Spit out the Bone (M)

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

Harper Malley rested his head against the cool metal of the Whitevale council chamber door. With the candles extinguished, the sunset crept in through the open curtains, casting the ceiling a rusty grey. Outside, the night shift watched the horizon like hawks; twelve guardsmen loyal to the Brotherhood cause trying to defend his township. It angered him greatly that their significance had been made a mockery of in the face of this mutiny he had just discovered.

If what he was being told was true, then his friend had been usurped by a sect of the Brotherhood even he had no prior knowledge of.

His hand ferreted around in his pocket for a piece of paper. It was one of many such scraps; encrypted notes passed from his Immortals to him, for his eyes only. The complex network of spies he had set up was so secret that even Storm Veritas knew nothing about them. Osiris had established them as the Brotherhood’s first true black operations team, and now Harper was using them to find out why Shinsou had vanished off the face of Althanas. Months of misinformation, bad informants and red herrings had turned up nothing, even for the best of his officers. But then, yesterday, a communique was intercepted to Director Crennick Wilfhelm from none other than Arius, Shinsou’s immediate and “temporary” replacement.

With a sudden jerking movement Harper stepped back and opened the door, the cool air of his council chamber rushing in. He turned, locking the door in three places, and paced forward. Continuing, he neither looked left nor right, yet had complete awareness of the figures gathered there. There was a man on the corner nearest him fronting all sorts of documentation and maps, and an aide rounding the corner to present what appeared to be some sort of letter. The candles in the chamber were all lit up. Harper’s feet stomped over the floor tile cracks, his body tense, his ears taking in every sound before he stood in front of throne on a podium.

Beneath the black hair, sodden, grey eyes glared out into the center of the room. There came a stressed groaning from the supports of his chair as the man sat his cloaked body further back into the upholstery. In the sultry air of his Whitevale chamber, a place one could only reach through either invitation or detention, the only communication between the two came when Harper screwed the paper into a ball and threw it nonchalantly into the lap of the man, a gesture that elicited no reaction at all from the man on the podium.

“Arius!” Harper hissed, his words slurred by anger. “What is the meaning of this?!”

For a moment, nothing was said, and then Arius silently rose from his chair. The room ground to a standstill as he calmly descended the steps from his throne to ground level and faced his accuser. The contrast between the two could not have been more pronounced. Harper, being a man of the sword, was heavy-set, muscular and rugged whilst Arius was thin and scholarly. Harper was middle aged and his complexion ruddy, yet the mysterious usurper was only just entering his thirties, by the looks of it.

“What is the meaning of what, director Malley?” Whilst Harper spoke with brash purpose and blatant challenge; Arius’s voice was mild, almost gentle, calm and reassuring.

“You know damned well what!” the former bellowed angrily. “Dealing with the Telgradians! Sending Crennick to do your dirty work and then putting him in a safe house in the south!”

Harper inched closer, his sandals scraping on the stony path. His beady black eyes focused hard.

Arius’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly in turn.

“Familiarize yourself with the facts, Director Malley, before you so freely accuse me of treason. My dealings were with a specific Telgradian; none other than Telos Soltair, Shinsou’s father. The Council of Five would have killed him outright had I not intervened. Crennick, I cannot speak for.”

Anger and frustration clouded Harper’s vision like a fog. Then realization struck, and the red mist dissipated from his eyes.

“You,” he growled, suddenly calm again. “You believed Telos would spare him? Then why hide Crennick in the south? What is all this subterfuge for?”

Arius didn’t reply straight away, although inwardly he could not contain his surprise at Harper’s persistence. He sighed gently as he unfurled the crumpled paper and placed it into his robes. Some shape came to his voice, odd for a man who appeared to be devoid of any expression of emotion at all. He raised a chalice to his disheveled face. Harper was unsure if he was actually consuming the contents it or simply using it as a device to antagonize him further.

“Who said I was hiding him?”