Chapter Ninety-Two: A Miraculous Touch and a Compassionate Heart, Deeply Suspicious

Lowering his head, he watched the room from the corner of his eye. Its bare walls and severe emptiness suggested a house requisitioned at short notice; the low stool that placed its occupant beneath everyone else, together with the ring of burly men around him, made use of a few basic tricks of psychological pressure. Too bad such methods could never move him.

Lifting his face, he looked at the man through the monocle and smiled. “Honored Eye of the King, Director Taler of the Intelligence Bureau, I can explain. This is all a misunderstanding.

Mr. Vivaldi has long suffered from impotence, and besides being an apprentice witcher, I also earn a living selling alchemical products on the side. My distributor is Mr. Griffin, the owner of the Hairy Bear Tavern, veteran of the Battle of Brenna, and member of the Brotherhood Team.

So today I came to deliver a custom restorative brew for Mr. Goran. If you don’t believe me, you may examine my herb satchel.”

The Intelligence Bureau director’s expression turned wonderfully complicated. The answer was utterly beyond his expectations, so he waved for one of the burly men beside him to step forward and take Victor’s satchel.

They emptied the bag out on the spot. Victor pointed out several vials without labels and had the man hand them to Taler.

The witcher apprentice said, “I brought eight such potions in all. Two of them are gifts, and they can be tested right now.”

No testing was even necessary. Victor looked far too certain. A man like the director could tell at a glance that this was unquestionably genuine restorative brew, and the boy’s suspicion was washed away almost at once.

Frowning, Taler folded his arms. “Next we’ll search your body. Don’t worry, it will be done by women, and we’ll also use instruments to monitor any magical reactions from you. Any objections, Mr. Victor?”

“None at all, so long as it proves my innocence.”

An hour later, the boy emerged from the house with easy leisure and crossed back to the opposite side, where he knocked on Goran Vivaldi’s door.

In the shadow beside the second-floor window, the King’s Eye, Taler, watched his back. Beside him stood another man, the King’s Hand, Vernon Roche.

“So you summoned me all this way just to watch you let a man go?” Roche asked.

“To hell with it,” Taler said with a bitter sideways smile. “I haven’t been this wrong in a long time. I’m almost certain that Ayvin asked him to deliver a message, but none of the magical monitoring instruments picked up anything wrong, and he wasn’t carrying any strange objects either.”

“What about his satchel?” Roche bit into his cigar and struck a match.

“That was the important part. We ran magical screening, needle probes, the works. Nothing. We were one step away from cutting up his old one and handing him a new bag.

“As for the strip search, Vys handled that herself. You can hear the report from your own men.”

The blue-uniformed Temple Guard adjutant stood just behind and to the side of the two men, her shirt habitually left unbuttoned at the chest. With her arms folded, she lifted two white curves into view and shrugged at Roche.

“Besides strong and huge, I didn’t find anything unusual,” she said. “But he is especially strong, especially huge, and if he’s really only sixteen as listed on the tax records, then that’s extremely suspicious!”

The commander of the Temple Guard barked at his adjutant without mercy. “Suspicious my ass! Am I suspicious too? And button your shirt up properly, I can see your navel.”

After dressing her down, he turned helplessly to the intelligence director. “Even so, you could still detain him and observe him for a few days. Maybe he’d slip up?”

Taler shook his head and removed his monocle to wipe it clean. “No. Aside from this matter, he’s clean as a fresh sheet of paper... no, not that white. More like parchment.

“But if we detained him on suspicion this thin, we might as well arrest everyone in the slums. Every one of them is more suspicious than he is.

“And besides, he received an invitation. Tomorrow he’s to perform at Princess Ada’s banquet. Didn’t you notice? Our Mr. Victor is also a bard. A very good one, too—at least according to Master Dandelion.”

Saying nothing, Roche smoked his cigar and stared at the back of Victor as he entered the house opposite, exhaling ring after ring of smoke.

At the banker Goran Vivaldi’s gate, Victor knew Taler must be watching him from behind, and perhaps the King’s Hand Roche as well.

But what of it? The herb satchel his grandmother had made for him was an impossible artifact, a thing of laws, a presence above all magic. So long as he did not reach into it himself, no one in heaven or on earth could produce the letter Ayvin had entrusted to him, much less mere spies and hounds of a kingdom.

Unless they personally witnessed Victor demonstrate how to retrieve an item, no one could find any difference between the endless herb satchel and an ordinary one.

The iron gate opened. Victor looked at the poor banker, now under house arrest, and took back the word poor—there was no need to pity him. If he himself had just been caught, the banker would not pity him either.

He stepped inside with ease. After confirming there was no danger, the boy drew Ayvin’s letter from the herb satchel and handed it to the banker, along with six bottles of restorative brew.

“This works very well for virility. Try it. If you need more, you can buy it in the Temple Quarter from Griffin at the Hairy Bear Tavern.”

A few minutes later, in the second-floor room opposite the banker’s residence, Vys saw Victor step out and stride openly toward this side, ready to undergo the departure inspection. She gave a soft laugh.

“I’ll go down and search him. Does anyone else want to come?”

Taler waved her off. “No point. He had no problem just now, and there won’t be any now either.”

Roche refused as well. “A man selling aphrodisiacs isn’t worth meeting. And button your shirt before you go downstairs.”

Vys grinned and fastened it for him with a casual motion. “You know, while I was checking him, I thought of someone. That free man.”

“Batman?” Roche said in exasperation, waving her away like a troublesome woman of the streets. “I’ve got enough headaches already. Don’t make me think of that cross-dresser.”

Taler didn’t take it to heart either. A fellow in outlandish clothes brawling in the middle of the night, and no one had died—he was nowhere near important enough to concern him. The squirrel faction’s strange movements were what truly demanded attention.

At last he returned home. Victor went straight down to the cellar and carefully opened the banker’s reply, only to find a full page of black-market coded slang written in a mixture of Common and Nilfgaardian.

After a moment’s thought, he threw a sheet of blank paper into the cauldron, then compared it with the original letter as he stirred. Soon he had produced a precise copy.

Going upstairs, he found Angoulême chatting and laughing with Catherine. Since his mind was on other matters, he paid no attention to their conversation; otherwise he might have drawn his sword and put an end to a family disgrace.

He handed the copied letter to the girl. “Didn’t you say you wanted to figure out what Ayvin and the others are up to? See if you can make sense of this slang.”

Then he left for the slums. Goran Vivaldi’s reply did not need to be sent out of the city; it only needed to reach a certain person in the slums. But the urgency of its delivery—so urgent it had to go today—gave Victor a bad feeling. That was why he had chosen to open it and keep a copy.

Soon he collided in a corner of a narrow alley with a dwarf whose beard was half red and half gray, quietly handed over the reply, and quickly left.