The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 036: Voss's Letter

"You've got the wrong man," Ethan said.

He didn't stop walking. He kept his cap low and his hands loose and his voice bored, the voice of a carrier at the end of a long day who has no interest in anyone's mistakes. Behind him, Corvin Marsh's boots scraped the cinders, quick and eager.

"No, no. Hold on. I've got it." Marsh jogged to catch up. "I saw it in the capital. Last month, at the east gate. A notice, with a drawing. They had your nose exactly. A little crooked, a bump here." He tapped his own. "It's the first thing you'd notice. I'm good at faces."

[Corvin Marsh. Human. Level 17. True attitude: Greedy. Excited. In debt.]

In debt. Ethan kept walking. "I'm a carrier," he said. "I've got a tag. I was with the party at the Orchard Gate. Ask anyone."

"That's what's so funny." Marsh grinned. His teeth were big and white against his sunburn. "You're not supposed to be able to enter a gate. But you did, in a donkey's clothing. Selka's party cleared a D-rank boss with a mage who sets his own boots on fire." He shook his head. "I don't believe it. I never did. And now I look at your face and I think, that's why."

"It's not what you think."

"It's two hundred gold crowns, is what it is." Marsh's hand came down on Ethan's shoulder. It was a heavy hand, calloused and warm. "I'm sorry, friend. Nothing personal. I owe money to some very unfriendly people."

Ethan stopped.

He could feel the Kindling trace stirring under his ribs, a low glow of heat. He pushed it down. The lane around them was nearly empty. A woman with a basket. A boy herding goats. Nobody who would stop a Level 17 hunter with a heavy hand.

He could fight. He was Level 11, with a rivet hammer and the best footwork in Greywatch, and he thought, honestly, that he could win. But a fight in the lane would draw a crowd. A crowd would draw Wardens. And Hesk's pencil was already moving.

"I'm sorry too," Ethan said.

He dropped, ducked under the arm, and went.

Scurry. The street rippled and fell away. He took the corner on one foot, slid across a puddle, vaulted a low wall, and heard Marsh bellow behind him.

"WARDENS! I'VE GOT HIM! THE NULL! THE POSTER BOY!"

Gods.

The lane dumped him into the market. Stalls on both sides, carts, shoppers, a thousand legs. He dove into the crowd and let it swallow him. His eyes went to the rooftops. Warden guards in grey, two of them, a hundred meters off, turning their heads toward the shout.

He slid under a hanging rack of laundry and came up behind a fishmonger's stall, breathing hard. Pulses everywhere. A thousand little hearts. Among them, one that was heavier, faster, closing. Marsh was running. Behind Marsh, two more, a pair of bronze-badged hunters who'd heard the word reward.

"There!" someone yelled. "By the fish!"

He ran.

It was the oldest trick he knew. Ethan had learned it in the lower ward as a child, hiding from Dorian: go where the pursuers can't follow, and be gone before they've finished arguing about it.

He went up.

A drainpipe, a gutter, a crooked row of tin roofs. He heard the hunters shouting below him, stuck at the base of the wall. His new Agility carried him over the rooftops in long, light steps. Below him the lanes swung past, the Rusty Ladle, a row of tanneries, the smoking domes of the Smelters' Row. Pulses scattered. Warden whistles shrilled.

He dropped into a narrow service alley behind the Guild hall and landed in a crouch.

A door swung open in the wall beside him.

"In!" Oake hissed, white as paper. His quills were all askew. "In, in, in! Gods above, Gray, in!"

Ethan didn't think. He went through.

The door slammed. A bolt scraped. Footsteps pounded past outside, and a voice yelled, "He went this way!" and the voices faded and rolled on up the lane.

Oake leaned his forehead against the wood. His hands were shaking so badly that the bolt chattered.

"I saw you from the window," he whispered. "I saw you go over the roofs. Nobody goes over those roofs." He swallowed. "Gray, I have to tell you something, and I want you to know I tried to stop her."

"Stop who?"

"The Guildmaster."

Ethan's stomach turned.

He followed Oake's pale gaze. At the end of the narrow corridor a door stood ajar, golden light spilling through the crack. Beyond it, in a room he hadn't noticed on his first visit, a woman sat behind a broad oak desk.

She was perhaps sixty. Broad shouldered, leather-faced, with white hair cropped close and a long grey scar that ran from her jaw to her collar. She wore a plain black coat with a gold badge on the lapel, worn smooth as a river stone. She had a pipe in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other.

[Ysolde Crane. Human. Level 46. True attitude: Calm. Dangerous. Undecided. Hidden skill: Verdict (Rare). Knows when a person lies to her.]

Level forty-six. A gold-badge A-rank who had retired into the Guildmaster's chair, and who could hear a lie. Ethan understood in a single cold flash that he had stepped out of a pot and into a fire.

"Come in, Mister Gray," said Ysolde Crane. "Or whatever your name is."

He came in.

The room was small and plain. A map of the frontier on one wall, a rack of old weapons on another, a window with a view of the Rift's red horizon. Crane laid her pipe in a tray and turned the paper around on the desk so that he could read it.

It was a letter. Creamy stock, thick, a pale grey seal at the bottom. The wax was stamped with a silver key.

To the Guildmaster of Greywatch, greetings.

It has come to the attention of the Wardens of the Crown that a male fugitive of twenty years, medium height, brown hair, with a prior fracture of the nose, may be traveling the frontier under a false name. He is believed to be a Rank F with unusual endurance. He is considered dangerous. He is to be detained without violence and delivered to the nearest Warden station.

A reward of five hundred gold crowns is offered for his safe delivery.

By order of Inspector L. Voss.

Ethan read it twice. The paper was slightly warm, as if it had been held in a hand.

"Five hundred," he said. "It was two hundred last time."

"Inflation," said Crane.

"Is that a joke?"

"I'm told I don't have a sense of humor." She picked up her pipe. "The courier brought it this noon. I've held it for six hours. A hunter named Marsh came through my door fifteen minutes ago shouting that he'd found you." She tapped the ash from the bowl. "I told him to wait outside. Oake, who is a coward but not a fool, went to find you first."

She looked up.

Her eyes were a very pale gold, the color of old brass. They didn't blink. They sat in her broad face like two stones.

"I'm going to ask you a question," she said. "I would like the truth. I'll know if I don't get it."

Ethan's mouth had gone dry.

"Why," said the Guildmaster of Greywatch, "is a man the Wardens want so badly wearing my iron tag?"