The door to The Drowned Rat groaned open on protesting, salt-swollen hinges, admitting me from the thick, muffling fog of the wharf into a haze of stale smoke, sweat, and cheap ale. The low-ceilinged room was a pit of shadows and murmuring secrets, the flickering lamplight casting a greasy, jaundiced glow on the hard-bitten faces of its patrons. Mercenaries, smugglers, and men who had no other names stared into their mugs, their gazes as murky as the harbor water slapping against the pilings below. The cacophony of the port city was replaced by a low, dangerous hum of paranoia. My arrival, though I moved quietly, caused a ripple in that hum. Heads turned, eyes narrowed, assessing. A stranger was a threat, or a mark.
I ignored them. My focus was a single, still point in the chaotic room. In the far corner, almost swallowed by the shadows, a hooded figure sat alone. He was nursing a mug of dark liquid, utterly motionless. The space around him was a pocket of absolute silence, a bubble of potent non-existence that the tavern's ambient misery seemed to flow around.
My Rhythmic Sense, when I tried to subtly probe that stillness, met a strange, shifting wall of static, a deliberate and masterful cloaking of his Aura that was unlike anything I had ever felt. It wasn't a fortress of pressure like my father's or Damian's; it was a void, a place where my senses simply found nothing to read. This was him. Silas. Leo. The Unseen Blade.
I navigated the treacherous path between the rickety tables, the floorboards groaning under my weight. With every step, I could feel the weight of his attention, a cold, analytical scrutiny from beneath the cowl of his hood. He was dissecting me before I had even spoken a word.
I stopped before his table. "They call you Silas," I said, my voice low and steady, pitched just for him. "I was told you were the man to talk to if one had a problem with… pests."
The hooded figure did not move for a long moment. Then, slowly, he lifted his head. The face in the shadows was not what I had expected. The novel had spoken of a legend, conjuring images of a sharp-jawed, roguish hero. The man before me was older, perhaps in his late thirties, his face lean and weathered, etched with the fine lines of weariness and a deep, abiding cynicism.
A faint, silvery scar cut through his left eyebrow, giving his expression a permanent, skeptical arch. But his eyes… his eyes were ancient. They were a pale, piercing grey, sharp as chips of ice, and they held the profound, soul-deep exhaustion of a man who had seen the absolute worst of the world and found it wanting.
"You were told wrong," he said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp, like stones grinding together. "I'm retired. And I don't like being found." His gaze flickered over my simple sailor's clothes, then lingered on my hands, where the calluses of a warrior were still visible beneath the grime. "Especially by little lordlings playing at being common folk. Your hands are too clean, your posture too straight. You stink of noble steel and inherited arrogance. Go home before you get hurt."
He had seen through my disguise in an instant. His perception was terrifying.
"My name is Lancelot Ashworth," I said, abandoning the pretense. "And my business is not a game."
He actually scoffed at that, a short, humorless bark of a laugh. "Ashworth. A border lord. Even better. You come down from your stone fortress to the gutter and expect to hire the help?" He took a slow drink from his mug. "Whatever rat is in your granary, kid, handle it yourself. I'm done fighting nobles' secret wars."
"This is not a noble's war," I pressed, my voice urgent. "This is a war against a poison that is seeping into the foundations of the entire kingdom. A cult."
"There's always a cult," he replied, his boredom a palpable insult. He pushed his chair back, preparing to leave. "Find a priest. Say a prayer. Leave me out of it."
His dismissal was absolute. He was a wall of pure, unadulterated cynicism. Gold wouldn't work. Pleas for honor wouldn't work. I had one card left to play, the one piece of leverage my unique knowledge had given me.
"They use a symbol," I said, my voice sharp, stopping him in his tracks. "A ritual marker. Three intersecting lines, a jagged star. They leave it where they kill."
He froze. His back was to me, but I saw his shoulders tense, a subtle, almost imperceptible tightening of muscle. For the first time since I had approached him, his wall of indifference had cracked. I had his attention.
"They are called the Children of the Black Sun," I continued, pressing the advantage, feeding him the curated truth. "And they use a specific kind of weapon. A curved throwing knife, forged in this city, bearing a unique maker's mark." I reached into my tunic and placed the blade Garrick had recovered on the sticky, beer-stained table between us.
He turned his head slowly, his piercing grey eyes falling on the knife. He didn't look at it with the curiosity of a warrior assessing a weapon. He looked at it with the pained, haunted recognition of a man staring at a ghost from his own past. I saw a flicker of raw, unguarded emotion in his eyes – grief, rage, and a profound, bone-deep sorrow.
"Where," he rasped, his voice a dangerous whisper, "did you get that?"
"From the site where they slaughtered a dozen of my family's guards," I replied, my own voice hard with the memory. "The same men who left that symbol behind."
He stared at the knife for a long, silent minute, the sounds of the tavern fading into a distant, irrelevant hum. He was no longer in The Drowned Rat. He was somewhere else, a decade ago, in a place of blood and shadow and loss. He finally looked up at me, the cynicism in his eyes replaced by a cold, deadly seriousness. But it wasn't acceptance. It was assessment.
"You want my help?" he said, his voice regaining its edge, but now it was the edge of a sharpened blade. "Earn it. You walk in here, a noble playing dress-up, waving around a ghost from my past, asking me to bleed for your cause. I've bled for nobles before. They pay in coin and betrayal." He leaned forward, his ancient eyes pinning me. "I need to know if you're just another employer, or if you've got the sand to walk in the shadows yourself. Prove you're not just another disposable lordling."
"What's the test?" I asked, my own resolve hardening.
He gave a cruel, thin smile. "There's a smuggling operation running out of the Tide-Eater warehouse at the end of the east pier. They're run by a man named Silas Grime—no relation. Vicious bastard. In his office, in a locked strongbox, is a ledger. It details his last month of shipments. Bring it to me. By dawn tomorrow." He stood, tossing a small, rusty key onto the table. "For the front door. The rest is your problem."
He turned to leave, then paused. "And if you bring your guards, if I so much as smell another trained soldier near that pier, the deal is off, and I will personally put one of these," he tapped the knife on the table, "in your back the next time you step into a dark alley. Don't test me on that."
Without another word, he melted into the tavern's gloom and was gone. I sat for a moment in the suddenly empty space he had left behind, my hands trembling slightly from the adrenaline. I'd found him. Against all odds, I'd found the Unseen Blade. But the man was a ruin of cynicism and trauma, harder and more broken than any story had described. He had given me an impossible, suicidal task, a test designed to make me fail. He wanted me to give up, to run back to my fortress.
I picked up the rusty key. Its cold, sharp edges dug into my palm. He was wrong. I wasn't just another lordling. I was a survivor. And I had a ledger to acquire.