Lord Florentyn told her he’d give me a better life, Elisse had explained. He gave her money and everything. But I never got ta visit her, and then when I ran away from Mirrorvale I couldn’ see her any more. She’d like ta meet her grandson. She’d hesitated a moment, before adding with rare shyness, And I think she’d like ta meet you, too.
Sorrow had never thought she’d end up meeting someone’s parents – well, not in that context, at least – but Lana Mallory had turned out to be all right. It must have been strange for her, seeing her daughter leave with the most powerful man in Mirrorvale, only to return with a child of Nightshade blood and a woman of dubious morality. Yet she hadn’t said anything about it at all. Upon meeting Sorrow, she’d given her one long, appraising look before setting her to work on the farm. That was fine by Sorrow. She’d far rather get her hands dirty than make any kind of attempt at heartfelt conversation.
She’d stayed with the Mallorys for several months, long enough for her wounds to heal, but soon after that she’d begun feeling restless again. It had been Elisse who suggested she go back to Arkannen.
You’re not happy stuck here, she’d said. I’d rather see ya occasionally and willingly than all the time under duress. It wouldn’ be any less than I had in Sol Kardis.
So Sorrow had returned to the city. To start with, she’d assumed she would go back to her old life: find the kind of work she always found, and visit Elisse and Corus as often as she could. It wasn’t as if carrying messages for Ayla was enough to earn her a living. Yet she’d discovered that, somehow, certain jobs no longer appealed to her. She was still perfectly happy to steal, to threaten, even to kill if the occasion demanded it; but not on behalf of the wrong people.
The wrong people, she’d mocked herself when she’d first caught her thoughts tending in that direction. You know perfectly well there’s no such thing as the wrong people. Everyone’s as guilty as each other. It was the fundamental principle by which she’d always operated. But now, she found there were some lines she was no longer willing to cross. Some actions that were unacceptable, even to her conveniently flexible morality.
That was why, when a trafficker had approached her in search of someone to guard his contingent of stolen slum children on their way to slavery in the Ingal States, she’d taken the job and then alerted the Watch. It had required a considerable amount of ingenuity on her part not to be identified as the snitch, but she’d managed it. The children had been reunited with their families, and she’d even given them some of the money … though not all of it. She wasn’t that much of a mug.
It was also why she’d accepted an extortionate fee from one of Arkannen’s idle young men to kidnap an heiress and carry her off to a deserted place, where he could convince her to marry him by fair means or foul. That all seemed a bit old-fashioned to Sorrow, but apparently the wealthy families of Mirrorvale still believed that women who’d lost their so-called virtue should be married off as quickly as possible, even if the prospective husband had forced them into it. So Sorrow had delivered the girl to the arranged location with the small addition of a loaded pistol. She’d heard the boy still walked with a limp.
And it was why, a few months later, Captain Caraway had offered her a permanent job.
I’m sure you’d be good at it, he’d said. And I need someone who knows how to bend the law without breaking it.
What exactly do you want me to do?
Keep me informed of what happens in the city. Obtain information for me, when I need it. Darkhaven’s spies perform many roles, and I need intelligence from within Arkannen as much as from without it.
She’d given him an incredulous look. You want me to be a spy for Darkhaven?
Why not? You’d be perfect for the job.
But the last thing I want is to be tangled up with bloody Changers!
He’d smiled. That’s exactly why you’d be perfect.
She’d had to stop and think about it properly, then, because he had a point. No-one who knew her would ever suspect her of working for Darkhaven. The Helm had hated her for years, and she’d made no secret of her own antipathy towards them. She was the least likely person in the entire city to be carrying tales back to the tower.
And if she took this job, she wouldn’t have to worry about crossing the wrong lines any more. She might have little respect for Caraway, but he was unlikely to ask anything of her that she couldn’t countenance. As much as she was willing to make such a judgement of anyone, he was the right people.
Besides, she was already working for Darkhaven in a way, wasn’t she?
All right, she’d said. I’ll give it a try. Temporarily.
That had been almost a year ago, and so far it seemed to be going as well as could be expected. Caraway didn’t ask anything particularly taxing of her. He paid her an acceptable fee – not, admittedly, at anything like the level she was used to commanding for her most dangerous commissions, but it came at reliable intervals and didn’t involve nearly dying on a regular basis. Perhaps that last point would have been a negative, rather than a positive, but the information he wanted was often tricky enough to obtain that the mental exertion involved went some way towards making up for the lack of excitement. The only downside – if such it could be called – was that as a spymaster, Tomas Caraway seemed to take all his tips from the lurid espionage novels Sorrow had read when she was a child, before she was old enough to know any better.
She looked again at the slip of paper in her hand, the message that been carried to the Mallory farm the previous afternoon on the very same train she was riding now. It requested her immediate return to Arkannen, and gave a time and address for her meeting with Caraway. Nothing wrong with that. Only the message was written in some stupid code she’d been forced to learn, and she’d be willing to bet the location was a ruined warehouse or a seedy back alley or something equally daft. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him that only an amateur would arrange a clandestine meeting in an obviously clandestine place.
The train made its penultimate stop on the south bank of the canal, where Sorrow had to wait for an age while the coal trucks were unloaded by the vast waterside crane, ready for use in the industrial quarter on the north bank. It would have been easier if she could have got out there, too, but there was no way across the canal for people. The north bank was part of Arkannen, but the south bank wasn’t; while authorised merchant barges unloading their wares at the docks were allowable, building a walkway across the canal that allowed entry on foot would have been too much of a security risk. And so she waited, until the last thunderous rattle of coal subsided and the train started again with a jerk, sweeping her across the new river bridge and round to the terminal station near the Gate of Birth.
Emerging from the station, Sorrow regarded the scene before her with a considerable amount of pleasure. For years, she’d come and gone from Arkannen by airship, which was an enjoyable enough experience; she always liked seeing the seven rings laid out beneath her as regular as the pattern on a game-board, their order belying the messy lives of the people who inhabited them. Yet arriving by train always hit her in a way that arriving by airship never had. Perhaps it was because that was how she had first set eyes on the city, as a young girl trudging up to the gate on foot with barely an ennol to her name. Perhaps she just preferred chaos to order. Whatever the reason, she never failed to appreciate it: the vast archway made of undressed stone that was the Gate of Birth, the sole entrance to Arkannen; the bridge that led to it, its balustrades lined with carved stone creatures; the wide wall that stretched out to either side, windowless and smooth, barely even starting to curve before it vanished from sight; the roofs peeking out above it, rising up and back until they faded into the smoke from the factory chimneys. From the air the city might be orderly, but from the ground it was bloody huge.
She crossed the bridge in a tangle of other people, some on foot and some on horseback, taking a small secret pride in the fact that she was the only one who had arrived by train. A
t the gate, she waited in line to show her border pass before walking through the archway into the open square beyond. It was one of the largest open spaces in Arkannen, designed primarily – or so Sorrow surmised – to allow people to stop and gawk without getting in each other’s way. Around the square were a hundred shops selling everything from food to fabric, as well as lodging-houses for the weary traveller – though any traveller who had visited the city before knew that the better, and certainly quieter, lodging-houses were to be found by turning right, to the fashionable shopping district and the leisure quarter beyond. Left led deeper into the heart of the mercantile quarter, and also to the first stop on the tramline, which was Sorrow’s own destination.
She checked the address she’d been given once more, then hopped on the tram and rode it all the way through the industrial quarter to the edge of the Night Quarter. Then she walked briskly through the narrow streets, dodging the usual crowds of hawkers and pushers and the occasional nervous-looking tourist – or rather, since she never entered Arkannen less than thoroughly armed, allowing them to dodge her. Fourth bell chimed while she was still picking her way past some kind of erotic street theatre, which meant she was late, but she maintained an even pace. Caraway would just have to wait.
Her destination, when she reached it, was just as bad as she’d feared: a boarded-up smoke den at the end of an alley. No way anyone would come here for less than nefarious purposes. Still, she’d only draw more attention to herself if she hesitated, so she ducked through a gap in the half-rotten door and found herself in a cool, shadowed room through which bright beams of sunlight leapt from holes in the broken shutters. Sure enough, the man himself was sitting on an old crate, writing something down in his notebook; he glanced up sharply at her approach, but then his expression softened and he stood up to greet her.
‘This was a ridiculous place to choose, Captain Caraway,’ she muttered, glancing around at the mould-streaked walls. ‘I suppose I should be glad you aren’t wearing a terrible wig and a false moustache.’
He smiled. ‘Where would you have chosen?’
‘Anywhere! Nowhere! Since you at least had enough sense not to wear your rainbow-coloured coat, no-one would look twice at you. The two of us could have stood and talked on any street in the city. And that way we soon would have noticed if anyone was listening, too.’
‘They might not look twice at me, Naeve, but I rather think they would look twice at you. Your reputation has only grown in the years since you came back from Sol Kardis.’
‘Yes, Captain Caraway.’ He’d made her free of his first name, once. But since he insisted on calling her by hers, even though he knew she didn’t like it, she’d decided to be equally stubborn and stick to his full title. ‘Which is why anyone who saw me coming in here would assume I was up to something secretive. Whereas anyone who saw me having a chat on the street with some scruffy-haired man would assume I couldn’t possibly be up to no good, because if I was, I’d be in a place like this!’
‘Were you followed?’ he asked calmly.
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Well, nor was I. And I didn’t see anyone when I came in, and I assume you didn’t either, so I think we can relax.’
Sorrow forbore from pointing out that she’d once followed him and Ayla without them being any the wiser; given that she’d subsequently sold their whereabouts to the old Captain of the Helm, leading directly to Ayla’s capture and near imprisonment, she didn’t think it would be a helpful recollection.
‘So what’s up?’ she said instead. ‘Let me guess … someone’s murdered the Kardise ambassador.’
Caraway said nothing, but the expression on his face spoke volumes. She shook her head in disbelief.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
His lips tightened. ‘Does it seem like the kind of thing I’d joke about?’
‘Shit. And you’re sure it was murder?’
‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Caraway said. ‘Ayla wants to believe it’s just bad luck, but …’
‘But this is Darkhaven we’re talking about,’ Sorrow finished for him. ‘Nothing is ever coincidence with you people.’
One corner of his mouth twisted upwards in acknowledgement of that statement. ‘Which is why I’m speaking to you now. If this does turn out to be murder, which I’m expecting it will, we’re going to have to move fast to uncover the culprit. Because it’s not just our chance at a peace treaty that’s at stake. It’s any kind of peace at all.’
‘You think the Kardise will declare war over this?’
‘Unless we can offer a damn good explanation for their ambassador’s death, I’m almost sure of it.’
Sorrow nodded. ‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘If it’s murder, the only possible conclusion is that someone wants to send us to war with Sol Kardis. Maybe it’s the Kardise themselves, manufacturing an excuse to reject peace. But if not … war is a vast thing, Naeve. Bigger than individual people. This doesn’t strike me as a personal crime. There’s power behind it, organisation … someone in the city has something to gain from war. And I want to know who.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But it’s a lot to ask without anything more to go on.’
‘I know. Like searching for a rat in a barn full of hay.’
‘It’s not finding a rat that will be the problem,’ Sorrow said. ‘It’s finding the right one. Your barn is teeming with rats, Captain Caraway. Throw a stone on any city street and you’d probably hit someone who had something to gain from war.’ She shook her head at him in mocking disapproval. ‘How’d you live in the first ring for five years and stay this naïve?’
He ignored the barb. ‘You’re telling me people want war?’
‘Not everyone. Most people are probably too consumed by their own petty concerns to think about it either way. But off the top of my head, I could list about ten different groups who might be in its favour.’
‘Please do,’ Caraway said. She gave him a long look, suspecting him of laughing at her, but he appeared perfectly serious.
‘Fine. Sellswords, for the pay. Merchants, for the profit – sure, black-market Kardise firearms are going to be harder to source, but the price of Parovian steel will shoot way up. Factory owners who can sell their products to the cause. Factory workers who could use the extra shifts. Rich men who can invest in all this, then sit back and watch the spoils roll in without ever having to see, hear or smell a battlefield.’ She quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘How am I doing?’
‘Five,’ he said. ‘But so far, they’re all about money.’
‘That’s because war is expensive, Captain Caraway.’ She shrugged. ‘Still, here you go: anyone who’s ever had a friend or relative killed in all the unrest at the southern border. Anyone who thinks we Mirrorvalese are naturally superior, our country is unfairly oppressed, and we need to show the world what we’re capable of. Anyone who thinks Arkannen is too crowded and could do without all these immigrants coming into the city, thank you very much. Anyone who fantasises about killing and would welcome a socially acceptable reason to do it …’ She smirked. ‘And people like me, who throw themselves behind the most suicidal cause there is going, because they’d far rather life was dangerous than dull.’
‘And here was me thinking you wouldn’t do anything without getting paid for it,’ Caraway said. ‘You win, Naeve. The city is crawling with people who’d love nothing more than for Mirrorvale to go to war with Sol Kardis.’ No doubt about it, this time: he was laughing at her. ‘But presumably most of them don’t have the skill or resources to arrange a murder within the walls of Darkhaven, so that must narrow it down somewhat.’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You can laugh. But not all of us are heroes of your stature, Captain Caraway. Most people are just out for what they can get.’
‘On the contrary, I think most people are exactly like me,’ he replied. ‘Decent enough, doing the right thing most of the time – though more by luck t
han design – and fucking it up monumentally every now and then. But the important thing is that our intentions are good.’
‘You’re including me in this pretty little worldview, are you?’ She couldn’t stop the scorn dripping from her voice, but he only smiled.
‘I wouldn’t employ you if I didn’t.’ To her mingled surprise and dismay, he gave her a friendly clap on the shoulder. ‘Good luck, Naeve. Let me know what you find out.’
After he’d gone, Sorrow relieved her feelings by kicking the wall. Then, because she’d unthinkingly used the foot that had been shattered three years ago – which ached in cold weather, let alone being driven at high speed into something large and solid – she spent a good deal of time swearing. Once she’d finished doing that, she stayed where she was, digging at the crumbling mortar between two bricks with the point of a knife and thinking about what Caraway had said. Decent enough, doing the right thing most of the time, and fucking it up monumentally every now and then. She found it almost alarming that he was willing to apply those words to her. Not the fuck-ups – she’d freely admit to more than a few of those. But never, not since she was a little girl, had she been motivated by trying to do the right thing. She’d learned while she was still young that morality was simply a way for other people to take advantage of you.
‘The right thing,’ she muttered. ‘The wrong people. I’m losing it.’
The point of the knife caught in the brickwork; she dropped it and sighed. She ought to quit working for Darkhaven and go back to what she did best: getting paid as much as possible. No matter how dirty the job. No matter how corrupt the client. And yet, she didn’t want to.
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