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He was being so respectful that Luo Wei didn't quite know what to do with it.
Had she beaten Troy down so many times that he'd developed an actual inferiority complex?
He looked pitiful. She still had to criticize him.
"I told you to follow him and see who he made contact with. Why did you grab him?"
Snatching the man up like that, wasn't that tipping off the whole operation?
Troy lowered his head. "He was heading to The Temple to pass a message. That's why I grabbed him."
"The Temple?" Luo Wei's expression shifted. "Is he one of The Church's people?"
"He's Prince Alfried's man." Troy unhooked a copper tube from his belt and held it out. "We found this on him."
Luo Wei took the tube and glanced around. "Inside. Let's talk inside."
They moved into the courtyard and settled in the garden.
Luo Wei worked the wooden stopper free from the tube and shook out a roll of linen cloth.
She unrolled it. The cloth was covered edge to edge in cramped handwriting, dense with dates, names, and a running log of daily events.
This man had been tailing Hall, Laura, and Theodore. Their three names filled nearly every line.
January fifth through January twentieth. A full half month. Every move they made, under this stranger's watch.
After Hall returned to Siria, he'd been coming by every day to teach Rosie dark magic. The linen noted his arrival time each visit and exactly how long he stayed.
Laura and Theodore worked shifts every day at Escore Dessert Shop, living in the employee dormitory behind the shopfront. The linen had all of it: their work hours, what they ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It even mentioned Laura planting mulberry trees and raising silkworms in the dormitory. He hadn't been able to identify what she was raising and had written down his best guess , some variety of magic insect.
Worse still, he'd connected the dots between Laura, Theodore, and Hall and concluded that the owner of Escore Dessert Shop and the Star Luo Residence had to be the same person.
"He can't stay." Luo Wei said it the moment she finished reading.
"I'll go kill him!"
"Wait." She stopped Troy with a look. "He can't die yet. If he dies, Alfried will almost certainly send someone new."
A dead informant wouldn't close the problem. It would reopen it.
And who was to say the replacement wouldn't be harder to handle?
"We still don't know what Alfried is after. He stays alive for now."
Troy frowned. "But you just said he can't stay?"
"Can't stay doesn't have to mean dead. It can mean incapable." A sharp light moved through Luo Wei's eyes.
Troy hesitated. "So I cut off his hands and feet?"
"No." Luo Wei's tone was unhurried. "We need him to look perfectly whole, Troy. Just completely useless."
Troy turned that over and came up empty. What did 'look perfectly whole' mean?
Luo Wei handed the copper tube and linen back to him. "Wash this cloth clean, roll it up, and put it back in the tube. Wherever he was originally going to deliver it, drop it into that person's room."
Garbled information would draw a reply from whoever was giving the orders. When it did, she'd know exactly what Alfried was after.
"Understood." Troy nodded.
"And bring that man over. Throw him in the cellar. I'll interrogate him myself later."
"Yes."
He left. Luo Wei called for Bella.
"Has Hall Felix arrived?"
"He has. Mr. Felix got back before you did, actually. He's having lunch in the outer kitchen right now." Bella paused, then added, in the private way of someone recounting a grievance to herself as much as to anyone else: The guests the mistress kept bringing home were one more bottomless pit than the last. Mr. Felix looked slim as a reed, but when it came to bread, he put away as much as the swordsman, and he materialized in the kitchen doorway the instant any meal was ready like clockwork.
Bella did her sums every night. Other housekeepers ran their households with gold coins left over. She spent every last one and then felt guilty about it.
A housekeeper who couldn't save her mistress money was not a good housekeeper. But what was she supposed to do? They just ate so much.
Luo Wei, unaware of any of this suffering, simply said, "After Hall finishes eating, bring him to the cellar. Tell him I'm waiting for him down there."
"Mistress, aren't you eating?"
"Yes, go ahead. Not too much, though. I don't have much of an appetite."
After the meal, Bella went to fetch Hall. Luo Wei headed down to the cellar first.
Troy had already deposited the man. The vendor had one of those utterly forgettable faces, the kind you'd pass on the street and immediately forget , which was probably the point. He was bound with rope, his mouth stuffed full of cloth, making muffled, pleading sounds as he looked up at them.
Luo Wei nodded at Troy, who pulled out the gag. She settled into a chair.
"Do you know why we brought you here?"
The man shook his head, tears and snot streaking his face. "Miss, I swear, I don't know anything. I'm just a small-time vendor!"
Luo Wei studied him with something like idle curiosity, leaning forward. "Because you look too ordinary. Genuinely remarkable, actually. I don't think I've ever seen someone this forgettable."
The man's face went stiff. Then he burst out wailing again. "Miss, is being ordinary a crime now!"
"Being ordinary isn't a crime. But a small-time vendor, dragged in here against his will, still finding the nerve to talk back to me?" Luo Wei propped her chin in her hand. "That's interesting. You're not scared of me. You want to shout and make enough noise for someone outside to come investigate. Am I wrong?"
The man's wailing cut off. He managed a sour smile. "Miss, you grabbed me and brought me here. Can't a man call out when he's frightened?"
"A real small-time vendor in this situation would be too terrified to string two words together. Who talks back this cleverly?"
"Miss, that's slander. You look down on commoners. I'm telling you, I really—"
"You're giving me a headache." Luo Wei raised one finger, expression bored. "Troy. Gag him."
"Yes, Miss." Troy grabbed the man by the hair and shoved the cloth back in.
"Mmph — mmph—" The man seemed to register that this was going poorly. He began nodding with great urgency, apparently willing to talk after all.
Luo Wei looked down at him from where she sat.
"I don't like it when people circle around what they're trying to say. You had your chance." She settled back. "It's gone now."
The man's expression changed. The frightened-vendor performance dropped clean away. His eyes went flat and hard, and he struggled against the rope with real intention now, his gaze carrying an open threat.
Luo Wei leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
A few minutes passed. Then Hall came down the stairs.
"Miss Luo Wei." The boy's gaze swept the cellar in one quick, practiced scan before he looked back at her, perfectly composed. "You needed me for something?"
Luo Wei opened her eyes and tilted her head toward him. "Yes. Hall , can dark magic turn someone into an idiot?"
Hall glanced at the man on the floor. His expression was entirely earnest. "It can. I just have trouble controlling the exact degree. I might turn them into a dead idiot."
He paused. "There are many types of dark magic, though. I'm most proficient in Nightmare Curse, Memory Erasure, Heartbone Rot, and Soul Extraction."
Dark magic ran toward the vicious end of the spectrum almost by definition. The people on the receiving end tended not to enjoy the experience , body and mind worked on simultaneously, no relief offered to either.
The color drained from the bound man's face, visible even in the cellar light. The hard look in his eyes had gone somewhere else entirely.
Luo Wei considered. "Help me erase his memories from the past two days. Are there side effects?"
"Depends on the method," Hall said. "Temporary erasure is straightforward. He rests for a while and he's fine. Permanent erasure means he'll have headaches. Regularly. For the rest of his life."
"Ah." Luo Wei raised a hand to cover her eyes. "Too cruel. I genuinely cannot bear it."
A beat of silence.
"Permanent erasure it is. Erase it thoroughly. He was going to be in pain either way , better to make it count."
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