The strongbox sat on the kitchen table above Greaves & Son, open, and nobody wanted to be the first to touch it.
It was an ugly thing.
Black iron, scarred and dented, with the Fennick Concern’s crest stamped into the lid and a lock that Rook had picked in nine seconds.
It had sat on Varga’s desk in the weighing-house, between the barge ledger and the silver pistol, and it had come home with them in a coal sack slung over Rook’s shoulder, clinking at every step.
Three thousand and forty silver marks.
Threaded.
Clean.
Lucan had counted it twice, and then Wren had counted it a third time, because she didn’t trust anyone’s arithmetic except her own.
“It’s blood money,” Nell said.
She was sitting on the windowsill with her knees drawn up, watching the morning smog curdle over the rooftops of Hob’s Cross.
She hadn’t touched her breakfast.
“All money in this city is blood money,” Wren said, without looking up from the barge ledger.
“Some of it’s just older blood.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No,” Wren agreed.
“It isn’t.
But it spends the same.” She turned a page.
“And this particular blood money belonged to the man who murdered your brother.
I can’t think of anyone who has a better right to spend it than us.”
Nell said nothing.
She pulled her knees tighter to her chest.
Lucan looked at the coins.
[ CLEAN CURRENCY acquired: 3,040 Silver.
]
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
8,420 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
]
The Exchequer had counted it before he’d even put his hand on the lid.
The Exchequer does not create value.
It records it.
And Varga’s last money, taken from his strongbox beside his corpse, was apparently a very fine piece of value indeed.
“We use it,” Lucan said.
“All of it.
For things that matter.” He looked at Nell.
“Things Dez would have liked.”
Nell’s jaw tightened.
“Dez would’ve liked a drink.
A real one.
Not that piss Harrick sold out of his boot.”
It was so exactly the sort of thing Dez would have said, in so exactly his voice, that for a moment nobody could speak.
Then Rook, who was standing at the stove frying eggs in a pan the size of a cartwheel, began to laugh.
It was a big, loud, rolling laugh, and it filled the little kitchen, and after a moment Nell’s mouth twitched.
Then she was laughing too, helplessly, with her face pressed against her knees, and her shoulders shaking, and it wasn’t entirely laughter but it wasn’t entirely crying either.
Lucan let her.
He looked down at the coins and waited until she was finished.
“Then we’ll buy him one,” he said.
“The best bottle in Grisholt.
We’ll pour it on his name in the pit wall.”
Nell wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“They’ll arrest you.”
“They’ll have to catch me.”
“You,” Wren said, still not looking up, “are going to get us all burned alive in Cathedral Square.
Somebody pour me more tea.”
Greaves & Son reopened on a Monday.
Lucan had expected it to be a quiet affair.
A new sign.
Clean windows.
The great carboys in the bow window scrubbed of fifty years of grime, so that the coloured water inside them glowed like stained glass, ruby and emerald and sapphire, throwing pools of jewelled light across the floor of the shop.
Old Abel Greaves sitting in his chair behind the counter with his green spectacles on his nose, nodding at customers he’d known for half a century.
That was all.
He had not expected the queue.
It started before dawn.
By the time Wren unlocked the door at the eighth bell, it stretched from the corner of Hob’s Cross all the way down Tallow Street to the canal bridge.
Mill-girls with bandaged hands.
Dockers with broken fingers.
Mothers with coughing children.
Old men with bad chests.
Young men with knife wounds they didn’t want to explain.
Word had got out.
Nobody knew how, exactly.
Somebody’s cousin had a friend who’d been on Velvet Row the night Madame Orlov’s girl had her face fixed.
Somebody had seen a docker with a crushed hand walk out of the Silk House flexing his fingers.
Somebody had heard that old Greaves had sold up to a young physician’s son from the provinces who had a cure for everything.
Lucan stood at the back of the shop, behind the counter, in a clean white apron that Wren had insisted on, and looked at the queue through the window, and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
“I can’t sell them the Draughts,” he said quietly to Wren.
“Not Saint’s Marrow.
Not to all of them.
The Brotherhood will hear.
The Thread Office will hear.
It’ll be the end of us inside a week.”
“Of course you can’t.” Wren was standing beside him with a sheaf of paper in each hand, looking, as she always did, faintly annoyed with the universe.
“That’s why you’re going to sell them these.”
She handed him a list.
He read it.
Willowbark tincture, Tier I, three copper for a bottle in the Market.
Honey-and-thyme cough syrup, two copper.
A salve for burns.
A salve for rashes.
A powder for headaches.
A tonic for the blood.
Eyedrops.
Bandages.
Plain, cheap, ordinary medicines, the kind any good apothecary in Grisholt might sell.
Except they weren’t quite ordinary.
Every one of them came from the Exchequer’s Market, from some world that wasn’t this one, and every one of them was better than anything Grisholt made.
The willowbark actually took pain away.
The cough syrup actually stopped coughs.
The burn salve made burns heal in a day instead of a week.
“Small miracles,” Wren said.
“Not big ones.
Nothing that makes anyone ask how.
To make them tell their friends.” She pushed her spectacles up her nose.
“Charge fair prices.
Not cheap.
Cheap is suspicious.
Fair.
Let the queue do the rest.”
“And the Draughts?”
“The Draughts stay in the back room.
For special customers.
Through Madame Orlov.
Through Dr.
Halloran.
Very rarely, at a very high price, with a very good story about where they came from.” She tapped the list.
“Every copper that comes through that door goes into the books.
Every copper of it.
And every week, we add a little extra on top.
Just a little.
The kind of extra a busy shop could easily make.
Nobody will ever be able to tell which coins were real customers and which came out of the air.”
“You’ve done this before,” Lucan said.
“In Ilvane,” Wren said, “the Ninth Archive was very badly funded.
One learns.” She walked away toward the door with her keys.
“Smile, Mr.
Thorne.
You’re a respectable businessman now.”
They sold four hundred and twelve bottles, jars, packets and tins that first day.
Lucan stood behind the counter for eleven hours and smiled until his face ached.
Rook stood at the door, enormous and grinning, in a new dark green coat with brass buttons that Wren had bought him, keeping the queue in order.
He was very good at it.
He made jokes.
He flirted outrageously with every woman between the ages of fifteen and ninety.
He picked up crying children and swung them onto his shoulders.
When a big drunk docker tried to push his way to the front, Rook simply put one hand on the man’s chest, smiled his golden smile, and said something very quietly into his ear.
The docker went white, apologised to everyone in the queue, one by one, and went to the back.
“What did you say to him?” Lucan asked afterward.
“I told him a story about a king I used to work for,” Rook said.
“And what the king did to people who pushed in line.”
“What did he do?”
Rook told him.
Lucan decided he didn’t want to eat dinner.
By the end of that first week, Greaves & Son had taken in more money than old Abel Greaves had seen in the last two years.
And on top of that, invisibly, among the honest copper and silver of mill-girls and dockers, Wren had folded in another twelve hundred silver of Lucan’s raw coin, washed through the books and the tills and the Lower Wards Bank where Thorne now kept an account.
It came back out of the bank threaded and clean.
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
9,615 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
]
There was a second thing Wren did that week, and it involved a great deal more swearing.
“I’m not wearing that,” Rook said.
“You are wearing that.”
“I’ll look like a fool.”
“You will look,” said Wren, with enormous patience, “like Captain Rook Salterre, formerly of His Majesty’s Southern Colonial Navy, retired with a modest pension after twenty years of distinguished service in the Ember Isles, now employed as the personal bodyguard of a young gentleman of means.” She held up the uniform.
It was navy blue with gold braid on the cuffs and a high, stiff collar.
“Every piece of this is genuine.
I bought it from a widow in Brassmarket whose husband actually was a naval captain.
The papers are genuine too, or as good as.
There really was a Captain Salterre.
He really did serve in the Ember Isles.
He really did retire.
He died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his ship went down off the Graves, and every record of him went down with it.” She shook the uniform at him.
“You’re very lucky I found him.
You’re the hardest man to make respectable I have ever met.”
“I don’t want to be respectable.”
“Nobody wants to be respectable.
It’s a disguise.
Like everything else.” She pushed the uniform into his arms.
“Put it on.”
Rook looked at Lucan pleadingly.
“Put it on,” said Lucan.
Rook put it on.
When he came out of the back room, Nell, who had been sitting on the stairs, made a noise like a kettle coming to the boil and fell sideways onto the landing, howling with laughter.
He did look ridiculous.
The uniform was too short in the arms and too tight across the chest, and with his black braid and his gold tooth and his throwing-knives still strapped across his chest over the gold braid, he looked exactly like what he was: a pirate who had murdered a naval captain and stolen his clothes.
Wren looked at him for a long time.
Then she sighed and took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we’ll tell people you were a very unconventional captain.”
Late that night, Lucan sat alone in the back room among Abel Greaves’s hundreds of little drawers, with the barge ledger open on the counter in front of him and a candle burning low.
He had read it three times now.
It was the missing half of the black book: every night-time shipment from the Eastern Sidings to Rennick & Crowe for eight years, barge by barge and ton by ton, every payment and every commission.
Varga had kept it as carefully as he’d kept everything.
But it was the back pages that Lucan kept coming back to.
They weren’t about bone-coal.
They were a list.
A short list, in Varga’s neat hand, with dates beside each entry going back eleven years.
Payments.
Not to Varga.
From him.
Large ones.
Every quarter, regular as clockwork, the same amounts going to the same four names.
Seat VII.
Commissioner.
Registry, Deputy Master.
L.I.F.
And beside the last name, one entry from eleven years ago, much larger than all the others, with a single word written next to it.
Husband.
Lucan sat and looked at that for a long time.
L.I.F.
Lady Isolde Fennick.
Husband.
Lord Fennick had died eleven years ago.
A riding accident, the newspapers had said. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Lucan had been eight.
He barely remembered it.
A riding accident.
A rail-yard accident.
A mining accident.
The Ashen Crown had a great many accidents.
He closed the ledger.
The candle guttered.
In the corner of his vision, the Exchequer’s panel glowed quietly, showing the same thing it had shown every night for a week.
[ ALERT LOG: A second ACCOUNT exists within three miles.
]
[ Account Holder: UNKNOWN.
System: UNKNOWN.
]
[ Their LEDGER: Debt owed TO them by Lucan Marr — One life.
UNCOLLECTED.
]
He had tried everything to find out more.
He’d searched the Market for anything that could locate another Account Holder.
There was nothing at his Rank.
He’d asked the panel directly, in every way he could think of.
The answer was always the same.
[ Information restricted.
Rank 2 required.
]
One life.
He’d thought about it every night.
Whose life did he owe?
He had killed men.
Marsh, the night-watchman.
Gorse’s two thugs on the landing in the Cradles.
He’d ordered Crane’s death.
He’d watched Rook kill the man on the wharf.
He’d put the silver knife in Varga’s hand.
Any of them could have had someone who’d want him dead.
A wife.
A brother.
A child.
Someone who, like him, had lost a person they loved, and been pushed down into the dark, and died in debt, and asked for an audit.
And been answered.
He went to St.
Ivo’s the next morning.
He went early, before the shop opened, while the smog was still thick and grey and low, lying in the narrow lanes of Tallowgate like dirty water.
He took a small bunch of white flowers from the Market, the kind that grew on the cliffs of some other world and smelled of salt and honey, and laid them on Ottilie’s grave under the twisted yew.
She cheated everyone.
She never gave anyone up.
He stood there for a while.
He didn’t pray.
He didn’t know any prayers that he believed in, in either world.
He just stood and remembered her polishing her glass eye on her waistcoat, and spitting in her palm before she shook his hand.
Then he walked across the churchyard to the other grave.
He’d found it two days ago, in the newer section on the far side of the church where the paupers were buried.
Most of the graves there had no stones at all, just wooden markers that rotted in a year or two.
This one had a marker, plain and new, already going grey in the damp.
TOBIN MARSH.
1849 – 1871.
NIGHT-WATCH.
BELOVED BROTHER.
Lucan had promised the dead man he would remember his name.
He had kept that promise.
He came here every few days and stood in front of the marker.
He never brought flowers.
That seemed wrong, somehow, like a lie.
He only stood there.
This morning, someone was already there.
A young woman was kneeling in front of the grave with her back to him.
She was thin and narrow-shouldered, in a shabby dark-grey dress and a black shawl, with straw-coloured hair pinned up in a hurried knot.
She was very still.
Her head was bowed.
Lucan stopped at a distance, among the rotting wooden markers, and looked at her.
Above her bowed head, his eyes found the faint gold words.
They were not like any words he’d seen before.
Everyone in Grisholt had gold words.
Debts, favours, lives, little crowded lines of ordinary misery.
But above this woman’s head the words were written in silver, not gold.
Cold, pale silver, like moonlight on a knife.
Owes: 0.
Is owed: 1 life (Tobin Marsh) — by Lucan Marr.
UNCOLLECTED.
And under that, smaller, in letters that seemed to shift and flicker every time he tried to look at them directly:
[ ACCOUNT HOLDER.
]
Lucan stood absolutely still.
The young woman lifted her head.
Slowly, very slowly, as though she had felt his eyes on the back of her neck, she turned around.
She had a narrow, pale face, too pale, with the purple remains of a bruise fading along one cheekbone and a healing cut across her lower lip.
She had her brother’s eyes.
Tobin Marsh’s eyes.
Brown and steady and very surprised.
Lucan had looked into those eyes from three inches away while their owner died under him.
She looked at Lucan.
And her gaze went up, very slightly, to the empty air above his head.
Her eyes widened.
He knew what she was seeing.
He didn’t need to be told.
He could see it reflected in her face: the slow, cold, perfect understanding.
Silver words, hanging over a stranger’s head in a pauper’s graveyard at dawn.
Owes: 1 life (Tobin Marsh).
Neither of them moved.
The smog drifted between them across the graves, grey and thick and slow.
“You,” she whispered.