Zerai caught the coin cleanly and slapped it down across the back of her right hand. No one crowded in to see. The market went on without them. Wheels rattled over bad stone. A vendor somewhere up the lane shouted himself hoarse over the price of onions. A child cried, was ignored, then cried louder. Kaethar had already folded the theft into its own bloodstream and moved on, which made the little silver coin feel less like a result and more like a verdict.
Thane leaned against the alley wall outside Varna’s shop, one hand hooked in his belt, the other resting near the front of his coat where the book sat hidden enough to insult the idea of secrecy. “Well?” he pressed.
Zerai looked. The Seal of the Great City of Kaethar stared right back at her.
Her mouth flattened. “Tails.”
Lira’s gaze shifted to Varna’s door, then to the street beyond, where the city churned past with all the grace of a mill grinding bone into flour. Public, then. No quiet return to Malakar or careful surrender in a room where at least they knew which predator they were feeding. If they were doing this, they would drag the carcass out where the city could smell it and wait to see what came sniffing.
Elora crossed her arms and stared at the coin for half a breath longer than she needed to. “Then we do it in the open.”
Thane scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Hate that.”
“You hate everything,” Zerai said.
“Not true.”
“What don’t you hate?”
Thane’s hand moved from his mouth, down his beard, and slid behind it to lightly rub his throat and chest. He glanced at her. “When problems stay dead.”
Zerai’s lips parted just long enough to think better of responding, then pursed them.
Tako stood a little apart from them, broad and still, the afternoon light catching in the rough dark of his hair. “Hide meat,” he said at last. “Only one hunter come. Show meat… many hunters smell.”
Zerai turned the coin once between her fingers. “You know, for a man who claims to be a bear, you’re making a strong case for fox logic.”
“Tako is Tako.”
“That clears it right up,” Thane muttered.
Lira put out her hand, and Zerai gave her the coin without argument. It was warm from skin and light as a lie. She closed her fingers around it and felt, absurdly, as though the city had spit something into her palm just to prove it could.
“We asked the question,” she said. “Now we live with the answer.”
Elora’s eyes lifted to hers. There was a kind of caution in them that was not there before. “That doesn’t make it the right answer.”
“No,” Lira said. “Just the one that one.
Thane pushed off the wall. “Fine. We drag the ugly thing through the streets and see who starts asking questions they shouldn’t.”
The noise of Kaethar rolled around them without pause. Cart wheels. Raised voices. A burst of laughter from somewhere up the lane. The city had its own pulse, indifferent to theirs, and it pressed at Lira’s nerves in a way the forest never did. In the woods, danger had shape. Here it wore too many faces.
Varna’s back room did not get warmer while they stood outside deciding what to do with her dead monster.
When Lira pushed the door open again, the bell gave the same bright little ring as before, almost cheerful in its refusal to care what sort of choice had just been made beneath it. Varna looked up from the counter, though Saren did not. He was bent over a ledger, writing in a tight, controlled hand that suggested the figures mattered less to him than the act of pinning them in place.
“Well?” Varna asked.
Lira stepped inside first. “We’re moving it.”
Varna’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “To Revaine.”
“Eventually,” Lira said. “First through the city.”
Saren looked up slowly, pen still in hand, and for the first time since they met him, he seemed honestly unsure whether the people in front of him were brave, foolish, or simply too tired to tell the difference anymore.
“That,” he said, “is a public inconvenience of unusual ambition.”
Zerai swept in behind Lira, stood on her tippy toes, and stretched to peek her nose over the counter. “Good. We’re aiming for visibility.”
“We’re aiming for bait,” Thane said, coming through the door with all the warmth of a storm front. “Let’s not dress it up.”
Elora slipped in after the others. The scrape of boots, the shifting of weight, even Zerai’s restless drumming on the counter seemed to ease off by a degree as she took her place. “We need to know who notices,” she said. “If the carcass matters to anyone besides Malakar, this gives them a chance to prove it.”
Varna studied them one by one. “And if the people it matters to are more dangerous than the wizard?”
Lira’s face did not change. “Then we learn that before we hand it to him.”
For a moment, nobody spoke. Outside, a wagon rolled past hard enough to make the front glass hum in its frame.
Saren set down the pen. “If you’re serious,” he said, “then stop speaking like people who still believe they have time. The body will move poorly. It is too large, too rigid in the wrong places, and too heavy for elegance. We can help you secure it for transport, but once it leaves this shop, it stops being a specimen and starts becoming a statement.”
Thane gave a short nod. “That’s the idea.”
“No,” cautioned Saren. “That is the consequence.”
Zerai opened her mouth, thought better of it, and shut it again.”
Varna wiped her hands on a fresh cloth and came out from behind the counter. “If you insist on making a spectacle of it, then we do it correctly. I will not have my work blamed for your theatrics.”
A faint sound came from Elora, almost a laugh, though it died before it quite became one.
Lira stepped aside to let Varna pass. “Fine,” she said. “Tell us what has to happen.”
Behind her, Thane shifted his weight and glanced toward the rear workroom where the grathok lay in pieces of cold light and iron. The book pressed awkwardly beneath his coat. Kaethar pressed in everywhere else.
The vote was over. Now they had to earn it.
If Saren disliked the plan before he saw it in motion, he hid it well beneath the expressionless efficiency of a man who decided that once people insisted on being stupid, the least he could do was keep them from being sloppy about it.
The grathok came out of Varna’s back room on a reinforced butcher’s sledge dragged by two draft mules whose patience deserved sainthood. Thick leather straps crossed the carcass at the chest, hips, and shoulders, while iron hooks held the whole brutal mass in place against the groaning wooden frame. Even dead, the thing looked wrong in daylight. The shaved chalk marks along its flank, the dark ridges of stone growth under the hide, the vast dead weight of it… None of it belonged in a city street. It looked less like prey than a siege engine somebody had skinned poorly.
Saren walked alongside the front rail, one hand on the beam, guiding the sledge through Varna’s threshold. His eyes flicked from the doorframe to the iron hooks and back again, jaw tight. When the left runner scraped stone, he caught the beam before it could swing wider and barked a sharp correction without looking up.
“Lift on my count,” he said.
Thane gripped the back corner. Tako took the other side without comment. Lira braced at the front with Elora just behind her, not because she could outmuscle the rest of them, but because someone had to stop the whole mess from taking the frame off the door and leaving them trapped under six hundred pounds of bad ideas.
“One. Two. Now.”
They heaved.
The sledge lurched, wood groaned, metal shrieked against stone, and the grathok’s bulk shifted just enough to make everyone immediately regret the physics of the world.
Zerai jumped back to avoid the swinging strap. “Lady of Luck, I hate this thing.”
“It hates you, too,” Thane grunted through his teeth.
“No, that’s the fun part. I think it respects me.”
“It’s dead.”
“Exactly. Best relationship I’ve had all week.”
The front runners in the street stopped first. Then the pedestrians behind them stopped because stopping spreads faster than fire in a city. Heads turned. Someone swore softly. A boy carrying a basket of eels froze in the middle of the lane and almost lost the whole slithering lot. By the time the sledge scraped fully into the street, Kaethar had already begun doing what cities do best when presented with something ugly and expensive.
It watched.
A woman at a sausage stall leaned over her counter so far that Lira thought she might fall into the road. Two laborers with lime-dusted arms slowed openly, one wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist as he stared. An older man in a long grey coat took one look at the carcass, then the chalk markings still visible on its side, and kept walking much too quickly for someone uninterested.
“That one saw more than meat,” Lira said quietly.
Elora followed her gaze. ‘Yes.”
Zerai, who moved to the side of the sledge where she could watch the street instead of helping drag, tilted her head. “Good. Nice to know this is actually doing its job.”
The sledge hit a seam in the stone and jolted hard enough to make the whole carcass thump against the frame. One of the mules flattened its ears and let out a miserable sound from deep in its chest.
Saren did not look back. “Steady.”
“Tell that to the road,” Thane snapped.
“I’m telling it to you.”
The crowd widened around them in rings. Closest were the curious. After that came the irritated people with carts, appointments, and no patience for adventurers hauling dead mountain horrors through merchant lanes. Farther out stood the ones Lira disliked the most. They did not gawk. They measured. A pair of well-dressed men outside a counting house, one broad-shouldered and gray at the temples, the other lean with a neatly trimmed beard, stopped their quiet conversation and let the sledge pass without pretending they had not noticed it. A woman in dark blue, tall and severe, with silver threaded through her dark hair and a silver pin at her throat, asked no questions at all, which meant she already had better ones. One city guard lifted a hand to slow traffic while another stood still and watched the body as if recalculating the afternoon.
“Think they’ll ask to see our permit?” Zerai murmured.
Thane looked at her. ”Do we have one?”
“No. But if they ask confidently enough, maybe I can make them feel foolish for asking.”
“You do that a lot, don’t you?”
“It keeps things lively.”
Tako walked beside the rear runner, shoulders squared, one huge hand resting on the wood each time the sledge threatened to cant too far. His expression never changed, but the people nearest him gave ground instinctively. The space around the lumbering vaelin moved with him like a second body.
One of the guards finally stepped closer, just enough to announce interest.
“What is that?” he asked.
Thane did not even look up. “Heavy.”
The guard’s mouth tightened.
Elora, as always, softened what did not deserve softening. “A grathok,” she said. “Dead.”
“I can see that.”
“Then we’re all having a successful afternoon.” Zerai looked up, smiling pleasantly enough that the guard could not decide whether she was stupid or mocking him.
Behind him, a merchant who had been forced to pull his handcart into a doorway threw up both arms. “You can’t move that thing through spice row! It’ll upset the animals!”
Thane barked a laugh. “If your spices spook that easy, they deserve what happens.”
Lira kept scanning.
There. A messenger in city green was slowing when he should have kept pace. Two men in aprons whispering with the intensity of people who had no interest in the body until they heard what it was. A hooded figure on the far side of the lane who did not stop long enough to be obvious, only long enough to mark direction, numbers, burden, and escorts.
Good, Lira thought. Come closer.
The city saw them now. They were neither travelers nor nuisances, but people dragging something through its arteries that did not belong there and could not possibly mean anything simple.
Beside her, Elora adjusted her grip on the front beam and winced as the weight shifted again.
“You alright?” Lira asked.
Elora nodded once. “No. But yes.”
Ahead, the lane narrowed toward the market’s central crossway, where the traffic thickened and the eyes would multiply. The bait had left the trapdoor. Now they only had to see what fed.
They made it as far as the central crossway before someone finally decided curiosity was worth the risk of being obvious. The street widened into a hard knot of traffic where three merchant lanes met, and none of them were broad enough for mercy. Carts stacked with casks and baskets jammed against handbarrows, porters shouted for room that did not exist, and above it all, the dead weight of the grathok came on like bad weather. By then, people were no longer just staring. They were stepping aside early, making room before they had to. The carcass had stopped being a spectacle and started becoming an event.
A cluster of merchants near the intersection broke apart without argument. Somewhere ahead, a porter hauling a handcart swore, saw what was coming, and swallowed the rest of it. Even the flow of traffic shifted around the newcomer in small, unconscious adjustments, a habit that spoke of years spent learning that resisting him created more trouble than yielding.
The man in the sable-trimmed coat stepped into the lane only after the space had already been made for him. He did not raise a hand or call for attention. He simply occupied the center of the road with the calm certainty of someone accustomed to being obeyed before he spoke. The crowd’s reaction did the rest. The human was broad through the chest, somewhere past fifty, with iron-grey hair at the temples and a face that would have looked almost genial if not for the careful deadness behind the eyes. A silver pin shaped like a scale hung at his throat. Beside him stood a younger clerk clutching a ledger board to his chest like a shield.
Saren stopped first, more from insult than obedience.
“Move,” Thane ordered.
The man’s gaze slid over the carcass, then the straps, then the chalk lines still visible along the grathok’s flank. He took his time with that, which Lira disliked at once.
“My apologies,” he said, in a tone that suggested he had none. “I was not aware this district had begun permitting unscheduled transport of unstable magical remains.”
Zerai brightened instantly. “And I was not aware this district had appointed you to ask.”
The clerk made a tiny sound through his nose, but the older man did not look at him.
“Berris Vale,” he said. “Deputy assessor for bonded goods, hazardous transfers, and irregular carcass movement in the central market lanes.”
Thane stared at him. “That a real job?”
“It is when enough money is involved.”
That got everyone’s attention.
Lira shifted her grip on the front runner. “This isn’t bonded cargo.”
Vale’s eyes moved to her, then stayed there. No,” he said. “That much is obvious. Which is why I’m asking why a field-killed grathok is being halted through merchant traffic under preservation marks instead of through licensed containment routes.”
The ragner said nothing.
The man looked at the chalk again. “Those aren’t butcher’s notes. Those are interface markings.”
Saren’s jaw tightened.
Good, Lira thought. So he really does know what he’s looking at.
Elora stepped in before the silence turned sharp. “It’s under private handling.”
“Whose?”
“Why?” Zerai asked sweetly. “Thinking of buying it?”
The clerk’s knuckles whitened around the board. Vale, on the other hand, smiled just enough to show he recognized the attempt and disliked neither it nor her.
“No,” he said. “Thinking of deciding whether I need to report it.
Tako moved slowly and slightly, just one heavy step forward with his hand still on the sledge. The vaelin did not bare his teeth or square his shoulders. He simply occupied more of the street than before, and suddenly the clerk looked much less interested in procedure.
Thane’s voice dropped a notch. “Report it to who?”
Vale glanced at the dwarf, measured him, then let his attention drift past the party toward the body again. “That depends,” he said. “On whether this is merely an expensive mistake or the beginning of something more interesting.
Before anyone could answer, the city guard who initially approached them barked for the lane to clear from the edge of the crowd. The moment broke just enough for traffic to shove at its edges again. Vale held his ground for a heartbeat longer, eyes lingering on the carcass. Then he adjusted a cuff, took a single measured step back, and let the flow of merchants and carts slide between him and the sledge.
As the sledge scraped past him, he reached out with two fingers and touched one of the leather straps. The carcass passed without interference, confirming to the deputy that what he saw was real. Then he looked at Lira and said, very quietly, “If this is heading where I think it is, you should worry less about who sees it now and more about who already has.”
The members of the party exchanged glances before Thane swore and started to turn, one hand coming off the runner as if he meant to bull through the crowd after Vale and drag the answer back out of him by the collar.
“Leave him,” Lira snapped.
The dwarf looked ready to ignore her, but the sledge shifted behind him with a low, wooden groan. One wheel caught hard in the rut it had settled into, and the whole ugly weight of the grathok dragged the moment back into the street.
Around them, Kaethar kept closing over the interruption. Merchants leaned, guards watched, carts pressed for room, and whatever little pocket of stillness Vale had created was already collapsing under the city’s normal appetite.
“Move,” Lira said.
This time they did.
The ranger took the front left again. Thane fell back into place at the rear, jaw clenched hard enough to ache, and threw his weight against the sledge. The cleric and the wizard kept close to the flank while Tako leaned his weight into the beam, driving the sledge forward another grinding stretch through the lane.
Only when they reached a cooper’s yard off the main lane did Lira finally call a halt.
The sledge came to rest crooked between stacks of casks and a leaning fence silvered by age and old spills. The mules stood with heads low, sides heaving, steam ghosting from their nostrils in the cool afternoon air. For the first time since they had dragged the carcass into public view, the city was not directly in their faces. It was only just beyond the boards and alley mouth, still roaring to itself.
Thane rolled one shoulder, then the other, working feeling back into muscles that had turned to rope. “Well,” the dwarf said, breathing harder than he wanted anyone to hear, “that went to slag.”
Zerai leaned both hands on the sledge and looked up at him. “That wasn’t so bad. Bad would have been an auction.”
“Give it time.”
Elora wiped a forearm across her brow and glanced toward the lane where Vale had vanished. “He knew too much.”
“No,” Lira said. “He knew enough.”
The ranger stood with one boot braced against the runner, eyes on the alley mouth as if the city might squeeze through it if she stared hard enough. “That’s worse.”
No one argued.
Tako rested one huge hand on the carcass. His sausage fingers spread across the hide while he stood motionless, head slightly tilted. The breeze carried blood and musk through the trees. He drew a slow breath through his nose, then another, weighing the scent. “City smell meat fast,” he said at last.
“Not meat,” Zerai muttered. “Value.”
Thane spat to one side. “Same thing, far as cities are concerned.”
The smallest of nods came from Lira. “He wasn’t curious. He was confirming.”
Elora’s hand found the small silver symbol etched with a crescent moon at her belt, then fell again. “And now?”
Lira looked back at the grathok. Even on the sledge, even half-bound and handled and marked, it still looked like something too large to belong to anyone. But that was the lesson, wasn’t it? In Kaethar, if a thing had value, then it already belonged to systems before you even understood which ones.
“Now we know,” she said, “that going public didn’t clear the road. It only lit it.”
Zerai exhaled through her nose, her hand drifting for a moment to the focus in her pocket as if to make sure it was still there. “Perfect. We hauled a dead nightmare through the street, and now the entire city’s acting like we rang a dinner bell.”
Thane grunted. “And Malakar’s still waiting.”
Elora looked from one face to the next. The cleric’s voice, when it came, was quiet. “Then whatever we do next, we do it knowing we are already being watched.”
That settled over them harder than the weight of the carcass had. The city answered with appetite. They stood in the cooper’s yard with the grathok hulking between them on its sledge, too large for the space and too dead to justify the amount of trouble it was still causing. Beyond the fence, Kaethar went on shouting, buying, hauling, and bargaining as if none of it mattered. Maybe to the city, it didn’t.
Lira kept one hand on the runner. “We learned something.”
Thane let out a humorless breath. “Yeah. We learned this city doesn’t need an invitation.”
Elora’s eyes stayed on the lane Vale had vanished into. “Going public didn’t make it safer. It just made it more visible to the wrong people.”
“That assumes there are right people,” Zerai chimed. “Are there?”
Lira glanced at her, then back at the carcass. “Malakar is still dangerous. But now he’s dangerous in a direction we can point to.”
Thane arched his back and felt an accordion of pops run from his belt to his neck. “Then we stop feeding the street and take it to him.”
Elora looked at Lira. “If we go now, we step onto his path.”
“If we don’t,” Lira said, “we stay on everyone else’s.”
As if in answer, one of the leather straps along the grathok’s flank gave a low creak.
Everyone looked.
Nothing moved. Not really. The carcass remained where it was, all ridged hide and iron-bound weight, but the strap loosened more than it should have without help.
Zerai jumped back and pointed at the beast. “That thing just moved!” Her bronze skin flashed a yellow-white as the blood drained from her face.
Thane frowned. “Not possible.” He poked at one of the grathok’s flanks and felt the muscle give way ever so slightly. “Rigor mortis. It’s leaving the body.”
Zerai looked from the loosened strap to the others and lifted one shoulder. “We could always leave it here and see who tries to snap it up first.
“No,” Lira and Elora said in unison.
Thane stared at her. “Absolutely not.”
Tako said nothing, which somehow sounded even more final.
Zerai held up both hands. “Fine. I was workshopping.”
The grathok loomed between them, huge and wrong and suddenly less convincingly dead than anyone liked. The city was still out there beyond the fence, swallowing noise and rumor and opportunity with the same open mouth.
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