeting isn't over for you. I've made my decision for myself. I won't take part in the auction. I won't take a share. I won't take responsibility. Six caravans leave for the Capital tomorrow. I'll be in one of them."

Devdan touched the door handle and looked back.

"When I return, I'll see whether this mountain is still standing."

For a moment he looked at Morrow.

"Don't drag me down with you, Morrow. That's all I ask. If you win, you needn't give me my share. If you lose, I won't be here."

Lower, almost a whisper to himself: "We're digging our own graves."

The door closed behind him.

Three men remained at the table. Morrow took another sip from Voss's beer. This time Voss didn't even raise an eyebrow. As Talon slid his sword into its sheath, he looked at Morrow.

"You run the bidding. But no showing the merchandise to anyone before the gold's on the table. And the lion's share is mine."

Morrow smiled. "I promise. Both are yours."

He was lying, but he didn't yet know which of the two was the lie. He would find that out for himself once the bargaining began. Talon sensed it, but he didn't care.

The clink of cups raised in a toast echoed through the room, curled for a moment against the mountain's stone walls, and bled out into the open air. The sound itself dropped into the shadows of the pass and was lost there.

Far away, in a rotting corner of the forest, at a distance the sound could never reach, a man sank to his knees.

Around him lay the marks of slaughter. Bodies beginning to rot, dried blood still clinging to the earth, sickly ground the rain had turned to mud... The man surveyed the scene with a practiced attention. He gave no reaction. No horror, no pain, no curiosity. Only a scan.

His hand brushed something in the mud. He drew it out slowly with two fingers. A shard of colored glass, small and paper-thin, a fragment of an Inquisition stained-glass window, washed clean and gleaming by the rain. The pattern on it was half worn away, but it still held a familiar curve. The shoulder engraving of noble armor.

The man held the shard in his palm for a moment. Then he tucked it into his pocket.

With a flick of a finger he opened the thin wooden cap at the top of his staff. From the sealed compartment inside he took a tiny scrap of meat and fed it into the small holes in the staff's shaft. The things inside stirred; a brief clicking sound came and went. The man closed the cap.

He stood. He braced his staff against the dew-wet earth. For a moment his eyes caught on the mountain range on the horizon.

Then he began to walk.