The dye-house stood behind Coldwater Mill like a tumour behind a heart.
It was an old building, older than the mill itself, a squat, windowless block of soot-black brick on the very edge of the Grise, with a crooked tin chimney and a single iron door.
Once, sixty years ago, it had been where the mill dyed its cloth.
The ground around it was still stained: great blotches of old colour soaked so deep into the earth that rain had never washed them out, sulphur-yellow and copper-green and a rusty, clotted red that looked very much like blood.
At night, it hummed.
Lucan could feel it through the soles of his boots before he could hear it.
A deep, steady, grinding vibration, coming up out of the ground.
The mana-turbine in the cellar.
Gorse kept it running all night, every night, Maren had said, so the noise would drown out the crying.
He lay on his stomach in the long grass on top of the canal embankment, forty yards away, and watched.
It was the first night of Thaw.
A thick, wet fog had come down off the river at sunset and lay over the mill quarter like wet wool, and through it the gas lamps on the canal road were nothing but faint yellow smudges.
It was cold.
Lucan’s breath steamed.
His ribs, strapped tight under his shirt, ached with a dull, steady throb.
Beside him, flat on her stomach in the wet grass, Nell Harlow was shivering.
“You should have stayed home,” he murmured.
“You’d have got lost,” she whispered back.
“You don’t know the mill.
I do.
I worked here for four years.” She didn’t take her eyes off the dye-house.
“And those are my girls in there.
Some of them, anyway.
The girls I worked the looms with.
Their little sisters.” Her jaw was set.
“I’m not staying home.”
He’d argued with her for two days.
Wren had argued with her.
Even Rook, from his bed, grey-faced and sweating, had argued with her.
Nell had listened to all of them with her arms folded and her chin up.
Then she’d said the same thing she was saying now.
They’re my girls.
In the end, Lucan had made her promise.
She would get the children out.
That was all.
She wouldn’t go anywhere near Gorse.
She wouldn’t go anywhere near the guards.
She’d wait until he called, and then she’d go in and bring the children out and take them to the canal, where a covered wagon would be waiting, hired from a carter in Ashfields with clean coin from Madame Orlov.
It would take them to St.
Ivo’s churchyard, where the gin-nosed old priest had agreed, for the price of a new roof on his church, to keep nine children in his crypt for as long as was needed and ask no questions whatsoever.
“There,” Nell breathed.
Two men had come around the corner of the dye-house, walking slowly.
Guards.
They wore heavy coats and carried short cudgels and shuttered lanterns, and one of them had a carbine slung over his back.
They walked to the iron door, checked it, then walked on, around the far corner, out of sight.
Lucan watched the gold words above their heads until they disappeared.
Owes: 22 silver (Gorse).
Is owed: 3 lives.
Owes: 8 silver (gin).
Is owed: 5 lives.
“They come round every quarter of an hour,” Nell whispered.
“Two at a time.
Four pairs.”
“Eight guards,” said Lucan.
“And Gorse.”
“Gorse comes at midnight.
To see them off.
He always does.” Nell’s voice was very small and very hard.
“He likes to watch them get into the wagon.
He gives them each a sweet.
A barley sugar.
Says it’s for the journey.”
Lucan said nothing.
He reached into his coat and took out the thing he had bought in the Market that afternoon, with raw coin, from the very bottom of the Tier I lists.
A bundle of tallow candles, thick and short and greasy, wrapped in waxed paper.
They didn’t look like much.
[ Poppy-Mist Candles (Tier I, Common) — When lit, release a heavy, sweet, sedative smoke that settles low and spreads.
A single candle will render a room’s occupants unconscious within two minutes.
Effects last 2 to 4 hours.
Not lethal at standard doses.
— 6 Copper each.
]
Not lethal at standard doses.
He had read that line very many times.
The turbine had to breathe.
Every mana-turbine did.
It drew air in through an intake and pushed it out through the chimney, and the draught it pulled was strong enough to suck a man’s hat off his head.
Lucan had spent three hours that afternoon, disguised in a mill-hand’s cap and smock, finding where the intake was.
It was on the river side of the dye-house.
An iron grating at ground level, the size of a cellar window, half-hidden by nettles.
“Wait here,” he said to Nell.
“When you hear me whistle, come.”
He went down the embankment in the fog, keeping low.
He reached the river side of the dye-house a minute after the second pair of guards had passed.
The grating was where he had left it.
He could feel the draught pulling at his sleeves as he knelt in the nettles beside it, a steady sucking wind, and he could smell what was coming up out of the cellar with it.
Hot oil.
Burnt mana.
Sweat.
And something underneath, sour and thick and animal, that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
Children.
Locked in the dark for weeks.
He lit six of the candles from a shuttered lamp and pushed them through the grating one by one.
The draught snatched their thick white smoke at once and drew it down into the cellar.
He watched it go.
Then he lit six more.
Then he crouched in the nettles, under the dye-house wall, in the fog, and counted.
At a hundred and twenty, he heard the first guard fall.
A heavy thump, somewhere inside.
A clatter.
A voice saying something confused and slurred.
Then another thump.
At three hundred, there was no sound inside the dye-house at all except the steady grinding hum of the turbine.
He waited for the outside guards.
They came round the corner at the quarter hour, the first pair, swinging their lanterns.
Lucan was waiting for them in the fog beside the iron door with the club in his hand.
He’d thought a great deal about what he was going to do with the guards.
He’d stood in his room above the wrecked shop and looked at the panel, at the gold words he’d memorised above each of their heads.
Is owed: 3 lives.
5 lives.
2 lives.
4 lives.
They were Gorse’s men.
They’d walked children to the wagon every month for years.
He had decided he wasn’t going to think about it any more than that.
The first guard died without seeing him.
The club came out of the fog and took him at the temple, and the Second Form put the weight of an anvil behind it, and his skull broke like a dropped plate.
The second guard got half a shout out.
Lucan caught him by the throat before he could finish it and crushed his windpipe one-handed and held him against the wall while his heels drummed on the stained earth.
The other two pairs went the same way.
Quickly.
Quietly.
In the fog.
Lucan dragged the bodies into the nettles by the river and stood over them for a moment, breathing hard.
His ribs were screaming.
There was blood on his hands, warm and sticky, and blood on his coat, and a smell of it in his nose.
He waited for something to feel.
Nothing came.
Just the cold, and the fog, and the hum of the turbine through the ground.
He wiped his hands on the wet grass and went back to the iron door.
It was locked.
He’d expected that.
But he could break one.
He put his shoulder to the door and pushed.
The Rank-1 dividend.
The Second Form.
Weeks of breathing the mana of Grisholt down into his bones until they were dense as iron.
The door groaned.
The hinges shrieked.
Then the lock tore out of the frame with a sound like a gunshot and the door swung inward, and a wave of heat and white smoke and stink rolled out over him.
He pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose, soaked in a Tier I counter-tincture that smelled of vinegar and pine, and went in.
The inside of the dye-house was one long, low room, lit by a few mana-lamps hanging from the rafters.
The air was thick with the sweet white poppy-smoke, drifting in slow layers.
The floor was stone, stained in great overlapping blotches of old dye.
There were vats along one wall: huge round wooden tubs, taller than a man, long empty and rotting.
Four guards lay on the floor among the smoke, snoring.
At the far end, there was a staircase going down.
The hum came up it.
So did the heat.
He went down.
The cellar was the size of a church, and it was full of the turbine.
It sat in the middle of the floor like a great iron beast crouching in its den: a huge, squat, round housing of black-riveted iron, twice the height of a man, with a vast flywheel turning slowly on one side and fat copper pipes running from it up into the ceiling.
A core of bone-coal glowed blue through the grilles in its side, and the whole machine thrummed with a deep, steady vibration that Lucan could feel in his teeth.
And around the walls, in the flickering blue light, were the cages.
They were iron.
Each one was about the size of a wardrobe, with bars as thick as a man’s thumb.
There were twelve of them.
Nine had children in.
They were lying on the floor of the cages in the poppy-smoke, asleep.
Boys and girls, all small, all thin, all filthy, all in the same grey mill-smocks.
The youngest couldn’t have been more than six.
The oldest, maybe eleven.
One little girl had curled up with her arms around a rag doll that had no face.
A boy had fallen asleep with his fingers wrapped around the bars, as though he’d been trying to pull them apart.
Lucan stood in the middle of the cellar and looked at them.
Then he looked at the three empty cages, and at the scratches on the inside of their bars, low down, at a child’s height, and at the dark stains on their floors.
He stood there for a long time.
Then he went and knelt beside the first cage and broke the lock.
He had broken five of the locks when he heard the voice.
“Well, well, well.”
He turned.
Jebediah Gorse stood at the bottom of the cellar stairs.
He was wearing his mustard waistcoat and a thick fur-collared overcoat, and his round pink face was damp and shining in the blue light.
He held a handkerchief pressed over his mouth and nose.
It was soaked in something; Lucan could smell it from across the cellar, sharp and chemical.
A counter-tincture, like his own.
Gorse had come prepared.
He had a small paper bag in his other hand.
Barley sugars.
Nine of them.
And behind him, on the stairs, something else was coming down.
It was a man.
Or it had been one.
It was huge, seven feet tall at least, and almost as wide, hunched under the low cellar ceiling.
It was naked to the waist, and its skin was grey and hairless and stretched tight over a body that was all slabs of muscle.
And along its spine, from the base of its skull to the small of its back, set into the flesh like the studs on a door, there was a row of bone-coal nodes.
They glowed a faint, dirty blue.
It was the same thing the Concern did to its mana-hounds.
Somebody had done it to a man.
Above its head, Lucan’s eyes read: Owes: everything (Gorse, Jebediah).
Is owed: 31 lives.
[ Altered.
]
“I wondered when you’d come,” Gorse said through his handkerchief.
“You don’t forget a face like yours.
Grey eyes.
Like a dead man’s.” His little red mouth smiled behind the cloth.
“That copper bitch with the brass hand dragged half the Bureau off to a warehouse fire in Brassmarket tonight.
All of them.
Even the sergeant on Grise Bridge.
I thought, now, isn’t that strange.
Isn’t that a coincidence.” He shook his head.
“I’ve been doing this for nine years, boy.
I know what it looks like when someone wants me to be alone.”
Lucan stood up slowly.
“This is Brutus,” said Gorse fondly, patting the grey thing’s arm.
“Lord Teague gave him to me.
A present, after the business with the copper’s hand.
Brutus doesn’t feel pain.
Doesn’t feel much of anything.
Brutus does what he’s told.” He stepped aside.
“Brutus.
Break his legs.
Then his arms.
Then bring him to me.”
The grey thing came at him.
It was the worst fight of Lucan’s life.
Brutus didn’t move like a man.
He moved like a landslide: slow to start, and then impossible to stop.
His first blow hit Lucan’s raised forearm and Lucan felt both bones crack.
His second hit Lucan in the chest, and the ribs that had been broken at the Hanged Bishop broke again, all of them at once, and he flew backward and hit the iron housing of the turbine and slid down it with his mouth full of blood.
He rolled.
A fist the size of a ham smashed into the floor where his head had been and cracked the flagstones.
He got up.
He swung the club with his good arm and hit Brutus in the knee with every ounce of strength he had.
It was a blow that would have shattered any man’s leg.
Brutus’s knee bent the wrong way, sickeningly, with a wet crack.
Brutus didn’t even look down.
He just kept coming, limping, dragging the leg.
“Smother!”
Black smoke burst out.
Brutus walked through it.
He didn’t need to see.
Lucan could see the blue nodes along his spine glowing through the smoke, brighter now, pulsing.
Like the hound in Pit Nine.
They can smell mana.
They can smell fear.
A hand closed on Lucan’s ankle and swung him like a sack of grain into the wall.
He felt something in his back give.
He hit the floor and couldn’t feel his legs.
For one long, horrifying second, he couldn’t feel his legs at all.
He fumbled in his coat for a Draught.
His fingers found the glass.
The cork.
He got it to his mouth.
Brutus stepped on his hand.
The vial shattered.
Lucan screamed.
Golden liquid ran across the flagstones, mixed with his blood, and was wasted.
The bones of his hand ground together under Brutus’s huge grey heel.
Above him, Brutus’s blank grey face looked down without any expression at all.
“That’s it,” Gorse said from the stairs, comfortably.
“That’s a good boy.”
Then something hit Brutus in the back of the head with a clang like a church bell.
Brutus’s head snapped forward.
He staggered.
His foot came off Lucan’s hand.
Nell Harlow stood behind him with an iron pipe in both hands.
It was one of the turbine’s copper pipes, as long as she was tall, wrenched off its brackets.
Her face was white and wet with tears and absolutely furious, and her scarf was pulled up over her mouth and nose, and she was swinging the pipe again before Brutus could turn around.
It hit him in the same place.
Clang.
One of the bone-coal nodes at the base of his skull cracked.
Blue light spilled out of it.
Brutus turned.
He looked down at her.
“Run.”
She didn’t run.
She lifted the pipe again.
Brutus’s hand came up and swatted the pipe out of her grip as easily as swatting a fly.
It spun away across the cellar and clanged into the cages.
The children inside stirred and whimpered in their drugged sleep.
Brutus reached for Nell.
Lucan opened the panel.
He didn’t look at the Market.
He didn’t look at the Roster.
He went straight to the Ledger and found the entry he’d been staring at every night for weeks.
▸ Gorse, Jebediah — (Recognised on behalf of the Cradles) — 6 lives.
9 lives pending.
— UNCOLLECTED.
And then the one below it.
The one he’d added that afternoon, sitting on the stairs of the wrecked shop.
▸ Gorse, Jebediah — (Recognised on behalf of Ottilie Brask) — 1 life (her sister, 1871).
— UNCOLLECTED.
And then he looked at the thing standing over Nell.
At the gold words above its head.
Owes: everything (Gorse, Jebediah).
Brutus was a debt.
Everything about him.
His body, his mind, his life, all of it owed to Gorse.
Bought and paid for and altered and owned.
He was the same as Varney.
The same as the Bound men.
Owned.
And Gorse owed Lucan sixteen lives.
[ Recognise: the asset known as “Brutus” is held by Gorse, Jebediah, in partial settlement of the debtor’s obligations to the Account Holder?
]
“Yes,” Lucan whispered.
[ Debtor’s assets may be SEIZED against an uncollected blood-debt.
]
[ SEIZE?
]
“Seize.”
Brutus stopped.
His hand was an inch from Nell’s throat.
It stopped there, in the air, and didn’t move.
The blue nodes along his spine flickered.
Dimmed.
Went out, one by one, from the bottom up, like candles being snuffed.
Brutus turned his huge grey head slowly, and looked across the cellar, past Nell, past Lucan, at the man standing at the bottom of the stairs with a bag of barley sugars in his hand.
For the first time, there was something in his face.
Lucan couldn’t have said what.
Recognition, maybe.
Or memory.
Some very small, very distant thing that had been buried a long time ago under all that grey.
Gorse’s pink face had gone white.
“Brutus,” he said.
His voice had gone high and thin.
“Brutus, no.
Brutus, heel.”
Brutus began to walk toward him.
Afterward, Lucan would remember it in pieces.
Gorse dropping the paper bag, and barley sugars skittering across the flagstones like little amber beads.
Gorse trying to run back up the stairs, his great soft body heaving, and slipping on the third step and falling.
Brutus reaching down, almost gently, and picking him up by the back of his fur collar like a man picking up a kitten.
Gorse screaming.
Begging.
Offering money.
A great deal of money.
Every bond he owned.
A house in the country.
Lord Teague’s name, and the names of everyone he’d ever sold a child to.
Brutus carrying him across the cellar to the turbine.
The flywheel was the size of a cartwheel, turning slowly in the blue light, its spokes thick and black and glistening with grease.
Brutus stood in front of it with Gorse held out at arm’s length, kicking and screaming, and looked back over his shoulder at Lucan.
Waiting.
Lucan, lying on the flagstones with his back broken and his hand crushed and blood in his mouth, looked at Gorse.
He thought about Maren Voss’s brass hand, clicking on the back of a chair.
It took them six hours to cut my hand out of the gears.
He thought about a nine-year-old boy called Arden coming to a fence every Sunday.
About scratches on the inside of iron bars, low down, at a child’s height.
He thought about whether he could stop this.
Whether he should.
He thought about it for a long time.
Long enough for Gorse to stop screaming and start sobbing.
“Ottilie Brask had a sister,” Lucan said at last.
His voice was a croak.
It carried anyway.
Gorse’s sobbing stopped.
“What?”
“1871.
Her name’s in my Ledger.
She was killed by you.” Lucan spat blood onto the flagstones.
“I don’t even know her name.
Ottilie never told me.
She never told anyone.” He looked at Brutus.
“That’s all.”
Brutus turned back to the flywheel.
It didn’t take long.
That was the only mercy in it.
The flywheel caught Gorse’s dangling arm first and pulled the rest of him in after it, and the turbine shrieked and juddered and ground, and the blue light flickered wildly, and something sprayed across the cellar ceiling in a long dark fan.
Then the flywheel jammed.
The whole great machine shuddered and screamed and went still, and the hum that had filled the dye-house every night for nine years stopped.
The silence afterward was enormous.
In the cages, the children were waking up.
[ LEDGER: Gorse, Jebediah — 6 lives.
9 lives pending (PREVENTED).
1 life (Brask, sister).
— COLLECTED.
]
[ Third blood-debt collected.
]
[ RANK 2 REQUIREMENTS MET.
]
[ Rank advancement will commence when the Account Holder is stable.
]
[ Current status: CRITICAL.
]
Lucan lay on the cold stone and watched the panel through a narrowing grey tunnel.
He heard Nell’s voice, very far away, calling his name.
He heard small feet on stone.
Children crying.
A little girl’s voice saying Nell?
Nell, is that you?
and Nell sobbing and laughing at the same time.
He heard heavy, slow footsteps coming toward him.
Felt the floor shake.
Brutus stood over him, huge and grey and silent in the flickering blue light, with blood across his chest and his ruined knee bent backward.
He looked down at Lucan with his blank face.
Then he knelt, very carefully, and slid his enormous hands under Lucan’s broken back, and lifted him off the floor as gently as a man lifting a sleeping child.
“Home,” said Brutus.
His voice was deep and slow and rusty, as though he hadn’t used it in years.
“Take you…
home.”
Lucan tried to say something.
He couldn’t remember what.
The tunnel closed, and everything went dark.