He woke up at dawn in a gully of slag with a crow standing on his chest.
The crow looked at him.
He looked at the crow.
It had a piece of something pink in its beak, and Lucan decided, very firmly, that he did not want to know what it was.
“Go away,” he said.
The crow considered this, then hopped down and walked off along the slag with an air of deep offence.
Lucan sat up.
Every part of him hurt, but it was the honest hurt of bruises and strained muscle, not the deep wrongness of broken bones.
The Draughts had done their work.
His left forearm, where the hound had bitten through to the bone, was whole again under the shredded sleeve, the skin shiny and pink and tight, a ragged ring of new scar tissue marking where the teeth had gone in.
He looked down at himself in the grey morning light.
He looked like a dead man.
Or, more accurately, like a man who had been dead for a while and then had a very bad night.
His work-shirt was a black, stiff rag of dried blood, some of it his and a lot of it not.
His trousers were torn at both knees.
He was coated from head to foot in pale bone dust and dark slag-grit, and when he touched his face, his fingers came away red-brown and gritty.
Somewhere in the descent he had lost one boot.
He couldn’t walk into Grisholt like this.
The first Constable who saw him would arrest him on sight, and that would be the end of everything.
He pulled up the panel.
“Market.
Clothing.”
There were hundreds of options.
He chose fast and cheap and forgettable: a dark wool coat with a high collar, grey trousers, a plain shirt, a cap, a pair of sturdy boots that actually fit.
A towel.
A canteen of clean water.
A loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese and an apple.
The apple stopped him for a moment.
It was red and shining, and when he held it up to his nose, it smelled of sugar and cold air.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten fresh fruit.
Some festival when he was a child, maybe, before his mother died.
He ate the apple first, slowly, core and all.
Then the bread and the cheese, so fast that he nearly made himself sick.
Then he washed in a pool of rainwater at the bottom of the slag gully.
It was black with soot and stank of sulphur, and he scrubbed at himself until his skin was raw, and he dried off with the towel, put on his new clothes, and stuffed the bloodstained rags into a hollow in the slag and kicked grit over them.
When he was done, he looked at his reflection in the dark water.
A thin young man looked back.
Too thin.
Hollow under the cheekbones, with skin that had not seen the sun in six years and dark hair that hung past his ears, ragged where he had cut it himself with a borrowed knife.
His eyes were the strangest part.
They had always been grey, but now there was something in them he didn’t recognise.
A stillness.
The look of something waiting.
“Right,” he said to the reflection.
“Let’s go and make some money.”
The problem, as he walked into the city through the waking streets of the Ashfields ward, was simple.
He had all the money in the world, and none of it was clean.
The Exchequer had made it very clear.
Raw coin would buy him food, clothes and cheap equipment straight from the Market.
That kept him alive.
But it wouldn’t get him to Rank 1, and Rank 1 was where everything that mattered began: the Roster, the spells, the second tier of the Market.
To rank up, he had to settle a Ledger debt.
And to settle a debt in the real world, to pay off anything, he needed threaded coin.
Real coin, from the real economy, with the king’s mana woven through it.
So the shape of the problem was the shape of every laundering scheme he had ever taken apart in his old life.
He had dirty money.
He needed clean money.
In between, he needed an exchange: something he could buy with raw coin and sell for clean coin, through someone who wouldn’t ask too many questions.
The Market had the goods.
He had the coin to buy them.
What he needed was a buyer.
And he knew exactly where to find one.
Tallowgate was the oldest ward in the lower city.
Once, three hundred years ago, it had been where the candle-makers worked, and the streets still smelled faintly of animal fat under the coal smoke.
Now it was a crooked tangle of narrow lanes and overhanging upper storeys, so close together that the buildings almost met above the streets, and the shops at street level sold everything that respectable people didn’t want to be seen buying: second-hand coats with suspicious stains, false teeth, used coffins, love philtres that didn’t work and poisons that did.
Brask & Daughter was on Needle Lane, wedged between a tattooist and a shop that sold nothing but glass eyes.
Lucan had been here once before.
He’d been thirteen, the week after his father died, and he’d come with his father’s silver pocket-watch wrapped in a handkerchief, and he’d stood at the counter shaking while the old woman behind it turned the watch over in her fingers.
She’d given him eleven copper for it.
He had found out later that it was worth forty.
He’d hated her for that for years.
Now, walking up to the green-painted door, he found that he didn’t hate her at all.
She’d given a frightened child eleven copper and hadn’t called the Debt Marshals.
In Grisholt, that counted as charity.
The bell over the door gave a cracked, sour little jangle.
The inside of Brask & Daughter was dark and cramped and smelled of camphor, old leather and pipe smoke.
Every wall was lined floor to ceiling with shelves, and every shelf was crammed with other people’s lives: pocket-watches, wedding rings, false legs, silver hairbrushes, a stuffed owl wearing a little hat, a sword with a broken blade, a whole case of dentures grinning in neat rows.
Somewhere behind it all, a clock was ticking slightly out of time with every other clock in the room.
“We’re closed,” said a voice from behind the counter.
“Your sign says open.”
“My sign is a liar.
Like most things in this ward.” A figure rose up from behind the counter, where she had apparently been sitting on a stool doing something with a jeweller’s loupe and a pair of tweezers.
“What do you want?”
Ottilie Brask was a small woman.
She could not have been five feet tall.
She was somewhere past sixty, with a face like a walnut and a cloud of iron-grey hair pinned up with what appeared to be several pencils and a knitting needle.
She wore a man’s waistcoat over a green dress, half-moon spectacles on a chain, and a short clay pipe clamped in the corner of her mouth.
Her left eye was dark brown and very sharp.
Her right eye was glass, and it was blue.
She looked him up and down with the brown one.
The blue one looked at a point somewhere over his left shoulder.
“Saint’s teeth,” she said.
“You look like a corpse.”
“I’ve been told.”
“I mean it.
You look like they dug you up.” She squinted.
“I know you.
Don’t I?
I never forget a face.
I forget names, dates, where I put my teeth, but I never forget a face.” She took the pipe out of her mouth and pointed the stem at him.
“Silver watch.
Engraved case.
A little crying boy in a cap.
Five, six years ago.”
“Six.”
“Six.” She put the pipe back.
“I cheated you.”
“You did.”
“I cheat everyone.
It’s the family business.
Says so on the sign.” She shrugged.
“Well?
You come back to complain?
Because I sold that watch years ago, sweetheart, and I’m not giving you the money back.”
“I came to sell you something.”
The brown eye narrowed.
“What?”
Lucan reached into his coat and took out the thing he had bought on the walk over, in a dark alley in the Ashfields, with forty raw silver.
He set it on the counter.
It was a small, thick-walled glass vial, corked and sealed with wax.
Inside, the liquid glowed like melted gold.
In the gloom of the shop, it threw a warm soft light across the counter and lit up Ottilie Brask’s face from below.
She didn’t touch it.
She didn’t say anything.
She took the pipe out of her mouth and laid it carefully on the counter beside the vial.
Then she reached up, plucked out her glass eye with two fingers, and began to polish it slowly on her waistcoat.
Lucan had the strong feeling that this was what Ottilie Brask did when she was thinking very hard.
“Where,” she said at last, “did you get that?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters a great deal, sweetheart.
It matters a very great deal.” She popped the eye back in.
It went in slightly crooked, so that now it was looking at the ceiling.
“Because unless I’m much mistaken, which I’m not, that’s a saint-grade restorative.
And the only people in Grisholt who make saint-grade restoratives are the Brotherhood of the Hollow Saint, up in the Cathedral Infirmary, where they sell them to the Spire families for two hundred silver a bottle and keep the recipe locked in a vault guarded by monks with flamethrowers.” She tilted her head.
“So either you broke into the Cathedral, which I don’t believe, because you’re still alive.
Or you stole it from someone who bought it, which I also don’t believe, because the kind of person who buys these doesn’t let little corpse-boys in the same room as them.
Or—”
“Or,” Lucan said, “I can make them.”
She looked at him for a long time.
“Can I test it?”
“Go ahead.”
She went into the back.
He heard the clatter of drawers, the clink of glass, a muttered curse.
She came back with a small wire cage.
Inside was a rat.
It was missing a hind leg, cleanly, as though it had been cut off with a blade, and the stump was raw and weeping.
“Bit of trap trouble,” she said, catching his look.
“Don’t fret.
He was going to die anyway.”
She broke the wax seal with her thumbnail, eased out the cork, and tipped one single golden drop onto the rat’s stump.
The rat screamed.
It was a horribly human sound, high and thin.
It thrashed against the wire, and the stump of its leg began to move, the raw meat bubbling and knitting.
Then, as Ottilie Brask and Lucan watched, bone pushed out from the stump, pale and wet.
Muscle wrapped around the bone.
Skin and fur rolled down over the muscle.
In thirty seconds, the rat had four legs.
It sat in the bottom of the cage, panting.
Then it washed its face with its new paw.
Ottilie Brask put the cork back in the vial very carefully.
“One drop,” she said quietly.
“One drop, and it grew a leg.”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t saint-grade.
This is better than saint-grade.
The Brotherhood’s stuff can close a wound.
It can’t grow a bloody leg.” She looked up at him, and for the first time, both her eyes seemed to be pointing in the same direction.
“What are you?”
“A businessman,” Lucan said.
“What will you give me for it?”
They haggled for an hour.
Lucan had expected her to cheat him, and she tried, and she was very good at it.
She started at thirty silver and explained, with a great deal of feeling, how difficult it would be to move such an item.
How dangerous.
How the Brotherhood had spies in every ward and how the Thread Office watched the potion trade like a cat watching a mousehole.
How she was an old woman with a weak heart and no one to support her in her twilight years.
“Your sign says ‘& Daughter,'” Lucan said.
“There’s no daughter.
I made her up.
Customers trust a family business.” She leaned on the counter.
“Forty.”
“A hundred and fifty.”
“You’re mad.”
“You just told me the Brotherhood sells inferior work for two hundred.”
“To the Spire families!
Who are mad!
Do I look like I sell to the Spire?
Look at this shop!
I have a stuffed owl in a hat!” She threw up her hands.
“Sixty.”
In his old life, Lucan had sat in on hundreds of negotiations.
He had watched lawyers and bankers and very rich men try to make each other blink.
He had learned that the person who wins is usually the one who cares least about the outcome.
He didn’t care.
That was the secret.
He could make another bottle in two seconds.
He could make a hundred.
But Ottilie didn’t know that.
And he wasn’t going to tell her yet.
“I can bring you more,” he said.
“Regularly.
Not just this.
Other things.
Medicines the Brotherhood doesn’t make.
Things the Spire would kill for.
But I need a seller who knows how to move them quietly, who knows the Thread Office’s habits, who can make sure none of it traces back to me.
And I need paying in threaded coin.
Clean.
Every copper of it.”
She went still.
“How much more?”
“As much as you can sell.”
The glass eye came out again.
More polishing.
A long, thoughtful silence.
“Ninety,” she said finally.
“For this one.
Paid now, clean silver.
And thirty percent of everything I sell on your behalf after it, my commission, for the risk and the trouble.”
“Twenty percent.”
“Twenty-five, and I’ll tell you a few things about the Thread Office that’ll keep you from getting burned alive in Cathedral Square within the month.”
Lucan held out his hand.
She looked at it.
Then she spat in her own palm and shook it, hard.
Her grip was like an iron clamp.
“Corpse,” she said, “I think this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
She counted out the coins on the counter from an iron box she kept under the floorboards behind the stuffed owl.
Ninety silver marks, in neat stacks of ten.
Lucan picked one up and turned it to the light.
It looked almost exactly like the coins the Mint made for him.
Same weight, same stamp, same stern profile of King Aldric the Fourth.
But when he held it close and breathed the Ironmarrow way, slow and deep, he could feel it.
A thread.
A faint, cold, humming line of mana running through the heart of the metal like a vein, alive and watchful.
The king’s mana.
In every coin in the kingdom.
He wondered, not for the first time, how much power that took.
And who exactly was paying for it.
The panel flickered at the edge of his vision.
[ CLEAN CURRENCY acquired: 90 Silver Marks.
]
[ Exchequer Balance (Clean): 90 Silver ]
“So,” Ottilie said, filling her pipe from a battered tin.
“What are you going to do with it all?
Buy a house?
A girl?
A nice hat?
You need a hat.
That cap’s a crime.”
“I’m going to pay off a debt.”
“Whose?”
Lucan was quiet for a moment.
“A friend’s,” he said.
“He died yesterday.
In Pit Nine.”
Ottilie paused with a match halfway to her pipe.
“Pit Nine,” she repeated.
“That’s Fennick’s pit.
That’s Varga’s.” Something passed over her walnut face, quick and hard.
“I heard there was a mining accident there yesterday.
Two dead, they said.
The Concern posted the names this morning at the Debt Office.”
“Two.”
“A Harlow and a Marr.” The match burned down to her fingers.
She shook it out without looking.
“Lucan Marr.
That’s you, isn’t it, corpse?
You’re the Marr.”
He said nothing.
“Well,” she said at last, very softly.
“That does explain the face.”
She lit her pipe.
For a while they both stood there in the gloom among the ticking clocks, and neither of them said anything.
“The Harlow boy’s next of kin,” Lucan said eventually.
“The debt transfers to them.
Do you know where—”
“Mill quarter.
I saw the transfer list.” She blew out a long stream of smoke.
“Sister.
Nell Harlow.
Fifteen years of age.
Works the looms at Coldwater Mill.
Inherits two hundred and eighty silver marks of her brother’s debt, plus a ten-lash disciplinary fee the Concern’s added on top, payable in labour.” She tapped her pipe against the counter.
“They’ve sold the contract already, sweetheart.
They do it fast with the young ones.
A mill-master called Gorse bought it at auction this morning.
He collects at sundown.”
“What does Gorse do with them?”
Ottilie looked at him with her brown eye, and her blue eye looked at nothing at all.
“Nothing you’d want done to your sister,” she said.
Lucan walked out of Brask & Daughter into the narrow grey daylight of Needle Lane with ninety silver in his coat and a name in his head.
Nell.
He felt in his pocket for something to hold onto and found, instead, a folded square of card that he didn’t remember putting there.
He took it out.
It was a ration card, old and greasy, of the kind they handed out in Pit Nine for soup.
On the back, in faint pencil, in a crooked, cheerful, terrible hand, someone had written a poem.
He recognised the handwriting at once.
It must have been in his old boot.
He must have moved it to his new coat that morning without noticing, the way you move things from pocket to pocket without thinking.
There once was a man down a hole, Who dug up the bones of a troll.
He said, “Well that’s grim, But at least it’s not him—” And then Varga came and took his soul.
Under it, smaller, squeezed in at the bottom:
Doesn’t scan.
Will fix it later.
Don’t tell Nell I’m writing these, she says they’re awful.
— D.
Lucan stood in the middle of Needle Lane and read it three times.
People pushed past him, muttering.
A cart rattled by.
Somewhere a church bell rang the hour.
Then he folded the card very carefully and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, over his heart.
[ Sundown in: 7 hours, 14 minutes ]
He started walking toward the mill quarter.