Unsleeping Patron - Pact in Starlight

Stale oil and coal smoke hung thick over the wet slate of the alleyway. and coal smoke.Silas dropped from the lower eaves of the mansion, his bare soles striking the narrow basalt lane with a dull, wet impact. He didn’t unroll his blood-wings; the red glare would have drawn every steam-gunner within four blocks. Instead, he kept close to the shadow of a high masonry wall, his canvas tunic pinned tight against his ribs, his breath coming in slow, measured drags.Behind him, three streets over, the Governor’s Manor remained dark. The message was still drying in blood on the white plaster beside Wei’s ashes.A soft, dry rustle sounded ten feet above his head.Silas didn’t reach for his mantis-scythe. He stopped, his right hand resting flat against the cold basalt wall, his Mind-Light perception expanding thirty yards into the alley.A figure sat perched on the wooden archway spanning the lane.It wasn’t an iron-vested guard. The green silk robe hung loose over thin, pale shoulders, its hems embroidered with silver thread that caught the faint starlight filtering through a gap in the Miasma. Two dark, velvet-textured deer horns poked through chestnut hair, twitching slightly as the steam vents down the avenue whistled.Lady Sharis.She didn’t raise a weapon. She held no bone knife, no silver thread. She sat on the wet timber beam with her long, fur-tipped tail wrapped loosely around her left wrist, her green, feline eyes locked onto Silas’s face.”You burned him quickly,” she said. Her voice was low, carrying a soft, purring raspy edge that cut through the hiss of the steam pipes. She spoke in the old trade-dialect, her tongue clicking slightly on the consonants. “I thought Wei’s iron-mesh would give you ten minutes of trouble.”Silas didn’t move out of the shadow. His amber-and-crimson pupils narrowed into fine points in the gloom. “He had five minutes of blood in him. That was enough.”Sharis dropped from the timber arch. She hit the wet cobblestones silently, landing on all fours before straightening up to her full height. She was two inches shorter than Silas, her posture loose, almost lazy, yet every tendon in her thighs was strung tight as wire.”The officers in the lower barracks don’t know he’s ash yet,” she murmured, glancing back toward the dark silhouette of the manor. “When they find the wall tomorrow morning, three hundred steam-pikes will be marching for your ditch.””They won’t reach the ditch,” Silas said flatly. “They’ll die in the shale.”Sharis let out a short, quiet breath that sounded almost like a laugh. “They would. And you would burn another sixty of my people, and then the Elders would bring the heavy boilers from the lower foundry and smash your timber cabins into splinter-wood.” She stepped two inches closer, her green eyes unblinking. “And after that? What’s left? A pile of dead cats and eighty thousand terrified transmigrators who can’t dig tubers without starving.”Silas kept his back against the basalt wall. “You came here to tell me your elders are stupid?””I came here because Wei was their hammer,” Sharis said, her tone dropping into a cold, sharp whisper. “The Fel-Coven isn’t a monolith, human. The Conservative Elders the ones who sat in the high chairs when the first sky-rift opened a hundred years ago they believe terror is the only crop worth farming. They think if humans feel safe, the Relic’s light will fade, and our secondary boilers will freeze.””And you?””I think a wounded tiger eventually turns and bites the keeper’s throat,” Sharis replied, her tail flicking against her green robe. “My faction wants trade. We want iron ore from the northern crags, Quicksilver Grass from the valley, and a border that doesn’t smell like burnt meat every afternoon.”Silas eyed her, his bronze inner light pulsing at thirty-six steady beats beneath his canvas tunic. “You let Wei do the harvesting for six months.””Because Wei had three hundred pikes behind him, and I had fifty scouts with bone knives,” Sharis snapped quietly, her feline pupils expanding in the dark alleyway. “Now Wei is a pile of grey soot on an oak table. The Elders are headless for seventy-two hours.”She reached into her green sleeve, pulled out a small scroll of thin, scraped vellum bound with a copper wire, and tossed it toward Silas’s chest.Silas caught it with his right hand, his Mind-Light hands remaining folded beneath his skin.”What is this?””A non-aggression pact,” Sharis said. “My faction will take control of the Citadel’s garrison before dawn. We will tell the Council that Wei was struck down by a Miasma anomaly a roaming spectre from the north. The Elders will be too busy fighting over his steam foundries to authorize a march on Brierhold.”Silas unrolled the vellum with his thumb. The script was written in dual lines rough Fel-Cat glyphs alongside crude, phonetically carved English words.”The terms?” Silas asked.”Move your people,” Sharis said simply, her hand gesturing toward the northern horizon beyond the city walls. “Take your Slate and your hundred and fifty thousand survivors out of the Brierhold Wastes. March them north, to the edge of the Hollow Canopy. Put fifty kilometers of shale between your sanctuary and our lower gates.”Silas stared at her. “You want us out of the valley.””I want a wall between my people and yours,” Sharis corrected, her voice dead serious. “If you stay at Brierhold, five miles from our front door, the Elders will never stop eyeing your Relic. If you move to the Hollow Canopy, you have the ancient canopy to shelter your perimeter, and we have the southern hills to ourselves. We leave you alone. You leave our steam lines alone.”Silas held the vellum in his grip.Moving fifty thousand humans across eighty kilometers of Miasma was a nightmare. But staying at Brierhold, trapped between twelve thousand Fel-Cats and a hundred and fifty thousand starving refugees, was slow death. The Hollow Canopy had the Purpur-Blossoms, the Whispering River, and the Old Warden’s shadow. It was where humanity belonged if they were ever going to build a real city.”If a single scout butterfly from your faction follows our march line,” Silas said, his amber-and-crimson eyes fixing on her face with a sudden, suffocating pressure, “I won’t burn a general next time, Sharis. I’ll drop the Blood-Lantern into your steam foundry and melt the lower terrace.”Sharis didn’t flinch, though the fur along her spine bristled slightly under her silk robe.”Agreed,” she whispered.She turned on her heel, her green robe swirling around her shins as she leaped onto the wooden archway above, vanishing into the steam-filled night without a sound.Silas rolled the vellum, tucked it into his canvas belt, and stepped out of the shadow into the open avenue.