SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 863: Whoever Moves First

Trafalgar left the others at the tunnel mouth.

Zafira had the cycle tables and wanted another pass at them before the numbers stopped meaning anything, and Rhosyn had gone wherever Rhosyn went in the hours she didn't account for. That left him walking back up through the castle district alone for the first time in two days, which suited him.

He found Nerith on the stairs below the archive floor.

She had two aides behind her, both of them carrying document boxes stacked to the chin, and she was moving at the pace of a woman who had somewhere to be four separate times over. She saw him and didn't slow.

"Lady Nerith. Do you have a few minutes?"

That did slow her. She looked at him, then at the boxes, then at the stairwell above them where two other people were coming down.

"A few, yes. Just preferably somewhere that isn't a staircase." She waved the aides on without looking at them. "Take those up and tell Brannet I'll sign them tonight. He can stop asking about this afternoon."

She took him along the east side of the floor and through a door he wouldn't have opened on his own.

Behind it was a maintenance gallery, a long narrow run of walkway pressed up against the outer skin of the castle dome, unlit except for the working lamps every twenty paces. On one side, pipework and shut-off wheels and a wall of stone. On the other, the reinforced glass, and behind the glass a wall of black water with nothing in it.

Nerith leaned against the rail and let out a breath she'd probably been carrying since morning.

"Nobody comes down here except the pressure crews, and they already passed through this morning." She pulled the glasses off her nose and hung them on her collar. "So whatever you came to say, you can say it properly. I've had enough half-finished conversations today."

"You've heard about the body?"

"I heard about it before you did, most likely. A clerk from the manifest office, found dead in a drained channel on the outer edge of the second ring. Which is why I've spent the morning trying very hard to be reasonable with people, and I'm starting to run out of patience."

"You want to do something?"

"I do." She said it flatly. "There's a council the day after tomorrow. I could put the death in front of everyone and ask why a man who spends his days stamping cargo papers ended up dead the same week two new observers arrived. I'd be interested to see how four faction heads answer that when they don't have time to prepare their faces."

Trafalgar took the rail beside her and thought about how to put it.

"The part I'd worry about," he said, "is that one of them might actually give you an answer."

"That's usually what questions are for."

"Sure. But only when you can do something with the answer. If you put it to the room and somebody gives you something reasonable, and completely false, you've spent the only surprise you had and gained nothing from it." He turned his hand over on the rail. "Worse, you'll have told everyone in that chamber what you're looking at. Whoever did this gets a week to tidy things up, and you'll never see the mess they left behind the first time."

"So what are you saying? That I should wait?"

"I think you should ask questions that don't look important yet. Slow down anything they need from you. Make them move before you do. Whoever gets nervous first tells us more than a council full of prepared answers ever will, and right now the only person who should be nervous is whoever thought one dead clerk would make us back off."

Nerith was quiet for a moment.

Then she turned around and put her back against the rail so she could look at him properly, and Trafalgar understood that he was about to be told something.

"You know? You're going to leave eventually."

"Eventually, that is the original plan."

"In a few months, one way or another. The succession gets resolved, or it doesn't and you go home anyway. Either way, you get on a submarine and this stops being your problem." She folded her arms. "I don't get that option. Whatever is left of this family when everyone finishes being clever with it, I'm still the one who has to live here."

"That's fair."

"Then understand what that advice sounds like from where I'm standing. You're asking me to wait. I've been doing that for two years. Two years of careful questions, delayed decisions, waiting for other people to make the first mistake. And what has it bought me? My mother is still dead, my eldest brother is still called a matricide in his own corridors, and Corvyn's fleet has taken another twelve per cent of the freight capacity while I've been busy being patient."

"I understand."

"You've been here four days. Delay isn't free, Lord Morgain. People keep treating it like the safe choice, but it still costs something. The bill just arrives later, and usually without anyone willing to admit they caused it."

Trafalgar didn't answer straight away, mostly because she was right. He watched the black water do nothing behind the glass. 'She isn't going to nod along just because I said something sensible. If this gets difficult, she'll still be here arguing with me instead of quietly doing the opposite.'

He kept all of it off his face.

"Then tell me the difference," he said. "Between waiting and delaying."

"There isn't one. That's exactly what I'm complaining about."

"Maybe. But try putting it into words anyway."

Nerith stopped, and he watched her actually do it, which took a while.

"Waiting costs me and costs them nothing," she said eventually. "Delaying would have to cost them something. Otherwise I'm doing what I've done for two years and calling it a plan."

"That sounds about right to me."

"Don't agree with me like that. You were steering me the whole way and we both know it." She pushed herself off the rail. "Fine. I'll leave the council alone. You're right that I'd be spending something I can't get back, and I'd rather not find that out in front of Ondrek."

"That's probably the smart call."

"Then since we're being straightforward with each other, you should take this."

She reached inside her coat and brought out a bundle of folded pages, thick enough that it had been sitting against her ribs all morning, tied with a length of plain cord.

Trafalgar took it and opened the first few.

Household ledgers. Her mother's final year, written out by hand in a small, fast, careful script that ran right to the edge of every page. Kitchen accounts. Staff rotas. Physician's entries with dates beside them.

He stopped moving.

"Are you seriously handing me something like this now?"

"Now seemed as good a time as any."

"Lady Nerith." He looked up at her. "I've been in this city for days. You've spent the last ten minutes telling me I don't understand what any of it costs you, and then you put your mother's last year in my hands in a maintenance corridor."

"It wasn't easy to get, if that's what's bothering you." Nerith took her glasses off her collar and turned them over in her fingers rather than putting them on. "Those archives are watched. There's someone posted on that floor at every hour of the day and he has no business being there and everyone has agreed not to mention it. I couldn't remove a single page without it being noticed by dinner."

"So how do you have them?"

"I sat in that room and copied them out by hand. A few pages at a time, over three weeks, with a man at the end of the row pretending to sort correspondence." She said it without any pride in it at all. "So it's just a transcription, not the original, and it won't be worth anything to a court. I'm aware."

Trafalgar looked back down at the bundle, and the handwriting made a different kind of sense.

Three weeks of it. Sitting in a watched room, writing out kitchen accounts one line at a time, while being perfectly pleasant to whoever was watching her do it.

"I hope they help," Nerith said, starting back toward the door. "Because I'm running out of patience with all of this, Lord Morgain, and I would rather spend the last of it on something than on more waiting."