SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 868: One Person Notices

"Yeah," Skeff said. "Though I'd rather do it somewhere with fewer people in it."

That was a change, and not a small one. Last time the whole point had been the crowd, and Trafalgar filed the difference away while the line shuffled them both another two paces along the canal wall.

"Then what do you actually want from me?"

"I've been watching where you go these last few days." Skeff said it in the same flat, tired voice he used for everything. "Other people around here have decided you're an observer and left it there. But I don't buy it. I was standing at that rope line the morning they pulled Emrin out of the channel."

Trafalgar kept his eyes on the back of the woman ahead of him and did not let anything move on his face.

'Alright… Half the ring was, and I spent twenty minutes making sure every one of them was looking at me.'

The soldier had lost his temper in front of thirty people, an officer had come over, and Rhosyn had gone down the maintenance ladder and back up without anyone noticing. Apparently one man in that crowd had been watching the wrong end of it.

"I've no idea what you think you saw," Trafalgar said. "I came down here for Lyren di Myrrhvale. That's the beginning and the end of it."

"Maybe." Skeff shifted his empty jug to his other hand. "But you're digging further than the job asks for, and observers don't do that. I've had three of them come through this city in my lifetime and every one of them ate well, went where they were invited, signed what they were handed and went home. You could be doing that right now, and nobody would think less of you for it."

"You think a Morgain came all the way down here for the food?"

"I think most men in your position would take the comfortable version if it was on offer." Skeff finally turned his head a fraction. "You haven't. That's the whole reason I'm standing in this queue again."

The line delivered them to the station a minute later. Skeff filled his jug, paid, took his change without counting it this time, and stepped out of the crowd.

"Come on, then."

He led them away from the canal wall and into the working end of the ring, past the shuttered yards and the crews sitting out the water hour on stacks of crating, walking the whole way like a man going back to his office because that was where men like him went at this hour.

The streets narrowed. The crowd thinned out and then stopped being a crowd, and the noise from the station faded behind two rows of storage sheds.

After that it was pipework and overflow runs and buildings with numbers instead of names, the sort of place that existed so the rest of the ring could function.

Skeff turned in at a low doorway in the side of an old pumping house, half its machinery stripped out and the rest rusted into a single shape. He went in without checking whether he was being followed, which was either trust or exhaustion.

Inside there was one working lamp, a dry floor and nobody else. Water ran somewhere under the concrete, loud enough that a conversation would not carry past the door.

Trafalgar stopped three steps in.

'Last week this man wouldn't speak to me anywhere except a queue of four hundred people. Now he's brought me to an empty building with one exit, he got here first, and he's calmer about it than I am.'

A frightened man who suddenly prefers being alone to being seen has stopped worrying about who might overhear him, because something has already happened and he knows the listening part is over.

"Right," Trafalgar said. "What happened this week?"

Skeff put the jug down on the floor by the wall, carefully, the way he seemed to do everything.

"Somebody pulled Emrin's file. Days after we buried him, out of the office archive, through the proper request form." He rubbed one thumb against the side of his hand. "It came back two days later with everything still in it. Nothing taken, nothing added."

"And that's it?"

"That's it. It's nothing. Any magistrate in this city would tell me a dead man's file gets reviewed as a matter of routine, and they'd be right, because it does."

He looked up.

"Except the form doesn't say who asked for it. There's a line on it for that. It's blank, and it went through anyway, and somebody signed it off blank."

Trafalgar let that turn over.

Nobody else would have looked twice. A clerk would have seen a returned file and put it back on the shelf, and that was the point of it. But Doran Skeff had spent twenty-two years watching paper move through one office, and a blank line on a form was the loudest thing in the world to a man like that.

"So they're looking," Trafalgar said.

"They've already looked, which is worse." Skeff's mouth did something that was not a smile. "They've been through his file to see how much of it he wrote down. Next they'll wonder who he talked to, and I sat across a desk from him for four years."

"Then say it. Whatever you've got, say it now, and I'll do something with it tonight."

"No."

It came out with no heat at all, and it was the first thing he had said that sounded entirely decided.

"I've got one thing to trade and I'm not spending it standing here. You'll have it, all of it, and I won't make you drag it out of me either." Skeff picked his jug back up. "But I want something first, and I've thought hard about what I can reasonably ask a man in your position for."

"Go ahead."

"I'm not asking for soldiers. I know you can't give me those, and I wouldn't want them anyway, because twenty men outside my door tells the whole ring exactly where to look."

He held the jug against his chest with both hands. "I'm asking that somebody knows where I am. If I don't turn up somewhere I'm supposed to be, I want there to be one person in this city who notices it the same day."

Trafalgar stood there in the lamplight with the water running under the floor and found that he could not immediately promise even that much.