Chapter 858: Body

"I'll see you later, Trafalgar." Lyren was already turning. "Be careful where you go."

Trafalgar gave him a nod, and Lyren went off down the corridor with the last of the administrators.

Toran had vanished at some point during all of that. Trafalgar hadn't noticed him go, which was what happened when a conversation took your attention and a man like Toran was standing at the edge of it.

He noticed the one coming toward him, though.

Black hair with silver running through it, cut long enough to fall where it wanted. Red eyes, dulled down, the colour of something that had been bright a long time ago. Dark clothes with red worked into the seams, and a walk that suggested the corridor could wait.

"Trafalgar du Morgain." The man smiled as if they were picking up an old conversation. "I wasn't expecting to run into someone like you down here."

This was the first time Trafalgar had laid eyes on him.

He went looking anyway, through his own memory and then through the other one, the crowded mess of a life that had come with this body. Councils, receptions, the endless parade of faces from the Eight. Nothing. He had never seen this man, and this man was walking at him like they'd shared a table.

"A man of few words, I see."

"Lucard au Vaelion. Alfons's older brother." Trafalgar let that sit for a beat. "I wasn't expecting another heir of the Eight down here either."

"Life takes turns, doesn't it." Lucard's shoulders moved in something too lazy to be a shrug. "Someone asked me to come and do this, and I couldn't think of a reason worth the argument, so here I am. What about you? What drags my little brother's rival all the way down to Myrrhvale? One of the handful of SSS talents in the world, standing in a corridor waiting for a door to open."

Trafalgar kept quiet and let him have the silence.

'He's interested in me, and I don't know what he wants out of it. Vaelions have always watched Morgains, so it might be nothing more than habit. And everything he's said so far is public. Any noble on the surface could recite the same three facts at a dinner party.'

"Same business as you, Lucard," he said. "How's Alfons? It's been a while since I heard anything about him."

"Hm." The sound had a shrug buried in it. "Without a rival to chase he's been left with his own company, and there's rather less of it than he believes. He'll survive. He always finds somebody new to stand next to and measure."

Trafalgar filed that away. 'Some people think Alfons au Vaelion is the future of that house, and his own brother talks about him the way you'd talk about a dog that keeps getting out.'

The corridor darkened at the edge of his vision.

Rhosyn came up on his left in black, the way she always did, black clothes and black hair and eyes that gave nothing back. Colour seemed to give up somewhere around her and leave the job to someone else.

Lucard straightened out of his slouch for the first time since he'd arrived.

"Well." He reached for her hand, already turning it toward himself to kiss. "Charmed to meet a lady this lovely."

Rhosyn moved her hand before it got there, without hurry and without making a moment of it, and put it on her own arm instead.

"Rhosyn. Pleasure." She was already looking past him. "I need to borrow Trafalgar du Morgain, with your permission."

She didn't wait for the permission.

Trafalgar went with her, and about ten paces down the corridor he glanced back and found Lucard exactly where they'd left him, hand still half raised, that easy smile hanging on his face without anything behind it.

'Everything about him conveys indifference, and the fact that a girl didn't shake his hand rubbed him the wrong way—in a way it shouldn't have.'

"What's going on?"

"There's a body," Rhosyn said.

They took the tunnel down to the second ring, and the crowd told them where to go before anyone had to ask.

The far edge of the ring ran up against the dome wall, and the maintenance channels there weren't the wide worked stone of the third ring. These were plain, deep, and functional, cut down between the loading yards to carry overflow when the locks were working hard. When the tide swung the other way, they drained, and half of them sat dry for six hours at a stretch.

This one was dry now. Trafalgar could see the tide line running along both walls at chest height, dark and slick above, pale grey and crusted with salt below. A few puddles left in the low spots, the smell of standing water and old rope, and cranes still swinging cargo two hundred paces away, because nobody was going to stop a shipping schedule over one dead man.

Myrrhvale soldiers had strung a line across the top of the channel. Dockworkers pressed against it, more of them than Trafalgar would have expected, all of them too interested and none of them saying much.

The body lay at the bottom, half on its side in maybe two fingers of water.

Trafalgar got close enough to see a plain coat, no collar, and a hand curled up near the head, and then a soldier stepped into his way.

"I'd like to take a look at him," Trafalgar said.

"Sorry, my lord." The man didn't sound sorry. "You're an observer, not an investigator. Leave it to Myrrhvale troops and Myrrhvale authority."

"Understood. My apologies for the trouble."

"Yeah. Best if you move along."

Trafalgar moved along.

He took it all the way down, the tone and the shoulder the man turned on him and the two dockworkers who watched a Morgain get sent away from a rope line. Making an issue of it would have felt excellent for about four seconds and cost him the only thing he had, which was permission to keep standing in this city.

He walked back up the slope until he had the whole channel in view, the drained walls, the tide line, the dry stone under a drowned man.

"You'll have to go," he said.

"I was already planning on it." Rhosyn was reading the soldiers, counting them, watching where they stood. "Keep the guard busy and I'll handle the rest."

"That part won't be difficult." Trafalgar rolled his shoulders once and started back down toward the line. "He already thinks I'm a nuisance. All I have to do is prove him right."