Chapter 175 – War Fever

Mirian was expecting the bullet, was watching for it, but it still caught her by surprise. Kinsman had a strong voice that carried people along with it, and the suddenness by which it was interrupted was almost as shocking as his sudden collapse.

There, Mirian saw. Opposite the podium, she saw a rifle barrel being withdrawn from a hole in a glass window. Then the window melded itself back shut.

Shocked cries and yelling began immediately. Several priests in the crowd began shouting and moving forward to heal him. It wouldn’t work, she knew. The shot had pierced him right through the skull and blown a red smear across a stunned woman standing behind him. She also collapsed, either from the bullet fragments as they went through the Prime Minister, or from shock.

From the same direction as the shot had come, an eastern Baracueli man stumbled out of the building, holding a rifle. He looked dazed.

Immediately, several people at the back of the crowd began shouting and pointing. It was impossible to hear what they were saying from her vantage, but Mirian could guess. The next part, Mirian knew. The Baracueli man, Theodoro, would be torn apart by the enraged crowd.

“Meet me at the rendezvous,” Mirian said to Selesia, and cast total camouflage and levitation. She leapt off the balcony and sped towards the area. As she neared Theodoro, she tapped into the titan catalyst like she would a focus, and dipped down.

Theodoro blinked, and as one Akanan man tackled him, another ripped the rifle from his hands. He let it go without any resistance. He tried to say something, but the shouting drowned him out. Some people started beating him, while others tried to pull them away, while others still shouted for the city guard to come quickly. Mirian hovered just above them.

The influence was subtle, but with her vision of his soul, she could see it clearly: thin black lines all around his head. Someone had cursed his mind. Mirian cast detect life next and turned her gaze to the door he’d stumbled out of. There were three people in that room. Mirian went for the door, but found it already bolted shut. She hesitated.

The people securing this room would be small players. Right now, the conspirators would be fleeing. She needed to go after the biggest target.

Mirian flew up to the sixth floor window where she’d seen the rifle barrel emerge. The room was dark—unnaturally so. Even without divination, she could tell there was a spell sapping light from the room. With detect life, she could see the assassin hastily disassembling something. The rifle, likely. She flew up to the roof and dismissed her levitation spell. No doubt, she’d tripped all sorts of city wards with it, but there was enough chaos it was the least of the city guard’s concern.

From above, she watched as the assassin moved about inside the room, then made for the stairwell. Glancing back down, she could see people from the crowd pointing in her direction. They’d likely noticed the light distortions from her camouflage spell.

Mirian crept over to the opposite edge of the roof and peered down. On the other side of the building was a spell carriage. As the assassin emerged from the back door, he immediately entered the back of it and the driver hit the glyphs.

Mirian used another short burst of levitation and landed gently on the back of the carriage. Her camouflage worked better when she was in the open air. Hopefully, no one noticed the light distortions she was making and did anything rash.

“…divination device is giving a strange reading. Surveillance six, check it out,” she made out someone saying from inside the carriage.

Ah. Whoops.

She flew off again, this time grabbing onto a different spell carriage that was just behind the one with the assassin. She had to fly to three different carriages as the one she was following wove around the streets, doubling back and zig-zagging through the maze that was Mercanton before it finally parked in front of a nondescript building. The first floor windows were boarded up, and the building looked derelict.

What are the odds this safe house has the same design as the one in Torrviol? Mirian wondered.

She ducked into an alley and began to apply the soul-disguise bindings that would make her appear as Adria. A few minutes later, she stepped out of the alley and made her way to the front door.

Sure enough, there was a pit trap triggered by a false door, with the real door behind the coat racks. Mirian supposed that most people wouldn’t be visiting Akanan spy safe houses more than once.

A man sitting next to a heavy rifle case with a small glass of whiskey turned as she entered. One of the people next to him started and reached for a revolver.

“Nikoline? What in the five hells are you doing here?” the first man asked. Frowning, he said, “And why are you still wearing that damned face.”

The agent next to him hesitated. “Mavwell, you know her?”

The first man, Mavwell, apparently, grunted.

Mirian gave him the kind of predatory smile Specter gave when she wasn’t wearing her mask. “I wanted to congratulate you. I saw the shot,” she said.

“Don’t you have your own task to attend to?”

She shrugged, and poured herself a glass of the whiskey. “It’s all handled. The objective is secured. At last, I can escape that little rat’s nest.” She sat down across from Mavwell and didn’t say anything. Specter loved making people talk by saying nothing.

Mavwell looked at her. “If Old Kudzu finds out, he’ll be pissed. You know he doesn’t like things out of place.”

Mirian made a mental note of the nickname. “I was thinking. A war is a perfect time to kill someone. Accidents happen all the time with that many guns around, and no one notices just another body.”

The assassin sighed. “You know that trust is the underlying principle that makes operations work, right? Paranoia is for the little people, out there,” he said, gesturing.

Mirian didn’t say anything, just wet her lips with the whiskey. It tasted awful. She didn’t know how anyone stood the stuff.

Mavwell kept looking at her, his blue eyes trying to drill through her skin. “You think there’s going to be an internal power play? That could bring the whole operation down. It would be a stupid, unnecessary risk. This is about building the new world. It’s bigger than one person.” He swirled the whiskey in his glass around, then added, “Yes, you’re right of course. There will always be someone stupid enough. Someone who doesn’t know their place. But that’s why people like me exist.”

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