POV: baxil
Summary
Baxil walks the streets of Azimir unseen, every inch of him wrapped in tight crimson cloths whose tied-off tails sometimes escape his cloak and wave in a wind no one else can feel. Hand on his sheathed kattar, he watches for anyone in the crowd whose eyes find him. None do. These days he can be seen only by those who are looking for him, and touched only by those who mean to kill him. The blessing and the curse he never asked to share.
The city is haphazardly bracing for a war it does not quite believe is coming. He passes through an Alethi camp pitched in the place of the Grand Market — soldiers in concentric rings that they think are perfectly even but which, by Azish standards, want their chalked guide-lines around the tents. He half-smiles, remembering when he was the kind of persnickety man who would have wanted those lines too. On his way out he whispers, half-seriously, a prayer to the Prime Kadasix for whatever he is owed.
He has a meeting in one of the city's most discreet tea-shops, a place known for not noticing its guests. The bouncer leaps up and ushers him in by his code name *Master Crimson*; the man at the back of the private room, he warns, is an odd one. *You don't know the half of it, Ulak*, Baxil tells him, tipping him spheres that become solid as he drops them.
Beyond the hanging-bead curtain and the haze of incense, Axies the Collector is sitting at the table hitting his own hand with a small hammer, trying to lure out a builders'-quarter spren rumoured a century and a half ago to come to men who hit their thumbs while aiming for a nail. The Aimian is almost certain the report was a joke. The entry will go in the appendix all the same. He sips between blows, eyes watering when he catches the thumb square on. *Pain is fleeting*, he tells Baxil, smacking himself again. *The thrill of accomplishment is eternal.*
Baxil cannot drink. He holds his hand out over the cup of bitter black jaramon and concentrates — letting the imagination of an entire teahouse savouring the same brew leak across to him, and tasting it that way for a moment, the only way left to him. *You're sure you're not a spren?* Axies mutters, planning to enter him in the book regardless. In exchange for the small spren-bearing gemstone Baxil sets on the table, Axies hands over a fresh stack of the red wraps prepared in the particular way Baxil needs to stay in the world another stretch — the only material that holds him together at all.
As Baxil is leaving, Axies mentions in passing that *she* is here. The Herald. Shalash — his old *Mistress*, from the years before his blessing and curse, the woman he had been more than half in love with and may never quite have stopped loving — travelled with the Alethi army on campaign because their king wanted to interview her. She came back when the king largely forgot about her. She and the big fellow, Talenel, are both in an Azish hospital now. Baxil could go to her. He pulls his cloak tight instead. *Not like this.* He tells Axies to get out of Azimir — dark days are coming — and continues on. Axies of course will stay; the Aimian has weathered worse, and there are unmapped spren of enraged passion to be catalogued during a siege. Himself, Baxil feels he is one calm breeze away from dissipating like smoke off a dead fire, and walks the city hoping that someday he might be able to sit and sip a cup of tea like an ordinary man.