Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 12 of 42

Kevintor burned the kimono in her stove and pulled on a clean robe from a peg by the door. Lady Astella waited in a stone hall at the center of her house, a long council table down the middle, banners on the walls, a map of the district pinned flat under four iron weights. She tapped the pipe out on the table edge and pointed him to a chair. "Sit. You sent me a sack. I owe you a name in return. I don't have one yet. I have the road it walked." She pushed a stack of stamped report papers across the wood. Each sheet had a red header, a date, a route number, and a column of checked boxes. "Every message in or out of these lands goes through my runners. Every drop is logged. I pulled the last six weeks." She tapped a checked box. "Three reports left here that should not exist. Your route to the bookshop. Your handoff to the ramen woman. Your name on a list I never wrote down for anyone." Kevintor read the top sheet. The route numbers meant nothing to him. The dates did. They sat one day ahead of each move he had made. "Who carries these," he said. "My couriers. Twelve of them." She drew on the pipe. "Eleven came back when I called. One didn't." She slid a second page across. A name at the top. A travel record beneath. The man had ridden out the morning after Kevintor left for the bookshop and again the morning he sent the sack. "He runs the east post. He keeps a strongbox there. My captain opened it an hour ago." She set a small leather pouch on the table and tipped it. Gold spilled out, the same stamp as the coins in Bookster's sack. Under the coins lay a folded slip with three lines in a careful hand: the ramen shop, the tower road, the back gate of her own house. Kevintor put his finger on the third line. "He sold you too." "He sold the seat under me." Astella's voice flattened. "He won't ride again. My captain has him in the cellar. I'll get what's above him by morning, or I won't, and either way the leak is closed tonight." She folded the slip and tucked it under the iron weight on the map. "Your road is clean from this house out. One step. Use it before someone hires the next mouth." She looked at him over the pipe. "Rest in the spring at the back of the grounds. No one goes there but me. Tomorrow you ride for the scroll. I'll have the name above him waiting when you come back."