The boy who was not Dunne Volkov's son led her firs tinto an empty gymnasium lit with screaming fluorescent and then down a flight of stairs that led to a closed, foggy glass door in one direction and continued in another. There were murmurs of laughter and music from behind the door, and even greater noises came from further below. Arnica had once read that Misk was built by the Iskans, and like the great cities of Iska, it was as big beneath the ground as it was above it.
This building, however decrepit it appeared, must have been tremendously old. She looked at the wall for any sign of original architecture but found plaster and framed portraits of oiled, muscular men and women wearing hand wraps and a few signed headshots of musicians. The boy might still have been talking, though she wasn’t sure, because as they reached the next subterranean floor, two wooden doors were closed, and when they opened, there was an avalanche of sound.
The room beyond the doors was bigger than the gym twice over. The ground-level floors must have been separated into multiple storefronts at one point after its construction. She sincerely hoped the basements had been thoroughly reinforced. Arnica found something unnerving about standing in a room two stories beneath the earth filled with raucous, ground-shaking noise, and she crossed her arms and followed the shimmering mint shirt between a wall and a row of backs.
The center of the room was sunken into the ground, another story’s depth, and at the base of it was a polished wooden floor beneath a grand chandelier that remained reassuringly still. At one edge, an older woman with startlingly white hair stood dressed in the all-white attire of an Iskan martial master, though she was not Iskan at all, and at another edge, an old man sat at a brass drum and beat it rhythmically with a cloth covered mallet. The drum was also Iskan, and he also was not. In the center of the floor, beneath millions of small, glistening Lustofian crystals and a good bit of vanadanite in the centerpiece, two skinny young men no older than the boy in the mint green shirt wrestled on the lacquer floor, and as she followed the boy who was not Dunne Volkov’s son through rows of spectators on risers, one of the fighters surfaced and began to pummel the other until blood spilled from his nose. The drum beat and the old woman yelled to end it.
Arnica frowned as they reached the other side of the labyrinthian construction that was not really a room but a subterranean arena and followed another few metal stairs to an alcove, one among many, where a man sat alone at a bench with a long, narrow table in front of it. To some extent, she knew his face. Or maybe she only thought she knew it, for it had been a long time since it was a face printed in newspapers. The man drank from a glass stein and nodded to a tall, narrow glass and a plate on the table beside him.
"You took long enough."
He spoke when they approached.
"Gowri getting ready?"
The boy asked at the table. Arnica could only assume Gowri was his sister. She had already forgotten his name, she realized. It was unlike her.
"I'd hope so."
The man shrugged and took a sip.
"Ready may be an overstatement..."
He trailed off when he realized she was not a passerby stuck behind the boy in the narrow aisles of the arena but that she was purposefully there. For half a minute, despite the shouts and laughter and the beat of the drummer, there was silence. The boy forgot her presence, eating something fried from a plate on the tbale, and Dunne Volkov looked at her. He looked more Iskan in-person than she imagined.
"Omni."
He spoke again.
"Oh yeah."
The boy, his name was Omni, choked down his fried cheese and smiled.
"Sorry, kinda forgot. I'm really hungy. This is Arnica. I found her at your house. She's from Violl. Has a letter for you. From the King.
The boy made a sarcastic facial expression and then crammed another piece of cheese in his mouth and sank into the booth.
"If a waitress comes, will you get me some noodles? I'm seriously starving..."
He continued on, but Volkov ignored him.
"Here."
She reached into her jacket but the man shook his head.
"Arnica?"
He said her name and stared at her for another few seconds.
"Let's go outside."
Two more flights of stairs and she was standing on cracked, overgrown pavement behind a building that smelled like bleach and beneath the aggressive brightness of a floodlight. It was windy in the crevice between buildings, and Dunne Volkov lit a lorrel cigar with an embossed lighter and took the letter only when he had inhaled once.
If someone had asked her what she would have expected the king’s brother, traitorous, disgraced, and infamous, to look like after twelve years in exile, if she even believed him to be alive at all, she would not have expected to find him so very regular. He could have been any other man in that arena, watching two teenagers bleed one another, but in the floodlight, he was a bit taller, a bit more Iskan and a bit more distinguished than the rest of the men in that arena. She supposed he was handsome and surprisingly well-dressed, at least for a madman.
When he was finished with the letter, he folded it back carefully into three segments, slid it back into its envelope, and into his own inner pocket, a flash of oostersteel in the lining reflected in the floodlight. He wore armor in Misk and yet sent a local boy to run his errands. The letter disappeared. He exhaled and spoke,
"So, he's dying, then?"
"I believe so."
She spoke carefully because it felt like he could see through words to their content, to the images burned in her brain.
"He looks it, anywya. I cna't imagine without improvement he has...very long."
"You saw him? Yourself?"
He asked, but it was barely a question. His words were flat, and his face was as stone and as grey as the rest of Misk. A guess as to the letter's contents based upon his reaction was impossible.
"I was his secretary."
She tried to match his abjection, but it was impossible. She may not have cared if the King died, in fact, she wasn't sure she did, but was afraid of death and it showed.
"His secretary?"
He smiled, barely, as slight as a smile could possibly be, a dry molecule of amusement. The same sort of smirk everyone wore when she gave her title.
"Well, considering he's what? Fifty? Would I be wrong to guess it won't be a natural death?"
"No."
She crossed her arms tightly. The wind was incessant. The ocean was somewhere nearby.
"There was nothing natural about him."
"You sound very sure of that. Are you a physician?"
His face was stone, again.
"Would you know the appearance of a natural illness to an unnatural one?"
It was a pedantic, predatory question and she sighed.
"It was your question."
She rolled her eyes. She wasn't sure she was afraid of him. Perhaps she should have been, but it didn't seem worth it.
“Maybe it’s entirely natural, maybe it’s an entirely natural yet unknown illness, and all his doctors have truly done their very best—I don’t know. You’re right. I’m not one of them. All I know is what I saw. He looks like he’s rotting from the inside out and putrefying like a preserved corpse in a jar, but it’s his whole body, and there’s no jar.”
"Poison, then."
He shrugged and that time, he did smile. Barely, and sinister but not for her.
“Not surprising. I’d poison him if I had the chance. But I didn’t. So who? Well...I suppose it doesn’t really matter, does it? My congratulations to whoever pulled it off.”
He inhaled as the cigar burned to half its former size.
“If you’re waiting for a response, you can go. I’ll send it.”
"Very well."
She nodded. She would be glad to be done with the conversation.
"Though, I have absolutely no idea where I am, where the nearest hotel is, and further still, how to recover my luggage from within your home. That is...essentially, why I’m still standing here. Not the response.”
"Luggage?"
He smiled genuinely this time.
"You have luggage? Were you told to stay in Misk for this?"
"No."
She shook her head.
"I was simply advised not to return. Look, I don't mean to hold you up, your assistant, the boy-
"He's not my assistant."
He interrupted.
"Well, whatever he is. He told me to leave my things there rather than carry them through the city, but I've still got my wallet on me, and if you could just tell me how to get to a hotel from here, I'll simply come for my things in tomorrow, and you can return to your...evening."
"My evening..."
He smiled, looked down at his watch, and spoke.
"It’s almost nine. There’s nowhere to stay for at least half a mile. Not for someone like you, anyway. And if I sent you on your way to the nearest hotel, you’d never be seen again. This is Misk, and you look you’re worth at least a few thousand jin. And I can't leave right now to bring you.”
She rolled her eyes and glanced around to see where she was in relation to the street, and then the ocean.
The ocean would be to the west. If she could find the ocean, she could find north, and if she could find north, she could find the train station. She should have really carried a compass. But who carried compasses in urban peacetime? Probably Dunne Volkov and his oostersteel jacket. But she wouldn't ask him. No, she just needed to find the train station. There were hotels around the train station, even if it took an hour to walk there. And then, in the morning, she would beg help from the [[city guards->City Guards]] to retrieve her things. It wasn’t lost on her the lunacy of the conversation, of the players in it, and of the potential repercussions of displaying general annoyance in such a situation with such a man. Immortals, if he knew who she was, and there was a chance he did, he might kill her only for her relation to her mother. It was only at that moment, cold beyond reason from the wind and not feeling particularly threatened at all, that those concerns seemed secondary.
"Come back inside. I need to watch the next fight. After that, I'll walk you to a hotel, alright? In the meantime, I'll buy you a drink."
He was forcing the sort of smile that one setting a trap would not need to force, and she found that oddly reassuring. And besides, she didn’t particularly care if it was a trap. He was likely right about her chances on the streets of Misk. Reviewing crime reports for relevance to the king was a part of her job.
"How long is a fight?"
She asked, for some reason.
"Does it fuckin matter? You got a meeting after this?"
He smiled genuinely and his facade broke. It was oddly comforting. She smiled back.
"No, you're right. It doesn't matter. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
He spat his cigar onto the grass, dug it into the ground with his heel, and stared for another moment. It wasn’t at her this time. Just the space between her and the door to the arena. She couldn’t tell if the man was sane, but she decided he didn’t seem dangerous. Not to her and not in that moment. He might have even been charming. Or at least, decent.
For a moment, she looked at him, just to see if he was asking the question she thought he was asking.
"She's your mother, isn't she?"
She could only nod. He didn't smile. She appreciated that.
"Does she know you're here?"
"I don't know."
She shook her head and followed him back towards the iron-bolted door buried in the side of a grey building beneath two grey chimneys billowing great clouds of grey smoke. Everything was grey in the Grey City.