In her experience, men and women who did not want to be found were creative about their place of residence. Soneste knew what to look for and wasn’t disappointed in either Tallis or herself.
Her mind was exhausted of its extrasensory power, so she relied on instinct alone. A few choice questions to the building’s occupants and a thorough search of its halls yielded a room on the third floor that matched her criteria: remote, neighbors to blend in among, and close enough to ground level to effect a quick escape.
At the second to last door of this wing, she paused and looked closer. Jotrem looked on thoughtfully, traced a finger along the faceplate of the lock, then walked past her and stopped to look at the last door.
“It’s not that one,” he said.
“I think it is.”
“That door is trapped. It’s a decoy. Leave it.”
Soneste examined the lock again, noting trace amounts of fine black powder. She dabbed at it with two fingers then rubbed them together. A revolting smell rose up from the substance. Some sort of smokestick variation? If the lock was picked and the doorknob turned, more of this alchemical powder would foul the air and probably be a warning to someone nearby. Someone … next door?
She looked down to where Jotrem examined the final door. He’d produced a set of lockpicks and was working at the lock.
Not bad, old man, she thought silently. How did I miss this? Soneste was still dead tired. With a sigh, she climbed to her feet and joined him. A minute later, Jotrem had picked the lock and pushed it open with one of the tension wrenches from his set.
Tallis’s apartment was clean and sparsely furnished, maintained as if expecting a raid. There were no obvious weapons in sight, but she soon found a thin dagger hidden on the underside of an ordinary desk near the wall. All signs suggested that Tallis did not actually spend much time here. It was a place to sleep for him, little more, a transient space in which to wait before moving to the next.
Was this any way to live?
“Evidently, Tallis is a petty thief as well.” Jotrem extracted a small velvet bag from the hollowed leg of the apartment’s only chair.
He upended the bag onto Tallis’s only desk and separated the objects with his wrench then left them for her to examine. Soneste felt uneasy as she looked upon them: a slender necklace on a delicate silver chain, a bejeweled bracelet, and a pair of gem-studded earrings. All women’s jewelry, seeming of considerable value-and clearly none of it Tallis’s.
Soneste felt the gentle pressure of the serpentine armband against her skin, hidden beneath her sleeve. She’d acquired it during the Blackfeather case, when she’d found the personal effects of the killer’s victims. Their families had long since forgotten about such valuables, hadn’t bothered to account for them all when Soneste went public with her findings. What they didn’t miss, she’d kept as a personal reward.
Considering the appearance of Tallis’s residence, Soneste assumed the Karrn didn’t use such jewelry to live well. It was probably currency for his trade, a means to fund his vigilante lifestyle.
But Soneste? She’d held onto valuables that weren’t hers when the opportunity arose-when she felt she deserved it. Inquisitive work had never paid well, so she’d supplemented her low income with such acquisitions. She made an active effort to get out and take part in Sharn’s extravagant night life. She could walk the streets and skybridges openly, go wherever she pleased, do whatever she wanted to do. She worked for Thuranne’s agency during the day, but at night she was a socialite reaching above her station. On more than one occasion, she’d even gone with friends to Silvermist, a dream parlor in Lower Dura.
Soneste tried to shake away the guilty thoughts. So what if some disreputable people also frequented the same places? Soneste certainly wasn’t a criminal-not like Tallis. She was an upstanding citizen of Sharn, a tax-paying subject of King Boranel. She refused bribes, paid for her necessities by herself, and rented her own apartment. Tallis was a vagabond, a thief, and a killer in some capacity.
She was an agent of the law. She was far above the lowlifes with which she often had to consort.
Something caught her eye, then: a rectangle of paper tacked to the wall in one shadowed corner near the bed. Grateful for something else to distract her thoughts, Soneste left the jewelry behind. She walked over and peeled the paper loose, carrying it into the fading daylight at the window.
It was a clipping, years old, but from the cracks and rough texture of the paper she knew it was from the Korth Sentinel. Soneste flashed through it, gleaning the content quickly. It told of a skirmish along Scions Sound, wherein Karrnath had lost an entire infantry platoon along the rocky shore when an Aundairian company had flushed them from hiding.
“I remember that,” Jotrem said, behind her. “They were outnumbered three-to-one. Twenty-six captured and systematically executed. A Karrnathi platoon discovered them and chased them off before the Aundairians could burn the bodies.”
“Were you one of-?”
“No. I was still a cadet at the time, reading the chronicles along with everyone else.” Prompted by the clipping, Jotrem started another round of searching. “The war was more than some distant threat here. It was a way of life, even for those who did not fight. Many Karrns keep articles such as these, remnants of the war. News of loved ones, accounts of battles. I have some of my own.”
In short order, the older inquisitive uncovered a cache of rolled up papers hidden behind a panel in a wall Soneste had overlooked. I need sleep, she thought.
Jotrem began to unroll the posters upon Tallis’s bed. War propaganda, she recognized instantly. Soneste had plenty of it herself in Sharn and even back home in Starilaskur. It was common enough across the Five Nations, intended to boost morale among the populace against one’s declared enemies and encourage recruitment. Mostly it sowed hatred and intolerance.
She felt blood rush to her face as she looked upon some of Karrnath’s war posters. One of them depicted the familiar likeness of King Boranel with scaly, bluish skin and a massive, saw-toothed glaive gripped in his hands. His mouth was stretched into a diabolic grin, framed by a slick, stringy beard. The artist had rendered the scenery underneath to make it appear as though famine and corruption flowed before Boranel. At the bottom, beneath a squad of warforged with green-glowing eyes, was a title: THE BRELISH DEVIL.
“Roll them up,” Soneste said in disgust. Pride for her own king and country swelled within her.
“There are others here,” Jotrem answered coolly as he flipped through them. “Would you care to see what Queen Barvette of Aundair looked like, or the Keeper of the Flame? Your king is not alone.” He turned and held her eyes with an unapologetic stare. “I can only imagine how you Brelanders saw us Karrns.”
As black crows circling carrion, she knew. As necromancers mustering the fallen to fight again. As fiends raising their own enemies from the repose of death to turn against their former comrades.
“I know,” she said quietly.
Never more than now, here in this quiet apartment in the middle of Karrnath, had Soneste ever been so glad the war was over. She’d never joined up herself, but as far as she was concerned, the Last War had already claimed too much from her family. Her father, a dragoon in the Brelish army, had been killed in the Battle of Cairn Hill, and her mother, once a soldier in the captain’s own unit before the two had married, had not spoken a word since.
Chapter THIRTEEN