Meek

Chapter 77: Competitors

The leaves of the peach tree fluttered in the morning breeze. The sound of carriage wheels rattled over the walls of the compound.

Eli faced Mage Elsavet from ten yards away. Her left hand toyed absently with her shawl while she held her right at the small of her back. Apparently that was a polite way to stand? He didn't know and he didn't care. He tensed, waiting for the telltale flicker of her fingers.

According to her new rules, he couldn't move until she did.

He exhaled his tension away, and watched through his closest spark while the others rotated in spirals between them.

A fist-sized rock beside her foot flashed toward Eli's chest.

Her left finger hadn't twitched; she'd attacked with her hidden right hand. Sneaky old bat.

He smacked the rock with a flattened spark, but it was a hundred times the size of a glass bead. His spark only managed to shift the trajectory slightly before it reached him. That was enough; he threw himself upward and to the side, pushing off the ground with another spark.

He used the momentum to dive across the yard. Elsavet still reflexively tried to predict his arc, even though she knew she couldn't. She fired a second rock in front of him, but he stopped short, bracing with another spark, then dropped into a crouch.

That time she fired a bead.

He spread his nearest spark as wide as his palm--wider than had been possible even a few days ago. Covering that much area weakened the spark, but he didn't need much strength to stop a bead.

Not anymore.

He raced forward, dodging another bead and narrowing his third spark into a blunt point like a knuckle.

Then he blasted through her shield.

He felt a shiver of magic as the air shattered--but his spark couldn't get through her next shield, which she cast in place the instant the first one weakened.

So he kept sprinting closer, trying to get close enough to strike with all four--well, with the four he admitted--sparks at once. He juked sideways, leaped forward ...

And ran face-first into a shield the size of a dinner plate.

His nose broke and his legs shot out and he landed on his arse. Again.

"You're becoming quite formidable," Mage Elsavet said, from above him.

"I lost another tooth," he told her, wiping blood from his face.

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"Well, you 'misplaced' another tooth," she said. "It will return."

She was right. He'd only chipped the tooth, and after two hours of meditation, he could barely feel the dent with his tongue.

To his gratification, he'd started feeling something else far more clearly: his core. Meditation didn't come naturally to him, so his progress thrilled him. He'd intuited for some time that his core and his sparks weren't separate things--they were a single whole, even if they existed in different places--but he'd finally started to feel that.

He didn't shift weight from his core to his sparks any more than he shifted weight from his arm to his hand when he grabbed a sword. No, he simply clenched a different part of himself ... and that understanding helped him move the sparks farther and faster than ever.

After dinner, and a particularly embarrassing chapter of The Duke's Silken Secretary, Lady Brazinka moved to the pianoforte. While Swan watched her, starry-eyed, Eli and Lara excused themselves. They changed into roughspun clothing and strapped plain daggers--more like eating knives--to their belts. Though Lara also took her fly-whisk blowgun.

Nanny watched them as they crossed to the rear yard, muttering suspiciously while she supervised the laundry. Everyone knew, of course, that they were exploring the city, even if they didn't know why.

Eli checked the far side of the wall with a spark. He waited until a lamplighter passed, then opened the servants' door. Lara slipped through and he followed, scouting in both directions with his sparks.

Twenty minutes later, they left the Old City, and started circling southward, nearer to the point where the lake narrowed into a river. The air smelled of freshwater and cadic trees, which never failed to bring a wistful smile to Lara's face.

An hour after that, they reached the warehouse district. The streets were quiet, that time of night, but they'd heard that a handful of hole-in-the-wall taverns stayed open late ... and catered to a less-rambunctious type of criminal: smugglers, fences, and mid-level dealers in various unsavory goods. Not the bosses, but not the street thugs, either. And after more than a tenday of eavesdropping on army officers and magistrates, and briefly breaking into one of the lesser city archives, they'd learned nothing about any strange, long-time threat that fit the 'Killweed' profile.

So it was time to start stalking the wrong side of the law.

"--and then I says to him," Lara chattered as they strolled along, using the 'Cousin Ugenia' method of avoiding suspicion, "that if he didn't want her to know, he should tell me not to tell her, and if he didn't, I would. And you know what he said? He said go on and tell her, but then he'd tell you that I did!"

Eli grunted in response, most of his attention on the sparks following two yellow-haired, Southern-looking women toward a drab wooden door between a salter's shop and an alley.

A sign with a picture of a barrel and a drawknife dangled on chains above the door. Looked like a cooper's shop to Eli, which brought back memories. But they'd heard it was a tavern called The Hogshead.

And sure enough, when the women headed inside, his sparks caught a glimpse of a taproom.

"--so when Arthur says that, I cannot believe my ears," Lara said, clinging to Eli's arm. "How did his father find out? Well, there's only one way, don't you think?"

He angled toward the door. "Yeah."

"Either she told him herself," Lara continued babbling, "or he was following her around, which is just the kind of thing he'd do except--oh! That's two ways."

When he pushed inside, the scent of whiskey and tobacco and oilsmoke wafted past him. A bar stretched half the length of the wall to his left, backing against the alley outside. The opposite wall was divided into eight booths, each one recessed enough to afford some privacy.

The Southern-looking women crossed to the farthest booth and joined a party that Eli couldn't see. The shadows meant nothing to him, but the tavern was twice the length he could send his sparks, and the booth walls blocked their view. Three of the other booths were occupied, and he checked them with sparks without moving his eyes.

Four men and two women sat in one, two men in another, three women and one man in a third. All of them dressed like moderately-successful merchants, from what he could see.

He headed for the bar while Lara continued to gabble. "Oh, but Arthur didn't know she'd told him, and he trusts his father, even though ..."

"Two pints of your darkest," he told the bartender while she nattered.

"This is an association-only tavern," the bartender said.

"What?"

"Association only. You have to leave."

Lara gave him a fake-drunken smile. "What association?"

"One you're not a member of," the bartender said.

"I'm a member of all the associations," Lara said, sweeping her arm grandly.

"C'mon," Eli told the guy. "One pint. I, uh, I just want to keep her happy."

He was trying to appeal to male solidarity. It didn't work, though. The man asked them to leave again, and they'd already drawn too much attention, so they left.

Well, mostly.

One spark remained behind, to eavesdrop after they departed.

Eli closed the door behind them, and they stood on the street for a moment. In silence, as Lara finally stopped babbling. Eli started along the street, continuing in the direction they'd been walking, but after three steps he sidled into the alley.

The bar was just on the other side of the alley wall. His spark hovered inside, only two yards away, still smelling the whiskey and tobacco, still watching the booths, still listening as the murmur of conversation restarted.

"I left one in there," he told Lara, half his mind looking at the pile of crates in the alley while the other half watched the bartender polishing a glass.

"We're not going to stumble across a Killweed like this," Lara told him. "And you know it."

"We've barely started looking."

"This is like the tenth tavern."

"It's a big city."

"Yeah, and the only benefit to running around like this has been getting to know it a little better. Which is good. Great. But it's the only benefit ."

"There are three more Killweeds, Lara. Someone's got to be talking about them."

"Who knew about the Bloodwitch? Nobody except spies."

"Oh." Eli thought about that as he absently watched the booths inside. "Hm. Well, we could try to find spies ..."

"They're most dangerous people to eavesdrop on, Meek. If we try spying on spies, they'll catch us."

"I guess."

Lara wrinkled her nose. "I caught you. Wait ... are you trying to drag this out? To delay?"

"Of course not."

"You are! Why do you ... " She tilted her head. "Are you happy here?"

"What?"

"You don't want to find Killweeds," she said, with a faint laugh. "You want to stay here. To sleep in a comfortable bed and eat two big meals a day. To practice with Elsavet and Fishhook, listen to romantic stories at night. Soaking in the bath every night. You--"

"Don't be stupid."

"Oh, sweetie," she said. "That's adorable."

"You're such a hedgehead."

"I'm not--" she started, and he caught motion in the street.

Three men were walking toward the mouth of the alley. Two were big men, one holding a mace and one holding a hatchet. The third man was smaller, wearing a bandolier of throwing knives.

A moment later, a door opened behind Eli, farther down the alley. A tall, thin man stepped out, followed by a woman with a dagger in each hand.

Eli and Lara put their backs to the wall, and he murmured, "Not going to stumble into anything, huh?"

"W-we don't want any trouble!" Lara blurted to the tall man, raising her hands and--incidentally--putting her fly-switch near her mouth.

"You won't be any trouble," the tall man said, as the three men stepped into the alleyway.

"We only wanted a drink," Lara told him.

"Sure, that's why you're hiding here in the dark."

"Waiting to ambush us," the woman said. "Working for the Cobblepot, are you? Well, you chose the wrong broodblessed tavern. Cobblescum steps in our turf, we bury you."

Eli grunted in disappointment. Whatever they'd stumbled into didn't have anything to do with Killweeds. They'd heard of 'the Cobblepot' during their nightly rounds--they were a mundane smuggling group. Which meant these were just criminals afraid of competitors, nothing to do with the Celestials.

"We're not--" he started, and the small man threw a knife at his throat.