Chapter 5: The Mercenary's Interview

The Broken Standard hired hall occupied the ground floor of a building on River Street that had been a mill in a previous arrangement with the world. The grindstone was still in the corner, repurposed as a table for contracts. The ledger was open on the bar. Contract forms were stacked near the fire the way menus were stacked in more reputable establishments — organized by type, available to anyone with money and a clear enough idea of what they needed.

Aldric came in out of the rain at midday and took a position near the door.

The room ran to capacity at this hour. Small companies at the long tables, reviewing work-papers. Single operators reading the job listings on the board near the hearth. A pair of lords' factors at the bar, comparing rates with the focused attention of men who were good at their work and not particularly troubled by the nature of it. The fireplace was lit and the smell was wet wool and tallow and the particular staleness of a room where arguments were conducted as a matter of routine.

He spent ten minutes standing.

Corvus was at the corner table. Forty-one years old, broad through the shoulders in the way that was built rather than born, face weathered into the kind of appearance that stopped drawing comment at some point because there was nothing remarkable to comment on. He was in an argument with a young man in Harwick livery about a clause in the contract between them.

The argument was professional. Both of them were calm. Corvus had the contract form in front of him and was pointing at a specific section. The young man was presenting the counter-position with the stiff persistence of someone who had been told before he left that the clause was non-negotiable.

Aldric was too far to hear the words but he could read the posture. The clause was about civilian authority. He could see that in the positions they each occupied — the young man leaning forward, advocating, and Corvus leaning back, patient in the way of someone who has already arrived at his answer and is waiting for the conversation to catch up with it.

Corvus had his back to the wall and his chair angled for maximum view of the room. He'd noted Aldric on entry — Aldric had seen the flicker of attention, the categorization, the return to the conversation — and had dismissed him as not immediately relevant. Not as not a threat. There was a difference.

His left hand rested on the table. Two fingers were missing from it, the ring and middle, severed cleanly at the second knuckle. The hand was held slightly forward, visible, neither hidden nor displayed — present, the way a man holds a hand that has always been there.

The argument ended. The Harwick man said something brief and gathered the contract form with the precise frustration of a man who couldn't afford to lose his composure in a room full of people who would remember it. He left.

Corvus looked at the table where the contract form had been. He picked up his cup and drank.

Aldric crossed the room.

He sat down across from Corvus without asking and set a silver coin on the table between them.

Corvus looked at the coin. Looked at him. "Most people in here have work. That's what the board by the fire is for."

"The board is for people who want to hire without a conversation. I want the conversation."

Corvus leaned back. He set his cup down with the same precise economy as Thessaly had set her water cup, though the resemblance was the only thing the two of them had in common. "What's the work."

Aldric described it without softening. An archivist holding documentation of significant political sensitivity who required sustained protection. A long contract with escalating scope. Active operations, medium-term, against Conclave assets — and he used the word Conclave directly, because equivocating about the target at this stage would produce a man who'd been hired under false premises, which was its own category of problem.

He described the final objective without naming a specific outcome, because he didn't yet know the specific outcome. He said: the removal of the current Conclave from its position of authority, by means that would be legal under the authority the Conclave's own documented criminal conduct had voided.

Corvus was quiet for a moment. He looked at nothing in particular — a look Aldric recognized as thought rather than theater.

"The Harwick man," Corvus said. "The clause he wanted. Civilian detention authority. Permission to hold and question locals at the company's discretion."

"You didn't sign it."

"I don't take contracts with implied civilian punishment. It's a liability problem." He said this in the tone of a man presenting professional policy, not personal ethics. "Those contracts produce situations where the hiring party does something on his own and the company gets the attribution. I've watched it happen. I don't need it."

"The work I'm describing will put you in contact with Conclave-aligned civilians. People who've made choices about whose side they're on."

"There's a difference between people who've chosen a side and people who happen to be nearby."

"Yes," Aldric said. "I know the difference."

Corvus looked at him with a different quality of attention. Not the entry categorization — something more deliberate. Aldric held it.

"You were the Crown's Champion," Corvus said. "Before."

"The record says otherwise."

"I'm not reading from the record." Corvus set both hands on the table — the complete hand and the incomplete one, side by side, neither emphasized. "The work you're describing isn't protection work. It's a campaign. You want a captain, not a bodyguard company."

"Yes."

"So tell me about the campaign."

Aldric told him. He kept it operational — the timeline, the documentation, the exposure strategy for the Conclave's legitimacy, the two-week window the false information had purchased, the secondary contacts he was working. He did not describe the cipher or Thessaly's role specifically. He said: there is evidence and someone holding it and I have the key between us.

Corvus listened without interrupting. He asked one question, midway through, about the clerk network — whether it was built for courier traffic or document extraction — and the question was specific enough that Aldric answered it directly, because a man who asked that question already understood enough to make a partial answer worse than a full one.

When Aldric finished, Corvus was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: "When this is over. When you've done what you're building toward and you've got whoever's going to be in charge of whatever's left — what happens to the men who helped you get there."

Aldric had not expected that question.

He considered giving a useful answer — something about compensation structures, about contract terms, about the formal mechanisms by which men who had served in a legitimate capacity would be recognized. He had those answers prepared for other people, in other conversations. He looked at Corvus and found he didn't want to use them.

"I don't know yet," he said. "It depends on what they're owed and what they want."

"That's an honest answer."

"I don't have a better one."

Corvus was quiet for another moment. Then he named a rate. Monthly, with a structure for operational bonuses tied to outcomes he listed precisely and without inflation. It was a professional number — high enough to establish the seriousness of what he was agreeing to, calibrated enough not to be extortionate.

Aldric agreed.

Corvus extended his right hand across the table.

Aldric took it.

The grip was firm and then held — a beat longer than the convention required, maybe two, and Aldric registered the pressure and the stillness of it as something being measured. He held steady. He kept his grip even and his wrist loose and his eyes on Corvus rather than the clasped hands. He let Corvus take whatever time he needed.

Corvus released. He nodded, once.

Aldric gathered what he'd put on the table and stood.

He didn't know what the test had been for. He knew he'd passed it. Outside, the rain was still coming down on River Street, and the walk back to the chandler's room on Westwall was twenty minutes, and Thessaly would be waiting, and the second document in the cipher sequence was still unread.

He put that in order and went out into the rain.