Six of Crows

by Leigh Bardugo

  Now Kaz gave her a nudge. “Lower your veil.” He pulled down his own mask; the long nose and bulging eyes looked doubly monstrous in the fog.

  She was about to give in and ask why the costumes were necessary when she realized that they weren’t alone. Through the shifting mists, she caught sight of other boats moving through the water, carrying the shapes of other Madmen, other Brides, a Mister Crimson, a Scarab Queen. What business did these people have at Hellgate?

  Kaz had refused to tell her the specifics of his plan, and when she’d insisted, he’d simply said, “Get in the boat.” That was Kaz all over. He knew he didn’t have to tell her anything because the lure of Matthias’ freedom had already overridden every bit of her good sense. She’d been trying to talk Kaz into breaking Matthias out of jail for the better part of a year. Now he could offer Matthias more than freedom, but the price would be far higher than she had expected.

  Only a few lights were visible as they approached the rocky shoal of Terrenjel. The rest was darkness and crashing waves.

  “Couldn’t you just bribe the warden?” she muttered to Kaz.

  “I don’t need him knowing he has something I want.”

  When the boat’s hull scraped sand, two men rushed forward to haul them farther onto land. The other boats she’d seen were making ground in the same cove, being pulled ashore by more grunting and cursing men. Their features were vague through the gauze of her veil, but Nina glimpsed the tattoos on their forearms: a feral cat curled into a crown—the symbol of the Dime Lions.

  “Money,” one of them said as they clambered out of the boat.

  Kaz handed over a stack of kruge and once it was counted, the Dime Lion waved them on.

  They followed a row of torches up an uneven path to the leeward side of the prison. Nina tilted her head back to gaze at the high black towers of the fortress known as Hellgate, a dark fist of stone thrusting up from the sea. She’d seen it from afar before, when she’d paid a fisherman to take her out to the island. But when she’d asked him to bring her closer, he’d refused. “Sharks get mean there,” he’d claimed. “Bellies full of convict blood.” Nina shuddered at the memory.

  A door had been propped open, and another member of the Dime Lions led Nina and the others inside. They entered a dark, surprisingly clean kitchen, its walls lined with huge vats that looked better suited to laundry than cooking. The room smelled strange, like vinegar and sage. Like a mercher’s kitchen, Nina thought. The Kerch believed that work was akin to prayer. Maybe the merchant wives came here to scrub the floors and walls and windows, to honor Ghezen, the god of industry and commerce, with soap and water and the chafing of their hands. Nina resisted the urge to gag. They could scrub all they liked. Beneath that wholesome scent was the indelible stench of mildew, urine, and unwashed bodies. It might take an actual miracle to dislodge it.

  They passed through a dank entry hall, and she thought they would head up into the cells, but instead they passed through another door and onto a high stone walkway that connected the main prison to what looked like another tower.

  “Where are we going?” Nina whispered. Kaz didn’t answer. The wind picked up, lifting her veil and lashing her cheeks with salt spray.

  As they entered the second tower, a figure emerged from the shadows, and Nina barely stifled a scream.

  “Inej,” she said on a wavering breath. The Suli girl wore the horns and high-necked tunic of the Gray Imp, but Nina recognized her anyway. No one else moved liked that, as if the world were smoke and she was just passing through it.

  “How did you even get here?” Nina whispered to her.

  “I came earlier on a supply barge.”

  Nina ground her teeth. “Do people just come and go from Hellgate for fun?”

  “Once a week they do,” said Inej, her little imp horns bobbing along with her head.

  “What do you mean once a—”

  “Keep quiet,” Kaz growled.

  “Don’t shush me, Brekker,” Nina whispered furiously. “If it’s this easy to get into Hellgate—”

  “The problem isn’t getting in, it’s getting out. Now shut up and stay alert.”

  Nina swallowed her anger. She had to trust Kaz to run the game. He’d made sure she didn’t have any other choice.

  They entered a tight passageway. This tower felt different from the first, older, its rough-hewn stone walls blackened by smoking torches. Their Dime Lion guide pushed open a heavy iron door and gestured for them to follow him down a steep staircase. Here the smell of bodies and refuse was worse, trapped by the sweating moisture of salt water.

  They spiraled lower, into the bowels of the rock. Nina clung to the wall. There was no banister, and though she could not see the bottom, she doubted the fall would be kind. They didn’t go far, but by the time they reached their destination, she was trembling, her muscles wound taut, less from exertion than the knowledge that Matthias was somewhere in this terrible place. He is here. He is under this roof.

  “Where are we?” she whispered as they ducked through cramped stone tunnels, passing dark caves fitted with iron bars.

  “This is the old prison,” Kaz said. “When they built the new tower, they left this one standing.”

  She heard moaning from inside one of the cells.

  “They still keep prisoners here?”

  “Only the worst of them.”

  She peered between the bars of an empty cell. There were shackles on the wall, dark with rust and what might have been blood.

  Through the walls, a sound reached Nina’s ears, a steady pounding. She thought it was the ocean at first, but then she realized it was chanting. They emerged into a curving tunnel. To her right were more old cells, but light poured into the tunnel from staggered archways on the left, and through them she glimpsed a roaring, rowdy crowd.

  The Dime Lion led them around the tunnel to the third archway, where a prison guard dressed in a blue-and-gray uniform was posted, rifle slung across his back. “Four more for you,” the Dime Lion shouted over the crowd. Then he turned to Kaz. “If you need to leave, the guard will call for an escort. No one goes wandering off without a guide, understood?”

  “Of course, of course, wouldn’t dream of it,” Kaz said from behind his ridiculous mask.

  “Enjoy,” the Dime Lion said with an ugly grin. The prison guard waved them through.

  Nina stepped under the arch and felt as if she’d fallen into some strange nightmare. They were on a jutting stone ledge, looking down into a shallow, crudely made amphitheater. The tower had been gutted to create an arena. Only the black walls of the old prison remained, the roof long since fallen in or destroyed so that the night sky was visible high above, dense with clouds and free of stars. It was like standing in the hollowed-out trunk of a massive tree, something long dead and howling with echoes.

  Around her, masked and veiled men and women crowded onto the terraced ledges, stamping their feet as the action proceeded below. The walls surrounding the fighting pit blazed with torchlight and the sand of the arena floor was red and damp where it had soaked up blood.

  In front of the dark mouth of a cave, a scrawny, bearded man in shackles stood next to a big wooden wheel marked with what looked like drawings of little animals. He’d clearly once been strong, but now his skin hung in loose folds and his muscles sagged. A younger man stood beside him in a mangy cape made from a lion’s skin, his face framed by the big cat’s mouth. A garish gold crown had been secured between the lion’s ears, and its eyes had been replaced with bright silver dimes.

  “Spin the wheel!” the young man commanded.

  The prisoner lifted his shackled hands and gave the wheel a hard spin. A red needle ticked along the edges as it spun, making a cheerful clattering noise, then slowly the wheel came to a stop. Nina couldn’t quite make out the symbol, but the crowd bellowed, and the man’s shoulders drooped as a guard came forward to unlock his chains.

  The prisoner cast them aside into the sand, and a second later Nina heard it—
a roar that carried even over the excited baying of the crowd. The man in the lion cape and the prison guard stepped hurriedly onto a rope ladder and were lifted out of the pit to the safety of a ledge as the prisoner seized a flimsy-looking knife from a bloody bunch of weapons lying in the sand. He backed as far away from the mouth of the tunnel as he could get.

  Nina had never seen a creature like the one that crawled into view from the tunnel. It was some kind of reptile, its thick body covered in gray-green scales, its head wide and flat, its yellow eyes slitted. It moved slowly, sinuously, its low-slung body sliding lazily over the ground. There was a white crust around the broad crescent of its mouth, and when it opened its jaws to roar again, something wet, white, and foaming dripped from its pointed teeth.

  “What is that thing?” Nina asked.

  “Rinca moten,” said Inej. “A desert lizard. The poison from its mouth is lethal.”

  “It seems pretty slow on its feet.”

  “Yes. It seems that way.”

  The prisoner lunged forward with his knife. The big lizard moved so quickly Nina could barely track it. One moment the prisoner was bearing down on it; the next, the lizard was on the other side of the arena. Bare seconds later, it had slammed into the prisoner, pinning him to the ground as he screamed, its poison dripping over his face, leaving smoky trails wherever it touched his skin.

  The creature dropped its weight on the prisoner with a sickening crunch and set about slowly mauling his shoulder as he lay there shrieking.

  The crowd was booing.

  Nina averted her eyes, unable to watch. “What is this?”

  “Welcome to the Hellshow,” said Kaz. “Pekka Rollins got the idea a few years back and pitched it to the right Council member.”

  “The Merchant Council knows?”

  “Of course they know, Nina. There’s money to be made here.”

  Nina dug her fingernails into her palms. That condescending tone made Kaz so slappable.

  She knew Pekka Rollins’ name well. He was the reigning king of the Barrel, the owner of not one but two gambling palaces—one luxurious, the other catering to sailors with less to line their pockets—and several of the higher-end brothels. When Nina had arrived in Ketterdam a year ago, she’d been friendless, penniless, and far from home. She’d spent the first week in the Kerch law courts, dealing with the charges against Matthias. But once her testimony was complete, she’d been unceremoniously dumped at First Harbor with just enough money to book passage back to Ravka. Desperate as she’d been to return to her country, she’d known she couldn’t leave Matthias to languish in Hellgate.

  She had no idea what to do, but it seemed rumors of a new Grisha Corporalnik in Ketterdam had already circulated through the city. Pekka Rollins’ men had been waiting for her at the harbor with the promise of safety and a place to stay. They’d taken her to the Emerald Palace, where Pekka himself had leaned heavily on Nina to join the Dime Lions and had offered to set her up in business at the Sweet Shop. She’d been close to saying yes, desperate for cash and terrified of the slavers who patrolled the streets. But that night, Inej had crawled through her window on the top floor of the Emerald Palace with a proposal from Kaz Brekker in hand.

  Nina never could figure out how Inej had managed to scale six rain-slick stories of stone in the middle of the night, but the Dregs’ terms were far more favorable than those offered by Pekka and the Dime Lions. It was a contract that she might actually pay off in a year or two if she was smart with her money. And Kaz had sent the right person to argue his case—a Suli girl just a few months younger than Nina who had grown up in Ravka and who had spent a very ugly year indentured at the Menagerie.

  “What can you tell me about Per Haskell?” Nina had asked that night.

  “Not much,” Inej had admitted. “He’s no better or worse than most of the bosses in the Barrel.”

  “And Kaz Brekker?”

  “A liar, a thief, and utterly without conscience. But he’ll keep to any deal you strike with him.”

  Nina had heard the conviction in her voice. “He freed you from the Menagerie?”

  “There is no freedom in the Barrel, only good terms. Tante Heleen’s girls never earn out of their contracts. She makes sure they don’t. She—” Inej had broken off then, and Nina had sensed the vibrant anger coursing through her. “Kaz convinced Per Haskell to pay off my indenture. I would have died at the Menagerie.”

  “You may still die in the Dregs.”

  Inej’s dark eyes had glinted. “I may. But I’ll die on my feet with a knife in my hand.”

  The next morning, Inej had helped Nina sneak out of the Emerald Palace. They’d met with Kaz Brekker, and despite his cold ways and those strange leather gloves, she’d agreed to join the Dregs and work out of the White Rose. Less than two days later, a girl died at the Sweet Shop, strangled in her bed by a customer dressed as Mister Crimson who was never found.

  Nina had trusted Inej, and she hadn’t been sorry for it, though right now she just felt furious with everyone. She watched a group of Dime Lions prod the desert lizard with long spears. Apparently, the monster was sated after its meal; it allowed itself to be herded back to the tunnel, its thick body moving side to side in a lazy, sinuous roll.

  The crowd continued to boo as guards entered the arena to remove the prisoner’s remains, tendrils of smoke still curling from his ruined flesh.

  “Why are they complaining?” Nina asked angrily. “Isn’t this what they came here for?”

  “They wanted a fight,” said Kaz. “They were expecting him to last longer.”

  “This is disgusting.”

  Kaz shrugged. “Only disgusting thing about it is that I didn’t think of it first.”

  “These men aren’t slaves, Kaz. They’re prisoners.”

  “They’re murderers and rapists.”

  “And thieves and con artists. Your people.”

  “Nina, sweet, they aren’t forced to fight. They line up for the chance. They earn better food, private cells, liquor, jurda, conjugals with girls from West Stave.”

  Muzzen cracked his knuckles. “Sounds better than we got it at the Slat.”

  Nina looked at the people screaming and shouting, the barkers walking the aisles taking bets. The prisoners of Hellgate might line up to fight, but Pekka Rollins made the real money.

  “Helvar doesn’t … Helvar doesn’t fight in the arena, does he?”

  “We aren’t here for the ambience,” Kaz said.

  Beyond slappable. “Are you aware that I could waggle my fingers and make you wet your trousers?”

  “Easy, Heartrender. I like these trousers. And if you start messing with my vital organs, Matthias Helvar will never see sunshine again.”

  Nina blew out a breath and settled for glowering at no one.

  “Nina—” Inej murmured.

  “Don’t you start in on me.”

  “It will all work out. Let Kaz do what he does best.”

  “He’s horrible.”

  “But effective. Being angry at Kaz for being ruthless is like being angry at a stove for being hot. You know what he is.”

  Nina crossed her arms. “I’m mad at you, too.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just am.”

  Inej gave Nina’s hand a brief squeeze, and after a moment, Nina squeezed back. She sat through the next fight in a daze, and the next. She told herself she was ready for this—to see him again, to see him here in this brutal place. After all, she was a Grisha and a soldier of the Second Army. She’d seen worse.

  But when Matthias emerged from the mouth of the cave below, she knew she’d been wrong. Nina recognized him instantly. Every night of the past year, she had fallen asleep thinking of Matthias’ face. There was no mistaking the gilded brows, the sharp cut of his cheekbones. But Kaz hadn’t lied: Matthias was much changed. The boy who looked back at the crowd with fury in his eyes was a stranger.

  Nina remembered the first time she’d seen Matthias in a moo
nlit Kaelish wood. His beauty had seemed unfair to her. In another life, she might have believed he was coming to rescue her, a shining savior with golden hair and eyes the pale blue of northern glaciers. But she’d known the truth of him by the language he spoke, and by the disgust on his face every time his eyes lighted on her. Matthias Helvar was a drüskelle, one of the Fjerdan witchhunters tasked with hunting down Grisha to face trial and execution, though to her he’d always resembled a warrior Saint, illuminated in gold.

  Now he looked like what he truly was: a killer. His bare torso seemed hewn from steel, and though she knew it wasn’t possible, he seemed bigger, as if the very structure of his body had changed. His skin had been gilded honey; now it was fish-belly white beneath the grime. And his hair—he’d had such beautiful hair, thick and golden, worn long in the way of Fjerdan soldiers. Now, like the other prisoners, his head had been shaved, probably to prevent lice. Whichever guard had done it had made a mess of the job. Even from this distance, she could see the cuts and nicks on his scalp, and little strips of blond stubble in the places the razor had missed. And yet, he was beautiful still.

  He glared at the crowd and gave the wheel a hard spin that nearly knocked it off its base.

  Tick tick tick tick. Snakes. Tiger. Bear. Boar. The wheel ticked merrily along, then slowed and finally stopped.

  “No,” Nina said when she saw where the needle was pointing.

  “It could be worse,” said Muzzen. “Could have landed on the desert lizard again.”

  She grabbed Kaz’s arm through his cloak and felt his muscles tense. “You have to stop this.”

  “Let go of me, Nina.” His gravel-rough voice was low, but she sensed real menace in it.

  She dropped her hand, “Please, you don’t understand. He—”

  “If he survives, I’ll take Matthias Helvar out of this place tonight, but this part is up to him.”

  Nina gave a frustrated shake of her head. “You don’t get it.”

  The guard unbolted Matthias’ shackles, and as soon as the chains dropped into the sand, he leapt onto the ladder with the announcer to be lifted to safety. The crowd screamed and stamped. But Matthias stood silent, unmoving, even when the gate opened, even when the wolves charged out of the tunnel—three of them snarling and snapping, tumbling over one another to get to him.