The Miracle of Rizvan was complete. And as Lloyd looked at the sleeping child, the quiet, warm glow of a job well done was, for a moment, overshadowed by the cold, thrilling calculus of the Major General. The boy was not just a patient he had saved. He was a beachhead. And from this beachhead, he was about to launch his conquest. The Drowned Rat tavern was, if anything, even more wretched than usual. A fresh wave of summer humidity had descended upon the city of Zakaria, turning the already thick, smoky air inside the establishment into a soupy, suffocating miasma that tasted of sweat and stale despair. The usual collection of cutthroats, smugglers, and informants seemed to have wilted in the heat, their usual boisterous arguments reduced to sullen, monosyllabic grunts. At their shadowed table in the corner, the assassins Jager and Kael were simmering in a stew of their own frustration. The hunt for Lord Lloyd Ferrum, which had begun with such arrogant, professional certainty, had now devolved into a tedious, soul-crushing exercise in futility. It had been nearly three weeks since their target had vanished, and the trail was not just cold; it was a frozen, barren wasteland. Kael, the brutish man of action, was a coiled spring of barely suppressed violence. He had abandoned his dagger and was now meticulously cleaning the complex mechanism of a hand-crossbow, the sharp, metallic clicks of the moving parts a staccato rhythm of his impatience. The waiting was a physical torment for him, an insult to his warrior’s soul. He was a wolf forced to sit in a cage, and he was beginning to chew at the bars. “This is a fool’s errand,” he growled, his voice a low rumble that made the cheap ale in his tankard tremble. “He’s gone. Slipped through our fingers like smoke. He’s probably back in his father’s fortress by now, laughing at us while he bathes in his perfumed soap.” Jager, as always, was a picture of languid, aristocratic calm, though a keen observer might have noticed the faint, tight line of annoyance around his thin lips. He took a delicate sip of the watered-down wine that was the best the establishment had to offer, his expression one of profound, theatrical distaste. “You have the patience of a hyperactive toddler, my dear Kael,” he purred, his voice a silken thread of condescension. “You see only the immediate. You fail to appreciate the subtle, beautiful art of the long game. Our prey is not a simple beast to be run to ground. He is a fox. He is clever. He has gone to ground, yes. But a fox must eventually leave its den to hunt. And we are the patient hounds, waiting for the scent.” “And what if he doesn’t hunt?” Kael shot back, snapping a piece of the crossbow back into place with a vicious click. “What if he is content to stay in his hole? Our benefactor is paying for a corpse, Jager, not for a philosophical debate on the nature of patience.” “Our benefactor is paying for a clean, politically expedient corpse,” Jager corrected smoothly. “A task that requires precision, not your usual brand of bull-in-a-china-shop enthusiasm. I have told you. We have our webs out. My informants are listening. Sooner or later, he will make a move. He is a young, arrogant noble. They are constitutionally incapable of being quiet for long.” As if to punctuate his point, a fresh wave of conversation, louder and more animated than the usual sullen murmurs, erupted from a nearby table. A group of rough-looking merchants, their clothes dusty from the road, were speaking in excited, hushed tones, their faces alight with the thrill of a new and fantastic story. Jager sighed, his elegant composure momentarily ruffled by the crude outburst. “And speaking of the endless, tiresome chatter of the common folk…” Google seaʀᴄh novｅlfire.net “—saved him, I tell you!” one of the merchants declared, slamming his tankard down for emphasis. “The Qadir heir! My cousin’s wife is a laundress at the estate. She heard it from one of the Lady’s own handmaidens. The boy was on his deathbed. A ghost. The Royal Physicians had already ordered the mourning clothes!” “And then he came,” another merchant chimed in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “The Saint of Rizvan! This Doctor Zayn. They say he walked right into the sickroom, took one look at the boy, and named the invisible sickness that no one else could see.” Kael paused his work, a flicker of mild, brutish curiosity in his eyes. Jager simply rolled his eyes, the very picture of bored disdain. More tales from the gutter. “They say he cut the boy open!” the first merchant continued, his voice now a mixture of horror and awe. “Right there in the bedchamber! Sliced into him with a silver knife, pulled a black, rotten thing out of his chest, and then stitched him back up with a poultice made from flowers that grow in the Dahaka Jungle! The handmaiden said the wound vanished before her very eyes! Healed! Not even a scar!” The story was, of course, a garbled, sensationalized version of the truth, a piece of folklore already being polished and embellished by a hundred different tongues. But the core of the miracle was intact. “A slum doctor?” a third, more skeptical merchant scoffed. “Curing the Qadirs with jungle flowers? It’s a fairy tale. A story to sell hope to the hopeless.” “It’s the truth!” the first merchant insisted, his voice rising in righteous indignation. “Lord Qadir himself has declared the doctor and his entire district to be under his personal protection! He’s given the man a fortune in gold, they say, and the doctor just uses it to buy medicine for the poor! He’s a living saint, I tell you!” Jager let out a soft, elegant snort of derision. “Saints and miracles,” he murmured to Kael, his voice dripping with condescending amusement. “The opium of the masses. A fascinating, if utterly predictable, study in mob psychology. A lucky charlatan probably fed the boy a purgative that happened to work, and now the city’s gossip mill has turned him into a god. It’s a worthless distraction.” He took another sip of his wine, dismissing the entire conversation as the irrelevant, superstitious ramblings of the lower classes. His mind was on a higher plane, a world of ducal politics and high-stakes assassination. The petty dramas of the slums were beneath his notice, a meaningless noise in the background of his grand, strategic hunt. Kael, however, was silent for a moment, a thoughtful, uncharacteristic frown on his brutish face. “A healer who can face the Dahaka Jungle and return,” he said slowly. “That is… not a common thing.” “Oh, please, Kael,” Jager sighed, his patience finally wearing thin. “Do not tell me you are falling for these peasant fables. He likely bought the herbs from a smuggler and invented the story for dramatic effect. It is a classic confidence trick. Now, can we please return our focus to the actual matter at hand? Our target is a Lord of Ferrum, not some hedge-wizard who is handy with poultices.” He waved a dismissive hand, and the conversation was over. He was the mind, the strategist. His judgment was absolute. The story of the Saint of Rizvan was a meaningless, worthless distraction. And so, the two hunters sat in their dark corner, surrounded by the swirling, growing legend of their own prey, and were completely, utterly blind to it. They were searching for a lion in a world that was now singing the praises of a saint, and their own arrogance, their own rigid, aristocratic worldview, had made them deaf to the song. The greatest disguise Lloyd had ever devised was not the persona of a doctor, but the simple, unassailable belief of his enemies that he was not worth noticing. Kael reluctantly conceded the point. Jager was the strategist, the one who saw the grand patterns, while he was the instrument of their benefactor’s will. If Jager deemed this burgeoning legend of a miracle-working doctor to be irrelevant, then it was irrelevant. He returned to his crossbow, the rhythmic click and scrape of his maintenance a familiar, comforting sound in the sea of meaningless noise. The conversation at the merchants’ table, however, continued, their voices a low, excited buzz that Jager did his best to ignore. They were now debating the nature of the “Saint’s” power, their imaginations running wild. “—not just herbs, I tell you,” the first merchant was insisting, leaning forward conspiratorially. “My cousin’s wife says the doctor has a divine spirit. A guardian angel, she called it. She says when he works his magic, a golden light fills the room, and you can hear the faint sound of celestial bells.” “Nonsense,” the skeptic countered, though his voice lacked its earlier conviction. “It’s alchemy. The Qadirs are secretive, but it’s well-known they have dabbled in the forbidden arts for generations. This doctor is likely an alchemist they hired in secret, a master of transmutation who has found a way to turn diseased flesh back into healthy tissue.”