They arrived one by one.
The warehouse on the eastern edge of Velmoor district — the old grain storage, disused since the Count's death had collapsed the import contracts — had been emptied of everything except the smell of the old grain and the rats that had been working through it since.
Aaron's men had put chairs in.
Nine chairs, arranged in a rough semicircle around a low table with a single candle on it, the furniture arrangement of people who understand that meetings work better when everyone can see everyone else's hands.
The first to arrive was Castor Helling.
The man who ran the eastern dockworks — the smuggling corridor, the import-without-papers operation that had been feeding half the city's illegal supply chain for three years. He was fat the way that men who eat well because they can are fat — the comfortable, established fat of someone who has not been physically threatened in long enough that the body has stopped preparing.
