“Wait!” Auldmaer rose abruptly from his chair, holding out a hand to forestall me as I started to turn toward the door. “This doesn’t add up. There’s always time to think, Lord Seiji; give me a moment to lay this out.”

The rising surge of incipient violence was practically tingling in my limbs, but I did pause and turn back to face him out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. “I’m listening.”

“We are assuming,” he said more slowly, sinking back into his chair with an intent expression, “that the point of this was to make sure I’d recognize this guy Cwynnar’s name, just in case you came here asking about people connected to participants in the Cat Alley fiasco, so I could tell you where he is, so you could wander into a trap?”

At that recitation, even some of the rising bloodlust began to cool back down. “Well…yes. But when you put it like that…”

Auldmaer nodded. “Because that’s a bad plan. Especially since it happened this morning and you’ve only just turned up now. It hinges on multiple variables—the timing, my reactions, your reactions—that she can’t even predict, much less control.”

“So you think Cwynnar coming here was…just a coincidence?”

“Not when he’d been sent on that particular fool’s errand,” he said, leaning back in his chair and frowning. “Coincidences do happen, but in my experience any event that inexplicable and specific speaks of intelligent action. And with all due respect to Master Alsiada, I doubt he’s all that interesting to anyone but yourself and Lady Gray—certainly no one else who’s connected to my company. Which makes the central question: does Lady Gray make bad plans? Is she prone to being reckless and disorganized? I only know the woman by reputation, Lord Seiji, so I’ll yield to your expertise on the subject.”

“No,” I admitted, “definitely not. In fact, I’d say Lady Gray’s overall high competence is her most annoying trait. Well, you know, in addition to being generally horrible. You’re right—this doesn’t add up.”

“Which means,” he said, nodding, “this is not the plan. We’re seeing one very small and perhaps not very important part of it.”

“You’re thinking this is…what?” Aster tilted her head in confusion. “Misdirection? A feint?”

“Still too random; it would still need to be a well-laid plan for that to work,” he said, his frown deepening. Auldmaer began drumming his fingers on his desk, staring intensely at the wall behind us. “Let’s step back, consider the overall situation. Lady Gray can’t operate openly inside the walls without bringing down the wrath of the Clans. And likely the Convocation and the King’s Guild, to boot. Her ability to gather information up here is not really hindered—anyone with any combination of time, connections, and coin can do that. It’s only assertive action that would get her in trouble.”

“Right,” I prompted when he paused for thought. Aster was right, this was really annoying when other people did it.

“And from what I’ve heard,” he mused after a moment’s consideration, “even her ability to act is somewhat eclipsed right now. She should still have all but total freedom in the Gutters, but even a minor antagonism toward the power structure by making a mess in the middle ring could spell her doom. Her resources are significantly thinner than they were a week ago, and getting thinner by the day as the outlying bandit gangs are growing more bold in their raids.”

I pulled out the chair in front of his desk and sat back down. “That’s the long and the short of it, yes. It sounds like you’ve put it together in a way that reveals something I missed, Master Auldmaer.”

His eyes came back into focus, meeting mine. “Hum. With all due respect, Lord Seiji, I think you may have fallen prey to Gray’s basic strategy already. A strategist must work upon his opponents’ minds—for example, by creating the impression that your own expertise means you will always have the upper hand, while making them so angry that they go right for a direct attack at the first sight of you.”

I grimaced. “Well, ouch.”

“Hell’s revels, you have to know all this stuff to be a merchant?” Aster demanded.

That bought her a grin from Auldmaer. “Well, I have a personal fondness for books on military history and strategy, but…yes, this kind of thinking does help in the trade. Business is war. My own battles are usually more cerebral, but many of the underlying philosophies still apply! Ahem, speaking of which, the point is that Lady Gray has primed you to assume she is more dangerous than the reality.”

“There’s nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal.”

“Indeed, but it makes a difference if that animal has had half its claws and teeth removed. Here’s my read on the situation: the actual trap or traps will be in the Gutters, where she can safely inflict violence. The key is getting you there. Up here in the middle ring, she’ll have been exercising what contacts she has to extract information and attempt to catch your attention whenever you showed up. That silly gambit with Cwynnar Alsiada only makes sense as one of a bunch of similarly half-assed measures—a wide net cast in the hope of catching something. That smells to me of desperation.”

“Mm,” I grunted. “She’s still Lady Gray, though. She’s good at improvising and very detail-oriented even under pressure. I think…if she’s set out multiple baits like that, she’ll have done so in such a way that noticing which I spring for will tell her my angle of attack. That’s the only reason I can think of why you were only primed to recognize one of the names on that list.”

“Good insight! So if you leave here and head for the Trader’s Guildhall, Gray will know to prepare you to think she’s taken Alsiada hostage.”

“Wait, think she’s taken him hostage?” Aster demanded. “What’s to stop her from actually doing it? I know, I know, middle ring and so on, but c’mon. Nobody in power cares about a guy like that.”

“Even less than they care about my modest little trading company,” Auldmaer agreed. “What they care about is someone like Lady Gray taking any aggressive action too close to their interests. She might risk it, but I think it’s more likely she’ll misdirect him out of everyone’s way again and claim to have him, to get you into the Gutters where she can spring the proper trap. However, that is an assumption, not a fact, and whether or not it proves correct, there’s a choice to be made. So before we make our own counter-strategy, Lord Seiji, you must decide whether you’re willing to leave Cwynnar Alsiada in Lady Gray’s hands, if it comes to that.”

I drew in a soft breath and let it out slowly. “I suppose you’re going to tell me next that he’s not worth taking a risk over.”

“It’s not my call to make; I have no stake in his well-being,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m a merchant, after all, I can’t help but weigh the costs and benefits. Sometimes, though, you can’t make a choice based on pure merit. Only corporations can be utterly rational; a man has to live with himself.”

“You have corporations here?” I asked, blinking in surprise.

“Oh, goodness, no, not here. The practice is banned in most Sanorite countries. In Dlemathlys I suspect only merchants, diplomats, and goblins even know what the word means.” I could see the intrigue on his face; he was dying to ask how I knew what a corporation was, but didn’t waste any more time on that tangent. “Regardless, that’s the situation. Gray won’t be coming here to force your hand, but she will make her move as soon as you emerge from these offices. That buys us time to make our own plan, so these are the questions we need to answer first. The other central one that I can see is what her assessment of your threat level is; that will determine what lies waiting for you in the Gutters. A repeat of her strategy up here, with several potential traps for you to stumble into? Or will she try to hit you with all of her resources?”

“All of it,” I said without hesitation. “Plus… Probably additional assets she’ll have sought out in the last week specifically because I won’t know to expect them. She won’t be taking any chances.”

Auldmaer nodded; again I could see him desperately wanting to ask why I merited so much attention, but again he refrained. “Then I propose that we divide our response. I have an idea to flush her out of the middle ring, but when it comes to striking back at the enemy directly, I must yield to your expertise.”

“All right,” I replied, slowly. “Give me a moment to think.”

“You have it, my lord. Allow me to make preparations while you consider.” He shifted over in his chair to pull a cord which dangled beside his desk, causing a bell to chime in the warehouse outside. I stepped to the side of the office next to Aster, leaning against the wall and rapidly considering my options.

My one advantage was that I knew there was a trap; in theory, that meant I could spring it without being caught. In practice, that got a lot stickier. Playing into traps was playing right into Lady Gray’s advantage, given how consistently she kept running circles around me. Could I prevail just by charging into it and gambling I had enough pure strength to smash through? She knew she was facing a Dark Lord now; she’d have prepared something much worse than anything I faced in Cat Alley, but it was still a question whether the best she could put together had the physical capacity to stop me.

All this time Gray had been out there playing 4D chess, but her opponent was a chimpanzee with superpowers whose only move was setting the board on fire and clobbering her with it. I’d had some early successes before she became aware of me, but since then it had been a series of stalemates in which I bled her organization by small amounts without landing a meaningful hit on her directly. Even the success of my goal in Cat Alley came down to the women there fighting back under their own impetus before I could actually rally them; in my direct confrontation with Gray, I’d benefited by looting artifacts from her people which increased my power, but I’d been unable to scratch her and she had managed to escape me intact and unscathed. Which, if you just ran the numbers, it really didn’t seem like she should’ve been able to do. I was new at this, but a street thug who could repeatedly fight off a Dark Lord was in a league of her own.

Preparation and maneuver, those were her assets. Mine was simple power. Whether or not I had enough power to trump her new preparations…even thinking that way made it a quagmire of attrition. Somehow, I needed to flank her. Even a small victory in strategy, a minor tactical edge, could tip the scales in my favor.

How? Well, that was the question. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be over here dithering.

The office door opened and a man entered. I didn’t remember his name, but I’d seen Auldmaer’s secretary around during my visits to the office; he looked like an odd combination of librarian and teamster, with his narrow spectacles, omnipresent clipboard, and the sleeves of his neatly-creased shirt always rolled up to display brawny forearms bearing the faded scars of years of what must’ve been hard work.

“Sir?”

“Merdion, change of plans.” Right, that was his name. Auldmaer had spent the seconds between his ringing of the bell and Merdion’s appearance rapidly scribbling on some documents, and now pushed these across the desk as the secretary approached. “A big change. I need every outgoing shipment scheduled for the next…” He paused to quickly peruse his recently-modified papers and jotted something down on one of them. “…two days, three as a stretch goal, to depart tonight by dusk at the latest. Simultaneously.”

Merdion boggled so hard his glasses almost fell off. “Every…for the…you can’t mean…”

“As much as we can arrange on such short notice. This will mean borrowing wagons and porters, of course. Whatever we can get our hands on.”

“Of…course,” said the secretary, recovering a bit. “I’ll send Rhan down to the—”

“I’m afraid not,” Auldmaer interrupted with an apologetic grimace. “We can’t have any direct contact with the Trader’s Guild until they ship out, or send any of our people too close to the Guildhall. You’ll have to make do with whatever can be loaned or rented to us from other companies nearby.”

For a second I thought Merdion was going to either faint or start shouting at his boss. Before he could do either, Auldmaer picked up one sheet from the top of the pile and wagged it at him.

“We need to adjust the routes, too. The shipments have to go out right before the gates close for the night, from every gate, and disperse as widely as possible down every available road departing the city.”

“Sir…even if we can arrange all this in the next few hours, sending out shipments at dusk is practically begging for bandit attacks!”

“I’m aware. We don’t have anything of particular value slated to go out for the next few days anyway. Special orders for this occasion only: instruct the teamsters to proceed as quickly as possible to the nearest safe waystations on their routes, and if attacked, hand over any cargo and flee. Also, they only need to leave the city itself on a wide divergence of paths, they can re-route back onto the main roads from there as soon as possible.”

“This is going to cost…” Merdion shot me a suspicious look, then pinched the bridge of his nose, displacing his glasses. “Master Auldmaer, how exactly do we profit from this?”

“Business requires foresight, Merdion. Some actions are meant to bring a profit directly; others are to set up a chain of events that will be profitable later.”

“But—”

“Hopefully in the near future there’ll be time for me to explain everything to you,” Auldmaer said in a quelling tone, “but for now, this is what I need you to do. Quickly; there’s a lot to arrange and very little time. And send Larinet up here, I have a job for her, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Merdion groaned, finally accepting the stack of papers. He gave me a particularly filthy look on his way back out, no doubt suspecting whose fault all this was, and shut the door harder than was necessary.

“All that sounds…expensive,” said Aster as soon as we were alone again.

“It’s only money,” Auldmaer replied with a wink. “You have to spend it to make it, and I expect to recoup my losses. Lady Gray is bad for business and I’ll gain a fortune in goodwill and connections by playing a role in hobbling her. Lord Seiji, do you need a rundown on what I have in mind?”

“I believe I follow you already,” I replied, “and now that you’ve laid it out, you’ve given me an idea. I know exactly how to turn this around on her.”

“Perfect!” the merchant said with a broad grin. He was so amiable and occasionally squeamish about violence, it was easy at times to forget when I first met him he’d been carrying poison around, just in case he needed to murder someone over a civilized drink. “Then while we’ve got time, let’s talk details.”

I made my own move in the late afternoon, well before Auldmaer’s caravans were ready to roll out. The next stage of my own plan needed to be executed before that happened. In the meantime, it went without saying that anybody watching the Auldmaer Company’s headquarters would be able to tell shenanigans were afoot. But that was the neat thing about executing bonkers nonsense: a strategic thinker wouldn’t see the pattern in it until too late. Undoubtedly Lady Gray would figure out what we were up to once she realized what was happening, by which time it would be too far into motion for her to stop.

Hopefully. Man, it’d be really nice to put one over on her for a change.

I made it two blocks in a straight line toward the Trader’s Guildhall before the expected countermove occurred, just long enough for me to start worrying whether this was actually going to work. But before I could despair, a man stepped out of an alley right in front of me, blocking my path.

“Lord Seiji, I presume,” he said with a knowing little smirk, folding down his hands at me.

“I have a funny feeling you’re about to presume a lot more than that.”

He was one of those borderline cases in the caste system, a fellow who might have been upper lowborn or lower middleborn, to judge by his lightish brown complexion and slightly wavy hair that looked a shade of deep chestnut under the sunlight but probably appeared black when in shadow. At least he was dressed well enough that he probably didn’t get too much direct suspicion from the guards.

“Now, now, let’s keep this civil, shall we?” he said, still wearing the slight smile of a man who believed himself to hold all the cards. “With you being in such a hurry to go check on your…let’s say, friend of a friend? It wouldn’t do for some rash action on your part to cause him undue…discomfort.”

Technically polite and performatively sleazy, just as expected from the thugs who’d approached me in my Healer persona before I was openly at war with their boss. It was almost too predictable. Considering who was behind all this, it made me wonder whether there was a second trap behind the obvious one that I was stumbling into. But I was committed, now.

“Rash action? Oh, you mean like this?” I drew my artifact rapier in a violent motion that hissed against its sheath and swished audibly through the air, because I don’t do things by half-measures.

Immediately foot traffic around us stopped and all those nearest backed away, while everybody safely outside rapier range commenced gawking avidly.

“Whoah! Hey, now, this is a respectable part of town,” my new acquaintance protested, raising both hands in a peaceable gesture. I had succeeded in wiping the smirk off his face, at least. “Let’s not go and create a scene, Lord Seiji. We wouldn’t want to have any unpleasantness.”

“Interesting proposal,” I mused, idly making figure eights with the tip of my sword. Not at his face or heart—aiming directly for his crotch. He backed up another step. “What’s in it for me?”

“Well, I should think—”

“Because any unpleasantness is only going to be unpleasant for you, my friend.” I grinned broadly at his visibly increasing unease. “I expect to find it hilarious.”

“Listen,” he protested, trying to lower his voice so as not to be obviously threatening me in front of all the suddenly-attentive onlookers. “You don’t want to do this. All right? Your interests require you to—”

He tried to evade me, but I was wielding a Rapier of Mastery and wearing Surestep Boots, and part of this fellow’s “respectable citizen” disguise clearly involved going unarmed; he had no chance. I closed the gap in a single lunge and sank the tip of my sword into his thigh just above the knee. That could’ve been a killing thrust, at least within a few minutes, but I deliberately missed the femoral artery. Thanks to the artifact’s enchantment, that was apparently something I could do.

The henchman went down on the street, clutching his leg, howling bloody murder, and squirting blood everywhere. There were a few incidental screams from the onlookers, as well as at least two distinct cheers. Fucking Fflyr. Even when I was in the wrong, I found a reason to hate this country.

“Are you crazy?” demanded my new opponent as soon as he found the wits to form words instead of miscellaneous shrill noises.

“Hah!” I flicked the tip of the sword at him, splattering his face with his own blood. “If you think this is crazy, wait till you meet my other personality. I say, guards!” I bellowed. “Assault! Mayhem! Assassination! Jaywalking with malice aforethought! Somebody come—ah, there you are.”

Unlike my previous encounter with the middle ring guards, I didn’t get an entire squad this time, just a pair of Kingsguard soldiers apparently on patrol; they came pounding up the street, the crowd dispersing around them.

“All right, what’s all the—Lord Seiji?”

“Oh, hey, Sergeant Sanaida!” I greeted him cheerfully. “And it’s Tannor, right? They finally moved you guys to middle ring patrol! Congrats, man, I love to see talent rewarded.”

Considering their “talent” was taking bribes to let me bring suspicious characters through the gate, this was literally the opposite of that, but I saw no reason to hurt the poor guys’ feelings. Not when I had a use for them, anyway.

“Thanks, my lord, it’s definitely a less boring gig. As you can plainly see.” Sanaida and Tannor silently caught my customary greetings—thrown coins—studying the scene before them with clearly no intention of physically stepping into it. “So what’s all this, Lord Seiji? This asshat giving you a problem?”

“He stabbed me!” the asshat shrieked.

I poked him—gently—with my sword. “Shush, the grown-ups are talking. I don’t suppose you gentlemen happen to know this character?”

Tannor spat in the street. “Fuckin’ jumped-up Gutter trash, Lord Seiji. Yeah, we know this clown. There’s a pool down at barracks going for when he’d finally get knifed. Glad I didn’t throw coins in; I wouldn’t’ve expected you, m’lord.”

“Or in the leg,” Sanaida added. “Future reference, Lord Seiji, if you poke ‘em in the gut or heart, you don’t have to listen to their bullshit no more.”

“Oh, I’m well aware, lads. As it happens, I specifically want to listen to more of this one’s bullshit. Or rather, I think the good folks down at headquarters need to. Anyway, in this case, he was quite correct. I did, in fact, stab this unarmed man with no—okay, actually, with very little provocation. You should probably arrest me.”

The two guards had already pocketed their coins. They now exchanged a loaded glance, then looked in almost comical unison down at the bleeding man, then back at me.

“You…want to be arrested, Lord Seiji?” the Sergeant asked carefully.

“Well, I think that would be best, don’t you? Actually, give me just a second, would you?”

“Sure thing, m’lord.”

“Are you serious?” screeched the previously well-mannered thug. “I’m bleeding here!”

“You’re makin’ a mess on the street, is what you’re doing.” Tannor kicked him on the shoulder. “Quiet down before I add littering to your charges.”

Meanwhile, I was turning in a slow circle with my eyes upraised, until I spotted Aster poking her head over a rooftop across the street, the tiny shape of Biribo hovering above her shoulder. She gave me a thumbs up and then ducked back down behind the eaves.

“All right, then!” I wiped the blood off my sword with a kerchief, gave it a flourish, and sheathed it. “Thanks for waiting, gents. Now let’s all head down to the barracks and explain all this lah-dee-dah to the Captain.”

“Yeah, I got a feeling he’ll wanna hear this one,” Tannor commented. “C’mon, you, up you get. It’s not that bad, you can still walk. That, or you can get dragged. No skin off my ass either way.”

“So, I guess you’re under arrest, Lord Seiji,” Sergeant Sanaida said apologetically. “This way, if you please. Mind your step, m’lord, street’s a bit slippery just there, what with the blood.”

Off we went to the Kingsguard headquarters. I have to say, the constant cursing of Lady Gray’s henchman was deeply gratifying. You have to appreciate the little things in life.