SHERRY'S PENINSULA | EVENING
The note had not arrived on paper, but by word of mouth. One small, lean little wick girl somewhere in the middle of her teens, bright blue hair cropped short and a metal ring in each ear had arrived sweaty and panting to The Attic, looking windburned and tanned as if she'd just stepped off an airship. Mostly because she had. The young thing had made her way to the counter, burgeoning glamour bristling with purpose, practically pouring herself onto it to lean forward and shout for Leander until heard. She'd not taken no for an answer, either, making sure the passive knew it was Silas 'Awke an' the Taxman themselves that had sent for him, hooking a thumb in the general direction of Sherry's Point as if to emphasize her orders. Urgent, she'd said, and bring yer work spitch, she'd added as if the passive would know what that meant, before spilling coins on the counter for a cab and slipping away as quick and breezy as she'd arrived.
Whether or not the young man chose to listen was, of course, completely his choice, but should he take the near-insult of cash and find himself a ride out of the dry seasoned salty stench of the Harbor proper in the heat of Yaris, rumbling along the shitty path that pretended to call itself a road all the way out around the crescent of the bay toward where Corwynn had claimed his abandoned old wreck of a home, it would be easy to see something was, indeed, going on.
Even from a distance, the airship that had landed on the beach was not a small one and once close enough, as if it could be any hotter today at all despite the sea breeze that whipped from the waves, the engines of the vessel that was still being tied down by a couple of bulky wicks were radiating their heat with shimmering declaration. It hadn't been here long, apparently, and the sand was still settling from its landing, making the air once the passive stepped out of the cab gritty and rough.
It was a decent-sized vessel, gas-bag cover and steering fins flapping loudly in the wind, and there, at the foot of the gangplank, were four bodies, face down on the beach, staining the pristine stretch of bay red with fresh blood as if they'd just recently been executed.
For a moment, the corpses were the only bodies to greet Leander, especially since once he stepped outside the cab, the driver was quick to turn tail and grind his way back toward town, quite terrified of the dead strangers.
Alone and apparently the only living thing in sight for a heartbeat or two, Leo wasn't left to his thoughts for long—down the gangplank from somewhere in the bowels of the large airship probably capable of carrying a dozen or so crew or passengers stalked Corwynn. Haggard would have been the first descriptive word that might have come to mind, the blond galdor looking just as windburned and sweaty as the young witch that had dragged the forger here in the first place, sleeves rolled up to reveal his tattoos on both wrists, the faded blue line art of ocean waves a contrast to the pale finery of a well-tailored dress shirt, though any illusion of propriety was quickly shattered by its disheveled state: untucked and splattered with the blood of his enemies. Mostly.
If any stains belonged to Corwynn, it was impossible to tell, and he looked up just as he was tucking his pistol back away at his hip, arching a fair brow at Leander,
"Good. You didn't tell little Min to fuck off. She'd have probably stabbed you if you did, though." He huffed, scarred hand reaching up to drag four fingers through fading blond curls before he came to a stop near the still-oozing bodies between himself and the passive,
"I've got a need that requires quick turnaround, Mister Aguilar." Using the toe of one of his very fine Turga crocodile boots, he rolled over each of the corpses. Their features made it obvious that two of them were galdori, and once he rolled over the older of the two who surely couldn't be far in age from Corwynn himself, he crouched over the bloodied thing and began to dig through the man's very fine silk vest without any particular signs of disgust or shame.
Yanking out a folded envelope mostly untouched by any gore or sand, he waved it in Leander's direction, "I've got barely two days—a day and a half, really—to get these edited, copied, and returned to Vienda. I've already flown for seven houses, so if you could be quick about things, I'll see you're well compensated for the rushed request."
The weary, agitated older galdor seemed to finally take a moment to actually look at the dark-haired passive, and it almost felt as though it required effort for the restless creature poured into his tanned, freckled self to focus at all. His field was just a bastion of a thing, no less frayed and exhausted, and the blond gunman waved the envelope until Leander took it before he slumped a little and turned toward the well-tended path that led up the beach, away from the bodies and the airship, toward his house,
"You did, of course, bring things to work from here, right? I don't have much time to send you home if you didn't."