The Eight Fingers Leader's POV
I had not removed the water priest's robes since the meeting was called. There had been no time. I had been midway through evening prayers, the performance of them, at least, the habit surviving long after the faith that had originally produced it, when the runner arrived with the summons, and I had come straight from the chapel to the underground chamber with the censer's incense still clinging to the fabric.
The other three were already seated when I entered.
Hilma Cygnaeus sat with her pipe trailing its purple smoke toward the ceiling, the poison in it diluted to whatever level let her function rather than die, her pale skin catching the lamplight in the specific unhealthy way that decades of her own product had left her. The snake tattoo on her arm seemed to move when she shifted, an illusion of the lamp's flicker rather than anything real, though I had stopped being entirely certain of that distinction after enough years working alongside her.
Ampetif Cocco Doll sat across from her, thin and composed and watching me with the particular stillness of a man who already suspected what I was about to ask and had no good answer prepared.
Zero filled the doorway behind them both, arms crossed, the tattooed beasts across his skin seeming to flex with the movement of muscle beneath them. He said nothing. Zero rarely said anything until violence became the relevant subject.
I did not sit. I asked Hilma directly, no preamble, because preamble was a luxury for situations that weren't emergencies, and this was an emergency.
"How much of the organisation's assets have we relocated to the Roble Holy Kingdom?"
She exhaled a slow plume of purple smoke before answering.
"Thirty-five percent. Combined, across departments."
My body froze, as Rage bubbled up.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIRTY-FIVE PERCENT? WE HAD TWO MONTHS. WHAT WERE YOU ALL IDIOTS DOING WITH THAT TIME?"
Hilma raised both hands, the pipe still smoking between two fingers, her expression unbothered by my volume in the specific way that someone who had survived worse confrontations than this one could afford to be unbothered.
"My side is at seventy-eight percent," she said. "The drug operation moves easily, small volume, high value, easy to disguise as legitimate trade goods. We were slowed mostly by Ampetif's department, not mine."
Ampetif's composure cracked slightly at being named directly.
"Moving people is considerably harder than moving product," he said. "Doing it without drawing attention is harder still. You cannot simply pack a person into a crate the way you pack a vial of-"
"How much," I said. "Give me A number."
He was quiet for a moment. When he answered, his voice had dropped low enough that I had to lean forward to hear it.
"Approximately three percent."
The rage that followed was not performed. I want to be clear about that, looking back on it now, everything else in that meeting was calculation, but this was not calculation. This was the genuine, bodily fury of a man who understood, in the moment the number left Ampetif's mouth, that the timeline I had been operating under had just collapsed.
"TWO MONTHS, AND YOU MANAGED THREE PERCENT?"
My voice came out as vemon.
"YOU HAVE TWO MORE DAYS. IF YOU ARE NOT READY, WE LEAVE WITHOUT YOU AND WITHOUT WHATEVER YOU HAVEN'T MOVED."
Ampetif's face went through several expressions before settling on something resembling acceptance, which was the correct response, arguing with me in this state would have produced nothing useful for him.
Zero spoke for the first time.
"If you want," he said, his voice the low gravel of a man who used words sparingly because he had never needed many of them to be understood, "my men and I could slow Tim down. Buy you the time you need."
I turned on him with whatever was left of the rage that Ampetif had already absorbed most of.
"WHAT, EXACTLY, COULD YOU AND YOUR FEW HUNDRED MEN DO TO A MAN WHO KILLED DRAGONS WITH HIS BARE HANDS? WHO DESTROYED AN ENTIRE COUNTRY OF BEASTMEN ALONE? I PAY YOU TO BE THE MUSCLE OF THIS ORGANISATION BECAUSE YOU CANNOT, EVIDENTLY, THINK FOR YOURSELF."
Zero's expression did not change. I had never once, in fifteen years of working alongside him, seen his expression change in response to being shouted at. It was one of the qualities that made him useful and one of the qualities that made him faintly unsettling to be around for extended periods.
I took several breaths. The rage needed somewhere productive to go, and shouting at Zero was not productive, so I forced myself toward the explanation that the room actually needed.
"When I was a young lad," I said, "before any of this, I worked at the Water Church. I was a low initiate, barely trusted to clean the altar cloths. I saw Tim then. He was only five years old."
The room had gone quiet in the way rooms.
"He was a just a child. Bones still showing through his skin the way they do at that age, before a body fills out. And he was already stronger than normal grown men I had watched train for years [level 8]. I felt it when I was near him, not magic exactly, just a wrongness in the air, as every day goes by, that THING kept getting stronger somehow, the specific feeling you get standing near something that does not belong in the category of HUMAN."
[The Eight Fingers Leader is born with the talent to detect someone total power level]
I looked at each of them in turn.
"That thing that calls itself Tim is not human. Whatever it actually is, I do not want to find out what the adult version of what I felt as a boy has become up close. We are not fighting him. We are not delaying him. We are leaving, as fast and as completely as we can manage, and we are grateful for every percentage point we manage to take with us."
I sat down.
The room was quiet for a long moment. Then Hilma exhaled another plume of purple smoke and began, in the brisk practical tone of someone who had decided the emotional portion of the meeting was concluded, to outline what the next two days needed to look like, which routes remained viable, which contacts in the Roble Holy Kingdom could be trusted to receive the remaining cargo, which members of the organisation were expendable enough to leave behind as a delaying presence if it came to that.
Ampetif took notes. Zero listened without comment, arms still crossed, his attention drifting periodically toward the door as though he expected it to open on something considerably worse than another meeting.
I sat in my priest's robes and thought about a five-year-old boy who had not yet learned to hide what he was, and about the considerably less containable thing that boy had clearly become in the years since, and let the others plan around me while I tried to remember how to be useful again, as I am clearly scaried out of my mind.