The Charlatan

36. All Cats Are Gray in The Dark

"You feel it as well, Charlie."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The imbalance between the Plane of Spirits and the Plane of the Living."

Safiya recalled the conversation she had heard not a few days prior, between Charlie and the Genesese priest. Or is it shaman? Safiya thought. She had never asked for the Seers' more general name.

Rime had spoken of imbalance, of scales tipping and spilling and of Ghosts weighing down the Plane of the Living.

"How is it imbalanced?" Safiya had asked.

"The Living are too heavy," Rime had stated simply in his accented Velte.

Those at wrong number too many, Safiya had understood. There are more dying than there need to be; there are more living than there should be.

And yet, with all this evidence, neither Rime nor Charlie had the courage to say that the way to fix everything was to try those at fault, to sentence the people who had partaken in those horrendous acts that had raped Safiya's home. Justice from the gods could not be fully observed until the gouged eye found a pair.

Safiya walked briskly through the thin woods of Passerine with all of this in mind. The ground was dry and crumbled under her boots. What would her sister have thought if she had heard what Safiya had heard from Rime? What would she have done? She would have followed me into battle, Safiya thought. I cannot allow that. Safiya had seen how Priyanka's prosthetic limbs wore her sister down. Priyanka was still feeling the pain from the day the sisters' town had been burnt to the ground. Yet, she was brave. She continued on as if nothing had fazed her, as if she didn't ache just as much or even more than Safiya ached. Safiya could not in good conscience drag her sister away from safety just as she had finally obtained it.

However, Safiya alone could not fell Velt in a single swoop, as Velt had done her home. She had thought that Clara's alliance, holding the Charlatan, could distract the warring nations enough to launch a successful attack, but Clara was unwilling to part with him. She held the key to creating an opening large enough to strike at Velt's heart, but she protected rather than used it. The Charlatan himself would also not give himself up so easily, a fact that made Safiya boil with anger now just as she had boiled when she had last approached him. Befriending the alliance or befriending the Charlatan did not and could not work. However, the Charlatan's secrets were known by people outside of the alliance; this Safiya knew. If Clara's alliance would not find them, as Air seemed keen to keep his mouth shut, then Safiya would.

This was the only other chance at leverage against the Veltie King.

It was a short walk to the small Passerinian camp Safiya had set her sights on. She and Charlie had been given word of survivors assembling to safety around these parts by a courier Charlie had spotted lurking around. That was before the women's disagreement. I should have known she was too tightly tied to Clara, Safiya thought. A cold breeze suddenly swept her hood over her eyes. The gods speak. She thought no more on her lost allies.

Soon Safiya approached the area she had photographed with her mind. The circle on the courier's map overlapped with Safiya's vision of tents and crackling fires. There was life here, and no guard of any kind to give it up or to ravage it. The camp was slightly hidden by the shallow trees; the Passerinian people seemed not to have disturbed the nature around them much. It was nice to not see the flashes of metal that guards and weapons shone. There was a peaceful, albeit cautious, air. Safiya stepped into the densest part of the camp without trouble. She guessed that the center of the camp likely held the most important people. That was where she hoped to find what she needed.