[Complete] Ch 6.6 Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain Sheathed Against Injustice?

Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain 

Sheathed Against Injustice?

Story Starts

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Chapter 6.6

The Gale’s Justice

Demands a Stakeout

Ardee Varma had joined the Ganesha Familia to protect people—well, she says joined, but she was born to parents who were already members of the Ganesha Familia.

She reminded herself of this fact several times a day. On good days, once or twice. On days like today, roughly every ninety seconds, in the manner of a prayer.

"MASTERFULLY DONE, ARDEE!" her god boomed from atop a chimney stack, one foot planted on the brickwork, cape snapping in the evening wind, elephant mask silhouetted against the sunset in a pose that could be identified from three districts away and probably had been. "WE HAVE LOCATED THE SUSPICIOUS ROOFTOP INDIVIDUALS!"

"Lord Ganesha." Ardee tugged at his sash from below the chimney. "We're supposed to be observing them discreetly."

"I AM BEING DISCREET!"

"You're shouting."

"I AM SHOUTING DISCREETLY!"

"That isn't—" She stopped. Breathed. Counted the roof tiles between herself and a quiet life. "Could you at least come down from the chimney, my lord? You're backlit. You look like a festival banner."

"GANESHA LOOKS LIKE A FESTIVAL BANNER ON PURPOSE!"

The complaints had begun arriving at the Familia's headquarters shortly after midday, and they had not stopped since.

A fruit vendor reported figures in long coats leaping between rooftops in the commercial quarter, "moving in formation, like geese, if geese wore hats." A laundress swore on her mother's grave that nine identically dressed women had emerged from an abandoned warehouse in single file, one of them holding a wine glass. An elderly grandmother from the textile district had come in person to report that "the coat people" had crossed her roof twice, and that on the second pass she had offered them tea, and that the small one had apologised very politely whilst the tall one in red had accepted a biscuit mid-leap.

And then there had been the written statement. A very earnest young man had described, in careful lettering, "a plague of moths, but people," and had attached a sketch. Shakti had stared at the sketch for a long moment. The sketch had depicted eleven trench coats arranged across a skyline like migrating birds, each one annotated with an arrow and the single word SUSPICIOUS?

Shakti had filed it under miscellaneous without a word, and Ardee had understood, in that silence, that her sister already knew something and wanted no formal part of it.

Patrols had been dispatched. Patrols had returned, baffled, one of them reporting that the coat people had signalled to each other using hand gestures that "did not correspond to any known military, guild, or criminal signalling system, and possibly not to any system at all."

And then Lord Ganesha himself had risen from his throne, declared that the safety of Orario's rooftops was a matter for the god of the masses personally, and seized Ardee by the shoulder before Shakti could interpose herself.

Her sister's parting look had contained an entire eulogy. Here lies Ardee Varma. She served with distinction. Nobody could have held him back. We will remember her fondly.

So now Ardee crouched behind a chimney on the pleasure district's outer lane, watching three figures in trench coats and dark spectacles slip through the evening crowd below towards a discreet establishment called the Amber Veil, whilst her god posed against the dying sun above her like a monument to the concept of noise.

The strange thing—the thing Ardee had not yet said aloud—was that she recognised the trio's walk.

The one in green moved like a first-tier adventurer pretending very hard to be a civilian: weight centred, hands loose, checking every alley mouth twice and hating herself for it. The one in purple carried a wine glass through a crowded street without spilling a drop, which was either a magic item or a lifetime of noble deportment weaponised for evil. And the one in brown, who walked as though the pavement should feel honoured, radiated a warmth that made Ardee's Falna prickle in a way it only ever did around—

"A GODDESS!"

Ganesha dropped from the chimney and landed beside her with a crash that cracked two roof tiles and startled a cat three houses over.

"ARDEE! ONE OF THE ROOFTOP MOTHS IS A GODDESS! I WOULD KNOW THAT DIVINE PRESENCE ANYWHERE!" He thrust a finger at the brown coat below. "THAT IS ASTRAEA!"

"Lord Ganesha, please, your voice—"

"WHY IS THE GODDESS OF JUSTICE DRESSED AS A CRIMINAL?"

"I don't know, my lord."

"IS JUSTICE UNDERCOVER? HAS JUSTICE GONE ROGUE? IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?"

"I genuinely could not tell you."

"THEN WE MUST INVESTIGATE! THE MASSES DEMAND ANSWERS! GANESHA DEMANDS ANSWERS! GANESHA—"

"—should perhaps accept some equipment first," said a flat voice behind them.

Ardee spun, hand halfway to her spear. Asfi Al Andromeda stood on the rooftop's far edge, holding a wooden case. She wore the same long coat as the trio who had just entered the establishment. Her mouth had settled into a thin line that suggested the evening was already long and intended to get longer, and that she had made her peace with neither fact.

"Andromeda?" Ardee lowered her hand. "What are you—how long have you been—"

"Since the chimney." Asfi crossed the roof and knelt, setting the case down. "My god is monitoring this frequency. He heard Lord Ganesha announce himself from—and I quote—'the next postal district over,' and has ordered me to equip you both before you—again quoting—'ruin the operation or improve it, honestly either would be entertaining, Asfi, run along.'" She unlatched the case and began laying out items on the tiles with funereal efficiency. "Resonance earpieces. Paired crystals. You'll hear the operational frequency. I apologise in advance for everything on it."

Ardee looked at the small crystal in Asfi's palm. "What operation? What is happening tonight? Andromeda, we've had complaints coming in since noon. There are sketches."

Asfi looked up at her. It was a long look, elf to human, second-in-command to second-in-command, and it carried the full accumulated weight of everything Asfi had witnessed since midday.

"The Astraea Familia," she said, "is surveilling a noodle vendor to determine whether he is evil."

Ardee waited for the rest of the sentence. There was no rest of the sentence.

"...That's it?"

"There are code names," Asfi added, in the tone of a woman reporting casualties.

Ardee opened her mouth. Closed it. Her eyes drifted, unbidden, down towards the Amber Veil, where—she now realised with a slow, sinking heart—Shirou Emiya was presumably sitting down to his dinner with two Guild employees, entirely unaware that eleven of Orario's finest were arranged across the skyline above him in matching hats.

'Oh no.'

She knew about Emiya. The Familia's whole leadership did—the godless adventurer at the gates, the status Lord Ganesha had personally confirmed and personally buried, the secret that Shakti reviewed twice a month like an old wound. If the Astraea Familia was digging into him—if they got close enough to see what was actually written on his back—

"MAGNIFICENT!"

Ganesha had already fitted his earpiece and was now turning his wrist over, examining the slim leather band Asfi had strapped there whilst Ardee wasn't watching. A small brass nozzle glinted along its edge.

"AND THIS DEVICE?"

"Compressed-air dart launcher." Asfi's voice went flat and careful, each word placed like a warning sign on a cliff path. "Single shot. Sleeping draught. It will drop a Level 2 in eight seconds. It is triggered by firm pressure on the band. Point it away from yourself."

"GANESHA UNDERSTANDS!"

"Away. From. Yourself."

"I AM GANESHA!" He struck the band with his opposite fist in enthusiastic salute, and Ardee's heart stopped for the half-second before she confirmed the nozzle had been pointing at the sky. "I NEVER MISS!"

"That is not the concern," Asfi said, but the god had already bounded to the roof's edge, cape catching the last of the light, mask tilted nobly down towards the Amber Veil's lantern-lit door.

Asfi packed her case unhurriedly. She had stopped fighting the current of this evening hours ago and was now simply floating downstream, conserving her strength. She stood, straightened her coat, and paused beside Ardee on her way to the shadows.

"He'll shoot himself with it," she said quietly. "They always do."

"...I know," said Ardee.

"My god did it within the first minute. Twice. The second time was to prove the first was deliberate."

"...I know," said Ardee, who did not know, but recognised the truth when she heard it.

The two women stood a moment in complete mutual understanding, watching their respective horizons. Then Asfi was gone over the roofline, and Ganesha's voice was already rolling across the district like festival thunder:

"COME, ARDEE! THE AMBER VEIL AWAITS! TONIGHT, GANESHA DRINKS INCOGNITO!"

Below, in the lane, four separate pedestrians looked up.

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The Amber Veil was, by reputation, the most discreet establishment in the pleasure district.

It occupied the ground floor of an old merchant house near the quarter's respectable edge, all dark timber and amber lamplight, its windows curtained in velvet thick enough to smother sound and reputation alike. Entry was by recommendation only. Its clientele included Guild administrators, Familia executives, at least two gods, and an assortment of persons who paid handsomely for the singular privilege of drinking somewhere nobody would ever, under any circumstances, announce their presence.

The doorman had one job.

"I! AM! GANESHAAAAA!"

The doorman had failed at his job.

To be fair to the man, Ardee reflected as she trailed her god across the threshold, no procedure existed for refusing a deity. There was especially no procedure for refusing a deity who had planted himself in the doorway, both fists on his hips, cape settling behind him with theatrical timing, announcing himself at parade volume to a room whose entire architecture had been designed around the principle of nobody being announced to it.

The bar's low murmur died as though throttled. Two dozen faces turned. Somewhere in the amber gloom, a Guild administrator slid slowly and deliberately beneath his own table, taking his drink with him.

"AND THIS IS MY ASSOCIATE!" Ganesha swept an arm towards Ardee. "SHE IS ALSO INCOGNITO!"

'I want to go home.'

Ardee bowed to the room in general apology—a deep, practised bow, the bow of a woman who had performed it in ballrooms, temples, and once at a funeral her god had interrupted—and steered him towards an empty table near the wall, cataloguing the interior on the way out of professional habit that no amount of mortification could switch off.

Long bar of polished blackwood, old and lovingly kept. A proprietor behind it: silver-streaked hair, forearms like dock rope, the settled bearing of a retired adventurer who had traded his blade for a polishing cloth and never once regretted it. A young server—half-elven, sixteen at the outside—wove between the tables balancing a tray of cocktails, ears pinned back in concentration. Behind the bar, mounted in a locked case of glass and brass, a single dusty bottle stood lit by its own dedicated lamp, displayed like a relic in a roadside shrine.

And there, at a table near the centre of the room: a red-haired man flanked by an elf in a yellow sundress and a werewolf in a white one, all three frozen mid-toast, staring at the god who had just detonated the establishment's entire reason for existing.

Emiya's expression did not change. But Ardee, who had spent her career reading people, watched his eyes complete one slow, unhurried circuit of the room—the doorman, the kitchen entrance, the curtained windows, the corner booth—and settle, briefly, on her own.

She gave him a tiny, helpless shrug. I know. I'm sorry. I couldn't stop him. Nobody can stop him. He is a force of nature wearing a mask.

The corner of his mouth twitched—the closest thing to laughter she had ever got out of him—and he turned back to his companions.

In her ear, the operational frequency erupted.

"Star One to all units, a god has entered the observation zone—"

"It's Lord Ganesha," said a weary voice Ardee recognised as the prum, Lyra. "The whole street knows it's Lord Ganesha. The next street knows. Melen knows."

"Is that Ardee with him?" That bright, ringing voice would be Alise Lovell. "It IS! Ooh, wave to her! No, wait, we're incognito—Agent 007 confirms two friendly assets have entered the interior! This is now a joint operation!"

"It is not a joint—"

"JOINT OPERATION! Somebody log it!"

"Anvil confirms the joint operation," said a new voice solemnly.

"Ember also confirms," said its twin.

"Nobody asked either of you—"

"WE HAVE CALL SIGNS AND WE ARE USING THEM."

Ardee closed her eyes. Breathed in the smell of old oak and expensive spirits. Opened them again, and looked—carefully, casually, over the rim of the menu she had picked up as cover—towards the corner booth.

Three foreign wine merchants occupied the shadows there, trench coats and dark spectacles, a bottle of red already open between them. The one in brown radiated soft divinity and unmistakable delight, her gloved hands folded on the table like a child waiting for a play to begin. The one in green sat rigid, spine straight, misery coming off her in waves an ordinary human could probably see. The one in purple raised her glass a precise celch in Ardee's direction: acknowledgement, one professional to another, we see you, you see us, let us never speak of this.

'How did they even get a booth here? It's recommendation only. It takes months—'

"You're welcome," said Hermes's voice, oozing smugness from somewhere on the frequency. "The proprietor owes me a small favour from the incident with the—"

There was a crunch, a yelp, and then Asfi's flat voice: "Apologies. Continue."

Ganesha, mercifully, had ordered drinks—"ONE OF EVERYTHING! DISCREETLY!"—and subsided into what he sincerely believed was blending in. This consisted of sitting bolt upright with his arms crossed, mask fixed dead ahead, motionless as a statue that had been delivered to the wrong address and was too polite to mention it. Patrons kept glancing over. He did not move. In its own way, Ardee had to admit, it was working: the human mind could only sustain alarm at a perfectly stationary elephant-masked god for so long before filing him under furniture.

For a quarter of an hour, the Amber Veil recovered.

Conversation crept back up to a murmur. The trio at the centre table relaxed into their evening—Sophie narrating some Guild scandal with expansive gestures, Rose interjecting corrections and confiscating Sophie's third drink, Emiya smiling into his glass and saying little, which appeared to be his role and one he'd made peace with. At the bar, the proprietor polished glasses in a slow rhythm. The young server wove between tables with his tray, and Ardee noticed—filed, without meaning to—that the boy's eyes snagged on the display case every time his circuit brought him past it.

And a florid man in expensive violet silk held court at a large table near the case, three merchant associates arranged around him like an audience he had rented, informing the entire room about the evening's coming entertainment.

"—the Starfall Vintage itself, my friends! A hundred and twelve years in the bottle!" He rapped a ringed knuckle on his table. "The last wine ever pressed in Loness before the village burnt—the last—there is not another bottle in the world, and at the tenth bell tonight, I shall drink it!"

He thumped his chest.

"Straight down! In one go! Mixed with sparkling honeywater—the sweetness cuts the age, you see, I have it on excellent authority from my vintner, who has never steered me wrong—"

Ardee watched the young server stop dead in the middle of the floor. His tray wobbled. A cocktail slid a full celch before he caught it.

"—forty thousand valis, and worth every coin for the story, gentlemen! Think of it! 'The night Bardolph drank a dead village's last vintage like a market ale!' They'll tell it at every table in Orario for years!"

At the corner booth, the merchant in green had gone very, very still.

On the frequency, someone inhaled.

"He is going to mix a century-aged elven vintage," said Ryuu Lion's voice, quiet and level in the way a drawn blade is quiet and level, "with honeywater."

"Steady, Bunny."

"It is the last bottle from a village that no longer exists, and he is going to chug it as a party trick—"

"Bunny. We are incognito."

"Justice does not require a jurisdiction—"

"It requires you to remain seated," said Kaguya's voice, level and final. "Sit."

A pause. The green coat in the corner booth sat.

The tenth bell was still half an hour off when the proprietor set down his cloth, moved to the display case with ceremonial gravity, and produced a small brass key from the hook mounted beside the candle sconce. The room's attention gathered around him the way it gathers around any ritual. He fitted the key. Turned it. Swung open the little glass door.

The case was empty.

A velvet cushion. A perfect ring of dust where a bottle had stood for the better part of a century. Nothing else.

The proprietor's polishing cloth hit the floor.

"The Starfall." His voice came out the way voices do at deathbeds. "The Starfall is gone."

The Amber Veil, discreet establishment of the pleasure district, sanctuary of the unannounced, erupted.

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"NOBODY LEAVES!"

Bardolph the merchant had taken charge, which was to say he had planted his considerable bulk in front of the door, gone a shade of purple that clashed with his silks, and begun jabbing a ringed finger at the room in general.

"Forty thousand valis! My bottle! Bought and paid for! Somebody in this room is a thief, and nobody leaves until they're found! You—barman—lock the doors!"

"Sir, I hardly think—"

"LOCK THEM!"

The doors were locked. The clientele—administrators, executives, one department head Ardee was quite sure she'd testified in front of last spring—found themselves sealed inside a crime scene, and reacted with all the dignity their stations could muster, which was to say several of them immediately began accusing each other.

"You were standing by the case not ten minutes ago, Herold—"

"I was fetching a candle, you absolute—"

"Someone check the elf! Elves love wine!"

"That is a racial generalisation and also I've been at this table all evening—"

Under his table, the hiding Guild administrator locked eyes with Rose across the floor. Both of them looked away at the same instant, entering into a silent treaty that neither had seen the other and no report would ever say otherwise.

On the frequency, meanwhile, the Astraea Familia was conducting its own trial.

"A locked case, no broken glass, key still on its hook—inside job—"

"Agent 007 requests permission to enter through the skylight—"

"Denied."

"You can't just keep denying—"

"There is no skylight, Alise."

"Then I request a skylight be MADE—"

"Denied," said Lyra and Kaguya together.

"Anvil supports the skylight," offered Iska.

"Ember also supports the skylight."

"The skylight faction has been noted and dissolved," said Kaguya.

At the centre table, Sophie had risen onto her knees on her chair for a better view, hands gripping the backrest, eyes shining like a child's at a puppet show.

"A locked-room mystery," she breathed. "On our night out. Rose. Rose. This is the best cocktail bar in Orario. I'm never drinking anywhere else."

"Somebody just lost forty thousand valis of wine, Sophie."

"And we get dinner theatre for free! Do you know what dinner theatre costs?"

"Someone will have to write the incident report." Rose's ears had flattened. "There's a god present. Property crime over ten thousand valis with a god present is a Form Twelve. With witnesses in excess of twenty, it's a Form Twelve-B, and the Twelve-B has four supplementary pages—" Her voice dropped into hollow prophecy. "It's going to be me. It's always me."

Emiya said nothing.

Ardee watched him take a slow sip of his drink, his gaze moving without hurry across the room. The empty case. The key hook beside the candle sconce. The server boy standing rigid by the kitchen door with his tray clutched to his chest like a shield. The cellar hatch behind the bar, its edge pale with something. The chilling rack.

He didn't look at any of it for longer than a heartbeat. Then he looked at none of it ever again.

Bardolph, meanwhile, had found a target.

"You."

His finger swung round and fixed on the half-elven server.

"You were closest to the bar all evening! You poured my table's drinks! You've been staring at my Starfall since I arrived—oh, don't think I didn't notice, boy, I notice everything—turn out his pockets! Search him! Search the little—"

The boy had gone white to the lips. "I didn't—sir, I never—I would never—"

"He's sixteen," the proprietor began, moving out from behind the bar. "He's been with me two years, he's never taken so much as a—"

"Then he's had two years to plan it! Guards! Is there a guard in this establishment? Somebody fetch a guard! Somebody arrest—"

"THERE IS NO NEED FOR GUARDS!"

The voice rolled through the Amber Veil like a landslide given diction. Glassware sang faintly on the shelves. Every head in the room turned.

Lord Ganesha had risen.

He stood at his table, chair tipped over behind him, cape thrown back, mask gleaming gold in the lamplight, one fist pressed to his chest in an attitude of tremendous solemnity.

"FOR TONIGHT," he thundered, "YOU HAVE SOMETHING BETTER THAN GUARDS! YOU HAVE GANESHA! GOD OF THE MASSES! PROTECTOR OF ORARIO! FRIEND TO ALL AND SUSPECT OF NONE! AND TONIGHT—"

He levelled his finger and swept it across the room in a slow, magnificent arc that made three separate patrons duck.

"—DETECTIVE!"

"Oh no," said Ardee.

"Oh no," said the entire operational frequency, in perfect unison, including—Ardee was fairly sure—Hermes.

"FEAR NOT, YOUNG SERVER!" Ganesha's finger came to rest, gently, aimed past the boy rather than at him. "GANESHA DOES NOT ACCUSE WITHOUT PROOF! GANESHA EXAMINES! GANESHA DEDUCES! GANESHA LEAVES NO STONE UNTURNED AND NO TRUTH UNSHOUTED! OBSERVE, GOOD PEOPLE, AS GANESHA—"

He swept his arm dramatically towards the display case, and in the fullness of the gesture, slapped his open palm against his own opposite forearm for rhetorical emphasis.

Directly onto the leather wristband.

There was a small, crisp phut.

The room waited.

Lord Ganesha looked down. A tiny dart stood proudly in his own bicep, its little tuft of fletching quivering.

"GANESHA...!" he said.

The room continued to wait.

"...HAS MADE AN ERROR IN JUDGEMENT," he announced, with tremendous dignity.

Eight seconds later, the god of the masses toppled like a felled monument.

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Ardee caught him before he hit the floor.

This was less an act of heroism than of applied physics. She had seen the fall coming from the word phut—had, if she was honest, seen it coming from the rooftop, from the moment Asfi strapped the band on—and she was already moving when his knees buckled. She wedged her shoulder beneath his arm, took the full weight of an unconscious deity across her back, and heaved him upright against her side whilst the entire Amber Veil watched in ringing silence.

She arranged his arm across her shoulders. Straightened his cape. Produced, for the benefit of the room, the most confident smile of her professional career.

"He's fine," she said.

Nobody moved.

"He does this," she said.

Somewhere near the door, the doorman made a small sound.

"Ardee." A voice hissed in her ear—Kaguya, low and fast and utterly composed. "Can they see his eyes?"

The mask. The elephant mask covered his entire face, eyes and all, always had, always would. Behind it, Lord Ganesha could be asleep, awake, weeping, or absent from the premises entirely, and no mortal soul would ever be able to tell.

"No," Ardee murmured into her collar.

"Then hold him upright and do exactly as I say. Star Three has the eyes. I have the voice. You have the body."

"The what—"

"The Sleeping Detective," breathed Astraea's voice, hushed and vibrating with a joy no goddess of justice had any right to feel, "is a technique from The Midnight Confession, chapter eleven. The great detective Corvus solves the Ambassador's murder whilst drugged, ventriloquised by his loyal assistant. Oh, Kaguya. Kaguya, we're actually doing it. I've dreamt of this."

"Goddess, please contain yourself, you're breathing into the crystal."

"I am containing myself. This IS contained. You should hear my insides."

Across the room, in the corner booth, Ardee saw the purple-coated merchant touch the small songbird brooch at her collar, lift her chin, and draw a breath.

"Testing," said Kaguya's own voice in Ardee's ear, dry and private. "Projecting in three. Two."

And then Lord Ganesha spoke.

"AH-HAHAHA! DO NOT BE ALARMED, GOOD PEOPLE!"

The voice was not Kaguya's. It was deep, resonant, unmistakably Ganesha in timbre and volume and sheer disregard for its audience's eardrums—Asfi's songbird brooch swallowing a samurai's murmur at one end of the room and hurling out divine thunder at the other. And it worked, Ardee realised, for one reason above all others: nobody ever inspected Ganesha closely. The entire man had been engineered, top to bottom, to defeat close inspection. It was possibly his greatest divine attribute.

From that moment on, Ardee lived in two worlds at once. In her left ear, Kaguya's real voice: quiet, precise, giving her instructions like a dance tutor. In the room at large, the same words arriving a breath later as the pronouncements of a sleeping god. The disorientation, she decided, was something she could have a crisis about later, in private, with her sister and a large drink.

"THIS IS MERELY MY DEDUCTION TRANCE!" the voice declared. "GANESHA THINKS BEST WHEN HIS BODY RESTS! THE MIND SOARS AS THE FLESH SLUMBERS! BEHOLD—THE SLEEPING DETECTIVE TECHNIQUE! PASSED DOWN THE GANESHA LINE FOR GENERATIONS!"

"He IS the Ganesha line," said Lyra on the frequency. "There are no generations. That is not a real thing."

"It is now," said Kaguya, and boomed onward.

A murmur rolled through the bar—confusion curdling into something like awe. Gods were strange. Everybody knew gods were strange. And this particular god was famously, dependably, professionally the strangest of them all; a deduction trance was, if anything, on-brand. Two patrons nodded to each other in the manner of men confirming a rumour they'd always half-believed.

Sophie began to applaud. Several patrons joined in, uncertainly at first, then with feeling.

"Ardee." Kaguya's real voice returned to her ear, calm as a tea ceremony. "Walk him to the display case. Left foot first. Slowly. You are assisting your god in his trance-state. This is normal. Your face should say this is normal."

Her face said it was normal. Her spine said otherwise.

Ardee walked her god to the display case. It was like waltzing with a cathedral. His boots dragged; she compensated by gripping his belt with her free hand and lifting on alternate steps, letting his feet swing forward in something that a generous witness might call walking. The mask lolled towards his chest; she straightened it with a shrug of her shoulder and disguised the motion as reverence. Halfway across the floor she discovered that if she pinched the tendon at his elbow just so, his forearm would rise in a fair imitation of a pointing gesture, and she deployed this discovery for the rest of the evening with the growing confidence of a puppeteer finding her instrument.

'Level 2 strength,' she reflected, heaving her god through a stately quarter-turn. 'Years of training. Blessed by heaven itself. All of it converging on this moment.'

"OBSERVE!" boomed Kaguya-as-Ganesha, as Ardee raised the divine arm towards the case. "THE LOCK! UNBROKEN! UNSCRATCHED! NO THIEF'S TOOL HAS TOUCHED IT! THIS CASE WAS OPENED WITH ITS OWN KEY—THE KEY WHICH HANGS UPON ITS HOOK BESIDE THE CANDLE SCONCE, IN PLAIN VIEW, WHERE ANY TRUSTED HAND MIGHT REACH IT!"

The crowd turned as one to stare at the key hook. The key hung there, small and brass and suddenly the most sinister object in the room.

On the frequency, Ryuu's voice came low and precise, stripped of everything except the work: "The dust ring on the cushion. The edges are undisturbed. No smearing, no drag marks. The bottle was lifted straight up. Slowly. With both hands."

"THE DUST!" Ganesha thundered, half a second later. "SEE HOW THE RING LIES PERFECT AND UNDISTURBED! THIS BOTTLE WAS NOT SNATCHED BY SOME THIEF IN FLIGHT! IT WAS LIFTED! STRAIGHT! GENTLY! WITH BOTH HANDS! WITH—"

Kaguya paused. Ardee felt the entire room lean forward into the silence.

"—REVERENCE!"

"Nice," whispered Alise on the frequency.

"Quiet."

"That was genuinely very good, Star Two—"

"QUIET."

"Star Two is enjoying this," observed Ryuu, flatly.

"Star Two," said Kaguya, "is performing a public service." A pause. The sound of wine being poured, one-handed, mid-operation. "Which she is also enjoying."

Bardolph shoved his way forward, sweating through his silks. "Then the boy did it carefully! What difference does careful make? Careful theft is still—"

"PATIENCE, MERCHANT OF HONEYWATER!" The finger—Ardee's tendon-work—swung round to fix him in place. "GANESHA IS NOT FINISHED! GANESHA HAS BARELY BEGUN!"

Ardee pivoted her god in a quarter-circle to face the wider room, an operation that required briefly bracing his spine against the bar and hoping nobody was counting her hands. His head tipped back; she disguised it as noble chin-lifting, the posture of a deity gazing down through his closed eyes at the frailty of mortals.

"Star Three," Kaguya murmured. "The key."

A pause. Then Ryuu, quiet, thorough: "Wax. The key hangs beside the candle sconce. The proprietor trims and lights the candles at dusk—his fingers were waxy when he opened the case just now, the smudge on the bow transferred fresh and clean. But there's an older print beneath it. In the wax coating near the key's shoulder. Smaller. A young hand. Pressed hours ago, whilst the wax was still soft—soft from the afternoon sun through the transom window, before the lamps were lit. Before the bar opened. Before there was a single customer to blame."

Silence on the frequency.

"...Bunny," said Astraea at last, and her voice had gone soft and warm and terribly proud, "that was genuinely magnificent."

"I read the scene. Anyone would have—"

"No one would have. Chapter eleven of my heart."

"Goddess, please. Can we focus."

"THE KEY!" roared Ganesha, arm swinging—Ardee's doing, her puppetry now approaching artistry—towards the sconce. "BRING GANESHA THE KEY!"

The proprietor brought it, bewildered, holding it out on his open palm like an offering. Ardee took it in her god's limp fingers—curling them closed around it one by one, under cover of his enormous sleeve—raised it solemnly to the mask's eyeholes, and held it there whilst the room held its breath and Lord Ganesha, deeply and dreamlessly asleep, examined the evidence.

"A THUMBPRINT!" the god announced. "IN THE WAX! SMALL! PRESSED THIS VERY AFTERNOON—BEFORE THE BAR OPENED—BY SOMEONE WHO HANDLES THESE CANDLES DAILY! SOMEONE WHOSE TOUCH UPON THIS KEY WOULD NEVER BE QUESTIONED! SOMEONE WHO BELONGS BEHIND THIS BAR AS SURELY AS THE BOTTLES DO!"

Every eye in the Amber Veil swung to the server boy.

The boy stared at the floor. His tray hung forgotten at his side.

"AND YET!"

Ganesha's voice dropped—Kaguya modulating superbly, thunder subsiding into the deep rumble of a landslide coming to rest—into something almost gentle.

"GANESHA ASKS THE QUESTION NO ONE ELSE HAS ASKED. NOT WHO. BUT WHERE. THE DOORS ARE WATCHED. THE WINDOWS SEALED. NO SOUL HAS LEFT SINCE DUSK. THE STARFALL, GOOD PEOPLE... IS STILL HERE."

Ardee felt Kaguya let the pause stretch. Felt the room stretch with it, forty held breaths pulling taut.

"The cellar hatch," Ryuu supplied, quiet and unhurried. "Behind the bar. There's white dust on its lip—chalk. Cellar floors are chalked against the damp. His boot soles carried it up. His cuffs are rolled down and buttoned—in this heat, in this work—hiding chalk or scuffs on his forearms from the ladder. And there's a bottle in the chilling rack that doesn't belong. Same shape as the Starfall, same dark glass, but it's sweating warm. It hasn't been in that rack an hour. It came up from below tonight. A decoy. He meant to swap them back before the tenth bell—return the real bottle to the case, let the merchant chug the substitute, and pray that forty thousand valis of palate couldn't tell the difference once it was drowned in honeywater."

"It couldn't have," said Kaguya, as an aside, with feeling.

And then, at full divine volume, she delivered it all—the chalk, the buttoned cuffs, the sweating impostor in the rack—in rolling thunder, whilst Ardee steered the sleeping god's pointing arm from hatch to rack to boy like a compass needle swinging home. Somewhere along the way, Kaguya had begun adding flourishes the script did not require—rolled R's, thunderous pauses, a rhetorical "GOOD PEOPLE OF THE VEIL" every third sentence—and beneath the borrowed voice, faint but unmistakable through the earpiece, Ardee could hear a samurai having the single best night of her year.

The performance was, Ardee had to admit, magnificent. The room hung on every syllable. Sophie was gripping Rose's arm with both hands. Rose had forgotten, temporarily, about the Form Twelve-B. Even Emiya had turned his chair around.

"THE STARFALL VINTAGE," Ganesha concluded, "LIES IN THE CELLAR BENEATH OUR FEET. UNBROKEN. UNDRUNK. PLACED THERE NOT BY GREED—"

The pointing arm came down. Ardee lowered it slowly, gently, until it hung at the god's side.

"—BUT BY GRIEF."

The boy's shoulders shook.

"YOUNG MAN," said the god of the masses, asleep on his feet, his voice filling the room like lamplight. "TELL THEM WHY."

For a long moment the only sound in the Amber Veil was the candles.

"My grandmother pressed it."

The boy said it to the floorboards. Then he made himself look up, and said the rest to the room.

"She was from Loness. She was fourteen the year of that vintage—she used to tell me she'd trodden the grapes herself, before the war, before the village—" His voice cracked down the middle. "She used to point at that case whenever she visited and say, that's my summer in there. It's the last thing left of her home in the whole world, and he was going to—to chug it. With honeywater. For a story at parties."

His eyes were wet and furious and sixteen years old.

"I was going to put it back. Before the bell. I swear it on her grave, I only wanted—I couldn't stand behind that bar and watch him do it. I'm sorry, Master Veil. I'll accept whatever punishment—"

"You'll accept nothing of the sort," the proprietor said quietly.

He turned to Bardolph. From beneath the bar he drew a leather purse, weighed it once in his scarred hand, and set it on the blackwood counter with a click of absolute finality.

"Forty thousand valis. Refunded in full. Count it if you like." He looked the merchant up and down, once. "The Starfall is no longer for sale."

Bardolph's jowls worked. "You can't—we had an agreement—there are witnesses—"

"I sold you a bottle of wine." The old man's voice never rose. It didn't need to; the room had gone quiet enough to hear the candle wax drip. "I find I never owned it. It belongs to a village of the dead, and its rightful custodian works for me. He'll go on working for me for as long as he pleases." He nodded towards the exit. "Doors are open. Good evening, sir."

Bardolph looked around the Amber Veil for support and found forty pairs of eyes and one golden elephant mask regarding him with precisely identical opinions. His three merchant associates had discovered urgent interests in their own drinks.

He took the purse and left to a silence more damning than any jeering could have been.

The door closed behind him.

The Amber Veil exploded into applause.

"MAGNIFICENT!" boomed Ganesha, as Ardee hauled both his arms aloft in triumph—an operation that took her entire Level 2 strength, both hands, one knee braced against the bar, and the last unburnt scraps of her dignity. "JUSTICE! JUSTICE FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD ALIKE! GANESHA THANKS YOU! GANESHA LOVES YOU ALL! GANESHA—"

The god twitched.

Ardee felt it run through his whole frame—the sleeping draught releasing its grip all at once, eight seconds early or eight minutes late, Asfi's craftsmanship keeping its own counsel—and she stepped clear a half-instant before Lord Ganesha surged upright under his own power, arms already raised, fists already clenched, fully awake and roaring as though no gap in his consciousness had ever occurred or ever could.

"—IS! GANESHAAAAA!"

The applause redoubled. Patrons stood. Somebody whistled through their fingers. The server boy was crying and clapping at the same time and making no attempt to hide either. Sophie was on her feet on her chair shouting "Encore! ENCORE!" and the proprietor was already lining up glasses along the bar and pouring drinks on the house with the first smile Ardee had seen from him all evening.

In the corner booth, the purple-coated merchant lowered her hand from the songbird brooch and reached, wordless, for the wine bottle.

"A shame," Kaguya said on the frequency, to no one in particular. "I had prepared a closing monologue."

"Let me guess, it was going to be pages long," said Ryuu.

"It was going to be transcendent."

Lord Ganesha basked. He bowed. He struck three separate poses in sequence, each one a distinct artistic statement. He accepted a drink, toasted the room, drank it somehow without visibly lifting the mask, and declaimed a short speech about the vigilance of the masses that bore no relationship whatsoever to anything that had happened.

He had, Ardee knew with complete and settled certainty, absolutely no idea what he had just solved.

"MY FINEST DEDUCTION YET!" he confided to her, at a volume the entire bar could enjoy.

"Yes, my lord."

"THE TRANCE WAS DEEP TONIGHT, ARDEE! DEEPER THAN EVER BEFORE! I RECALL NONE OF IT!" He clapped a hand on her shoulder that nearly buckled her knees. "THAT IS HOW YOU KNOW IT WORKED!"

"Yes, my lord."

"WE MUST TELL SHAKTI!"

"We absolutely must not, my lord."

"WE MUST TELL SHAKTI DISCREETLY!"

At the centre table, three people watched the celebration with three entirely different expressions. Sophie was applauding with her whole body, cheeks flushed, committing every detail to memory for retelling at the Hostess of Fertility, where Ardee estimated the story would gain two sword fights and a romance by the third telling. Rose had her face in one hand, ears flat, muttering the words "supplementary pages" and "god present" and "witness statements, forty of them, forty" into her palm like a curse.

And Emiya—

Emiya was looking at the corner booth.

At the merchant in purple, whose small songbird brooch caught the lamplight as she raised her glass and drained it in one elegant motion, a professional coming off shift. At the merchant in green, sitting rigid with a full evening's unspent adrenaline and no legal outlet for it. At the merchant in brown, who had pushed her dark spectacles up onto the brim of her hat and was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, moved to open tears by justice done in a cocktail bar.

Ardee watched him take in the brooch. The wine glass. The green coat's posture. The whole apparatus of the evening, from the rooftops down. Watched the sums complete themselves, one by one, behind those golden eyes—then he turned back to his drink, rolled his shoulders once, and his whole expression settled into a very particular kind of peace.

'Not my problem,' said every line of his body. 'Not my problem. Not tonight. Tonight I am a man at dinner.'

Across the room, entirely by accident, Ardee's gaze met Ryuu Lion's.

The dark spectacles had slipped a fraction. Elf and human regarded each other over the heads of a celebrating crowd—two seconds-in-spirit, two keepers of impossible people, two women who had spent the evening holding up their respective worlds by the belt whilst those worlds took the bows and the credit and the drinks on the house.

Ryuu inclined her head. A fraction. No more.

Ardee returned it, to the same fraction, and not a hair further.

And somewhere on the operational frequency, beneath the applause and her god's continued self-congratulation, Asfi Al Andromeda could be heard scratching out notes for a report nobody would believe, and quietly asking the heavens what, precisely, she had done to deserve any of them.

-=&&=-

End

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