What happened next took about a breath and a half.
The first debt man swung a punch; the young man leaned out of its way, took the wrist as it passed, and turned it, and the man went face-first over his own arm into a table. The second let go of Nilo to grab at him and was suddenly holding nothing and sitting in the wreckage of a stool with his nose already bleeding.
The third man didn't swing anything. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Four more came in from the street, big men with the unhurried walk, spreading out between the tables.
It still wasn't close. The young man went through the first two, no wasted motion, his feet never crossing, but while he did, the last of them hooked Nilo off the floor by the hair and made for the door with him.
Adam slid a stool into the man's path with his foot. The man stumbled, cursed, and Adam caught the arm that held Nilo and turned it just so, and the boy came free and the man met the doorframe with his shoulder, hard, and then the street with the rest of himself.
It took three seconds and no more. The young man glanced at Adam. Adam glanced back. Neither of them said anything.
"He works here," the young man said again, to the room in general, pleasantly.
They left, all seven, beaten. The room pretended that nothing had happened. Nilo scrambled up and vanished behind the counter, and reappeared thirty seconds later as if he had merely been restocking bread.
"THAT WAS AMAZING," Zeren announced.
The young man laughed, and let himself be waved over to their end of the counter.
They righted the tables first. It happened without anyone proposing it: the young man took one end of the big table and Adam took the other, Zeren stacked what was left of the stool with great ceremony.
"You've made my week interesting," Bakr said flatly. "Stew's on the house."
Nilo stood at the young man's elbow, and pressed something into his hand: the fake eldritch tooth, dog-sized, on its bit of string.
"Free," Nilo said, and was gone before it could be refused.
And while the introductions were happening, Adam put a moment's trained focus behind his eyes and looked.
Resonance. He's cursed. And that footwork, his raw martial skill is better than mine and Noah's.
"Zaid," the young man said, and clasped Adam's hand.
"Adam. That's Zeren."
"Where did you learn to fight like that?"
"Where I'm from, everyone learns." Zaid tore his bread in half. "My family is... strict about it."
"And you are from?"
"The Southern Continent."
"Oh really, that’s very far away."
"Then how did you end up here?", Zeren asked.
Zaid laughed again. "Well, let’s say I have some problems with my family, so I ran the day we landed. You two are the first people in this city who've talked to me about something other than money."
"Everywhere I go in this city," he said, "one word. The auction."
"So your family is here for it?" Adam asked.
"Technically yes. But they came a week early, for a more urgent matter that I myself don’t know about since I came as a prisonner."
"Must be some family," Adam said.
"The Zyriam." Zaid's voice went suddenly lower. "Highest noble family of the Southern Continent." He picked his bowl back up as if he'd said nothing at all.
Zeren leaned in. "And what are you going to do now? Now that you ran?"
"Everything." Zaid said it immediately, with his mouth half full, and then he swallowed and said it properly. "I'm going to travel. All of it, every road, every city I've only seen on maps. Climb things. Eat things I can't name. Get into trouble that nobody planned for me." He gestured at the bar, the smoke, the caged lamps, all of Nauz, with his bread. "This is shaping up to be the best week of my life. I mean that."
"You're eating fish heads in a hole in the ground," Adam said.
"Yes," Zaid said. "Nobody scheduled it. In my family, the day is divided before you wake."
"Won't they look for you?" Zeren asked.
"They already are."
Bakr set the rag down. He'd been polishing the same clean patch of counter for a while now.
"Then that's a thing I'm owed for the stew," he said. "If men come through that door looking for you, what kind of men do I feed next?"
"Polite ones," Zaid said. "Retainers of the House. You'll know them because they'll be the cleanest thing in Nauz."
"And why did you run away from a noble family, just to come here into this dirty ground, people here would kill for a bed and some food, life too boring when you have everything?"
Zaid was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, the lightness had stepped back, not gone, just standing aside.
"You know what an Eldritch heart is?"
"We know," Adam said.
"My family keeps them the way other houses keep land. It's what the House is. But there's one above the rest. The oldest, the strongest, the one the others are measured against. It belonged to my grandfather's father." He turned his cup slowly on the counter. "He carried it for over a hundred years. And one morning, five months ago, he killed himself."
Zeren blinked. "Why would he do that? He could have lived forever…"
"That is because his life was meaningless, boring, and disgusting." Zaid looked at him. "That's not an answer I'm keeping from you. It's an answer nobody in that house will speak. They found him, and the heart he left behind, and they repainted the shrine, and the only thing that mattered to anyone was that the strongest heart the Zyriam possess was sitting there without a bearer."
"So they needed a successor," Adam said.
"They tested every child of the main line for three years, it seems this heart is different thatn normal ones, it kills the bearer from inside if they incompatible, my family says it looking for someone worthy, what an irony." Zaid's clunched his fists, "And then the House gathered, all of it, and the choosing was read out, and the name they read was mine, they said im the most promising young family member who doesn’t bear a heart yet."
"And you said no."
"I said no in front of everyone hundred people, at the naming, out loud." He tore a piece of bread and didn't eat it. "I have never said anything so clearly in my life."
"Noble houses don't hear no," Bakr said.
"No. They don't." Zaid set the bread down. "They put me in the shrine with it and locked the door. It was going to happen with my consent or without it, and the House preferred without."
He turned the cup again.
"I wanted out of that room more than I have wanted anything, ever, in my life. And something heard me." He glanced up, just once, quick. "A white place. A door with no handle. An old, withered thing with a staff, that talked about deals."
Adam set his cup down very slowly and said nothing.
"It gave me a way out. It took…" Zaid stopped. "Doesn't matter what it took. When I came back to myself, the locked door wasn't a problem anymore. No door has been a problem since."
"You escaped," Zeren breathed.
"For three weeks. You can escape a room. Escaping the richest house on a continent takes longer to learn." He shrugged. "They caught me. And they decided the successor doesn't leave arm's reach again, so when the House sailed for the city of gold, I sailed with it, since the highest authority is now my father, and I had to be kept by his side, like a wild dog. Second try worked better. I'd had the whole crossing to plan it.".
"Why refuse, though?" Zeren asked, because he was Zeren. "You'd be immortal. You'd be the strongest one."
"My family doesn't raise children," Zaid said. "It raises instruments. The heart isn't a gift, it's a curse. You stand it forever. My old man chose death instead, and nobody in my house ever asked why out loud, not once." He picked the bread back up. "I want the opposite of whatever that is. That's the whole story."
The door opened without a sound.
Adam hadn't heard steps. Nobody had heard steps. Three men came in out of the dark, southern brown faces, grey travel coats without one speck of Nauz on them, and stood just inside the doorway with their hands folded, and the bar's noise dipped and then deliberately, carefully, rose again.
Bakr's chin moved half an inch. Zaid was already gone, through the gap at the counter's end, quiet as a thought.
The eldest of the three inclined his head to the room.
"Good evening. We are looking for a young man. This tall. Southern, like ourselves. He came down a mouth one night ago." His voice was courteous, unhurried, and pitched to carry. "The House he belongs to is generous to those who help it, and it is offering a great deal of help."
Every head in the bar turned away. Every conversation continued a note louder. The Nauz thing, and Adam realized he was watching it done as a kindness this time, thirty people building a wall out of turned backs.
The eldest retainer waited out the noise. Then he walked to the counter.
"You keep the only fire in three streets," he said to Bakr, pleasantly. "A stranger down here would smell it in an hour. I ask you plainly: have you fed him?"
"I feed anyone with coppers," Bakr said. "Descriptions cost extra."
"I see." The retainer laid one gloveless, clean hand flat on the counter. "Then before you answer a second time, I will tell you what the House already knows. It knows he came down. It knows he ate. It knows yours is the only place he could have eaten." He glanced, mildly, along the bar, at Nilo frozen mid-step with three bowls, at the room pretending. "The House of Zyriam does not punish honest men. It has a long memory for the other kind. Consider the answer you're about to give me, and consider everyone who works your floor—"
"Enough."
Zaid came out from behind the counter and stood in the open, in the lamplight, where all three of them could see him.
The retainers bowed. All three, at once, to exactly the same depth, and the sight of it was somehow worse than any weapon they could have drawn.
"Young master," the eldest said. "The House will be—"
"Be quiet and carry a message." Zaid's voice had nothing of the bar in it anymore. It was a voice off the top of a very old house. "Word for word. To my father."
The eldest straightened, and waited.
"Tell him: take the heart, and the shrine, and the choosing, and the House, and choke on them. I am not coming back. If the House wants its successor, tell it to send men ready to kill me, because dead is the only way I return." He took one step forward. "And tell him this last. These people fed me. If anything the House owns so much as breathes on this bar, on this street, on this city, I will stop treating its servants as my family's, and start treating them as my enemies. You can be gone, or you’ll have to fight me, I’ll make sure I kill at least two of you before I go down."
He stopped speaking.
For a moment the three retainers didn't move, and the whole bar didn't breathe. Then the eldest bowed again, exactly as deep as before.
"The message will be delivered word for word, young master."
They went out the way they had come, without sound, and the dark took them, and somewhere down the street Nauz swallowed them whole.
The bar exhaled. Somebody laughed too loudly. Nilo reappeared with the three bowls as if he had merely been restocking bread.
"You said polite," Bakr said.
"They were polite," Zaid said.
He came back to the counter and sat, and for a while nobody said anything, and Zeren pushed his own bread over to him without a word, and Zaid ate it, he ate too much bread for a single meal.
Then he counted coppers onto the counter and stood.
"I should go. I need to find somewhere to sleep."
Adam looked at him. A runaway from the strongest house of a continent, hunted by it, cursed like him, with feet like that and a message like that.
The smart thing is to walk away from anything the Zyriam are hunting.
That was the logical taught that crossed Adam’s mind, he had enough problems to deal with, yet he couldn’t help himself.
"We could use a new traveler," Adam said, and put out his hand. "A strong one, at that."
Zaid looked at the hand. Then he smiled the way he had laughed after the fight, with his whole face.
"I'm an excellent traveler," he said, no hesitation even though he just met Adam a few minutes ago, that is how Zaid was.
"THIS IS THE BEST DAY," Zeren announced.
"Bread for the road is extra," Nilo said, appearing from nowhere. "For three topsiders, six coppers."
"Three," Zaid said.
"Five."
"Four, and I teach you the wrist thing so you can beat their ass next time."
Nilo considered the offer.
"Done."