Book 5 Chapter 4: Indirection

++Trafficking rings, by their nature, need to be small and operate fast, which generally prevents the massive, sprawling operations that are found in other forms of criminal enterprise. To compensate for this, it is not uncommon at all for the wealthier rings to staff themselves with surprisingly gifted magicians as a means of safeguard. They can, after all, pay better than just about any Institute.++

- Lord Jintan, High Justice of Garamon.

Bornu could not have been more different from the cities of Garamon. It was less overgrown, less rotten.

The poverty we passed struck me as being quite unlike anything I had seen anywhere in Garamon itself, but it was not a product of the surrounding environment. This was not a city crushed beneath its own weight, rather it was suffering from the Empire parasitically attached to its gut.

The people we passed reached out to touch our clothing as we went, praising and smiling, all beaming friendliness. They were not doing this out of some genuine adoration of the people of Garamon, though I did not doubt many pale-skinned tourists were stupid enough to think just that. They were simply forced to by circumstance. Those in Bornu who alienated foreign wealth may well die for their mistake.

Agrian was more perturbed by this than I was. I saw him flinch each time someone asked us for money, especially the children. While I mostly tuned it out and simply focused upon our mission, he was far more easily distracted.

“You must remain focused,” I warned him. “We are not here for these people.”

Agrian glared at me. “Unlike you, it actually bothers me when I see others suffering. Forgive me if I have a hard time ignoring it.”

“Okay,” I told him with understanding. “I forgive you.”

That, ridiculously, only seemed to enrage my brother more, and he pointedly turned away from me with a snarl of anger.

I was growing more and more concerned that I simply did not understand how Agrian’s brain functioned anymore. Was there some abnormality within it that had previously gone undiscovered, or…hm. Was I regressing to be more like I had been when we last spoke?

Being in his presence left me feeling like the years were falling away. I did not care for it.

Agrian and I both distracted ourselves with the same technique; focusing on our surroundings and keeping our minds too busy examining the buildings of Bornu for resemblance to the mercenaries’ stories to dwell upon our own emotions. It would have been so very fast if we could simply fly over the rooftops, by comparison walking felt like I was dragging myself along with a single hand.

Still, it was a finite area to look through, especially once we became somewhat used to the city’s layout and started making educated guesses about where the hideout would be most logical to place. I doubted it would be too far from any Garamon authority centres, not anywhere near the outskirts, where travel times could be lethally long. The people running this operation would want easy access to their own storehouses.

They would also want a place that could be approached with relative obscurity, not necessarily isolated, but difficult for a nearby watcher to trace who was coming and going. Then there was the need to occasionally transport and hold prisoners. It would need room to add adequate sound-proofing and entry ways that could accommodate people who were likely to be bound.

And a vehicle would need to have room to park very close by, because there was no way, even in Bornu, human beings were going to be simply hauled through the street as prisoners in the open, whether night or day.

Actually finding locations like this was still part of our challenge, but once we knew what to look for Agrian and I were able to order a carriage to take us more quickly through the city on a route that let us examine all the locations most likely to boast such a structure. Once our search was streamlined in that way, we took only a few more hours to notice a place that could not have been anything but the one described by our prisoners at the river.

The building itself was just as it had been described. Originally built for occupancy rather than storage, it was a block of rooms stacked atop one another and clearly made for robustness and expediency rather than comfort. The windows were small, the walls thick, and the whole thing looked like a typical apartment complex had been rather painfully cross-bred with a bomb shelter. There were four floors to it, any more and it would have been weakened in its integrity.

“We could flatten it without much trouble,” I noted.

“We don’t want to flatten it,” Agrian told me icily. “Varna might still be alive in there.”

I frowned. “You said that as though you expected her to be in the building. We do not know if that is the case, temper your hopes.”

He looked like he wanted to snap back at that, but hesitated, then reluctantly nodded.

“She might be, though,” he told me after a moment. “Which means we can’t just blow the whole place up like we did the mercenaries.”

It was my turn to admit he was right now.

An unapproved copy of the chapter came from , where the author publishes it and receives reader support.

“A frontal assault then,” I sighed. “But without the advantage of a massive opening blast to unbalance or kill the enemies.”

“Or not,” Agrian suggested. “We can take another look around, try and think of something better.”

“You wish to wait longer now that we know where they are?” I asked him.

“No, I don’t. I want to run in there as fast as I can and tear through the fucking wall with my fingernails because it’d take a few precious milliseconds to cast a spell. But that won’t save Varna, so I’m going to force myself to be patient and careful and do this right. It’s not like they’re going anywhere anyway, right? We’ve got them sighted now.”

I thought about that.

“I can try to add a spell around the possible entryways to alert me if something crosses their threshold. It may yield false positives, but it will give me some idea of speed as well as trajectory.”

“So you’ll know if something is suddenly moving faster than everyone just coming and going normally, like a person fleeing?” Agrian asked. He really was brilliant. A genius in more than just magic, my brother.

I resisted the smile that threatened to form on my face and nodded. “Yes, precisely that. It is, as I said, not fool proof. If they have an exit not visible from the outside, which they should, then they can disappear anyway.”

“They might not,” Agrian frowned. “Human traffickers aren’t exactly smart people.”

“It is generally better not to rely on your enemies making lapses in judgement,” I told him gently. Agrian’s hands curled into fists, but he nodded.

“Alright then, we’ll do one circuit for your spells on the exit routes, then we’ll head for the building. I’ll see if I can’t think of something more while you work.”

***

Agrian was surprised at how easily Isabel was keeping pace with him as they moved. She’d definitely gotten taller since they last saw each other, but not by that much. He still had at least four inches on his little sister, and his legs were that much longer than hers, his clothing rather more practical for long walks.

Isabel wasn’t exactly dressed for a ballroom, but she was still in a skirt. Her boots weren’t heeled, at least. She still probably wouldn’t be running fast in them.

Agrian had said something twice, and both times Isabel had told him the same thing; “I will simply tear anything that gets in my way and replace it later.” Under normal circumstances, he might’ve objected to the prospect of her essentially exposing her skin to the air should she need to run. Then again, maybe not. It had been years, but Agrian still remembered how impossible his sister had been to argue with in the past.

She was a millionaire now, a hundred times over if the estimates he’d read in magazines were to be believed. A brick wall would be infinitely more tractable.

Then Agrian paused, winced, and sighed. It did not, of course, matter what Isabel wore, either. Not as long as she wanted to wear it. Agrian had figured that out a while ago, spent years smugly criticising his fellow citizens of Garamon and their backwards expectations of women and their modesty. Apparently it hadn’t taken much for him to relapse; just a reunion with his own sister.

He studied Isabel as they went, watched her work magic and saw how she reacted to the people they passed. Agrian’s heart broke a little more with each beggar, but Isabel, as usual, just stepped right over them.

He’d expected to see that, but the expectation did little to keep the sight from boiling his blood all over again.

Agrian was reminded why he didn’t visit his family much. He could tolerate being around Garamon people as they did and thought Garamon things, but seeing that in his own loved ones just hurt a little too much.

Isabel was the worst. She didn’t seem to even care much about the culture she was raised in, as far as Agrian could tell her own disregard for human life was entirely self-taught. He shuddered as she finished the second spell, and made himself think until his mind moved back onto the topic of their present mission.

“You keep staring at me,” Isabel said as they made their way to the third exit-route, this one dangerously close at only two hundred yards from the building proper.

“It’s been a while,” Agrian told her as he hastily looked away.

“...Yes, it has,” Isabel said after a moment. Agrian looked back in time to see her hastily looking away. Great, they were fencing with their eyeballs now.

He sighed. “I missed you.”

Isabel said nothing, so he continued.

“I just want you to know that. Or…I want to say it, I guess. I know we haven’t been in touch, and—”

“You left me undefended at my refinery, when the Vorets came. I called on you for help and you ignored me,” Isabel blurted out suddenly, voice hot. Agrian felt his face burn, and his own temper quiver and thrash.

He felt shame, too, of course.

“I know,” he told her. “I’m sorry for that. It doesn’t change anything else you’ve done, still do or think, but…I am sorry.”

Isabel looked like she had a retort, but that she decided against sharing it. They continued much of their walk in silence.

Maybe Agrian was finally growing up, that his own little sister couldn’t tie him in knots so easily anymore. Maybe Isabel herself was just having an off-day. Whatever the explanation, he knew that he needed to stop fucking thinking about it and wasting valuable brain power that could be used figuring out how to stop Varna from dying. Or worse.

He had to make himself stop thinking about the ‘or worse’, too.

Their problem wasn’t exactly that the place was well defended, but that it had that combination of well-defended and potentially holding the only reason Agrian was even here. As he’d said before, simply blowing the thing open would run the risk of killing Varna, plus any other poor sods stuck inside.

If they went in more gently, they’d be losing the element of surprise and dragged into a protracted fight. Hell, that might even end up with the city watch getting sicced on them, Agrian knew traffickers had money and police of all kinds generally preferred money to upholding the actual law.

There had to be another way. He racked his brains and approached the problem from as many different angles as he could think of, cycling through one possibility after another, aware all the time that Isabel was accelerating their timer by working so damned fast on her spells.

And then it hit him.

“Remember when we were kidnapped?” Agrian asked his sister. “It’s just given me an idea.”