“Where are we going?” Eld asked. I dodged a particularly buxom woman with searching hands who reeked of rum and stepped over an old man who’d passed out with his mug still in his hand. I’d seen worse in Servenza, but not before the sun went down. Unless it was a feast day. Eld tripped over the old man and cursed. “Where are we going?”
“Harbormaster.”
“Harbormaster?” Eld’s voice was tight, whether from the mage nearly killing us or upsetting the old man, I wasn’t sure. “Why?”
“You’re full of questions, Eld,” I told him. I left unsaid that we should have gone to her straight off to get a lay of the land from someone on the ground and my mind had been too muddled at the docks and too busy taking in all that Port au’ Sheen had to offer to think of that. “We need to contact the Company bitch.”
“She has a name,” Eld said.
I stopped so suddenly that he bumped into me, but I’d been expecting that and was braced accordingly. The woman behind Eld wasn’t so fortunate and I heard her arse hit what must have been the last cobblestone on that section of street. I turned around and arched an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? What is it?” Eld frowned as the woman found her voice and began to curse us both roundly. “Her name?”
“I—I.”
“Don’t remember either. She’s blackmailing us, Eld. Using us, forcing us into a situation that she likely helped engineer. So I’ll call her whatever I damn well please.”
“You’re still heated she got one over on you,” he said, stepping aside and bending down to help the woman to her feet. Her red face, surrounded by brown curls, froze in surprise. Whether at Eld’s gesture or his looks, I wasn’t sure, but either way she stopped yelling and allowed him to help her up. “But if she hadn’t, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to claim a share in the Company. And that’s what you claim you want. Or is this merely a feint?”
“I wouldn’t risk my life over a feint,” I said, shooting daggers at the woman, who had wrapped her hands around Eld’s arm.
“But you’d risk mine?”
“I’d never say that,” I said. Eld opened his mouth and I threw my hands up. “All right, all right, you win! I give over. We need to contact that polite but manipulative old crone so we can give her the good news.”
Eld managed to disentangle himself from the woman even as she tried to snare him with her calico scarf. “She’s not old. She’s not much older than me. Why, she can’t be more than twenty-five years!” I laughed and he cursed. “And what good news?” he growled when he reached my side again.
“That we know the Widowmaker is sinking pirates in the Southern Expanse. Given the other information we have, it’s likely she’s sinking merchant ships carrying sugar as well. So we’ll find her mage and pass that along, and maybe if we’re lucky, she’ll let us go back. Case closed in a day,” I said.
“I doubt we’ll be that lucky, knowing her. She’ll—Wait, what mage?”
“Her Harbormaster.”
“Is a mage?” Eld sputtered.
“If you read the instructions left for us on the ship, you’d know that she said the Harbormaster of Port au’ Sheen was a Company woman and would be able to put us in contact with her immediately.”
“I read the instructions. I didn’t see any mention of a mage.”
“We just came across the sea on one of the fastest ships ever built, Eld. And that still took three days. So if her word is true, and in this case I’ll believe her, then she must be speaking of some form of sorcery. Ergo, mage.”
“We’re going to put ourselves in the hands of another mage after one just tried to kill us?”
“Well, there are mages and then there are mages,” I said. “Veneficus are one of the lesser known branches of the Dead Gods’ order; I guess they don’t want to advertise that their Gods have powers that can turn their priests into were-creatures. But they were willing to risk sending one to Port au’ Sheen, which makes sense given the dead man’s story that the Dead Gods are backing the Widowmaker. Who, remember, is behind the disappearances.” Eld blinked and I couldn’t keep the laughter from my voice. “Try to keep up, Eld. Their mage could be of the Dead Gods or they could be Sin Eaters of Ciris.”
“So they could be waiting to turn into bulls or murder us like that traitorous bastard that shot Salazar and got us into this mess in the first place,” Eld said. He seemed to find restating things helpful.
“Aye. So mind your manners and watch your language.” I slapped his shoulder. “Or … you might want to try biting your tongue.” I marched past him and considered smoking some kan. Needling Eld was one of my favorite pastimes and if I felt up to that, perhaps the seasickness was finally leaving and taking my weakness with it. My fingers touched the tightly wrapped leaf at the same instant the mage’s face back in Salazar’s warehouse flashed through my mind. Vacant eyes staring elsewhere even as his hands moved, drawing and firing the pistole, like some form of clockwork automaton. I pulled my hand out empty, and let Eld catch up to me. “We’ll need our wits about us for this.” I glanced at him. “What? No comment?”
“Not when you speak sense.”
“If that were true, then you’d be a mute.”
Eld’s silence spoke volumes.
* * *
The Harbormaster was easy to find, given that the only tower in the entire port was marked with the Kanados sigil of a rolled kan leaf in a steaming cup, showing both the sedative and stimulant properties of the leaf. The courtyard confirmed it—when Eld’s boot crossed the threshold, ahead of mine, a faint vibration ran through the cobblestones between us and the gilded door. The door took on a new sheen, its surface rippled, and a gemstoned handle and knocker appeared as if by magic. Which it was. Ostentatious, but then nothing about the Company had been subtle.
The serving man who greeted us didn’t believe our story and seemed to take a special pleasure in denying us entry. He managed to try even Eld’s famously marathon patience and another headache began building in the back of my head. Between that, his brightly gilded suit that hurt my eyes, and the preposterous feather—phoenix, if you were fool enough to believe it—in his tricorne, I was reaching for a blade when the Harbormaster herself appeared.
“Now, before you slit my assistant’s throat because he has been waving a crimson flag in your face, what do you want?” the Harbormaster asked. She was almost as young as me, but fair where I was dark. Her eyes, while green like mine, looked far too old to sit in an unlined face with a button nose and dimples. She was unsettling in a way I hadn’t anticipated, Sin Eater or no.
“I wasn’t going to slit his throat,” I said. “Just spear his windpipe like an apple on a pole.”
The Harbormaster’s face grew still for half a breath before she laughed. It sounded like wind chimes. Or maybe that was her medallion tapping against the silver buttons of her lavender dress. Either way she looked easily as young as I, until she opened her eyes and the wisdom of scores of years stared back at me. She wiped at her eyes with delicate fingers covered in thin silver rings that glinted in the lamplight of the courtyard. “I’m not sure he would appreciate the difference,” she said.
“We’re here about a … sweet problem the Company has been having. Sent from Servenza three days ago,” Eld said before I could reply. “We need to report back and our instructions indicated you might be able to help.”
“Oh—you’re that lot?” She reassessed us and nodded fractionally. “Leave your pack by the door. You’d better come up.”
13
The mage led us up a wide gilded staircase and into a larger study that appeared to wrap around the entire tower. A large glass window dominated the far wall, affording us a magnificent view of the harbor. As she crossed the room toward the window, it parted in half seamlessly, withdrawing into the floor and ceiling, letting in the sharp, crisp smell of the ocean and the softer sounds of the port waking up from its hot nap.
“Sit, sit,” she said, gesturing to the two chairs and a small oval table to the right
of the window. She threw herself into the larger, high-backed chair to the left and crossed her legs. “Our drinks will be up in a moment, but first I need to ask you—please sit.” There was something in her tone that felt like … my arse was in the hard, wooden seat before I realized quite what I was doing. Magic? “Thank you, that’s better,” she said. Or suggestion? “Have either of you used the services of a Sin Eater before?”
Eld and I exchanged looks and he appeared as unsettled as I did at how quickly we’d obeyed her commands. “No,” I said.
“Yes,” Eld said after a pause. I kept my expression neutral, but I couldn’t keep my body from tensing. He worked with mages? It made no sense. As long as I’d known him, he’d hated mages and magic of all kind. I hated them for their power and their waste of it, good reasons, but whatever my reasons, from what little Eld had said about them, mine were shadows in comparison to his own. “In the army,” he added. Army?
“Ah, did you see Transference? Communication across great distances between mages?”
“N-no.” He coughed to clear his throat. “Nothing so useful as that,” Eld said quietly, looking away.
The woman tilted her head but didn’t say anything at first. “Transference is a process whereby I will make a connection with one of my counterparts in Servenza,” she said, as if the knowledge were a gift, but one she’d disposed to many listeners before. “He’ll find Salina and then she will use him as a channel to speak to you.”
“A channel?” My religious reading had been more focused on the way the Dead Gods pulled strings to fight their undying war with Ciris—the New Goddess, some forgotten daughter of the Dead Gods, who created all life. But when I’d stumbled across Marten’s On Religion and Power, I’d dug deeper into his source material and found the truth in manuscripts written when the Imperial tongue was but one dialect among thousands.
The Gods didn’t create our world. They aren’t even of our world, not truly. An anonymous scribe, a priest of the Dead Gods, writing a secret history for their Council of Elders, told of a war in the stars and skies above, a war that had ended with Ciris’s apparent defeat and the death of the Gods themselves. A truce, save that their teachings infected some of the early leaders in the time when tribes ruled a few leagues, long before the nations of today. Religion—to me, just another word for control and power—had been born. With Ciris’s return, the war had resumed, with our world as the battlefield and all of us pawns. I’m no fucking pawn.
“How’s that?” I asked. I’d read of Sin Eaters who worshiped Ciris and were given superhuman powers and others who prayed to the Dead Gods and were gifted the power to change flesh and bone or command the dead, but clearly I had more reading to do.
The Sin Eater sighed, a knowing smile playing across her lips. “Think of a horn that amplifies your voice across hundreds of paces. Now imagine that instead of amplifying your voice, the horn is focusing your voice, so that only a single person hears you across hundreds of paces.” She spread her hands. “This is one of the gifts from our Goddess, the ability to find one another across great distances.”
“How do you find that single person, though?” I asked.
“Well, only Sin Eaters can communicate via the signals left in the air from the Goddess’s entry to our world.” She shrugged. “I use the signals in the air to connect with her and she connects me with the one I want.” Eld and I exchanged confused looks and she rolled her eyes. “More detail than you can comprehend. To return to the horn analogy, in this case we are the horns, but your voices are your own.”
“Will you—”
“Hear or remember everything that was said through my mouth?” she asked, finishing Eld’s question for him. “Everyone’s always wondering about that,” she said with a laugh. “After a fashion. I’ll hear and remember what I hear, but I won’t remember speaking the words you give to me. Another thing—ah, Albar, I hope you haven’t tarried long enough that the tea’s grown cold?” she asked, looking across the room. Her assistant’s features were more sullen than a dog denied a bone, but he did have three steaming pewter mugs on a tray. “Which is the tea?” she asked.
“This one.” He indicated the one closest to her, just across the table from us, and she took it gingerly, inhaling deeply before nodding him toward us. “And kan for you lot.”
“Manners,” the mage said, clicking her tongue. Albar blanched but said nothing, setting the tray on the table between us and nearly running to the stairs. “Insolent man,” she muttered as his heels echoed after him. She took a sip of tea and smiled. “But he does know his brews.”
“Would you be terribly offended if I had some of your tea instead?” I asked.
The mage laughed. “Did I make it look that good?”
“No.” I leaned forward so my hesitation wouldn’t be as noticeable. Kan is a fickle thing, beautiful when inhaled, but harmful when drunk if you’ve a brain like mine. “But I’ve had kan many times before; Servenza has a kanhouse on every corner, after all. It’s been ages since I’ve had tea.”
The mage inclined her head. “I should have asked your preference before ordering Albar. Of course you may try my tea.” She smiled that strange young smile from ancient eyes. “And I suppose it won’t kill me to taste some of my own brew.”
I moved so we could exchange mugs, then sat back down next to Eld, who was watching me with feigned interest while his kan sat untouched on the tray. I’d thought I’d known every nook and cranny of Eld, not his history, but who he was. Now I wasn’t so sure. Othotus had been an old man who had grown too fond of his own words when he wrote The Study of Centuries, but his final theme was clear and succinct: history repeats itself.
Eld’s history included working with the types of people who had landed us in this predicament in the first place. Mages and military. If I had made a mistake, something I don’t do, I would remedy it. But not now. I crossed my legs, adjusted my skirts, and took a sip of the mage’s tea, keeping my smile light even as I felt the foul liquid turn my tongue bitter. I should have risked the kan.
“Now that I have something for my throat, we can begin,” the mage said. She drank some kan, frowned slightly, then tried another sip. “Sweeter than I remember, but they do put sugar in everything around here.” She took another swallow, smacked her lips, and set the mug down. “I will reach out to Servenza and when I do, my voice will change.” She pressed a finger to her throat. “If you’d like Salina to hear your voice, you need to provide me with a drop of your blood.” She reached for the small knife in an embroidered sheath that lay on the writing desk behind her.
“Is that necessary?” Eld asked.
The mage paused. “No. You will hear Salina’s voice, but she knows mine and the connection cannot be hijacked, so there’s no need. Unless you want her to understand your inflections and emphases better.”
“I think she’ll understand our meaning just fine,” I said.
“Very well.” She turned back around in her seat and closed her eyes. “This will only t-take a m-moment.” Her teeth chattered and her eyes snapped open sightlessly. “I have reached the central altar.” A small moan escaped her mouth. “Mother.” Another moan, the pleasure more pronounced than the first. “Hello, Katal.”
“Good evening, sister,” the mage said, speaking with a deep man’s voice. “It is early here. What do you require?”
“Salina,” the Harbormaster said in her own voice. “I have two with me on a mission of hers involving the sugar crisis.”
“So soon?” the man’s voice asked. “Very well, I shall wake her, but I hope they have good news.”
“If they don’t, what better way to deliver it than with a sea between them?” she asked. She chuckled in a man’s voice and then blinked and her eyes focused on us. “We are still … connected, but I am returned for now. Some find this experience unsettling the first time.”
“The first time?” I asked. “And how do you find the experience?”
“Rapturous,” she breathed.
/>
“Gods,” Eld muttered.
“Precisely.” Eld opened his mouth, but her face twitched; her eyes grew still and her features blank.
“Buc and Eld,” the Company bitch’s voice said. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Time for some good news,” I said, sitting up in my chair.
“You didn’t give her any blood?” Salina asked. There was amusement in her voice. “I guess I’m not surprised, but I do miss your dulcet tones, Buc.”
“With any luck, you’ll not miss them for long.” I wasn’t sure how much of my tone made it through the mage’s voice, but I didn’t hold back on the satisfaction. “We’ve solved your big mystery.”
“That easily? And what is the cause?”
“Pirates,” Eld said.
“Pirates?”
“It’s often the most likely answer that’s the right one,” he said.
“Pirates,” Salina repeated.
“Not just any pirates, if it makes you feel better,” I said. “One of the more famous ones. The Widowmaker.”
“Impossible!” Spittle flecked the mage’s lips. Eld and I looked at each other. I mouthed “resting bitch face” and he turned away quickly, covering his mouth with his hands. “Explain yourselves. Now.”
“I don’t like orders,” I said. “But I like this island less, so I will explain.” I sat back in the chair and cleared my throat. “It started with a fat-arsed sweaty merchant who’d lost a few sugar ships of his own.…” I laid out the evidence for her, drawing the portrait as clearly as I could, trying to fill in the places where my mind had leapt ahead so that she could keep up. It felt like I was explaining how a gondola oar worked to a child, but the mage didn’t interrupt, so I must have kept the contempt from my voice. Or else Salina was willing to suffer a little to get what she wanted, the same as I was. Now there’s a thought. The two of us have something in common. I reached for the tea to clear my throat. “And he confirmed my suspicions: the Widowmaker is in league with the Dead Gods and this island is rife with their agents.”
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