SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 869: Pair of Eyes

"I can't give you that," Trafalgar said. "You're asking for protection with what you've told me..."

Skeff took it without any visible reaction, which somehow made it harder to say the rest.

"I want to be straight with you about why. I don't command anybody in this city. Not one soldier, not one guard post. I can't put you in a room in the castle district, because nothing about this place belongs to me, and everyone will be asking questions about why you were in it."

He let that settle before continuing. "And I can't ask Myrrhvale for a watch on you without telling them what you are to me. The moment an observer asks for protection for a manifest supervisor, everyone in Meraval knows that supervisor has something to say."

"Right." Skeff turned the jug a little in his hands. "I did wonder about that part. I thought maybe there was some arrangement I didn't know about."

"There isn't. I've got exactly as much authority down here as you do."

"That's a strange thing to hear from a Morgain."

"It's the truth, even though it feels like shit right now."

Skeff looked at the dead machinery along the wall for a while, and when he spoke again it was in the same worn-down register he'd used for the price of water.

"Well. I've been alive fifty-one years and nobody's ever handed me anything I asked for, so I'm not going to be dramatic about it. Is there something you can do, or should I go home and stop wasting both our evenings?"

"There's one thing." Trafalgar gave him all of it. "I have one person with me. She isn't a soldier and she can't stop anybody. What she can do is know where you are. She'll have you in sight most of the day and she'll know which door you went through at night. If you don't come back out of it, somebody will be aware within the hour."

"One person?"

"One."

"For a man who's already had one clerk out of his office end up in a drained channel." Skeff said it without any edge, as a man reading out a figure. "That's thin."

"It is."

"But it's more than I had this morning." He picked at the handle of the jug with his thumbnail. "All right. I'll take it. I keep regular hours, I go home the same way every night and I've done it for eleven years, so she won't have to work hard to learn the route. And I'd rather not meet her. If I don't know what she looks like, I can't give her away when somebody asks me."

'That,' Trafalgar thought, 'is a better instinct than most of the people I've worked with have ever had.'

"Understood. When do I get what you're holding?"

"Give me three days." Skeff finally lifted his eyes off the floor. "Not because I'm playing with you. Because what I've got isn't in my head, and where it is right now, I can't go and collect it without somebody seeing me do it."

…

He told the other two that night, in Zafira's place above the channel, with the old woman downstairs pointedly finding things to do.

Zafira didn't even wait for him to finish explaining. "I can have someone on him by midnight."

"Zafira."

"I mean it. We've got four people in this city and two of them are good at exactly this. They'd never be seen, he'd never know they existed, and your man gets to keep breathing while he goes and digs up whatever he's buried." She had gone very direct, all the lightness gone out of her. "Say the word and it's done before he's finished his dinner."

Trafalgar could see the shape of the next month with that yes in it. It looked better in every direction, which only made it harder to ignore what accepting would actually cost him.

"If we take any people and put them on a Myrrhvale witness," he said, "that's a second Great House operating inside another family's succession. Which is the exact crime Lyren brought me here to find."

"Nobody would know."

"Somebody always knows. And the moment anybody does, every word that man gives me is finished." Trafalgar leaned forward on his knees. "They wouldn't even have to prove you changed anything. They'd only have to say it in a room with Ithanne in it."

He opened one hand as he continued. "A Zar'khael protected the witness. After that, you will not be an observer anymore. You'll be a foreign house running an agent, and you will lose the right to accuse a single person in this city of doing the exact same thing."

"Then what makes Rhosyn different?" Zafira asked. "Because from where I'm sitting, that's the same thing with fewer people."

"It isn't, and I know how it looks." He nodded toward Rhosyn without turning his head. "She has no house. No name behind her, nobody she answers to except me."

Trafalgar paused briefly before finishing the point. "She's my hand. An observer keeping an eye on a witness through someone already attached to him is one thing. Your two would be Zar'khael's hand inside Myrrhvale. That's a different Great House. It's the whole difference, and it's the only thing keeping any of this usable."

Zafira looked at him for a moment, and he braced for her to push. But in the end she didn't.

"All right." She reached for the decanter instead and poured for herself, and the offer went away as simply as that. "You know your own job better than I do. I won't bring it up again."

Rhosyn had been sitting through all of it without moving. When she finally spoke, there was no accusation in her voice, only the problem exactly as it was.

"I can't cover one man for a full day. I'd have his morning route, his office and his door at night. That leaves the hours he's inside the office building, where I can't follow him, and it leaves every one of the six hours I need to sleep."

She looked at Trafalgar. "You already know that."

"Yeah," Trafalgar said, holding her gaze for a moment. "I know."