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Port Damali's hot as hell this time of year, and only getting hotter. The Menagerie Coast boils no matter the season, but today the heat was a living beast, slinking low-bellied through the streets and baring its muzzle at anyone fool enough to venture out their threshold, sending them scrambling back to cower in the cool, quiet dark. Night's no better; if anything, the heat's worse by moonlight, prickly and close, like all the stars are boring down to scorch the land and all the oceans, too.
That suits Beau just fine. Last time she was in Port Damali there were thunderstorms prowling up and down the coast, and the warm, wild sea breeze whipped the city into a frenzy, as though they don't already spend the whole year enjoying weather she's had actual dreams about. The city was a riot of color and waterlogged laughter; a minute in the street would ruin a lady's delicate silk robe with mud and worse, but she'd just laugh and let it fall from her shoulders, and everything else she was wearing besides. Port Damali's stood for a thousand years and will stand a thousand more, but her people ran wild like the seas were coming to sweep them away. Beau's from verdant green hills and rich, good soil, the kind you can dig a fortune into. She's got no water in her, as the Damalians would say, and while she might be wild for the Archive, something about Port Damali always has her feeling - strange. On edge. Naked.
There's no one on the streets now. This block's watch has been dozing beneath a street awning since the start of her shift; the most action the street's seen tonight was a mama cat chasing her wayward litter back beneath the porch. The runt, a little burr of a kitten with scratch marks on his belly and a tear straight through his ear, slipped from her paw and bolted towards the sea. Beau understands the impulse. This block is a dead-end, too far from the harbor to scoop up the sailors, too close to the slums to entice even the most adventurous tourist. Closed-up shopkeeps and townie bars, a pitiful wind and distant waves. There is nothing, and no one, to watch. And still, Beau does.
The Staggered Wave is a squat little alehouse, interesting only for how uninteresting it is. Two stories, a few chairs on the porch. Well-washed windows. Peeling paint. A nice place. A boring place. Not the kind of place anyone would expect to find the most promising young agent of a highly covert group of scholar-monks watching from the opposite rooftop for three days, staring at the front door and cooking to spoil in her own skin. But here she is, and here she'll stay, until the Sapphire arrives, and Beau can go to work.
Word of the Menagerie Coast's newest nightmare only made its way up to Zedash a few months ago. The Cobalt Soul has known for some time that there's been trouble in the underworld, but they've had more important things to worry about. A corrupt merchant's husband is left robbed, drugged, and naked in the Restless Wharf; a crime lord wanders into Port Zoon's watch headquarters and politely requests that she be locked up for the rest of her natural life, only to recant everything when she wakes up screaming and sweating the next morning. Let the sewer rats drown themselves; weighed against a nation, it's hard to care. More and more Expositors have been vanishing in the night; more and more reports glide in by way of doss-billed sparrows, who nest along the Brokenveil Bluffs. Bread prices rise. Old men reenlist.
It isn't until the conflict begins to budge up against this not-war that the Archive is asked to help. The Empire can tolerate smugglers; it's elevated mobsters, and liars, and murderers to its highest ranks. But then a ship belonging to one of Dwendal's pet privateers, carrying pounds of uncut suude and weapons marked for the front, is firebombed on the Open Quay, her captain left hanging like a marionette from the crow's nest. The Sapphire declares the death theirs, and theirs alone. King Dwendal looks towards the Coast.
He grants the Cobalt Soul permission to investigate. That no one had been seeking such permission goes ignored.
Every senior monk having already been dispatched to the Ashguard, the problem falls on Beau's unburdened shoulders. Four months of careful recon have taught her:
1) The Sapphire burst onto the scene one year ago with the massacre of Lord Nihan of Feolinn, as he enjoyed a wine tasting with his very new, very young bride. Lord Nihan was the heir of the Sunfield wine fortune, and also the leading Skein importer this side of the Shearing Channel. They called it a massacre because the Sapphire left no one alive, not Lord Nihan, not the somme, not the doorman or the cook; just his child bride, found blinking dazedly in a thick puddle of blood, crying for her nursemaid. They called the killer Sapphire for the diamond drawn on Lady Nihan's forehead, smeared like fingerpaint in a strange liquid that could be blood, if it weren't bright blue.
2) The Sapphire almost definitely answers, or is at least connected to a crime lord the Archive occasionally turns to for information, a water genasi who likes to call himself the Gentleman. It's strange, everyone Beau asks agrees, that nearly everyone killed stood in competition to the Gentleman's interests. It's strange, they agree further, that he has emerged unscathed. (It's not strange that the Gentleman is now the only source of pure Skein in Wildemount. That's just good business.)
Perhaps, they suggest, she should take it up with him? Oh, but he hasn't been seen in Zedash for at least six months - what a shame. Of course they'll contact the Archive as soon as they hear from him, oh thank you, have a nice day yourself, dear.
3) The Sapphire is childish, and efficient, and chaotic, and feared. They will not touch children, but they will crush wives that pretend they are blind to where their wealth comes from; they will burn down a warehouse and flay those already burning, and leave spoiled flowers on the corpses. There is a delight in their fury, and no sophistication. They leave behind survivors. They do not consider this mercy.
4) The Sapphire is fucking fascinating.
She leaves the last one out of her report.
Here's the thing, though: Beau has spent the last seven years drying out in a library, reshelving scrolls and learning how to fight enemies she's never seen. She's good at this, she knows she is, she knows she could be, will be, if she was ever given the chance. She's thought about running a few times, but she can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It looks like a gray sash, and Dairon, and the secret grim smiles the Expositors give each other when they meet in the Archive halls. She covets their barely scabbed-over knuckles and their war-gotten limps; she's burning up from the inside-out to do something, to know something, to be something.
And the Sapphire... is. They're in gleeful opposition to everything Beau stands for, but the violence they're carving up and down the Coast calls out to Beau like it was made by her own hand, like a breath to a spark, like the wind to a wing - furious potential energy, once leashed, now unstoppable. Beau doesn't want the hurt, but she wants the deadly purpose behind it. She wants to make choices and know that they've mattered; she wants to scream for the world's attention, and know that it's hers, undivided. She wants to know what makes up the Sapphire, soul and heart or lack thereof, that makes them this way, and she wants to take it for herself, every inch and atom.
That didn't go in the report, either.
She tracked them to Port Damali by way of bloodshed and blue diamonds. They have to get their orders from somewhere, she figures; the Gentleman likes to play at being gregarious, but even he wouldn't allow a rabid dog to run wild for long. She examined bodies in their parlors and their pleasure houses, noticed scuff marks on window ledges, footprints in the dust. Slowly, like a child tripping through a hedge maze, Beau began to see the right path. When they struck (near dawn, when bodies were sluggish and the sunrise was beautiful). How they escaped (by rooftop and alley, never leaving the city, she's so close). She follows the signs. She closed in. She found them.
The Sapphire's last job was by the edge of town, in a sleepy little neighborhood named Lantern Rock. There were two victims, a university professor on sabbatical from Vasselheim and his husband of 32 years. Nothing was taken, except for their seventeen year old daughter, Senna. From Beau's investigation, the professor was a kind, absentminded man who could have been a genius if he'd worked a little harder. He and his family spent most summers in Port Damali, and the neighbors remembered them fondly. He was a little too fond of wine, and spoiled his daughter rotten. He and his husband were split open from gut to gullet, and lay rotting for three days before anyone found them. The sapphires were drawn on their foreheads gently, like a kiss goodnight.
The Sapphire's left survivors, but they've never taken anyone before. Something about this job is different. Difference means the opportunity for mistakes, for panic, for going to ground. And Beau's ready for that. Out of the five alehouses that could be the Sapphire's rat hole, the Staggered Wave is the only one with an attic window. It's the only one with a back alley entrance. It's the only one owned by the aunt of one of the Gentleman's most loyal lieutenants. It's the only one nobody's come in or out of the entire time Beau's been in Port Damali.
Now all she has to do is wait.
So. Three days. Hot sun. Counting the roof tiles, the ravens, all the ways she hates Dairon. The night sky is a listless navy. The city watch is slumped down so far he's about to fall in the dirt. There's somebody singing, badly, in the house below her. There's a ship coming into harbor, its sails sagging for want of a breeze.
There's a figure cloaked in green, vanishing in the slip of an alley beside the Staggered Wave.
Well. That's something.
She doesn't move immediately, she's not stupid, but after ten minutes pass and nobody shoots at the tile she kicks into the street, Beau's ready to go. She slips across the rooftops, and it's only a few seconds before she's crouched behind the Triton's Blood chimney, right next door to the Staggered Wave. She peers into the alley, but the green-cloaked figure is gone. She takes a few breaths, getting her hammering heart in order. She knows how to sit still, how to meditate, how to become nothing and take in everything - but this is what she was built for. She could wait up here, but she's tired of rooftops, and they're tired of her. Dairon always tells her she's too fast, that she's too impatient. Well, she put in her time. She showed that she can follow orders, sit tight like the doll her father bred her to be. Now it's time to show she can be other things, too. She can be the knife in the dark. She can be an Expositor.
She leaps onto the Staggered Wave's roof and, slowly, slowly, nudges her way towards the window.
A figure huddles in the farthest corner. It's too dark for Beau to distinguish anything but the curve of their spine, huddled protectively around their heart. It doesn't look like they're wearing a robe; the person she saw go into the alley was tall, and whoever this is looks smaller than Beau. Small as a teenager.
Dairon calls Beau hasty. Beau wants to be called a hero. She's in the window before she can think to stop herself.
The light in here isn't much better, but when Beau pushes back the curtains moonlight floods in and gives her a little more to work with. It's definitely a girl, definitely a teenager, definitely bruised and battered. She doesn't move from her corner, but scuttles backwards from Beau like she's afraid she's going to lunge at any second - she's been taught that fear, well, and recently. Her hair is straw-blond, like the professor's, and her eyes are big. Scared.
"Senna?" Beau whispers, and the girl bursts into tears.
This isn't supposed to be a search and rescue mission. Technically speaking, Beau's not authorized to make contact with the Sapphire - intel-gathering, pure and simple, Dairon told her a thousand times. But the kid is so small. She lets Beau pull her to her feet without even asking who she is, and slumps into her chest like a sack of flour. The Sapphire must've only had her for a few days but she's practically skin and bones. Beau tentatively wraps her arms around her, and feels Senna start to sob into her, small kitten hiccups that she knows from experience could soon turn loud and violent. She wraps her clumsily in her vestments and pulls her over to the window, as far away from the stairs - and the cloaked figure below - as she can manage.
"My name is Beau," she whispers into Senna's hair, rubbing a soothing hand up and down her back. She doesn't have much practice with this, but she's seen Dairon do it before when the really young novices break their noses in sparring, and she thinks she's doing it right, because Senna doesn't start crying louder. "I'm a monk from the Cobalt Soul, in Zadash. I was sent- I was sent to rescue you."
"The Cobalt Soul?" Senna darts watery eyes up at her. Beau feels a jolt as she looks into her eyes - deep, almost violet blue. "Wh- What's that?"
Beau unwinds a strip of cloth from around her hands and hands it to Senna, who tentatively wipes her eyes. "Keep your voice down, I think the Sapphire is downstairs. The Cobalt Soul, we're a monk order, from the Empire. We save people." Senna's eyes go even wider, and Beau feels a kind of thrill all up and down her spine - at the awe in Senna's expression, at the pride her own words give her. This is why the Expositors smile at each other, she realizes. Because they get to think that to themselves every day.
"T-The person who took me," Senna says, twisting Beau's wraps between her hands. "You said they were called... the Sapphire?"
"Yeah," Beau says, leaving Senna by the window to creep through the rest of the attic. No footprints, no dust, no nothing. No movement or sound through the attic door, either, even when Beau closes her eyes and extends her awareness like Dairon taught her. It's a little hard to concentrate - her heart is beating so fast, faster than she likes - and the only thing that she can register are herself, and the girl behind her, standing in the moonlight. She'll have to check the rest of the house; Dairon would say that was her first priority, but Dairon isn't here to tug her puppet strings this way or that. This is Beau's mission, this is Beau's choice, and if she chooses to save people first, get information later, Dairon is going to have to learn to live with that.
Senna watches her move through the attic. She doesn't look any more reassured than she did a moment ago, even as Beau nods to show that it's clear. "The Sapphire- They, they killed my fathers, right?"
Beau makes herself look Senna in the eye when she nods.
Senna clutches Beau's wraps to her chest, right above her heart. "But- why? They- Papa was a professor, and Da, he wrote stories. They didn't hurt anyone, they didn't hurt anyone- Who would do something like this?" She surges forward, lets the wraps flutter to the floor as she grasps at Beau. "Please, tell me, who is the Sapphire? What does she want? Please, Beauregard, tell me!"
Dark blue eyes, piercing into her; tears still on her cheeks, sparkling in the moonlight. Beau wants to be a hero. She wants Senna to think she's a hero. She tells her everything she knows about the Sapphire.
By the time she's done, Senna has stopped crying. She's standing a little taller, and when she squares her shoulders back she looks older, too, stronger. Beau finds she can't look away.
"It's so sad, isn't it? You've spent so long chasing her, and you know so little about her. Is there anything else you can tell me about her? Anything at all?"
Her voice has changed, too, a Nicodranas accent sugaring her tongue like hot molasses. Beau is distracted thinking about it as she answers, "I never said the Sapphire is a woman."
"Oh. Lucky guess! Come on, Beauregard, you have to know a little more, right? Or did they not teach you anything in big bad monk school?"
Senna is laughing at her, and Beau likes that. Senna has a beautiful laugh, loud and rich. She'll alert the Sapphire, Beau thinks distantly, but she doesn't really care right now. She reaches out to touch Senna's hair. "The Sapphire... I know they're tricky, and smart, and don't follow anyone's orders. I know they're violent, and cruel, but only to people who deserve it. I know they're strong. I know they think violence is beautiful. I know they make violence beautiful."
"Wow, Beauregard," Senna says softly, her eyes never leaving Beau's. "It sounds like you think she's beautiful. Hmm?"
Her hair is silk in Beau's hand. She reaches up to smooth the matted bits down, and she touches- something hard. Something cold. Something curling out of the top of Senna's head like a fiendish ram's horn.
"You're-" She doesn't have time to speak as the charm and disguise spells break at the same moment, and spectral ropes wrap around her torso, yanking her backwards.
When she's finally able to look up she sees standing before her - a young woman, still, roughly the same size, roughly the same height. But where Senna had bright, tangled hair, hers is smooth and dark; where Senna had roughhewn, tattered clothes, hers are loud and expensive; where Senna was a human girl, this is a tiefling. A tiefling with dark blue skin, and dark, dark blue eyes.
She's such a fucking failure.
"Oh," Beau hears herself say. "Sapphire." Her tongue feels thick and stupid in her tongue.
The Sapphire claps her hands together, like Beau's an enterprising student who's just made a great discovery, rather than an idiot who's just fallen head-first into a trap she laid out for herself. "Yes, but you can call me... Hmm, what should I tell her." She's speaking to an audience of no one, her lips curled into a smile Dairon never taught Beau to read. "Jester. Yes, you can call me Jester."
What a stupid fake name. Beau says it out loud, and Jester laughs, delighted. "My mama would be very mad to hear you say that, but my papa agrees. But I don't want to talk about them, is that okay? I want to talk about you. I want to talk about the way you've been following me."
Beau twists her head around. There's a translucent chain rope around her middle, and two spectral cuffs around her wrists, binding her to the floor. She tugs on them experimentally, and feels the mildest shock go up her arms - not enough to hurt, but enough to promise. It's like no magic she's ever seen. "What are you? How are you doing this?"
Jester touches a finger to her lips, and then, leaning over, presses it to Beau's. "Shh, shh, we're not talking about me, I just told you. We're talking about you, and your Cobalt Soul, and your mission. Your silly, silly mission."
"Shut the fuck up."
Jester is still close, too close. She circles around Beau, and Beau can feel her gaze traveling up her spine, settling on the base of her neck. The reality of the situation has been slow to set in, but now that it's here Beau can feel it deep in her marrow. The Sapphire is a killer. Violent, and beautiful, and so indiscriminately deadly it's difficult to believe that Beau's neck is still attached to her head right now. Beau has to get out of here, and she knows that she won't.
"You've already told me about why you're looking into me." She comes to stand in front of Beau again, settling her hands into that ridiculous pouf of a dress - how the hell does she climb in and out of crime scenes all day without it getting even a speck of dirt? "We knew from the first time we saw you that the King sent you - we weren't sure who you were, we're so sorry, Beau, we promise we'll remember now! It's just, there aren't any monks in Port Damali, and it was really kind of awesome, you know? That you were so handsome, and we had no idea who this really cool, really beautiful person was, following around after us like a detective lady!"
She waits, almost like she wants Beau to chime in. Beau glares at a spot above her shoulder. She claps her hands together and continues.
"Okay, so there's this cool detective lady, and she's really pretty and smart, smart enough to find where we've been, but not smart enough to fiiiiind us find us, and then we started thinking, if we were a smart and super cool detective monk person, why would we be in Port Damali? Why would we be looking for me? Besides," she bats her eyelids, "the obvious. And then we thought, okay, so she's from the Empire, so the King sent her, yes? And then then we thought, when did she show up on our beautiful, sensational trail?"
Beau can't stay quiet anymore: "Who is this we you're talking about? Are you crazy? I mean, I know you're crazy, but this is another level."
Jester ignores her. "You only showed up after we killed that stinky old Captain Lattvara! And what does - oops, what did Lattvaaaaara ship? Weapons! But we've blown up a lot, I mean a lot of ships with weapons. In other places," she says, dismissing Beau's bewildered look, "but your King was never happy about them, trust me. But this time there was something else on board? You know what it was, right, Beauregard?"
Beau stares at the floor, defiant, furious. At Jester. At herself. She's going to die a failure, and Dairon won't even know what happened to her. She's going to die chained up, strung to the ceiling, sedated and useless. She's going to die.
"Drugs," Jester says happily. "Your King was so mad about me blowing up drugs that he sent his little monk investigator lady to stomp around after me and get to the bottom of it! Which means!" She claps her hands again. "Which means we have what Mr. Dwendal wants."
"King Dwendal doesn't want your fucking drugs," Beau spits out, still not able bring herself to look up. "He wants to win the war. He wants to make the Empire safe."
Clawed fingertips underneath her chin, forcing her gaze up, up, up. Jester smiles down at her, so sweet. "You look really smart, Beauregard, and I think you are, too. But you're also really, really dumb."
Jester leans down, so that her cheek presses right into Beau's. She smells like the kind of expensive perfume Beau's mother used to wear, and nothing else. Her skin is soft. Her breath is soft, too. "We made sure that we'd leave you lots of clues to follow us, and we made sure that we took a child - we saw you cry at the first one, do you remember? You have such a big heart, that's going to hurt you in the end. We knew you'd follow us. Which is really good! It's so good, because we need you to give your King a message. From the Gentleman, to him. Do you want to hear what the message is, Miss Detective? The one that's going to keep you alive?"
"Go to hell."
Jester presses her lips against Beau's ear, and the jolt that runs down her spine is entirely independent of her chains. "Pay up, or we'll burn it all, and we'll burn you, too."
Even when she steps back, Beau can feel the aftershocks of her body pressed into Beau's. Her skin had been warm.
"Well!" Jester practically rocks on the balls of her feet. "This was really fun, Beau, thank you! We got to kill a professor and I got to play a game with my new detective friend. I'm really sad we have to go now, but we're going to see each other soon! Tell King Dwendal you're the only messenger that the Gentleman will take. The only messenger the Sapphire will take." The name sounds so important, like a title, like a crown. Staring up at her - wreathed in moonlight, eyes aflame - Beau doesn't disagree.
"Senna," she manages, because the only other thing she wants to do is scream. With her failure. With her fury. With longing, for the arrogance and joy Jester doesn't even seem to realize radiates from every part of her body and soul. "What happened to Senna?"
When the moment passes, and then another, and another, Beau finally lets herself look up. Jester's smiling down at her once more. This time, it's pitying. "Maybe if you find us faster next time, we'll let you know." She reaches out once more, and pats Beau on the head.
But Beau isn't focusing on that anymore. She's looking at the wall behind them, where the moonlight hits just right. In this angle, with this light, it almost seems like Jester's casting two shadows.
The shackles disappear from her wrists, and in that split second Beau lunges forward, channeling every bit of ki she has into a blow that will send Jester sprawling through the floor and into the basement below. She swings wildly- and finds nothing, nothing but air, and silence. She sprawls to the ground, her head ringing wildly. As she tries to raise herself up, she feels something heavy - a boot - in the center of her back.
"Oh, Miss Detective, you're so much fun to play with" Jester says - except her voice isn't entirely Jester, it's twinned, now, with something deeper, something ancient, something that makes Beau want to freeze up and hide more than any cheerful threat Jester could have given. She can't look back. She can only stare at the wall, and the two shadows.
"We'll see you soon, Beauregard. So soon. Or else." And then a sharp pain explodes in the back of Beau's head, sending her back down on the floor. The world refracts into points of blue and violet, and sapphire, too, and then the world becomes black, and there's no color left at all.