SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 874: No Warrant

Rhavel Sorn had left that reception with his drink unfinished, and Trafalgar had spent the whole of the next day waiting to find out what a frightened man does with a night.

He found out in a service passage under the second ring, four hundred paces from a warehouse nobody had put a trading name on.

The address had come out of Kesh's own tables. Three sealed windows, three deliveries in the cargo registers, all three ending at the same leased building on the outer edge of the ring, four doors down from a cooperage that had closed years ago.

They went at the ninth hour, when the yards were noisy enough to hide in and quiet enough to walk through.

The passages under that part of the ring ran in a grid, low-ceilinged and lit every thirty paces, built so maintenance crews could reach the overflow runs without crossing the loading floors. Trafalgar had walked two of them already. This was the first time he'd noticed how few exits they had.

The passage split ahead of them, one branch bending toward the dome wall and the other cutting back under the yards.

"I'll take the wall side," Rhosyn said. "It comes out behind the warehouse. Better to see who's watching the front before you walk into it."

"Twenty minutes. If you're not back at the junction by then, I'm coming after you."

She was gone before he could argue, which was standard.

Trafalgar took the other branch.

The first thing he heard wasn't footsteps. It was a hatch coming down behind him, heavy and unhurried, closed by people who had been waiting long enough to get comfortable.

Then the lamps ahead went out in a run, and men came up the passage in the dark.

He didn't fight them. Nine, competent, with three more at the edge of the light, which meant somebody had planned this with a headcount rather than a hope. They put hands on him, took the coat off his shoulders, and walked him forward rather than back.

'Forward. Someone wants me deeper in.'

They brought him into the junction under the yards, a square chamber where four passages met beneath a vaulted brick ceiling, one working lamp hanging on a chain in the middle of it.

Rhosyn was already there.

Six men had her between them and she was letting them, which was the only reason any of them still had the use of their arms. She caught his eye and moved two fingers against her thigh, which meant they were waiting for us, and he gave her nothing back because there was nothing to give.

'Both branches. At the same time. They didn't follow us down here, they were already sitting in both ends of it before we left the castle.'

Which meant somebody had known the address before he did.

Rhavel Sorn stepped into the lamplight with his hands behind his back and the look of a man who had rehearsed the next part.

"Lord Morgain. You've broken the terms of your oath."

"Have I?"

"You swore before Ithanne di Myrrhvale that you would observe. You've been in the manifest office four times, taken copies of restricted cargo records, and tonight you're three hundred paces from a leased property you've no business approaching."

He recited it rather than argued it, which suggested he'd been handed the list instead of compiling it.

"That's interference in the internal affairs of a Great House."

"Then read me the order."

Rhavel didn't move.

"The detention order," Trafalgar said. "Signed by Ithanne's office, a sitting heir, or the harbour authority. That's how this works, Commander, and you know it better than I do. Read it out and I'll walk wherever you want me to walk."

Nobody in that chamber said anything.

Trafalgar let the quiet stretch until it had a shape, and then asked it plainly, because it was the only question in the room.

"Under what authority are you holding me?"

Rhavel's jaw worked once and no words came out of it.

That was the whole thing. That was all of it, right there, in a man who had never in his life had any trouble saying who he served.

'There isn't one.'

Trafalgar looked past him at the men filling the chamber and did the arithmetic he should have done four minutes earlier.

Closer to twenty now, with the ones coming in behind him, and all of them a commander's own people rather than a mixed watch detail. No writ. No officer of the court. No cart waiting at the yard entrance to carry two detained observers anywhere, because nobody had ever intended to put him in front of anyone.

A real arrest is loud. It's paperwork and witnesses and a magistrate's clerk yawning at four in the morning.

This was a sealed junction under the yards with one lamp in it.

"You're not detaining me," he said.

"Stand down, Lord Morgain."

"You came with twenty men and no paper. You put a hatch down behind me instead of marching me out." Trafalgar rolled his shoulders loose inside his shirt. "You're not here to charge me. You're here because I asked a man a question at a party and somebody decided I shouldn't get to ask the next one."

Rhavel's right hand opened at his side, fingers loose, palm turned inward.

It was a small movement and it answered everything.

"Rhosyn," Trafalgar said, without looking away from the commander. "When this starts, you go."

She turned her head fractionally. "No."

"You go, and you find Lyren, and you bring him here."

"You'll be dead before I'm back."

"I won't." He said it flatly, without any heat, because he had spent the last year being taken apart and rebuilt by a Primordial and he knew what twenty men in a brick room amounted to.

"That isn't the problem. If I finish this alone, then tomorrow morning a foreign observer killed a dozen Myrrhvale soldiers underground with nobody to say why, and every faction in this city gets to write that story however it likes."

He watched the air pull tight around the commander's open hand.

"I don't need help. I need Myrrhvale eyes in this room, and they have to be the right ones."

Rhosyn stopped arguing.

The men holding her found out two seconds later that they had been holding her as a courtesy. By the time the first of them hit the wall she was into the mouth of the north passage and gone.

Four went after her, which meant four fewer in the chamber, and Trafalgar didn't correct them.

He kept his hands open and empty at his sides.

"Last chance. Tell me who signed for this and I'll stand here and wait for him."

Rhavel Sorn called his lance.

It appeared in his hand with a sharp crack and a brief flash of mana along the shaft before going still. Nothing like the weapon the old man on that terrace had simply been holding.

A long grey haft, a narrow head with no ornament on it, and a man who had spent twenty years learning to put it through people.

Trafalgar let him come. Let the lance drop level, let the step commit, waited until there could be no argument afterwards about who had begun it.

Then he called Maledicta into his hand.