It was a tranquil room, high-end yet masculine, peaceful and clean without being sterile. Stepping into it was like entering a refreshing lake after a hard sweaty run.

“My deepest apologies,” I told him. “I’m sorry you were attacked in my inn. I’m sorry I didn’t keep you safe.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

The wall parted and a tray slid out, offering a plethora of food from the banquet: the starters, the drinks, the desserts in tiny cups, and in the center, the pan-seared chicken. Orro must’ve recovered enough to put a plate together.

“The best chicken in the Galaxy,” Turan Adin said, a hint of something suspiciously resembling amusement in his voice.

“Of course,” I told him. “We only serve the best to our honored guests.”

I stepped outside and quietly closed the door behind me.

###

The trick to finding an invisible thief is making him or her visible, which sounded like the most obvious conclusion in the world. Teaching the inn to recognize the faint blur of the thief’s presence and target it was a lot harder.

I raised my head from the screen. I was sitting in my lab under the main floor of the inn. In front of me, the inn had formed a square niche in its walls five by five feet and roughly nine feet tall.

“And go,” I murmured.

A holographic projector in the wall of the niche conjured up the close approximation of the blur. The wall split and a jet of mist erupted over the blur. The niche’s walls looked exactly the same.

“Lights,” I murmured.

The light died. A black UV lamp came on, rotating slowly. Its beam swept the niche. Once sterile walls glowed with bright blue.

“Perfect.”

My screen blinked and changed into an image of my front room. George and Sophie were looking around, as if they had lost something.

“What is it?”

The two of them spun around, back to back, identical neutral expressions on their faces. My voice had emanated from the walls. Usually I didn’t do this because it was bad manners and guests tended to react badly to disembodied voices echoing through their living spaces, but I was still annoyed.

“We came to check on you,” Sophie said.

Wasn’t that sweet? I could tell them to piss off. Unfortunately, I was still an innkeeper and they were my guests to whom I would afford every courtesy even if it made my insides explode from the strain of containing my rage.

I waved at the inn. A set of stairs formed in the wall and I walked up into the front room. The floor flowed closed behind me.

George and Sophie looked at me.

“I’ll get us some tea,” Sophie said and went into the kitchen.

“She made you come down here to talk to me.” I took a seat on the sofa.

“Yes.” He lowered himself onto a chair opposite me.

“And you humored her. Her feelings are important to you, so you weighed the odds and decided that whatever plan you have wouldn’t be injured too much by you having this conversation with me, and here we are.”

“Yes.” He leaned back, his handsome face somber. She must’ve told him he had to be honest.

“Everything you have done since you arrived here, every word, every expression, and every action has been carefully calculated. You’ve destroyed the alliance between Robart and House Meer, isolating him from his peers. To Arland and Isur, he is damaged goods and to House Meer he is no longer an asset. He’s an embarrassment, a witness and facilitator of their dishonor. He will be desperate to make peace now. House Meer is huge and House Vorga is one fifth of its size. If the knights of Meer choose to set aside the shame of Beneger’s failure and pursue House Vorga, the Meer will swallow Robart’s House whole and barely notice. Robart has no choice but to throw his lot in with Arland and Isur now and pray for a strategic alliance. On the flip side, House Meer is dishonored. They sent three of their better fighters and they couldn’t take one man. They look weak and pathetic. Together with their excommunication, this will make them hard pressed to form any alliances at all.”

“The region will be more stable for it,” George said, matter-of-fact.

“Then you’ve murdered the pride of the Horde in front of the otrokari. I saw Sophie’s face. She lives for the challenge. You knew that the moment you showed her Ruah’s image, she would target him and kill him. You didn’t check the Horde’s hubris, you annihilated it.”

“Yes,” George said.

“Now the vampires are desperate, and the Horde is desperate. Both are humiliated. Both are indebted to me and the peace talks are in shambles. All part of the plan?”

“Yes.”

If he said yes one more time, I would brain him with something heavy.

“And my inn is an unfortunate casualty of this process?”

“Perhaps.”

“Are you done?”

“Not quite.”

“What else is there? You could also make the Merchants desperate. Is that next?”

“Yes,” he said.

“George, stop with single word answers. You came into my inn and you used me and Gertrude Hunt in the worst way possible. I deserve to at least know the final objective of this terrible mess.”

“It’s not a mess,” he said. “It’s a carefully steered ride. And the objective has always remained the same: to do the impossible and broker peace on Nexus.”

I leaned forward. “Where is my place in this?”

“You’re in the very center of it,” he said. “You and the inn. Everything that happened has been designed for its impact on you.”

“To what end?”

“I can’t tell you that. You have to trust me.”

“That is the one thing I will never do again. You can’t just play with people’s lives.”

“I never play.” A hint of frustration twisted George’s face. “I examine my objective very carefully and I weigh everything I do against the benefits attaining that objective will bring. I’m intimately familiar with death. It’s been a constant companion, almost since childhood. I take no one’s life for granted, not yours, not Ruah’s, not even Beneger’s. To avoid murder, I will go as far as to endanger myself and my objective, provided that the level of risk to my goal is acceptable and my threshold of acceptability is a lot higher than you might believe. I resort to killing only when it becomes absolutely necessary, and you can be sure that when I take a life, it is because I have examined all my options and had no choice. But some events are greater than the people who bring them about and so I will do what I must to set them in motion. It’s almost over, Dina. You will understand soon. I promise, I will not drag it out.”