There were fourteen of them in the back room of the Hanged Bishop.
Lucan counted them without moving his head, the way Rook had taught him.
Two by the locked door behind him.
Three along the left wall, by the fire.
Four along the right wall, by the shuttered window.
Two at the far end, standing behind Varney’s chair.
Two more sitting at the long table among the supper dishes, pretending to eat.
And one, a big man with a broken nose, at the end of the table nearest Lucan, with a mana-carbine across his knees and his finger resting lightly on the trigger guard.
None of them had silver in their eyes.
Only Varney did.
Above the others’ heads, the words were ordinary gold.
Owes: 30 silver (Varney).
Owes: 12 silver (Varney).
Is owed: 2 lives.
Is owed: 4 lives.
They weren’t Bound.
They didn’t need to be.
They worked for Varney, and Varney belonged to her.
“Please,” said Varney again, gesturing to the empty chair at the far end of the table.
“Sit.”
“I’ll stand.”
“As you like.” Varney picked up another oyster and tipped it down his throat.
He chewed slowly, swallowed, and dabbed his lips.
His movements were exactly the same as they’d always been: neat, small, precise.
A schoolmaster at his supper.
But his eyes were wrong.
Behind the round wire spectacles, the silver rims glinted dully in the firelight, and every so often they would twitch, very slightly, as though he were listening to a voice that nobody else could hear.
“I want you to know,” Varney said, “that I don’t care for this.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“Ah.
If only.” He set down the shell.
“It’s the strangest thing, Mr.
Thorne.
I’m entirely myself.
I remember everything.
I have all my opinions.
I know exactly who you are and exactly how valuable you’ve been to me and exactly how foolish it is to throw that away.
And yet.” He spread his small, neat hands.
“She told me what to do.
And I find that I’m doing it.
I can’t seem to stop.” He frowned slightly, as though considering a mildly interesting puzzle.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever felt anything like it.
I’ve made a great many men do a great many things they didn’t want to do.
I never once wondered how it felt from the other side.” He smiled faintly.
“It’s quite educational.”
“What did she tell you to do?”
“Several things.” Varney ticked them off on his fingers.
“First, to send some of my boys to the warehouse on the river, the one where you’ve been conjuring up all that lovely tea and pepper, and burn it to the waterline.
That’s being done now, I should think.” He glanced at a clock on the mantelpiece.
“Yes.
Almost certainly now.
Second, to send some more of my boys to Hob’s Cross, to call on your shop.
Third, to cancel every arrangement you and I have ever had, and let it be known in every gin-shop and back room in Tallowgate that anyone who buys from you, sells for you or carries for you will answer to me.” He tilted his head.
“And fourth.”
“Fourth?”
Varney looked past Lucan’s shoulder.
At Rook.
“To kill the pirate,” he said.
“She was very specific about that one.
She said he was the most valuable thing you owned.”
Rook laughed.
It was a big, delighted, rolling laugh, and it filled the smoky room, and every man in it twitched.
“Oh, I like her,” Rook said.
“She’s got taste.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Varney, and nodded to the man with the carbine.
Everything happened at once.
The man with the carbine brought it up.
Rook was already moving.
He went sideways, low, his curved sword clearing its sheath in a long silver hiss, and the carbine went off with a crack like a lightning strike.
The mana-round tore past Rook’s shoulder and blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in the panelled wall behind him, and the room filled with blue light and the smell of burning wood.
Lucan said “Smother,” and the room went black.
The smoke boiled out of his hands in a choking wave and filled the back room of the Hanged Bishop from floor to ceiling.
Men shouted.
Somebody fired blind, and the blue flash lit the smoke from inside like lightning in a thundercloud, and somebody else screamed.
Lucan moved.
He couldn’t see.
Nobody could see.
But he knew where they’d all been standing, every one of them, and he went for the two by the door first.
He had the iron club in his hand.
He swung it low, at knee height, and felt it connect, and heard a kneecap shatter with a sound like a pistol shot.
A man fell screaming.
Lucan stepped over him, found the second man by the sound of his breathing and drove the end of the club into his face.
Teeth went.
Bone went.
The man dropped like a sack.
Behind him, he could hear Rook.
Rook was laughing.
In the dark, in the smoke, with men screaming and dying around him, he was laughing, and his sword was making a sound Lucan had never heard a sword make before: a high, thin, whistling hum, rising and falling, like wind across the mouth of a bottle.
Every time it rose, someone shrieked.
Every time it fell, something heavy hit the floor.
Somebody grabbed Lucan from behind.
Big arms, thick and strong, locked around his chest and lifted him off his feet.
Hot breath on his neck, smelling of gin.
Lucan drove his head backward.
The Second Form had made his skull dense as iron.
He felt the man’s nose go flat under the back of his head, felt the bone splinter and the cartilage burst, and the arms loosened.
Lucan twisted, dropped, came up with the club and swung it into the side of the man’s head with all his strength.
The man’s skull caved in.
Lucan felt it give under the iron, felt the whole side of it fold inward like a crushed eggshell.
Something hot and wet sprayed across his face.
The man fell without a sound.
Lucan stood over him in the smoke, gasping.
He couldn’t hear Rook any more.
“Rook!”
“Here.” A grunt, somewhere to his left.
“Busy.”
The smoke was thinning.
Through it, Lucan began to see shapes.
Men on the floor.
Men crawling.
A man sitting against the wall with both hands pressed to his stomach, staring at nothing.
The fire was still burning in the hearth, red and low, and in its light he could see the long table overturned, oysters and broken plates and blood scattered across the floorboards.
And at the far end of the room, by the fire, two figures, locked together.
One of them was Rook.
The other was Varney.
Saul Varney was a small, neat, middle-aged man who wore spectacles and ate oysters and couldn’t have weighed more than ten stone.
And he had Rook by the throat, against the wall, with one hand, and Rook’s feet were off the floor.
Rook’s sword was gone.
He had both hands on Varney’s wrist and was hauling at it with every ounce of strength he had, and the muscles in his arms were standing out like ropes, and Varney’s arm didn’t move an inch.
Varney’s face was calm and pleasant and faintly apologetic.
His spectacles had slipped down his nose.
The silver rims of his eyes were glowing.
A Bound debtor obeys you in all things, and receives a portion of your strength.
Lucan crossed the room in three strides and swung the club at Varney’s elbow.
It connected with a crack like a dropped plank.
Varney’s arm bent in the middle, the wrong way, ninety degrees.
He let go.
Rook dropped, gasping, clawing at his own throat.
Varney looked down at his broken arm hanging from the elbow.
“Ah,” he said mildly.
“That’s going to be very inconvenient.”
He hit Lucan with his other hand.
It was the hardest Lucan had ever been hit in either life.
Harder than the Marshal’s baton in Pit Nine.
Harder than Varga’s pistol.
It was a short, neat, schoolmasterly jab to the chest, and it lifted him off his feet and threw him the length of the room, back over the overturned table and into the wall by the door.
Something in his chest cracked.
All the breath went out of him.
He slid down the wall and sat on the floor among the broken plates, unable to breathe, and watched Saul Varney walk calmly toward him through the thinning smoke with one arm hanging loose at his side.
“I really am terribly sorry about this,” said Varney.
Behind him, Rook was getting up.
He had his sword again.
He came off the floor like a spring uncoiling and drove the blade into the middle of Varney’s back.
It went in a foot.
Varney stopped walking.
He looked down at the point of the sword sticking out of the front of his green waistcoat, just below the breastbone.
He frowned at it.
Then he turned around, very calmly, with the sword still in him, and backhanded Rook across the face.
Rook went into the fireplace.
He landed in the coals.
His naval coat caught at once.
He rolled out of the fire, onto the floorboards, beating at himself, and Varney stood over him with Rook’s sword still sticking out of his own body, front and back, and bent down, and picked up a heavy iron poker from the hearth.
Lucan forced air into his lungs.
One breath.
Thin and agonising, through cracked ribs.
He reached for the panel.
Not the Market.
There was nothing in the Market he could use now, nothing at Tier I or Tier II that could stop a Bound man who wouldn’t die.
He went past the Market, past the Roster, to the Ledger.
Varney, Saul.
Owes: 9,400 silver (Marsh, Tamsin).
BOUND.
For as long as the debt remains unpaid.
He couldn’t pay it.
Not with clean coin.
Not here.
Not now.
But there was something else in the Ledger, below the debts.
Something he’d seen a hundred times and never thought about.
A line in small grey letters at the very bottom of every entry.
[ Recognise a debt?
]
He thought: Saul Varney owes me.
He thought about the deal in this room.
The two thousand silver in clean coin.
The pepper and the tea and the brandy.
The promise Varney had made, shaking his small neat hand, to stand beside Lucan when Holloway fell.
A promise he’d just broken.
A partnership he’d just betrayed.
A debt of loyalty.
Broken.
[ Recognise: Varney, Saul — owes the Account Holder: 1 broken contract (partnership, Hanged Bishop).
Value: assessed.
]
[ NOTICE: Debtor is already BOUND by a hostile Account.
A debtor may hold obligations to more than one creditor.
Competing claims detected.
]
[ Account Holder may COLLECT.
]
Varney had the poker raised over Rook’s head.
“Collect,” Lucan said.
He didn’t know what would happen.
He would think about it afterward for a long time, lying awake at night.
Varney froze.
The poker stopped in the air, a foot above Rook’s face.
The silver rims in Varney’s eyes flickered, wavered, like a candle flame in a draught.
And for a single moment, under them, Lucan saw a flash of gold.
Just a thread of it.
A thin bright line, running through the silver like a crack through ice.
Varney’s mild, pleasant face changed.
Something came into it that Lucan had never seen there before.
Confusion.
Pain.
Two voices, pulling in two directions.
“Mr.
Thorne,” he said, and his voice sounded very strange.
“What…
have you…”
The poker dropped from his hand and clanged on the floorboards.
Rook rolled away from it, onto his knees, and looked up.
Varney stood in the middle of the ruined room, swaying.
Rook’s sword was still through his body.
Blood was running steadily down the front of his tweed trousers and pooling on the floor around his good brown shoes.
He looked down at it as though he had only just noticed.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh, dear.”
His knees folded.
He sat down very suddenly in his own blood.
“Rook,” Lucan croaked.
“Get me up.
We have to go.
Now.”
Rook was already beside him, hauling him up by the arm.
Rook’s coat was smoking.
His face was burned down one side, the skin red and blistered and weeping.
But he was on his feet.
“The door’s locked,” he said.
“Then don’t use the door.”
Rook looked at the corner of the room, where the shadows were deepest, behind the fire.
He nodded once.
His arm closed around Lucan’s chest.
“Hold your breath,” he said.
They stepped backward into the dark.
Cold.
Silence.
Pressure.
The black water closed over them like a lid.
Lucan held on.
He couldn’t see Rook, couldn’t feel Rook’s arm around him, couldn’t feel anything at all except the cold and the weight and the faint, fading pulse of his own cracked ribs.
And the things.
The huge, slow shapes turning in the black around them, the way fish turn in deep water.
One of them came close.
He felt it notice them.
It was much closer than last time.
Much bigger.
Its attention moved over them like a cold hand, curious and hungry, and lingered.
And this time, it did more than look.
He felt Rook jerk.
Felt him convulse, all at once, the whole length of his body going rigid.
Somewhere in the silent dark, Rook made a sound.
Lucan had never heard him make a sound like it.
Then they were out.
They fell onto wet cobbles in a pitch-black alley that stank of fish and rot.
Lucan landed on his cracked ribs and screamed.
Rook landed beside him and didn’t make a sound at all.
Lucan rolled over.
Rook was lying on his back on the cobbles, staring up at the glowing smog.
His mouth was open.
His breath was coming in short, shallow gasps.
And his right leg, from the knee down, was black.
Not burned.
Not bruised.
Black.
The black of the shadows they’d just come through.
As though the leg had been dipped in ink.
Black from the knee to the ankle, and the edges of the black were moving.
Creeping.
Very slowly, like frost spreading across a windowpane, the darkness was spreading up his thigh.
“It bit me,” Rook said.
His voice was very small.
“Lucan.
It bit me.”
[ Bound Servant ROOK — Status: SHADOW-BITTEN.
]
[ Condition: Progressive.
Untreated, the shadow will consume the bearer within 14 to 20 days.
]
[ Treatment: Tier III or above.
(LOCKED — Requires Rank 2.) ]
They got back to Hob’s Cross an hour later, in another cab, with Rook stretched across the seat moaning and Lucan holding him down.
The shop was wrecked.
The great bow window had been smashed in.
Every one of the old carboys lay shattered on the floor of the shop, and the coloured water had run together across the boards and dried in streaks: ruby and emerald and sapphire, like a broken rainbow.
The shelves had been torn down.
The hundreds of little wooden drawers had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor, and their contents trampled into a paste of powders and herbs and broken glass.
In the middle of the wreckage stood Abel Greaves.
He was seventy-three years old and barely five feet tall.
He was in his nightshirt, with a dressing gown over the top and his green spectacles askew on his nose.
And he was holding Ottilie Brask’s old blunderbuss in both his shaking hands, pointed at the door.
“Oh,” he said, when Lucan and Rook staggered in. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“It’s you.
Thank heavens.” He lowered the gun.
It was nearly as long as he was.
“They came about an hour ago.
Six of them.
With hammers.
I’m afraid I hid behind the counter until they’d done the shop.
But when they started up the stairs toward the girls, I found Mrs.
Brask’s gun under Miss Talcott’s bed.” He looked down at it with mild surprise.
“I haven’t fired a gun since I was twenty.
I’m fairly sure I missed.
But it made a very loud noise and quite a large hole in the stairwell, and they went away.”
Wren appeared at the top of the stairs.
She was holding a carving knife.
Nell was behind her, holding a poker.
They both stopped when they saw Rook’s leg.
The Constables came at dawn.
Lucan had sent for them himself.
He’d sat on the stairs with his ribs strapped and a cold cloth on his face and made himself think about it, coldly, the way he’d once thought about a set of books.
The shop had been attacked by a gang.
In front of witnesses.
On a public street.
In the eyes of the law, Mr.
Lucan Aurel Thorne, apothecary, was the victim of a crime.
So Mr.
Thorne would behave like a victim.
There were four Constables in blue coats and helmets, and a sergeant with a notebook.
And with them, lighting a clove cigarette by striking the match on the thumb of her brass hand, Inspector Maren Voss.
She stood in the middle of the wrecked shop and looked around slowly, taking it all in: the broken carboys, the streaks of dried colour across the floor, the trampled powders, the hole in the stairwell.
Then she looked at Lucan, sitting on the stairs with his ribs strapped.
“Mr.
Thorne,” she said.
“Inspector.”
“You’ve had a busy night.”
“I’ve been robbed.”
“So I see.” She walked over to the stairs and looked down at him.
“And where were you while you were being robbed?”
“At the Hanged Bishop.
On Wicker Row.
Trying to discuss a business matter with Mr.
Saul Varney.” Lucan met her eyes.
“His men attacked us.
My bodyguard was badly injured.
We escaped.
We came home and found this.”
“Varney.” Voss’s face didn’t change.
“Saul Varney was brought into the Saint Ivo’s Infirmary three hours ago with a sword wound through the body and a badly broken arm.
He’ll live, apparently.
He won’t say who did it.” She drew on her cigarette.
“Nine of his men are dead.
Three more won’t walk again.
There’s a man with his skull caved in like a soft-boiled egg.”
“That sounds like a very bad fight.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” She looked at him for a long moment.
“Varney’s runners are saying that you’re done in Tallowgate, Mr.
Thorne.
Nobody’s to buy from you or sell to you or carry for you, on pain of having their hands nailed to their own counters.
The word went out last night.”
“I heard.”
“And your warehouse on the river burned to the waterline last night.
With, I’m told, about four hundred silver worth of tea and pepper and brandy inside it.” She blew out a long stream of fragrant smoke.
“Somebody really doesn’t like you, Mr.
Thorne.”
“It would seem so.”
She looked at him a moment longer.
Then she turned to the sergeant.
“Write it up,” she said.
“Malicious damage and assault, by persons known to be associated with Saul Varney of the Hanged Bishop.
Mr.
Thorne is the victim.
I’ll want warrants for every one of Varney’s men we can identify.” She looked back at Lucan.
“That’ll keep them busy for a week or two.
Make them think twice about coming back.”
“Thank you, Inspector.”
“Don’t thank me.” She dropped her cigarette on the ruined floor and ground it out under her boot.
Then she leaned down, close, and spoke quietly enough that only he could hear.
“There’s a woman.
Small.
Straw-coloured hair.
Brassmarket accent.
She came to the Bureau two days ago and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the Pit Nine case.
She wanted to swear a statement.” Voss’s dark eyes held his.
“She says the apothecary on Hob’s Cross is a dead miner named Lucan Marr, living under a false name.
She says she can prove it.”
Lucan said nothing.
“I told her I’d look into it,” said Voss.
She straightened up.
“I’m looking into it.”
She walked out of the shop through the broken window frame, and her Constables followed her, and the shop was quiet again.
That evening, Lucan sat on the floor beside Rook’s bed in the little room under the eaves with the panel open in front of him and the numbers glowing in the dark.
Rook was asleep.
Wren had given him something from the Market to make him sleep.
His face was grey and sweating, and the black on his leg had crept two inches above the knee since the morning, and it was cold to the touch, cold as the bottom of a well.
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
9,800 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
]
[ Clean Currency Balance: 6 Silver.
]
[ Laundering channels: Greaves & Son (DAMAGED — closed).
Varney network (LOST).
River warehouse (DESTROYED).
]
[ Bound Servant ROOK — Shadow-bite progression: 11%.
Estimated time remaining: 13 to 19 days.
]
Six silver.
Two hundred to launder.
One more blood-debt.
And in thirteen days, maybe less, the shadow would reach Rook’s heart.
Nell came in.
She sat down on the floor beside Lucan without asking, the way she always did, and looked at Rook’s sleeping face.
“I know where we can get the last debt,” she said quietly.
Lucan looked at her.
“Gorse,” said Nell.
“He’s still got the nine.
The ones you saw over his head.
Nine pending.” She swallowed.
“I went past Coldwater this morning.
Before the shop opened.
I talked to the girls on the looms.
Some of them knew me.
They said he’s got them locked in the old dye-house behind the mill.
Children.
All bonded to him.
He’s selling them on, the first of next month.
To the Throat.”
“To Shaft Thirty?”
“They take children down there.
To get into the narrow seams.
Where the men can’t fit.” Her voice was steady.
Her hands were not.
“The girls said they don’t come back up.”
Lucan looked at the black creeping up Rook’s leg.
Then at the numbers on the panel.
Then at the silver writing he could still see behind his eyes, whenever he closed them, over Saul Varney’s head.
Default.
She was doing it.
Exactly what she’d promised.
Taking his pipes.
Burning his warehouse.
Breaking his shop.
Taking his allies, one by one.
Pushing him down, and down, until there was nothing left but the debt.
He closed the panel.
“Gorse,” he said.