Only one way to find out. Go and ask the man.
Finding Rache was easy. It was like he wanted me to find him.
Sometimes easy wasn’t good. I’d learned through experience to be wary of easy.
Now that Rache was less than a dozen feet away from me, keeping my hands from around his throat was going to be a challenge, if not damned near impossible.
He was sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar. There was a door at his back, probably a storage room. Rache wouldn’t be sitting next to a doorway unless it led quickly to the outside and a dark alley. You’d think assassins would prefer to sit in a shadowy booth. Many might, but Rache had never been one of the many. If anyone was to walk through the front door of that bar with violent intentions, Rache liked to have plenty of room to play. He wasn’t shy about making a scene—or a mess. A little bag of gold tossed on the bar went a long way toward mollifying any barkeep’s annoyance at having to mop blood off the floor, or toss a body out his back door.
I pulled the brim of my hat a little lower over my eyes and stepped inside. There were six other men in the small bar. It was connected by an open double doorway to a tavern that wasn’t rowdy yet, but sounded like it would be soon. Here in the little bar, one of the men was facedown on a table, muttering to himself. The smell and empty bottle in front of him testament that this wasn’t his first stop of the evening, just the place where he happened to pass out. Three men were huddled over drinks in the aforementioned shadowy booth. Four empty bottles shared the space with them. They were armed, but with that much liquor in them, the worst trouble they’d cause would be falling over their own feet trying to stand up. And the fact that the bottles were still there said that customer service wasn’t the barkeep’s strong suit. He was human, thick-armed, with hard eyes. He gave me a terse nod, and I returned the gesture. The two others sitting at the other end of the bar were more interesting. They sat perched on the edges of their stools so that their swords hung loosely from their belts, no obstacles to making a quick and clean draw. Foam-topped tankards of ale sat in front of them. These boys didn’t appear to be thirsty. Either that or they were disciplined. In a place like this, both could mean trouble waiting for the signal to happen. They turned their heads when I came in, sized me up, and turned back to their ales and quiet talk, sitting up a little straighter than before.
Great.
Just great.
I went to the bar and sat down two stools away from Rache.
“What’ll it be?” The barkeep’s voice was gravelly, and his sleeves were rolled up to expose scarred forearms. Knife fighter and good at it. His scars didn’t tell me that—that he was still upright and breathing did. No one came away clean in a knife fight. Winners got scars; losers got dead.
“Whiskey, neat,” I told the barkeep. It wasn’t my voice; it was an exact copy of Rache’s.
Rache’s own drink paused halfway to his lips. He finished the movement, took a swallow, and set the glass back on the bar as one hand dropped to his side where he’d always kept a stiletto. It was small enough to hide, large enough to get the job done. I didn’t know if he still carried it there, but I think I was about to find out.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, and I pushed back the brim of my hat just enough to give him a good look.
“We meet again,” I said.
The corner of Rache’s lips twitched in a grin. “Get tired of the banker?”
I shrugged. “He wasn’t my type.”
My voice carried, and the barkeep stopped wiping glasses, frozen in place, his eyebrows raised. All conversation in the bar had ceased, even the muttering drunk in the corner.
Rache chuckled. “You’re ruining my reputation again.”
“I’m not here to ruin anyone’s reputation, just to finish the talk we started last night.”
“That would be the talk that you started. I had other things I’d much rather have been doing. I don’t want to talk about it here.” He waved the barkeep over. “Tom, can I use your office?”
The man tossed him a ring of keys and Rache nimbly snatched them out of the air.
“I like it here just fine,” I told him. “I like company.”
Rache shrugged and tossed the keys back to the barkeep. The man caught them without even looking.
Rache half turned to face me. “All right. What do you want to know?”
“Your competition. I need his name.”
“So you and Eiliesor can take him down.”
“Something like that.”
Rache snorted and raised his glass in a half salute. “I wish you luck.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said—good luck if you think you’re going to catch that one flat-footed.”
“I’m good.”
“He’s better.”
“Tell me why, give me his name, and let me be the judge of that.”
“And in return, I get . . .”
“We get rid of your competition for you.”
“And as soon as I leave here, the men with you are going to try to get rid of me.”
“What makes you think I didn’t come alone?”
“Eiliesor and that goblin friend of yours, Nathrach.”
I raised my own glass. “Well played.”
Rache didn’t move, but his eyes took in the men around us in various stages of consciousness. “If all of these fine gentlemen hadn’t been here when I arrived, I’d think that one of them was the paladin.” He lifted his glass and took a sip. “The two down the bar have been entertaining themselves for the past half hour watching me drink.”
“Who are they?”
Rache shrugged. “The gut on the short one tells me they aren’t Guardians. Could be watchers. Could be something else.”
The last thing I needed was something else.
I knew I was wasting my breath, but I told him about Sathrik’s plans after baby brother Chigaru was dearly departed—murder, invade, and enslave elves. Rache wasn’t a patriot unless he was paid to be, but there was a first time for everything. Then for good measure, I told him what Taltek Balmorlan had planned.
For me.
When I finished, Rache didn’t say anything, but just because he wasn’t talking didn’t mean he hadn’t been listening. He’d heard every word I said, and now he was measuring what he’d been paid to do with what the son of a bitch who was lining his pockets would be paying mages to do to me.
I hoped the scales in Rache’s head wouldn’t call that deal even. Yes, I broke up with him. Yes, I’d hurt him. He’d hurt me, so I called that even.
“You want to take out a hit on Balmorlan?” Rache asked.
“I wouldn’t shed any tears if he washed up at low tide tomorrow morning.”
Rache laughed, low and soft. “You’re asking me to do him for free?” He, like Mago, was a firm believer in the power of currency.
“I’m saying you might want to be more selective who you take money from.”
Rache met that statement with silence. I’d just as much as said that Balmorlan had been the man who’d hired him. Rache knew that in addition to his competition’s name, I wanted confirmation on Balmorlan being his latest client.
“Quite a few of my clients have deserved killing more than the target they were paying me for,” Rache said quietly.
That was as close as I was going to get to a confirmation. I’d take it.
I set my drink on the bar. “You give me your word, your blood oath not to kill Chigaru Mal’Salin, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure your competition takes the fall for you.”
“And just how do you propose to do that?”
“I’m a Benares, Rache. We can set people up in our sleep.”
“You can say that again. It’s not like I’m going to forget what happened in Laerin anytime soon.”