Rewrite That Witch
CH1305 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1305: Lurking

This is an easy job. No great risk. You place the message in the designated location. No one will ever know it was you.

The silver-masked man’s voice returned to him unbidden, as it had since he’d opened the drawer.

Utterly ridiculous. Why in the world would I help Graycastle? They’ve gutted the nobility — what do I gain even if they win?

The memory of the conflict surfaced with it.

I’d thought Black Money were intelligent merchants. To say something this foolish — aren’t you afraid I’ll have you bound and delivered to Lord Marwayne for a generous reward?

If you truly intended that, this conversation would never have begun.

The masked man’s tone had not shifted at all. He had not seemed to care about his own safety, or perhaps had simply made a calculation precise enough that safety was no longer a variable worth tracking.

The fact that you’re still sitting here is proof of your intentions. And it’s because you’re intelligent that we’re offering you this at all.

You’ve misjudged me, Fueler had said. My loyalty to the duke is unshakeable. Now leave, before I change my mind.

Of course. But consider: this is what opportunities are. Black Money has no interest in forcing your hand — the choice is yours entirely.

The silver-masked man had risen, bowed deeply, and set the black card on the tea table with a deliberateness that suggested he had placed many such cards in many such rooms.

Before I go: Graycastle never forgets those who serve them. I hope to see you again.

Fueler drew a long breath and let the memory recede. The room was quiet now.

Graycastle never forgets those who serve them.

The irony of it arrived like a bruise pressed. He had served Marwayne for one purpose only — to restore his family’s name, recover what had been lost — and Roland Wimbledon, enemy of every noble house, was the last man in the world he should have been weighing. And yet here he was.

Black Money were operators, not idealists. They were right about one thing, though: if he had truly intended to hand the man over to Marwayne, the card would have been ash days ago. It would not have been tucked carefully at the back of the drawer, beneath everything else, preserved without quite admitting it was being preserved.

After a long silence, Fueler tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Then he sat down at the desk.

He pulled out a blank sheet and a goose-feather quill.

Was there anything left to lose?

The prospect of recovering his territory receded further by the day. He had run out of reasons to hold on for its own sake. And the calculation, stripped of sentiment, was clean enough: Black Money’s instructions required nothing extraordinary of him. He would place a message and return home. If the demons won, his position couldn’t worsen. If Graycastle prevailed, there might be some other path forward. Two bets instead of one.

He finished writing. Set the quill down.

At dusk, Fueler put on a deep-brimmed felt cap and a long trench coat and walked into Horn Alley in the inner city.

Horn Alley belonged to the Northern Chamber of Commerce — all foot traffic was merchants, all transactions legitimate on their surface. By sunset the street thinned to almost nothing. No one who had a reason to look would find cause to look here.

The silver-masked man had described the location precisely, and Fueler found it quickly: a gentle slope between two brick houses, and between them a large silver fir tree, old enough that the bark had grown in ridges and folds.

The delivery method itself was part of what had finally decided him. No physical contact with any recipient. No witnesses to any exchange. Even if the message were somehow found, he had written it in a hand he reserved for nothing else — no document existed to match it against. And Black Money could not use the letter to blackmail him, because they could not prove it came from him.

He lingered near the tree for two circuits of the surrounding block, watching the lane and the windows above. Nothing moved that shouldn’t.

Then he stepped behind the trunk and felt along the bark until he found the hollow. The compartment inside was faced with ordinary wood — indistinguishable by sight, detectable only by touch. He pushed the letter in, pressed the panel back flush.

Done.

He returned to his rooms and placed a flower pot on the bedroom windowsill. For a resident of this quarter of the inner city, a potted plant was entirely unremarkable. For whoever was watching him from a position he had not identified and did not need to, it was a signal: the message has been delivered.

From beginning to end, he had met no one. He did not know who would collect the letter from the tree or how it would travel from Snow Reflection Castle to Graycastle. Those things were no longer any of his concern.

Standing at the window after he set the pot down, Fueler felt something he had not expected: a loosening, somewhere behind his sternum, as though a tension he had stopped noticing had finally released. He looked out across the city toward the castle quarter, which blazed with light under the red haze of the sky — the banquet, still going, its noise too distant to reach him. The losers of Frost Town, celebrating as though the battle had been theirs.

Any last hope in Marwayne had followed the card out of the drawer.

There was only one question left.

Could Graycastle actually defeat the demons?

The messenger pushed a thick stack of papers onto the damp and dilapidated wooden table.

“Is this today’s batch?” Smarty lit the candle. “Thank you.”

No reaction.

Smarty repeated himself in hand signals.

The messenger nodded.

He was a silent warrior — deaf and mute, trained by the master, communicable only through a limited vocabulary of gestures. There was no gesture for gratitude, which Smarty had long since stopped finding ironic. “Keep watch outside,” he signed. “No one enters.” Then he waited until the man left before pulling the papers toward him.

This was the building Black Money used as its underground chamber of commerce — invitation-only, theoretically secure. Smarty had chosen to review the intelligence in the basement regardless. If something went wrong, the extra floors gave him more time to destroy what needed destroying.

He did not fully understand why his master regarded Graycastle’s war as a matter of such personal urgency. That was not a question he was permitted to ask, which meant it was not a question he had any business dwelling on. The master’s instruction had been simple: support Graycastle with everything available. His function was to execute that instruction as precisely as possible.

At present, that meant organizing the incoming intelligence and moving it out of the city without leaving a trace.

The problem was timing. The merchant group qualified to move goods through the border left Snow Reflection Castle once a week, and Black Money had only one embedded member in each group — a cart driver, not a supervisor, with no authority to reverse the column’s direction. Any dispatch missed this week waited for next. And every day of waiting was a day the intelligence aged.

Prioritization, then. He had to identify the most reliable dispatches, reduce them to a confidential letter, and work it into the goods bound for Wolfheart before the next departure. The rest would require another channel.

Most of what he received from Rats was exactly what Rats produced: disordered, repetitive, full of hearsay and approximation. He had learned to move through it quickly, marking what was corroborated and setting aside what was not.

This time, one item stopped him.

The characters were neat and regular, written with care. This was not a message scrawled in a tavern or copied down hastily in the street. The ink was high-quality. The paper was unfolded and unsmudged, entirely unwrinkled — the product of a clean desk, privacy, and time. Whoever had written this had access to all three.

Smarty held his breath without quite deciding to, and read it through from the first line to the last.

The contents were unlike anything else in the batch.

This was the first dispatch to name the core of the Army of Demons directly: Sky Lord Hect Zod.

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