Silence followed in the wake of that announcement, as I folded my arms, staring at her intently.

  “Really?” I said. “How.. fortuitous.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that look,” Vesper said. “You were sent here to learn Diabolism from me, you should guess that I possess some knowledge able to tap into for just such an occasion. Why, Voltar sending you here might have been for just such a purpose.”

  I was pretty sure that if Samuel Voltar wanted her consulted on this, he’d just ask her. Then again, it was Imperial Intelligence. She might be right, knowing how their minds twisted.

  “Walk me through it,” I said.

  “I was avoided by the devil,” she told me. “Like I said, I have a reputation, but it was not so skilled at this that it avoided notice. And deals, have a way of leaving their mark on the soul. If only so the devil has something to drag any failures to them once they reach the Hells.”

  I pursed my lips. As far as my knowledge of Diabolism went, she was correct, but when dealing with the Hells in any way, providence could always be considered potential enemy action. Especially when the offer was so convenient to what I needed.

  “You would know the devil?” I asked her.

  “Only if I encountered them before,” she said. “And I have not, thankfully. Even trying to hide as it was, its presence made waves. Like a whale trying to stealthily leap out of the water. Such weight that you can’t avoid seeing it.”

  That unfortunately sounded true. “Any hints at all?”

  She chuckled. “It already was trying to hide, and upon realizing what it was, I did my best to avoid prying. I prefer my brain on the inside of my skull, not blown out through my nose.”

  That sounded far too specific to be a guess, and I decided not to press.

  “So, you can detect its touch on souls, at a gnce or is this going to be a little harder than that?”

  “There are some drawbacks,” she admitted. “To see the mark of the devil on the person, I would need to examine their soul. And the process is not one that can be done quickly.”

  “So, immobilized or willing,” I said. “That’ll be an issue.”

  Putting it mildly. If the person being tested was guilty, they’d do all they could to avoid it. And in the case of the priests, they might have their own objections to a diabolist messing around with their soul. Infuriatingly, they’d probably have a good point as well.

  “It’s something to consider,” she told me. “At least until you get that contract so I can be certain your little passenger isn’t a trick.”

  Eat the contract The Imp whispered, and I rolled my eyes. Honestly, while Vesper was beginning to get on my nerves, that wasn’t making the Imp that more patable option.

  ***

  I left the Vesper’s estate soon after, the sun beginning to dip towards evening. A few hours till then. Meanwhile, up above I could hear the older Vesper ranting and raving, and looking up there he leaned out of a window, fist shaking at the rotating tower next door.

  “Damn you Malkerath, your rotating abomination clipped one of my balconies. Repair the damage your ridiculous contraption has done to my manor!”

  The rotating tower brought its owner into view, some smug-looking elf who seemed barely able to hold back their ughter.

  “Mayhap if you did not make your house encroach on my property in some dispy of-”

  Whatever was said next faded from my hearing as the tower continued to rotate, taking its owner and the ongoing argument with it as I hurried to the carriage. No need to get involved in that, even as just an innocent bystander.

  “Something has come up,” I told Tagashin as I got on the driver’s bench once more. I could endure the stares and the gestures if needed, this needed to be discussed. “What should it be called when the Hells are involved and seemingly be luck a convenient answer arises?”

  “I’ve tangled with enough devils in enough ways to know that answer,” Tagashin said. “As pleasurable as some of those encounters might have been, you can never fully trust a devil. The ones you can are such exceptions to the rule.”

  “And thank you for phrasing it like that,” I said irritably. “Still, you understand my sudden suspicion when the Diabolist I was sent her partially to keep an eye on suddenly cims to have the key to our mystery.”

  Tagashin grabbed the reins, and in a few seconds, we were on our way down the street. We had the entire road to ourselves, minus a cart a ways back trudging it’s way through the street, pulled by a single mule.

  “Something we can discuss on the street?” She asked. “Wouldn’t want for someone to overhear and Intelligence ciming your head for being a bbbermouth. Poor Malvia Harrow, dead and in the Hells because some six-year-old child heard words he couldn’t understand.”

  “Or you could use your magic to stop that and we can have a reasonable conversation?” I suggested, and that fsh of irritation in her eyes felt far too genuine.

  “Oh, now an honest conversation? But fine, talk.”

  She’d barely twitched, but the sounds of the world outside faded. I could hear the couch still moving on the road, the squeak of the wheels and the sound of the stones underneath, but everything else faded to an indistinguishable haze of noise.

  “Vesper cims she can track down who took the Devil’s deal,” I told Tagashin. “Which, from how she expined it is entirely possible, but has its drawbacks. It’s still very convenient in many ways.”

  “Convenience is not always the sign of a trap,” Tagashin said. “When a grasshopper trusts when its instincts tell it food is plentiful when it’s happened upon a farmer’s harvest stored right next to it, is that simply not good fortune?”

  “When dealing with the Hells, good fortune is rarely what it appears to be,” I said. “Those they tend to reward do it on a mountain of corpses belonging to those killed at the behest of Devils, directly or indirectly. Or has experience taught you differently?”

  Behind us, something burst into fmes, and both of us did our best to ignore it as the shouting only grew louder. Further behind the lonely cart spurred into action, its driver desperate to try and escape any potential spells.

  “Convenient,” I mused. “Or maybe I’m just used to life not being nice in what it hands me. Good things arrive so rarely.”

  That snort from Tagashin was entirely too loud and too dismissive to pass without comment, never mind the surge of red-hot anger it sent spiking from my blood as I gred at her.

  “You disagree?” I said. I was about as tired as I could get of this Kitsune.

  “I’m not going to deny you your trials and travails,” she said, that vulpine grin infuriating in its smugness. “But I think you have more power on your hands and are a little too well off in your day-to-day to consider yourself cursed.”

  “Am I?” I said as we rounded a corner. I chewed on that for a few more turns.

  I was better off than I had been at my lowest, yes, but that didn’t change the fundamentals of my situation. Chained to the Imperial Government, doomed if they took offense to my existence.

  A few turns down the road, I finally spoke up.

  “No, I don’t think I am. And I resent you even suggesting I am, because if things were truly fair, if I was actually well off? You know what could happen then Tagashin? I could step outside the damn Quarter without half the popution throwing signs of a puffed-up sun deity around in some attempt to drive me back inside! Instead, everywhere we go, I get that damnable sign thrown at me! Here, there, everywhere!”

  I was standing now, gesturing around at each of the buildings in front and behind us. We hadn’t left the Silver Road yet, so maybe not accurate. But I wasn’t just letting my anger out.

  The same cart from the Vesper’s came to a halt, the driver frozen at my sudden excmation. It sted only until they noticed my gestures were at everything around me, not just them in particur.

  The sudden btant halting of the cart was the final confirmation. We were being tailed. Worse, we were being tailed badly.

  I spent another half-minute on excmations and grievances of increasingly milder nature, still loud enough for the person in the cart to hear. After a while, writing off my gesture towards them as a coincidence, they continued forward.

  Definitely inexperienced.

  “We are being tailed by an incompetent,” I said to Tagashin, keeping my tone conversational. At this distance, what was being said couldn’t even carry to an elf’s ears, but tone might.

  “The one in the cart yes?” she asked. “Humans. Stinks of desperation and fear.”

  The slight breeze we had was blowing from us towards the cart, but I chalked that up to Tagashin’s fey nature.

  “Fear might just be not able to take us in a fair fight,” I said. “Desperation though indicates something else is in py. You’re certain he’s human?”

  “It’s a very distinct aroma,” she assured me. “Distinct in its banality.”

  I considered where we were for a second. “Take us by the Coffin?”

  “Heading back to your pce?”

  “Yes, Vesper’s offer can wait-no, we were to meet Bishop Derrick at the end of today, weren’t we? Can we still swing by the Coffin?”

  Tagashin grinned. “Why Malvia, tossing some poor soul to the mercy of the Watch? What’s gotten into you?”

  “They’ve decided to follow me,” I replied. “Or possibly you. No, I want to see if they’ll stop following us around there. If not, Bishop Derrick is sufficient firepower to risk confronting them.”

  So we trundled on, one old woman transporting me between two others. Retively old, at least.

  ***

  The cart had managed to stick with us, a bit of a shock as we made it back to busier streets of Avernon.

  We were close to the Ironworks now, the industrial area of the city making for quite a lot of traffic, although thankfully for not a lot of smog today.

  Either they weren’t very busy or the weather mages were actually making themselves useful, keeping the air clear enough you didn’t need a filtration mask to make your way through the thick pea-soup clouds of chemicals.

  Not that workers were provided any, I brought my own whenever I needed to come here. Not too often. Infernals weren’t often hired. The Quarter y nearly halfway across the city, other bor was closer and still pretty cheap, and you avoided a whole host of possible fights between your employees on the factory floor.

  Those still happened, but far less than if you added another votile ethnicity to the mix.

  Now, we were jam-packed between carts bringing lumber to feed the hungry factories of the Ironworks. They hadn’t id a rail line directly into the district, yet, so everything was still being carted in by horse.

  That railway was getting id down, but was being drawn out. Her Majesty reminding the industrialists building her who truly controlled her country. Rumour was behind the scenes a fierce bidding war had erupted for whose factory the rail line would end near, and I’m sure that would end with quite a bit of coin changing hands between everyone involved.

  For right now, it meant being stuck between carts loaded high with pre-cut lumber or even uncut trees and stuck at the pace of a snail.

  “Pleasant afternoon for a drive, don’t you think?” Tagashin said, sarcasm in her tone so unneeded the complete ck of it looped back around to as if every word dripped with it. “A brilliant strategy, traveling near the Coffin and so we can take the scenic route to the Bishop.”

  “Oh be quiet,” I said sulkily. “It’s not normally this bad.”

  I wasn’t lying, while traffic along

  We were still being tailed, having long since passed the Coffin’s twelve towers. Tagashin hadn’t even smelled a slightest shift in the desperation of our would-be watcher.

  “Very useful sense of smell,” I said as we continued our slow trudge behind the lumber-carrying cart in front of us.

  “It is,” she said. “Very useful for picking people out.”

  “So then?” I asked, the rest of the question clear to me, and from the way she looked at me, by her as well.

  “They knew how to adjust their scents,” she told me. “Detection by smell doing their kind in was a cssic adventuring trick centuries before you came around. So no, I couldn’t sniff out the shapechangers, nor was I pretending not to as some kind of cruel joke.”

  That was…believable but not convincing. And from how she looked at me in resignation, she could tell that as well.

  Before that conversation could continue, we could hear something from up ahead, a magically magnified voice who had been hidden by the din of the Ironworks in the distance but could now be made out.

  “Behold, the newest marvel of the steel age! One of my company’s newest products, the Brexington Mark 2 Guard Robot, designed to thoroughly end anyone who would invade the sanctity of your home!”

  Up ahead on a ptform, a red-haired, top-hatted man was running through a list of different features of this robot, which stood right next to him. They’d attracted a small crowd, which in turn had constricted traffic down to a trickle going past.

  I was a little surprised. After the disasters of some of the earliest tests, either the tech had finally reached a point where it didn’t threaten injury or death to the bystanders, or there were still fools around. Probably the second, as I turned my gaze to the machine.

  It had four legs, thick pilrs keeping the central body a bare foot off the ground as it rotated, a pair of red slits on one side of the boxy, blocky body facing a steel anvil on the ground. It was barely the height of a short ogre, but those heavy arms of steel on the side were much more powerful than any ogre’s.

  “As a demonstration of strength. Engage!”

  Both arms raised up and came down at the same time on top of the anvil. The steel didn’t break or even bend, instead it sheared and squealed as the fists colpsed the steel underneath, leaving a rough cube of steel in its pce. The robot raised it’s hands, bits of fttened steel embedded in the stylized human fists someone had cut the hands into.

  I whistled as the person I presumed must be Brexington continued to hawk his robot.

  “Better,” I said. “Still a lot of room for improvement with those.”

  “Blows aimed sloppily,” Tagashin said, distaste barely hidden under a sheen of innocent curiosity. “You could dodge those easily enough. And it probably couldn’t handle a moving target as easily.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But most previous models I’ve seen demonstrated? Couldn’t hit a target as small as an anvil. It’s improving, and I doubt it being demonstrated out here is a coincidence.”

  A little reminder for the workers where the real power y, although maybe a bit strong of a hand. After all, if these creations were constantly improving, how long until the ones on the assembly lines making these machines were the machines themselves?

  “Even odds Her Majesty starts exerting influence to assume some direct control of these,” I said to Tagashin.

  “I’ll take that bet,” she said, staring at the machine. “Your queen isn’t that blunt of a hand. She’ll buy from these industrialists, under the strict understanding that only she is allowed to buy them.”

  “And I’m certain within days they’ll have excuses for why some of them are missing and in the hands of private citizens,” I replied. “Or her enemies.”

  Pusible deniability could do wonders while you were still powerful enough or influential enough to not be worth removing from the board. Not if you made removing you enough of a hassle.

  “Our friend is gone,” Tagashin noted.

  “Really?” I said. I didn’t even bother gncing back, too obvious of a move to make just in case they still lurked about.

  “I don’t tend to lose scents like that. Not this soon after the first sniff.”

  “In the Ironworks?”

  She nodded slightly, and I frowned, thinking. Not by the Coffin, arguably the seat of the Watch, but in the Ironworks?

  “Something to consider ter,” I said. “You got their scent?”

  “Yes.”

  It was something, as we continued to travel through to Bishop Derrick’s.