Chapter 854: Ondrek

The Ancients didn't keep their people in the castle district, which told Trafalgar something before he'd met a single one of them.

Their compound sat in the third ring behind a barrier of its own, an older dome built inside the newer one, the way a family keeps one room in the house that nobody's allowed to touch. The stone had gone dark with age and nobody had bothered to bring the shine back. The guards at the gate wore armour that was at least two centuries out of fashion, and they wore it like it had never gone out of fashion at all.

"They built their own wall," Rhosyn said, tipping her head back to look at the top of it.

Trafalgar handed his seal to the guard and waited while the man read it twice. 'Inside the city, behind their own barrier, with their own soldiers. A second house pretending to be a faction.'

They were taken through a courtyard where the air felt colder than it had any right to feel, past a row of banners so old the dye had gone grey, and out onto a wide terrace at the back of the compound. Water ran below it in a deep open channel, black and moving fast, fed through a controlled gate that opened straight into the ocean beyond the dome.

An old man stood at the rail with his back to them.

He was thin the way a rope is thin, all of it still there and none of it wasted. His hair had gone white long ago and he kept it long, tied at the neck. Heavy scales ran from his jaw down under his collar, and the gills there moved slowly while he watched the water.

Trafalgar's core reacted before his brain did.

He'd been standing at Ascend for a while now, long enough to know what the ranks felt like from underneath, and this was two floors above him. Paragon, and comfortable there. Not a man who had clawed his way to it recently. A man who had been standing on it so long that he'd stopped noticing the height.

'Well. That's the wall, then.'

"Lord Morgain." Ondrek turned around without hurrying. "You've been in Meraval one day and you've already worked out that I'm the one you have to convince. I'd have expected two."

"I had help. Your name comes up more than the First Heir's does."

"That's because the First Heir doesn't talk to anybody, and I do." Ondrek gestured at the rail beside him, and it landed as an invitation instead of an instruction. "Come and stand where the air's better. I'm too old to shout across a terrace."

Trafalgar went. Rhosyn stayed a step behind his shoulder, which was where she always ended up when she wanted to be forgotten.

"Then I'll ask you straight," Trafalgar said. "Almost everyone in this city thinks Vaelis killed his mother. You're the reason he's still in the succession."

"I'm one of them."

"So why?"

Ondrek looked out at the channel for a moment before he answered, and when he did, he sounded almost patient about it.

"Because the first is the first," he said. "That's the whole of it. Nyssara di Myrrhvale bore Vaelis before she bore any of the others, and this house has never once decided its head by which child the room liked best that year. If you can put proof in front of me that he killed her, the law will remove him and I'll carry the motion myself. Until somebody does that, he holds the right, and I'll keep standing behind it."

"Even if you think he did it?"

"What I think doesn't come into it." Ondrek's mouth moved slightly. "That's the part outsiders never manage. You all want me to have a private opinion I'm secretly acting on. I've been alive for four hundred years, Lord Morgain, and I've watched this family survive three of these. It survived them because the rule held when the rule was inconvenient."

Trafalgar turned that over and found nothing to grab. 'He's not defending Vaelis. He's defending the order of things, and Vaelis just happens to be standing in the right spot on it. I can't argue a man out of that.'

"That's a clean answer," he said. "It's also very convenient for whoever's doing this."

"It is," Ondrek agreed. "Doctrine usually is convenient for somebody. That doesn't make it wrong, it makes it a tool, and everybody in this city is holding one."

Behind them, a door opened.

Two of the compound guards came out with a man between them, a slave by the iron at his collar, thin, maybe forty, with his feet barely under him. One of the guards said something quiet at Ondrek's back.

"Ah." Ondrek's voice didn't change at all. "The one with the letters."

"Third time, my lord. Out through the laundry gate again."

"To the same address?"

"To the same address."

The old man sighed the way a man sighs at a leaking pipe, and there was a spear in his hand. It arrived without a sound and without a gesture, three heads on it, the outer two curved back like hooks, the metal so dark it barely caught the light.

Ondrek crossed the terrace, put it through the slave's chest, and pulled it back out.

The two guards had the body over the rail before it finished falling. The water took it, turned it once, and carried it toward the gate and out.

"Forgive me that you had to see that," Ondrek said, and the spear was already gone from his hand. "For three months he's been carrying paper out of this compound for somebody who doesn't have the nerve to walk in and ask. He knew what it cost. He'd been told."

Trafalgar didn't move, and neither did Rhosyn.

He'd known from before that Myrrhvale kept slaves and that nobody in this city considered it worth a conversation.

"I'll be honest with you, since we're being honest." Ondrek came back to the rail and rested both hands on it. "It doesn't sit well with me that one of the Eight is standing as an observer inside the house I swore my life to. Your paperwork is correct, and I've read it, and I'll still say it out loud. You have no vote here and no business here beyond watching."

"That's the arrangement."

"Then we'll get along." The old man's eyes came around, and there was something almost warm in them, which was the worst part. "I'd rather not watch you do something an observer shouldn't, Lord Morgain. I'd have to treat you the way I treat anyone else who carries things out of a house that fed him. And you're better company than that one was."

Trafalgar held the look for a second longer than was polite, and then he inclined his head, because there wasn't a single useful thing left in the room.

"Thank you for your time."

They were back through the courtyard and out past the grey banners before either of them said anything.

The lights along the dome had shifted while they were inside, the pale blue dropping toward something deeper, and the streets of the third ring had gone quiet in that particular way that told you the working rings above and below were still going and this one had decided it didn't need to.

"He has power," Trafalgar said at last. "He also has a personality, which is worse. Power on its own you can plan around."

"He has reach too." Rhosyn adjusted the strap across her shoulder as they walked. "The Ancients aren't just old men with opinions, not if he can keep a private garrison in the third ring and drown a man in front of a Morgain to make a point. We should keep an eye on them."

"They'll be keeping one on us. He made sure I knew that before I left." Trafalgar glanced up at the dome and the darker water beyond it. "It's gone to evening already. We've still got Maela Sorrel and the Canal Houses, so let's find out whether she'll see us tonight."