“How far,” Lucan asked, “can a blood-mage track someone?”
It was mid-morning.
Rook was asleep upstairs, snoring like a ship’s foghorn, his arm healed but his face still grey with exhaustion.
Nell was at the counter, glaring at a customer who was trying to sell her a jar of pickled eyes.
And Lucan was in the back room, sitting at Ottilie’s workbench, with the panel open in front of him and the Market spread out across it in gold and bronze.
[ Searching: “blood,” “tracking,” “ward,” “hemomancy” ]
[ Hemomantic Tracking (Information): A blood-mage who has consumed a target’s blood may sense the target’s direction and approximate distance.
Effective range depends on the mage’s power and the freshness of the blood.
Typical duration: 3 to 10 days, fading thereafter.
]
[ Countermeasure: Hollow-Vein Charm (Tier II, Uncommon) — Worn against the skin, it gradually masks the bearer’s blood from hemomantic senses.
Full effect after 72 hours of continuous wear.
— 95 Clean Silver ]
Seventy-two hours.
Three days before the charm would hide Rook completely.
Three days in which Crane could follow the taste of Rook’s blood straight to Needle Lane.
He had a hundred and thirty-two silver in clean coin left.
He bought it.
A small object dropped into his palm: a pendant on a leather cord, a narrow tube of dark grey metal, cold and dull.
When he held it close to his ear, he thought he heard something inside it, very faint, like the sound of blood rushing through veins, only slower and emptier.
He took it upstairs and hung it around Rook’s neck while he slept.
Rook muttered something about his third wife and rolled over.
Thirty-seven silver left.
It wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t nearly enough.
Lucan went back downstairs and opened the black book on the workbench, and started to read again from the beginning.
He read it all morning.
By noon he had covered six sheets of paper with notes in his old-world language, the one nobody in Grisholt could read.
Numbers, dates, names.
Lines connecting them.
Circles around the important ones.
In his old life, this had been his favourite part of the work.
Not the courtroom, not the arrests, not the moment of triumph when the thief was led away in handcuffs.
This.
The quiet hours with a set of books and a pot of coffee, following the money.
Watching it move from one account to another, one name to another, hiding and changing and doubling back on itself, until suddenly the whole shape of the thing stood up out of the numbers at you, clear as a face.
Varga’s shape was standing up now.
The secret bone-coal went to a smelter called Rennick & Crowe, on the river.
Rennick & Crowe paid into an account at the Holloway Loan Society.
The account was in the name of a dead man named E.
Vargasson, almost certainly Varga himself with four letters added.
From that account, money went out in a dozen directions: to a house in the country, to a tailor in the Spire, to a jeweller, to an actress at the Royal Opera.
And to Silas Crane.
Every month.
A very large sum.
But it was the other direction that caught Lucan’s eye.
The money coming in.
Because Holloway Loan Society wasn’t just a bank where Varga hid his stolen money.
According to the black book, Varga owned a quarter of it.
A silent partner.
And Holloway lent money all over the lower city, at monstrous interest, to anyone who needed it.
Shopkeepers.
Gamblers.
Desperate families.
And criminals.
Lucan ran his finger down a list of Holloway’s biggest debtors, copied out in Varga’s neat hand.
Near the top of the list was a name he recognised.
Varney, Saul.
Owes: 9,400 silver.
Overdue.
Collateral: properties on Needle Lane, Tallow Street, Wicker Row.
Lucan sat back on his stool.
Then he started, very slowly, to smile.
“You want to what?” said Ottilie.
“I want to meet Saul Varney.”
“The man who’s had two thugs standing on my corner for a fortnight.”
“Yes.”
“The man who controls every protection racket in Tallowgate, who once had a tailor’s hands nailed to his own counter because the tailor was two days late with a payment.”
“That’s the one.”
Ottilie stared at him.
Then she took out her glass eye and began to polish it so furiously that Lucan was afraid she would wear a hole in it.
“Why,” she said, through gritted teeth, “in the name of every saint who ever lived, hollow or full or somewhere in between, would you want to do that?”
“Because he’s the biggest pipe in Tallowgate,” Lucan said, “and I need a bigger pipe.”
Saul Varney held court in the back room of a pub called the Hanged Bishop, on Wicker Row.
It was a low, smoky, dark-panelled room with a single long table and a fire that never went out, and Varney sat at the head of the table every evening from eight until midnight, receiving visitors, collecting payments and giving orders.
He was not what Lucan had expected.
He’d expected a brute, a bigger, harder version of Gorse’s thugs.
Instead, the man at the head of the table was small and neat and middle-aged, with thinning sandy hair combed carefully over his scalp, round wire spectacles and a mild, pleasant face like a schoolmaster’s.
He wore a brown tweed suit with a green waistcoat.
He was eating a plate of oysters, slowly and carefully, and dabbing his lips with a napkin after each one.
Above his head, Lucan’s eyes read: Owes: 9,400 silver (Holloway).
600 silver (various).
Is owed: 14,220 silver (various).
31 lives.
Rook stood one pace behind Lucan, his hand resting loosely on the hilt of his sword.
There were eight of Varney’s men in the room.
Rook had counted them as they came in, and Lucan had seen him do it, and seen him smile.
“Mr.
Ashby,” Varney said pleasantly.
Lucan had given that name at the door.
It was the first one that had come into his head.
“Please.
Sit.
Can I offer you an oyster?”
“No, thank you.”
“A drink?”
“No.”
“You don’t mind if I continue?
They’re very good today.
Fresh from the estuary.” Varney tipped another oyster down his throat and dabbed his lips.
“So.
You’re the young man who’s been supplying Mrs.
Brask with all these remarkable goods.
The pepper.
The tea.
The restoratives.” He smiled.
“Pickett tells me you’re a dead man.”
“Pickett’s mistaken.”
“Pickett usually is.
It’s why I keep him around.
Makes me feel clever.” Varney set down the oyster shell and steepled his fingers.
“Well, Mr.
Ashby.
You asked to see me.
You’ve walked into my house with a man who looks like he eats swords for breakfast.
I can only assume you want something.
“I want to sell you things,” Lucan said.
“A lot of things.
Regularly.
Tea, spice, wine, cloth, medicines.
Things you can move through your network in Tallowgate and beyond, at a very good margin.
I’ll give you a price no one else in Grisholt can match.”
“And in return?”
“Clean coin.
Threaded.
Paid in advance.”
Varney’s pleasant expression didn’t change at all.
But something behind his spectacles sharpened.
“That’s an interesting thing to ask for,” he said slowly.
“Most men don’t care whether their coin is threaded or not, as long as it spends.
Only a man who has a great deal of the other kind would care so much about getting the clean kind.” He tilted his head.
“Do you have a great deal of the other kind, Mr.
Ashby?”
Lucan didn’t answer.
“Hm.” Varney picked up another oyster.
Looked at it.
Put it down again.
“And why should I do business with you?
You’re nobody.
You came out of nowhere.
You’re very obviously in some kind of trouble.
You’ve got the Detective Bureau sniffing around the Pit Nine accident, and a dead watchman with a spike through his neck, and two dead men on a staircase in the Cradles, and a great fat mill-master telling everyone in the mill quarter that a demon with grey eyes tried to eat him.” He spread his hands apologetically.
“I’m a careful man, Mr.
Ashby.
Trouble is bad for business.”
“You owe nine thousand four hundred silver to the Holloway Loan Society,” Lucan said.
“Overdue.
Secured against your properties on Needle Lane, Tallow Street and Wicker Row.
Including this pub.”
The room went very quiet.
Varney’s face did something complicated.
For half a second, the mild schoolmaster vanished, and there was something else underneath it, something cold and flat and watchful, like a lizard on a warm stone.
Then he smiled again.
“How do you know that?”
“I know a lot of things.
I know Holloway’s going to call in that loan within the month.
I know they’ll take this pub, and Needle Lane, and everything else you’ve got.
I know you can’t pay.” Lucan leaned forward.
“And I know who owns Holloway.”
“Everyone knows who owns Holloway.
Old Matthias Holloway.
He’s ninety years old and lives in a—”
“Matthias Holloway owns half,” Lucan said.
“A quarter belongs to his sons.
And the last quarter belongs to Edmund Varga.
Overseer of Pit Nine.
Who uses it to hide everything he steals from the Fennick Mining Concern.”
The silence in the room was total.
Even the fire seemed to have gone quiet.
“Mr.
Varga,” Lucan went on, “is going to lose everything very soon.
When that happens, Holloway is going to be in a great deal of trouble.
Inspectors will come.
Audits.
They’ll look at every loan on Holloway’s books.
Including yours.” He sat back.
“You can be standing in the way when that happens.
Or you can be standing beside me.
Your choice.”
Varney looked at him for a long, long time.
Then he picked up his napkin, dabbed his lips one last time, folded it neatly and set it on the table beside his plate.
“Everybody out,” he said softly.
“Except Mr.
Ashby.
And his friend.”
They talked until midnight.
When Lucan walked out of the Hanged Bishop, the night air was cold, and the smog overhead was glowing a dull, sullen red, and he had in his coat pocket a signed promissory note from Saul Varney for two thousand silver in threaded coin, payable on delivery of the first shipment.
In return, Varney would get tea, spice, wine and cloth at a price that would make him richer in a year than he’d been in a decade.
And something else.
Something they hadn’t written down.
When Varga fell, Lucan would make sure that Varney’s debt fell with him.
“I don’t like him,” Rook said as they walked back through the dark lanes toward Needle Lane.
“Neither do I.”
“He has thirty-one lives on his tally, you said.
He’s a killer.”
“So are you.”
“Yes, but I’m your killer.
It’s different.” Rook kicked a stone along the cobbles.
“He’ll stab you in the back the moment it’s worth more to him than you are.”
“I know,” Lucan said.
“So I’ll make sure I’m always worth more.”
The shipments went out over the next four days.
Lucan bought them from the Market by the cartload, in a disused warehouse Varney had lent him on the river: crates of tea and sacks of pepper and barrels of brandy, appearing out of the air in neat stacks in the dark, while Rook stood guard at the door.
Varney’s men came at night with wagons and took them away, and Varney’s money came back, slowly at first and then faster, in heavy leather bags that clinked when they hit the table.
By the end of the fourth day, Lucan’s clean balance stood at two thousand three hundred and eighteen silver.
He stood in his little room above Brask & Daughter and looked at the number.
He thought about how, two weeks ago, he had never held more than four silver in his whole life.
Then he opened the Roster.
He knew exactly what he needed this time.
He had been thinking about it ever since he had opened the black book.
He needed someone to make him real.
He was dead.
The Concern had posted his name.
Rook didn’t exist.
Neither did the money.
Every move he made in Grisholt from here on would require papers: deeds, licences, contracts, bank accounts, letters of credit, a birth certificate, a family history.
He couldn’t buy a shop or open an account or sign a lease without a name that would stand up in front of a Registry clerk with a brass lens.
And he couldn’t take Varga down the way he wanted to, legally, publicly and completely, without documents that would stand up in court.
He needed a forger.
But not just a forger.
He needed someone who understood paper the way he understood numbers.
Someone who could look at a document and see the lies in it, and build lies of their own that were better.
He filtered the Roster.
Grade II.
Scholar.
Scribe.
Archive.
There weren’t many.
He found her in the second column.
▸ Wren Talcott (Grade II — Archivist / Scrivener)
Origin: Ilvane, a world of great libraries, which burned when its people discovered a way to set ideas on fire.
Under-Keeper of the Ninth Archive of Ilvane.
Catalogued four hundred thousand documents. Get faster updates on g.com.
Never forgot one.
Skills: Perfect memory for anything she has read.
Expert in law, contracts, bureaucracy, history and languages.
Ability — SCRIVENER’S HAND: May reproduce any handwriting, signature or seal she has seen, perfectly.
Cannot reproduce mana-sigils or Royal Assay threads.
Weaknesses: Physically frail.
No combat ability whatsoever.
Socially difficult.
Blunt to the point of rudeness.
Becomes irritable without tea.
Personality: Precise.
Cost: 410 Silver
In the little portrait was a woman of about thirty, with a sharp narrow face, enormous round spectacles that magnified her eyes, and a frizzy cloud of mouse-brown hair escaping from a pencil-skewered bun.
She wasn’t smiling.
She was frowning out of the frame at him as if he had just put a book back on the wrong shelf.
“Her,” Lucan said.
The air in the middle of the room tore open, and the room filled with smoke.
Not ordinary smoke.
It was thick, white and choking, and it smelled of burning paper.
A huge, dry, rushing roar came through the tear, the roar of a fire bigger than any fire Lucan had ever imagined, and with it a sound that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck: thousands and thousands of pages, all burning at once, crackling and curling and whispering as they went.
Something fell out of the smoke and hit the floor.
The tear closed.
The smoke began to clear.
There was a woman on her hands and knees on the floorboards, coughing her lungs out.
She was wearing a long grey robe, scorched black at the hem and singed at the sleeves, and she was clutching something against her chest with both arms.
A book.
A big, heavy, leather-bound book, its corners charred.
Her spectacles were crooked.
Her hair was full of ash.
She coughed until she was finished.
Then she sat back on her heels, straightened her spectacles with one ink-stained finger, and looked around the room.
At the sloping ceiling.
At the narrow bed.
At Lucan.
He saw the same thing happen behind her eyes that he had seen behind Rook’s.
The rope pulled taut.
The key turned in the lock.
The certainty settled into place.
She looked at him for a long time with her huge magnified eyes.
Then she looked down at the book in her arms.
“I saved one,” she said.
Her voice was hoarse from the smoke, and very precise, every consonant crisp.
“Out of four hundred thousand.
Just one.” She turned it over and read the spine.
Her face didn’t change at all.
“It’s a treatise on the tax law of a minor coastal province.
It’s not even a good one.” She looked back up at Lucan.
“Do you have any tea?”
The door opened.
Rook stood there, with Nell peering past his elbow.
“Ah,” Rook said brightly.
“Another one!
Hello!
I’m Rook.
Welcome to Grisholt.
The food is excellent and the air will kill you.”
Wren Talcott looked at him.
She looked at his braid, his gold tooth, his sword and his bandolier of knives.
She looked at the half-eaten sausage in his hand.
“You,” she said, “are getting grease on the doorframe.”
Rook looked at the doorframe.
Then at the sausage.
Then at Lucan.
“I like her,” he said.
Wren drank four cups of black tea in Ottilie’s kitchen, one after another, without speaking.
Then she put down the cup, cleaned her spectacles on her sleeve, and said, “Show me what I’m here for.”
Lucan showed her the black book.
She read it in eleven minutes.
She didn’t skim.
He watched her eyes go down every page, line by line, and then move to the next, steadily, like a clerk’s stamp coming down.
When she was finished, she closed it and set it on the table.
“I’ll need samples of Varga’s handwriting,” she said.
“His signature.
The Concern’s seal.
The Registry’s stamps.
The Holloway Loan Society’s letterhead.
Any document with the Detective Bureau’s seal on it.” She ticked them off on her fingers.
“And a copy of the Bondage Statutes.
The full text, not the summary they post on the walls.
And a copy of the Crown Mining Safety Act.
And the charter of the Holloway Loan Society, if it’s lodged at the Registry, which it must be by law.”
“Why the Safety Act?”
“Because if what’s in this book is true,” Wren said, “your Mr.
Varga hasn’t just stolen from his employers.
He’s defrauded the Crown of forty-three death fines.
That’s not theft.
That’s treason.
And the penalty for treason in a kingdom like this one, if I’m any judge of kingdoms, is a great deal worse than losing your job.”
Lucan looked at her.
“And you,” she went on, “need to stop calling yourself Ashby.
It’s a terrible name.
Nobody would believe it.
You need a family, a history, a birth record, a baptism, a dead father with a respectable profession and some money, and a reason for coming to Grisholt.” She frowned at him.
“Your friend the pirate needs one too, though I don’t know what anyone could possibly write that would make him look respectable.
And then you need a business.”
“A business.”
“A front.
Something real, with real accounts and real income, where your money can come in and go out and look like it belongs there.” She pushed her spectacles up her nose.
“What does the Market sell most of?
What do you have that nobody else has?”
Lucan thought about the rat in the cage, growing a new leg.
“Medicine,” he said.
“Then you need an apothecary,” Wren said.
“A failing one.
One that’s about to go under, with a licence that’s still good.” She stood up.
“I’ll go to the Registry in the morning and look.
Ottilie, I’ll need a chair, a desk, a lamp, a great deal of paper and more of this tea.
Rook, stop eating while I’m talking, it’s disgusting.”
She walked out of the kitchen.
There was a long silence.
“Well,” said Ottilie at last.
She had taken her glass eye out and was holding it in her palm, looking at it as if it might have an opinion.
“Saint’s teeth, corpse.
Where on earth do you keep finding these people?”