Chapter 24.5: The Truth

“See?” Penny said, self-satisfied. “It worked. He’s awake now.”

Wepp tugged more aggressively at the thick twine binding him to his chair. “Assistance!” he called, throwing his head back. “Assistance! I've been kidna—”

Penny snatched up the jute sack her twine had come in and stuffed it in Wepp’s wide-open mouth, reducing his cries to an unintelligible series of low and muffled grunts that wouldn’t be heard beyond the door. “That’s enough. We didn’t kidnap you. We only—”

Minkus caught her attention with a nervously questioning glance.

“OK, fine, I can see how someone might say we kidnapped you,” Penny admitted.

Wepp continued jerking and squirming, drawing both of the other’s attention back to him. He seemed to be lost somewhere between attempts at freeing his arms and unstuffing his mouth, but he achieved neither. Penny waited, arms crossed as she and Minkus watched him in silence.

After a few minutes of this, Wepp finally settled back into the chair with a huff that was just audible behind the jute. He made eyes at Penny, imploring her to remove the jute, but Penny only scowled, staring down her nose at the diminutive figure laced to the chair. “Yeah, right,” she mocked. “Let me just take that thing out of your mouth so you can scream up and down for help, because I’m a big, dumb human. You better prove to me you’ll keep it down.”

Minkus couldn’t keep his eyes on them long, but he also couldn’t help but keep looking back. He stepped back and forth awkwardly, one step toward the chair and the next away from it, staring at the wall and fiddling with his ear. Nothing he could think of was the right thing to do; everything seemed wrong, but he couldn’t say he knew what right was. Eddie was potentially in trouble, and Penny believed Wepp was responsible for it. There was no evidence to that end, but there was also no evidence that he wasn’t connected to Eddie’s disappearance. Loose floorboards creaked beneath him each time he moved in one direction or the other, debating if any action in any direction would really be right as he’d come to know it.

“The role of the guardian,” he recited under his breath, “is to surrender to the greater magics.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. Compassion, love, kindness, justice—they would find him if he waited, even here, even in this situation. Wouldn’t they?

Neither Penny nor Wepp seemed to notice him pacing behind the human.

“You ready to talk now?” Penny asked, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow at Wepp. “Or should Biggie and I take a nap? Because we can always come back.” Wepp compliantly nodded, and Penny reached down to pull the sack from his overstuffed mouth.

“You — you kidnapped me,” the asura said quietly, stretching his mouth as he spoke. His wide eyes seemed genuinely astonished. “Where am I?”

Minkus recognized an opportunity to help and stepped forward without a pause for thought. “We’re in the—”

“Biggie!” Penny interrupted, snapping around with a fierce glare.

“Oh.” Minkus shrunk back. “Is that something we shouldn’t tell?”

‘“Yeah,” Penny groaned, putting a hand to her forehead. “Where we’ve taken our accidental guest and strung him up to a chair against his will is absolutely something we shouldn’t tell him. You’re the one who just insisted we kidnapped him, aren’t you? Seems to me that’s how kidnappings work.”

Minkus tugged at his ear. “Oh, right,” he murmured. “I suppose that’s wise. I’ve just— I’ve never kidnapped anyone before. I don’t really like it.”

Penny was looking at him as he spoke, and she remained that way for a moment after, unable to look away. It seemed to Minkus his friend was stuck somewhere between pity and exhaustion.

Wepp interrupted both their trains of thought. “Did you drug me?” he asked.

Penny turned back to the asura tied to the chair and reassumed an air of annoyance. “What? No. Of course we didn’t drug you.”

“If you did, I really need to know. There are certain elixir compounds I’ve found I have rather bad reactions to, and I’d rather not be asphyxiated by a swollen airway if you please.”

Penny blinked hard, trying to make sense of the person before her. “No,” she said again, “we didn’t drug you. Why the hell would we need to? I was about to slap you, and you just passed out. We didn’t mean for any of this to even happen.”

“Oh, yes.” Wepp nodded knowingly. “That has been known to happen. I have a fairly weak constitution.”

Minkus and Penny exchanged a curious look.

“Fine. Whatever,” Penny replied, stepping even closer to Wepp and highlighting the substantial size difference between them. “Right now, I don’t give a drake’s ass about your constitution. I need you to tell me everything I want to know about Eddie, starting with what you did with him.”

Wepp squinted at her uncertainly. His shoulders relaxed into the chair. “This isn’t about your shop? I was fully prepared to stand my metaphoric ground in a debate about the proper ownership of your commercial establishment, but I am a great deal less prepared for this subject, primarily because there isn’t anything to this subject.”

Rubbing her face with both hands, Penny exhaled sharply. “Biggie, are you the only asura in Tyria who doesn’t babble like this?”

Minkus shrugged, unsure how to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

She spun back to Wepp. “Just answer the damn question already. Where have you taken my apprentice?”

“I told you,” he said. “I haven’t the vaguest notion where your apprentice is. I spotted a human youth matching your description at your establishment—slender and blond, yes? I never caught sight or sound of him again after that.” If not for the twine lacing him to the wooden chair, Wepp might have shrugged. As it was, his neck just sort of sucked down awkwardly into his shoulders.

“Right,” Penny said mockingly. She paced beside him, breathing deeply as she counted off her thoughts on her fingers. “You people push Maurice into selling to you, you con me into helping you, you backstab me in our deal, and now you expect me to believe you aren’t also the reason Eddie is missing? Dolyak shit.”

Wepp’s brow furrowed beneath his horseshoe-bald head. His scowl was familiar to Minkus. He wasn’t negotiating with a captor at the moment; he was figuring how to translate his thoughts for an inept student.

“What reason,” he began slowly, “would we have to take your associate hostage?”

“To get me to sign your gods-damned contract,” Penny grunted, bending in closer. “Don’t think I don’t know how people like you operate. I’ve spent my life dealing with people like you.”

“In this city, I doubt you’ve worked with anyone on a level with my employers, and I don’t think you grasp how they operate." Wepp sighed. He wasn’t angry, as far as Minkus could tell. He seemed almost apologetic, despite his factual tone. “We already attained our objective from you. Skixx possesses it right now. There is really nothing further we need from you.”

Once again they’d mentioned Skixx, Minkus recognized. They’d said his name earlier that day, and still Minkus had no idea what he had to do with any of what was happening; he couldn’t see how these people and events were connected. Not understanding didn’t surprise him, of course, but this time it had begun to frustrate him. He concentrated, trying to string the information together.

The conversation between the woman and her captive went on. “But you need my signature on that contract,” Penny said to Wepp. “Your plan’s not done, so you obviously have Eddie as leverage. I can smell it.”

Wepp cleared his throat, seeming to stall a second, no longer moving against his bonds at all. At the moment, he seemed more uneasy with the conversation than he was with his circumstances.

“Forgive me Miss Arkayd,” Wepp said pensively, “but no, you smell nothing on me. If you refuse our terms, it makes very little difference to anyone. I have half a dozen other avenues I might pursue to justify the cost of that property. You served your function, and our remaining arrangement with you is more for courtesy than anything else. You were kind enough to deal with us after all, so I at least wanted to offer you what I could, even though Skixx simply wanted to double-cross you.” He paused, shaking his before continuing. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that. Still, at this juncture, it hardly matters to our machinations what you choose to do. And however much you may care for him, your apprentice is even less relevant to us than you are.” He seemed to get quickly carried away in a subsequent thought, verbally expressing what passed through his mind as it came to him. “Besides, if a hostage were useful to our objective, he would only be so after I made you aware of him. That is how hostages work, if I’m not—”

“Courtesy?” Penny burst, interrupting Wepp’s lengthening tangent. “You think this is a courtesy?!” she almost yelled, just barely catching herself. Wepp craned his neck as far away from her as the chair would allow.

“Penny?” Minkus interjected, no longer able to keep his questions to himself. He felt like he had so many now, though only one was clear enough to him to find its way to his lips. “You made a deal with Wepp and his— employers?”

Penny turned. The fire in her eye abated, and the words that had been flowing off the tip of her tongue seemed to melt away.

“What was it?” Minkus asked. “What was the deal?”

She just looked at him, blinking stupidly.

Minkus squinted, giving her time to think. Was this the first time he’d caught her at a loss for words?

“I know you didn’t take the shards,” Minkus said after another moment. It seemed Penny couldn’t find her words, and he really was confident on that point. “I don’t know how I know you didn’t take them, but I do. Wepp knows Skixx, though—or at least it sounds like it. That’s weird, isn’t it? Both of you have mentioned him. That’s also weird. And it’s weird that the contract on your shop changed right now with everything else going on.” He put a hand to his head. Sometimes the swimming thoughts got to feeling heavy and muddled. “It’s just— we’ll, it’s  all weird, especially now that you’re saying you two made a deal. What’s happening?”

“This isn’t really the time,” Penny said, finally getting some semblance of a response together, but her words were unusually weak, lacking both conviction and sass.

Minkus pressed in further, surprising even himself. “What was the deal, Penny? And please don’t lie.” With a nod at Wepp, Minkus gently added, “Also, I think he’s telling you the truth about Eddie. He doesn’t know where Eddie is.”

Exhaling, Minkus watched his friend for any sign of a response. Even Wepp seemed to wait.

Lips pursed, Penny held her breath for several seconds before releasing a deep sigh that cut the silence. “Gods, I know he is,” she groaned, throwing a furious glance at Wepp. She pushed hair from her forehead with the heel of her hand as she met Minkus’ eye once more. She couldn’t hold his gaze, though. Her eyes darted around the room, and her shoulders rolled forward.

“I— Biggie, I—” Her words just sort of trailed off, as though she was still working to find exactly what they would be. Minkus waited, blinking at the foreignness of this experience. Words were not something he’d known Penny to have a hard time finding. If anything, she tended to have a hard time stopping them.

He successfully met her eyes. “Biggie, I made a deal with Skixx,” she blurted all at once. “I made it look like I stole Carrot-Stick’s rocks, and Skixx gave me my shop for it. OK? There. That’s it.” Her voice then turned cold. “Except he didn’t—his employers didn’t—and now we’re here, with this little shit.” She shot a dark look at Wepp.

“That was uncalled for,” Wepp complained. Still tied to the chair, he looked more genuinely offended by her remark than his current condition. “Also the implication that you’re a victim is heavily inaccurate.”

Minkus scratched his ear. In every way, he was so far outside his comfort with this whole situation. He understood Penny’s admission was something he should be bothered by, but he couldn’t find why. “You didn’t take the jade from Ventyr,” he began, slowly reviewing the information he had, “but you made it look like you did, on purpose. But why? And where did it really go—because, Penny, someone really did take it. And what does Skixx have to do with any of this?”

Wepp leaned as far as he could in his chair, to stare past Penny at Minkus. He pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow as he eyed his fellow asura up and down. It made Minkus uncomfortable.

“Skixx was actually right in his assessment of your intellectual capacities, wasn’t he?” Wepp said simply. “How unusual.”

Penny leaned into Wepp’s line of sight, putting herself between him and Minkus and meeting his gaze coldly.

“Perhaps you should illuminate your friend, Miss Arkayd,” Wepp calmly suggested. "There’s little to lose now, and he seems earnestly curious.”

Penny quivered with anger. “I’m sure you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she growled. “I say anything, and I void the whole shitty deal. I know the rules.”

Wepp nodded. “Miss Arkayd, I’m surprised how well you’re upholding your agreed-upon ruse, but there's no longer a need. Neither you nor Minkus pose a threat to our machinations now.” He turned his attention to Minkus, softening his tone in a way that Minkus didn’t expect. “It was Skixx who purloined the jade, precisely because Penny drew attention away from him.”

“Skixx?” Minkus asked, his brow furrowing in thought.

The other asura they’d traveled with came to mind: images of their meeting, travel, and generally unpleasant conversations. He’d never felt entirely comfortable around Skixx. In truth, Minkus had often fended off the sense of something oily about him. “But that doesn’t—” He paused to let the words come together in his mind. “I searched Skixx. For the jade, I mean, I searched him, and he didn’t have anything.” Even as he said it, Minkus could suddenly feel the reality of that situation. He couldn’t explain how or why, but it had been wrong; he’d been lied to.

“Skixx is excellent at what he does,” Wepp said. “However he accomplished it, I assure you he has the shards, and our ends will be achieved.”

Increasingly confused, Minkus looked back and forth between Wepp and Penny. Wepp met his eyes. Steely though her eyes were, Penny did not.

“But why would he want jade? And why would Penny—” Minkus paused, turning his attention from the asura to the human. “Penny, why would you help him steal it? I— don’t understand.”

Wepp’s expression turned measuring again. He continued to assess Minkus, though he spoke to Penny. “He’s in earnest, isn’t he? So very peculiar.

“Minkus,” Wepp went on, “the answer is straightforward. Skixx offered Miss Arkayd what she wanted: ownership of the building on the Melandru High Road.”

Minkus’ attention flashed rapidly between the two. “Penny?” he asked.

It took the woman a moment, but she finally returned his gaze. “Fine,” she said, scratching the back of her head awkwardly. “Yeah. Skixx promised me the shop, said his partner here had bought it and they'd give it to me.” She threw a thumb at Wepp, and her voice turned more hostile. “But what this guy failed to mention is that they also said I'd lose everything if I didn't do what they wanted.”

“Technically,” Wepp said, “that was Skixx’s scheme. All of it was really, but especially that part. He wanted the ‘stick to go with the carrot,’ as he put it. I really thought—”

The human shot him a look that stopped his tongue.

Minkus’ face fell, but his eyes never left his friend. “Penny. You broke your word to Ventyr.”

“No. No, I didn't, Biggie,” she rebutted with a snappy wave of her finger. “My contract was about getting him and his jade to the bookworm club in the mountains, and we did that. We did it long before Skixx made this threat—”

“Not a threat,” Wepp interjected. “I like to think of it as an incentive.”

“You're an ass,” Penny said to him flatly. She quickly turned her attention back to Minkus. “Point is, I don't owe Vent anything.”

Minkus turned away and found himself staring at the bedpost. He thought it had been hard when he knew his friend had lied to him about the theft, but somehow it was worse now that she’d told him the truth, and this was certainly the truth.

“Hey, Biggie. I’m sorry,” she said, touching his shoulder. “I’m sorry you're bothered by all this, OK? But I didn’t have a choice.”

He glanced up at her, squinting hard, as if hoping to see something that wasn’t there.

“Besides,” she said, growing bolder, “who did I really hurt? Nobody. Vent just went right back to Vigil work, right? Your sister and the scholar, they're all off the hook. I'm the only one still out anything.”

“Ventyr and Yissa didn't stop,” Minkus corrected quietly. He didn’t know why he felt the need to say it, but he did. “They still went back to Brisban—the moors, they said—to look for more of those constructs, the mursaat ones that the jade was from.”

Mursaat. The word rung in Minkus’ ears as he said it. Even now, amid all this, something about it nagged at him: those people and their constructs. It sounded so familiar, aside from the hundred times Yissa had said it in the few days they'd traveled with her.

“Your friend—the sylvari, I mean—he went back there?” Wepp asked, drawing Minkus out of his thoughts. “Where the jade creature attacked them?”

“Yes,” Minkus answered. “A couple of days ago.”

“Biggie, he doesn't need to know any of this,” Penny said, eyeing Wepp suspiciously.

Minkus brushed her concern aside, passing around her to stand nearer to Wepp. It was hard for him to look at her. “Why do you ask?” he asked the other asura cautiously.

“I— well—” Now it was Wepp who fumbled for words. A bead of sweat collected on his high forehead and rolled down his face. More wet pinpricks followed in the second it took him to collect his thoughts. He hadn’t looked this nervous since the moment he’d woken to find himself kidnapped. Penny seemed to notice it as well, paying closer attention to him now.

“I’m just sorry is all,” Wepp was finally able to muster. “Brisban— it can be a very dangerous place.”

Penny planted herself square with the little figure tied to his chair. “You're sorry? What are you talking about? What do you know?”

“I don’t— nothing— well, nothing I can say for certain.”

Minkus stood right at Penny's hip. Something here was wrong, more wrong than everything else going on, and that was very wrong indeed.

Penny growled, leaning in toward Wepp. “What are you not saying, you little shit?”

The closer Penny got, pressing her face right into his, the more sweat beaded and rolled down the asura's face. His breath grew quicker, and though his body was lashed tightly to the chair, his head began to bob and swivel gently. “I— I just — I—”

“Penny,” Minkus warned at her side, “he's about to—”

“I know, Biggie,” she said, still staring intensely at Wepp from mere inches away. “But he can pass out as many times as he wants. He’s not going anywhere.” She turned her address to Wepp. “You better get talking, because it sounds like you know something. And I know something too: how to jerk with you.”

Snatching up a pistol from her hip and flipping it butt-forward in her hand, Penny cocked her arm back as though winding to strike him. With a gasp, Wepp fainted, his head falling forward onto his chest.

Penny stood over the sleeping figure for a minute, looking only briefly at Minkus, who stood watching as well. She holstered her weapon, bent to grab her wrench and ratchet from where they now rested on the floor, and vigorously clanged them together in Wepp’s face. His eyes snapped open wildly, and he blinked hard several times, taking in the room again.

“Wake up, little Wepp,” Penny said in a mocking singsong. “You haven’t shared what you know yet.”

“Nor will I,” he groaned, trying to muster as much confidence as he could. “Try as you might—”

“Wrong answer,” Penny interjected. She raised a tool and swung downward several inches away from his face. He was out before her hand had reached her side.