Brassmarket was where Grisholt kept its middle.
It sat on the slopes below the Spire like a step on a staircase: too high for the smoke to be truly unbearable, too low for the air-wardens to bother with.
Here lived the managers, the bankers, the senior clerks, the doctors and lawyers and engineers, all the men who kept the great machine of the city turning for the families in the towers above them.
The streets were wide and paved and lit by tall brass gas lamps that gave the district its name.
The houses stood back from the street behind iron railings, tall and narrow and respectable, built of pale stone that had long since gone the colour of weak tea.
Edmund Varga lived at Number 14, Lantern Crescent.
Lucan and Rook watched it for five nights.
They took turns.
They watched from a coffee house across the street, from the roof of a bank, from the back of a hired cab with the blinds drawn.
They learned the house the way Lucan had once learned a company’s accounts: line by line, looking for the gap where something didn’t add up.
Varga left every morning at the seventh bell in a black carriage and came back every evening at the sixth.
He dined alone.
He went to bed at eleven.
His house was run by a housekeeper, a cook, two maids and a footman, all of whom went home at nine except the footman, who slept in the basement.
There were bars on the ground-floor windows.
There were bells on the doors.
And there was one other person in the house.
One who never left.
They saw him on the third night.
Rook spotted him first, from the roof of the bank: a shape standing at an upstairs window, perfectly still, looking out at the street.
A tall, thin man with a shaved head, in a long black coat buttoned to the throat.
He stood there for an hour without moving.
Then the curtain fell back, and he was gone.
“I don’t like him,” Rook said.
Lucan had seen him too.
Even at that distance, with his new eyes, he had been able to read the gold words that hung above the man’s head.
They had made him go cold.
Owes: nothing.
Is owed: 211 lives.
“His name’s Silas Crane,” Ottilie said the next morning.
She was behind the counter, sorting a box of wedding rings.
She didn’t look up.
“They call him the Tallyman.
He’s a hemomancer.
A blood-mage.
They’re illegal in the Ashen Crown, have been for a hundred years, but the Spire families keep a few of them anyway, the way rich men keep tigers.
You hire one when you want someone dead and you want it to look like their heart gave out in their sleep.” She held a ring up to the light, frowned at it and dropped it in a different pile.
“Crane’s the best there is.
Or the worst.
He works for whoever pays most.
Right now that’s apparently Varga.”
“Why the Tallyman?” asked Nell.
She was sitting on the stairs with a cup of tea, listening.
Lucan had tried to keep her out of these conversations, and she had made it very clear, with words that had cost her four copper on Ottilie’s wall, that she was going to listen to anything she liked.
Ottilie hesitated.
Then she pushed up the sleeve of her dress and drew a line across her own forearm with one finger.
Then another.
And another.
“He keeps count,” she said.
“On his skin.
With a knife.
Every one he kills.
They say his arms are white from wrist to shoulder with scars, so many you can’t see the skin between.
They say he started on his legs when he ran out of room.”
The shop was quiet for a moment.
The clocks ticked.
“I’ve seen him,” Lucan said.
“Two hundred and eleven.”
Ottilie’s brown eye came up and fixed on him.
“How,” she said slowly, “could you possibly know that?”
Lucan didn’t answer.
Ottilie looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at Rook, who was sitting on the counter eating an onion like an apple.
Then she shook her head and went back to her rings.
“I don’t want to know,” she said.
“I’ve decided.
Whatever you are, corpse, whatever he is, whatever’s going on up in that room of yours at night with the gold light under the door, I don’t want to know.
I’m old.
My heart’s weak.
Just don’t get Crane’s attention.” She threw a ring into the pile so hard it bounced.
“Because if you get his attention, there won’t be enough of either of you left to bury.”
They went in on the sixth night.
The plan was Lucan’s, and it was simple, because in his experience simple plans were the only ones that worked.
Crane stood guard over the house, but he couldn’t guard every room at once.
He spent most of the night on the second floor, near Varga’s bedroom.
The study, where Varga kept his papers, was on the first floor, at the back.
Rook would go in through the shadows.
Lucan would wait outside with the cab.
Rook would find the red book and bring it out.
If anything went wrong, Rook would stitch out the way he’d come.
“In and out,” Lucan said.
“Don’t fight.
Don’t kill anyone.
Especially not Crane.”
“You’re no fun,” said Rook.
But when Lucan had shown him the plan, Rook had shaken his head.
“No,” he’d said.
“I can get into the study.
But I can’t read your language, and I’m not going to know which red book is the right red book.
And if there’s a safe, I need to be able to tell whether what’s in it is worth taking, or whether it’s a trap.” He had tapped his temple.
“You’re the one who reads ledgers, Paymaster.
You need to come in with me.”
Lucan had argued.
Rook had won.
So now it was four hours past midnight, and Lucan was standing in an alley behind Lantern Crescent with his back pressed against cold, wet stone.
The alley was pitch black, and the gas lamps of the street beyond threw their light across its mouth in long yellow bars.
He was wearing dark clothes from the Market, soft-soled shoes and gloves, and he had a small canvas bag over his shoulder.
His heart was beating very hard.
Rook stood beside him in the dark, eating a pear.
“Do you have to eat that now?”
“I’m nervous,” Rook said.
“When I’m nervous, I eat.” He finished the pear in two bites and threw the core over his shoulder.
“Ready?”
“No.”
“Good.
Nobody’s ever ready.” Rook put his hand on Lucan’s shoulder.
His grip was very strong.
“Hold your breath.
Don’t let go of me.
And whatever you see in there, don’t scream.
It upsets the shadows.”
“What do you mean, upsets the—”
Rook stepped backward into the darkness, and pulled Lucan with him.
It was like falling into cold ink.
There was no light.
There was no sound.
There was no up or down or near or far.
There was only cold, total and complete, and a terrible pressure on every inch of his skin, as if he had been dropped to the bottom of a deep black lake.
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t move.
He couldn’t feel his own body.
The only real thing in the whole world was the weight of Rook’s hand on his shoulder.
And there were things in the dark.
He couldn’t see them.
He knew they were there anyway.
Huge, slow shapes, turning in the black around him, the way fish turn in deep water.
One of them came close.
He felt it notice him.
He felt its attention move over him like a cold hand, curious and hungry.
Then he was out.
He was on his knees on a soft carpet, in a dark room that smelled of furniture polish and pipe smoke, retching silently, and Rook was crouching beside him with one hand still on his shoulder.
“Told you,” Rook whispered.
“Don’t scream.”
“The shadows.” Rook shrugged.
“There are things that live in them.
They don’t usually bother you.
Don’t worry about it.”
“You said—”
“Shh.”
They were in the study.
Lucan’s tincture-sharpened eyes picked it out in the faint grey light that leaked through the gap in the curtains.
It was a long, rich, dark room, panelled in black wood, with a big leather-topped desk at one end and a fireplace at the other.
Shelves of books.
A globe.
A brass orrery of the moons, motionless on a side table.
Over the mantel hung a portrait of a severe old woman in black silk, with a face like a hatchet and pale grey eyes.
Varga’s mother, Lucan guessed.
He got to his feet and went to the desk.
It was very neat.
Varga was a neat man.
There was a blotter, a pen-stand, an inkwell shaped like a crouching lion and a stack of correspondence tied with ribbon.
There were two red ledgers lying side by side on the left-hand corner, exactly parallel to the edge of the desk.
Lucan opened the first one.
He knew within thirty seconds that it was the public book.
Production figures for Pit Nine, tonnage, wages, bond values, death-in-service reports.
All neat.
All clean.
All signed and countersigned.
A perfect set of books, the kind of books any auditor in either world would nod at and pass over.
Too perfect.
He opened the second.
It was the same.
A duplicate copy, for the Concern’s head office.
He closed both of them and stood very still, thinking.
A man like Varga always keeps two sets of books.
That’s what he had told Rook.
One for the people above him.
One for himself.
So where was the second set?
Not on the desk.
Varga wouldn’t leave the real book lying around where his housekeeper could dust it.
He looked around the study.
The shelves.
The globe.
The portrait.
The portrait.
He went to the fireplace.
He reached up and took hold of the heavy gilded frame, and lifted it gently away from the wall.
Behind it was a safe.
It was small and square and heavy, set into the stone of the chimney breast, with a brass dial in the middle of its door.
Lucan looked at it, and his heart sank.
Rook came and stood beside him and looked at it too.
“Ah,” Rook said.
“One of those.”
“Can you open it?”
“Of course I can open it.
I used to be a pirate.
Pirates open safes for a living.
That’s what makes us pirates instead of sailors.” He pressed his ear to the door and began to turn the dial, very slowly, listening.
“It’ll take a few minutes.”
“We don’t have a few minutes.”
“Then it’ll take a few minutes we don’t have.” Rook closed his eyes.
The dial clicked.
Clicked.
Clicked.
“Talk to me.
It helps me concentrate.”
“About what?”
“Anything.
Tell me about your old life.”
Lucan opened his mouth to refuse.
Then he found himself, standing in the dark in a stranger’s house with his heart in his throat, telling him.
About the white-walled office.
About the glowing screens.
About the river of traffic outside the windows, honking all day and all night, and the monsoon rains that came every summer and turned the streets into rivers.
About his mother, who had sold vegetables.
About the cancer, and the hospital, and the beeping.
Rook listened and turned the dial.
Click.
“You were a sort of priest,” Rook said softly.
“A priest of numbers.
Finding the sins hidden in the books.”
“Something like that.”
Click.
“And you died, and you came here, and you found the same sins.
In different books.”
“Yes.”
Click.
The safe door swung open.
Inside was a single book.
It was small, much smaller than the other two, and bound not in red leather but in black.
There was nothing written on the cover.
Lucan took it out and opened it, and began to read by the faint grey light from the window.
He turned the pages quickly, his eyes running down the columns, and he felt his breathing change.
It was all there.
Every single thing he had suspected, and more besides.
The first section was bone-coal.
Varga had been running a second, secret line out of Pit Nine for at least eight years: high-grade bone-coal, written off in the public book as “spoil,” as waste rock, and dumped on the slag heaps.
Except it wasn’t dumped.
It was loaded onto barges at night and sold to a smelting works in the river district for half its value.
The profit, after the smelter took its cut, went into an account at the Holloway Loan Society under a false name.
The numbers were enormous.
In eight years, Varga had stolen more from the Fennick Mining Concern than most men in Grisholt would earn in a hundred lifetimes.
The second section was worse.
It was a list of names.
Bondsmen.
Each one had a date beside it, and a debt value, and the name of a next of kin.
And beside each one, in Varga’s neat, small handwriting, was a single word.
Deserted.
Lucan read the list.
He read it twice.
And he understood.
When a bondsman died in the pit, under the Crown’s mine-safety laws, the company paid a fine.
A big fine, per head.
And the debt died with the bondsman, unless there was next of kin to inherit it.
But when a bondsman deserted, when he simply ran, there was no fine.
And his debt didn’t die.
It was still owed.
It passed to his family.
And the family could be chased for it forever.
Varga hadn’t been reporting his dead as dead.
He’d been reporting them as runaways.
He’d been throwing their bodies down the spoil chute, so there would be no corpse for anyone to find, and writing Deserted next to their names, and saving the Concern the fines.
Then he’d been selling their families’ debts privately, at auction, to men like Gorse, and pocketing the money.
There were forty-three names on the list.
Lucan’s hands were shaking.
He forced them still.
He turned the page.
There was one more name, at the very end.
On a page of its own, in older ink, faded almost brown with time.
Marr, Tobias.
Rail-yard clerk, Fennick Eastern Sidings.
Observed the night loading.
Debt engineered via Holloway: 480.
Accident arranged.
Son bonded to Pit Nine.
The word Settled had been underlined, once, very neatly.
Lucan stood in the dark study and looked at his father’s name for a long time.
He had always known, somewhere, that the accident hadn’t been an accident.
Every bondsman in Grisholt had a story like that, a father or a brother or a husband who’d died suddenly and conveniently with a debt on his back.
You learned not to think about it, because thinking about it didn’t change anything.
But he’d never imagined it would be written down.
In neat, small handwriting, in a black book, in a safe behind a portrait of someone’s mother.
Settled.
“Lucan,” Rook said quietly.
He didn’t move.
“Lucan.” Rook’s hand came down on his shoulder, hard.
“Someone’s coming.”
Lucan heard it then.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Slow, measured, unhurried.
Coming down from the second floor.
He snapped the book shut and shoved it into his bag.
Rook was already closing the safe, spinning the dial, lifting the portrait back into place.
They moved to the darkest corner of the room, beside the shelves, where the shadows were deepest.
Rook’s hand closed on his shoulder again.
“Hold your breath,” he whispered.
The study door opened.
Silas Crane stood in the doorway.
He was even taller than he had looked from across the street, and much thinner, so thin he was almost skeletal, his long black coat hanging from his shoulders as if from a coat-hook.
His head was shaved to the scalp.
His face was pale and hollow and completely without expression, and his eyes were a pale, washed-out pink, like an albino rabbit’s.
He held no lamp.
He didn’t need one.
He stood in the doorway and sniffed the air, the way the mana-hound had sniffed the grate in Pit Nine.
“I smell,” Crane said softly, to no one, “salt.”
He turned his head slowly, and his pink eyes looked straight into the darkest corner of the room.
Straight at them.
“And fear.”
Rook pulled Lucan backward into the shadows.
They didn’t go anywhere.
Something hit the shadows like a hammer.
Lucan felt it: a red flare, a hot, wet pulse of power that burst out from Crane and filled the room like a wave of heat from an opened furnace.
The cold black water of the shadow-world shattered around them like ice, and they fell back out of it and onto the carpet, sprawling.
“Hemomancy,” Crane said.
He hadn’t moved from the doorway.
He was rolling up his left sleeve.
His forearm was covered from wrist to elbow in thin white scars, hundreds of them, so close together that his skin looked like ruled paper.
“Blood calls to blood.
It’s very hard to hide from a man like me in a room full of beating hearts.” He drew a small silver knife from his coat.
“Now, which of you shall I add first?”
He cut his own arm.
One quick, neat line.
The blood didn’t drip.
It rose.
It lifted from the cut in a thin red thread, and the thread twisted and lengthened in the air like a living thing, and then it split into a dozen threads, and every one of them shot across the room at Rook.
Rook moved.
Lucan had never seen anyone move like that.
One moment Rook was on the floor; the next, he was on his feet with his curved sword drawn, and the sword was a silver blur.
It cut through four of the blood-threads, five, six, and each one splashed apart into red droplets that hissed when they hit the carpet.
But there were too many.
Two of them got through.
They wrapped around Rook’s left arm like whips and pulled tight, and Lucan saw them slice through the sleeve and the skin and the muscle underneath, deep, all the way down to the bone.
Rook’s blood sprayed across the bookshelves.
He didn’t cry out.
He grinned.
He spun, cut the threads, and threw a knife.
Crane leaned his head two inches to the left.
The knife thudded into the doorframe beside his ear.
“Very good,” Crane said, and cut his arm again.
Lucan scrambled to his feet.
He had prepared for this.
He had prepared for exactly this, sitting up late in the room above Brask & Daughter, reading through the Tier I spell list, while Rook snored on the floor.
He had bought three spells.
None of them were very powerful.
All of them had been chosen for one thing only: getting out.
He reached for the first one in his mind, the way the system had shown him, and spoke the word.
“Smother.”
Black smoke exploded out of his hands.
It was thick and greasy and choking, the colour of coal, and it poured out of him in a rolling wave that filled the study from floor to ceiling in less than a second.
He couldn’t see Crane.
He couldn’t see Rook.
He couldn’t see his own hands.
He heard Crane cough.
“Rook!” he shouted.
“The window!”
Something hit him hard around the waist, and he was lifted off his feet and carried through the smoke, and then there was a shattering crash and glass everywhere and cold, wet night air.
They were falling.
They fell one floor, and hit the paved back garden of Number 14 Lantern Crescent hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and Rook was already dragging him up and over the back wall into the alley.
Behind them, the whole house was waking up.
Lamps flared in windows.
Someone was shouting.
A bell was ringing.
And standing in the smashed window of the study, in a slowly thinning cloud of black smoke, was a tall thin shape in a long coat.
It didn’t follow them.
It didn’t move.
It just stood there in the shattered frame, looking down at the alley where they’d vanished, and raised one hand to its face.
Lucan, looking back over his shoulder as Rook hauled him around the corner, saw what it was doing.
It was licking its fingers.
Licking the blood off them.
Rook’s blood.
The blood that had sprayed across the bookshelves.
They got back to Tallowgate an hour before dawn.
Rook’s arm was in ribbons.
In the cab, Lucan had wrapped it in strips of his own shirt, and they had both soaked through within a minute.
By the time they stumbled through the back door of Brask & Daughter, Rook’s face had gone the colour of candle wax and he wasn’t grinning any more.
Lucan bought a Saint’s Marrow Draught and poured half of it into the wounds and the other half down Rook’s throat.
Rook bit through a leather belt while the meat of his arm knitted itself back together.
He didn’t scream.
When it was over, he lay on the floor of the back room, panting, and stared up at the ceiling.
“He tasted me,” he said hoarsely.
“Did you see?
At the window.
He tasted me.”
“I saw.”
“A blood-mage with your blood in his mouth.” Rook laughed weakly.
“That’s not good, Lucan.
In Saltreach, we used to say: never let a witch keep your hair, your nails or your blood.
They’ll find you with it.
Wherever you go.”
Lucan sat down on the floor beside him with his back to the wall.
He took the black book out of the canvas bag and held it in his lap.
He didn’t open it.
He just held it, feeling its weight.
In the corner of his vision, the Ledger was glowing.
▸ Varga, Edmund — 1 life (Dez Harlow).
1 life (Lucan Marr, pending).
— UNCOLLECTED.
▸ NEW ENTRY: Varga, Edmund — 1 life (Tobias Marr).
— UNCOLLECTED.
▸ Fennick Mining Concern — 43 lives — UNCOLLECTED.
“We got it,” Rook said, after a while.
“The book.
We got what we came for.”
“We did.”
“Then why do you look like that?”
Lucan didn’t answer.
Upstairs, he could hear the floorboards creak as Nell turned over in her sleep.
Out in the shop, the clocks ticked.
He was thinking about a tall thin man standing in a broken window, licking blood off his fingers.
He was thinking about how far a hemomancer could follow the taste of blood in a single night.