Sworn in Steel

by Douglas Hulick

  “That’s precisely when I get to decide: When you’re busy being a stubborn, shortsighted, selfish ass.”

  “In other words, most days.”

  “Damn straight, most da—oh, you bastard.” Fowler turned away, trying to stifle a grin. “You son of a bitch. That’s not fair, making me laugh.”

  I smiled in turn and forced myself to release some of the tension that had been gathering in my shoulders. “Fair has nothing to do with it. Or didn’t you realize that, now that I’m a Gray Prince?” I made the last two words sound comically ominous.

  Fowler snickered, then took a deep breath. When she turned back to me, her fires were, if not out, then at least banked. “You’re right,” she said. “Fair has nothing to do with it. But that’s my point. You’re a Gray Prince now, Drothe—you don’t get to take stupid risks. Drawing three swordsmen away in a street fight is our job—we’re the ones who’re supposed to face the steel while you fade. It’s not just about you being smart enough to stay ahead of the rest of the Kin; it’s about you staying alive. About letting the rest of us handle the street-level shit so you can focus on the bigger picture.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not how I work and you know it.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s how you need to start operating. Otherwise it won’t matter whether it comes from another Prince or some cut-rate Eriff who gets lucky in an alley—you’ll still end up dead because you couldn’t let go of the street. And I’ll be damned if I lose any more people just so you can keep playing the Nose instead of the Prince.”

  “Give me some cred—wait,” I said, picking up on what she’d just said—or rather, what she hadn’t said. I looked past her, scanning the street. “Where’s Scratch? Is he dust-mans?”

  Fowler barked out something that, on any other day, might have passed for a laugh. Now it just sounded like pain. “There’s no getting anything by you, is there?”

  “How’d he—?”

  “Does it matter? He was doing his fucking job, which is more than I can say for you.” She turned her head as if to spit, then seemed to think better of it and instead pulled off her cap. She ran a hand through spiked, greasy hair. “People are dying for you, Drothe. And they’re going to keep dying. My people, your people—Kin you don’t even know. And you can’t stop it. All you can do is be worth it.” She put the cap back on and turned away. “Try to be worth it, will you? At least for me.”

  I stood there, watching her go, until the morning crowds swallowed her up.

  I forced tired legs to lift heavy feet and began to make my way back toward Blackpot Street. Of a sudden, sleep didn’t sound so tempting anymore, if only because of the work I knew that would be waiting for me on the other side.

  Be worth it. Angels help me.

  Chapter Five

  I woke to the sound of a late summer storm, the rain hitting like shovelfuls of gravel in the paved courtyard outside my window. For a moment, the remnants of a dream flitted at the edge of my consciousness—memories of roses and rivers, of blood and carpeted hallways—before the reality of the night came in and crowded them aside.

  I shifted in my bed and listened to the noise.

  I wasn’t used to a courtyard yet, let alone one big enough to allow rain to fall down into it. The closest I’d ever come was a street running along the other side of my shutters, and most of them had been so narrow that rain didn’t drop so much as seep into the gap between buildings. Before that, in my youth, it had been the rain coming down through the trees, which was a different thing entirely.

  I sat up in darkness that wasn’t darkness and looked over toward the window in question. Rain without, none within, thanks to the covered walkway that ran around three sides of the courtyard. I’d left the shutters open on purpose, to test myself. To see if I could sleep with them open. I had, but only, I suspected, out of exhaustion.

  When was the last time I’d left a window open when I slept? When was the last time I’d had the trust, or the courage, to even try? I couldn’t remember, and that alone told me too much.

  I reached over and took an ahrami seed from the bowl beside my bed and placed it in my mouth. Rest wasn’t an option anymore—not now. Not with the rain and the window and the nerves.

  I stood up. It wasn’t easy.

  Everything felt sore, from the bottoms of my feet to the bruise on my forehead, and double for what lay in between. I stretched this way, twisted that, and filled the air with more curses and grunts than were likely necessary. Then I drew on a fresh shirt, pulled up blissfully clean pants, and padded my way—stiffly—out of the bedroom and down the hall. I stopped in the shadow of the doorway that led out onto the courtyard.

  Out here, the rain was a curtain, the noise so loud I took a step back. Where normally I could have seen across the courtyard—seen the stone bench and the potted trees, the iron gate and the entry alcove beyond—now all I could make out was an amber blur of falling water. I, who could see in the dark, blinded by a bit of falling water.

  In a way, I preferred it like this: the not seeing—or at least, not seeing the trappings of my princedom before me. It was still unnerving to wake up and find rooms and a courtyard and sky overhead. For nearly as long as I’d been in Ildrecca, it had been close walls, loud neighbors, and, maybe, a smoke-shrouded strip of blue glimpsed between buildings. Even when I’d graduated to apartments of my own, they’d been in the darker, danker, tighter portions of the capital. Narrow was good, loud was secure, smelly was reassuring. But this?

  Even with Fowler’s people standing Oak and making the rounds, the place didn’t feel secure to me; didn’t seem as if I belonged. Oh, I understood why it was easier to keep watch over a private house rather than a set of rooms above a shop or in a tenement, how it made sense for someone like me to set himself apart from the rest of the Kin and the Lighters—but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  It had been Kells’s idea, of course. Once my boss, now my sworn man, he was the closest thing I had to a mentor when it came to being a Gray Prince. It was Kells who had first told me about the street naming me a Prince, just as he had been the first to offer me his Clasp and help me begin forming what little organization I now had. He was a master when it came to running a crew, and I was happy to have him at my side.

  Or would have been, if he wasn’t also serving as a Long Nose for me in another Gray Prince’s operation. It hadn’t been my intention to put him to spying on Solitude, but she’d already taken him under her cloak when he’d approached me on the matter. We’d talked about him walking away from her over the last few months, but Kells was concerned that his leaving would make her suspicious of the other members of his former organization that had taken shelter with her. In some cases, the suspicions would have been justified—I had five people actively working the corners in Solitude’s camp—but in most others, it wouldn’t.

  I’d spent seven years working as a Long Nose for Kells before our respective reversals of fortune—I knew what it meant to live neck deep in another person’s organization, with only a slip of the tongue or the wrong piece of information standing between you and a very long, very painful death. I wasn’t willing to put his people at risk simply for my convenience.

  And so we communicated on the sly, using coded messages and blind drops and the occasional carefully orchestrated meeting. His advice was still invaluable—more so even than his information—but it came too seldom, and usually with too much delay, to make a difference most days.

  No, just like the house, I was having to get used to more space around me when it came to the Kin. More room to maneuver, more space to make mistakes, more sky to bring down both disaster and opportunity upon me.

  I sat down on the stoop and listened to the rain falling in the courtyard, comforted by the fact that right now, whether my eyes were open or closed, I was equally blind.

  Eventually, I fell asleep.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  I looked up from my plate to find Betriz standing over me,
an impish smile on her face. She always seemed to have an impish smile on her face, usually for good reason. I just never liked when it was directed at me.

  It was two days after my entry back into the city and I was sitting at an outdoor table at a tavern called the Plucked Quill. It was three blocks from my new house, did respectable trade, and had an excellent board when it came to food. I’d arranged to gain a small interest in the place after my second meal there.

  “Sit,” I said, indicating the place across from me. She did, swinging one long leg over the chair rather than pulling it out. Betriz then placed an elbow on the table, put her chin on her hand, and regarded me with bright brown eyes.

  “You realize the answer is still no,” she said. “Right?”

  I smiled as I picked up a piece of flat bread. It was still warm. “You haven’t even heard my offer.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m not about to be narrowed, not even by the likes of the great Drothe himself.”

  I made a rude noise with my lips. “Please. If I were ‘great,’ I wouldn’t be asking you to work for me, I’d be telling you.”

  “And I’d still be saying no.”

  “Which is why I keep making offers.”

  Betriz flashed an easy smile and helped herself to a corner of my bread. I didn’t argue.

  Betriz was a Nose, and a good one at that. She had a strong reputation on the street, with a record of not falling for bullshit and a habit of getting things done. I’d been trying to bring her into my organization for a couple of months now, but she was happy playing the Wide Nose—a freelance information scrounger—and had no interest in tying herself down. I couldn’t blame her, really: I’d felt much the same way in my early days on the dodge. It hadn’t been until I’d fallen under Kells’s sway that I’d even considered working exclusively for one crime lord, and that had only been because he was, to my mind, a legend among Upright Men. I might be a Gray Prince, but I hadn’t done near enough to warrant that kind of starry-eyed devotion—at least, not in Betriz’s opinion.

  “So what’s the dodge?” She leaned forward, eyes practically dancing. “Does it have anything to do with the ambush Soggy Petyr pulled on you the other day?”

  I shook my head. Per Fowler’s pointed suggestion, I already had some people looking into dealing with Petyr, not to mention getting the plays back for Tobin and his troupe. Between the bragging the Petty Boss was likely doing and the complaining I could expect from the actors if I didn’t have something to show them, I didn’t want to leave things longer than I had to. But that didn’t mean I wanted to bring someone like Betriz in on either issue. The last thing I needed was outside talent getting wind of my debts.

  “Don’t worry about Petyr,” I said. “All I need from you is a bit of cove hunting.”

  “And you can’t use your own people because . . . ?”

  “Because I don’t want to risk them being tied to me.”

  “Meaning there’s a chance of someone seeing me if I do this dodge.”

  “There’s always a chance. We both know that.”

  Betriz put the corner of bread in her mouth and chewed.

  “Who?” she said.

  I tore off a portion of bread myself and dragged it through a smear of young, runny goat cheese on my plate, then topped it off with a piece of sliced sausage. There were hints of cardamom and aniseed in the greasy meat, along with a healthy dose of black pepper, all of which worked against the sourness of the cheese. I chewed, swallowed, and then followed it with one of the fat black grapes to help cut the spices.

  Betriz waited patiently during this, knowing it for the delay it was.

  “Rambles,” I said at last.

  “Huh.” She sat back in her seat, then leaned forward to take a grape off my plate. “Huh,” she said again.

  “What?”

  “Way I hear it, he’s been looking for someone to do a bit of snilching on you, too.”

  It didn’t surprise me, especially considering what else he’d been doing lately. “And?”

  Betriz made a face. “He’s still figuring out he has money. Didn’t offer nearly enough for me to turn on you. Boy has to learn that people expect a certain amount of ready when it comes to working for an Upright, let alone spying on a Gray Prince.”

  “I’m heartened by how hard you cling to your standards.”

  “Girl has to have ’em.” The grape went into her mouth. “So, what d’you need?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Just a time and place where I can drop in on Rambles and knock the shit out of him.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Betriz shook her head and helped herself to my cup of coffee. “And this is why I’ll never take your Clasp, Drothe.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because if this is the kind of shit you have to talk me into doing, I hate to think about the jobs I’d get if we didn’t have to dicker over price.”

  I smiled and signaled for another cup.

  Chapter Six

  I crouched, my body hidden by the decorative stonework that ran along the roof’s edge, and peered around the nymph’s carved ass in the growing dusk. Sweat trickled down my back. Even three stories up, it was humid and still.

  Below, in the small courtyard in front of the whorehouse, I could hear the voices of two toughs talking to a third. The two were alternately joking and pleading, trying to talk their way into the Mort Ken across the way. The doorman was having none of it. He kept telling them over and over that the whorehouse was closed until an hour after sunset, but the two men weren’t taking no for an answer.

  Which was the whole idea.

  “This is stupid,” muttered Nijjan.

  I flexed my fingers and stared at the roof across from us and stayed silent.

  “I mean, really stupid.”

  “Shut up, Nijjan.”

  Nijjan Red Nails shifted behind her own nymph, her slippers scraping softly against the roof tiles. As an Upright Woman, Nijjan wasn’t used to dancing roofs or playing the Crow; but neither was she used to having her Gray Prince at her door, demanding she put together a raid on another boss’s territory in less than four hours. To say she hadn’t been happy to see me would have been an understatement; to say part of her wouldn’t have preferred to gut me and throw me out the door after hearing my plan would have been an outright lie. Especially since she was right: This was stupid. Really stupid.

  Betriz had come through better—and faster—than I’d expected. A day of nosing had seen her back at my door, information in hand. It turned out that Rambles had developed a pattern for himself, at least when it came to checking his investments, and today was the day he collected his profits—and sampled the wares—at the whorehouse across from us.

  “Are you sure he’s in there?” said Nijjan.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because if I end up going to war over this bastard and he isn’t even in there . . .”

  I turned my eyes away from the roof and met Nijjan’s gaze. “I’m sure.”

  Nijjan glared at me, her blue eyes standing out like lanterns in the fading light. She was wrapped in russets and tans and browns, her dark hair cropped short and spiky. Hennaed designs on her hands and cheeks turned round and round one another, like some lost language run amok on her skin. Only her fingernails remained devoid of any decoration, and that because she didn’t want there to be any confusion about her name. She wasn’t Red Nails because of what was at the end of her fingers; she was Red Nails because of the broad-headed copper spikes she used to hold people down—or up—when she was annoyed with them.

  “Fine,” she said. “He’s in there. But I still don’t see why we can’t bring a few more Cutters with us in case—”

  “Because more Cutters mean more noise,” I said. “And being noticed is not what we need right now.”

  Nijjan grumbled and looked back out over the roof.

  I couldn’t blame her: We were deep in a rival Upright Man’s t
erritory, preparing to make a raid on one of his properties. If we were looking for a way to start a minor war, it didn’t get much better than this. Add to that the fact we were outnumbered—possibly severely—and that any help we might call on was hiding in a basement at least two blocks away, and it was a wonder she’d agreed to come at all.

  And yet here she was, all because I’d said one word: Rambles.

  Ever since he’d climbed over the ruins of Nicco’s organization to become an Upright Man, Rambles had been working on expanding his territory. Take over a minor racket here, twist the arm of a lesser gang there, and suddenly he was a growing concern. That kind of give-and-take wasn’t uncommon among the Kin, especially in the aftermath of a major war—uncertainty could be translated into opportunity, after all—but in Rambles’s case, some of the take had been at Nijjan’s expense. Not enough to justify all-out war, but enough to fester and make her knife that much looser in its sheath when it came to his name.

  I turned my attention back to the roof of the Mort Ken. It was a morass of shadows now, the planters and statues and ivy conspiring to cloak the place in early darkness. The only saving grace was that the statues and the roof behind us did the same thing over here.

  I hooked a finger into the pouch around my neck and scooped out a pair of ahrami seeds. I slipped them into my mouth almost without noticing. They didn’t help my nerves, but then, I hadn’t expected them to. We were long past that.

  “How long are your boys going to take?” I said.

  “Give them time. They can’t just start a fight at the drop of a hat.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  I could hear the smile in her voice. “Not if you want them to be a distraction, they can’t. Too soon, or too easy, and the Jiggerman at the door will catch on. Finesse, my Prince. Finesse.”

  I bit down on the seeds in irritation and reached for another. That’s when I saw the shadow move on the opposite roof.

  “There,” I hissed. “There’s our Crow.”