Wren found the apothecary on the second morning.
It was called Greaves & Son, and it stood on the corner of Hob’s Cross, at the very edge of Tallowgate where the old candle-makers’ ward began to climb toward the respectable streets of the Lamplighters’ Quarter.
It was a tall, thin, crooked building of black timber and yellow plaster, leaning slightly to the left as if it were tired.
The sign over the door was faded almost to nothing.
In the bow window, behind dusty glass, stood rows of enormous glass carboys full of coloured water, red and green and blue, the old apothecary’s advertisement, glowing dimly in the grey light.
“Fifty-one years in business,” Wren said, reading from the sheaf of papers she had copied at the Registry.
She had been up all night.
There was ink on her nose.
“The licence is good for another nine.
Abel Greaves, aged seventy-three.
Widower.
The son in the name died eleven years ago of lung-rot from the river air.
Greaves owes three hundred and eighty silver to two suppliers, and his landlord has filed for eviction.
The hearing is in eight days.”
“He’ll sell?”
“He’ll sell,” Wren said, “or he’ll be on the street in eight days, and the licence will lapse, and he knows it.
I’ve drawn up the contract already.
He keeps the rooms above the shop for life, rent-free, and draws a small salary as a consultant.
You get the business, the licence, the stock, the premises and his fifty-one years of good reputation.” She handed him a document.
“I’ve also made you a person.”
Lucan looked at the papers.
Lucan Aurel Thorne.
Born the 9th of Thaw, in the 1855th year of the Crown, at Lowmere, in the province of Harrowdale.
Only son of Dr.
Matthias Thorne, physician, deceased, and Agnes Thorne, née Calloway, deceased.
Baptised at the Church of St.
Ermengard, Lowmere.
Educated privately.
There was a birth certificate.
A baptismal record.
A letter of probate from a Harrowdale magistrate.
A letter of introduction from the Bishop of Lowmere.
Every one of them was perfect, stamped and signed and sealed, with the faint wear and yellowing of years.
“Lowmere,” Lucan said.
“A town of four thousand souls, nine days’ travel from here by rail.
Its parish register was destroyed in a flood six years ago.
So was its magistrate’s court.
There’s no one in Grisholt who could check, and no records left in Lowmere to check against.” Wren pushed her spectacles up her nose.
“Your father was a respected country physician who left you a modest inheritance and a great deal of medical knowledge.
You’ve come to the city to seek your fortune.
It’s dull, it’s believable, and nobody will ever look at it twice.”
“And the money?
Where does my fortune come from?”
“The inheritance, at first.
I’ve written a probate valuation of four thousand silver.
Then the business.
Greaves has fifty-one years of loyal customers.
If you sell medicines that are actually good, they’ll come back and bring their friends.
Most of your sales will be in cash.
Most apothecaries are.
Nobody keeps proper books.
Nobody will be able to tell how much of it is real.” She looked at him over her spectacles.
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?
That’s what you need.”
“That’s exactly what I need,” Lucan said.
Wren nodded once, crisply, as if a small and uninteresting problem had been solved.
Then she yawned so hugely that her jaw cracked.
“Rook gets papers too,” she said.
“Tomorrow.
I’m thinking of making him a retired naval officer, but I keep running into the problem that he’s obviously a pirate.”
They went to see Abel Greaves that afternoon.
Lucan wore his best coat.
Rook wore a borrowed suit that was too tight across the shoulders and kept tugging at the collar.
Wren wore her scorched grey robe, because she refused to wear anything else, and carried the contract in a leather folder under her arm.
Old Greaves was a tiny, stooped man with a fringe of white hair and a pair of round green-tinted spectacles.
He received them in the back of his shop, in a room that smelled of camphor and liquorice and old dust, surrounded by hundreds of tiny wooden drawers, each one labelled in faded copperplate: Willowbark.
Sulphur.
Nightshade (POISON).
Saint’s Thistle.
Powdered Unicorn (FRAUD — DO NOT SELL).
He read the contract very slowly, with his nose almost touching the paper.
Then he took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes.
“My son would have liked you,” he said to Lucan.
“He always said the business needed new blood.
Young blood.”
Lucan felt something in his chest twist uncomfortably.
“I’ll take good care of it.”
“You’ll keep the name?”
“I’ll keep the name.”
Greaves nodded.
He dipped a pen and signed, in a shaky hand, and Wren witnessed it with a signature of her own and a seal she had made the night before.
Lucan signed as L.
A.
Thorne.
It was the first time he had ever written that name.
His hand didn’t shake at all.
[ ASSET ACQUIRED: Greaves & Son, Apothecary.
]
[ Licensed.
Legal.
Owned by: Lucan Aurel Thorne (assumed identity — verified status: HOLDING).
]
It was nearly six by the time they walked out onto Hob’s Cross.
The smog had turned the colour of old rust, and the gas lamps were coming on one by one along the street.
Rook was eating a liquorice whip he had taken from one of Greaves’s jars.
Wren was explaining, at great length, the tax implications of the purchase.
Lucan was listening with half his mind.
The other half was thinking about the clean-coin balance in the corner of his vision, and the second Roster slot, still empty, and Varga.
Afterwards, when he went back over that evening again and again in his mind, looking for the place where he could have changed it, that was what he would remember most clearly.
That he had been happy.
That for the first time in six years he had walked down a street feeling as though things were going to be all right.
They turned the corner into Needle Lane.
The door of Brask & Daughter was standing open.
Rook was through it before Lucan had finished taking his next breath.
Lucan ran after him.
Wren followed, clutching her folder.
The shop was dark.
The lamps were out.
The clocks were still ticking, all of them, all slightly out of time with each other, and the sound was very loud in the silence.
In the grey light from the window, Lucan could see that the shelves had been pulled down.
Watches and rings and silver hairbrushes and false teeth were scattered across the floor in drifts.
The stuffed owl in its little hat lay on its side by the counter, staring at nothing.
And there was a smell.
Thick and sweet and coppery, with something sharp underneath it, like burnt hair.
“Ottilie!” Lucan shouted.
“Nell!”
Nothing.
Rook had his sword out.
He went through the shop toward the back room, low and fast, and stopped in the doorway.
He didn’t go in.
He stood in the doorway and didn’t move.
“Lucan,” he said.
His voice was very quiet.
“Don’t.”
Lucan pushed past him.
She was in the back room, where they had sat together every evening for two weeks, eating and drinking and arguing.
Ottilie Brask sat in her chair at the workbench, upright, her hands resting in her lap.
Her head was tilted slightly back.
Her eyes were open, the brown one and the blue one, and both of them were looking at the ceiling.
There was no blood on her clothes.
Almost none on the floor.
The blood was all on the wall behind her.
It had been drawn out of her.
Lucan understood that at once, with the cold, distant part of his mind that was still working.
Drawn out through the skin in a thousand tiny threads, the way Crane had drawn blood from his own arm, so that it rose into the air in a red mist and floated, and could be shaped.
And Crane had shaped it.
He had written on the wall with it, in big, neat, careful letters, a foot high, still wet, glistening dark red in the dim light.
212.
And underneath, smaller:
TELL THE SALT MAN I AM COUNTING.
Ottilie’s skin was grey and soft and wrinkled, like a fruit left too long in the sun.
She looked as though she had shrunk. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
As though she weighed nothing at all.
On her forearm, pushed up from under the sleeve of her green dress, someone had cut a single thin neat line.
Fresh.
Still beaded red at the ends.
Lucan stood and looked at her.
He couldn’t feel anything.
That was the strange part.
He was looking at her, at the open eyes and the grey skin and the line on her arm, and he couldn’t feel anything at all.
It was as if he had stepped back into the shadows again, into that cold, black, silent water, and everything was very far away.
Behind him, he heard Wren make a small sound and then stop herself.
“Nell,” Lucan said.
His voice sounded normal.
Perfectly calm.
As if it belonged to someone else.
“Where’s Nell?”
They found her under the floor.
There was a loose board behind the stuffed owl’s shelf.
It was where Ottilie had kept her iron money-box.
Under the board was a space about two feet deep and four feet long, between the joists.
Ottilie had taken out the money-box and put Nell in its place, and put the board back over her, and pushed the shelf in front of it.
When Rook lifted the board, Nell was lying curled up in the dark on her side, with both hands pressed so hard over her mouth that her nails had broken the skin of her cheeks.
She had been there for two hours.
She had heard all of it.
Rook lifted her out.
She didn’t make a sound.
She didn’t cry.
She didn’t look at anyone.
She just stood in the middle of the wrecked shop with Rook’s coat around her shoulders, shaking, and stared at the doorway to the back room.
“He asked her where you were,” she said at last.
She was looking at Rook.
Her voice was flat and hoarse and empty.
“He kept asking her.
Where’s the salt man?
Where’s the man who tastes of the sea?
Where’s the man with grey eyes?
He asked her and asked her.” She swallowed.
“She told him to go to hell.
She told him a lot of things.
She was very rude.” A tiny, terrible ghost of a smile.
“It would have cost her about a silver, on the wall.”
Nobody said anything.
“He did it slowly,” Nell said.
“So she’d have time to change her mind.”
“She didn’t,” Rook said.
“No.” Nell looked at him.
“She didn’t.”
Then her legs gave out.
Rook caught her before she hit the floor.
Lucan stood in the back room alone for a long time after that.
He closed Ottilie’s eyes.
It was harder than he had expected.
The glass one wouldn’t stay shut, and in the end he took it out very gently and put it in his pocket, because he couldn’t think what else to do with it.
He pulled down her sleeve over the line on her arm.
He took her shawl from the hook behind the counter and put it around her shoulders, because it seemed wrong for her to be cold.
Then he opened the Ledger.
▸ NEW ENTRY: Debt owed TO Account Holder: Crane, Silas.
Amount: One life (Ottilie Brask).
Status: UNCOLLECTED.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked at the wall.
TELL THE SALT MAN I AM COUNTING.
Crane had come here following the taste of Rook’s blood.
Rook had bled here.
Here, in this room, on this floor, a week ago, when Lucan had poured the Draught into his ruined arm.
It had soaked into the boards.
The Hollow-Vein charm hid the blood in Rook’s veins.
It hadn’t hidden the blood on the floor.
Lucan had not thought of that.
He had thought of everything else.
He had thought of the Thread Office and the Registry and the Bureau.
He had thought of laundering and fronts and false identities, and how to destroy Varga legally and publicly and completely.
He had thought about everything a forensic accountant would think about.
He had not thought about the blood on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Ottilie.
She didn’t answer.
She just sat there in her chair, with her shawl around her shoulders and her head tilted back, looking at the ceiling with her one remaining eye.
Rook found him an hour later, standing in the shop among the scattered watches, with the panel open in front of him and the Market spread out across it in gold.
“Wren’s put Nell to bed,” Rook said quietly.
“Upstairs.
She gave her something from the Market.
To make her sleep.” He paused.
“What are you doing?”
“Shopping.”
Rook came and stood beside him and looked at the panel.
He couldn’t read it.
He watched Lucan’s face instead.
“He’s a hemomancer,” Lucan said.
“Everything he does, he does with blood.
His own or other people’s.
He draws it out and makes it move.
That’s his whole power.” He scrolled down.
“So I’m going to take it away from him.”
[ COAGULATE (Tier II Spell — Uncommon.
Blood affinity — Restrictive.) ]
[ Forces all blood within a ten-pace radius, outside a living vein, to clot instantly and solidify.
Blood that is airborne crystallises and falls.
Lasts thirty seconds.
Has no effect on blood within the body.
]
[ Cost: 640 Clean Silver ]
“Thirty seconds,” Rook said, reading Lucan’s lips as he read it out.
“It’s enough.”
“For you to do what?”
“For you to get behind him.”
Rook was quiet for a while.
“He’s tasted me,” he said.
“He can feel me, even with the charm.
Faint.
Like a smell on the wind.
That’s why he came here.” He tapped the pendant on its cord.
“Two more days and it would’ve been gone.
Two days.”
“I know.”
“So he’ll come for me again.”
“Yes,” Lucan said.
“And this time, we’ll be waiting for him.”
He bought the spell.
Then he kept going.
He bought a Tier II longcoat lined with something the Market called spider-silk mail, light and soft and supposedly as strong as steel.
He bought a heavy steel-capped club, a three-foot iron bar wrapped in leather at one end.
He bought six more Draughts.
He bought a bright, steady, smokeless lamp that burned with a cold white light and wouldn’t go out.
Then he stopped, and he thought, and he bought one more thing.
[ Ironmarrow Breathing — Second Form (Tier II Technique) — Permanently doubles the effects of the Foundation Form.
Bone density, endurance and striking force substantially increased.
— 820 Clean Silver ]
The knowledge came into his head like a nail being driven into wood.
He gasped and grabbed the counter.
He felt the change begin in his bones at once, an ache so deep it was almost sweet, his skeleton growing heavier and denser inside him, his whole body settling a little lower toward the floor.
[ Clean Currency Balance: 19 Silver ]
He had spent nearly everything.
He didn’t care.
They went to Varney’s riverside warehouse at midnight.
It was a long, empty, echoing barn of black timber on stilts over the water, with a high roof and a double door at each end.
The river ran underneath it, slow and black and stinking.
There was one lamp.
Lucan set it in the middle of the floor and lit it, and its cold white light filled the centre of the warehouse and left the corners in deep, solid shadow.
Rook took off the Hollow-Vein charm and handed it to Lucan.
Then he drew his knife and cut his own palm, a long, shallow cut, and let the blood drip onto the boards.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip. Get faster updates on g.com.
“He’ll feel that,” he said.
“Fresh.
It’ll be like ringing a bell.”
Then he stepped back into the shadows, and the shadows swallowed him.
Lucan stood alone in the circle of light with the iron club in his hands and waited.
He waited an hour.
He breathed the Second Form while he waited.
It was different from the Foundation.
Harder and slower and deeper, like hauling up a bucket from the bottom of a very deep well.
He could feel the weak mana of the river air coming into him and sinking into his bones and staying there, heavy and cold.
He thought about Ottilie polishing her glass eye on her waistcoat.
At the second hour after midnight, the far doors of the warehouse opened.
Silas Crane walked in out of the dark.
He came slowly, unhurried, his long black coat hanging from his bony shoulders.
His shaved head gleamed in the white light of the lamp.
He stopped at the edge of the light, twenty paces from Lucan, and looked at him with his pale pink eyes.
“The grey-eyed man,” he said.
“How nice.
I was hoping it would be you.” He sniffed the air.
“But I smell salt.
I smell the salt man.
Where is he?”
Lucan said nothing.
“The old woman didn’t tell me,” Crane said.
“I want you to know that.
I tried very hard.
I took my time.” He smiled.
It was the first expression Lucan had ever seen on his face, and it was the worst thing he had ever seen.
“She called me a long list of things.
Some of them I’d never heard before.
I’ve been looking them up.”
“How many are on your arm now?” Lucan asked.
“Two hundred and twelve.” Crane began to roll up his sleeve.
The white scars ran from his wrist to his shoulder, row after row after row.
“Shall we make it two hundred and thirteen?”
He drew his silver knife across his forearm.
The blood rose.
It came out of the cut in a thick red rope and twisted in the air and split into twenty threads, thirty, forty, each one as thin and sharp as wire, and they hung there for a moment in the white light, quivering and gleaming.
Then they came for Lucan all at once.
“Coagulate,” Lucan said.
The spell went out from him like a wave of cold air.
He felt it pass through the warehouse, felt it hit the threads of blood.
They froze.
Every single one stopped dead in the air, a foot from his face.
They went from bright liquid red to a dark, dull, crusted brown, then hardened into something like red glass.
They hung there for a moment, brittle and shining.
Then they fell, and shattered on the boards with a sound like a dropped chandelier.
Crane stared at the red glass on the floor.
For the first time, something moved in his face.
Not fear.
Surprise.
He drew the knife across his arm again.
Nothing happened.
The blood welled out of the cut and immediately clotted, thick and dark, crusting over the wound like wax.
“Oh,” Crane said softly.
Behind him, a shadow moved.
Rook came out of the darkness behind Crane like a shark rising out of deep water.
He didn’t make a sound.
His curved sword was already swinging, low and flat, and it took Crane across the backs of both knees.
Crane went down.
He was fast, much faster than he looked, and even falling he twisted around and slashed with the silver knife, and it caught Rook across the stomach and opened his shirt and a long red line under it.
Rook grunted and stepped back.
Crane was on his knees.
He had both hands on the floor, scrabbling, trying to push himself up, and his legs wouldn’t work, and his blood was pouring out of the backs of his knees and clotting instantly, hard and black, on the boards.
He lunged at Lucan’s ankles with the knife.
Lucan brought the iron club down on his wrist.
The bone didn’t break.
It burst.
Crane’s hand flattened on the floor like a squashed spider, and the silver knife skittered away across the boards.
Crane screamed.
It was a high, thin, cracking sound, like an old door swinging on a rusted hinge.
Lucan stood over him.
His blood was still pounding.
His bones ached with the Second Form’s new weight.
The club in his hands felt light as a stick.
He looked at the white scars on Crane’s arm.
Row after row after row.
Two hundred and twelve.
The last one, near the shoulder, still fresh, the ends still red.
“Rook,” he said.
“You were an executioner.
For a king.”
Rook looked at him.
His shirt was soaked red at the stomach, but he was standing straight.
“I was.”
“Is there a way you did it?
Something you said?”
Rook was quiet for a moment.
Something passed over his long brown face, something old and far away and very tired.
“There were words,” he said.
“In Saltreach.
The Coral Throne had words for it.
For the condemned.”
“Say them.”
Rook stepped forward.
He put his foot on Crane’s back and pressed him flat to the floor, and Crane writhed and spat and cursed.
Rook lifted his sword in both hands.
The white light of the lamp ran down the curved blade like water.
“Silas Crane,” Rook said.
His voice had changed.
It was deep and slow and formal and carried through the whole warehouse like the tolling of a bell.
“By the authority of the one you have wronged, you are judged and found wanting.
The sea takes back what the sea gave.
Go down into the dark and do not rise.”
Crane twisted his head around.
He looked up at Lucan with his pale pink eyes, and his thin lips pulled back from his teeth.
“She cried at the end,” he said.
“Did the girl tell you?
The old woman.
At the very end, she cried for her—”
The sword came down.
It went through his neck cleanly.
Rook had done this before.
He had done this many, many times.
The head rolled away across the boards and came to rest against the leg of the lamp, looking up at the high dark roof.
The body jerked once and lay still.
There was almost no blood.
What there was clotted at once into thick black crusts.
Lucan stood and looked at it for a long time.
Then he knelt down beside the body.
He took the little silver knife off the floor, where it had fallen.
He pushed up the sleeve of Crane’s black coat.
Under the last of the white scars, near the shoulder, there was a little space of clear skin.
Lucan cut one line into it.
A single, neat line.
[ LEDGER: Crane, Silas — 1 life (Ottilie Brask) — COLLECTED.
]
[ First blood-debt collected on behalf of another.
]
[ Reward: Rank 2 progress — 1 / 3 blood-debts.
2,240 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
]
[ Additional reward: The Account Holder may claim one item from the deceased.
]
Lucan looked at the panel.
He looked at the silver knife in his hand.
Then he put the knife in his pocket, next to Ottilie’s glass eye, and stood up.
“Help me with him,” he said to Rook.
“The river’s right there.”