POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna and the mercenaries arrive at their new safehouse — a three-story town house deeper than it is wide, palms on both sides to block the neighbours' sight lines, deliberately modest compared to Lemex's former villa. Denth approves of its strong wood paneling for breaking; Tonk Fah approves of its closets for storing bodies. Vivenna is uneasy at how, even at half the scale of Lemex's, the place still rivals her father's palace at Bevalis in size. They had refused cheaper streets; she did not want a neighbourhood where her Breath-bright halo would make her a target after dark. Parlin is out at the market for the rest of the furniture.
Denth briefs her on the cleanup of Lemex's old house. Hints have been seeded with the city's underground; a gang of burglars will finish stripping it tonight; the watch will assume burglary tomorrow; the nurse has been paid off; with no one to pay funeral costs, the body will be cremated for debt with the rest. Vivenna flinches at letting a fellow Idrian be burned by heathens, and Denth and Tonk Fah do not let it go gently — *didn't your father give him the money to buy those Breaths in the first place?* — and she has to admit, again, that she is not innocent in any of this. She holds his same Breaths in her own chest.
She kneels on the hardwood floor and Denth lays out plans. First, Vahr's old allies. Vahr was a dye-fields worker who, about five years back, started organising plantation hands to donate their Breath to him so he could revolt; the rebellion never had a chance and was suppressed by the Court of Gods, but the survivors are out there. They were never committed insurrectionists, Tonk Fah admits — they were the smart ones, who knew when to fold — *thugs and crime lords*. Vivenna does not like the look of it, but agrees to meet them: she does not have to start a revolt, only to make life difficult for Hallandren when it tries to march. The rest of the slate is more concrete. They will raid the Lifeless storage warehouse to muck up Hallandren's automaton soldiers without killing them outright. They will burn merchant caravans — priests own most of the long-haul trade and will be more hesitant to back a war when their stockpiles are burning — and dress the work as bandits or as remnants of Vahr's movement. Tonk Fah announces, cheerfully, hazard pay.
The door slams open. A grey-skinned, grey-eyed Lifeless stands in it with canvas bags over his shoulder. Vivenna's Heightening tells her at once: not one Breath in him, no colour, eyes that *track*. She is on her feet calling for Denth to attack before the mercenaries' joke lands: this is Clod, Jewels's Lifeless, whom the team has owned for months without telling her. Jewels herself steps in behind him — short, light-brown-haired, thick through thigh and bust, hands on hips — and snaps at Denth that *he* is in the city. Vivenna, cornered between her revulsion and her ignorance, calls back her Royal Locks to dark, sits hard on the wooden floor, and listens.
She tries, with Denth's patient prompting, to explain her objection to Clod; he turns her own Austrinist theology back at her — the soul has left, the corpse is only dirt; why not use it? — and tells her bluntly that if she sends Jewels away she sends them all away. She holds her ground but lets the Lifeless stay for now. Then he widens the question: the Breaths she carries are tools too. He can use an Awakener at his back. She closes her eyes. *I will not Awaken,* she tells him. She means to carry the dead spy's Breaths to her own grave so that no one else can profit from how they were harvested. Denth does not argue. He stands; if she will not, she will not; he loses only an employer if the work fails.
Jewels returns the conversation to *him*. He has Breath — Fourth, maybe Fifth Heightening — picked up, she guesses, off Vahr. He left a friend dead in Yarn Dred a couple of months back, the fourth member of the team: a duelist named Arsteel, near Denth's equal with a blade, whom Vasher is said to have killed clean — though Tonk Fah insists the blackness around the wound was cut out after the fact. Denth tells Vivenna his man's current name. *Vasher.* A joke on his part. Vivenna freezes. Black hilt, silver sheath, ragged man with a rope belt. The man at the arena yesterday. She tells them.
The room turns sharp. Jewels confirms what the description tells her. Denth swears at the Colors and belts a dueling blade to his hip. There are no coincidences with this man, he tells her: if Vasher was watching her at the arena, then he knows exactly who she is and where she came from, and he is probably planning to kill her. Tonk Fah lays a friendly hand on her shoulder. *He wants to kill us too. At least you're in good company.*