The Broken Halo

The conversation had gone in Simon’s favour.

The Voice had not openly accepted his terms, but she had allowed him to keep the Murmur Bone and told him to name his price when she contacted him again.

That was enough to preserve their connection.

It was not enough to make Simon trust her.

The Voice would continue looking for his identity, testing his limits, and searching for a method to either control or dispose of him. Simon intended to do the same to her.

He returned the Murmur Bone to his spatial ring, then his fingers stopped.

There was something they had not discussed.

His payment for the mission he had already completed.

The Voice had promised to pay him when she gave him the task. Her anger over the Fifth Needle and the dead rebels had allowed the conversation to move toward their future arrangement without settling the current debt.

Perhaps she genuinely forgot.

Perhaps she wanted to see whether Simon would forget.

It did not matter.

Simon was wealthy, but wealth did not turn him into a charitable demon. More importantly, allowing the Voice to leave one completed task unpaid would create an undesirable precedent.

A debt ignored once became easier to ignore the second time.

Simon reached for the Murmur Bone again, but before he could take it out, the stationary Shadow Eye beneath the fallen bell showed him movement near the northern edge of the Old Bell Quarter.

The middle-aged Lesser Demon had been captured.

Simon had already watched the eastern faction’s agents question him while he spoke with the Voice. They dragged him into the remains of an old foundry, searched his clothes, and asked the same questions repeatedly.

Who hired him?

Where did they meet?

What did the demon look like?

Did he receive another instruction after placing the ring?

The courier gave them everything he knew.

An old merchant with one eye.

A loose black robe.

A dry voice.

Twenty low-grade hell stones.

He had not seen where the merchant went afterward and did not know what the spatial ring contained.

The agents struck him several times, broke one of his fingers, then questioned him again to see whether pain changed his answers.

It did not.

Not because the Lesser Demon was brave or loyal.

He simply knew nothing else.

Now, two watchers held him on his knees inside the roofless foundry. Blood ran from his nose and mouth, while the broken finger on his right hand bent at an unnatural angle.

"I told you everything," he begged. "I swear I don’t know him."

One of the agents stood behind him with a narrow blade.

"We know."

The Lesser Demon’s expression changed.

"Then let me go."

"You’ve already seen our faces."

The agent in front of him crouched and looked into his frightened eyes.

"I’m sure you know that we can’t let you go after seeing our faces."

The courier’s breathing became faster and began sweating buckets.

"No. Please. I can leave Velmora. I’ll disappear. I swear!"

The demon behind him placed the blade against his neck and sneered.

"Shouting won’t save you. And no one will."

Simon watched without emotion.

He had always known this could happen.

The courier was an expendable piece chosen because his capture would reveal nothing. Allowing him to die would close the false trail and cost Simon nothing beyond twenty low-grade hell stones.

Saving him carried several disadvantages.

The eastern agents might guess that Simon was still observing the quarter. They would learn that he possessed some means of affecting a target from far away, and the Lesser Demon himself remained a possible liability.

He could be captured again.

He could panic and spread rumours.

He could try to use the entire situation for more money.

However, none of those problems were serious problems to Simon.

Meanwhile, the Lesser Demon still had value.

He followed instructions despite knowing the Old Bell Quarter was watched. He endured the beating and questioning without inventing false details, and the eastern faction had already searched him thoroughly.

More importantly, the agents now considered him a loose end that should have died tonight.

The courier was poor, desperate, easily controlled by fear and money, and would eventually believe that the mysterious demon who hired him could reach him from anywhere.

Simon could use that belief.

And if the Lesser Demon became troublesome later, Simon could still kill him.

The blade began pressing into the courier’s neck.

Simon shifted his attention fully into the ShadowEye and fixed the Lesser Demon’s position within his mind.

Several streets away from the Old Bell Quarter was a deserted pottery warehouse Simon had passed while changing faces. Its doors were locked, its roof remained mostly intact, and nobody had entered it throughout the night.

He fixed that location as the second point.

The distance was not great, and the Lesser Demon was also too weak and frightened to resist the spatial force surrounding him.

Simon released his spatial energy.

The air around the courier folded.

The agent holding the blade felt the demon’s body become strangely light beneath his hand.

"What the-"

The Lesser Demon suddenly vanished, and the narrow blade sliced through empty air.

A faint silver distortion remained where he had knelt, then collapsed before either agent could touch it.

Both watchers froze.

The demon with the blade spun around and searched the foundry, while the other immediately brought out a communication artifact to speak to the other watchers.

"He’s gone."

"What do you mean, gone?"

"He disappeared. Someone moved him through space."

"From inside the quarter?"

"Yes. But we didn’t sense anyone."

Their voices became sharper as they searched the surrounding ruins.

However, they would find nothing.

Inside the abandoned pottery warehouse, the Lesser Demon appeared several feet above the floor. He fell onto a pile of old sacks and rolled onto the stone with a frightened cry.

For several seconds, he remained there, clutching his injured hand and staring around the dark building.

He did not know where he was.

He did not know who saved him.

But all that mattered to him was that he was alive.

Simon dismissed the ShadowEye beneath the fallen bell. The fragment of mental energy returned to his Sea of Consciousness, while the second Eye remained hidden inside the eastern watcher’s shadow.

Saving the courier had cost him little.

What he eventually gained from it remained to be seen.

Simon brought out the Murmur Bone once again and channelled his demonic energy into it. The red lines beneath its surface slowly brightened.

The Voice answered with clear irritation.

"What now?"

Simon leaned against the cracked wall.

"We forgot something."

A pause followed.

"What?"

"My payment."

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