Chapter 76 : Killing Intent at the Inn
The room went silent the moment Evan walked in. He noticed it — a slight frown, quickly smoothed — and then the innkeeper's wife called out: "Welcome, honored guest. What can I get you?"
"What do you have?"
"Rotterdam bread, Norma pasta, roasted sturgeon, caviar from the Sunset Sea, king oyster mushrooms from the Black Forest, strawberry preserves, and dark ale."
"Bread with caviar, a serving of the mushrooms, a dark ale. Two plates, two sets of cutlery, and some honey."
The innkeeper's wife glanced at him once with mild curiosity and said nothing further. The food came quickly. Evan cut a small piece of bread, spread caviar on it, divided a portion of mushrooms onto the second plate, and poured all the honey there as well. Shuang flew down to her plate and ignored the cutlery entirely — the food rose gently from the surface and broke itself into smaller pieces in the air, feeding itself into her mouth while she examined the room with open interest.
"The honey has been watered down," she announced. "And what exactly is that?" She was looking at the ale. She drew in a thin stream of it from the cup, and her whole face recoiled. "What is this? People actually drink this?"
The room laughed. The tension that had settled with Evan's entrance dissolved, and the noise picked back up. Evan smiled along with it, but he had already been reading the room. Several of the men were mercenaries — not locals. One had left shortly after Evan sat down. The ones who remained were making a point of being conspicuous: loud conversation, crude jokes, the deliberate ease of people trying very hard to look like they weren't waiting for something.
He had been a target for enough different parties over the past year to run the mental checklist automatically. The Church would find Shuang's presence difficult to reconcile with a lich identity — that cover was reasonably solid. The Gonno Society had targeted him once already over a relic he'd never had. The Silver Hand had an outstanding grudge from Kansas City. The Harpist Guild's client base was anyone's guess. And there was always the possibility of a bounty he didn't know about. He finished the bread and caviar and reached for his ale. All of this processing happened behind a completely unremarkable expression.
"I should mention," Shuang said, in a conversational tone that carried across the nearby tables, "that several people in this room mean you harm."
The mercenaries' faces shifted in ways they couldn't fully control. Evan set down the cup, flicked a gold coin in a clean arc onto the counter in front of the innkeeper's wife — "For the food, keep the change" — and fixed his attention on the men who had started to rise.
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Four of them. One with a spiked mace, one with a greatsword, one with a curved blade of the desert-nation type, and one notably thin man who — as he stood — ceased to exist in the visual field of everyone present. Stealth. Not true invisibility, but the practiced technique of thieves and assassins exploiting light and shadow and spatial awareness, combined with a level of skill that made the effect nearly indistinguishable from real disappearance for anyone not looking through the right lens.
Evan's lens was different from most people's. The moment the man vanished from ordinary sight, his lich soul-perception spread outward — and where it usually produced vague impressions of presence, it now produced something almost unnervingly clear. A bright figure, distinct and readable, moving along an obvious approach line. He suspected the clarity had something to do with the flower fairy's elemental sight layering over his own through their contract.
He stepped forward, body weight shifting, and brought the sword-cane around in the manner of a long-handled war hammer — not drawn, but using the cane itself, the force generated from foot through hip through shoulder, carrying the momentum of what felt like a cavalry charge despite being a single step. The cane head connected with empty air to his left, which was where the invisible man actually was, and the invisible man's forward motion brought him directly into it.
The contact was audible. The man became visible at the moment of impact, hanging in the air for a fractional second before flying backward across several tables, landing on the floor in a heap, blood from his mouth, body still twitching.
Evan didn't pause. The greatsword user had already committed to a downward swing — a powerful man with no sword-aura, relying entirely on reach and weight. Evan stepped inside the arc before it completed, the cane tip pressing once into the stomach's vital triangle with the same coiled-spring release. The man's legs gave out immediately. He hit the floor on his knees and began vomiting, loudly.
The mace and the curved blade came in together. Evan's body contracted like a startled snake drawing itself in, the two weapons crossing the space he'd occupied a half-second before, and then he extended again and the cane found two more points in rapid succession. Two more sounds. Two more men on the floor.
From overhead, Shuang pumped her small fist with genuine enthusiasm. "Yes — serve them right!"
Evan looked at the three who were still breathing. "Who sent you?"
Before they could answer, the door opened.
A man stood in the entrance with eyes that moved the way a hunting bird's eyes move — constant assessment, nothing wasted. The energy around him was a professional's: contained, dense. Behind him, a pale-faced young man with calloused hands. And behind that man, the mercenary who had left the inn early, now returned.
The eagle-eyed man at the front took in the scene — the bodies on the floor, the blood, the smell — and his attention settled on the small figure lying at an angle. The mercenary who had come back pushed forward. "Fourth? What happened to Fourth?"
"Jam," the greatsword user managed from the floor, still clearing his mouth, "he killed Fourth."
Jam Kinsas, mercenary — his expression went wild in the way of someone performing rage rather than feeling it, a faint ripple of magical energy moving through him, but he didn't close the distance.