Malfeasance and Mummery
Fifth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
The docks of Meereen once heavy with the sound of clinking chains as thousands upon thousands of newly broken slaves were consigned to pitch black holds now sounded more often with the creak of boards under the tread of idle longshoremen, freemen by ancient custom going back to the days of old Ghis, and the squeak of rats who might just be counted the freest living things in the Red City, they surely seemed to have the run of the place. Kira's hands itched for a quill and parchment to lay down the feeling into notes. Alas that she was on lookout duty and could not take her eyes from the alleyway opening before the mouth of their current hiding place.
Glyra had called it the 'Sunken Palace' in a fit of fey wit and the name had stuck, but it had most likely been a bathhouse that slowly slipped into the clinging sandy earth until at last it was simply built over, more or less intact. The Tolosi spies had stumbled over it last month and used some of the plentiful gold they had been given to buy the shop whose basement was the only easy access to the place. Since then they had all been working like moles to build new escape routes and hidden tunnels, with even Wisdom Malarys and Yrael setting their arts to help when they were not pouring over reports or out looking for answers themselves.
Usually that came down to having a gremlin on watch, but all of them were busy with some errand or another leaving Kira watching for enemies and trying not to wince when the Unsullied 'trainer' marched his charges by, cracking his whip and spewing profanity. No... not spewing, that would imply he did not know what he was doing, but the detestable little man most certainly
did. Every insult, every humiliating task was meant to impress upon the boys that they were nothing, that they were not to think unless their master bade them, and never were they to feel.
So it was with some relief that the incarnate noticed the assassin swagger around a corner giving, the 'all clear' sign while feigning a yawn. He and his bother were still best at that, of course, but they had started to teach the inquisitors, Kira suspected, out of sheer boredom as much as their proclaimed frustration over 'mortals that need to yammer like parrots'.
Looking past Morwyn she spotted a girl walking in his shadow, at first mistaking her for a gremlin, but quickly recognizing her small measured steps as those of one used to wearing a tokar, though she now wore a patched cloak likely stolen from a clothesline.
What had the cat dragged in? she wondered.
***
"Wisdom, Excellence..." The drow's tongue lingered on the second word as though he found it particularly funny to call Yrael by that name. "May I present Miss Jezhene Pahl, she did not enjoy the company she found herself in so I took it upon myself to divest her of it."
The Lord Justice gave a small sigh, never taking his eyes off the girl. "We have not even been here a week, we barely know more of the players than can be gleamed on the streets, and you decide bringing her here is a sensible notion." Then seemingly more to pay back the assassin for his brashness he performed what looked like every divination spell in his repertoire to ensure that she was clean, though finding nothing... or so at least Kira thought before she felt a surreptitious spell open her mind to the mage:
"The child is possessed by a devil, one skillful enough to as to have almost escaped my sight. It is rather carefully not doing anything right now lest I take action."
"I shall meditate upon an exorcism," Yrael's reply came swiftly, as though he were afraid the Lord Justice would not have patience for it, but that fear proved unfounded.
"Kira, keep it busy, pretend to try to put the girl at ease."
So did she play her part, the incarnate of song and story, with skillful smiles and deft words, for both kindness to children and the entrapment of fiends came naturally to her, until at last Yrael finished his discreet prayer. The archon willed himself into the center of the room in a flash of silver fire, his
words like a hammer upon the soul's shackles, the memory of sundered heavens made manifest if only for an instant.
Jezhene fell to her knees, her mouth forming into a wordless scream, but the fiend within could not deny the call. She vomited up what looked like a tide of clear glass, unseen but for the spells that sharpened their eyes. Even as the amorphous mass congealed into a
snarling infernal visage Wisdom Malarys reached out to
seal it in a lantern adorned with coiling dragons.
"Good job," the Lord Justice said, raising his eyes to Morwyn.
"No need to pour salt in the wound," the drow snapped, staring daggers at the mage.
"I'm not, you did your job well in securing the girl, I did mine in removing the devil," came the perfectly level reply. "If you could do
both I would be elsewhere, for there are more tasks than hands to do them. The censure I delivered earlier was as much a deception as the one Lady Kire perpetrated."
The assassin nodded slowly, as though he did not fully believe the answer, but he could not quite disbelieve it either.
OOC: The glass devil was a fiend of possession, the combination of being ethereal and naturally invisible made it so even Malarys had to roll to spot it.
