NOVEL NEXT 88 – Oblique Maneuvering
Looking into the binder revealed a single, thick sheet of parchment - no, that wasn’t right. This was all too thick to be called parchment, this was more like preserved skin, tattooed with meticulous writing and glyphwork. The writing was ancient and meaningless to her eyes, yet it shifted in place, swimming through the piece of skin to reform into words and letters that made sense, revealing...
…A deed of ownership detailing the extent of the property and its contents. The most interesting part of it was the statement that bearing the deed will permit one to control who the property’s warding allows in. It covered things like stating that servants and livestock do not fall under the deed, or that bearing the deed will provide no means to enter the property’s restricted areas without the usual means.
She looked up at Crovacus, to which he said, “Lock it back up and put it away somewhere safe. It should work even in Fog Storage. Now, onto the other matters at hand… Your family registration - I need a family name. It’s fine to think about it for a while, just-”
“Newman. I’ve already decided,” said Zelsys, sliding the deed back in its binder, retightening the black cord, and closing the lock back up. She proceeded to do as suggested and put it in Fog Storage.
While she did this, she continued the conversation: “I have two things I wish to discuss, one of which is your mention of a Slayer’s Guild. You want me to be, what was it? Prime Slayer? What would such a position entail?”
“In effect, a figurehead position, a first among equals - separate from the guildmaster position. You would have a say in the running of the guild, which contracts are assigned to who, veto who can join in the first place, that sort of thing,” Estoras explained.
“The Prime Slayer is - as the name suggests - the most qualified in the guild to deal with particularly dangerous targets. Just… One condition if you do take it. The previous incarnation of the guild had been under near-total Black Horse control. They used this leverage to effectively shut out anyone not in their family, forcing them to either compete without a guild’s support, travel to another major city to try their luck there, or just give up on slayer work. You see where I am going with this, yes?”
“Yes, I do. And yes, I think I’ll take you up on that offer,” Zel nodded. She wouldn’t arbitrarily deny someone just because they didn’t kowtow to her, that wasn’t how she was. She did, however, fully intend to be very thorough in vetting someone’s true loyalties.
The governor smiled, “Outstanding. Would you prefer to take your payment now or have it delivered?”
“I’ll take it right here and now,” she replied.
He nodded, stood from his seat, and walked over to one of the shelves on the wall, reaching out for something before his frame obstructed the view. There were subtle sounds of sliding and clicking, and then the wall swung inward, accompanied by a hissing sound.
Turning, he beckoned for her to follow, “Come, this will take a moment.”
And so, she did just that. A passage beyond the wall had been revealed, a lever on one of its walls, which the governor pulled when she entered. It swung closed, sealed itself once more, to which he walked to the other side.
The other end of this intermediary chamber bore a miniature vault door with two zigzagging keyholes and four dials. He pulled an elaborate key from his suit pocket, moving the pieces of its head around before he pushed it into the left-hand keyhole. With a click it sunk in and he took to turning the dials. Back and forth, back and forth, slowly turning the key as he went.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
It went on. And on. And on.
It had been ten seconds by the time he moved onto the second dial, and so Zelsys decided to bring something up.
“There’s traitors in your senate,” she said.
“I know,” the governor replied, unfazed.
She continued, leaning on the wall as she expounded: “They’ve been coming after me and mine since we came to Willowdale. First a locust ambush near a field. Then, a break-in by a so-called “Private Investigator” while I and Zefaris were away. That incident with the would-be-suicide bomber in the middle of the street. Most recently and most overtly, the assassin. Of these four, the latter three explicitly confessed to being connected to the Pateirian senators.”
Estoras stopped, turning to look at her with a steely stare. He looked aside for a moment in consideration, then re-established eye contact with a sigh.
“I’ve known them to be traitors ever since I took up the mantle. Zheng Zemin and Luo Mu were thorns in my side for years, and they’ve escalated to anything and everything short of open warfare to undercut me in recent months,” the governor admitted, turning his gaze back to turning the lock and spinning the dial.
“If you can think of a filthy political trick, they’ve tried to use it. After they realized that trying to whittle me down with stress and sleep deprivation wouldn’t work, they tried outright poisoning me with cyanide. Thankfully, my family has had to deal with enough poisoners to have developed special poison-countering glyph tattoos centuries ago…”
Second dial done. He moved onto the third one.
“Why not expose them? Charge them with “high treason” or whatever term Willowdale’s law books use for “get fucked traitor”? Surely, you could’ve built a bulletproof case by now,” Zel pried.
The governor nodded, “I could, and I have, but I know better than to try fighting them in court of law. It would draw the attention of far higher powers, and much worse, give them an excuse to act. Luo Mu especially is old, conniving, and enigmatic enough to make me wary of even speaking in the same building as him. If I were to push them legally, they would simply change their position, their tactics, destroy old networks and build new ones, and redouble their efforts to undermine both me and Willowdale at large.”
