The Fixer

The morning after the Emerald Diamond, with the meeting looming at nightfall, each of them woke to something of their own.

Randy rose before dawn at the Boot and found his old soldier's edge waiting for him in his axe drills, then sent a courier home to Hans with twenty gold and a note that he might be gone a while. Biz woke to find his lucky coin warm on the nightstand, and for half a breath saw himself sitting across the room wearing a wider, knowing smile that was not his own; then the coin went cold, the room was empty, and he blamed the brown liquor. Aelion dreamt of a field beneath two moons, one white and familiar, one so blue it made his eyes ache — he reached toward the blue one, felt the space between them fold, and woke standing three feet from his bed with the crystal pendant at his throat humming a single sustained note. And Worm, earlier that night, had watched his own shadow lengthen and reach toward the window with fingers that were not his. He did not seem surprised. He did not seem afraid. He went back to sleep.

They reconvened at the Boot over plates of Hammond's scrape-the-pan eggs, where a failed pickpocket revealed that Biz sees the world in greys and browns. They argued about whether to bother with Maren's attendant at the pit, decided against it, and made for the Ashveil estate directly. On the way Biz ran a bump-and-grab on a distracted nobleman that ended with Worm fumbling the lift and a chorus of shouting for the King's Guard; Randy walked on ahead pretending not to know them. They regrouped at a stone facade with the name Ashveil chiselled above the door.

Marshall, the hunchbacked, big-eared servant, dismissed them at the threshold until Maren Ashveil herself appeared, unimpressed that a full night of her gold had bought no discernible progress. Biz salvaged it by reporting the meeting set for nightfall, and Maren gave them the run of her late husband's study.

Under a thin layer of dust and the boot-prints of the constabulary, Aelion found three things: a shipping manifest stamped with the seal of House Betony, carrying Dale's own note in the margin — G wants this moved before the 14th; a scrap of paper on which Dale had scrawled his dying word, The Fixe, the letters weakening left to right as the sedative took him; and, caught in a splinter of rough wood beneath the desk, a single curly strand of red hair. Randy traced a numbness in his fingertip to the arm of Dale's chair and named it: moon petal, a contact sedative common to the canal district marshes, enough to put a man down but not to kill him. Someone else had finished the job.

Marshall hustled them out the back when an important visitor arrived for the madam. Biz went around the side of the house in time to see a nobleman and his armoured attendants wearing a sigil of pink and purple spiked petals with serrated leaves — House Betony, one of the dissenting houses of the last war. They left with more questions than they had come with, and a working theory that Maren had not told them everything.

With hours to kill they sought out an alchemist in the merchants' guild district, a gnomish man in protective goggles surrounded by rainwater-fed plants, who confirmed the moon petal, sold them a refined vial for five gold, and threw in two small healing draughts. Flint arrived at the shop late; his morning had tangled briefly with the tabby's heartbeat and a glimpse of the world through its eyes. At Randy's asking, Flint worked the vial down into a single concentrated ointment, thin enough for the back of a glove. Some of them sampled the powder first, went numb and giddy, and came out the other side fine.

Night fell. They came up the service alley behind the Emerald Diamond, gave the password through a slit in a heavy steel door — Giovanna sent us — and climbed a back stairwell that opened through a false wall into the VIP hallway.

The room had been rearranged. The card game was gone. A round table stood in the centre with six chairs, an ashtray, a bottle of wine, and the Fixer herself: a human woman in her mid-thirties, red curly hair pulled back but plainly visible, green eyes, lean, in dark practical clothes, a leather satchel at her elbow. The brute stood at her left, between her and the window. The half-elf sat at her right, rings glinting. The hooded rogue leaned on the wall behind them. The Fixer did not stand. She gestured at the chairs. "I understand you've been looking for me. My people tell me you're persistent. Clumsy, but persistent."

She proposed a turn and turn about of questions, and let them stumble through the early rounds — the fighting pit she claimed to know nothing about, the manifest and the Ashveil name she handled carefully. When she learned Bremmick had survived, she smiled. "It seems I was right to kill him. Bremmick was a slob." Randy asked her plainly whether she had killed Dale. She smiled again. "Why yes, I did. And what do you plan to do about it? I fix things. That's what I do." He offered her a deal — give up her employer, sign a confession. She declined. "I think I'll be laying low for a while." Then she took up the satchel, said "Handle it" to the brute, and moved for the window.

It did not go the way she had prepared for. Worm vaulted the table in a wall-kicking lunge that startled his own companions, closed the ten feet to her, and put the moon-petal glove across her face. She went down before she had taken a step.

What followed was a brawl. Randy threw a dart at the half-elf, went over the table after Worm, and knocked her flat with an axe swing — and was clamped where he stood by arcane chains of her own making, held fast while the rogue came out of hiding and put a poisoned bolt into him at point-blank. Biz blessed the fighters, dove under the table, threw a second Biz into the far corner of the room, and warded Worm from cover while the double mimicked the fight above. Flint sickened the brute and then swallowed the whole room in a wave of thunder — which blew Biz out from under the table, glanced off Aelion, and left the brute staggering. Flint took the shape of a brown bear with tiefling horns. Aelion flung a knife of ice into the brute and caught his own companions in the spread, for which he was deeply apologetic. Worm finished the half-elf with a flurry of blows. Biz's double, from the corner of the room, drove an imaginary knife into the brute's ear, and the light went out of him. Only the rogue was left, and Aelion — learning at last what his sorcery was for — bent her to a suggestion. With her comrades dead, she set down her short sword and her hand crossbow and let herself be tied.

Randy hoisted the unconscious Fixer over one shoulder and the bound rogue over the other. Aelion took the leather satchel off her as she went. They slipped out the hidden door at the end of the hallway and down the service stairs into the night, Biz's double covering the movement, the thunderclap upstairs presumably setting off alarms they did not stay to hear. They reached the Boot without incident, deposited their mark and her companion in Randy's rented room, and Biz ordered eight grey waters from room service.