SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Moses set it out on the table without ceremony, and the room got smaller around it.

There wasn’t much. A few slim rods of dark metal like the one Trafalgar had turned over in the dark, their wire cradles corroded and burnt out. Shards of thick glass with a residue dried inside, some tarry sludge gone black and stinking faintly of something chemical. A ring of iron pegs. And the ugliest piece of all, a broken length of tubing they’d pulled out of the wreck of the nest itself, its inner surface eaten smooth by whatever had run through it.

”Alchemy,” Moses said. ”Or near enough that the difference doesn’t help us. Somebody was dosing that brood, and dosing it steadily. The residue’s in every one of these.” He tapped the tubing with a thick finger. ”This came out of the nest floor. They were feeding it into the thing directly, right where she brooded.”

Trafalgar turned a rod over and let the pieces line up in his head. ”That explains the size of her.”

”It explains all of it.” The captain’s voice went flat. ”A queen that grows past her tier, a brood that fights above its rank, animals staked out to keep the whole warren fat. She was force-grown and driven mad on purpose. Whatever these devices pushed into her, it made her bigger and it made her furious, and both of those served whoever built the setup.”

”So the wave wasn’t a beast getting out of hand.” Trafalgar set the rod down. ”It was a fuse, burning at the speed someone chose.”

Gerhardt had gone grey listening. ”So how in the deeps did the thing get here at all? Beg pardon, my lord, but I’ve worked this mountain forty years. Nothing like that lives in this range. Nothing like that has ever lived in this range.”

”It didn’t.” Moses looked at him steadily. ”It was brought.”

”Brought.” The old foreman said the word like it insulted him. ”From where? Through what? There’s one road up this valley and my people watch it. You’d need a hundred men and a train of wagons to move a beast that size, and not one soul saw so much as a cart.” He shook his head, hard. ”It isn’t possible. Someone would have seen.”

”It’s possible.” Moses didn’t raise his voice, and it carried anyway. ”Old workings run further than the maps say, and this range has been dug for three centuries. Half the galleries down there aren’t on any chart, and some of them cut toward country that isn’t Morgain ground at all. If a shaft in this mountain meets a shaft in another, you’ve got a road nobody watches, and you can walk whatever you like down it in the dark.”

Gerhardt opened his mouth to argue, and found he had nothing to put in it.

”We’ll be looking for that door,” the captain went on. ”The men are already down there. If it exists, it’s a hole in a wall somewhere with fresh tool marks around it, and we’ll turn it up.” He gave Gerhardt a look that wasn’t unkind. ”Your people didn’t miss anything on the road, master foreman. They were watching the front door while someone came in through the cellar.”

That took the fight out of the old man. He sank onto the edge of the chair Trafalgar pushed toward him and stared at the little collection of ruined metal like it might bite.

Trafalgar had stopped listening halfway through, because something had caught in his mind and refused to shake loose.

Alchemy. Devices built to force a living thing past its own tier and burn its judgment out.

’That is not tavern work,’ he thought, running a thumb along the burnt wire. ’That’s a craftsman. Someone who has done it before, on things that were alive, and got good at it.’

He knew of exactly one name that fit. Esmond. The alchemist Vaelion had kept under its roof for a century, the one who had opened his own patrons’ bloodline on a table, and who had walked out of Aurevane and into thin air with a hundred years of that family’s worst work in his head.

House Vaelion had thrown gold and men at finding the old man since Aurevane and turned up cold trails and shut doors, and they would go on turning up nothing, because Trafalgar was the one who had him.

That was the piece nobody else in this room could have guessed at, and it changed the whole afternoon.

Esmond had been sleeping for two years, tucked away somewhere a very short list of people knew about, held under so deep by Caelum’s own hand that he had not surfaced once in all that time.

Trafalgar had kept him that way on purpose. A living witness was proof, and proof only paid out the day you set it on the right table in front of the right people, so he had left the old man folded away in the dark and been content to wait for that day.

’And now I have a reason to open the drawer early,’ he thought, turning a burnt rod over in his fingers.

He needed no scholar for this, and no month of squinting at residue. He could walk into that room, put one of these in front of the man who had spent a century building exactly this sort of thing, and ask him a single question. Is this your work? Yes or no. If the answer came back no, the next one cost him nothing either. Whose is it? Which of your students? Esmond would know the hand on sight, the way a painter knows a forgery of himself.

Waking him carried its own price. Two years of a secret kept flawlessly, spent to answer a question, and Caelum would have opinions about that. So would Valttair, once he learned the old man had been breathing under his nose the whole while.

’Worth it,’ Trafalgar decided, and found he’d made up his mind somewhere back around the tubing. ’No proof yet. But a direction, and this one I can walk to.’

He gathered the pieces and stowed them away, all of it vanishing into the dark of his inventory. ”These go with me. There’s someone who can read them better than we can.”

Gerhardt watched the last shard disappear and let out a slow breath. ”My lord. I don’t know that I was ever meant to hear any of that.”

”A bit late for that.” Trafalgar’s mouth quirked. ”You’ve heard it. And you deserved to.” He met the old man’s eyes. ”You’re the one who actually runs this place. You govern it, you command it, you bury its dead. That’s your mountain out there far more than it’s my family’s. Telling you the truth about what happened to it is the least I owe you.”

Gerhardt worked his jaw, and when he spoke his voice had gone rough around the edges.

”I accept it, then. And thank you, my lord, for being straight with me. There’s few enough who bother.” He got to his feet, cap back in his hands, and something lighter came into him. ”Now. There’s a crowd waiting for you outside, my lord. Word’s gone through the whole town about what you did down there. All of it.”

Trafalgar’s eyes went to Moses.

The captain had developed a sudden and profound interest in the far wall. He studied a water stain in the plaster with the concentration of a scholar, hands behind his back, saying not one word and pointedly meeting nobody’s gaze.

’Of course.’ Trafalgar pushed himself up out of the chair. ’The whole town it is.’