The Perfect Asset
Pick up where you left off.
Part 1
Chapter One
Someone, perhaps cruel, had given him a chair with one short leg. Tav had noticed it the first morning, the little forward lurch when he shifted his weight, and he had spent three days deciding whether it was deliberate. He’d settled on yes. Somewhere in this building was a forgotten room full of chairs, each with its own little cruelty.
His choice to rock was deliberate. Give them something to write down.
“The tattoo,” said Investigator Marren, for the fourth time in three days. He was a narrow man with a clerk’s stoop and a soldier’s patience, and he sat like his chair had four good legs, which it did. “Walk me through it again.”
“It doesn’t walk. It sits there. Occasionally it itches.”
The second one, the young one by the wall, wrote that down. He wrote everything down. Tav had started performing for the pen more than the man, on the belief that his words on the paper had a brighter future than he did.
“The ink spreads,” Marren said. “With debt.”
“With debt, with cheek, with being late to things. It’s a very motivated tattoo.”
“And when it reaches the face.”
“Then you’ve stopped being late to things.”
Marren let that lie where it fell. He had a way of not chasing, this one. The others, the first day, had chased. Big men with loud questions, wanting names in a hurry, and Tav had fed them names of the safely dead and watched them go away satisfied. Marren didn’t eat what he was thrown. Marren had the nose of a bloodhound, and a patient way of letting his prey lay its own trail.
“Tell me about the Marked.”
“You’ve seen them.”
“I’ve seen bodies with ink on the face. Dock finds, mostly.” Marren turned a page in the folder without looking at it. The folder was theatre, Tav was fairly sure. A man who needed the folder wouldn’t hold it that lightly. “They don’t carry papers. They don’t carry anything. Nobody claims them.”
“What use does a nobody have with papers or claims?”
“They’re nobodies because they crossed the organization.”
There it was. The shape of what this office knew, laid out flat like a fence showing you his money.
To Special Investigations, the Marked were product. A syndicate’s brand burned all the way through a person as a lesson to the rest of the gutter ilk. It was tidy, and it was wrong, and it was wrong in a way Tav had no interest in explaining to a man with a folder. Try describing the sound a Shadow’s footsteps didn’t make.
“Something like that,” Tav said.
“Something like that,” Marren repeated, mild as milk, and the pen went scratch, scratch by the wall.
They broke at what he guessed was the noon bell, though the room had no window, and no bell made sound wherever he was being kept. That had troubled him more than the chair, the first day. Merranth kept time out loud. You lived in the city with its bells on your skin, shift bells, harbour bells, the thin sour bell of the debtors’ court, and you knew where you stood in the day the way you knew which way was down. This room sat outside all of it. A little pocket of nowhere with three chairs and a folder. He supposed that was the idea. And it worked.
They fed him something grey and mushy with rogue lumps of something chewy. Marren set the folder down and folded his hands on it, which after three days Tav had learned was the man rolling up his sleeves.
“The debt itself,” Marren said. “How is it kept? Ledgers, tallies. Who holds the figure?”
“Wrong question.”
“Give me the right one.”
“You carry the figure, for a time if you’re lucky. And if you’re not, if it overtakes you, you become it.” Tav tipped the chair. His chair either rocked or it didn’t. “There’s no book you can burn, if that’s where this is going. Believe me.” He smiled. “The mark is the ledger. No clerks to bribe, no back door. The more it grows, the more you owe, the less you... what rhymes with owe?”
“But you found a back door?”
“Contrary to popular belief, doors can be tough to get through. Windows, on the other hand.”
“So you found a window. Tell me about the window.”
“No.”
Marren nodded, unbothered, like a man crossing off an item he’d already expected to cross off. That was the fourth time he’d asked about the escape and the fourth shape of the asking.
His father used to say you could tell an amateur because he only watched the hands. Watch the till, watch the door, watch what the room wants. Tav watched the room. The room wanted the Accord broken open like a crab at a decadent lunch. Yet the room had no idea what was in the shell.
“Recruitment,” Marren said. “The organization takes on debtors. How does it find them?”
“It doesn’t find them. It receives them.” Tav shrugged, and the shrug pulled at three days of sleeping on a plank, and he let the wince do a little work for him. Wounded man, harmless man. “You’re picturing crimps congregating in an alley. It’s not that. Someone’s drowning, so someone else mentions a rope. It’s quiet as church.”
“So, someone else then.”
“Sure, a bunch of ’em. Landlords, lenders. Men at the gates of things.” His words came easy now, an old rhythm catching in his ear. He kept it light, and moving, and here is where he was sloppy, and he would spend that night and several after reflecting on exactly how sloppy. “Harbourmasters are good for business. Half the harbourmasters on the coast are on the take. They log more than cargo. Who came in, who signed off on what ship, and what it was or wasn’t carrying. Who asks after work on the wrong docks.” This last part slipped: “Merranth’s is thorough. I’d know. I was sold inside the morning of my boots touching wet wood.”
The pen stopped.
It was a small silence. A clerk’s silence, half a breath maybe. The sound of a nib lifted and hovering in the air, and no one in the room moved. Marren’s face did nothing at all. Tav had just handed over something for free.
But it was nothing. Every thief from here to Dolliver knew the harbour registry had eyes in it. That was a factor like the weather for a sailor, so far beneath consideration that he’d never once thought of it as a thing that needed to be told. Yet this office hadn’t known. Three days of guarding the vault and he’d been robbed through the letterbox, idly chatting.
“The harbourmaster,” Marren said. Level. Careful. A man walking toward a bird he did not want to startle. “Merranth’s harbourmaster reports to the organization.”
Several quick quips and safer answers presented themselves. A joke about wages. An emphatic shrug. A retreat into the safely dead. Each possible reaction, he understood with a settling weight, would also now go into the folder. It would be the scent the bloodhound needed to follow. The damage was done, the pen had stopped.
“Reports to is strong,” Tav said. “He mentions. To someone who in turn mentions it further along.”
“To whom?”
“I’ve never had the pleasure.”
The pen started again. Scratch, scratch. Longer this time. The young one’s hand moving with an appetite, and Marren watching Tav with a new stillness. Perhaps that was only his mind, and this another move in the game. Tav sat in his lurching chair in the room beyond the bells and the sun. Three days feeding them bones, and the one piece of meat had fallen out of his coat while he was doing the act. Sloppy. The word arrived in his father’s voice, the way it always did, and he had the sense not to let any of it reach his face.
“Let’s go back,” Marren said, turning to a fresh leaf. His voice had changed ever so slightly. Warmer. Attentive. The voice a fence uses when the tenth trinket out of a sack turns out to be true gold and there might, after all, be an eleventh. “You arrived by ship. Start at your first steps on the dock. Everything you saw, everyone you spoke to.”
Tav looked at him for a moment. Then he tipped his chair, and began.
Prisons were loud in the same way ships were loud: each had a language of its own. Once you learned the language, and adapted to it, you could sleep, if not peacefully, then soundly. The cough two cells down that came in threes. The guard with the loose bootheel, whose rounds you could set a watch by if they’d given you one. Water in a pipe above, dripping at irregular hours. Tav had catalogued all of it the first few nights out of habit. The same way he checked his pockets in a crowd.
Something was still missing from his cozy new abode.
He lay on the plank with his arm over his eyes and went through a mental inventory again. It beat thinking about the futility of his situation, and how only days ago he’d pulled off the perfect heist. Perfect. Heh.
Gone were his familiar hat, his blue-lined coat, his two daggers and the backup in his boot, and the painting, though it had never really been his to lose. And gone too, most notably, was the ring he wore on a necklace. Maddy’s ring. Her gift to him from what felt like another life. Or at least a different room. His mind caught on that thought like a toe catches the corner of a stair.
It was a ring. Plain silver, scratched dull, worth about what she’d paid for it, which was nothing. She’d lifted it from a market stall in a harbour town whose name he’d lost, two summers back, grinning at him sideways while the stall-keeper counted the wrong pocket of his takings, and the whole point of the game had been that the thing stolen didn’t matter. He knew this. He’d told himself this for three nights now.
Sentiment, then. He was a man who kept a trinket from every job on a shelf. He traded in sentiment. Except sentiment felt like a little drop in the chest when his fingers went looking for the ring and found only shirt. This was something else. This was the first night ashore after a long voyage, lying awake for the creak of a hull that wasn’t there anymore. A sound gone missing, one he’d never noticed hearing.
He took the arm off his eyes and lay listening. Properly listening, and the prison gave him an honest take. Cough, bootheel, annoying pipe. Nothing amiss. Everything accounted for.
And still, something was missing.
He put his arm back over his eyes and breathed. He did not once think about the ring. Instead, he listened to the nothing until it was nearly morning: the cough came in threes, the bootheel walked by. He slept an hour and dreamt of nothing, and he awoke with his thumb rubbing against the empty patch on his chest.
Chapter Two
The witness’ name was Dobb, and Harlan had known him twenty years ago as a man who watered wine and swore at his daughters. He knew him now as a man who watered wine and had no daughters left willing to visit. Dobb sat across the interview table sweating through a shirt that had been good once, twenty years ago, insisting for the third time that he’d seen nothing on the night in question. Harlan let him finish, and nodded slowly, and said, “Dobb. Your cellar.”
That was all. Dobb turned the colour of his shirt. The cellar had held things over the years that weren’t wine, everyone on the street had done a little holding in the bad seasons, and it was two decades gone and no court in Thestria would care. Dobb didn’t know that, of course. Dobb only knew that this big grey investigator had come out of nowhere, wearing a face from the old life, and if he knew about the cellar, then he knew everything.
He folded in under ten minutes. Names, times, the cart’s markings, all of it. Harlan recorded it in a slow, careful hand and thanked him. And he meant it. That was the thing, he was genuinely grateful to Dobb. Without the cellar it would have been a week of knocking on doors. He walked him out; Dobb hesitated at the door, wanting something. Absolution maybe.
“You always were a fair sort, Harlan,” he said. “Back when.”
“Go on home, Dobb.”
He watched him down the corridor. A month ago, he thought, I’d have had to work up to the cellar. Would have circled it for an hour, maybe let the man keep his lie and taken the long road instead.
He was still standing there when Blundo found him, which was how Blundo liked to find people: mid-thought and undefended.
“There he is. The Service’s newest terror of the town.” Aldean Blundo had grown up three doors down from Harlan. He had grown into the kind of man who wore his office like a proper coat. He fell in beside Harlan, walking him without seeming to steer, yet Harlan felt the steering anyway. “You’ve heard about the Pendleton boy.”
“Everyone’s heard about the Pendleton man.”
“Interviews are nearly done. Marren’s report reads like a fisherman describing the fish that took his arm off. Respectful.” Blundo said it with relish. “Word above is he’s worth more swimming than mounted, if you take my meaning. There’s a discussion this afternoon about who holds the line.” He stopped at the stairwell, and his voice stayed light, and his eyes didn’t match. “Your name is top of the list, Harlan.”
The corridor carried on as corridors do.
“There are people more senior,” Harlan said.
“None that the boy knows.”
And there it was, laid out plain in Blundo’s friendly, ruthless face. An asset who trusted no one in this building, and the one investigator he had history with.
“He won’t work with me,” Harlan said. “You know what I am to him.”
“Yes, yes.” Blundo clapped his shoulder, already moving. “Better the traitor you know. Isn’t that right, Harlan?” Business concluded, on his inevitable terms.
Harlan stood at the stairwell a while. Then he went back to his desk and wrote up Dobb’s statement in his slow, careful hand. Every word of it accurate. He read it through three times and then a fourth time for no reason in particular. When he lifted the sheet to blot it, he found he’d pressed hard enough on Dobb’s name to mar the pages beneath.
She had expected to wait, and she was waiting. That was the first thing worth noticing about Sayd Basha’s outer room: it was built for waiting. Good chairs, warm stove, a boy bringing tea you hadn’t asked for. Comfort as a message. We keep people here as long as we like, and we like them comfortable, and both halves of that are true and you should think about both halves.
Maddy thought about both halves, drank the tea, and counted doors. Two obvious, one likely behind the panelling by the stove, going by the draught. Old habit. She was still deciding whether to be annoyed at herself for it when the inner door opened and the scent of ginger came out ahead of the man like a servant announcing the house.
“Mistress Floris.” He used the surname she’d given. It gave her the impression he thought her name false. She didn’t bother correcting him. “Sit. You’ve brought me something.”
She had brought him precisely three things, and she presented them on his desk in the order she’d rehearsed. A page copied from a Nemogali shipping log, sixty years old, a cargo of quarried stone signed for at a port that served no quarry. A monastery provision record, much older, that detailed mutton and lamp oil sent up a valley that every map agreed held nothing. And finally, a surveyor’s note from a Dolliver archive, a complaint really, about a ridgeline that refused to match its triangulation, filed by a man who died before anyone answered him. Shame.
“Three documents,” she said. “Three archives, three centuries of clerks, no two of them aware of each other. Separately, they’re errors. Together, they point somewhere.” She kept her hands still and her voice at its working level. “Stone going in. Food going up. A ridge that measures wrong because something’s cut into it. There is a settlement in the mountains above the Southern Reach that doesn’t appear on any map made since, and I can point to the valley with my finger.”
“But not today.”
“Obviously.”
Sayd sat back. He hadn’t bothered to touch the documents. She recognized the deliberate tactic: touching them would have signalled wanting them, and he did not show wanting. The pipe smoke moved and settled. Behind her, faintly, she could hear the boy in the outer room failing to be quiet.
“You’re offering me the method as proof,” Sayd said, “and keeping the conclusion as payment. That’s the gist of your proposal?”
“Near enough.”
“And the price is the boy thief.”
“The price is Tavish Derring out of a Crown cell with charges that die quietly.” She had rehearsed this flat, and it came out flat, and she was glad of it. She wasn’t used to saying his name aloud, and it felt heavier on her tongue than expected. “You have reach in places that most people don’t. In places that I definitely don’t. That’s the whole of what I know and the whole of what I need.”
He looked at her for a moment. Most people’s looks took something from you, or tried. He just measured. A tailor’s look sizing you up for a coat, and she sat and let herself be measured because flinching would send him a message.
“You found this,” he said, “with a library membership and patience.”
“Plus postage.”
“Most people in my employment could not find their own debts with both hands.” It was said without contempt. “You are proposing to sell me the one thing my money has trouble buying, which is a thing nobody knows exists. I’m going to tell you what I think, Mistress Floris, and you’ll forgive the poor manners of accuracy. I believe the ruins are real. I think you’d sooner burn your notes than give me the valley before the thief is back on the streets. And I think you priced this against exactly what I could check and nothing more, which means you’ve dealt with dangerous men before and learned to water your wine.”
The stove ticked. She revised, upward, her estimate of how carefully she would need to tread.
“Then we understand each other,” she said.
“We’re beginning to.” He drew the documents one finger closer, first touch, the deal’s truest signature. “The law moves slowly. With my intervention, it moves slower. As if it isn’t moving.”
The door burst open. No knock, all elbows of a boy, maybe eighteen, and a message half out of his mouth before he saw her. He pulled up like a horse refusing to cross water, and looked between them, appalled at himself.
“Odd Hands,” Sayd said, without turning, and the mildness in it was its own kind of discipline. “Later.”
The boy vanished. The door, closing behind him, was the quietest thing he’d done. Maddy knew him from Pendleton, and kept that off her face.
“So we have a deal, I take it?” she said.
“We have terms. The thief walks, and you stay where I can find you.” Sayd turned the first document toward him and began, at last, to read.
Chapter Three
They’d fixed the chair.
Tav noticed it a half-second late and all at once, like a picked pocket. He sat, braced for the little forward lurch, and the chair received him levelly, four working legs. He sat very still and thought: guess I got to them.
Marren came in with the folder and, this time, company. The new addition took the corner behind Tav’s shoulder where the pen-boy used to sit, and Tav didn’t turn to look. Older, heavier man, soft boots, judging from the sound.
“Derring.” Marren sat. Something had shifted. “I want to leave the organization aside this morning.”
“The organization will be relieved to know their secrets are safe another day.”
“Tell me about Pendleton.”
“I’ve never been to Pendleton.”
“Your painting has.”
“Then you’ll want to put the painting in this chair,” said Tav. “Though, I warn you: it’s a landscape, and they tend to not talk much.”
Behind his shoulder, the new man laughed. Once, and caught it too late. Marren’s expression did not change. Three days emptying the barrel, and now they’d come to peer into it.
Marren asked him about the vault. He answered like a professional describing weather at sea. Freely, technically, with a touch of exaggeration and filed down truths. Marren didn’t press, which confirmed it. They had the truth of it. They weren’t casting a net anymore. They’d charted a course and were watching him sail it.
Four nights of an hour’s sleep sat behind his eyes like grit. It made him talkative, and talkative was where the danger lay.
“Your father was in the trade,” Marren said, as if it had only now occurred to him.
A door, opening. Tav stepped through it anyway.
“He was better at it, for all my trying.”
“He died poorly, according to record.”
“He died well.” It came out with an unintended edge. “Poorly describes the company he died in.”
“You were fifteen.” Marren let that number sit on the table between them. “Within the year you were wearing the organization’s ink. That’s a turn most folk would want explaining.”
“Most folk had fathers who made false promises.” Tav tipped the chair back, and the chair, level now, tipped like a normal chair. He missed the flaw. “Mine kept his word. Rarer trade.”
“A boy of fifteen, in the outfit that owns half the misery on this coast. And you say it like it was your inheritance.”
Silence.
“Enlighten me,” Marren prodded.
Tav paused, because the true answer wasn’t something he said aloud. It was fact, and facts didn’t need discussing. The smart play was a shrug and a joke. He heard himself skip it, from somewhere a little outside his own body.
“He’s the only man who never once cost me anything,” Tav said. “Living people, you settle up with them your whole life.” He shrugged. The shrug was light and the voice was light. “The dead don’t turn their back on you. It’s their best quality. Very reliable, the dead.”
The pen, wherever it had migrated to, would have written that down.
“Reliable,” Marren said.
He closed the folder, first time in four days he’d done it before the meal, and behind Tav the soft boots shifted. “That’ll do for today.”
“It’s barely past the noon bell.”
“There’s no bells in here,” Marren said, mild, gathering his papers.
The soft boots left first. Marren followed with the folder under his arm, and the lock turned behind them. Tav sat alone in the level chair. He tipped it back on two legs and held it there, and it didn’t so much as creak.
They brought him up two floors to a room with a window. Merranth, grey and wet and going about its business. Roofs he had run in another life, the harbour a forest of bare masts past the chimney line. Sound came through the glass, faint and real, cartwheels and gulls and somewhere the quarter bell. Tav stood drinking the city like a man off a long desert road, until the doors opened behind him. He arranged his face and turned.
The soft boots turned out to belong to a wide grey-whiskered man introduced as Principal Investigator Sess, who occupied the head of the table the way a paperweight occupies paper. Marren sat to his left with the folder, retired now to a prop.
Harlan sat to his right.
Tav had rehearsed this on the plank that was his bed, three nights and counting, so the cold that went through him arrived almost on schedule. Without directly acknowledging him, he took his read. Same beard, same scarred knuckles folded on the table. The coat was new. Crown cut and dark, and Harlan wore it like a man who’d been measured for the chair. He could feel Harlan’s gaze. He imagined the stone face, the one Tav had spent three weeks admiring across the back room of the Buckled Mast without once asking what it was for.
“Sit down, Derring,” said Sess.
Tav sat.
“You’ve been cooperative,” Sess said. “Within limits that Investigator Marren describes as professional, which from Marren is courtship. So I’ll pay you the same courtesy and be brief.” He laced his fingers on the table. “The Pendleton charges carry fourteen years. This office can arrange for them to carry considerably fewer, or considerably none at all, depending on the next quarter hour.”
“That’s a wide range.”
“We’re a flexible office.”
“Those dwelling in the lower levels disagree.”
“The building holds criminals,” Sess said. “This office spends them.” He nodded at Marren, who slid a single sheet across, and Tav read it without touching it, another habit. The sheet said in fine Crown language that Tavish Derring would enter Special Investigations as a registered asset, conduct and continuance at the discretion of the office, charges held in abeyance thereto. Held. A leash written by solicitors.
“You’d be worked,” Sess went on, “in the city, against subjects of standing interest. You know the ground and the people better than any man we could grow in a decade, and unlike a man we grew, you can be returned to a cell three days hence if returning you is more promising to us. I find candour saves everyone’s afternoon. We hold the painting. We hold a sworn statement from a witness with direct knowledge.” Sess did not glance to his right, which was its own kind of courtesy. “And we hold a Procession pass, false name, very good stock, recovered from the floor of the third alcove on the west wall. You are valuable, and you are expendable, and the second is why we can afford the first.”
“You want the Accord.” Tav said it to see what it did to the room. He was disappointed not to get a rise from anyone. Three still faces, which meant it had been discussed and settled before he’d been brought up the stairs.
“The organization is of interest to us,” Sess said. “However, it is not the interest.” He paused with the air of a man drawing excitement before unrolling a map of the new world. “What do you know of Lord Casvern?”
“Money,” Tav said. “Old kind. Owns things that own things.”
“He is the roof this city’s weather comes from,” Sess said, and for one sentence the paperweight was gone and something hungrier took its place at the table. “This office has spent nine years standing in the rain writing down where the drops fall. We have never once been inside the house. Every man we’ve grown toward him has been priced, bought, or found floating.”
“What about the ones you don’t find?”
Sess let the quip pass, and the hunger with it. “You will not be pointed at Lord Casvern. You’d be dead in a month, and you’d owe us money. We are not in the business of collecting from the dead. You will work in the city. And everything in this city, sooner or later, runs uphill to his door.”
Sess turned over one hand: the sheet, the pen beside it. “Or the fourteen years. I’m told the food starts to improve at the seven-year mark.”
Tav looked at the sheet. Then, because he’d earned it, because he’d been saving it for four days, he looked at Harlan.
The stone face held. It held well, it was a good face, and a week ago, Tav would have believed it to the bank they had robbed. He had believed it. That was the joke. He had believed everything this man’s face had ever said and done. Now he just looked, and let the looking go on one beat past comfortable, and watched the smallest thing happen at the corner of Harlan’s jaw: tightening, a load-bearing wall taking weight. Warm eyes, the wife’s honest trade, twenty years of favours owed to a dead man. All of it still in there. None of it had stopped him.
“Does it come with a pen,” Tav said to the room, still looking at Harlan, “or is this one of those places that signs in blood?”
Marren pushed the pen across.
Tav signed. The nib caught on the grain halfway through the D and he dragged it through anyway, so the signature came out a little ragged, a little like someone else’s. He slid the sheet back. Sess blotted it himself.
Outside the glass, the quarter bell struck.
Chapter Four
The clerk of the magistrate’s court had a system, and the system was that nothing moved. Maddy had watched it do exactly that for two hours, from a bench polished by a century of waiting, in a queue of men and women clutching papers like they were sick children. Petitions went into the wire basket. Nothing came out of the wire basket. The clerk drank his tea at the pace of a man with no enemies.
Then a boy came through the side door, no knock, all elbows, and laid a single folded paper on the desk and left. No seals that she could see. No name. The clerk unfolded it, read for the length of one held breath, and became a different clerk.
It took eleven minutes. She counted, and it kept her focused and the nerves at bay. A file summoned from an inner room. A signature fetched from behind a door that had not opened all morning. A word with the usher, the usher gone and back, and somewhere past the panelled wall the specific paper that concerned a specific thief moved from one stack to another stack, and the second stack, she gathered, was the one where charges went to die quietly. Nobody hurried. Nobody so much as looked up. It was like watching a lock open from the wrong side of the door, tumblers going over one by one, greased silent, and the people on the benches all around her holding their sick children of paper had no idea they were in the presence of a key.
The clerk resumed his tea. The room resumed not moving.
That’s what I bought, she thought; more precisely, that’s what I’ve bought into.
She took the north stair walking out, rather than the public one. She went past the records annex, noting the window latches, single-throw, painted shut on the left, and the drop to the cart yard, and the yard’s two gates. She noted which ones were used, and then she was on the street with the whole building surveyed. She stopped at the corner, and made herself stand in the foot traffic like a stone in a stream. She asked herself, honestly, what exactly she was planning to escape from. No answer came. That was the trouble with her training: it didn’t ask permission, it just kept counting doors and windows, in case she went back to being someone who left.
They gave him back his coat, his hat, one dagger of three, and a paper explaining the whereabouts of everything else in language that meant he wouldn’t soon be seeing them. The property clerk read him the inventory of what the Crown was keeping like a eulogy: painting, sundry items, effects. Tav signed the receipt and did not ask about the necklace. He’d have it back. First, though, the house rules of being owned.
Then a door, and another door, and then the street.
Nobody eases you into a city. Merranth arrived all at once, the whole roaring stinking orchestra of it: fish, tar, wet wool. A ballad-seller murdering something in the next street, and under it all the bells, the quarter striking from two towers a half-beat out of step with each other the way they had been out of step his entire life. Tav stood on the steps of the Crown’s building with his eyes shut like a drunk in the rain and let it all land on him. Five days. It had felt like a sea voyage. It had felt, said a small dry voice he ignored, like a first night ashore, and wasn’t it strange how fast that went, out here, in the noise.
He walked. No destination for the first half hour, or none he’d admit to, just streets, taking the city back block by block. Some things five years had eaten: a cookshop, a whole alley gone under a warehouse. Some things, however, were eternal: the fishwives at the shambles arguing in the same key, the beggar with the grey dog who had been old when Tav was a boy and had apparently decided against dying.
The tail picked him up somewhere past the shambles.
He’d have been insulted otherwise, honestly. Fresh asset, first hour loose, of course someone walked in his shadow, the only question was who they served. He read the footfall of the crowd without effort, that was the thing he’d notice later as he lay awake: one set of steps among hundreds holding its interval like a note held under an orchestra. Leather heels, city-shod, twelve yards. He gave it three turns to be sure and lost it in the cloth market on the fourth, an old dance done at walking pace, coat reversed at the stalls, out the wool-carters’ gate, and standing in the lane beyond he heard the tail’s rhythm break behind the wall, stop, cast about. Heard it clean through four feet of hanging cloth and a market’s roar, the specific stutter of a man realizing, and grinned to himself before the grin died on its own. That, said the small dry voice, was very good hearing. That was, be honest, remarkable hearing.
Prison ears, he told the voice. Five days of listening to a bootheel. The trade came back sharp when you starved it, everyone knew that, and the voice had no retort. He took that for agreement.
The lodging Sayd kept for meetings that weren’t meetings stood where it had always stood, in the crooked street above the chandlers, ginger smoke ghosting from an upper shutter like the house was breathing it. Tav stood across the way a minute, hat down, watching the light in the shutter’s seam and putting his story in order, which parts to share, which to hold. The next dance, which tonight would be against a friend.
Then he crossed the street, and knocked the old-patterned knock, and the door was opened before the third rap by a boy with two hands too fast, who looked at him with frank professional awe and said, “He’s been expecting you.”
“Course he has,” said Tav, and up he went.
The stairs were narrower than he remembered, or he was wider, which was impossible after five days of grey mush. Odd Hands went up ahead two steps at a time, looking back at every turn like a dog checking to see if you’re still following.
Halst filled the landing. He sat on a stool that had long since given up complaining, the gnarled truncheon across his knee, and watched them come up with the same total absence of opinion he’d brought to Tav’s skull a month prior.
“Big man,” Tav nodded.
Halst considered him. “You look worse than after I hit you.”
“I’ve been resting.”
Halst stood and moved aside as Tav continued upward.
The room at the top had been a storeroom when Tav last saw it, five years back. Someone had redecorated. There was a fire now, and a carpet that someone had recently beaten. On the sideboard a covered dish was keeping warm over a candle. Ginger smoke hung under the beams.
Sayd was in the chair by the fire. He turned his papers face down on the arm, unhurried. Then he set down the pipe.
In all the years Tav had known him, Sayd Basha had never put down the pipe to greet anyone. He did it now, and stood, and crossed the carpet, and took Tav’s forearm in a grip that was dry and a good deal stronger than it looked. He held it a moment longer than a casual greeting needed.
“You’re thinner,” Sayd said.
“The food was a lesson in humility.”
“Then we’ll move on to gratitude.”
Maddy was at the window. She hadn’t moved when he came in. That was the first thing he saw, before he registered her face, before anything: she had chosen not to move. She sat on the sill in her grey overcoat, one boot up and a sheaf of paper across her knee, and she looked at him. Just that. It went on long enough that Odd Hands found something urgent to do with the fire.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“I was going for distinguished.”
“You missed.”
Something in his chest let go a single notch.
He sat. Sayd filled a plate and put it in front of him himself. That was another thing Sayd didn’t do: serve people. Though once, when they were boys with nothing, Sayd had given him bread. Given, not traded. A month ago Tav had sat roped to a chair in a cellar waiting for some flicker of the boy he remembered, and it hadn’t come.
He looked at the plate a moment before he picked up the fork.
The covered dish was lamb in something dark and sweet with ginger, and for a while, eating was the whole of the conversation, and nobody seemed to mind.
Sayd didn’t ask. That was what Tav kept waiting for between mouthfuls. Where were you. What did you give them. Sayd relit the pipe and watched the fire.
There was an older debt on the table besides. After Pendleton, you tell me how you froze the debt. It had been the price of the whole arrangement, and Tav had his answer ready, trimmed and polished on the plank that was his bed over five nights. Sayd didn’t ask for that either. Tav found he was grateful.
In the end, it was Tav who cracked. “They let me go.”
“So I see.”
“Insufficient evidence. Turns out a painting makes a poor witness.”
“Landscapes rarely testify.” Sayd drew on the pipe. “The magistrate’s court had a productive afternoon, I’m told. Your charges died very quietly.”
Tav looked at him. Sayd looked to the fire.
There it was, on the table between the bread and the lamb: had his friend reached into a Crown court and quietly smothered a case on his behalf? Any question he asked would pull on his own story, and his story was mostly air and a ragged signature that could have been someone else’s.
Across the room, Maddy turned a page. She hadn’t read the last one.
“Then I owe the magistrate a drink, it would seem,” Tav said.
Halfway through the lamb a clerk came in without knocking, which meant he was expected. He bent to murmur at Sayd’s shoulder. Ink on his cuffs, a ledger hugged to his chest. “Factor,” he finished. Sayd gave him two words Tav didn’t catch, and the clerk went out again.
Factor.
Tav knew the word. Every thief in Merranth knew it. A Patron’s hand: the man who held another man’s keys and made his problems go quietly into the harbour. A lot had changed in five years. Gone was the clever young man with a pipe and empty pockets.
Factor to whom. The question sat on his tongue with the ginger, but the fire was warm, and the lamb was the best thing he’d eaten in near a week, and Maddy was across the room. He was convinced she was pretending to read. He could ask in the morning. The morning had plenty of room to it.
He had business in the morning anyway. Fourteen small things on a workbench across the city. The Crown’s inventory hadn’t listed them, so nobody had found the place. He’d fetch them first. A man ought to own something he could count.
“Mistress Floris has been remarkably warm company,” Sayd said, “while we waited.”
Floris.
Maddy had given Tav names before. One per harbour town, usually, and he’d enjoyed collecting them the way you enjoy a card trick you’ll never work out. He would have counted Floris among the tricks, except he’d seen it once. A year back, in a book she swore she’d bought: a library ticket tucked inside the cover, M. Floris, Reader, in a clerk’s clear penmanship. He had assumed she’d stolen the book, as she stole most things.
He looked at her across the room, yet she continued to read.
Was Floris her real name, then? Handed to Sayd. To the Factor. She had never once handed it to him.
The lamb had gone to paste in his mouth. He swallowed it anyway, and set his cup down a little harder than the table deserved.
“She’s good company,” he agreed. “Expensive, though.”
“As good things ought to be.” Sayd tapped the pipe out against the grate. “Which brings me to business, now that you’ve finished your meal. There’s ample work, when you’re ready. Not tonight. Not this week, if you’d rather. But it’s there.”
“What sort of work?”
“Your sort.” Sayd let that settle. “I find I have more doors than I do people who can open them.”
“A job offer and a compliment. Where’s the fun if there’s no negotiation?”
Odd Hands, at the fire, had stopped pretending to tend it. Five nights ago he’d gone into Pendleton’s vault at Tav’s back. And by sunrise, the Crown had Tav in irons, and the boy had spent the days since hearing it told in taverns, worse each time. Now here was the same man finishing a plate of lamb, and Odd Hands watched him with the open hunger of a boy who has just seen a coin vanish and badly wants to know where it went.
“I’ll think about it,” Tav said.
“Do. The offer won’t spoil.”
His thumb had gone to his chest again, to the empty place under his shirt. He caught it and put the hand on the table. When he looked up, Maddy was watching the hand.
She put the papers aside and stood. “It’s late.”
“Odd Hands will see you down,” Sayd said.
“I’ll do it,” said Tav, already up. If Sayd had an opinion about it, he kept it to himself.
Halst stood again to let them by. Below him, the stair turned, and turned again, and went dark between the lamps, and for thirty seconds or so there was nobody in the world but the two of them and the creak of old wood.
At the bottom she stopped with her hand on the latch.
“How are you?” she said.
“Distinguished.”
She waited.
“I thought you’d be halfway to the Reach by now,” he said. “That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
“Plans change.” She let go of the latch and turned to face him in the narrow entryway.
He was suddenly aware of how long it had been since he’d washed. She was at the bottom of Sayd Basha’s stairs in her grey coat, looking at him in the dark. She had something to say, but decided against it.
“Floris,” he said. “I remember seeing that on a library ticket, in a book you swore you bought.”
He reached past her, lifted the latch himself, and walked out into the street before she could answer.
It was a good exit. The cold came up to meet him, the door swung shut on whatever her face was doing, and he went off down the crooked street with his hat low and his back straight, a man with somewhere to be.
He made it to the corner by the chandlers’ before he remembered he didn’t. He needed a place to sleep, and to wash. Only, he had no money to his name. His contract with SI didn’t specify a wage, did it?
So, he stood in a doorway around the corner, in the smell of cold tallow, and waited for Maddy to leave. Five nights ago he had robbed the Pendleton vault. Tonight he was hiding behind a candle shop from the same woman who had helped him rob it.
The door didn’t open for a long time. When it did, he heard her on the step, then her boots on the cobbles, unhurried, going the other way. He knew that walk. He gave it a hundred count after it had gone, to be safe, and then fifty more, because he was nothing if not a professional.
He returned to the door, lifted the latch and went in. Halst was on the landing when he came back up, and he didn’t stand this time. He looked at Tav for a while with no opinion whatsoever.
“Good exit,” Halst said.
Chapter Five
Somebody had made up a bed in the room off the landing, and Tav had fallen into it like a dropped coat.
He woke to the chandlers. Tallow going into the vats below, the smell of it climbing the walls, a boy downstairs whistling the same four notes and losing the fifth every time.
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