There were three of them, and Aren could have tried.
He thought about it for exactly ten seconds, standing in the wet alley with the canal behind the big man and the two sets of boots coming up behind him.
He was Rank E now.
These men were probably F, maybe one of them E.
He had a soldier’s sword on his hip that Mag had sold him ten minutes ago, a technique that could cut stone, and another that let him move without sound.
He also had a face that anyone in the lower city could recognize, a sister in the healer house three streets away, and a story about being a Servant with a combat aptitude of zero.
If the stone-seller cut three of Rook’s men to pieces in an alley, then by morning, Rook would know exactly what the stone-seller was.
And so would everyone Rook talked to.
Never show the market your real position, he thought.
Not for a small trade.
He put his hands up.
“Smart boy,” said the big man, and hit him in the stomach with the club.
They brought him to a warehouse on the river, with a sack over his head and his hands tied behind his back.
He knew it was the river from the smell, and he knew it was a warehouse from the echo when they pushed him through a door.
Inside, it was warm and smelled of lamp oil and tar and men who had not washed in a while.
Someone kicked the back of his knees and he dropped onto a wooden floor.
Someone pulled the sack off.
The warehouse was huge and full of crates.
Lamps hung from the beams overhead.
A dozen men stood or sat around the edges of the room, some playing cards on a barrel, some cleaning weapons, some just watching him with the bored faces of people who had seen this many times before.
At the far end, on a raised platform where the warehouse foreman must have once kept his desk, there was a long table covered in papers and maps.
Behind the table, in a tall chair, sat a man reading a book.
He was not what Aren had expected.
He was perhaps forty years old, slim, with dark hair going grey at the temples and a neat, pointed beard.
He wore a long black coat of very good cloth, old now and patched at the elbows, but carefully brushed.
His hands were long and pale.
On the little finger of his left hand, he wore a heavy silver ring with the crest scratched off, as if someone had taken a knife to it.
He turned a page.
He did not look up.
“Is that him?” he asked.
“That’s him, boss,” said the big man.
“The stone-seller.”
“Hm.” The man in the black coat closed his book, set it carefully on the table, and finally looked at Aren.
His eyes were very dark and very calm.
“You’re younger than I expected.”
[Rook.
Rank C: Level 3.]
[Hostility: 72%.]
Rank C, Aren thought.
Two full ranks above me.
He could feel it now that he was close, a pressure in the air like the weight before a storm, the same thing he had felt around Vivienne since her awakening, but heavier and darker and older.
If this man decided to kill him, it would take less time than it took to blink.
“You cost me a great deal of money, boy,” Rook said.
His voice was quiet and educated, the voice of someone who had grown up in a house with a library.
“Every year before the Awakening Ceremony, the children of the Academy buy my charms.
Every year, I make enough to pay my men through the winter.
This year, a gutter rat with a sack of polished quartz walked into the east garden and took it all.” He tilted his head.
“Do you know what happens to a man in my position when he loses face like that?”
“People start to wonder if he’s still worth being afraid of,” Aren said.
Rook’s eyebrows rose very slightly.
Then he nodded to the big man.
The big man hit Aren across the face with the back of his hand.
It knocked him sideways onto the floor.
Someone laughed.
“Kneel properly,” Rook said.
Aren pushed himself back up onto his knees.
Blood was running from his lip.
He kept his eyes down.
“Better.” Rook leaned back in his chair.
“Now.
I could have you thrown in the river tonight, and nobody in the city would notice.
That would make me feel better.
But it would not give me back my money, and I am, above all things, a practical man.” He spread his long hands.
“So tell me, stone-seller.
What are you worth to me alive?”
Aren did not answer right away.
He was looking at the room.
He had been looking at it since the sack came off.
Not at the men.
At the things around them.
He looked at the crates stacked along the walls.
Some of them were open.
Inside, there were crossbows, short swords, jars of lamp oil with cloth stuffed in their necks.
Too many weapons for a gang that only sold charms and collected debts.
These were weapons for a fight, and a big one.
He looked at the long table on the platform.
Under Rook’s book, there was a map of the docks, with the warehouses drawn in neat ink.
Three of them, on the eastern side of the river, had been circled in red.
He knew those warehouses.
Everyone in the lower city knew them.
They belonged to the Tanners, the other big gang, the one that ran the leather trade and the east bank.
Beside the map, there was a paper with columns of numbers and times, and the word Thursday written at the top and underlined twice.
He listened to the men by the barrel, who had stopped playing cards to watch him get hit and were now talking again in low voices.
…the boats come in under the Salt Bridge…
midnight, when the bells ring…
they’ll never see us coming…
And he looked at the man standing closest to Rook’s table, a narrow, nervous man with a scar on his chin, who had been watching Aren with more interest than anyone else.
The man’s hands were folded in front of him.
His fingernails were stained a deep brown, all the way to the cuticle, the way nails only got stained after years of working with tanning dye.
Aren’s mind put the pieces together, quickly, the way it always had.
It was not even hard.
It was just paying attention.
“You’re going to attack the Tanners on Thursday night,” he said.
The warehouse went quiet.
Rook’s calm face did not change.
“Go on.”
“Three warehouses on the east bank.
You’re going to bring men across the river in boats, under the Salt Bridge, at midnight when the bells cover the sound.” Aren licked the blood off his lip.
“It won’t work.”
“And why is that?”
“Two reasons.” Aren lifted his chin toward the paper with the times.
“Thursday is the new moon.
The tide in the river will be at its lowest in the whole month.
I grew up three streets from the canal, my lord.
On new-moon nights, the water under the Salt Bridge is so low that a loaded boat scrapes the bottom.
Your boats will get stuck in the mud right under the bridge, in the middle of the river, with every one of your men sitting in them.”
Nobody in the room said anything.
Rook’s long fingers had gone still on the arm of his chair.
“And the second reason?”
Aren turned his head slowly and looked at the nervous man with the scar on his chin.
“Your man there has tannery dye under his fingernails,” he said.
“Not old stains.
Fresh ones.
That color only comes from the vats on the east bank.
He’s been working for the Tanners, my lord.
Probably for a while.
They already know you’re coming.”
The nervous man’s face went white.
“That’s a lie.
Boss, that’s a lie, he’s just saying…”
He did not finish.
Aren did not see Rook move.
Nobody did.
One moment, Rook was sitting in his tall chair.
The next, there was a sound like the wings of a huge bird, a rush of black that filled the platform, and Rook was standing behind the nervous man with one long pale hand resting on his shoulder.
Black feathers drifted down through the lamplight like ash.
Rook took the man’s hand and turned it over.
He looked at the fingernails.
Then he looked at the man’s face.
“Ah, Willem,” he said softly.
“I was so fond of you.”
He did something with his other hand that Aren could not see.
Willem made a small, choked sound and folded to the floor and did not move again.
The black feathers kept falling around him for a long time after.
Rook stepped over him and walked down from the platform, slowly, until he was standing directly in front of Aren.
Up close, he smelled of old books and black tea.
“Get up,” he said.
Aren got up.
“The tide,” Rook said.
“You’re certain.”
“I’m certain.”
“Then what would you do, stone-seller, if you were me?”
Aren met his eyes.
He did not look away, though every instinct in his body told him to.
Powerful men only respected you in the moment you refused to break eye contact.
“I wouldn’t go on Thursday,” he said.
“The Tanners think you’re coming on Thursday.
Let them.
Let them pull every man they have to the east bank and sit there all night waiting for boats that never come.
They’ll be tired by morning, and angry, and they’ll think you lost your nerve.” He paused.
“Then go on Friday, at low tide, on foot.
Not across the river.
Under it.
There’s an old drain that runs from the rope-makers’ sheds to the back of the third warehouse.
Children use it to steal leather scraps.
It’s narrow and it stinks, but a man can walk through it bent over.
You’d come up inside their walls while they’re all asleep.”
Rook was silent.
His dark eyes moved over Aren’s face as if he were reading a page in a language he had once known well.
Then, quietly, he started to laugh, the laugh of a man who had just been beaten at a game by someone he had not even known was playing.
[Rook.
Hostility: 72% → 81%.]
He hates being told, Aren thought.
Good.
A new window opened in the corner of his vision.
[Hostility threshold met.]
[Anchor slot available: 1/2.One slot available.]
[Anchor this target?]
He looked at Rook, the disinherited noble with the scratched-off crest, standing among the drifting black feathers in a warehouse full of weapons.
A man two ranks above him, who killed his own people without raising his voice, and who would happily kill Aren too the moment he stopped being useful.
A man whose whole world was about to get much bigger if Friday went the way Aren thought it would.
Yes, Aren thought.
[Anchor established: Rook.]
[Anchors: 2/2.]
Rook stopped laughing.
He reached out and, almost gently, took Aren’s chin between two long cold fingers and turned his face to the light, the way you would look at a horse you were thinking of buying.
“Friday, then,” Rook said.
“You will be here on Friday night, stone-seller.
You will stand beside me while we walk through your little drain.
And if you are wrong about any of it, the tide, the drain, the Tanners, anything at all…” He let go of Aren’s chin.
“I will feed you to the canal one piece at a time, and I will make you watch.”
He turned and walked back up to his chair, stepping over Willem’s body as if it were a coat someone had dropped.
“Untie him,” he said.
“And somebody find him a cloth.
He’s bleeding on my floor.”