Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 18: OPEN UP!

The voice that answered was male, rough, carrying the particular flavor of authority that came not from earned respect but from enforced compliance.

"Open up, old woman. We know the dead boy is in there."

Kaelen's hands, which had been resting on the table, went still.

The dead boy.

Old Moth opened the door.

The man who filled the doorframe was large. 

Not cultivator-large, not the refined power of someone who'd spent years channeling spiritual energy into their physique. 

This was the large of someone who'd spent their life in labor and violence, thick-shouldered and heavy-handed, the kind of large that breaks things without precision or elegance. 

He wore the mark of an enforcer on his chest, a crude iron badge in the shape of a clenched fist, and behind him, visible in the narrow street beyond Old Moth's door, stood more men. 

Kaelen counted quickly. Fifteen. Possibly more beyond his line of sight.

He recognized the badge. Zain's memories surfaced with unpleasant clarity. 

The Enforcers of the Mortal Coil. Not a formal law-keeping body. The Mortal Coil had no formal law. 

The Enforcers were a private force maintained by the various power brokers who'd carved the lowest Heaven into territories, collecting debts, removing problems, and generally ensuring that the hierarchy of exploitation remained undisturbed.

And at their head stood a man Kaelen identified immediately from Zain's memories, not fondly.

Dax.

Dax was the kind of man who had appointed himself an authority and found, to his ongoing satisfaction, that the Mortal Coil did not particularly argue with people who could back their appointments with violence. 

He was perhaps thirty-five, with a face that wore its cruelties openly, a nose that had been broken and reset imperfectly, eyes that moved with the constant assessment of someone who'd learned to identify weakness the way merchants identify opportunity.

Those eyes went past Old Moth immediately and found Kaelen at the table.

Something moved in them. 

Not quite recognition. Something more unsettled than that.

"Dax," Old Moth said, in the tone of someone acknowledging something mildly unpleasant, like bad weather. 

"What an unexpected visit."

"Unexpected." Dax's voice rolled with contempt. 

"You're harboring the corpse of Zain Dustwalker in your one-room hovel, you blind hag, and you call it unexpected that we came looking."

He leaned on the doorframe with casual menace. "Step aside."

"I don't believe I will," Old Moth said pleasantly. 

"Can I ask what specific concern brings you to my door this evening?"

"The dead boy," Dax repeated, his voice hardening. 

"Zain Dustwalker. He owed two months of street tax to the Mortal Coil Authority, four silver lengths and six copper pins, and when my boys went to collect them four days ago, he had the nerve to resist."

"And your boys beat him to death," Kaelen said from the table, his voice perfectly level.

Dax's gaze snapped to him. The unsettled quality intensified.

"That's right. Which is why seeing him sitting up in a blind woman's house talking back at me is a problem that needs addressing." 

He straightened off the doorframe. "Step aside, old woman. The boy still owes the debt. His death doesn't cancel it."

"His death," Old Moth said thoughtfully, "has generally been considered to discharge financial obligations in most jurisdictions I'm familiar with."

"This isn't most jurisdictions. This is the Mortal Coil. And in the Mortal Coil, a debt doesn't die with the debtor. It transfers." 

Dax smiled, and it wasn't a pleasant thing. 

"To whoever decides to take on the corpse."

"Meaning?”

"Meaning you're taking him in, you take on the debt.”

“Four silver lengths, six copper pins, due immediately. Or we take the boy and collect... alternative payment." 

The smile widened. "Starting with his hands. Debtors who can't pay in coin pay in labor. Hard labor.”

“The salt mines in the Seventh Ward don't care what condition a worker's in."

Old Moth tilted her head, as if considering something. 

"That's an interesting position. Particularly given that the boy you beat to death was, as you say, dead. And yet somehow he is sitting at my table."

"Some sorcery," one of the men behind Dax said, loudly enough to carry.

"Look at his eyes. They're the wrong color. That ain't Zain. That's something wearing Zain."

A murmur ran through the men outside.

Dax's expression had shifted from contemptuous authority to something more calculating.

"We noticed," he said. "Zain had brown eyes.”

“That thing has grey eyes that flash like someone put stars behind them." 

He looked at Kaelen with an expression that was trying to be intimidating and was, in fairness, doing a reasonable job of it. 

"So either that boy had some kind of delayed cultivation breakthrough, which would be the first time in living memory that shattered meridians fixed themselves after death, or someone crawled into his corpse."

"Either way," the man behind Dax added, "it's dark magic. Black cultivation. That's a violation of the Celestial Order's edicts. We report it, we get a bounty."

"A bounty," Old Moth said, as if the word were mildly interesting.

"Fifty silver lengths for confirmed instances of forbidden cultivation in the Mortal Coil. Enough to buy every man standing out here a month of comfortable living." 

Dax crossed his arms. "So you see, this has gotten considerably more interesting than a street tax debt. Step aside, old woman. We're taking the boy."

"To turn over to the Celestial Inquisitors?" Old Moth's voice was still pleasant. Still unhurried.

"To turn over to whoever pays the bounty, yes."

"I see." Old Moth seemed to consider this for a long moment.

Behind her, Kaelen was calculating distances and numbers with the cold part of his mind, the part that had been trained in tactical assessment.

Fifteen men were visible. Formation array cultivation marks on at least six of them, the badges of cheap, mass-produced formation techniques available in the Mortal Coil's less reputable markets.

The others, physical fighters primarily, with weapons at their belts.

He had no cultivation base. Broken ribs still mending. Four days of training that consisted primarily of meditation and brief movement exercises.

And Old Moth between him and all of it.

"The boy," Old Moth said, "is my student."

The announcement was met with a beat of silence, and then Dax laughed. 

Not politely. The full, derisive laugh of a man who'd heard something that deserved no less.

"Your student," he said, turning to share the joke with the men behind him. 

"Your student!" He turned back, the laughter settling into contempt. 

"You're a blind beggar woman who lives in a one-room hovel and talks to moths. You're not a cultivator. You're not a teacher.”

“You're not anything except one of the forty thousand nobody-people rotting in this city who I've been stepping over for fifteen years." His eyes moved past her to Kaelen. 

"And that thing at your table is a corpse that owes me money, wearing sorcery like a mask. My boys are taking it."

"Blind," Old Moth said, conversationally.

"What?"

"You called me a blind beggar woman. That's the second time this evening someone has mentioned my blindness as though it were relevant." 

She tilted her head. "I'm curious what you think it means.”

"It means you can't see us. It means you can't fight us.”

“It means you don't know how many men I have with me or what they're carrying." 

Dax took a step closer to the door. "It means you should have stayed out of this, old woman, but since you have

n't, you get to make a choice.”

“Step aside and we only take the boy.”

“Keep standing there and we will take you too.” Dax immediately said arrogantly.