It was two days before Callista guided her horse, more brown than white now with the dirt of traveling, up the granite cobbles between the crowded gates of Stormwind. The towering statues of old heroes cast little shade in the noonday sun, and the dust kicked up by dozens of hooves and wagon wheels clung to the sweat that beaded her neck. She'd intended for her first act upon reaching home to involve a long warm bath, but a cold flagon and a plate of bread and cheese at the local tavern was sounding more and more appealing. Besides, she'd been away from the capital for more than a week, and the kind of news that interested her was hard to find in the countryside.
Waving goodbye to the plump merchant seated on the gaudy carriage to her right (the road from Goldshire was quite safe, but merchants were still pleased to travel with friendly mages – or those they believed to be – just in case), she turned her horse off the main road and on to one of the side streets that led to the Mage Quarter.
This lane was only slightly less packed, thick with merchants and their customers, messenger boys (and pickpockets pretending to be messenger boys, no doubt) dashing through the press. The white mare snorted and snapped at a black gelding passing the other way, and Callista yanked warningly on the bit. Sometimes she thought the creature was only barely less mad than her felsteed, but at least it was less likely to get her lynched.
Her mount calmed somewhat as they left the crowded streets of commerce near the city center and moved deeper into the Mage Quarter. Here, the noisy peddlers of fruit and fish were replaced by more sedate shops selling magical artifacts and tomes. Soldiers wearing the tabards of various Alliance organizations (the Stormwind Guard, the Argent Dawn, even a nondescript-looking woman she imagined was SI:7) called out recruitment pitches for missions requiring arcane talent. Callista ignored them, having a healthy dislike for mercenary work. The coin was almost never worth the level of risk involved, and any arcanist of even middling talent could do far better at something else.
She dug a knee into her mare's side, directing it down a twisting alleyway that somehow managed to seem darker than the main thoroughfare, though that was probably just a trick of the narrow street and the high buildings that flanked it. A battered sign bearing the name "The Slaughtered Lamb" hung over a shadowy doorway halfway down the alley.
Callista swung herself out of the saddle in front of the sign, tying her horse up to a free hitching post and giving the well a few pumps to fill the trough before it. The mare eyed her balefully and switched her tail, clearly unhappy with the local atmosphere, but after a moment condescended to drink.
Callista narrowed her eyes at the animal – she wasn't about to be judged by some walnut-brained fiend of a horse, even if that trader had lied – before pushing the door open and stepping into the pub.
The inside was dark and mostly empty, smelling faintly of spilled beer and faded enchantments. This wasn't unusual – most places frequented by students of magic tended to smell that way.
She took a seat at one of the cracked leather stools at the bar and placed her order with the dour-faced bartender, half-turning to survey her fellow customers. There weren't very many this early in the day, but two women sat at a round table in the back corner, one of whom waved her over upon noticing her gaze.
Recognizing both, Callista hesitated ambivalently a moment before deciding there was no dignified way to escape and sliding off the stool, giving a brief half-wave in acknowledgement. Madame Fairchild, the woman who'd beckoned, sat in her chair in a straight-backed, somewhat professorial way, grey robes falling in stiff lines around her. The other woman, Lady Devereux, had golden hair and eyes the startling blue of a habitual arcane user (though Callista would've bet her last soul shard the only magic she'd done lately was the illusion that kept them that color) and would have turned heads at any royal function.
Lady Devereux's lip curled delicately as Callista approached, eyes lingering pointedly on the dirt that streaked her face and clothes. Deciding she was glad she'd come over after all, Callista pulled out the chair nearest her on wicked impulse, settling herself in it rather more heavily than was necessary and causing a puff of dust to rise from her traveling cloak.
The woman's look of disgust became more pronounced as she waved the dust away with a manicured hand. "Are you certain the Academy expelled you for your demons and not your manners?"
"No," Callista said, weighing the amusement value of pointing out there was hay stuck to her eyelashes against that of letting her discover it for herself.
Madame Fairchild ignored this exchange of hostilities, fixing sharp black eyes on Callista's face. "Daeron Miller is missing," she said abruptly.
Callista cocked her head and wrinkled her nose, somewhat startled by the shift in topic and not sure what she was meant to make of it. She knew Daeron, vaguely, but he was certainly no friend, and it wasn't as though it was strange for warlocks to vanish periodically. She'd done it herself not too long ago. "Is that why you called me over here?" she asked, hoping this conversation wouldn't actually be as dull as she now suspected. "His wife probably caught him with that succubus and chained him to the hearth."
Lady Devereux sniffed prettily, and there was a brief pause as a barmaid arrived with Callista's bread and cheese and a flagon of beer.
"Then why is she running about town wailing and offering gold for a search party?" Lady Devereux said once the barmaid was out of earshot, pretending to examine her pristine nails for flaws.
Callista, who knew Talia Miller about as well as she did her husband, resisted the urge to scoff. She thought the woman seemed far too practical to go wailing about anywhere, but she got the point. Not that that made Daeron's possible fate any more interesting. "Maybe the succubus caught him with his wife and chained him to the summoning circle."
Lady Devereux tossed her head so her hair shone, reminding Callista strongly of her own succubus. "Slightly more likely," she said with a deceptively lovely smile. The woman claimed to have High Elven blood in her family, and had the fine-featured good looks to prove it, but if it was true then the elvish talent for magic had completely passed her over. Not that that made her stupid – she'd married a very influential lord (who almost certainly had no idea where his wife was at this moment) and was perpetually up to her not-quite-pointy ears in Alliance politics. Callista intensely disliked her; practitioners of demonic magic walked a knife's edge of legality, and the woman's position made her nervous.
"Is there a point to this?" Callista asked, narrowing her eyes and slicing a piece of cheese from the block with a sharp motion.
"Yes," Madame Fairchild said. She folded her hands neatly on the table in front of her, shooting the golden-haired woman beside her an unreadable look. "Our colleagues are disappearing, we don't know why, and it's no longer only the ones we'd expect."
Callista raised a brow, still not convinced this was worth her and Lady Devereux suffering each other's company, but slightly more interested. Not just traitors and fools whose own demons murdered them, then. "What makes you think Daeron didn't defect?"
Madame Fairchild shook her grey-streaked head. "He may have been indifferent to his wife's charms, but by all accounts he loved his daughter. I don't think you'll find him in the…usual…places."
The usual places being Jaedenar or one of the other Burning Legion outposts on Azeroth. It was amazing how many "vanished" warlocks turned up there eventually, especially with the war going poorly in Outland.
Callista tore off a chunk of bread and swallowed it. "Then what sort of places do you think you'd – "
She didn't bother finishing her question as her gaze lit on Lady Devereux's face, which was currently arranged in an even more intense expression of scorn than usual. "Oh, Twisting Nether," she said instead, half in amusement and half in irritation. "What sort of conspiracy is it now?"
"An imaginary one," Lady Devereux said. "As I've already explained to our dear Madame Fairchild, you're far too valuable now. Who else would deal with all these wretched demons?"
"Unless someone's looking for someone to blame for them," Madame Fairchild said, drumming her fingernails on the tabletop in a measured pattern.
Lady Devereux's eyes flicked to her scornfully. "They aren't."
"Then where's Daeron?" Callista put in, perverse dislike of the golden-haired woman momentarily overriding her conviction that Madame Fairchild was insane.
The Lady's rosy lips curved delightedly, putting Callista in mind of one of the crocolisks that occasionally surfaced in the city canals, albeit a very beautiful one. "I'm sure I don't know. Where were you when you vanished for weeks?"
Madame Fairchild leaned forward slightly over her folded hands, and Callista suspected they'd hit on the real reason she'd been summoned into this little discussion. Annoyance at being suckered into an interrogation when she'd been looking for gossip, coupled with the unpleasantness of being filthy and travel-sore, bred in her a vicious irritation. If they thought they were about to hear anything useful they would be sadly disappointed. Callista had been posed this question countless times since her return from Booty Bay, and she alternated between answering with a plausible lie and the most lurid thing she could think of. There was no doubt in her mind which one this situation warranted.
She swept her eyes over the room as though checking for eavesdroppers, leaning forward seriously. "Argus," she said in a breathy whisper. "I joined the Shadow Council, married an orc, and swore our pasty-skinned babies to the Legion lords."
There was a brief moment of silence in the wake of her pronouncement, broken by Madame Fairchild's unimpressed snort.
They didn't believe her, obviously, because the story was ridiculous, and in hindsight Callista regretted making up something so immediately dismissible. It was much more satisfying to imagine them stewing after she'd left. Struck by a sudden burst of diabolical inspiration, she stood up and pushed her chair back, tossing a handful of coppers onto the table and scooping up what was left of her bread and cheese. "Two of those things are lies, of course," she said, lingering just long enough to see Madame Fairchild's brow crease with confusion before turning and stepping from the bar.
Satisfied that the two women would shortly be just as cranky as she was trying to figure out what in the Nether she was talking about, she pocketed the hunk of break and held the cheese between her teeth, untethering her horse and swatting absently at its nose when it tried to bite her. Warlocks weren't all paranoid, power-grubbing harpies, but they did tend to lie more in that direction than the population at large. If her friend Tun had been here, she suspected he would've told her to walk away in the first place from a conversation she knew would be both useless and unpleasant, and she also suspected the idea might have some merit. If only the thought of skulking away from those two witches like a kicked dog didn't make her teeth grind.
Hoisting herself back into her saddle, she swallowed the last bit of cheese as her mare trotted out of the alleyway and into the full sunlight of the main street. Lunch hadn't been as pleasant as she'd hoped, but at least she could get herself cleaned up now on a full stomach. She let the mare choose her own pace as they picked their way around the foot traffic, making for the yellow-thatched roof of the local stables.
A flock of children tumbled out of a shop ahead of her, all clad in identical blue cloaks and clutching books of spells as they giggled and shrieked at one another, and she drew rein to let them cross. They were clearly students of the Academy of Arcane Arts and Sciences at the end of the street, which put her in mind of Tun again. She hoped the gnome remembered their dinner plans for tonight. Otherwise she'd have to go up into the Wizard's Sanctum to drag him out, and even though it had been years since any of the professors there could set her to diagramming spells, she still had to fight an ingrained urge to cringe guiltily whenever some bearded old archmage scowled at her. And they did scowl – those who remembered the circumstances of her expulsion, anyway.
She walked her mare up to the front of the stables and dismounted, handing the reins to a freckled stable boy who ran up to greet her. Unbuckling her saddlebags and slinging them across her shoulder, she began the short walk home, squinting as she moved out of the shade and into the bright sunlight.
The day was hot, but a breeze, sea-scented from the port that was Stormwind City's heart, ruffled the pennants that hung from the Academy's ivy-wreathed towers. Callista's house was in a decent part of town, populated mostly by mages and near to the stables, but the hair that had escaped her messy knot was damp and clinging to the back of her neck by the time she turned on to her street.
She shifted the straps of her saddlebags and began digging around the inside pocket of her robes for the key as the familiar slate roof drew into sight. Like most of the houses in this row, Callista's was cheerfully whitewashed, second floor windows peeping out from beneath deep dormers.
Unlike most of the houses in this row, Callista's had a man in full plate armor standing on its step, clad in the colors of the Guard and digging the point of his broadsword into the flagstones.
Callista froze, eyes narrowing.
Someone behind her, caught unawares by her abrupt stop, jostled into her and swore, but she hardly noticed. What in the Nether was he doing there?
More mystified than really alarmed – yet – she whirled and pretended to examine the wares of a tinkerer who'd laid his mechanical gadgets out on the grass near the street, mentally running through her list of possible offences. Since she hadn't spent much time in the city lately this was easier than usual, and her eyes widened again as she realized, with surprise and a strange sort of misgiving, that she couldn't think of any. None that would result in one guard and not a whole squad of them, at any rate. Oh, plaguing hells, had that jittery Madame Fairchild actually been right?
Seized by the twin specters of impending arrest and her colleague's vindictive gloating, she turned away from the mechanical squirrels gamboling on the grass and began to walk rapidly back the way she'd come, resisting the impulse to pull her hood up to hide her face.
She needed someone to mull this over with (as well as somewhere to stash her saddlebags, which were beginning to dig uncomfortably into her shoulder). With that end in mind, she cut down the first cross street she came to, pointing herself towards the dignified stone towers of the Academy of the Arcane Arts.
Ensconced in a comfortably-worn armchair behind an antique reading desk, Tunregar Weldiciruit leaned close over the yellowed page in front of him. The meticulously-inked diagrams, faded by age to a tea-stained brown, were difficult to read even in the light of the enchanted globe that floated over his right shoulder. An original treatise on underwater ward-breaking by Erzavet the Bluefaced…
He dipped his quill absently into the inkwell, and was just about to set nib to paper when a sharp knock scattered his thoughts. Annoyed at the interruption, he toyed for a moment with the idea of not answering and pretending to be out, but when the sound repeated itself more insistently he set the quill down with a sigh. "It's unlocked!" he called, somewhat impatiently.
The door swung open wide enough to admit Callista's slim form, clad in a dusty traveling cloak and dragging a pair of saddlebags. She nudged the door shut with her foot as she dropped her luggage and looked at him. "The Stormwind Guard is on my front lawn," she announced, with a curious mixture of irritation and the self-satisfaction of someone who's just thrown a lit firecracker into the room.
Not ready to give up his annoyance just yet, Tun furrowed his brow and traced a finger down a particularly obscure passage in Erzavet's text. Still grasping for the pieces of his interrupted thought (and having heard similar pronouncements too many times before to be more than vaguely alarmed), he picked up his quill again and flicked the excess ink off against the side of the well. "All of it?" he asked.
"No, just the one. How many do I need?"
Tun finally gave his half-formed sentence up for lost and dropped his quill, leaning back in his armchair and looking up at his friend. If she'd been hauling around two clearly heavy saddlebags, it meant she hadn't been home yet since her trip, which meant, despite her apparent unconcern, she was taking this at least somewhat seriously. Sympathy born of affection warred with suspicion born of long association. "What did you do?" he asked, tilting his head to eye her critically sidelong.
"I didn't do anything!" Callista said, shedding her dusty cloak and perching herself on one of the chairs opposite his desk with a disgruntled expression. "Which is exactly what I don't like. How am I supposed to know what to lie about?"
She looked sincere enough (relatively speaking), and for once Tun thought that she might actually be innocent. After all, she'd been spending most of her time lately away from the city, and making inroads on the recent plague of imps was something Alliance authorities would be likely to appreciate rather than condemn (even if her rates were exorbitant). "How do you know he was going to arrest you?"
"What else would he be doing in my yard?"
Tun carefully shut Erzavet's tome and pushed it to the side of his desk, waving away his reading light so it floated up into one of the corners. "You could've tried asking him..." he said.
Callista wrinkled her nose, clearly not thinking much of that idea.
Tun rolled his eyes. "You can't avoid your own house forever."
"I had been planning to move…" she said thoughtfully. Clad in pale green and silver caster's robes, she looked wholly un-warlock-like and almost indistinguishable from any of his colleagues in the Sanctum. Which was what she should have been, Tun thought with a mix of regret and irritation, if she'd ever learned to exercise a little less recklessness and a little more restraint.
He snorted, shifting in his chair and stretching a little after so long poring over his work. Maybe it was for the best she'd interrupted him. He couldn't even remember if he'd eaten yet today. "Unless it's to Shattrath City, you'd better find out what they want. I'll go with you if you think it will help."
"I suppose," Callista said reluctantly, not looking particularly pleased with the inevitable. She glanced down at herself and made a face at the state of her clothes. "But not today. I need to clean up before dinner."
She was rather dusty, Tun observed. The green mageweave of her robes faded to muddy brown at the hem. "Is there any dirt left in Goldshire?" he wondered.
"Nope, got it all. Can I borrow your house?"
"Yes," he said, drawing a ring of keys from his pocket and pulling one off before tossing it to her. "Here. I need to finish, but I'll meet you at sixth bell."
"Thanks," she replied, catching it. She stood and began collecting her cloak and saddlebags from where she'd dropped them, slinging one over each shoulder. "If I see Archmage Gaiman on the stairs I'll pretend I don't know you," she said, waggling her brows playfully.
Tun rolled his eyes affectionately. "Go take a bath."
She left and shut the door behind her, leaving him once more in the pleasant solitude of his study. Motes of dust drifted lazily in the light that slanted through the arched window behind him, and the enchanted gadgets and focusing crystals that bookended the tomes on his shelves gleamed. He stretched contentedly again before reaching for Erzavet and waving his reading lamp over to bob above his shoulder.
All things considered, he didn't think Callista's mysterious trespasser would amount to anything serious. Probably just a guardsman canvassing for a missing child, or searching for the owner of some recovered object. Or, at the very worst, asking questions about some infraction so minor she'd forgotten about it – sometimes he suspected that Callista deliberately encouraged these kinds of pickles just because she got bored. Hopefully she wasn't actually in too much trouble. Not that, he reasoned dryly, anything could possibly be more trouble than the last of her escapades he'd involved himself in. At least there were no dreadlords in the Guard.
He muttered a simple cantrip that riffled the pages of his book open to where he'd left off, fanning the scent of old parchment into the air. Leaning over the faded diagram once more, he picked up his quill.
Much cleaner and changed into a spare tunic from one of her packs, Callista shifted in the armchair she'd curled herself into in Tun's sitting room, rearranging the heavy tome on her lap. A glance at the intricate timepiece on the mantle (the clock had no casing, revealing the stylized gears and counterweights of the mechanism) confirmed that it was already nearly seven o'clock. Giving a fond snort at her friend's tardiness, she stretched briefly and turned the page, examining the neatly-penned enchantments on the other side.
Tun's latest academic obsession was with rune magic, and this particular volume featured an in-depth survey of warding inscriptions. Some of them looked very similar to the spells she'd carved into the crystal spheres she used in her demon-catching, and she skimmed the chapters with interest, pausing to read more thoroughly the bits that looked applicable. Maybe she'd see if Tun would let her borrow this one.
The click of the doorknob turning caught her attention. She looked up in time to see Tun hurry in from the street, pausing to hang his leather satchel on a hook near the door. "Sorry I'm late," he said, grimacing at her and running a hand sheepishly through his tousled green hair. "I got distracted – "
He paused as he noticed the book in her lap, excuse forgotten as his gaze suddenly sharpened. "Is that Tabetha's treatise? What did you think of the section on warding against demons?"
Callista closed the book and set it on the end table next to her chair, standing and brushing the wrinkles out of her tunic. The excerpt Tun referred to was actually the first thing she'd read, and from it had concluded that the author, though clearly an exceptionally skilled mage, was familiar with demonic magic only through hearsay. "Elegant and technically brilliant…" she said, quirking a lip, "if you want to get killed."
"I knew it," Tun said with satisfaction. "She forgot to account for counterspells."
"Her enchantments might still be good for cursed objects," Callista said, cocking her head. She handed him back his house key as they ambled out into the street and shut the door behind them. Their shadows stretched long in the mellow light of late afternoon, and the neighborhood was quiet, mostly cleared of the midday bustle. "The ones that can't fight back, at least."
"They might," Tun said, gaze unfocused on the scenery around him as he mused. "Maybe I'll write a commentary."
Callista nodded as she strolled along at his side, content to slow her pace to match the gnome's smaller steps. Summer days in Stormwind could be scorching, and she enjoyed the evenings the best. Especially evenings with the prospect of good food and a long night's sleep at the end of them.
Laughter and the sound of clattering plates spilled from the open doors of The Gilded Rose as they drew near. The usual dinner crowd was out in force, and patrons leaned against the porch rails, pipes lit, or hallooed cheerfully to attract the attention of arriving friends. Callista slid sideways through the press around the doors, Tun following in her wake.
The sound intensified as they moved into the enclosed space, and she stood on tiptoes to try to see over the shoulders of the people around her (some of whom were dusky-skinned Night Elves or Draenei, and much taller than she was).
"I think Nissa's already here!" Tun shouted to be heard over the din. "There!" he said after a moment, tugging on the sleeve of her tunic.
A Night Elf woman and her two armored companions moved out of Callista's line of sight to reveal a purple-haired gnome seated at a booth, a harried-looking human man hunched over a book across from her. She waved as Callista and Tun waded through the crowd to join them.
They'd already ordered a large potful of beef stew, and it sat half-empty on the tabletop along with two untouched bowls. "We were going to wait," Nissa said with a teasing smile at Tun, nodding her chin towards it, "but, well…we know you, dear."
"I'm not always late," Tun said mock-huffily, sliding into the booth beside her and pecking her on the cheek.
"Only mostly always?" Callista suggested. She dodged the piece of bread crust he threw at her as she sat down next to the young man poring over his book. He didn't even look up at her, muttering inaudibly to himself. "Hello, Darryl," she said, craning her neck to see what could possibly be so interesting.
"Don't talk to me," he muttered distractedly, hunching down further into his seat. "Have to study."
"He's got an examination with Lady Elsharin tomorrow," Nissa explained in response to Callista's raised brow. "He's convinced he's going to open a portal to somewhere so horrible they expel him immediately."
Callista made a disbelieving sound. Darryl was Nissa's protégé, and was about as likely to bungle his portal exam that badly as Callista was to wake up a priestess. "Being expelled isn't so bad," she said, petting him sympathetically on the shoulder before ladling herself a bowl of lukewarm stew.
"Easy for you to say," Darryl replied, completely oblivious to the fact he was being teased as he looked up from his text long enough to scowl at her. His blue eyes were red-rimmed, and the beginnings of a beard scruffed his chin. "I hate demons. And blood. Oh, Light, warlocks have to look at blood, don't they?"
Nissa sighed, reaching over to pat his hand with one of her small ones. "No one's going to make you be a warlock," she reassured him patiently. "You're going to do fine."
"He needs a stronger drink," Callista recommended, dunking a piece of bread into her stew.
"Drinks," Darryl muttered. The paper muffled his voice as he let his head fall to bury his face in the crease of his open book. "Lots and lots of drinks."
He cut such a perfect caricature of misery that Callista laughed. "Oh, alright," she said. She popped the piece of bread into her mouth and stood up from the table. "I'm getting him drinks," she said to Tun and Nissa. "Do you want anything?"
"She's been fleecing the nobility again," Tun said in a stage whisper to his girlfriend, pulling his face into a frown.
"Has she?" Nissa asked delightedly. "In that case I'd like a glass of mead, please."
"None for me, thanks," Tun said, making a face and waving his hands in a warding gesture. He planned to wake up "early" tomorrow to work on his new treatise, and even though early for Tun meant sometime around eleven, Callista knew better than to press the issue.
"Alright. I'll be back," she said, turning to weave her way through the sea of people that filled the inn.
She managed after a few moments to push herself to within sight of the bar, which was packed with both the Stormwind regulars and the usual crowd of travelers passing through. The bartender hovered at the far side taking the order of a large party of dwarves, and Callista resigned herself to wait.
She'd only been standing for a few minutes when a large hand settled heavily on her shoulder. Startled, she jerked and then whirled around. Opening her mouth to playfully scold whichever of her friends it was for alarming her, she shut it again, narrowing her eyes, as she realized she didn't recognize the man's face. Hair, nose, skin…all of his features were bland and utterly nondescript, and her gaze seemed to slide involuntarily away from him if she stared too hard. The effect set her teeth on edge. "Do I know you?" she asked, staring at his hand in a way that suggested he might shortly be losing it.
"Probably not," the man said, looking completely unaffected by her glare as he removed the offending limb. "Callista Dunhaven?"
"Who?" she asked, crinkling her brow in puzzlement.
The man smiled, an expression cold as the flash of a knife. "Don't."
She eyed him venomously but didn't try to lie again, liking this encounter less by the second. This was exactly the sort of thing she expected to happen in a shady corner of The Slaughtered Lamb, not in a crowded public space when she was out to dinner with friends. Either way, though, Callista had bargained with creatures a lot nastier than whoever this man thought he was, and it would take a great deal more than a smile and a face like a blank piece of parchment to intimidate her. "Whatever you want," she said, showing her teeth in imitation of his expression, "no."
"That would be very rash," the man said. "I have a business proposition for you."
"Then write me a letter."
"I suppose I could," he said, stroking his completely unremarkable chin thoughtfully. "What's the postage to the Vault, I wonder."
Callista's eyes narrowed even further as her sensation of being cornered increased. Well, that had degenerated into bald-faced threats rather sooner than she'd expected. She wished Tun or someone would come over to see what was taking her so long. "You tell me," she said aggressively, trying to project more certainty than she felt. "Last I checked, extortion was still illegal."
She didn't think it was possible, but the man's smile became even more glacial. "Take a walk with me."
There was nothing Callista would've liked less on all of Azeroth, but unfortunately she didn't see that she had a choice. This almost certainly had something to do with that guard she'd seen posted at her house, in which case not only did this man know where she lived, but he also had more clout with the Alliance powers that be than she could ever dream of. Since she had no intention of fleeing the continent, she followed coldly in his wake as he made his way to the exit.
She craned her head back over her shoulder as she jostled through the crowd, trying and failing to catch the eye of one of her companions back at the booth. Cursing inwardly, she crossed the threshold into the cool evening air.
"This only has to be unpleasant if you make it that way," the man said, watching her closely as he fell into step beside her. His features seemed to blur even more in the orangey light of sunset. Whatever enchantment he'd used to mask himself, it was extremely well done.
Callista snorted. "You threatened me. Who are you and what do you want?"
They walked down the cobbled path and back out to the street, leaving behind the patrons smoking on the inn porch. The man steered her to an empty cul de sac ringed with expensive shops, making sure they were alone before continuing. "You want to dispense with the niceties?" he said quietly. "Fine. I'll put it plainly. We have a task for you, you'll do it, or we'll put you in a cell until even your familiars die of old age."
A baleful glitter entered Callista's eyes at his blunt statement. Dealing with demons, she'd gotten very good at disregarding heartfelt threats, but something about this man made her nervous. "You can't arrest me," she said, "because I haven't done anything. Or does SI:7 invent its own evidence now?" That last part was a guess, but she thought it was a good one based on the quality of his disguise.
The man actually laughed, flashing those cold white teeth again. "We've done much worse than that, I promise you."
The temperature of the balmy night air suddenly seemed to drop as icy fingers of dread closed around her. He was lying. He had to be…or she was in more trouble than she'd even thought possible.
Something of what she was feeling must have told on her face (she suspected she'd paled) because he continued with a dismissive flick of his hand. "Not that we'd need to resort to such methods. The House of Nobles has resurrected the Wishock petition, and you and your…colleagues…have just become very, very vulnerable."
The Wishock petition? It took Callista a moment to place the name, but when she did she nearly laughed. "You mean they're shutting down The Slaughtered Lamb?" She tossed her hands up in faux despair. "Oh, no, wherever will I drink?"
"Yes, that was the petition's original purpose," the man said, and she thought she could read hard amusement on his strangely malleable face. "But its reach has…expanded somewhat in committee. Should it be ratified, any practice of fel magic within the Kingdom of Stormwind will be punishable as highest treason. And before you ask, it is retroactive."
For a moment she was silent, digesting this and feeling the icy fingers creep back. The only reason she hadn't totally surrendered to them yet was that the only evidence she had of any of this was the word of a wholly untrustworthy-looking stranger. If it was really true, what he was telling her was serious enough that she would almost certainly have heard of it already. "Who's sponsoring this petition?" she asked.
"Lord Devereux."
That stopped her cold. Yes, she almost certainly would have heard of this – if the petition's main supporter hadn't been the husband of the warlock community's main political source. She wondered how many of those disappearances Madame Fairchild had been worried about had been colleagues close to the court. Her jaw tightened, and she resisted the urge to close her hand around one of the soul shards she always kept in her pockets. She wasn't completely resigned to whatever "task" this assassin had for her, but her ways out were collapsing around her one by one, and she didn't like the sensation. "Alright," she said in a carefully measured voice. "I believe you had a...business proposition?"
"See? Not so bad," the man said with another of those knife-like smiles. "The House of Nobles is financing an expedition – mostly knights of the Argent Dawn – to search for a missing settlement of Lordaeron refugees on Kalimdor. You'll be part of it."
Callista's nose crinkled in distaste. "Paladins? What in the Twisting Nether do they want with me?"
The man shrugged. "The route passes near Felwood. And," he continued after a brief pause, "neither of the other parties came back."
Oh. So that's how it was. She could die in a cell, or she could die on a suicide mission. "So you want me to go with them, and do…what, exactly," Callista said, eyeing him scathingly. "Enslave the entire forest?"
The man shrugged again. "That's not really my problem, is it? The expedition leaves at dawn in two days on the ship The Fortitude. Third pier. Your commander is Sir Aren Westwood. Take it or leave it."
"And if I take it?" Callista asked, unable to keep the spite from her voice.
"Then we don't arrest you," the man said. The sun had gone down behind the buildings, and dark shadows flickered oddly across his features. "And you'll be paid, of course. With an option for future immunity to all related crimes, should you decide to stay on with the House of Nobles. If you survive, naturally."
"I see," she said. Somewhere in the last few exchanges, her dread had transmuted into a cold but savage fury. No matter how she spun it, she could think of no way to get out of this.
For now.
She needed to cut her losses and buy herself time to think of something else, and so she narrowed her eyes. "Then I suppose I have no choice but to accept."
"I knew you'd be reasonable," the man said, white teeth glinting in the dark. "No need to look so angry. Think of it as…an opportunity."
"Angry? I'm just flattered you went to all this trouble for me," Callista sneered.
The man laughed, a sound with all the warmth of drawn steel. "Don't be." He smirked as he turned to depart. "Any of your kind would've done. You were just the easiest to catch." He left the words to rankle, sauntering off and fading into the shadowed street.
Callista, momentarily speechless, merely glared viciously at his retreating back.