“Who’s the picture of?” Asa asked.
“Think they’d show it? Beneath their kind, me.”
“What are they asking people?”
“ ‘Have y’seen this man.’ ”
Asa’s belly sank. If the council of Nevripal had taken it into their heads to side with Steppan’s enemies, things were about to become unsupportable. Josep nodded as if in agreement. Five escape plans already in place, Asa stepped smiling into the street and walked toward the hunters. Their eyes were as hard as slate and one of them put a hand on the hilt of his blade.
“Morning. Heard you strapping young men were looking for something and thought I might be of use.”
“And you are?”
“Asa.”
The hunters looked at each other as if unsure whether to be insulted or amused. For a tense moment, no one spoke. The one took his hand from the sword and pulled a curl of thick paper from his belt. He held it before Asa’s eyes like he was pressing a scent to a hunting dog’s nose. Instead of Steppan’s thin nose and wide-set eyes, the inked face that looked back at him was broad and long and perfectly familiar. Asa’s eyes narrowed to cover the relief.
“Chancellor Rouse?” Asa asked, faking incredulity.
The hunters exchanged a look that meant they had just become rather more interested in Asa than they’d been before. “You know him?”
“Of him. Enough to say you’d be better off searching the graveyard. He died six years ago.”
“He didn’t,” the second hunter said. “Used a potion to feign his death and buried a servant in his place. Now we’re come to pick up where they left off.”
“Have you seen him?” the first asked. “Does he live here?”
“If he does, I haven’t seen him. And … All respect, but Councilor Rouse defeated Sarapin’s army and killed seventy people with his own hands. If he were living around here, he’d be running the place by now, and we’d all be drilling in his army come mornings. At least, that’s the way I’ve heard it.”
The hunters looked at each other in disgust. “We’ve reason to think he’s here. And if he is, we’ll find him.”
“Godspeed to both of you,” Asa said. “I’ll ask around, and if I find anything … Well, if I do, is there a reward?”
Fifteen minutes later, Asa was headed back to the quay. The pens were built and the overseer squatted behind his purple desk. No slaves had taken their places behind the pen’s bars yet, but that would come soon enough. Zelanie and her father were nowhere to be found, and Asa had no way to know if they’d been turned down by the workhouses, if an agreement had been made, or if old Jost was holding out for a better price on his daughter’s future. For the greater part of the day, the line of men and women inched forward, but those particular two didn’t return. Eventually Asa gave up, spent a shaved coin in a filthy kitchen by the water, and went back to the little room carrying a burlap sack of cooked pigeons.
Steppan sat by the brazier, feeding the fire with twigs and tiny lumps of coal. The light flickered in his dark eyes as he looked up at Asa. The smoke and warmth gave the room an uncomfortable close feeling. From beyond one of the thin walls, a woman’s wailing came like the mating song of a great hunting cat. A gray cloth bundle lay on Steppan’s mattress. Asa dropped the feed bag and sat on the mattress beside it.
“How was your day?” Steppan asked.
“Interesting. I saw your ladylove. You’re right, her father’s looking to sell her.”
“And?”
“And Brother Rouse down at the Temple’s about to have a more interesting life. His past is sniffing at his heels again though I don’t see how that affects us. Also I thought we’d agreed that should stay hidden.”
The prince looked at the cloth the way a mouse might eye a placid snake. “There may be a need for it.”
Asa drew out a pigeon and took a thoughtful bite. The meat was on the dry end, but it was spiced with pepper and salt that forgave it. Steppan took a bird for himself in one hand and unwrapped the cloth bundle with the other. The scabbard was green enamel and as ostentatious and gaudy as everything the hunters had worn put together. Steppan drew the blade.
“So, which need was it you had in mind? Planning to go slaughter all the workhouse crews? Or maybe her father?”
“She is being sold,” Steppan said, “and so I must be in a position to buy her. If I can better the price of the workhouses, I can claim her and set her free.”
“I don’t think you can sell it for that much. Not in our markets.”
“That wasn’t my plan.”
Asa took another bite, then put the bird’s carcass down on the mattress. Steppan looked away, caught between bravado and shame.
“Why don’t you tell me what the plan is, then?” Asa said, pronouncing each word carefully.
“Everyone knows Sovereign North Bank is the haven of outlaws and thieves. I can’t call it a crime to steal from the stealers. The crime lords meet in the Salt. That’s what you told me. Surely there would be enough gold there to buy her freedom.”
“No. That’s not going to—”
“Stop it!” Steppan shouted, and when he turned, the blade turned with him. The tears in his eyes stood witness to the fact that he knew how bad the plan was. “You have been my companion and my only friend, and I will be in your debt forever, but you can’t tell me to abandon her. You can’t tell me not to try.”
“You won’t help anyone dead. And there’s another way.”
“What?”
“I haven’t thought of it yet,” Asa said, and picked the pigeon back up.
Steppan’s mouth opened and closed like a marionette’s. The point of the blade slipped down toward the floor, and he laughed once and mirthlessly. They ate in silence while outside the sun fell and darkness crept through the filthy streets. The wailing woman’s cries turned to a shouting match in a language Asa didn’t know and then ended abruptly. Steppan fed the smoky little fire, went to piss out the window at the end of the hall, and then came back and collapsed onto his mattress. Asa sat up, resting against the cold and creaking wall.
The best plan, of course, was for somebody—anybody, really—to outgrow their naive illusions about love, but since that was going to be tricky to whistle up, they needed a fallback. Otherwise, Steppan really would do something desperate and florid and suicidal. The idea of buying the girl’s freedom wasn’t bad, but the part about how to get the coin was terrible. So perhaps there was another way. Across the tiny room, Steppan’s breath slowed and deepened, his hands folded under his neck like a child’s. In the dim glow, his cheeks were a lighter shadow, the curve of his lips all but lost in the darkness of his little beard. How much did the workhouses pay, anyway? Without knowing what the price would be, it was hard to think of a concrete solution. Asa thought of the hunters looking for the supposedly dead Councilor Rouse and the joke about a reward. For most of the people of Sovereign North Bank, life was pretty damned cheap.
Life was cheap, and corpses were inexpensive.
Steppan’s eye flew open. “What?”
“What what?”
“You laughed.”
“Did I? Well, I thought of something funny.”
Steppan’s smile was as much a sound as anything. “You thought of something?”
“I’ll look into it in the morning while you put that thing back in hiding, eh?”
“Of course. Thank you, Asa. For everything. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Die, most likely, Asa thought.
The Temple sat beneath the city, its deepest chambers dug into the damp soil of the riverside. A great net of ropes hung suspended above the building itself, and the trash and garbage and bird’s nests and dead animals that had built up on it over the course of the years blocked what sunlight struggled down through the taller structures surrounding it. Dim beams caught the dust and filth that hung in the air, and also glimmered off tilework of scarlet and gold, ancient and ruined glasswork, pathways of yellowed marble
kept clean by monks and priests. The effect was often compared to being under the overhanging trees of a jungle, but Asa thought it looked more like something underwater. The ruins left beneath the waves after a vast and sludgy flood.
Torches and lamps heated the air, even at midday, and the vast central hall with the statues of seven gods smelled of sweet incense. The priests and physicians who peopled the dark halls and worshipped the gods in the dimness were an equal mixture of saints dedicated to serving the most wretched in the worst places of the world and monsters who had fouled every more pleasant nest. Sometimes—rarely—the two classes overlapped.
Asa sat in the back pew, watching the vast bulk of the priest as he made his way down the aisle. The years had grayed his hair and thickened his jowls, but anyone who looked closely would have recognized him as the man the hunters sought. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough as a landslide.
“Asa.”
“Chancellor Rouse.”
“That is not my name any longer,” the priest said, lowering himself into the pew in front of Asa’s and twisting around to look over his massive shoulder. “But you know that. And so I have to think you are saying it for effect?”
“I’m nothing if not affected. But I’m not the only one saying that name recently. I talked to a magistrate’s hunter yesterday in Hafner’s Choke. He had a picture of you.”
Rouse pressed his lips together and heaved a sigh. “I’ve heard.”
“Then I assume you’ve got some plan for removing yourself from danger.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps it is time to surrender myself to the judgment of the council.”
Asa laughed once. Rouse looked injured.
“You don’t think so, friend Asa?”
“I think you’re as much the ice-hearted killer now as you were when you were in power, and you wear the priest’s collar well because you never thought anyone less than a god had authority over you.”
“True. All true.”
“So you have a plan.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well if you don’t, I do. And the price for my help is profoundly reasonable.”
Rouse was silent for a long while. The seven gods stared back at them with empty stonework eyes. Somewhere not too far away, an unseen choir lifted their dozen voices in the midday chant. Asa fought the impulse to fidget. There were stories of Chancellor Rouse slitting a man’s throat and pulling the tongue out through the hole as punishment for interrupting. Chances were good it was an exaggeration, but the stakes were high if it wasn’t.
“What would you have from me?” Rouse asked.
“Your help in a problem I’ve got. Your expertise. Nothing you haven’t done before. And in return, I’ll help you pull the hunter’s teeth and get rid of them for you, and they don’t even have to know you were involved in it.”
“That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”
“I can be reasonable.”
“Tell me precisely what it is you have in mind,” Rouse said.
Asa did, adding fewer embellishments than usual along the way. Rouse listened with an intimidating ferocity. By the end, he was laughing silently and with a violence that left the pew creaking under him.
“They will be missed,” he said when he’d regained himself.
“Perhaps, but that was always going to be a problem. Be honest, you were going to kill them.”
“I was.”
“So they’d have been missed anyway. This way, they stop stirring up the deep mud, you aren’t implicated, and we both make a little money. And if they do make their way back to the world, the danger of it falls on me. No one even knows for certain you were here at all.”
The choir resolved the chant on an ambiguous harmony, as if the gods were better honored by something that stayed open and unfinished at the end.
“My way is simpler,” Rouse said.
“My way doesn’t kill anyone.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“You’ve killed a lot of people, friend, and it’s gotten you here. Not a resounding argument for the strategy.”
The man who had once driven nations before his whips sat with the thought.
“Someday it will all go too far. The magistrates will come. Or the soldiers. They will burn this all to the waterline and call the world cleaner for it.”
“Probably,” Asa agreed. “But they aren’t doing it today, so why talk about it?”
A moment later, Rouse sighed. “Let us try your way.”
The rest of the day was spent preparing. Rouse’s list of herbs and poisons was shorter than Asa expected and also harder to put hands to. Dried lobelia and apron grass, distilled wine and arsenic powder. Asa traded one thing for another, talked sweetly, made promises and threats, wheedled, begged, wept, and stole. By sundown, Rouse had everything he’d asked for and a bit more, and Asa felt like the rope in a pulling contest. But it was done for the moment.
Sovereign North Bank did not sleep, but it did drowse. The ruddy light of sunset deepened the shadows, reddened the towers and walkways. Fires began to glow and flicker in the windows and on the rooftops, smoke stinking of coal and wood and dried dung filling the air. Some nights, mist rose from the dark water of the Taunis and mixed with it, and Nevripal across the water faded into nothing. On those nights, Sovereign North Bank seemed to stand on the edge of an endless sea, shrouded and silent. Friends and conspirators gathered to sing or complain or plot their escape. Those without shelter begged for warmth and food or else died in the corners, unlamented. People fell in bed or fell in love, shouted and wept and danced. It was like any great city, only more so, and that was part of why Asa loved it, but only part.
Steppan wasn’t in the room, and neither was his sword. He wasn’t in the tiles hall where they would sometimes spend the evening playing against the old men with missing fingers and teeth. He wasn’t in the alley or the common rooms. The addict who lived in the room next to theirs hadn’t seen him since midday. Annoyance bit into Asa’s giddiness, but not so much as to erase it entirely. And the solution to the puzzle of Prince Steppan’s vanishing was perfectly clear, if only in retrospect.
Near midnight, Asa stepped onto the street beside the river that overlooked the quay. Steppan sat with his legs hanging out over the water, his gaze fixed on the pens. Where the workhouse overseer had been that morning, torches like flares lit the bars and the captives. Ten men and six women ranging from hardly out of childhood to approaching dotage huddled together, property of the workhouses now. There would be more before they shipped out. Asa had seen the pens so packed that there hardly seemed room enough to breathe. Seven guards stood or sat, laughing with one another, water and fog making their voices seem close and far away at the same time.
“We’re too late,” the prince said.
“How do you figure?”
“She’s already sold.”
Standing at the pen bars like a bird in a menagerie, Zelanie, daughter of Jost, for all the good that had done her, looked out toward them. Her gown was yellow-brown but had probably started out as pink or white. On the river, a barge hove into sight. A smuggler or a cadre of young men from the city in search of adventure. Asa’s exhaustion and pleasure and anxious anticipation of what was still to come bubbled up in laughter. Steppan’s expression was as stark as a slap.
“It’s uncomfortable for her,” Asa said, “but it’s temporary. And we can’t get her without going through this part.”
“What?”
“Think it through,” Asa said, sitting beside him. “Take her before she’s sold to the workhouse, and we’re stealing from her family. They live here. They know people. If they held a grudge, it could cause real problems. But if she’s sold, her father’s been paid. Whatever brothers or sisters or aunts needed the money already have it. When she goes lost now, it’s the workhouse that’s losing her. They can stand it better, and they’re less likely to know who’s behind it, and even if they do, it’s a small loss to them and a small risk to us. They
’ll be taking a hundred people at least on their barges by the end of the week. One less, they’ll hardly notice, and even if they did, they come here three times a year for a week or less each time.”
“You planned for this?”
Asa clapped an arm around Steppan’s shoulders, grinning. The despair in the prince’s eyes shifted first to disbelief, and then something like admiration. The expression was sweet as honey and intoxicating as wine to Asa, and it justified the whole day’s effort.
“All this and more, my friend. I planned all this and more. But I need rest, and so do you. Tomorrow’s a long day, and I’ll need my wits about me. So come back to the room. I won’t be able to sleep if I’m worrying where you’ve gotten to.”
They rose together, and across the darkly turning water the girl stared out at them. Drunk with cleverness, Asa raised a hand, hailing her like a friend, and, after a moment, she waved tentatively back.
Finding the hunters was easy enough. They hadn’t come to be subtle. Sending a message to them was hardly more difficult. Half a dried apple was enough to buy a dozen street couriers. But until the men stepped out onto the rooftop court, Asa hadn’t been sure they would come.
It was a low, gray rooftop, no larger than a peasant’s bedroom would have been on the other bank of the river, but palatial by the standards of Sovereign North Bank. It huddled beneath taller buildings all around it, so that even though it was technically open to the sky, there was only a tiny square of dull blue above them. The view was mostly of walls. Drying laundry hung from gray, unglazed windows, and someone had built a dovecote across the alley below them that filled the air with alarmed coos and the stink of droppings. A squat iron brazier belched out a thin, foul smoke. A girl no more then nine years old bowed before the hunters, jabbering in the tongue of Far Coiris and pointing them on toward the table where Asa sat, waiting with three cups and a stone bowl of cider.
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