Chapter 4: Old Debts

Neld Ferris had served the Crown for twenty-two years before the massacre and had mourned the King in the quiet, practical way of men who understand that mourning is only useful up to the point where it interferes with survival.

He was fifty-two now, gray at the temples and careful with money. He ran an accounts-consulting practice on Veller Street out of the front two rooms of his house, and the practice was doing adequately — the Conclave had replaced many of the Crown's administrative mechanisms with their own and required people who understood how accounts and records worked, and Ferris understood how accounts and records worked.

He had been useful to the King in a specific way. Twenty years ago, as a young factor in the Crown's discretionary accounts, he had made an error: a misattributed sum, a genuine mistake rather than fraud, the kind that could nonetheless be prosecuted selectively if the right person decided to make use of it. The King had been that right person and had decided not to — had covered the loss from the discretionary fund and sealed the record. He had done this without comment, with no payment expected and no explicit obligation stated.

Ferris had not forgotten it. He had not been asked to.

Aldric had confirmed, two weeks ago, that Ferris was now also providing information to the Conclave's intelligence network. This had not surprised him. Ferris had a daughter in the city and the Conclave knew where she lived. The information Ferris provided was low-level — movements, names he'd heard, the kind of intelligence that expanded the network rather than directed it.

He rang the bell at Ferris's door at midafternoon.

---

Ferris received him in the consultation room. Brought out a decanter that he didn't usually offer to clients, which was a tell. Poured two glasses and sat across the table and asked, with the genuine warmth of a man who had once liked Aldric, how he had been keeping.

Aldric said: adequately.

Ferris asked where he'd been staying. He asked whether Aldric was alone or had people with him. He asked whether Aldric had been in the city long. Each question was natural in isolation. In sequence, they were a profile.

Aldric watched the fireplace.

The fire in the grate had been built recently — the ash beneath it was cold, but the fire itself was only an hour old. The room temperature didn't require a fire. It was not cold enough. Whatever Ferris had burned, he'd burned it in preparation for this meeting or in the hour before, which meant he'd been told to expect Aldric, or had decided independently that Aldric might come, or had burned something for reasons unrelated to either.

The third option was unlikely.

Aldric answered the questions at the level of detail that was useful without being actionable. Yes, he'd been in the city a week. He'd been staying near the docks. He was not entirely alone. He was looking for a specific piece of documentation — a procurement record from the late Crown's reign, something that had been archived and might still exist in a private collection. He named a record. It was not the cipher. It was not anything the Conclave would find plausible if they knew what he was doing, but it was specific enough to seem real.

He watched Ferris receive it.

There — the small pause before Ferris continued, the repetition of the record's description in different words to confirm he'd gotten it right, the careful neutral expression of a man organizing information he intended to transmit. Ferris was good at it. He'd had a year of practice.

Aldric named two people who had allegedly helped him. Neither existed. He gave a route he'd traveled, which terminated at a Conclave checkpoint on the eastern district line. He gave a rough timeline — he'd be in the city another two weeks, maybe less.

Ferris nodded, and asked small questions, and poured more wine.

They talked for twenty minutes. Aldric watched the fire and let Ferris fill in the silence whenever it opened. Ferris, who was not a bad man and who had done this because the Conclave had made certain calculations about his daughter very clear to him, filled in the silence with the diligence of someone who understood that the quality of what he provided determined what happened next.

When Aldric stood to leave, Ferris said: "If there's anything I can do to help—"

Aldric looked at him.

Ferris stopped. He was not stupid. He had spent twenty-two years working adjacent to people with considerable power and he understood, in his body rather than his reasoning, what it looked like when someone knew.

"Give it to your handler exactly as I gave it to you," Aldric said. "The names, the route, the timeline. Don't improve it and don't delay it." He held the man's eyes. "If you embellish or sit on it for more than a day, I'll know, and the result will be unpleasant for both of us."

He didn't mean the threat as stated. What he meant was: the false information he'd just provided would, when the Conclave acted on it, expose the network of handlers who tried to verify it — the checkpoint agents, the district watchers, the contact points along the dead route. When the verification went nowhere, the handlers would be visible by their movement. He'd be watching.

He needed Ferris to pass it promptly and accurately to make the exposure work.

Ferris sat very still in his chair. His hands were flat on the table.

"I'm sorry," Ferris said. "For whatever it's worth."

"For the King," Aldric said. "Not for me."

He went to the door.

---

Outside, it had started raining.

The kind of autumn rain that was neither dramatic nor comfortable — a persistent, grayish precipitation that made the street look like it had been left out too long. The lampposts were lit early against it. He turned up his collar and walked south through the district boundary, not hurrying.

He thought about what it cost, visiting Ferris. Not sentimentally — the cost was operational: the false information was useful, but he had now confirmed to the Conclave's network that he was alive, in the city, and looking for something. Vauren would receive that report within two days. She would begin cross-referencing it with the extraction from the transport wagon, which she would already be analyzing.

He had given her the wrong city sector, the wrong associates, the wrong target. If the false route held its integrity through transmission, she would spend two weeks looking at the wrong half of Valdenmere.

Two weeks was what he needed.

He had one name left from the contacts who had owed the King: a mercenary captain currently operating out of River Street, whose reputation for contract integrity had survived four years and two changes of local authority.

Corvus.

He walked south through the rain toward River Street. The contact after Ferris would not be someone who owed a debt. He'd be someone who had to be convinced that the work was worth taking. That was a different kind of meeting, and he spent the walk preparing for it.