Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 167 of 619

Tucker, Chalam, and Marco rode out at noon. Ajax watched them from the gate until the road bent them out of sight. Two days there and back, he had said. He expected the first day gone before they reached the port. They reached it by dusk. The road was dry and the horses fresh. Tucker set a pace that ate ground. Marco listened as they rode and flagged nothing. Chalam kept his staff across the saddle and said little. They came down the last rise with light still in the sky and the harbor smell rising to meet them. Tucker pulled up at the alley behind his house. "That is faster than it should be." "The road was empty," Marco said. "No one watched the turns." Chalam swung down. "Then we work while the luck holds." They went in through the back. Tucker's doorman looked up from a stool and stood when he saw who it was. Tucker held up a hand for quiet and walked him through the rooms one at a time. Chalam went first with the staff. He touched each doorframe, each sill, each bedpost. He knelt at the hearth and ran chalk along the stone. Nothing answered him. Marco stood in the hall and listened to the house. "Six upstairs," Marco said. "Two men, three men paying, one boy asleep in the kitchen. None of them are thinking about us. None of them are thinking about her." Tucker checked the ledger behind the bar. He ran a finger down the last three weeks of names. He stopped twice, tapped the page, and shook his head. "Regulars. Both of them since spring." Chalam finished the last room and came down the stair. "Clean. No sigils. No marks in the wood. No working on the door." "She named the place to scare us," Tucker said. "She never sent anyone in." "Or she meant to and died first," Marco said. Tucker went behind the bar and knelt. He came up with a locked box and set it on the wood. He counted out silver into three purses. One he pushed to Chalam. One to Marco. The third he kept. "Ajax's share of the last two months," he said. "I keep the house cut. He gets the rest." Tucker finds six men in the city to hire as Ajax requested. Marco reads them as clear and the men go to meet Ajax at the cliff. They return to the brothel to drink and rest. Tucker looked around his clean house.