They buried Ottilie Brask on a Thursday, in the old churchyard of St.
Ivo’s at the top of Tallowgate, under a sky the colour of wet ash.
Lucan paid for everything.
He paid for an oak coffin with brass handles and a plot near the wall, under a twisted yew tree, where the smoke was thinnest.
He paid a stonemason to cut a headstone.
He paid the priest twice his usual fee, and the priest, a red-nosed old man who smelled of gin, looked at the coins, looked at Lucan, and decided not to ask why a young apothecary from Harrowdale was burying a Tallowgate pawnbroker with no family.
Thirty people came.
Lucan hadn’t expected that.
Shopkeepers from Needle Lane.
The tattooist from next door, a huge bald woman covered in blue ink, who cried noisily into a handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.
The man from the glass-eye shop, who left a single blue glass eye on the coffin lid.
Dock-hands and fences and pickpockets and three very old women in black who said they’d been at school with her sixty years ago and that she’d cheated them at marbles even then.
Saul Varney sent a wreath.
He didn’t come himself.
Nell stood at the graveside in a black dress Wren had bought her, and didn’t cry.
She hadn’t cried once since they’d lifted her out from under the floor.
She stood with her hands at her sides and her chin up and watched them lower the coffin into the ground, and when the priest finished, she stepped forward, picked up a handful of earth and threw it in.
Then she took something out of her pocket and threw that in too.
Lucan saw what it was as it fell.
A little square of wood, painted with chalk.
The tally board from the kitchen wall.
Every copper Nell had owed Ottilie for cursing.
Fourteen, it said, in Ottilie’s spidery handwriting.
And counting.
The stone went up a week later.
Lucan had chosen the words himself.
It was short.
OTTILIE BRASK 1803 – 1871 She cheated everyone.
She never gave anyone up.
And on the day the stone went up, Lucan went back to the room above Greaves & Son, where they had all moved after the funeral, and sat down across a table from Wren Talcott, and said: “Now.”
It had taken Wren nine days to prepare.
Lucan had watched her do it, and he had come to understand, watching her, that she was the single most frightening person he had ever met.
She didn’t sleep.
She drank tea by the gallon.
She sat at a desk in the corner of the room under the eaves, surrounded by towers of paper that grew higher every day, and she wrote.
She wrote in a dozen hands, none of them her own.
She copied out every page of Varga’s black book, perfectly, in Varga’s own handwriting, so perfectly that when Lucan laid the copy and the original side by side, he couldn’t tell which was which.
She drew up summaries.
She drew up schedules.
She cross-referenced every name in the book against the records of the Registry, the Crown Mining Safety Inspectorate and the Holloway Loan Society.
On the sixth day, she went to the Registry in a borrowed hat and came back with the full text of the Bondage Statutes, all four hundred pages of it, which she read in one afternoon and then could recite, from memory, section by section.
“You could do this in your old world,” she said that evening, when Lucan brought her a fresh pot of tea.
It wasn’t a question.
“Some of it.
Not all of it.
I could follow the money.
I couldn’t build the case.” He set down the pot.
“We had people for that.
Lawyers.”
“I was a lawyer,” Wren said.
“Of a sort.
In Ilvane, the archivists were the lawyers.
We kept the laws, so we understood them better than anyone.” She poured her tea.
Her hands were stained black to the wrist with ink.
“Do you know what I learned, in twenty years in the Ninth Archive?
About laws?”
“What?”
“They’re just a kind of machine,” Wren said.
“Like a loom, or a mill.
Someone builds them to do a particular job.
But once they’re built, they don’t care whose hands are on the lever.” She looked at him over her spectacles.
“Varga used the Bondage Statutes to destroy your father.
To destroy you.
To destroy forty-three families.
He understood the machine and he used it.” She took a sip of tea.
“We’re going to put his hands in it.”
The plan had three parts.
Wren called them the three blows.
Lucan, privately, thought of them as an audit.
The first blow was the money.
At the eighth bell on a grey Monday morning, a plain brown parcel was delivered by hand to the front gate of the Fennick mansion on the Spire.
It was addressed in a neat, anonymous copperplate to Lady Isolde Fennick, Personal.
Inside was a bound copy of the first section of Varga’s black book: eight years of secret bone-coal, diverted from Pit Nine as spoil and sold at night to Rennick & Crowe.
Every barge.
Every ton.
Every payment.
Every account.
Laid out in Wren’s beautiful copy of Varga’s own handwriting, with a covering summary that added it all up, column by column, to a final number at the bottom of the last page.
There was no letter.
No signature.
Just the number.
The second blow was the bodies.
At the same hour, a second parcel was delivered to the front desk of the Crown Detective Bureau, addressed to Inspector M.
Voss.
Lucan had learned her name from Varney, who had heard it from one of his men inside the Bureau.
There’s one honest copper in the whole building, Varney had said, with a kind of disgusted wonder.
A woman.
Brass hand.
She went down to Pit Nine the morning after you climbed out, and she’s been asking questions about you ever since.
Lucan Marr.
She’s got your name underlined on a list.
The second parcel contained the list of forty-three names, each one marked Deserted.
And a copy of the Crown Mining Safety Act, Section Thirty-One: Death in service shall be reported to the Inspectorate within three days, and a fine paid to the Crown of not less than two hundred silver per head.
And a hand-drawn map of the old east gallery of Pit Nine, with an arrow pointing to the grate over the spoil chute.
And a single line, written on a plain white card.
They are all at the bottom.
The third blow was the law.
That one, Wren had to do in person.
“Varga,” Wren said, “is very rich.
But not very liquid.”
They were sitting in the back room of Greaves & Son, among the hundreds of tiny labelled drawers.
Old Abel Greaves had gone to bed.
Rook was in the corner, eating a whole roast chicken with his hands.
Nell sat on the stairs, listening, as she always did.
“It means most of his money isn’t money,” Lucan said.
“It’s things.
A house in Brassmarket.
A house in the country.
A quarter-share in a bank.
Jewellery.
Land.
He can’t spend them quickly.
If he needs a lot of cash, fast, he has to sell them, or borrow against them.”
“And he’s borrowed against all of them,” Wren said.
She laid a sheet of paper on the counter.
“Every single one.
The country house is mortgaged to the Bank of the Lamplighters.
The Brassmarket house is mortgaged to Holloway, his own bank, which is a very stupid thing to do.
He owes his tailor four hundred silver, his jeweller nine hundred, his wine merchant two hundred, and the landlord of the actress’s apartment, which he pays for, six hundred and fifty.
In total, his personal debts come to a little over seven thousand silver.
All perfectly legal.
All perfectly normal for a man of his standing.
Rich men in this city are always in debt.
It’s how they know they’re rich.”
“And?”
“And by tomorrow,” Wren said, “Lady Fennick will have read the first parcel.
She’ll freeze every penny the Concern pays him.
She’ll take his position.
She’ll want her money back, eight years of it, and she’ll put her lawyers on his property to get it.
The moment that happens, every creditor in the city will hear about it.
They’ll panic.
They’ll call in their loans, all at once, because they’ll be afraid there won’t be anything left by the time Lady Fennick’s done with him.” She tapped the paper.
“He won’t be able to pay them.
Not in time.
Nothing liquid.”
“So he’s bankrupt,” Rook said.
“So what?
That’s not enough.
The man killed Lucan’s father.”
“Not bankrupt,” Lucan said quietly.
“Indebted.”
Rook looked at him.
“In the Ashen Crown, there’s no such thing as bankruptcy,” Lucan said.
“Not for anyone below the Spire.
When a man can’t pay his debts, he doesn’t go bankrupt.
He’s bonded.
His creditors have him valued at the Registry, and the debt becomes a bond of obligation.
And then they sell it.” He looked at Wren.
“Section Nine.”
“Section Nine,” Wren said, “allows the transfer of a bond of obligation to any lawful holder, by sale or assignment, upon registration.
The bondholder may then employ the bondsman in any lawful labour, within the terms of the bond.” She folded her hands.
“Varga has always been very fond of Section Nine.”
The back room was silent.
“So we buy his debts,” Rook said slowly.
“We buy his debts,” said Wren.
“All of them.
Through Mr.
Varney’s people, and two or three others, so it doesn’t look like a single buyer.
Quietly.
Tomorrow.
Before anybody else thinks of it.
His creditors will be desperate.
They’ll sell us his notes for half their value, or less, just to get something back.”
“And then?”
Lucan looked at the panel, glowing in the corner of his eye.
▸ Varga, Edmund — 1 life (Dez Harlow).
1 life (Lucan Marr, pending).
1 life (Tobias Marr).
— UNCOLLECTED.
“And then,” he said, “I own him.”
It went almost exactly the way Wren had said it would.
Lady Isolde Fennick received the parcel at the eighth bell on Monday.
She was sitting in the glass garden on the roof of the Fennick mansion, where the air-wardens kept the sky clear and blue and the sun came down warm through the glass onto rows of white orchids.
She was forty-four, and very beautiful, and very still.
She had dark hair streaked with a single lock of pure white, and a long pale face, and grey eyes so pale they were almost silver.
She wore black, as she had every day since her husband had died, eleven years ago, and left her the largest mining concern in the Ashen Crown.
She read the parcel from beginning to end without changing her expression once.
When she reached the number on the last page, she sat for a long time looking at it.
Then she rang a small silver bell.
A man appeared.
He was grey-haired and grey-suited and so utterly unremarkable that it was difficult to look at him for long.
“Edmund Varga,” Lady Fennick said.
“Freeze his salary.
Take his keys.
Seize his books.
Have the lawyers file against his property by noon.” She folded the papers.
“Quietly.
I don’t want this in any newspaper.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“And Mr.
Coyle.”
“My lady?”
“Find out who sent this.” She looked down at the papers in her lap.
“Someone in this city can read a set of accounts the way I read a face.
Someone who knew exactly which numbers to show me, and in exactly which order, so that I would act exactly as I am acting now.” She looked up, and her pale silver eyes were very cold.
“I want to know who that person is.
Because a man who can make me dance like this is far more dangerous to me than a little thief like Varga will ever be.”
Inspector Maren Voss opened her parcel at her desk at the ninth bell.
She read the list of names.
She read Section Thirty-One.
She looked at the map.
Then she turned over the white card.
They are all at the bottom.
She sat very still for a long time.
Then she stood up, put on her coat, and walked straight past Chief Inspector Penhallow’s door without knocking, down three flights of stairs, out into the street and into a cab.
“Pit Nine,” she told the driver.
“Fennick’s.
As fast as you can.”
By noon on Tuesday, the black book’s numbers were spreading through the Lamplighters’ Quarter and the Brassmarket like water through a cracked dam. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
Nobody knew exactly what had happened.
That was what made it so frightening.
A Concern clerk had seen Lady Fennick’s lawyers arrive.
A carriage-driver had seen Varga’s house locked and bolted, with bailiffs on the steps.
Somebody’s cousin had heard from somebody’s maid that the Overseer of Pit Nine had been dismissed in disgrace.
Somebody else had heard that the Detective Bureau had been seen at Pit Nine with ropes and ladders and lamps, and that they’d been going down the old spoil chute, and that what they’d found at the bottom—
Nobody wanted to say what they’d found at the bottom.
Varga’s creditors panicked.
Exactly as Wren had said they would.
His jeweller sold his note for four hundred silver to a quiet young man with ink on his fingers, who said he was buying on behalf of a client.
His tailor sold his for two hundred to a man with a gold tooth.
The wine merchant sold to a pleasant little man in spectacles who said his name was Pickett.
The actress’s landlord sold to the same pleasant little man and was so relieved he bought him a drink.
By evening on Wednesday, every single one of Edmund Varga’s personal debts belonged, through one front or another, to a young apothecary named Lucan Aurel Thorne.
On Thursday morning, Wren walked into the Lower Wards Debt Registry in her scorched grey robe and her enormous spectacles and laid all of the notes on the counter in front of a clerk with a cold in his head.
She requested, under Section Six, that the debtor, being in default on all obligations, be valued and bonded.
And that the bond, under Section Nine, be registered to the holder of the notes.
The clerk read the notes.
He read them again.
He held every one of them up to his brass lens.
They were all genuine.
They were all perfectly legal.
Wren hadn’t forged a single one.
He looked at the name on them.
“Edmund Varga?” he said.
“The Overseer?
Fennick’s Varga?”
“Formerly,” said Wren.
The clerk sniffed.
He looked at her.
He looked at the notes.
Then, very slowly, the corners of his thin mouth lifted, as though someone had just told him a joke he’d been waiting his whole life to hear.
“He’s been coming to this window for fifteen years,” the clerk said quietly.
“Every week.
Bringing me debts to bond.
Widows.
Children.
Old men.
He always made me stay late.” He took a stamp from the rack, inked it, and brought it down on the form with a heavy, final thunk.
BONDED.
[ ASSET ACQUIRED: Bond of Obligation — Varga, Edmund.
Value: 7,140 Silver.
]
[ Holder: Lucan Aurel Thorne.
]
There was only one problem.
Nobody could find Varga.
He had vanished on Monday afternoon, the moment the lawyers came to his door.
His carriage had been found abandoned in a back street in the river district, horses and all.
His housekeeper said he’d come home at noon, gone to his study, opened the safe behind his mother’s portrait, looked inside it for a long time without moving, and then walked straight out of the front door with nothing but the clothes he stood up in.
Lady Fennick’s men were looking for him.
So was the Detective Bureau, now.
So, Varney said, were half the knife-men in the lower city, because word had got around that there was a price on Varga’s head and nobody knew exactly who’d put it there.
On Thursday night, Lucan sat at the window of the room above Greaves & Son and looked out over the rooftops at the glowing smog, and thought.
He thought about Varga.
About the neat handwriting and the pale grey eyes and the scented handkerchief.
About a man who had spent his whole life pulling the levers of a machine and had never once imagined he might end up caught in it.
Where would a man like that go?
Not to the Spire.
The Spire belonged to Lady Fennick.
Not to Brassmarket.
The bailiffs were there.
Not to the river.
Everyone would be watching the river.
He would want to leave Grisholt.
He would want to go somewhere far away where nobody knew his name, and start again.
And he would need money to do it.
He’d lost his house, his carriage and his position.
He couldn’t go to Holloway.
Lady Fennick would have it watched.
He couldn’t sell anything.
Everything he owned had been seized.
Where would a man like that keep the last of his money?
The money he’d hidden even from his own black book?
Lucan sat up straight.
“Rook,” he said.
Rook was lying on the floor with his boots up on the bed, eating an apple.
“Hm?”
“Varga ran the night loading at Pit Nine for eight years.
The secret bone-coal.
He sold it to Rennick & Crowe on the river.” Lucan turned from the window.
“But he didn’t trust Rennick & Crowe.
He didn’t trust anyone.
So where do you think he kept the ledger for the barges?
The real numbers?
The ones that would tell him if they were cheating him?”
Rook stopped chewing.
“Not in the black book?”
“There’s no barge ledger in the black book.
Only totals.
I noticed it the first night.
I thought it was strange.” Lucan was already pulling on his coat.
“He kept the barge ledger at the place he went to every night to watch the loading.
The place he trusted.
His place.
Where his money was, and his men, and his books.”
He looked out of the window, east, toward the great grey spoil-heaps on the edge of the city, where the slag rail ran out along its iron trestle over the dark.
“He’s gone home,” Lucan said.
“He’s gone back to Pit Nine.”
[ LEDGER: Varga, Edmund — Bond holder: Account Holder.
]
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