Chapter 483: The Cost Of Alignment
"I will think about the sponsorship," he said. "For at least two days. I will send Caelen a response by the fourth day."
"That is acceptable."
He paused.
"One more thing I want to ask, before we end."
"Please."
"The old soul I have been eating with. The S-rank cook at the eastern edge of the market."
Elenora smiled, faintly.
"I know them."
"They warned me about factional offers. About patron offers. About bounty offers. About quiet observers."
"That is good advice from a good source."
"They told me you were the safest first Nonagon contact."
"They are correct."
"Are they working with you?"
Elenora was quiet for a beat.
"No," she said. "They are not working with me. They have known me for a long time. They give hunters like you advice that they think is honest. Sometimes that advice benefits me. Sometimes it does not. They do not coordinate with me. I do not pay them. I do not ask them for favors. I visit them once a year to eat their soup and to listen to what they have observed. That is the entirety of our arrangement, and it has been that way for forty years."
"Then they are neutral."
"They are not neutral. They have opinions. They give advice that reflects their opinions. But they are not aligned. They give the same kind of advice to hunters who end up joining Ashen Carr’s factions that they give to hunters who end up under my sponsorship. They believe in the advice, not the outcome. That is who they are."
"Alright."
"That is a good question to have asked. It tells me you are thinking about who might be maneuvering you and who might not. Please continue thinking about it. I would rather have an ally who tests my honesty than one who accepts it."
Bruce nodded once.
"Thank you, Elenora Vessa," he said. He used her full name deliberately, and then, after a small pause: "for the honesty tonight."
"Bruce Ackerman," she said, using his full name in the same way. "for coming. And for the questions. Please take your time with the sponsorship. And please, if any of the other approaches happen before you have decided about mine, come to me first. Caelen will always be at the fountain in the main square at noon-equivalent. You can find him there any day."
"I will."
She stood. They stood.
The meeting was over.
They walked out of the Second Light through the small quiet main room and into the deep blue evening of the Spire district.
None of them spoke until they were three blocks from the restaurant and the district’s border checkpoint was in sight. Bruce did not want to have any conversation in the district itself, where every wall might have soul-script listening seals.
At the checkpoint, they passed through with the same fifteen-second efficiency as the entry. The B-rank guards did not look up. Bruce, Kael, and Theron stepped back into the warmer streets of the Guild district and the wider corridors of the ordinary city.
Only then did they speak.
Kael, first: "That was not what I expected."
"No."
"She was genuinely respectful."
"She was."
"Which means one of two things."
"One of two things."
Theron, quietly: "Are we going to accept the sponsorship?"
"I don’t know yet. I want to think about it for the full two days. Longer if I can."
"What are the pros?"
"Cover against Ashen Carr and the other factions. Access to better portals. Fewer approaches from the layer of hostile political interest. Faster advancement. The higher-value portals will give us better essence and better cores."
"Cons?"
"Loss of unaligned status. Being seen as Elenora’s, even though the sponsorship is not exclusive, the perception will be that we have chosen her side. If she loses political ground in the future, we lose with her. If she is not who she appears to be, we are more exposed than we would be alone."
"How likely is it that she is not who she appears to be?"
Bruce thought about it.
"I don’t know. She gave a good performance tonight. Which is not the same as saying she was performing. She might have been sincere. She might have been performing sincerely. She might have been performing while being sincere in the moment. Those are not the same thing either."
"That’s a lot of possibilities."
"That’s the nature of politics at that rank. You don’t know what someone actually is until you have worked with them for a long time, or until they betray you and you look back and see the pattern."
"Which is exactly why the old soul warned us."
"Which is exactly why the old soul warned us."
Kael, walking beside them: "Bruce. I have a thought."
"Go."
"What if we take the sponsorship for a shorter period than her three months? What if we take it for one month, with an explicit end date, and we tell her upfront that at the end of the month we will either continue or return it? That way we get the cover without the ambiguity, and she has to make her case for continuing sponsorship at a defined moment when we have the leverage to walk away."
Bruce considered this.
"That’s a good thought."
"Would she accept those terms?"
"Probably. She would probably respect them. It would tell her we are careful without telling her we are hostile. And if she refuses shorter terms, that itself is information. It tells us the sponsorship is more important to her than she is letting on, which means the actual value to her is higher than she said, which means we should be more careful."
"Right."
"I like this framing. Let me think about it for a day and then I’ll decide. If we go with a shortened sponsorship, we can send that as our response to Caelen."
"Alright."
Theron, on Bruce’s other side, said: "She mentioned Grave Ondar."
"Yes."
"You noticed that."
"I noticed that. She spent more time on him than she did on Ashen Carr, and Ashen Carr is her direct opponent. Grave got a whole paragraph of his own with careful language about how he was different. That means either she wants us to be prepared for him, as a real potential contact, or she wants us to think about him because he is important to something she is not telling us about."
"Which one is it?"
"I don’t know. But when Grave Ondar approaches, if he does, I want to be paying full attention."
"Understood."
They walked in silence for a while.
The city around them was in its full evening now. Lanterns bright. Streets quieter than the day. The last of the day’s hunters coming back through the Guild district with their evening hauls. Souls sitting outside taverns. The ordinary life of the ordinary city continuing around the three of them, indifferent to the meeting they had just come from.
Bruce watched the streets and thought.
He thought about Elenora Vessa. About her small quiet smile. About the way she had looked at him when she said you are going to seek power, Bruce Ackerman, because you need SSS to return home. She had said it with a peculiar mixture of understanding and permission. As if she was giving him permission to be the thing he already was.
Which was, of course, another possible way to be manipulated.
He filed it.
...
They stopped at the old soul’s place on the way back to the rooming house.
The old soul was closing up for the night when they came in, the pots off, the small work area being cleaned by one of the two older regulars who apparently helped in the evenings. The old soul saw them at the doorway and gestured them in without speaking. The regular did not acknowledge them, but Bruce saw them settle into a slower cleaning pace when the three hunters came in, which meant they were listening.
Bruce did not mind. He had planned to speak in front of them anyway.
"It went well," Bruce said quietly. "In the sense that it was what you predicted. She was careful. She was honest, or performed honestly. She offered open sponsorship with no cost. I did not accept. I said I would think about it for two days."
The old soul nodded.
"That is the right response."
"She said something else. She said the reason my talent has drawn attention is that the orb overloaded when it read me at the Guild. She said there have been six previous cases in Xiltra’s history, and that all six were souls whose talents worked on the fabric of the realm itself. Three of them were killed by political action. Two of them lived by not seeking power. The last..."
Bruce paused.
The old soul was looking at him with a small unreadable expression.
"I did not tell you about the orb," Bruce said. "I did not tell you my talent overloaded it. How did you know?"
"I did not know," the old soul said. "I inferred."
"Inferred from what?"
"From your talent’s behavior. From what you have told me about it. From the fact that a talent that can rewrite reality would be the kind of talent that overloads a testing orb built to grade discrete effects. It was a reasonable inference. I have not confirmed it, and I did not know before tonight that Elenora would confirm it. But I suspected."