Chapter 80 Five Days

Averill woke to a glasshouse fire on Marlowe ground, eleven alarm bells, and a house that spent the next four hours accusing three separate rival families.

Damien spent those four hours turning the confusion into distance, since a house looking eleven directions sees none of them.

’Five days on the clock, one seal press in a carriage, and a witness who has not decided she is a witness yet, yeah, this is going to be a long week.’

The work split four ways before dawn, each of them holding a piece nobody else could carry.

Vivienne took the eastern hunters, who had spent an entire night guarding a road nobody used and were, by six in the morning, thoroughly humiliated.

She met eleven of them at the junction below the eastern service road, both blades drawn, her Ashe cape deliberately left behind.

"Right, House Ashe is not present, my name appears on no writ tonight, and I intend to be extremely difficult for nine minutes," she told them.

The Mirror-Edge forms cut across a lane too narrow for eleven men to use their numbers, putting six down without a fatality while five ran.

’She left five of them standing on purpose, yeah, since five men repeating a story about an unnamed swordswoman beats eleven who cannot talk at all.’

Mina carried the custody case out through the tunnels with the living poison signature sealed in brass and a burn across her left forearm she refused to mention.

She came up in the drying yard, walked four hundred meters through a compound full of running hunters wearing a stolen apron, and reached the ferry with the evidence intact.

"That apron had somebody’s lunch in the pocket, I ate it, and every part of the decision haunts me," she reported through the charm.

"You walked a house-ending exhibit out of Marlowe Keep in a stolen apron, so eat whatever you want," Damien answered.

Bram moved the surviving laboratory technician, a nineteen-year-old named Petra who had fed those cases six months at eight silver a week.

He got her out through the clinic porters, into a room above the grocery, and had her signed statement in front of a neutral registrar before nine in the morning.

The statement said Celene Marlowe ordered the cultures, Evander signed the transport, and Petra was never once told what she had been feeding.

"Hey, she asked me whether she was going to prison and I told her the truth, which is that I have no idea," Bram said through the charm.

"Tell her she has a bed above a grocery, a registrar’s copy of her own words, and nine people who will notice if she disappears," Damien answered.

’A frightened teenager with a ledger and a signature, damn, and that is worth more than every blade in this city right now.’

Damien himself spent his four hours writing two letters, neither of which he sent to anybody who would help him.

The first went to Cassius, by house courier, requesting Sterling security support for a family matter at the Marlowe northern gate, worded to sound frightened.

The second went to the Sterling estate’s steward, unsealed, mentioning in passing that his brother had declined to assist.

’He will send men to the northern gate purely to be seen refusing me, yeah, the moment his men appear there, Marlowe puts everything it has on that side of the compound.’

Cassius sent fourteen house guards to the northern gate at eight in the morning with instructions to observe and not engage.

House Marlowe, reading fourteen Sterling guards along its northern wall the morning after a fire, sent thirty of their own to face them.

The eastern gate, where Celene’s convoy had actually left, was covered by four tired men and a clerk.

The system charged him for the whole morning at its usual rate, which never showed up on any bill until the end.

[Divergence: 34% → 36%]

[Foreknowledge Integrity: 67% → 65%]

[Memory corroded: the ancestral arena’s water channel]

[Correction density: elevated]

’The water channel, shit, there was something about a channel under that arena floor and now there is a hole where the something was.’

He wrote what he could still remember about the arena onto the back of the hearing schedule, which came to four lines, one of them probably wrong.

’Four lines for the room I have to fight in, damn, three months ago I would have had the whole Chapter and the floor plan with it.’

The convoy chase started at eleven and ran all afternoon across three districts, nothing clean about it, extremely expensive.

Two Marlowe outriders found him on the river road, both of them Level five hundred and up, riding under orders that did not include capture.

[Debt: 0 → 341]

[Death Flag detected: River road ambush - Fatality 61%]

The first one put a venom-edged spear through his left side before Iron Veil closed, and Damien paid for the second one with the first one’s momentum.

Reckoning ended it against the road wall, the flag paid at ten times, and those numbers arrived while he was still bleeding into his coat.

[RECKONING - 341 Debt × 2.0 = 682]

[Verdict conductance +20% = 818]

[Death Flag survived - All rewards ×10]

[Experience: +29,382,000]

[System Points: +4,100]

[Level: 701 → 742]

[Experience: 239,000 / 742,000]

’Forty-two levels off two outriders, yeah, the story sent them, so the story paid for them, which never stops being funny.’

The injury refused to improve, while keeping venom out of his blood cost more shop stock in one afternoon than the whole expedition had.

[System Points: 10,140 → 14,240]

[Emergency antivenom and tissue stock: 11,140]

[System Points: 14,240 → 3,100]

’Three thousand one hundred left, four days out from an arena, damn, I am going into that pit poorer than I was at the gala.’

By evening he had spent nearly everything he owned on a chase that still caught nobody.

Isolde ran the whole operation from a cell, which was the part Damien found genuinely remarkable when he had time to think about it later.

Feyn carried four messages a day through the confinement visit schedule, and each one arrived as a correction rather than a request.

One read do not take the river road twice, another Petra refuses to sign anything with the word poison in it, use compound, the third my aunt will run east then turn north, since she never once goes where she says.

’She has nothing left, not a ring or a laboratory or an hour of her own, she is still the best-informed person in this operation, damn.’

The last message came at nine in the evening, carrying nothing tactical whatsoever.

They moved me to the arena holding cell this afternoon, it has a window, the first one in eight days.

Damien read that one four times, then folded it into his coat beside the hearing schedule and mentioned it to nobody at all.

’Eight days without a window and that is the line she chose to spend a message on, ah, damn it, do not think about that until this is finished.’

Celene’s convoy turned north at the eleventh hour exactly where Isolde had said it would, running for the old skybridge beyond the city wards.

The bridge had been condemned for two years, it carried no traffic, it was the only crossing that did not require a registry stop.

"Four carriages plus sixteen guards, over a bridge deck rated for absolutely nothing," Bram reported, "and they cross it tonight in the dark regardless."

"Then after four days of surprises they have finally done something predictable," Damien answered, and started running toward a bridge that people who knew their trade had condemned two years ago.