Chapter 208: The Line to the Capital

Chapter 208: Chapter 208: The Line to the Capital

Chapter 208: The Line to the Capital

The crystal pulsed a fourth time.

Draven held it in his gloved palm and watched the violet light crawl beneath the polished surface.

"Open it," he said.

Corwyn stared up at him from the iron chair. His hands were whole. They had not stopped shaking since Draven mended them.

"You want me to hand you the Believers," Corwyn rasped. "You want me to give you the only people in that city who are trying to stop this."

"No."

Draven crouched down until the white mask was level with the Envoy’s face.

"You bought that crystal to keep a fleet on the ground. Nothing about that has changed. The fleet is still in the northern yards. Your Believers are still waiting on a transmission that is an hour late, and every minute you sit here quiet, they get closer to deciding you are already dead."

He set the crystal on the Envoy’s knee.

"You are not betraying them. You are keeping them breathing. That is the entire offer."

Corwyn looked at the crystal.

The terrible part, he thought, was not that the masked boy was lying to him.

It was that he was not.

’I have nothing left to protect,’ Corwyn thought bitterly.

’They took my hands apart to learn a truth I would have given them for free.’

He picked up the crystal.

Nyx moved out of the corner and stood where he could see her. She did not draw anything. She did not need to.

Corwyn pressed his thumb into the facet.

The crystal split the dark with a thin violet line.

Static. Then a woman’s voice, dry as old paper and twice as thin.

"Thalis."

"Elder Renwick," Corwyn said.

"You are ninety-four minutes late. I have been sitting in a cold room drinking cold tea and composing a very moving eulogy. It is not good. You would not have liked it."

Corwyn closed his eyes.

"Verification phrase," he said. "Thirteen lamps, one wick."

"One wick, thirteen lamps," Isolde Renwick answered.

Then, without any change in tone at all:

"You are compromised."

Corwyn’s throat closed.

"I said the phrase correctly."

"You said the phrase like a man reading it off a card someone was holding for him. Forty years, Thalis. I have heard that cadence from hostages, from drunks, and once from a Senator with a blade under the table. You are not drunk."

Silence in the stone room.

"Yes," Corwyn said quietly. "I am compromised."

"Well. That is refreshingly direct." A long, tired exhale crackled through the crystal. "That is more honesty than I have received from the Senate floor in six years. Are you alive in a way that will continue?"

"For now."

"Then put whoever is standing over you on the line before I start guessing, because my guesses are worse than the truth and I am too old to be frightened efficiently."

Draven took the crystal from the Envoy’s hand.

"Elder Renwick."

The pause on the other end lasted three full seconds.

"That is not Thalis."

"No."

"Who is this?"

"The reason your envoy is late."

"That is not a name."

"No."

"Splendid." Something clinked faintly against a saucer. "Forty years of service to this Bastion and I am finally negotiating with a pronoun."

Lucien made a small sound near the door that he covered badly.

"You have him in a cell," Isolde continued.

"He is in a chair. He has been given water."

"Water. How lavish. Did you break something first, or does the hospitality precede the violence up there?"

Draven did not answer immediately.

"Yes," he said.

The line went quiet.

"At least you did not lie about it," Isolde said at last. "You would be astonished how rare that is. I have men in the Senate who will lie about the weather while standing in the rain. What is it you want?"

"To ground your fleet."

"Everyone wants to ground my fleet. I want to ground my fleet. Unfortunately, I require a reason, and the last reason I gave the Senate was that the Bastion Seven anomaly was buried under thirty tons of Miasma and no longer a concern. I put my name on that. In writing."

"Then your name was wrong."

"My name is frequently wrong. It is usually wrong more slowly than this. Explain."

Draven turned the crystal slightly in his fingers.

"Strike Team Zero is alive. All ten. They are standing in Bastion Seven, and every one of them has crossed the hundredth threshold."

Nothing came back through the crystal.

Not a gasp, not a curse. Just a long stretch of empty static, and then the sound of a very old woman setting a cup down very carefully.

"Say the number again."

"One hundred."

"Each."

"Each."

"...I am going to need better tea."

"I want names," Draven said.

"Of course you do."

"Every Elder driving the war. Every General with a hand on the fleet. I want the list."

"There is no list."

"There is always a list."

"You are asking me for a list of men taking orders," Isolde said.

"You want to hear that the Hawks are puppets. That someone is whispering, and if you cut the whisperer out, the arm stops moving. I know that shape of question. I have asked it myself."

Draven said nothing.

"There is no whisperer. There is no infiltration. I have had three Hawk Generals scanned by the Sanctum in the last year, discreetly and illegally, and they came back clean as river water."

"Then why."

"Because they are afraid, boy."

The old woman’s voice sharpened for the first time.

"They read the same scouting reports I did. A squad of first-years shattering every progression metric on record. Children posting numbers that took my generation forty years and two wars to reach. They looked at that and they did not see heroes. They saw the beginning of something that eats the continent, and they decided to strangle it while it was still small."

She let that sit.

"They are not villains. They are terrified men doing arithmetic. That is so much worse, and you are about to find out why."

Draven stood perfectly still in the lamplight.

’I can cut a parasite out of a man,’ he thought. ’I have done it with my bare hands.’

’I cannot cut this out of forty million.’

"Then we have a shared interest," Draven said.

"We have a shared inconvenience. Interests come with trust." Isolde’s voice flattened back into exhaustion. "Here is my price, and it is not negotiable, so do not waste my evening."

"Speak."

"Thalis comes home. Walking. Talking. Verified by my own physicians, not yours. With every finger he left with."

Draven paused.

"He will have every finger."

"...That was a peculiar pause."

"It was a long day."

"Mm." A dry rustle, like a woman rearranging papers she has no intention of reading.

"A Believer who vanishes into Bastion Seven is a martyr. The Hawks will hang his portrait in the Senate and launch the fleet under it by the end of the month. A Believer who walks back through the gate with all his teeth is a witness, and witnesses are inconvenient. Send him home."

"Agreed."

Aegon stepped forward. "Captain."

Draven raised one hand without looking at him.

"Give me three days," Isolde said. "I can stall a fleet for three days on procedure alone. Fuel audits. Requisition forms. You would not believe how much of civilization runs on paperwork nobody wants to sign."

"You will have your envoy tomorrow."

"Then you will have your three days. Do not spend them doing anything I will have to explain."

Draven lowered the crystal, and Aegon finally spoke.

"You have overruled me twice tonight."

"Three times, if we count the roof."

"He is a foreign asset, and you have just handed him a schedule." Aegon’s armor ticked as it cooled. "That is a risk."

"He is a foreign asset who now owes us his hands and his life, and who cannot report either without confessing he met us," Lucien said mildly. He pushed off the wall and adjusted a cuff. "Which is elegant, and which is also not the actual problem in this room."

Draven looked at him.

Lucien held the look.

"You just negotiated a ceasefire with the Capital," Lucien said. "Terms, timetable, prisoner exchange. That is a treaty, Captain. The Lord Commander does not know it exists."

"No," Draven said. "He does not."

"You will tell him."

"I will. When there is something worth telling him. Right now I have a frightened diplomat and a three day window, and Helion Goldmane cannot act on either without turning it into policy."

At the back of the room, Estella watched him.

He had taken the line without a breath of hesitation. He had spoken to an Elder of Bastion One the way other people ordered breakfast. He had known which price she would name before she named it.

’Where does a boy from the gutters learn to do that,’ she thought.

She said nothing. She had not said anything since the alley.

The crystal pulsed once more.

"One more thing," Isolde said.

"Since we are being direct with one another, and since I will be lying to a great many people on your behalf by morning. Who am I speaking to?"

Draven raised the crystal.

"The Embracing Hands."

The silence that followed had a different quality than the last one.

"I have never heard of you."

"You have," Draven said. "You simply did not know what you were looking at."

He crushed the light out of the crystal with his thumb.

Four floors up and eleven hundred miles away, in a cold room in Bastion One, Elder Isolde Renwick sat looking at a dead crystal and a cup of tea she had let go cold twice.

She was seventy-one years old. She had buried two wars, four Pontiffs’ worth of heresy, and one husband.

’I have just agreed to lie to the Senate,’ she thought, ’for an organization I cannot name, at the request of a boy who tortures diplomats and then heals them.’

She reached for the cold tea and drank it anyway.

’And the appalling thing,’ she thought, ’is that he is the only one on this continent currently telling me the truth.’