anticipate such—“
“Hog-crap, hog-crap! I know about the reports from the coast! You knew things were going to shit, but you did nothing—you didn't want to break your precious agreement with the Empire, even after the first time those pikers rampaged through my tavern! What, did you think you could just throw some supplies and prisoners at them and they'd go away? What do you think happens to the people they catch? They piking die! ”
“I don't set policy,” Ardent responded stiffly.
“Gonna hide behind that, are you?” His fingers dug at the soft material futilely, his teeth gleaming in the lantern's light. “Policy and nonintervention hog-crap and treaties that aren't worth the handshake they're made over? No, let me tell you the truth about your precious Regency. They don't give a shit about us on the outside—about the cities, the kai s, the unbloods who rely on them. All they care about is the benefit to the family, to themselves—“
“Shan Cayer,” she said sharply, “I am not here to debate the ills of the Regency. I am here to evaluate the Crimson threat and either eliminate it, or end our presence in Bahlaer.”
“End it? We're abandoning the city?”
“It is an option.”
“You can't— We're not— All my life, you bitch, I've—“
“I know your history, and we owe a debt to you. To your generation and all the Kheri you have brought up behind you. If we do pull out of Bahlaer, we will re-home you in any of our cities or retire you to Hjaltar with honors—“
“What worth are honors to the dead!” He lurched again, spitting with rage, and the way the cords stood out in his neck made her worry for his health. He must have put pressure on one of his stumps, because he immediately fell back with a sound of pain, chest heaving. “We called for you,” he rasped. “We trusted you to save us, but you let it happen. You let it happen!”
“You know that the Shadow can not penetrate magic,” she replied sternly. “We were able to rescue you because you were already in contact with the eiyets, but even that was not enough.”
Cayer bared his teeth again, but then the pain mastered him and his face slumped, his shoulders sinking deep in the black material. It made him look small and frail, a battered codger with two stick-limbs and two stumps.
“You could have saved them all,” he rasped. “The bar-flies, the waitresses, the families... It wasn't just us in that block. I wanted Bahlaer to love the Shadow like I once did, so I rented the housing cheap, I fed the beggars, I halved the protection tax, and people came. They felt safe there; they wanted to be around us even if they weren't a part of us. We had the biggest above-ground Shadowland in the north, and it was great. It was working. People raised their piking children there. Oh lord, the children...”
She didn't know how to respond to the sudden wet streaks on his cheeks. She had never been much for family or friends—her mother always away on Regency business, her father an unknown, her youth spent in private tutelage under emotionless eiyensuriel. Though technically just shadowbloods who had lapsed into the god's realm upon death, the eiyensuriel held half the Regency seats and most of the Office of Oversight, and thus dominated the rule and education of the Realm.
Ardent might become one when she died, though it was uncommon for a second-generation shadowblood and vanishingly rare for anyone lower. She didn't really care either way. While she respected them, she wasn't enthused by the idea of an eternal afterlife; the eldest had seen millennia pass, which made them distant and cold.
Emulating them had served her well as a lieutenant in Taradzur- kai , and as an Enforcer, but not so much personally.
She rubbed absently at the scar that marred her lips. It had been given to her by another unblood—a fellow Taradzur Kheri who'd been offended by
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