The Baron's Closed Door
While the rest of the party went shopping — healing potions, supplies, the practical inventory of people who had been in several fights recently and intended to be in several more — Elaazar went to work.
Arya went to the market with Gru on her shoulder.
The treantling had taken to the city with the same unhurried attention it gave to everything. It sat very still in dense crowds, which was either serenity or strategic caution — difficult to tell with Gru. At the spice stalls it leaned slightly toward the dried herb displays. At the fabric stalls it leaned toward nothing at all, which Arya noted and kept moving. People looked at it, and then looked at Arya, and then decided not to ask, which was the correct decision.
Arya let it handle a few leaves from one of the produce stalls. The vendor watched this. The treantling examined the leaves with the focused seriousness of a small creature conducting an assessment. It handed them back.
Arya bought them anyway.
That evening she set Gru on the windowsill of the warehouse with a small clay dish of water beside it. She wasn't certain what a treantling needed — the lab hadn't come with instructions — but water seemed like a reasonable hypothesis. She watched it for a while without making it obvious she was watching it.
Gru put one twig-foot in the dish. Then the other.
In the morning there were two new leaves, very small, unfurled from a joint on its left arm that hadn't had them the night before. Bright, genuinely green, the particular green of something that had recently decided to keep going.
Arya refilled the dish without comment.
Over the following days it became a routine — water in the morning, water at night, the occasional leaf from the market tucked into the dish alongside. Gru grew incrementally and with great seriousness, as if the growing were a project it had undertaken and intended to complete properly. The twig-joints that had been bare when Arya found it in the lab were beginning to show the fine texture of bark. The new leaves multiplied. By the end of the week it was visibly, undeniably healthier — rounder at the joints, a little taller, the branch-fingers more articulated.
It had also begun to follow Arya's movements with its head when she crossed the room.
This was new. She noted it the first time it happened, and the second, and by the third she had stopped pretending not to notice and simply acknowledged it — a small nod, the kind you give to something that has recognized you. Gru's leaves shifted slightly. It was not, exactly, a response. But it was something in the direction of one.
The Upper Circle of Campton had a hospital. It was well-maintained, staffed by people who knew what they were doing, and full of patients who had been waiting long enough that the arrival of an elven cleric with documented healing ability produced something close to relief in the administrative staff. Anduin followed at his heels and helped where he was directed and generally did what he was told, which remained his best quality.
Elaazar healed. This was what he did; it was not complicated.
Tyr, it turned out, had some reservations.
The communication was the usual kind — not words, but pressure. The specific weight of a deity's attention falling on a decision the way light falls through a gap in clouds: unmistakably directional. Some of these patients, the weight seemed to say, were not here through the misfortune of circumstance. Some of them had arrived at their beds through routes the God of Justice had noted.
Elaazar healed them anyway. He was not, ultimately, the one who administered justice. He was the one who healed people.
The staff thanked him warmly. The patients received what they needed. One woman, in labor since early morning and doing badly, delivered a healthy child by the time Elaazar finished the last of what he had to give.
He named the boy Solomon, when asked, because someone had to.
He was walking out of the hospital — still sorting through the persistent awareness of Tyr's disapproval, which was not a comfortable thing to carry — when the insignia appeared on the threshold: the scales, Tyr's mark, pressed into the stone of the doorframe as if it had always been there. Elaazar looked at it for a moment. He was not entirely sure if it was a rebuke or a receipt.
He gave a short speech to the people lingering outside — about justice, about why it mattered, about what it meant to believe in something that didn't always make the obvious choice easier. He was not certain anyone was really listening. One person was. A young man in worn clothes, the specific kind of worn that comes from sustained poverty rather than a bad week, who followed him at a careful distance until Elaazar stopped walking.
His name was Mitzos. He was miserable in the particular way of someone who had been hoping, for a long time, that there was a reason for it.
"I'll find you again," Elaazar told him. It was a promise, and he meant it, which is worth noting because he didn't make them carelessly.
The Royal Castle sat in the Inner Circle behind guards who were polite about their job and thorough about their reasons. No invitation, no entry — a rule applied with the consistent courtesy of people who had been taught to be firm without being rude.
Elaazar explained, calmly, that he was a healer. He asked if anyone in the castle had need of one.
The guards exchanged a glance. One of them went inside. The party waited.
Cylia, because she was Cylia, made efficient use of the waiting time. The guard on the left — Gio, his name was Gio — had good posture and a decent jaw and the particular careful blankness of someone who had been trained not to react to the public and was not finding that training fully sufficient. She said something quiet to him. He held his position admirably.
She scheduled a date for that evening. He accepted.
The inside guard returned with Lord Byron, Baron of Campton — a man of middle age and middle height and the contained expression of someone who had been hoping for this for a while and had stopped expecting it. He looked at Elaazar with the focused attention of a man about to ask for something significant.
He led them through the castle, down corridors that became progressively quieter, to a room at the far end of a passage that smelled like medicine and enclosed time.
His daughter, Margarita, was grown — not a child, whatever he'd implied in the asking. She was tied to her bed with the practical restraints of someone who had required them for long enough that it had become routine. She was still when they entered.
Elaazar began the incantation.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then something happened.
It was not Margarita who responded to the healing — or rather, what responded was not what the healing was offered to. The presence behind her eyes had nothing to do with illness. It pushed back with the targeted precision of something that knew exactly what he was doing and had decided it did not want him to continue. Not pain. Not force. Something closer to being turned around in a space that hadn't physically changed — the disorientation of a mind that was no longer quite pointing in the direction it thought it was.
He was in the corridor.
He didn't remember the exact moment of transition. The door was closed. The guards were watching him with careful neutral expressions that suggested this had happened before.
The presence in that room was not something he had a name for. It was old, and it was deliberate, and it had no interest in being examined. He did not go back.
The theater was the kind of building that understood itself as an institution. High ceilings, good stone, the specific weight of a space that had held the same play many times and had learned to carry it without effort. The party arrived in whatever approximation of their best clothes they could manage — Cylia managed better than most, Elaazar wore his temple vestments and considered them appropriate, Arya looked like an elf who had decided to attend a theater and made precisely that much effort.
The Architect's Door was city legend as civic ritual: the life of Sareth Voss, his marriages, his heirs, his death, and the door he had built between himself and the rest of the world. The audience watched with the comfortable familiarity of people who knew every line and were here for the feeling rather than the plot.
During the second act, the character of Queen Ilayne — wife to the Architect — appeared.
The actress wore horns.
She moved with the specific precision of someone who had done this role many times, which made it genuinely difficult to determine whether the horns were part of the costume. They looked real. They also looked like exactly the kind of prop a good theater company would invest in. The party looked at each other in the dark and found no consensus.
Harry, who had come with them, was not watching the stage.
Arya noticed.
She went invisible between one breath and the next — a habit by now, near-reflexive — and found a position that gave her a sightline to the row of seats where Harry had been speaking, in low tones, with two people whose clothes announced membership in the city's upper class at considerable volume.
She watched the conversation. She couldn't hear it clearly. But she watched the body language, the pauses, the small gestures that accompany the exchange of something more substantial than pleasantries. Harry was careful and relaxed, which was the most controlled kind of careful.
After the performance, she put it to him directly.
Harry received the question with the equanimity of someone who had been expecting it. He explained, without particular defensiveness, that the people he'd been speaking with were political contacts — the kind you maintain in a city like Campton not because you need them immediately, but because cities run on the give and take of favors, and the people who understood that tended to be the people who got things done. He said it the way a practical person explains a practical thing: not apologetically, not with flourish.
Arya listened. She did not tell him what she thought of it.
The actress was not easy to follow.
She left through a side exit and moved with the purpose of someone who knew the theater's back routes and had reasons to use them. Most of the party followed. The alley behind the building was dim and narrow and smelled of old stone and lamp oil. She was thirty feet ahead and pulling away.
Elaazar, who had been carrying the wine bottle poem in his head since the Brickborn hideout, spoke the verse out loud. Into the alley, at a carrying volume, with the tone of a cleric reciting something at a doorstep.
To find out more, meet with the Horned Goddess below the full moon's light.
The actress stopped.
She turned. She had a gun — small, compact, the kind of thing kept close for specific situations — and she shot Elaazar with it before anyone had time to explain that this was meant as a greeting.
The noise it made was significant. Elaazar decided against further recitations.
Things settled, gradually, into conversation.
She had a name — Deborah — and the horns were real, which answered that question, and she was a tiefling who had been playing this role for long enough that the question of whether she was the character had become somewhat academic. She had an arrangement with the Brickborn: she provided information about wealthy patrons visiting the theater, they helped her secure better roles. It was a practical trade and she was not especially proud of it and she was also not pretending it hadn't been happening.
In exchange for their discretion, and because the poem on the label meant they already knew more than most people who'd come looking for her, she gave them what she had: the Brickborn's main headquarters were further east of the city, past the inner walls, out into the gorge country.
The Canyon. She gave them a direction.
They parted. Elaazar noted, quietly, that he had been shot in a theater alley while delivering what he'd considered a fairly reasonable conversational opening. He filed this under the long and ongoing list of indignities that serving Tyr in the company of these particular people had produced.
The horns had been real. The wine label had been a map, of a kind. The full moon was still a few days away.
Next episode: a dwarf goddess, a wine yard that yields nothing, and dancing in the dark with a very old friend.