by M. J. Kuhn
The salt breeze tugged at her hood as she wound her way back toward the dying party on the southern docks. She tossed Efrain Althea’s severed finger up and down, whistling an old Gildesh sea shanty as she went.
2
NASH
Claudia Nash watched the mud drip slowly from her boot to the delicate wooden table beneath her heel as the clock ticked past the quarter-hour mark. To be fair, she wasn’t actually sure the soupy brown liquid pooling on Bardley’s table was mud. After sloshing around the docks of Carrowwick Harbor, it could be anything, really.
Well, she thought, tapping one dark finger against her kneecap, if Bardley didn’t want his sitting room tea table ruined, he shouldn’t have kept me waiting so long.
Honestly, after ten years of running with Clem’s crew, she expected a little more respect than this. But the lace merchants in this pisshole were way more arrogant than the fish traders she had grown up with down on the Gildesh border. They always thought they were better than her, and they wanted her to know it.
She didn’t even bother to turn her head when she finally heard the prissy click of footsteps entering the room.
“Glad to see you’ve made it, Miss Nash,” Bardley said, extending a hand as he swept through the door surrounded by a flurry of fine silk. “I know it’s a bit late, but with the chaos from the heretics’ festival, you understand.”
Nash raised an eyebrow, looking down at the merchant’s hand before tilting her neck sideways, releasing a series of loud cracks. Bardley rubbed his fingers together in apparent irritation, withdrawing his hand and taking a seat on the pristine sofa.
He eyed the destroyed table, curling his lip in irritation, but all he said was, “I trust Callum has sent you with good news?”
There was no way this prig was on first-name terms with Cal Clem. Nash pulled a jingling bag from the pocket of her salt-stiffened coat and tossed it onto the table.
“That’s right,” she said, her voice raspier than a stack of decade-old ledgers.
Bardley leaned forward, plucking the linen bag from the table before the waves of the Shit Sea streaming from Nash’s boots could reach it. He poked around the contents with his little birdlike fingers before tutting deeply and shaking his head.
“I thought we had agreed on five crescents per unit.”
Nash ran a fingernail between her two front teeth. “That’s right.”
“Miss Nash—”
“It’s just Nash.” It was actually just Claudia, but if anyone was dumb enough to call her that, she was likely to rip out his throat and show it to him.
“Nash, then,” Bardley said, clearly irritated. “I know all about the little games your kind like to run. Allow me to make myself clear. If you cheat me, it will not end well for you.”
He snapped his fingers, then looked meaningfully toward the open doorway in the corner. Nash followed his gaze, swallowing as a hulking shadow lumbered into the room.
Its black linen cloak rippled as it took a step forward into the candlelight. Her stomach squirmed. Its eyes were focused squarely on Bardley, as though awaiting an order. But of course it was. That was all the Adept servants did 99 percent of their miserable lives: Stand still, wait for the master to clap.
There was no pattern to how the Adept babies were born. Or possibly it was just a puzzle nobody but the Guildmaster had managed to crack. No one knew how he and his loyal Disciples could tell which babies would grow up to have powers—how he tracked them down from every nook and cranny of Thamorr before they could even sit up—but the Guildmaster was always right. And they always grew up to become… that.
Nash could still remember Ma’s sobs the day the Guildmaster’s blue-sailed ships came to take her baby sister, Jolie. It had been stupid of them to name the child before her first birthday, everyone knew that, utter lunacy to get attached, but Ma had taken the risk. And it had not paid off. Nash’s father was away at sea; he didn’t even know he had a second daughter yet… but somehow the Guildmaster did. But that was irrelevant. This Adept couldn’t be Jolie. This one was male—not to mention white as a Borean winter, ten shades paler than Nash at least.
It turned its head, and she squinted. In the light of the candelabra sitting beside the window she could just barely make out the letter inked onto the side of its pale, bald head.
K
A Kinetic. She eyed the creature’s left cheek. Just as she’d thought. Rebranded—more than once. That told her two things: This twat Bardley wasn’t important enough to get an invite to the proper Guildmaster’s auction, and he was slimy enough to buy an Adept illegally.
Lovely. Cal always managed to find the most charming business partners.
She chewed the inside of her cheek absently as she ran her eyes over the Adept. This one probably wasn’t very powerful. In Dresdell, the only real Kinetics—the ones capable of stopping swords and splintering walls with their minds—were tucked away inside the Bobbin Fort. They were all dangerous nonetheless. Unnaturally strong and faster than a damned dragonfly. But Cal didn’t keep Nash around because she was easily intimidated. In fact, she was pretty sure the only reason he had taken her on all those years ago was because she had been bold enough to use her last two silvers to track him down and ask to join the Saints. If she hadn’t backed off from the most fearsome syndicate lord in Carrowwick at the tender age of fourteen, she sure as shit wasn’t about to do so with a spoiled little prat like Bardley now.
Nash leaned back in her velvet chair.
“Impressive, but it doesn’t change our deal.”
“And what deal is that?”
“Five crescents a unit… and a ten percent cut to the Saints.”
“Ten percent?” Bardley’s lips curved into a smile so smug Nash had to forcibly resist the urge to pop him in the jaw. “No, no. I’m certain I would not have agreed to such an outlandish figure. Especially not with such a… low-ranking syndicate. I seem to recall it was seven percent.”
Merchants. If there was anything Nash had learned in her twenty-four years, it was that they were even dirtier than the gutter rats of the Lottery. If Bardley thought he could leverage the Saints’ recent downfall into a deal here, he was sorely mistaken.
Nash leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and splitting her lips into a wide smile. It grew even wider when she saw Bardley flinch. Her carefully sharpened canines tended to have that effect on people.
“You can bring all the Kinetics and all the little jokes you want, Bardley, but if you try to short the Saints”—she pawed through the bowl of nuts on the mud-covered table—“at the very least, you’re going to be stuck going through the bullshit taxes of Briel’s legal trade. At worst?” She popped an almond into her mouth with another grin. “You might just find yourself face-to-face with Cal’s most famous friend.”
Bardley scoffed, but Nash saw that beneath that fine doublet he was sweating like a sailor in his first storm. Mention of the Butcher did that to a man.
“I could work through the Harpies.”
Nash’s chest rumbled with a gravelly laugh. The Harpies—good for nothing but licking boots, as Cal liked to say. They had enough smugglers to run the best black market south of Volkfier, the Carrowwick Fair, sure… but mostly they dealt in dice halls and brothels.
“Good luck finding one of those Harpy bastards who can talk the shopkeeps in Sandport into buying your shit-poor lace at five crescents a bolt.”
“Shit-poor—” Bardley opened his little pink mouth like a babe about to cry for milk, then shut it again. He repeated the motion twice more. No more words came out. Nash’s smile widened again as she pushed herself to her feet, leaning over to pat him amiably on the shoulder.
“There’s a good man,” she said. “I’m heading back south again at the end of Juli. I’ll send my men to pick up your next shipment then, if you’re ready.”
Neither Bardley nor his precious Kinetic moved an inch as Nash gave a wink and sauntered from the room, leaving a trail of filthy boot prints i
n her wake.
* * *
THE MERCHANTS’ quarter was eerily silent. Nash pulled a battered old pocket watch from her coat, catching the moonlight on its face. Just past two in the morning. Most of her crew had run off to the Mermaid’s Tail the second the Seasnake’s Revenge had butted up against the southern dock. The brothel was close—just along the northern edge of the Harpies’ territory—but that wasn’t really Nash’s style. The dice hall beside it, however… She ran her tongue over her teeth. The night was still young enough to turn a pocketful of coppers into silvers.
The streets grew louder and busier the farther south she moved. A hundred faces swam past in the dimly lit alleys, all blotchy red with drink. Halfway to the Tail she paused, wrinkling her nose as she watched a familiar silhouette stumbling through the slowly dispersing crowds. Harlow Finn.
The leader of the Harpies was an impossible man to forget. His spine was so twisted that Nash had to imagine every lurching step must be agony. Then there were the boils. They covered his pale flesh from head to toe. His claim to fame—proof he’d survived his bout with the Borean Death during the plague years. Nash always felt like she could still smell the sickness on him. She bit back a shudder.
Beside Finn, obviously struggling to match his painfully slow pace, was a short, slight figure in a deep purple coat. A woman. How much wine would someone need to guzzle to find herself eager to climb into Harlow Finn’s bed? Nash wondered. Well, she supposed, there was no accounting for taste.
Then the woman turned her head, a finger of lantern light brushing along her cheekbone. Nash slowed to a stop, hiding her face in her collar as the pair picked their way toward the skeletal tangle of naked masts crowding the Harpies’ docks. Nash spent enough time at sea that there weren’t many faces she recognized in this city, but that was definitely one of them. Round and cherubic, but somehow also deadly and sharp. Pale gray eyes cut deep into paler cheeks.
Tana Rafferty. A Kestrel Crown. Not just any Crown—Wyatt Asher’s second-in-command.
Now what in the hell would she be doing skulking around with Harlow Finn at two in the damned morning?
Trying to make her six-foot-tall frame as small as possible, Nash nudged her way past a man emptying his guts into the gutter. There was no way Rafferty was walking out on the Crowns, was there? Asher’s syndicate brought in twice the coin the Harpies did with their fighting pits alone. Besides, as far as Nash knew, the only person to betray Wyatt Asher and survive was Callum Clem.
Rafferty was sharp, but she was no Cal Clem. Asher had to know she was here… but why?
Nash kept her distance, walking a parallel path through the twisting alleys. She paused as the unlikely duo slowed to a stop beside the Undertow, the dice hall just beside the Tail. She leaned one arm against the moldering siding beside her, peering through the misty shadows across the dock.
Finn and Rafferty were clearly in deep conversation. What were they saying? Maybe she could slip down the next dock, come up on the Undertow from the back alley…?
But the moment had already passed.
Rafferty drew a small, weighted pouch from her pocket. Coins. Bigger than coppers, from the looks of it. Nash could almost feel the weight of the small bundle as Rafferty slipped it into Harlow Finn’s waiting claws. It vanished into the ragged folds of the man’s jacket. He limped into the Undertow, leaving Rafferty to slip away with the wind.
Wyatt Asher was paying the Harpies? For what? Since when had anyone but Harlow Finn himself given half a shit about the third syndicate of the Lottery? Unless…
Nash ground her teeth. Dammit. She had hoped not to see that pompous son of a bitch tonight. This was supposed to be a short stopover, a quick detour on her way to bring a fresh shipment of dormire’s blood to the Borean port town of Volkfier.
Maybe it was nothing. She stopped, hovering at the corner of Threader’s Lane. Four alleys left would take her back to the Revenge. She could pretend she hadn’t seen a damned thing, collect her coin from those drugged-up northerners, and get on with her life.…
“Damn it all,” she said, turning right instead. Her Borean friends would have to suffer the weight of a clear mind a little longer.
Smuggling Brillish drugs and third-rate lace might bring in enough coin to keep her out of the gutters, but if the Kestrel Crowns and the Harpies were working together, that had to mean there was a big job in the works. Big jobs meant big money.
And big money was something Cal Clem was going to want to know about.
3
TRISTAN
Drunken shouts echoed all the way from the docks to the edge of Braider’s Corner as colorful sparks rained down from the sky. Soon, the fireworks would end, and the inns along the southern trade docks would be bursting at the seams with drunken fools in ridiculous costumes. For many, the Festival of Felice was over. For Tristan Beckett, it was just beginning. “Th’ game’s Nobleman’s Luck…” Tristan pushed his voice into a drunken drawl as he collected the cards on the table with deliberate clumsiness. He winked at no one in particular. “Since you lot can hold your wine, I know there ain’t a nobleman among us. We’ll call’t Sailor’s Luck.”
The four men seated around his table chortled appreciatively. Tristan picked up the last four cards, stacking them on top of the deck with carefully crafted indifference. He split the deck lazily in half. “How many’ve you lot are in?”
“Me,” grunted a ruddy-cheeked man wearing a wooden crown. The woman seated on his lap cheered as the other three men agreed.
“A full-table game! That’s what Felice likes t’ see,” Tristan said, making sure to let his voice carry. He reached into his pocket, flicking a dingy silver half onto the table. A bold first wager. The other men hesitated.
“Do I see real coins on this table? Finally,” said a voice with a thick Borean accent.
A tall, slender man sauntered toward their table, parting the smoke like bed curtains. He smiled at the woman on King Drunk’s lap. “Where I come from, a man is not so afraid of risk as these little mice-men from Dresdell, playing with their coppers.”
The woman smiled at the newcomer, eyes running from his messy blond curls to the lean muscles of his chest, peeking out from a half-unbuttoned shirt.
“Mice-men?” King Drunk asked, shooting a concerned look at his companion as she started to toy with her long, dark hair. He reached for his purse so quickly Tristan thought he might throw a shoulder out. No one in the Lottery could say the newcomer, Ivan Rezkoye, wasn’t a professional. In the past few months, Tristan had seen him run this little game a hundred times. Almost often enough to forget the time he’d been the drunken idiot diving for his coins.
Almost.
Tristan shuffled the cards, stacking them in his favor with practiced speed. His hands slipped, crimping the bottom card of the newly stacked deck ever so slightly. He cut the deck, burying the crumpled card in the middle.
“Care t’ cut your luck?” he asked King Drunk.
The man cut without looking, his fingers naturally finding the crimp.
“What are the rules to this game of yours, mouse-man?” Ivan asked, flashing a dazzling grin at the brunette, now halfway off King Drunk’s lap.
King Drunk gave a derisive snort. “What kinda idiot puts down good silver on a game he doesn’t even know?”
“Idiot? Perhaps I am just hoping to get lucky.” Ivan slung the woman another smile. She blushed.
“Ye want a total’ve twelve,” King Drunk said, almost shouting as he tried to keep his companion’s attention. “A king and a dyad is a perfect hand, but a nine and a three’ll work if no one’s got better.”
Ivan tapped his chin, as if in deep thought. “And if no one has twelve?”
“Then you’ll want close to twelve as you can get,” said the brunette. “But no higher.”
Tristan scooped up his cards. Two aces, just as he’d planned.
“Who’s lookin’ for another card?” he asked, holding the deck out, waggling his eyebrows. “C’
mon now, the cards’nt gonna take themselves.”
At least one of them had to draw one or his carefully stacked deck wouldn’t be able to save him. But that was what Ivan was there for. Well, partly anyway…
Across the table, Ivan was whispering conspiratorially with the slender brunette, who had now completely removed herself from King Drunk’s lap. Her former comrade ground his teeth in irritation, snatching up another card. Tristan smiled, plucking his planted card from the deck. A Valier stared up at him, the card version of one of the somber guards of the Dresdellan throne, clad all in fading purple ink.
“Last round for bets, yes?” Ivan said. “Come now, do not be shy. I want to buy the lady a cup of stervod.” He swept a golden crescent from his purse and dropped it on the table, looking at the drunk. “The bet is to you, mouse-man.”
“Call me a mouse one more time, blondie,” King Drunk said, slamming a dingy crescent onto the table. Tristan tossed his coin in next, and the last man followed.
Ivan flipped his cards first. Two dyads. Four. A dismal hand.
“That’s what ya bet on?” King Drunk cackled. He flipped his own cards. Eleven.
“Schwachschiss,” Ivan swore in Borean. “You Dresdellans and your pitiful card games.” He pushed himself up from the table. The woman hurried to follow.
“Can’t win ’em all, m’ northern friend,” Tristan called after him.
The third man flipped his cards. An eight and a three.
Tristan tutted. “So close, so close.”
He flipped his winning hand over, watching Ivan finally shake the brunette and stalk away. The Borean pulled a button at the back of his collar. His own invention. A cascade of black fabric flooded over his bloodred shirt. He swept his shoulder-length curls into a bun as he melted away into the crowd, his hawklike eyes already searching for his next table of victims.
