Steel's Edge te-4

by Ilona Andrews

  She held out his cloak. “Thank you for your cloak.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Richard held her horse’s reins while she put her foot in the stirrup and mounted. He handed them to her, got into his saddle, and they rode out.

  Half an hour later, the forest parted. Charlotte halted her horse. A wide field of waist-tall grass spread in front of her, rolling into the distance, where a nacre sea lapped at the shore under a bottomless dark sky. To the left, bathed in the salt water of the ocean, rose impossibly tall towers. Built of pale gray stone, they were triangular in shape, smoothly curved at the corners. A turquoise metal wave tipped each tower, sending rivulets of metal down the pale stone sides, like climbing plants that had sprouted a network of thin roots. The moonlight played on the metal, and its gleam matched the reflections on the placid ocean. The towers stood in a perfect semicircle, enclosing most of the city, like wave breakers.

  “Kelena’s Teeth,” Richard said. “During hurricanes the towers send out a magic barrier, shielding the city from the storms and the worst of the surge.”

  “It looks as if the city is halfway in the water.”

  “About a third. There are canals running all through the city, so when the tide rises, the water simply passes through Kelena into the salt marshes. All that grass is deceptive. That’s not solid ground under it, it’s marsh flats with a thin layer of water over mud. An ideal home for horned turtles. They grow to five feet wide and can snap a human femur in half with their jaws. Fortunately, they are slow and rarely venture on the road. Shall we?”

  Charlotte nodded and they trotted down the highway toward the city. She could see between the towers now, and from her vantage point in the saddle, the interior of the city looked like a mess of roofs, balconies, and bright, frayed banners. A human hive, just as Richard had described it: messy, chaotic, filled with strangers. A vague anxiety rose in her. From here, the city appeared too large, too full of people. While at the College, she had dreamt of traveling, but once she left it, the marriage and the house had taken precedence.

  Now she was riding toward this teeming city through the night, accompanied by a man born between the worlds who cut steel with his sword and had flawless manners. It felt surreal.

  “My brother says the Broken has a city in this exact same spot. According to him, its citizens have an unhealthy fascination with pirates,” Richard said.

  She found his voice strangely reassuring. “The same brother who stole your ballad?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “What does he do?” she asked to keep the conversation going.

  “He’s an agent of the Mirror.”

  Charlotte turned to him. “He is a spy?” The Mirror was Adrianglia’s intelligence and espionage agency, the realm’s main weapon in its cold war with the neighboring Dukedom of Louisiana. It operated in the shadows, and the exploits of its agents were legendary.

  Richard grimaced. “He steals anything that’s not nailed down, cons people into going along with his improbable schemes, and possesses a unique talent that lets him win when he gambles. It was the Mirror or a prison cell.”

  His distaste had a false, put-upon quality about it. “You’re proud of him,” she said.

  A narrow smile lit Richard’s face. “Extremely.”

  “I’ve never been to the Broken,” she told him. “I tried, but my magic was too strong.”

  “Neither have I,” he said. “I also tried to cross and nearly died. The Edge is my limit. I would love to see the Broken.”

  “I would, too.”

  The Broken’s gadgets fascinated her. Some, like microwave ovens, had their equivalent in the Weird, but others, like plastic wrap and cell phones, were completely new to her. When she had received de Ney manor, she had climbed into the attic. It was filled with strange things from the previous owners’ travels, and she loved to sort through their abandoned treasures. Each item was a little discovery, wrapped in echoes of adventure. She felt the exact same way about the swap meets she’d gone to in the Edge. She rarely bought things, but accompanying Éléonore on one of her treasure hunts was an experience in itself. Éléonore would find some strange gadget from the Broken, and her face would light up.

  Grief stabbed her. Charlotte stared ahead at the city. She would make them stop. They would regret the day they ever came to East Laporte.

  “Do we have a plan?” she asked.

  “The slaver ship docks tomorrow night,” Richard said. “They will expect a crew of at least ten men and a group of slaves, usually twelve to fifteen, typically adolescents and young adults. If they don’t see that on the shore, the ship may not dock. It’s imperative we get on that ship.”

  “Because it goes to the slave market?”

  “Yes. The slavers are run by a board of trustees, like a business. The individual slaver captains don’t know who the trustees are.”

  “You seem very sure of that,” she said.

  “Once you hang a man over an open fire, he usually answers your questions honestly,” Richard said. “The slavers don’t know the identity of the trustees, but they do know that once the slaves board the ships, they are taken to an island. There are sixty-seven islands along the Adrianglian coast. The slaves are sold at the market, and the sales are recorded and presided over by a bookkeeper. He’s directly accountable to the trustees. He will know their identities and faces.”

  “So where are we going to get a crew of slaves and slavers?” she asked.

  “We’re going to bargain with Jason Parris,” Richard said.

  “Who is he?”

  “The most vicious crime lord in the Cauldron.”

  The anxiety she’d been feeling since coming into view of Kelena returned full force. “Ah,” Charlotte said, forcing her voice to sound light. “I’m so relieved. I thought we would be doing something dangerous.”

  * * *

  RICHARD strode down the wooden boardwalk along the Cauldron’s Sharkmonger Canal, aware of Charlotte walking next to him and the dog trotting a few yards behind. To the right, two-story buildings rose in a continuous wall, built of anything from stone to discarded lumber, each story with its own faded, weather-beaten awning. The awnings hung over the boardwalk, shielding it from the rain and sun. It was late evening, and the numerous colored lanterns hanging from chains and ropes seemed almost to create more shadows than they banished.

  Beyond the buildings, even higher structures stretched upward, making the canal resemble a river running along the bottom of a deep, man-made canyon. The water, the color of milk tea, was completely opaque. Small docks punctuated the canal here and there, marked with bright orange-and-green sail-like banners that stretched all the way from the top story to the ground.

  The air smelled of bitter salt, seaweeds, smoke, and a confusing, slightly nauseating amalgam of odors particular to the Cauldron: incense; cooked meat; alcohol fumes; the distinct reek of sumah, an illegal narcotic; and the ever-present stench of fish guts.

  They passed a small square dock. A body floated facedown, bumping against the wooden supports. Next to him, Charlotte stopped for a short moment and then kept walking.

  She had probably never been to a place like this before, but if she had, he wouldn’t know. She obviously didn’t belong here, in the vicious human gutter. In her place, Cerise, his cousin, would’ve put her hand on her sword and stalked like a predator in unfamiliar territory. Rose, Declan’s wife, would’ve been wary, alarmed, at the very least cautious. Charlotte floated. The way she held herself with assurance and slight indifference, as if she were strolling through a garden listening to the slightly boring droning of a friend, made it impossible to question her right to be here. She made herself belong, and when she saw a bloated corpse in the water, she’d merely paused for a moment, as if it were an odd flower, and resumed walking.

  Her training was so strong that even here her poise was flawless. Charlotte must’ve had a mentor, someone with an ancient bloodline and an instinctual understanding of etiquette
. He recognized it because despite being a poor Edge rat, his own education had come from such a man. His mentor was his granduncle, an exile from the Dukedom of Louisiana, and he was sure that if Vernard were still alive, he would’ve offered Charlotte nothing but praise.

  Who could’ve hurt her so much that she had abandoned everything and fled to the Edge?

  * * *

  DAWN Mother, there was a dead person floating in the water.

  Ice rolled down Charlotte’s spine, an alarming mix of revulsion, fear, and anxiety. The sight of a single corpse after she had created so many shouldn’t have been so unsettling, but somehow this lone bloated body, discarded like garbage and ignored by everyone, nearly made her gag.

  “Tell me about this crime lord,” Charlotte said, hoping for a distraction before her stomach rebelled and emptied itself on the boardwalk.

  “Jason Parris was born in the Broken, in a small mountain town,” Richard said. “His family was poor, so after he finished high school, he joined the Marine Corps. It’s one of the elite branches of the Broken military. He survived a war in a foreign country and decided to leave after his four-year term of service was completed. When he returned home, he couldn’t hold a job. He worked for a series of businesses doing manual labor and was either fired or quit—he didn’t last long at any of them.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t being in the military teach him discipline?”

  “Oh, he has discipline.” Richard shrugged. “He also has very definite ideas about who is and isn’t worthy of his loyalty. He listened to his sergeants and officers because they had done what he did and he was smart enough to recognize that they were trying to keep him alive. In his mind, they had earned the right to give him orders. His civilian employers weren’t worthy of the same respect. They understandably took a rather dim view of his attitude. Jason found himself often unemployed. He was used to having his own money, and suddenly he had to depend on relatives for a roof over his head. It made him angry. One night, in a bar fight, that anger boiled over, and he severely injured a man. A relative took him to the Edge to keep him out of jail. He was just coming to terms with the idea that magic existed when slavers raided the Edge settlement. Jason was fit and healthy, prime merchandise from their point of view. They overpowered him. He proved to be a difficult captive and attacked them every chance he got. Voshak tried his best to break him but couldn’t. Jason went through the Market and was sold to a garnet mine. A month later, I raided that mine and found him in a hole in the ground. It was my second raid, and knowing what I know now, I would’ve had doubts about pulling him out of that hole.”

  “He didn’t want to go home?”

  Richard grimaced. “No. He asked for directions to the nearest city instead. I dropped him off at Kelena. He started calling himself Jason Parris and said that this city would become known as his island. An allusion, if you will, to the place where he first received his military training. Now, a year later, he owns everything you can currently see. The old crime lords that ran the Cauldron had established certain boundaries. They had families and business interests, and were unwilling to risk them. Parris had nothing. He tore through them and took over all of their territory. He kills whoever whenever however he feels necessary, without reservation or remorse.”

  “Why would anyone follow him?” Sooner or later, someone like that would turn on his own people.

  Richard shook his head. “Jason isn’t a psychopath. He’s vicious, but he kills selectively, with a strategy in mind. His people fear him, yet they also know that as long as they comply with his demands, they will be safe and rewarded. He respects strength. He can be charming, but no matter what he says or how he greets us, don’t trust him or his second, Miko. In fact, don’t trust anyone in that building. Jason is the drive and the muscle, but Miko is his mind, and that mind dreams up plans with high body counts.”

  Richard stopped, and Charlotte paused next to him. The continuous wall of buildings here was particularly ramshackle, the awning pale and weather-bleached from a once deep rust to a pale, sad orange. Loose lumber had been nailed to the wall in every direction.

  “Why did we stop?” Charlotte murmured.

  “There are sentries watching us,” he said. “Across the street on the roof, one on the right in the boat, and there is one directly above us on the balcony, listening to everything we say. They will report to Jason, and we’ll wait here and see if he decides to see us.”

  She leaned closer to him. “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Then I’ll knock,” Richard said.

  The wall of the house behind them slid open. An old woman emerged, wearing a shapeless red dress and a red scarf on her hair. She waved at them with a wrinkled brown hand and disappeared inside, into the gloom.

  “We’ve been invited.” Richard smiled.

  “Indeed.”

  “Follow me, please.”

  He strode through the narrow hallway. The dog trotted in after him. She was last through the door, in command of Rear Ward, or whatever the proper military term was. Charlotte followed the dog up a short flight of narrow dark stairs, into a hallway, and through another doorway. A spacious room stretched before them, illuminated by the familiar Weird-style lanterns. Shaped like bunches of delicate glowing flowers, the lanterns cascaded from the hooks between the windows near the tall ceiling. An expensive rug stretched across the polished wooden floor to the stone fireplace. In the center, a tea table waited, surrounded by soft chairs upholstered in light leather.

  A man sprawled in the largest chair. His broad shoulders stretched the fabric of his gray shirt. His chest was broad, and his arms, revealed by the short sleeves of his tunic, bulged with muscle. He had to be over six feet tall, and his huge frame dwarfed the chair. His head had been shaved in a series of meticulously spaced strips of various widths that ran from his forehead to the nape of his neck; the effect was alternating stripes of glossy hair and smooth, shaved, light brown scalp.

  His features would’ve been handsome in a masculine, square-jawed, leader-of-the-pack way, but a scar covered most of the left side of his face. A burn, Charlotte diagnosed. Not by direct application—either from steam, or more likely, flash-magic heat. Deeper lines crisscrossed the scar. Probably from a grate of some sort that had covered the heat source. So this was Jason Parris. She had expected someone older, but he appeared to be in his mid-twenties.

  The man’s eyes, startling green against his darker skin, surveyed Richard and paused on her. Intelligent eyes. He radiated power and menace, and when she met his stare, his eyebrows crept up a hair. Perhaps he had expected her to flinch.

  A girl stood next to him, as lean and slight as he was bulky. She looked too young to be here, seventeen, perhaps eighteen. Her face was smooth and a shade darker than his. Her hair hung over her face in stiff, straight locks, the result of some sort of hair product. She wore close-fitting jeans and a gray sweatshirt with HARVARD printed on it in red letters. It had to have come from the Broken.

  “The Hunter,” Jason said. His voice was deep and resonant, and he spoke in an unhurried manner. “I feel honored. Do you feel honored, Miko?”

  Miko said nothing.

  “See, she feels honored.” Jason spread his massive arms. His voice had a slight mocking quality to it. “You smell like piss and you look even worse.”

  Jason’s stare slid over to her. His light eyes widened. “Richard, you have a girl. And you got a dog together. Where are you registered? I will buy you a toaster.”

  “The dog is hers,” Richard said.

  The wolfripper showed Jason his big teeth.

  “So, what can we do for the mighty Hunter?”

  Richard reached into his bag.

  Miko leaned forward, focused.

  A man stepped from the doorway, a crossbow in his hands.

  Richard extracted Voshak’s bleached-blond braid from the bag and tossed it to the crime lord. Parris snatched it from the air and looked at the blond strands. “When?”

  “About ten hou
rs ago.”

  “Anybody left from his crew?”

  “No.”

  Parris glanced at the crossbowman and tossed the braid into the air. A bolt whistled and bit into the opposite wall, pinning the braid securely in place.

  The crime lord turned to Richard. “You bring me such fine gifts, Hunter. What do you want?”

  “There is a slave ship docking north of the city at eleven tonight. They expect a crew of slaves and slavers to board it,” Richard said.

  Parris leaned forward, his eyes suddenly predatory. “They will take them to the Market.”

  “Yes. One small problem: the slaver crew is dead, and they’d failed to capture any slaves. If someone was in charge of a rough crew, that someone could take their place.”

  The crime lord smiled. It was a chilling smile. “If only we knew a man with such a crew.”

  Richard shrugged. “He might be a valuable man to know. He would become quite wealthy, but more importantly, he would be the man who sacked the Market.”

  Parris raised one eyebrow.

  “The security on the island is geared toward dealing with runaway slaves and irate customers. They won’t expect an assault from a couple of dozen armed fighters. It’s an opportunity for money from the slave trade, wealth from the buyer’s agents, and a chance for revenge.”

  “Risky,” Parris said. “We don’t know how well the place is guarded. I was half-dead when they dragged me through it, but I remember guards.”

  “‘No guts, no glory,’” Richard quoted.

  Risky was an understatement, Charlotte reflected. This plan Richard had hatched made a hardened criminal pause, yet he didn’t even mention it to her beforehand. Unquestionable obedience was one thing, not being used to her full potential was another. She would have to point this out to him when they were alone.

  “What share do you want?” Parris asked.

  “None. I want the bookkeeper, and I want him alive.”

  The crime lord pondered it. She could sense Parris’s hesitation. They needed to offer him something to tip the scales in their favor. What could they possibly propose to him? What would a crime lord be interested in? Money, of course, but even if she could get access to her finances, she doubted money alone would make him risk his life and his people.