Chapter 468: The Patron

"He extended the invitation to me," he said. "But I would be a fool to go alone to a meeting whose terms I haven’t set. If I accept, I’d want you both there."

"You’d want a demon there?" Kael said, with a small grin.

"I’d want my friends there. The demon is incidental."

Kael’s grin held but his eyes were serious. "I’d come."

"I’d come too," Theron said.

"Then we have two days to think." Bruce turned toward the Guild. "Let’s sell the haul. And then let’s go talk to the old soul about it."

They walked across the square in the gold late morning light, three E-rank hunters with full rings and a meeting on the horizon they did not yet understand, and the city of Xiltra moved around them without pause.

....

The Guild sale went quickly.

The senior clerk was at his table again. He looked up as the three of them approached, and his glance took in the rings, the fuller carriage, the change in their glows, and made a small note before they had even set down their haul.

"E-rank," he said.

"E-rank."

"Overnight?"

"Last evening."

He nodded once. He did not ask how. He did not congratulate them. He simply gestured for the haul.

Bruce laid out the day’s kills. The alpha’s single core came first, then the flame-mane cores from the ordinary packmates, then the alpha’s spine-plates and the cured hide sections. The clerk worked through each item with the same efficient professional attention he had given them yesterday. The alpha core was priced at two hundred and eighty, less than the two-core alpha from the stone dungeon, but still substantial. The other cores were priced at forty-five each, a jump from the F-rank prices, because E-rank hunters had access to a slightly better grade of core.

He totaled the sale. Each of them received close to five hundred points.

Bruce’s window, when he checked it walking away from the table:

Soul Points: 1,187

He closed it.

The margin was returning. He would spend some of it tonight on the old soul’s food and on a second cup of soul-clarifier, some of it on the rooming house rent extension, some of it on a small purchase he had been thinking about. He would save the rest against the meeting that might be coming in two days.

He did not know yet what he would need for that meeting. He wanted to be able to walk into it with resources, whatever it turned out to be.

They walked to the old soul’s place in the early afternoon light.

The three of them had eaten only the morning stew and had done a full hunt, and Bruce was hungry, properly hungry, not the desperate hunger of the mist but the honest hunger of a working man who had done work. Kael was hungry too. Theron looked slightly dazed, as if the E-rank consolidation and the morning’s hunt had drawn on more of him than he had realized, and only now was he noticing it.

The old soul was outside their place, not inside. They were sitting at one of the three small outside tables with a small cup of something in front of them, and the two older regulars from yesterday were seated at the other two tables. All three of them were reading, the old soul from a thin bound book that Bruce did not recognize, and the two regulars from what looked like soul-paper letters. The scene was quiet and domestic and had the deep stillness of an afternoon among people who had settled into their versions of contentment a long time ago.

The old soul looked up as the three of them approached.

Their eyes went once across the three, took in the E-rank consolidation that had happened overnight, took in the faint tension in Bruce’s shoulders, and Bruce could see this, read something in Bruce’s face that told them the day had produced more than just hunting.

"You have news," they said.

"We have news."

"Come inside. It’s early for dinner but I have soup."

The old soul closed their book, stood, and gestured the three of them into the small warm kitchen space.

The two outside regulars did not look up. They continued reading. One of them turned a page. The other took a small sip from their cup. Neither of them acknowledged the passing of the hunters, in the specific quiet way that told Bruce they had already noted the group’s presence, decided it was not their concern, and returned their attention to their letters, which was itself, Bruce understood, the mark of soul-realm veterans who knew that half of being useful in a city like this was knowing when not to be useful.

The old soul served three small bowls of soup at the inside table. A different soup than the dinner meals. Thinner. Lighter. A meal for the middle of the day. Bruce and Kael and Theron ate, Bruce with the slower attention he had been learning, Kael with the deliberately slowed attention he had promised himself last night, Theron with the loud noticing that made the old soul smile.

Bruce let the meal do its quiet work. He waited until the bowls were mostly finished before he spoke.

Then he told the old soul what had happened.

He told them about the presence at the edge of his perception in the flame-mane chamber. He told them about the presence following them out through the portal. He told them about Caelen, the tall man’s calm, his refusal to give the name of his employer, his clean withdrawal after Bruce asked for time to think. He told them the terms of the invitation. He told them the language Caelen had used, the precise word hunter rather than a personal name, the absence of pressure.

The old soul listened without interrupting.

When Bruce finished, the old soul was quiet for a long moment. They ran one lined finger slowly around the rim of their teacup. They looked at the surface of the tea for perhaps thirty seconds.

Then they said:

"Caelen."

"You know him?"

"I know of him. I have met him once, forty years ago, in a different context. He was A-rank then. He is A-rank now, he has not pushed for S in all this time, which is meaningful. He works, and has worked for most of the last hundred years, as a private intermediary for one specific person in Xiltra."

"Only one person?"

"Only one. He has been offered other work by other patrons. He has declined all of it. His loyalty is total and it is directed at exactly one soul." The old soul lifted their teacup, took a small sip, set it down. "This is unusual in Xiltra. Most intermediaries at Caelen’s rank work for two or three patrons in rotation, to keep their income steady and their networks broad. Caelen does not need to. He has one employer, and one employer is enough for him."

"Then his employer is powerful."

"Very. And very careful with their approaches. Caelen’s use of the word hunter, his refusal to give a name, the clean terms of the invitation, those are all Caelen’s employer’s fingerprint. She does not send flunkies. She sends Caelen. And Caelen does exactly what she asks and no more."

Bruce noticed the pronoun.

"She," he said.

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell me who she is?"

The old soul looked at Bruce for a long moment.

"I am considering it," they said.

"Considering what?"

"Whether telling you now serves you better than letting you learn from her in the meeting."

Bruce thought about this.

"Let me argue for you telling me now," he said. "If you tell me now, I go into the meeting with more information than she expects me to have. I can be more useful to myself. I can ask better questions. I can decide better whether to accept whatever she offers or asks."

"And an argument against."

"If you tell me now, I might go into the meeting with a bias that closes me off to what she actually is, rather than what you know about her. Second-hand information about a person from someone who knows them well tends to shape the first impression more than first-hand information should."

The old soul smiled, a small, quiet, appreciating smile.

"Those are both good arguments. I am glad you can hold both of them."

"Which do you think I should follow?"

"I think," the old soul said slowly, "that I will tell you her name and one fact about her. Not everything. One fact. And I will let you go into the meeting mostly fresh, but not so fresh that you cannot orient."

"That’s fair."

"Her name is Elenora Vessa. She is a member of the Nonagon."

Bruce set his spoon down.

He kept his face steady. He did not visibly react. But Kael, beside him, made a small involuntary sound, and Theron looked up sharply from his soup.

The Nonagon was the ruling council of Xiltra. Nine SS-rank souls who governed the city’s most important decisions, trade routes, portal access, faction arbitration, external policy. The Nonagon was, by every measure Bruce had learned, the closest thing to a supreme political power in this city. There were three known SSS-rank souls in the whole soul realm, according to what he had picked up from stall conversations, and none of them lived in Xiltra. The Nonagon was as high as Xiltra’s political hierarchy went.