“Not yet,” Gyre said, pulling the basement door closed behind him. It led directly into a forgotten tunnel, which made coming and going convenient. “But it was a near thing.”
“Someday you’re going to run out of luck,” Lynnia said. “I’ve been telling Yora that for years. Not that anyone listens to me, mind.”
“Good to see you, too,” Gyre muttered.
The basement was lit by more glowstones, safer than fire around alchemical compounds, which meant everything was tinged blue. By that pallid light, Gyre could make out a large room, with a long, scarred granite worktop along two opposite walls, both covered in a menagerie of glassware, boxes, and iron devices with cranks and toothed wheels that looked like instruments of torture. Lynnia sat on a swiveling chair, working a tiny grindstone with one hand and peering at the results through a loupe. When she looked up, her eye was grossly magnified by the lens, pupil dark and enormous.
Gyre had no idea how old Lynnia Sharptongue really was, only that she’d been a fixture in Deepfire longer than anyone could remember. She didn’t look ancient so much as weathered, her skin wrinkled and spotted, her curly black hair hacked off short. She wore an eclectic collection of tattered dresses, sometimes several at a time, with protective leather gear thrown over the top. Given the tendency of the things she worked with to explode or catch fire, it was a sensible choice.
As far as the Republic’s tax collectors knew, Lynnia was a respectable spinster, drawing a modest income from family wealth invested in a Deepfire merchant combine. This allowed her to keep a well-appointed brick house in the West Central district, comfortably close to the Pit and far from the chill of the tunnels. It had a ground floor and an upper story, both of which went almost entirely unused. Lynnia spent her days in the basement, mixing, grinding, and very carefully burning the strange substances the ghouls had left behind and turning them into all manner of alchemical cleverness.
This was highly illegal, of course, but that didn’t seem to bother Lynnia, any more than the risk of blowing herself up did. At her age, she always said, she welcomed any sort of excitement.
“Everyone’s fine, incidentally,” Gyre said. “Thank you for asking.”
Lynnia waved as though that was of little importance. She flipped her loupe out of the way and peered at Gyre. “And?”
“And what?”
“The new stunner,” she said, barely able to contain her glee. “How did it work?”
“Well enough,” Gyre said. “It got the thickheads hunkered down just like we wanted, and knocked the Auxies sprawling.”
“Did you find a use for the other one?”
“Tossed right in a Legionary’s face,” Gyre said. “It just about slowed her down, but that’s about it.”
“The glass in those helmets shifts in response to light. Cuts out glare. I bet she’ll have a headache, though.”
“Good to know we can mildly inconvenience our enemies, at least.”
“If you want to take down Legionaries, I’m going to need more to work with than glow dust and black drip,” Lynnia said. “A bit of ignition oil, some drive stems—”
Gyre held up a hand. “Take it up with Sarah. She’s going through what we got from the carriage. Right now, I’m about five minutes from falling over.”
“Get yourself upstairs quick, then.” Lynnia spun her chair back to the worktop. “Chosen know I can’t carry you.”
Gyre edged past her, pushing through the narrow lane down the center of the basement not occupied by alchemical glassware or general detritus. He’d reached the narrow stairway at the far end of the room when Lynnia looked up again.
“There was a delivery for you this afternoon,” she said. “One of your mysterious friends. It’s on the front table.”
Gyre paused for a moment, then continued upstairs. The main floor was furnished much more conventionally than the basement workshop and was distressingly neat and tidy. Gyre shuffled over to the second-floor stairs, exhaustion growing in him with every step, and nearly forgot to pick up the envelope waiting for him on the front table. It was cheap paper, bulging and sealed in wax with the stamp of one of his usual couriers. Gyre put it in his coat pocket and went upstairs.
His bedroom was as ordinary as the rest of the house. Gyre made a point of not keeping anything incriminating here that he couldn’t grab in a hurry on his way out, to make sure Lynnia could deny everything if Raskos ever tracked him this far. Even after three years, therefore, the place bore few traces of his personality—just some of his respectable clothes in a dusty wardrobe and a map of the city pinned up over the small desk. Gyre shrugged out of his coat and let it fall, the mask in his pocket hitting the floorboards with a metallic clunk. Then he flopped into bed and closed his eye.
Plaguefire. He rolled over and looked down at his coat. The end of the envelope stuck out of his pocket. It’s probably a lot of nothing, just like last week. And the week before. But there was always a chance …
Sleep first. I can be disappointed in the morning.
He closed his eye again and took a deep breath. A moment later he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, swearing irritably as he broke the wax seal. He pulled out a few folded scraps of paper, along with another, smaller envelope.
Each torn sheet bore a few lines of hurried script, written in several different hands.
Doran Hardskull and his crew returned from the deep tunnels south of southwest. One man lost to plaguespawn. Recovered one antique armored suit, one blaster rifle, assorted trinkets.
Hina of Asclo back from looking for her sister. Found the body, died from a fall, but couldn’t recover. No plaguespawn activities.
Carolinus Redeye brought in a wagonload of debris from the dig at Gaston’s Fork. Some unidentified arcana that may be of interest.
And more, all in that vein. Gyre flipped through one after another, then tossed them aside.
He’d made the decision when he was eight years old. Lying in bed, skin slick with fever sweat, the gash where his left eye had been swollen and leaking pus. His father had cared for him. His mother, he’d learned later, hadn’t been able to look at him without weeping.
Even at eight, he’d understood what had happened and what had to be done. If the Twilight Order could do this—if they could reach into his quiet, peaceful farm, unbidden, and destroy his family’s happiness in an afternoon—then the Order could not be allowed to exist. It was that simple.
Only, of course, it wasn’t. People fought the Order—or the forces of the Republic, which amounted to the same thing—all the time. Bandits, rebels, smugglers, dhakim cultists. None of them amounted to anything, no more than mites on a warbird. How could they? The Auxiliaries were ordinary men, even the Legionaries were only soldiers kitted out in Chosen relics, but the centarchs were something else entirely. They had deiat behind them, the fire of creation, and nothing could stand against that. And the power was inborn—if you didn’t have it, no amount of wishing or training would ever let you wield a haken.
When he was twelve, he’d left home. He’d done what he had to do—been a thief, a bandit, a whore, a spy. Always working his way north, in the mountains, toward Deepfire. He’d come chasing a pair of rumors. The first was that in Deepfire, even after the failure of Kaidan Hiddenedge’s rebellion, there were people who stood up and fought back against the authority of the Republic. The second was that there were wonders still to be found in the tunnels under the Shattered Peaks, ruins so deep that even the Order had never cleaned them out, where the lost power of the ghouls still waited. The only power that had ever been able to stand up to deiat, the power to topple the Order itself.