Chapter Text
Essek’s reaction to the two scourgers on his doorstep is far more muted than it would’ve been six weeks ago.
“Can I help you?” he asks, and it doesn’t even sound like he’s panicking.
“May we come in?” says the shorter one, a human woman with a scarred face. She makes it sound like a perfectly reasonable question instead of a death sentence.
“Do I have a choice?” he asks anyway.
“Not a very good one,” says the taller one—another human, male, dark hair.
Essek lets them into his tower.
They end up sitting at the dining room table that he never uses. He briefly entertains the thought of making them tea, but it’s a ridiculous impulse. He’d have to turn his back to them. They probably wouldn’t even drink it.
The irony is that he wasn’t anticipating this. Not anymore. The Dynasty still seeks the cancer in its own ranks, and there is nothing left he can do to stave off that inevitable discovery. But for some ridiculous reason he’d thought he no longer had to worry about this particular end. It’s caught him off-balance.
“Why are you here?” Essek asks. Blunt, maybe, but neither of them seems to be in a rush to begin speaking and it’s making him sweat. “You haven’t killed me already, which leads me to believe that it’s information you’re after. I must warn you that I have few answers to give you.”
They probably know what he’s done. They probably also know that he knows that they know. Beyond that, he’s lost.
“The Mighty Nein,” the woman says. Essek doesn’t let himself react, not visibly, but he can feel his heart rate pick up. “You were the one who taught their wizard dunamancy.”
“I have extremely few answers for you in that particular area, I’m afraid.”
“We just want to know why. Were you aiming to gain his trust, his favor? Something else?” She says you like she means the entire Dynasty, but it seems more likely that she’s interested about him in particular.
It’s a strange question. His impulse is to lie just because of the topic, but it feels like a trick, the sort of question someone asks because they already know the answer. Essek takes a moment to consider his response. “A bit of that. I also needed to learn what motivated him, what he was after. Sometimes it’s easier to gain information if you give some away first,” he adds pointedly, which the woman smiles at. It’s a gentle smile, the sort of smile meant to reassure a child before you clean scraped knees with alcohol.
“You can take your hint back,” the tall one says. “That’s all we need, anyway.”
They walk out of the door and back into the street before teleporting away, turning their backs to him when they leave. That show of confidence only serves to make him more anxious.
He searches his towers for any signs of disturbance, then does the thing he wishes he’d done years ago, the very first time he’d been visited by agents of the late Cerberus Assembly: he sends a message to the Bright Queen.
—
Every meeting he has with the Court nowadays feels dangerous. He wears that fear like a second mantle, the creeping dread of the hunt drawing closer, the noose indistinct but ever tighter. Two years, two months, two weeks—it all seems so optimistic, now. But that’s something he expects, at least, something he can see coming.
This was a surprise, and the most surprising part of it is that he isn’t dead already.
It's strange, to have a meeting with the Bright Queen where the main reason he's nervous is not because the investigation is looming but because he's still coming down from the adrenaline high of being accosted by scourgers. He explains what he remembers—the figures at his door, letting them in, answering a single question—and then asks for a Greater Restoration, because the visit was less than ten minutes and the only thing he can think of is that perhaps it was a cover memory for a magically-coerced interrogation. He still has the amulet from the Nein, so at least mind reading isn't a concern, but there are so many things he could have—
Of course, the Greater Restoration does nothing and he looks like a paranoid idiot. His composure is failing him, just slightly, and he hates that the Court gets to see him shaken by this. There have been enough concerns about his emotional stability as of late.
They assign some guards to his front gate, like that will do anything, and send him off on his merry way. If he goes home and curls up under his bed to hyperventilate for half an hour...well. He knows he’s being spied on, but at least with the amulet the chance that anyone will notice is relatively small.
—
He makes them tea, the second time around.
It’s not his favorite blend, of the ones Caduceus gave him, so it’s no great loss if it goes to waste. Neither seems interested initially, but the man smells the cup, mutters something in Zemnian. The woman raises a brow, takes a small sip. Nods, in politely surprised affirmation.
“Are you going to ask me a single question and disappear again?”
“You’ve stayed in contact with the Mighty Nein after the end of the war, yes?” the woman asks, ignoring his question.
“That’s common knowledge.” He doesn’t like that the Nein are a topic of conversation, still. He’d assumed that the scourgers were interested in dunamancy, not them.
She gives him a practiced smile, equal parts amused and condescending. “But you know what kind of... uncommon knowledge we have about you. Do they know what we do?”
“I cannot answer that question.”
“We could make it worth your time,” the man says.
“You really can’t.”
They both stare at him, predatory, waiting for an opening. He stares back, unflinching.
Finally the woman tilts her head and shrugs, like the matter has been settled. “Vess is dead. Ludinus is dead. Trent is dead. The Assembly has been dismantled. All of that has to be very convenient for you. How much of a role did you have in all that?”
“Very little. They dug other graves for themselves, things that I had nothing to do with.”
“But it was, as I said, very convenient for you. Safer.”
“Just because there are fewer people left to borrow that shovel doesn’t mean I haven’t already dug a grave for myself. Are you here to sit around and threaten me? Or would you like more tea?”
The man slides his empty cup across the table. Essek refills it, slides it back.
“Why are you here?” he asks them both.
“We’re just very curious about you,” the woman says. “Surely you can appreciate that.”
“I do, but I suspect you misunderstand the nature of my relationship with curiosity.”
“We aren’t getting anywhere,” the tall one says. “You still refuse to answer our first question?”
“I didn’t refuse to answer. I said that I couldn’t.”
“Hm.” The woman smiles—she seems to have many smiles, this one polite and threatening—and stands. “Maybe we’ll see you around some other time, then.”
The man downs his second cup and gives Essek a curt nod before following her out. He watches them from his window as they walk to the street, waving to the utterly useless guards as they leave. His hands feel numb. Part of him is already calculating how to best censor this particular conversation when he explains it to the Court.
But first, he has another Sending to cast. “I have reason to believe that some surviving scourgers suspect that the Nein knows what I did. Be wary. Stay on guard.”
There’s a brief pause before he hears Caleb’s voice in his head. “Ja, we know they know. You don’t need to worry about us. Not in that regard, at least—Jester did cause an explosion, yesterday.”
Essek laughs, which is strange considering it doesn’t feel like he can actually breathe right now.
He searches his towers top to bottom, twice, like maybe this time something will be out of place, like it will reveal a reason for the scourgers’ visit. But he finds nothing. There’s the plants Caduceus gave him, which are either dying because he hasn’t given them enough water or because he’s given them too much. There’s the components for an experiment he’d begun to set up in his lab, before he’d realized that it would take at least two years to complete and, at the rate the investigation is going, Essek will be arrested and dead within six months. There’s the flower Yasha gave him, which was, at least, already dead when he received it. The pile of books he’d been meaning to read before Eiselcross now has months of dust blanketing them. The chronometer for the apparatus on his roof is still in need of repair, and he still hasn’t repaired it, because what use would it be? What point is there in measuring the time, when he has so little left?
—
There were wolves, up north, sharp-eyed creatures that would ghost across the landscape in single file, there and gone again. There are many things he misses about his time at the outpost, the rapid change of light with the seasons, the simple satisfaction of performing his duties and performing them well, the quiet vast emptiness, the feeling that perhaps everyone there was running from something.
But he feels foolish, now, for ever having missed the wolves.
—
The third time, the scourger woman throws a knife into the wall next to his head and he almost disintegrates her in return.
After they’ve finished throwing Counterspells back and forth, the woman snaps, “Relax. There was a spider.”
“And you didn’t think to explain that beforehand?” Hands still raised to cast, he backs away so he can look at the wall while still keeping both of the scourgers in his peripheral vision. No traces of a spider, or at least not a mundane one.
“She didn’t miss. You have someone paying attention to this,” the tall one says.
“It’d better be one of mine and not one of yours,” Essek mutters, and sits down at his table without bothering to remove the weapon from his wall.
“I’d assume you’d be more worried if it were yours.”
“Do you think I’ve kept it secret that a pair of Empire agents keeps visiting my home at odd intervals? If it’s one of mine, I have someone to yell at after I give my report. Yours, I can’t do anything about.”
“Fair enough,” says the scarred woman. Then, with a reconciliatory smile, “How about we set up a meeting in advance, next time? Somewhere more...neutral, perhaps.”
“I cannot imagine anywhere neutral enough that it would be safer than my own home,” he mutters tersely. He can, actually. He’s just been trying to avoid getting them caught in the aftermath of his own stupidity.
—
He does complain about the familiar, especially the fact that it wasn’t well-hidden and that he could've started an international incident over it, had it not been for the fact that he is hopelessly outnumbered for Counterspells and is therefore entirely defenseless. He details the precautions he is taking—a Contingency set to destroy his own spellbook upon access by outside parties, the amulet protecting against divination magic, mechanical alarms at his doors and windows, scouring his home for any classified information he’d previously overlooked—methodically, in an even tone, trying his best not to sound like a hysterical child in front of the Court and probably failing just a little.
And then he gets to the request for a neutral meeting space, hesitates. He's been trying not to bring up the Nein as a topic of conversation, after what happened in Aeor—or rather, what happened after he got back from Aeor. The Bright Queen had suggested that perhaps he was emotionally compromised by the Nein. Essek had snapped, I am allowed to have emotions. That does not mean I am compromised, which, while technically true, is not something one should say in front of the entire Court if one is trying to prove that they are reliable and emotionally stable. He's been on thin ice ever since, which is saying something considering the previous thickness of the metaphorical ice had already been questionable.
But the scourgers have been asking about the Nein. It would force them to reveal their hand, one way or another, if he suggests that they meet at a space facilitated by them. And it would be safer, for Essek, to have numbers on his side.
He explains this, carefully, trying to look exceptionally emotionally stable about it. The Bright Queen agrees, but the hint of doubt on her face suggests Essek has utterly failed at feigning neutrality.