Lowe had always considered himself a tea man.

  It was a small thing. A link to something resembling normalcy in a city where the lines between life and death blurred far too easily. The simple act of pushing mana into a rune, boiling the water, steeping leaves, and taking that first sip had always been an effective way to calm him down. It might not have been as effective as one of Mylaf’s mugs of hot chocolate, but it was a ritual that, over the years, had worked more often than it didn’t

  Except, right now, his hands weren’t steady. Not at all.

  The porcelain cup rattled as he set it down. He reached for the pan - it was nice how Temple torture chambers came with all the modern conveniences - and it filled with cold water as he touched it. The sound of bubbling water was far too much like the gurgling, choking gasps that had filled the basement only a bell earlier.

  The Shimmerskin had died. Eventually.

  There hadn’t been much of an option over that. Not really. You didn’t fuck up a Level 51 assassin who could change their appearance and then pat him on the backside and wish him a good day. You just couldn’t let someone like that walk away after tearing bits off him until he told you all his secrets.

  The Shimmerskin had told them everything he knew about what was going on, right up until his body started failing him. The core mass had been slipping, his powers of regeneration stalling after so much punishment, and his voice had turned thin and reedy. At the end, he was more fear than flesh. And then Rook had stepped forward.

  Lowe’s fingers twitched as he flicked the rune to ignite the heating mechanism of the pan, and watched as flames bloomed around it. He could still see it. The way Rook had crouched beside the dying assassin and murmured something too quiet to catch. The way his hands had been gentle when they settled on either side of the man’s head.

  Then, a sharp twist. A crack.

  It had been quick. Cleaner than Lowe had expected. A quiet end to a process that had been anything but.

  Lowe gritted his teeth as he grabbed the tea tin from his inventory. But his hands weren’t shaking anymore. They were clenching. He forced himself to take a breath. They had what they needed, and they had done what needed doing. And yet—

  “Hmm, I hit Level 50 with that,” Rook had said, glowing briefly gold as he selected his Threshold reward. Then he’d stepped back, stretching as if he’d just finished a particularly satisfying workout.

  Lowe had barely noticed. His attention had been on Latham.

  The big man had stood frozen, his hands still slick with blood. His breathing had been steady, but his face had been unreadable. Not blank. Not uncaring. Just… still. He hadn’t said anything. Not to Lowe. Not to Rook. Not to the corpse cooling at their feet.

  Lowe exhaled sharply as the water bubbled up and over the pan. He lifted the pan and poured it into the cup too fast, nearly spilling as he overfilled. Sloppy. He scowled at himself, grabbing a spoon and stirring with unnecessary force, watching as the dark tendrils of tea swirled into the water.

  The Shimmerskin’s blood had swirled the same way on the basement floor. Lowe squeezed his eyes shut. Just drink the fucking tea, Lowe. He took a sip.

  It tasted like ash.

  ***

  "Okay," Lowe said. "So, let’s go over it all again. Slowly, for those of us who have recently been murdered and then set on fire."

  "Just so we know, how long are you going to be playing the ‘wah, I died again’ card?" Latham said. “Your man Rook over there’s literally been dying for the last year, and you don’t hear all this whinging from him.”

  Lowe ignored him. He was too tired to banter properly, and he still hadn’t finished his goddamn tea.

  Across from them, Rook stood with his back against the wall, flicking through the notes he had made. "Our late lamented friend said that his company was contracted a Fourteenday ago," he said. "On a standard ‘Watch and Wait’ brief. They were to use their Skills to ‘replace’ a number of employees at the Sovereign Bank of Soar and make a record of anything unusual that they noted."

  "Which probably included the Vault being robbed and a bunch of their fellow mercenaries being murdered?"

  "He certainly believed that fulfilled the ‘unusual’ element of their brief."

  "By the way, what did we make of ‘replace’ there?” Lowe said. “That doesn’t sound like anything good for the missing employees of the Vault.”

  “He was clear that wasn’t anything to do with his crew," Rook said, flicking to a new page and quoting. How the client makes space for us to move in is none of our business.’"

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Lowe hadn’t liked that answer the first time he’d heard it. He felt he was developing some serious questions to be put to the Warden of the Reserve. Because, after all, wasn’t the thing with Shimmerskins? People didn’t just casually step aside for them to replace. They were, most usually, violently removed so a new body could take their place, with the world moving on, none the wiser. He feared this case had already picked up all sorts of casualties before he was even on it.

  "But he didn’t know who the client actually was,” Rook continued. “Turns out our Synchler was a grunt rather than the Grunter. All he was clear on was that ‘Watch and Wait’ contract was replaced by a ‘kill Lowe and all his friends’ after the robbery occurred and a bunch of his mates were wiped.”

  "Because," Latham said grimly, "someone was cleaning up."

  “But that makes no sense,” Lowe said. “I’ve got both the Mayor and the Warden of the Reserve on my arse to solve this case! There’s no way either of them wasted a shedload of gold on a bunch of assassins to kill me.”

  “Well, someone hired an entire Out of Bounds company to sit and watch the bank well before you became involved,” Rook said. “And then, after all hell broke loose and bunch of them were killed, I presume the same someone gave the order to wipe us all out. Remember, the Warden and the Mayor are far from the only people in Soar with the gold to do that. Presumably, whoever is holding the Shimmerskin’s reins wants access to the same unidentified missing thing as those guys. And rather than see you and yours as a path to it, chose to view you as an embuggerance.”

  "Well," Lowe said. "That’s not fucking ominous at all, is it?"

  “Which brings us back to the Black Knight,” Latham said. “Is he paying the Shimmerskins?”

  “If he is, he chose to kill a bunch of them in the Vault. I think we all agree The Black Knight is unlikely to be a model of empathetic interpersonal relations, but it seems a touch . . . unlikely for him to have done that,” Rook said

  “Okay. Okay. So someone figured out something important was in the Vault. Something the Warden and the Mayor were happy to sit there undisturbed. In order to get it, we know they ‘replaced’ a bunch of Vault staff with Shimmerskins a Forteenday back. That’s a pretty substantial financial input - OOBS don’t come cheap. But then, the Black Knight - for reasons that, right now, passeth understanding - got in there, somehow wiped these very strong military types all out, took the aretefact for himself and left a ‘come and get me sailor’ message for you, little man. At which stage, the Warden of the Reserve - who had his own Shimmerskin keeping an eye on him - and the Mayor decide to get up close and personal with you and put on all the pressure. That cover it?” Latham seemed to have rallied after this little torture session.

  “Not quite,” Lowe said, spinning the manacle on his wrist around. “Because, somewhere in the middle of all this, I think Arkola’s fucking around too.”

  Neither Rook nor Latham reacted to that for a moment. There’s something about being told a literal god - and not just any god, the god - is taking in an interest in your daily life to make you go a bit quiet. It was Latham who found his voice first. “Excellent. Because what this situation needs right now is more stakes. Why the fuck do you think Arkola is involved?”

  Lowe held up his wrist. “This, for starters. It’s just the sort of unnecessarily overpowered trinket I’m likely to need if I’m going to make it through all this alive.” A memory of being casually backhanded to death in Hel’s house tried to surface, but Lowe pressed it down. “And the message when I received it in the Dungeon made clear that Arkola would be happy for me to have a chat about the case if I got stuck.’ And then there’s, well, you,” Lowe said, looking at Rook.

  “You think Arkola turned me into a Threshold Guardian so that, a year after I should have died, I happened to still be about to help you? Self-absorbed much?”

  “You can be a prick about it, but I think that's what happened.” Lowe was aware of how ridiculous that sounded. “You have to admit, it seems like a bit of a coincidence otherwise, doesn’t it? The Black Knight comes back, and - what do you know! - you’re here to help me bring him down. The more I think about it, the more I think perhaps I should take it up on the offer of a chat?”

  “Nah, let’s park Arkola for now,” Latham said. “There may well be a time when a visit to the First Floor is the only path that’s left to us, but I don’t think we’re there yet. You need to remember that nothing comes from that direction for free,” he said, looking at Lowe’s manacle meaningfully.

  “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport," Rook said. Both Lowe and Latham looked at him. “Sorry, I don’t know where that came from. The words just popped into my head.”

  “Fair enough,” Lowe said, nodding to Latham. “I think you’re right. I don’t fancy being in the presence of Soar’s supreme being either. I think that’s likely to be the kind of card we get to play once. “

  Latham was suddenly looking thoughtful. “Okay. Well, it strikes me that the be-all-and-end-all here is going to be whatever has gone awol from the Vault. We’ve got someone hiring Shimmerskins, we’ve got the Black Knight and we’ve got the Warden and the Mayor collectively losing their shit. We need to figure out what it is.”

  “I know,” Lowe said. That was actually the thing he’d asked Karolen and Arebella to look into for him. He figured, between the two of them - with their Skillsets - they were the most likely to uncover some answers on that front in short order. But the attack from the Shimmerskins had put pay to any help coming to him from that quarter. There was going to be a hard limit to the amount of investigation those two were going to be able to do while Hel had them in hiding . . .

  “What we really need,” Latham said, “is someone - and not a god - who we can get on our side, and who is too powerful to be able to be easily pushed around by the Mayor and the Warden, and also likely to have an insight as to what was being protected in the Vault.”

  “Yeah,” Rook said. “What a shame there’s not anyone like that.”

  “When you say ‘on our side’,” Lowe said, the beginnings of an idea forming in his mind, “exactly how long do you think it takes someone to get over being pissed off with me . . .”