by M. J. Kuhn
Ivan watched the streaks of reddish brown swirl around the bowl like liquid rust, working his fingers through the rest of his long hair, pulling the color free. Already the blond began to show through. The dye was his own special mixture. Perfect for quick disguise changes… absolute hell when it rained.
“Good to see you’ve made it back in one piece,” Clem said, striding into the room. “I trust you’ve caused no damage to my dear smuggler?”
Ivan shook the last bits of tawny brown from his hair and turned toward the window. “Nash is fine. Or she was, last I saw.” He opened the glass pane, dumping the ruddy water into the alley beyond.
He wondered if what Nash had said was true: that the rumors about Callum Clem and his beloved smuggler were truly no more than just that. Where Harlow Finn and Wyatt Asher frequented the Lottery’s brothels, Clem had always been a bit more… particular. Nash was the only woman he had allowed into his bed in all the years Ivan had been in this city. And if they were not involved… perhaps the Snake of the Southern Dock simply had no interest in such things.
Clem nodded, making his way across the room toward the desk in the far corner. It was covered in an assortment of papers the Needle Guard would find most interesting. A carefully organized collection of ledgers, agreements, and contracts. A sum of Clem’s business dealings, more illegal than not. He placed a crisp slip of parchment on the leftmost pile, straightening it until its edges were perfectly flush.
Ivan threw his sopping hair behind his shoulders. He settled into a decaying armchair in the corner, pulling his latest project toward him. The disguise was a new challenge. A structured piece, swaths of purple and gray fabric stitched together, a panel of fine Carrowwick lace just over the heart. When he was done, it would be indistinguishable from a true Needle Guard uniform. Getting caught wearing it would be as good as suicide, but Clem did not seem to care for things like caution any longer. Only time would tell if that would be the Saints’ salvation or their destruction.
No matter how calm the Snake appeared on the outside, Ivan could see through the illusion. The man was becoming unhinged. It was only a matter of time before his desperation to regain his status caused him to do something truly terrible.
Clem turned from the desk, fixing him with his piercing gaze. “The job?”
A dangerous question. A dare. Ivan pulled a stitch of gold threading tight. “The Butcher is tracking down Asher’s contact as we speak.”
“Good. When should I expect her?”
Before he could respond, another energy shift rocked the house. Nolan’s braying laugh echoed through the walls. Strained. Oversold. Like he believed if he did not laugh hard enough, he might be punished. With the Butcher, that was not impossible.
Ivan pointed toward the doorway with his chin, pulling another stitch through. “Now, it would seem.”
If Callum Clem was a change in key, the Butcher of Carrowwick was a dissonant chord. Out of place. Alarming. Powerful. Ivan did not miss the disgust with which Clem looked at the mysterious mercenary from Briel. And lately, the fear. Ryia was on borrowed time. She was useful for now, but the moment her threat exceeded her usefulness she would be gone, just like all the others before her. Clem never had a second-in-command. Anyone who came close was as likely to find themselves at the bottom of the Arden as they were to get a pat on the back.
It seemed he had not forgotten how having a second had worked out for Wyatt Asher all those years ago.
Clem turned back to the desk, filtering lazily through the neatly stacked scrolls as the sound of footsteps echoed down the hall.
“Come to bring me more fingers?”
Ryia paused at the foot of the stairs leading to Clem’s apartment, changing directions to enter the sitting room instead. Her face twisted into the wolfish grin that gave the poor Beckett boy heart palpitations. “Sadly, no. Just information. But I think you’ll find it nearly as satisfying.”
Clem looked up. “Dare I hope your confidence actually matches your worth, for once?”
“I know what the Crowns were up to.”
The Snake turned to the cold fireplace, struck a match, and coaxed a fire to life despite the already sweltering temperature of the room. “Allow me to guess. The assassination of one of Shadowwood’s rivals?”
Ryia shook her head, lowering herself into the lumpy chair across from Ivan. She seemed… frantic. Ivan could not put his finger on why. Her posture was as relaxed as ever, but she was vibrating with an unexplained energy. “Theft.”
Clem was silent for a long moment, staring into the fledgling flames. “Theft? Do you mean to tell me there are no thieves in Duskhaven?”
Ivan considered the question. It was a good point. Why would the king of Edale send his envoys all the way to Dresdell to hire a thief?
“It’s a matter of… political sensitivity,” Ryia said, propping her feet up on the rotting table in the center of the room.
Clem eyed her filthy boots with distaste. “Isn’t it always?” He returned to his desk, lifting a ledger, seemingly at random, and looking it over with glazed eyes. “Who is this sensitive mark?”
“The seventh Guildmaster of Thamorr.”
“The seventh…” Clem blinked. It was the first time Ivan had ever seen him struck speechless. He cleared his throat, cracking his most dangerous smile. “Then it looks as though Felice has smiled upon me. The Crowns are finished. My dear old friend will be dead before the summer is through.”
“There’s the bad news.”
“How so?”
“Asher didn’t bite.”
Clem blinked again. “So the Kestrel Crowns are up to…”
“Nothing, anymore.” Ryia leaned back. “Which leaves one job wide open for the taking.”
“Tell me, Butcher”—Clem’s fingers tapped the edges of the ledger, a musician keeping time—“why did Wyatt turn down this job?”
“I seem to recall him saying something about it being awfully difficult for dead men to spend their crescents.”
“For once, I must agree with the man.”
“Your call. But I think a dead man might find a way to spend this many crescents.”
Clem was silent for so long that most would have assumed he had not heard, but Ivan saw the slight twitch in his nostrils, the madness sparking in his eyes. He knew it was only a matter of time before he asked the question.
“How many crescents?”
Ryia slid a fingernail between her front teeth. “Four hundred thousand.”
Inconceivable. What in Yavol’s realm could be worth a sum that massive? Ivan’s eyes flicked to his chamber door. Toward the floorboard where he had stowed the scroll. If King Tolliver wanted something badly enough to pay nearly half a million crescents, what might the Keunich of Boreas be willing to trade?
The life of one traitor, perhaps?
“For what?” Clem asked, his face guarded, his eyes bursting with renewed interest.
Ryia pulled a crumpled piece of parchment from her cloak. Tongue pressed between her lips in apparent concentration, she smoothed it out on her leg.
“Some dusty old relic.” She leaned forward in her seat, stretching to hand the paper to Clem without standing. “Asher’s contact is our mutual friend Efrain Althea.”
“A dusty old relic…”
Ivan could not see much from his chair, just a few lines of notes scrawled hastily with far too much ink, but he did not miss the look that crossed Clem’s face. He was too distant to hear it, but he was quite certain the Snake’s heart rate had just tripled, sending the hints of a flush creeping out of the neckline of his impeccably starched shirt.
It was gone an instant later as he lifted a hand to his immaculate beard. “What kind of relic?”
“He didn’t say, but what the hell do we care? Four hundred thousand crescents. You could buy the Bobbin Fort from the damned Baelbrandts with that kind of coin.”
Even more so, Clem could build his own verdammte fort with that kind of coin. Buy every disorderly h
ouse from here to Golden Port. Bribe every last member of the Needle Guard to look the other way when the Saints came to call. All he needed to do was leverage Efrain Althea into hiring them for the job… a simple enough task.
Clem tapped one finger on his desktop. The Snake of the Southern Dock was always calculating. Profits, people… here he was calculating risk.
Secretly, bent over his stitching, Ivan was doing the same.
Stealing from the seventh Guildmaster of Thamorr was suicidal. As was stealing from Callum Clem. He bit the inside of his cheek. Was he bold enough to do both? If he had to cheat death this time, Kasimir would not be there to pull him from the fire… but if he did nothing, his brother would never be there to pull him from the fire again.
“And how would you suggest we go about stealing this prize from the most secure fortress in Thamorr?” Clem drawled. “Without finding ourselves locked in the Guildmaster’s dungeon or sinking to the bottom of the Luminous Sea, I mean?”
Ryia flipped a throwing axe around her fingers with frightening dexterity. “I’m not the mastermind here. I just gather the information—you can do whatever the hell you want with it.”
Clem turned back to his desk, pulling a map toward him. Smuggling and trade routes were traced onto its surface in dizzying loops of colored ink, spiraling through the three seas, and up and down the length of the Arden. He traced a finger along the eastern coast, to the Luminous Sea beyond, to the Guildmaster’s island, nestled just off the eastern coast of Edale.
“Our problems begin with our arrival,” Clem said. “Thamorri ships are not permitted to make port there. And we can hardly pass a mainland ship off as one of their own.”
He was right. The island was a stronghold. The only vessels permitted to dock belonged to the Disciples of the Guildmaster, narrow sloops used to fetch Adept infants from the kingdoms of Thamorr.
Ivan still remembered the fear in the eyes of every new mother in Nordham each time those vivid blue sails appeared on the horizon. Those ships were unmistakable. Unmatched. Trying to imitate one would not get them far.
But what other option did they have? The island was impenetrable. Giant cliffs, jutting hundreds of feet above the crashing waves, according to the stories. The only landing was the harbor, guarded day and night by Disciples—the Sensers and Kinetics the Guildmaster deemed too powerful to sell off to the mainlanders. The ones who stayed back on the island to train the young wards. The ones who would someday be up for the job of Guildmaster themselves, when this one died. They could never sneak past forces such as those. Unless…
Ivan looked up. “What about the auction?”
The Guildmaster’s auction. The sale of the oldest of the Guildmaster’s wards to their new masters. The ships docking at the island would undoubtedly be searched, scoured by Sensers. The nobles in attendance would be walled in by Kinetics. There would be thousands of prying eyes to see them, instead of just a few hundred Disciples and students. In short, stealing something would be nigh impossible… but at the auction, they would at least have a chance at getting their feet on dry land.
Ryia scoffed. “Because it’s not like the nobles on this shit continent all know each other or anything.”
Clem’s eyes were no more than slits. “We wouldn’t need to be nobles. Just merchants wealthy enough to garner an invitation.”
“You expect gutter rats from Carrowwick to blend in in a place like that? We’d stick out worse than Asher’s ring finger. And how will we ever find that tiny relic on an island none of us has ever been to?”
Clem’s lips curled into a lethal smile. “You said it yourself. You just gather the information. It’s my job to make use of it.” He turned back to the desk. After a long silence, he looked up. “You may leave.”
Ryia disappeared down the hallway, no doubt heading for the Miscreants’ Temple.
Clem snaked out of the room without another word, mounting the stairs to his apartment. In the instant before he disappeared into the shadows, Ivan caught his expression. It was one of a fox that had hunted for one mouse and instead caught two. He was already plotting, then. A dangerous thing, to be sure. But so was Ivan.
His blood alternated violently between boiling hot and icy cold as he stitched in silence, sewing the Baelbrandt crest into the right breast of the uniform.
Gott weich nim; Gott gevt nach. The last line of the letter.
Gott takes away; Gott gives again. It was an old northern saying, one Kasimir had adopted for his resistance. Ivan had said the words over and over again, spoken them by way of greeting and parting, lived and breathed them… but in all this time he had not really believed them. For his entire life, he had only witnessed the first half of that saying, had only seen all the things Gott took away. Now he understood why.
Gott gevt nach. Boreans were a hard people. Their deity was the same. Gott would not hand him the things he wanted most—such as his ticket home. His brother’s freedom. Victory for the Fvene and the people of Boreas over Keunich Andrei Tovolkov’s regime of terror.
If Ivan wanted it, he would have to take it.
He tightened his grip on his sewing needle, squeezing so hard he nearly bent it in half. He just had to find the nerve.…
The tattoo hidden on his scalp seemed to burn with the thought. The one that matched the symbol on the wax seal of that horrible scroll.
One more job. One more job, and Kasimir could be free.
9
EVELYN
Of all the disgusting things a body could produce, vomit had always been Evelyn Linley’s least favorite. Not that she was fond of the others, but after years of training and living in close quarters with twenty-odd men at a time, she’d become numb to the rest. For some reason vomit had never lost its… charm. Which was bloody unfortunate, considering her nose was only inches from it.
The acidic smell filled Evelyn’s aching skull, dragging her from bleak dreams. Before she was even fully alert, her stomach turned again. She rolled across the splintery floor, spewing another vile mouthful to her left. It burned her throat, leaving behind the taste of regret and misery. She wiped her lips on the back of her hand, blinking as she sat up, her head spinning like a top.
The shutters were tightly drawn, the lamps extinguished, but she could sense the sun blazing brightly outside, could feel its heat baking the room. In just a few hours’ time, it would be as hot as the fort kitchens in this tiny room. But what did she care? Evelyn ran her hands over her long face, pushing the tangle of unkempt red hair behind her ears. She grabbed a half-empty bottle of stervod from the floor. Hopefully, she would be piss drunk again by then.
She hesitated as the sound of raised voices echoed dimly from the alley below her window. The bottle hovered an inch from her lips. In a pisshole like this, shouting was nearly always followed by shoving, maybe a few punches. If no one stopped the gits, blades would be drawn, and the gutters of Leech Alley would run red.
She looked at her sword, crooked on the floorboards where she had tossed it two days before. Her fingers twitched, unconsciously reaching for the familiar, well-worn hilt.… Then she ground her teeth, tilting the bottle upward instead, letting the Borean liquor numb her from the inside out. Let the gutters run red, then. A few days ago it would have been her problem. Now? Her only problem was finding the bottom of this bottle. Then the next. Then the next.
Funny how simple life became once it fell completely to shit.
And all because of the Prince of Nothing. Efrain bloody Althea. Because the queen’s idiot nephew couldn’t keep himself out of trouble for a two-month visit to the fort. Because of one measly finger.
Evelyn cast the bottle aside, the aggressive burn of stervod mixing with the already delightful smells of vomit and filth. Twelve years of training. Nineteen years of Father’s meticulous planning, bled dry in a blink. She’d gone from the youngest Needle Guard captain in a century to retching in some Lottery hovel in the span of one night.
The king had stripped her of her title. Her
armor. Her bars and honors. Dismissed her from the Guard the moment the Butcher slipped their nets. Not a slap on the wrist. Not a demotion. A full dismissal, after years of perfect service. She scrubbed a hand over her face again. If the Brillish prince’s Senser hadn’t sounded the alarm quickly enough to catch that fiend, how in the hells was she supposed to?
The other guards had been waiting to see her fail for a long time now. Their sneers had been nothing but predictable, but her trip home to the Linley estate? That was where she had started to crumble like day-old toast. Father had turned her away at the door. Only those contributing to the future of the Linley name shall be allowed into the estate, and that no longer includes you, Evelyn, he’d decreed.
He was right, of course. Father had spent hundreds of his hard-earned crescents on her training, so she could rise through the ranks of the Guard. To ensure she would be named Valier, join the king’s personal guard, pull the Linley name into the ranks of nobility.
She thumbed the ring circling her middle finger, bearing the Linley family crest, the image of a crossed crescent and quill. She knew she wasn’t fit to wear it any longer, but she couldn’t abide taking it off. Shite. She punched the wall beside her. Evelyn had singlehandedly taken her family’s ambitions and sent them rushing down the Arden with the daily refuse. She would do anything to take it back. But there was nothing she could do. Nothing but drink and wait to die.
Evelyn felt around for the bottle of stervod, now dripping its contents onto the floor a few steps away. Just as she tilted the bottle upward, the sharp rap of knuckles echoed on her door. She pushed herself to her feet with a groan. The floor swayed beneath her. When Evelyn reached the door, she paused, one hand resting against the rotting wood. In this part of the city, it was as good as suicide to fling a door open unarmed and half-pissed.
She opened the door, and there, in the dingy inn hallway, stood a man a few inches shorter than her, blond hair cropped neatly against his skull, vivid blue eyes crashing like sunlit waves in their sockets. He was dressed entirely too well for the Lottery, that was for sure. Fine leather shoes, well-fitted trousers, and a thin black doublet. He could have passed for a merchant. Maybe even a minor lord. The stranger extended a hand, giving a smile that sucked every last speck of warmth from the room.