On Thursday night, the Tanners waited.
Aren heard about it the next morning from a fish seller in the lower market, who heard it from her cousin, who drove a cart on the east bank.
Every Tanner in the city had been called out to guard the three warehouses.
They had stood on the riverbank all night with torches and clubs and crossbows, staring at the black water under the Salt Bridge, waiting for boats that never came.
At dawn, they had gone home cold, tired, and laughing.
Rook lost his nerve, they said.
The old crow is finished.
“They’re celebrating today,” the fish seller said, wrapping a herring in old newspaper.
“Free beer at the Tanners’ hall all afternoon.
You’d think they’d won a war.”
Aren paid for the herring and walked away without saying anything.
In his old life, he had always loved the moment just before a market opened, when everyone was certain about something that was about to stop being true.
On Friday night, he stood in the old drain with forty men behind him and a lantern in his hand.
It was worse than he remembered.
When he was a child, the drain had seemed like a secret cave.
Now he was taller, and the tunnel was so low he had to walk bent almost in half, and the water at the bottom came up over his ankles and smelled like everything the city had ever thrown away.
The men behind him cursed in low voices.
Somebody was quietly vomiting.
Rook walked directly behind him.
He did not curse.
He did not bend as much as the others either, though he was taller than all of them.
He moved through the tunnel as smoothly as if it were the hallway of a palace, his long black coat held carefully above the water in one hand.
“How much farther, stone-seller?” he asked softly.
“Two hundred paces.
Then a grate.
It comes up in the yard behind the third warehouse, under the dye vats.”
“And if the grate is locked?”
“It isn’t.
The children of the lower city broke the lock four years ago.
Nobody has noticed.”
“Hm.” Rook was quiet for a few steps.
“You know a great deal about stealing leather for a boy who goes to the Academy.”
“I grew up stealing leather, my lord.
The Academy came later.”
They walked.
The tunnel bent left, then right.
The water got deeper, then shallower.
Aren counted his steps in his head and thought about the problem he had not told Rook about.
On Wednesday, after Rook had let him go, he had walked past the Tanners’ hall on the east bank with a basket of bread on his arm, like any errand boy.
He had seen the new men going in and out of the side door.
They were not Tanners.
They were too clean, and they wore real armor under their coats, and they moved like soldiers.
He had counted twelve.
Hired swords, probably from the Free Cities, the kind the Tanners could only afford because they had been planning for this war too.
Rook did not know about them.
If those twelve men came down into the yard during the fight, Rook would still win, probably.
He was Rank C, and there was nobody on the east bank who could stand against him.
But a lot of his men would die.
Rook would remember that his little stone-seller’s perfect plan had cost him half his gang.
And a man who remembered that kind of thing did not stay grateful for long.
Aren needed Rook to win cleanly.
He needed it to look easy.
And he could not do anything about it while forty of Rook’s men were watching him.
The grate appeared ahead in the lantern light, a square of rusted iron bars in the roof of the tunnel.
Above it, through the bars, he could see a patch of black sky and the dark shapes of the dye vats.
Aren stopped.
He put the lantern down on a dry ledge, turned around, and made a face.
“My lord,” he said weakly.
“I’m sorry.
I think I’m going to be sick.”
He did not wait for an answer.
He pushed past the first few men, back the way they had come, around the bend in the tunnel, and made very loud, very convincing sounds.
Behind him, he heard someone laugh.
The great genius, somebody said.
Can’t handle a little smell.
Then he was alone in the dark, and he did not stop moving.
There was a second way out of the drain.
He had known about it since he was nine years old.
A narrow pipe, much too small for a grown man, which came up behind the Tanners’ rope shed on the far side of their yard.
Aren was not a grown man yet, quite, and he was thin from a lifetime of not eating enough.
He pulled the roll of grey bandages out of his coat, the one Old Mag had given him for his arm, and wrapped them around his head as he crawled.
Over his mouth, over his nose, over his hair, around and around until only a thin gap was left for his eyes.
He tied the end tight.
He felt the System settle over him, cold and slippery, like water closing over his head.
[False Face: Concealment active.]
He crawled out of the pipe behind the rope shed on his stomach, covered in mud, and lay still in the shadows.
The Tanners’ yard was a wide square of packed earth surrounded by long wooden buildings, with the great stone dye vats in the middle, steaming faintly in the cold air.
A few lanterns hung from the walls.
Most of the windows were dark.
After a night of waiting on the riverbank and an afternoon of free beer, the Tanners were asleep.
Not all of them.
On the second floor of the long building to his right, there were lights in four windows, and he could hear voices and the clink of armor.
A wooden staircase ran up the outside of the building to a single heavy door.
The barracks.
Twelve hired swords, awake, in armor, sitting on the only staircase into the yard.
He did not have a plan for fighting twelve trained soldiers.
He was Rank E, and some of them would be D.
He did not need a plan for fighting them.
He only needed them to stay where they were.
He went along the wall of the rope shed, keeping to the shadows, the way he had moved through the canyons of the Old Quarry.
His feet made no sound.
The Moonlit Step came to him without thinking now, sliding him half a step farther than his body should have gone, from shadow to shadow.
He reached the bottom of the staircase.
He went up it, one step at a time, pressing his feet to the edges where the old boards would not creak.
At the top, outside the heavy door, there was a long wooden beam leaning against the wall.
It was the bar for the door, the kind that dropped into iron brackets on either side to lock a building from the outside.
Someone had taken it off and leaned it there, because why would anyone need to lock the barracks?
He picked it up.
It was heavy, and he was very careful.
He lowered it into the brackets so slowly that it made no sound at all.
Then he went back down the staircase, and around the side of the building, to the small room at the bottom where the Tanners kept their alarm bell.
A rope ran from the bell up through a hole in the ceiling, so that someone in the barracks could ring it without coming down.
He took out his knife and cut the rope.
He was turning to go when the door of the bell room opened.
A young Tanner stood there, maybe fifteen, with a lantern in one hand and his trousers half buttoned.
He had obviously come down to relieve himself.
He stared at the grey shape in front of him, at the bandaged face and the knife and the cut rope, and his eyes went strange and unfocused the way the crossbowman’s eyes had on the terrace, as if they kept sliding off something they could not hold.
He opened his mouth to shout.
Aren hit him once, very fast, in the soft place under the ribs that the old men of the lower city had taught him about when he was seven.
The boy folded up without a sound.
Aren caught the lantern before it hit the floor, set it down, and dragged the boy into the corner of the bell room where he would be warm.
He would wake up in an hour with a terrible stomachache and a story nobody would believe.
Then he went back to the pipe and crawled down into the dark.
[Investment recorded.]
[Type: Hidden aid.
Anchor unaware.]
He came back around the bend of the drain wiping his mouth on his sleeve, with the bandages stuffed deep in his coat and mud all over his front.
Forty men looked at him in the lantern light.
“Better?” Rook asked.
“Sorry, my lord.”
Rook looked at him.
His dark eyes moved over the mud on Aren’s coat, the scratches on his hands, the fresh dirt in his hair.
If he noticed that Aren was a little dirtier than a boy who had only thrown up in a tunnel should be, he said nothing.
“Open the grate,” he said.
It was over in less than an hour.
Rook’s men came up out of the ground in the middle of the Tanners’ yard and went into the dark buildings like water into a sponge.
The Tanners woke up to men already standing over their beds.
Some of them fought.
Most of them did not.
Somebody ran to the bell room to ring the alarm, and pulled the rope, and the rope fell down around his shoulders with its cut end swinging.
Upstairs, in the barracks, the twelve hired swords heard the noise and ran for the door.
It did not open.
They threw themselves against it, again and again, shouting, while the old wood groaned.
By the time they broke it down, the yard below them was full of Rook’s men with crossbows, and the fight was finished.
The leader of the Tanners came out last.
She was a huge woman with grey hair cut short and arms like ship’s ropes, a Rank C with an axe in each hand.
Her name was Mother Hesk, and Aren had been afraid of her his whole childhood.
She walked out into the middle of the yard, between the steaming dye vats, and called Rook’s name.
Rook went to meet her.
Aren watched from the edge of the yard with the other men.
He had seen Rook kill Willem in the warehouse, but he had not really seen him fight.
Now he did.
It was like watching a storm decide to become a man.
Mother Hesk’s axes were fast and very strong, and she had been fighting in the streets for thirty years.
Rook moved around her in a rush of black feathers, never where she aimed, never where she expected, and his long pale hands found every opening in her guard as easily as if she had drawn him a map.
It took three minutes.
At the end of them, Mother Hesk was on her knees in the mud with both axes gone, and Rook was standing over her, not even breathing hard.
“The east bank is mine,” he said.
She looked up at him.
Then she bowed her head.
[Anchor progressed: Rook has defeated a Rank C opponent.]
[Rook.
Rank C: Level 3 → Level 4.]
[Anchor’s skill evolved: Gutter Instinct (Grade D): Stage 1 → Stage 2.]
[Source: Investment recorded.
Hidden aid.]
[Mirror Return triggered.]
The small wheel appeared at the edge of his vision.
He watched it turn while the whole yard cheered around him.
It passed x10.
It passed x100.
It slowed on the edge of the narrow red segment, hung there, and slid back into x100.
[Result: x100.]
[Return: Gutter Instinct.
Grade D +3.]
[Skill acquired: Street Fighter’s Instinct (Grade A).]
It came into him like a cold wind.
Suddenly, the yard looked different.
He could see how every man in it stood, which ones were tired, which ones were drunk, which ones would fall if pushed.
He could see how Mother Hesk was kneeling, and he knew, without knowing how he knew, that her left knee was badly hurt and she would never fight properly again.
He could see Rook’s shoulders, his balance, the small hitch in his right side where something had once broken and healed wrong.
He looked away from Rook very quickly.
The next day, the whole lower city was talking about two things.
The first was that Rook had taken the east bank in a single night, without losing a man.
The second was a strange story told by a fifteen-year-old Tanner boy with a very bad stomachache.
A man had appeared in the bell room in the middle of the night, he said.
A man wrapped in bandages from the top of his head to his chin, like a burn victim, or a corpse that had gotten up out of its grave.
The man had cut the alarm rope and locked the barracks and knocked him down with one blow, and then he had disappeared.
Nobody believed him, at first.
Then the hired swords from the barracks started telling the same story about their door.
And by evening, in every tavern on both banks of the river, people were telling jokes about it.
Watch out tonight.
Old Wraps might get you.
Aren heard the name for the first time in Old Mag’s shop, while she was counting out silver for three new cores.
She said it with a little smile and a long look at the bandage still wrapped around his left arm.
He did not say anything.
He took his money and left.
That night, Rook sent for him.
He went to the warehouse alone.
Rook was sitting in his tall chair on the platform, reading the same book as before, with a cup of black tea steaming beside him.
The map of the docks was gone.
In its place was a new map, of the whole river, both banks, with nothing circled at all.
It all belonged to him now.
“Ten percent,” Rook said, without looking up.
“My lord?”
“Of everything the east bank makes.
Every month.
For as long as you keep being useful.” He turned a page.
“You will come here whenever I call.
You will tell me what you see.
You will tell no one else.” He looked up then, and his dark eyes were very calm, and very cold.
“You belong to me now, stone-seller.”
[Rook.
Hostility: 81% → 88%.]
Aren bowed, low, the way a servant should.
“Yes, my lord,” he said.
He walked home through the dark streets with ten percent of a gang war in his future and a new name being whispered in every tavern behind him, and he did the math all the way back to the Academy.
The numbers were starting to look very good indeed.