Angelfire | The Whispering Wall #3

Sixty Three: Betrayal

Arlen looked up from mending his trousers, sensing something was about to happen. He hated the job; he usually allowed Usk to do a quicker, neater job of patching clothes up, but Usk had been out half the night on errands and the tear had become too big to ignore. It was the damned prosthetic wearing the fabric out too quickly, but Arlen could hardly go clothes shopping after publicly challenging Marick's leadership. He couldn't go anywhere except for sneaking between his safehouses until he knew what Marick intended to do; he could tell the man hadn't expected him to make a move. If his knee-jerk response was to have Arlen murdered, well, he wasn't about to stick around and make it easy.

A moment later, his instinct was proved correct as Usk came barrelling into the room with Jesper on his heels.

"He's burning your house," the Varthian gasped.

"And one of our safehouses," Jesper added, wiping his brow.

Arlen set down his trousers and darning needle on the table. Ezra shifted behind him where he'd been huddled next to the fire, playing cards with Leon, but Arlen didn't look back.

"That's a shame," he said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears. "Can't say it's particularly unexpected."

Usk's brow furrowed. Jesper didn't hold back. "A shame? That's all you're gonna say? He hasn't even settled the terms of the challenge with you yet!"

Arlen looked at him evenly. "I didn't expect him to."

Of course, it was protocol. A guild like the Devils had to have rules for these things, otherwise they were little better than bandits and thugs. They were loose rules, perhaps not what the average citizen might consider fair or reasonable, but nevertheless these things tended to take place within parameters, if only so the guild didn't destroy itself.

Arlen had never expected Marick to play by the rules. Part of his appeal as a leader was his ruthlessness, his willingness to bend the old ways to suit them all better. But that had been back when his sights were set on fixing a guild that had been fading in skill and reputation; he had built them back up into a force to be reckoned with, a force Harkenn had to take seriously. It didn't surprise Arlen one bit that once he had achieved that, his goals had become more ambitious. Back when Arlen had first supported his leadership bid, Marick's ambition had been what the guild needed. Now it was going to doom them, all because he couldn't keep the dark-damned Angels out of it.

"He never has," he continued, when Jesper continued to stare at him in disbelief. "He makes a good show of it, but he always gets his way in the end. The only difference now is that my dissent forces his motives into the open."

"Arlen, he's burning your house."

"I heard you," he snapped, some irritation finding its way through the fog that had settled on his brain. "And it's a fucking pain in the arse, but I can't fairly say I didn't see it coming. If I hadn't thought he'd take it that far I'd be burning with it, not rotting down here."

"We still had stuff there! It was a good place! How are you so calm about this?"

"Jes," Usk said quietly, putting a huge hand on the man's shoulder, but Jesper shrugged it off and stalked down the hall to another room. A moment later they heard a door slam. It shook dust down through the gaps in the floorboards above them.

Arlen had known the price he'd got for this cellar system under an active tavern had been too good to be true. If it hadn't, they wouldn't be sharing space with barrels of the cheapest piss the place sold. The plumbing leaked and the walls were constantly damp, and noise and spillage filtered down through sizeable gaps in the floor. The boarding house he owned would have been much better, only he couldn't bear to share space with that Angel Marcus had foisted on him. He left Ashe and Raziel there with her instead, and told himself he was here in Bisa for better strategic positioning.