Back to Basics
Espire
The intelligencer had been far less useful than Alyssa had been hoping for. She could honestly not tell if she was being lied to or if the intelligencer genuinely didn’t know anything about the group of people. Alyssa had presented the idea that the people were still alive and had simply been detained in the hopes that the intelligencer would worry that one might betray Yora if pressed, but…
In short, the intelligencer had done nothing but deny, deny, and deny. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t know who the people were. And she definitely didn’t know why she was being questioned over the matter.
Seeing that she wasn’t going to get anywhere in the conversation, Alyssa started to leave, only to stop as the intelligencer got to her feet.
“How long am I going to be here?”
Alyssa glanced back, frowning. “How am I supposed to know?”
“I’m only here at the request of your princess. I didn’t do anything against Illuna.”
“Thievery is legal here in Illuna? I was unaware.”
“That’s not— It is my job.”
“Perhaps it is time to find a new job then.”
“Is that an offer?”
Alyssa blinked twice before turning fully toward the intelligencer. “What do you mean?”
“Oh come now. I am well aware that my countrymen are on the way out of this city. One way or another, they won’t be sticking around for another week. At this rate, they’ll be leaving without me. Even your princess has likely forgotten about me.”
Doubt it. Though it was true that Irulon hadn’t so much as mentioned the intelligencer since locking her away.
“I’ll be trapped in here,” she continued, “a prisoner of a petty crime, for the rest of my life. I’ll be lucky if they keep throwing scraps of food in.”
“They wouldn’t forget… would they?” The cell was in a fairly prominent area. Guards could see her while walking down the hall. The jailhouse wasn’t that big, so even if she got forgotten by some fresh guard on his first shift, shouting down the hall would alert others to her problem.
“This is a temporary holding cell,” the intelligencer said as if reading Alyssa’s mind. “If I’m here more than a month, they’ll probably transfer me to somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“That’s a bad euphemism to use.”
“It is quite literal.”
“That aside… I can’t hire you. You are entirely untrustworthy. I could list a few dozen other reasons why hiring you would be a bad idea, but none of them quite compare with the first and I’d rather not waste my breath.”
The intelligencer let out a long sigh, letting her hands fall from the bars. “Shame. Guess you’ll never find out what happened to those dead men you were asking about.”
Alyssa pressed her lips together. There was no point in pointing out that the woman shouldn’t have known about them being dead. Alyssa hadn’t referred to them as being dead even once. She had been careful to not use any past-tenses that might have given her away either. Perhaps she had slipped up or perhaps her overly careful questions were too obvious.
There were a few other things she had mentioned over the course of their conversation that the intelligencer shouldn’t have known about. According to the guards, she had received no visitors since being incarcerated. Yet she had just mentioned that her companions would be leaving her behind, which fit with what Kasita had mentioned the other day. Not only that, but she had given a fairly specific time-frame of less than a single week. Alyssa hadn’t let that little detail slip by.
So somehow, she was likely getting information from the outside. A Message spell directed at her was the most likely offender. A guard talking where she could have overheard wouldn’t know about the plans of the Yora people. That she had someone still willing to feed her information said, to Alyssa at least, that someone wasn’t likely to forget about her.
Speculation was well and good, but the how didn’t really matter at the moment.
What actually mattered was that the intelligencer wanted her to think that she knew something about the situation. She was either showing off how good she was at her job or simply trying to offer information, something enticing enough that Alyssa would want to know, in exchange for something else. Freedom, most likely.
Possibly a job if she had been serious about that.
“What do you know?” Alyssa asked, wondering how much free information she could get out of the woman before she started making actual demands.
The intelligencer turned away, not fully, just enough to put her side to Alyssa. A slight turn of her head made it difficult to see her face.
“They aren’t from Yora. I’ll tell you that much.”
Alyssa frowned. If true, that shot half of Alyssa’s theories full of holes. “Where are they from then?”
“Hmm…”
“You don’t know?”
“Of course I know. It is my job. I’m just wondering if I should tell you.”
“Don’t believe it,” Alyssa said instantly. “I’ll call your bluff. You’re just trying to get some concessions.” This time, it was Alyssa’s turn to turn away. She had really nothing to lose from just walking off. The intelligencer seemed to think that none were alive. Yet the one in the hospital was still around. Between him and Volta’s efforts with a possible monster, she would discover what happened sooner or later.
And if all else failed, there was always the angelic route. Iosefael or Tenebrael might know what happened and, if they didn’t, they could probably find out without too much trouble. Barring the Astral Authority resuming their efforts against Tenebrael following the annihilation of the demons and the falling of the Justice, Alyssa was expecting someone with wings and a halo to show up any day now.
But until then, she wasn’t the kind of person to just sit around waiting for answers to fall into her lap.
“They were bounty hunters,” the intelligencer said just as Alyssa reached the end of the hall.
Turning around, Alyssa found the woman back up against the bars, practically pressing against them to see down the hall. Both her hands were clamped around the bars tight enough to turn her knuckles white. Alyssa had to stop and stare for a moment, wondering if she was actually that frightened about being left and forgotten inside some dungeon.
If the intelligencer knew that she had accurate intelligence and thought that Alyssa wouldn’t figure it out on her own, the correct play would have been to allow Alyssa’s departure. Later on, a theoretical more desperate Alyssa would have come back, far more willing to agree to whatever demands the intelligencer had. The intelligencer couldn’t have known about the angels aspect, but her desperation here probably meant that she knew there was more information out there. She might even know about the one survivor…
Or she just trusted that Irulon would be able to work it out if Irulon actually set her mind to it.
Regardless of the why, the power dynamic had shifted. So Alyssa slowly turned back. She pretended to ignore the flicker of relief on the intelligencer’s face as she approached the bars again. “Bounty hunters? The guild said they weren’t aware of anyone out there.”
“Not guild aligned. There are other bounty hunters out there. Annoying to find and even more annoying to hire, but plenty of people don’t like their dirty work going on the guild’s records.”
“People like you?”
“Of course.”
Alyssa nodded, not at all surprised. “Then these particular bounty hunters were also hired by you?”
The intelligencer pressed her lips together, staring for a long moment. “Look. The higher-ups back home want things done. Things that we aren’t equipped to deal with out here in the middle of nowhere.”
While Alyssa would hardly call Illuna the middle of nowhere, she somewhat understood what the intelligencer was getting at. And what their plan was. “Your friends want to kidnap a few monsters for whatever reason. You can’t do it yourselves and you can’t hire the local guild—they probably want to keep on good terms with the government here, after all. So your friends pack up and leave, disappointed in Martin’s decisions and possibly threatening retribution. Meanwhile your bounty hunters go kidnap a few monsters. You get what you want without having to get your hands dirty or come into any real conflict with Illuna, Yora leadership gets what they want, and Martin is left with some threats and some angry monsters on his doorstep.
“Except the plan has failed. The bounty hunters are dead. So what is the next step? Yora goes home empty handed?”
“The retainer? Disgrace himself with failure?” She scoffed, looking off to the side. “He’ll be getting desperate after this. Maybe even make a fool of himself in front of Steward Martin. I was supposed to be our key to getting what we wanted. A bit of dirt here, a bit of blackmail there. But here I am, trapped thanks to a foolish blunder on the part of my contacts in the city.”
“You expect me to believe that you don’t have a way of getting information in and out of this cell? I already know that you know a lot of things that have happened since you’ve been locked up.” Blackmail surely didn’t need her physically present. In fact, being trapped in a cell seemed like a great alibi for not having anything to do with the situation. Though the alibi fell apart entirely by saying all that…
Just what is her angle.
“I’ve been stripped of my spell cards. None of the guards here are on my payroll. Getting word out is not as simple as you might think. But information in? In is easy. I have a ton of contacts constantly feeding me information via Message spells. Most don’t even realize that I’ve been incarcerated. Or… at least… didn’t realize. The information coming in took a sharp drop over the past two days. I’ve… started worrying that the next thing I get in is going to be a knife across my throat.”
“You’re going to be assassinated?”
“I know things. I told you, it is my job to know things. Plenty of the things I know would politically harm Yora as a whole, maybe even enough to put Valorous and Decorous in a precarious situation over in Lyria. If Retainer Deezer got word that the bounty hunters were wiped out and put the word out that he suspected me of betraying them, it would certainly explain the information cut-off.”
“So you decided to tell me all this, preemptively betraying them just in case. Again, I find it incredibly difficult to find you trustworthy at all. This conversation really hasn’t done you any favors if you’re still trying to get hired by me or Irulon.”
“I know Princess Irulon by reputation. She could keep me safe from whatever they might send my way. And being under the protection of the royal family will dissuade a good number of assassins. If I have to spill everything I know, I’m fine with that. But I would prefer to go sooner rather than later, if it is all the same to you. If this were Lyria, I’m sure I would have been dead on the first night. I should thank Tenebrael that Illuna isn’t full of cutthroats and murderers. I should also thank Tenebrael that you showed up at all. I asked the guards the other day if they would get into contact with Princess Irulon, but I do not believe they did.”
Alyssa didn’t think so either. She had checked in with Irulon every single night since the research started, and was pretty sure she would have heard something about that. Unless, of course, Irulon hadn’t bothered to tell her. She was once again deep in her research to the point where Alyssa wasn’t sure that she was consciously answering questions when Alyssa showed up to ask them.
“How long would you say you had?”
“Hard question to answer,” she said, glancing to the thin barred window high in the cell. The sun hadn’t set yet, but it was quickly approaching the rings of the planet. “I would be surprised if they could find someone by morning. Things like this take a bit of planning. It isn’t easy to just walk into a place like this. It was designed with only one entrance. As long as the guards do their jobs and don’t accept bribes, it could be a few days. Were I in charge of assassinating myself, I would probably want to wait until I’m being transferred elsewhere. Moving targets are much softer. But knowing that I have lots of damning information in my head, I might be willing to take a few risks.”
The intelligencer spoke calmly about her own impending demise, but her hands were still gripped around the bars. It was enough to make Alyssa sigh. She couldn’t just let someone possibly get murdered. Probably not today was a terrible way to talk about her own death.
There was still the possibility that none of it was true. The intelligencer could be making the entire thing up in order to get out, upon which she would drop a smoke bomb and disappear like some kind of ninja. Or maybe even not disappear, but rather stick around and spy on Irulon for Yora. Not that Alyssa thought there was much to spy on at the moment. In fact, since entering Illuna, Irulon really hadn’t done much aside from magical research.
Which might be fascinating to spies, but was probably useless research in general. As far as Alyssa knew, Irulon was singularly unique in having two souls within her body.
“Poison might actually be the best method for assassinating me,” the inquisitor said, apparently thinking aloud more than actually talking to Alyssa. “In fact, yes. If I were in charge of assassinating me, I would definitely pick the food vector. A little nightshade leaf mixed into the slop they feed me would be hard to detect and would put me in the ground in a single meal. Even if I didn’t eat it all, the delirium and memory loss would ensure that I wouldn’t be able to effectively communicate.”
“Alright,” Alyssa started to say, only to get interrupted by the intelligencer.
“You’ll get me out?” she asked, perking up.
“No. I’ll get you food and—”
“That’s just the way that I would carry out this mission. But I’ve always preferred the more subtle touch with the least amount of failure points. If that boorish oaf of a retainer is directing things, I wouldn’t be surprised to find an arcanist standing outside my cell with an explosion spell in hand.”
“Which is why, if you’ll let me finish a sentence, I’ll be spending the night here.”
The intelligencer’s eyes narrowed. “So you can die too when an assassin shows up?”
“Hardly. I’ve decided that I am rather tough to kill. Especially when I’ve got friends around. All I have to do is call up Fela and Kasita and we’ll be untouchable.” Mostly. Alyssa wouldn’t let her guard down. Fela, with her sense of smell and hearing, would be able to notice people approaching. As long as she didn’t fall asleep. Kasita never seemed to sleep much at all so she could stay awake on a more permanent basis. Her ability to detect invisible or otherwise cloaked individuals would be handy as well.
This could all be some sort of trap in addition to a regular assassination attempt. Alyssa couldn’t discount that possibility.
“Why not just take custody of me, imprison me at your own place.”
“At the guild?” Alyssa tapped her knuckles against the bars. “This seems pretty sturdy. Don’t know that I can say the same about the guild rooms. They have windows without any glass and big doors that don’t have locks.”
“I won’t try to run.”
“We just established that you are perhaps the least trustworthy person I’ve ever met. And that includes Cid.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Alyssa shook her head. “I’m going to step out for a moment and contact some help. And maybe have Kasita bring us some food. Tomorrow, maybe, if you behave, I’ll speak with Irulon about your situation.”
“Why not tonight?”
“You’re lucky I’m not asking tonight. She would undoubtedly tell me to quit wasting my time.”
If she didn’t try to assassinate the intelligencer herself. But Alyssa doubted it. The intelligencer wasn’t an issue anymore in Irulon’s eyes. But she probably wouldn’t bother to stop an assassination.
Alyssa honestly didn’t know what she would do about the woman in the long-term. She couldn’t spend every night at the jailhouse. Maybe it would be better to simply release her. Let her figure things out on her own. In a world like Nod, it would surely be an easy task to disappear to elsewhere, create a new identity, and probably go right back to spying on people. If the intelligencer knew half as much as she implied, and had as many contacts as she seemed to have, getting a new identity probably wouldn’t even be an inconvenience.
But for now, for at least this one night, Alyssa could sit around.
And if the intelligencer happened to let a few more details slip, all the better.
Thanks for the chapter. No stray words to prod.