The Hidden City

by Michelle West

  As Harald, like the rest of The Den’s occupants, considered curiosity a venal sin, Rath turned to look at him, shifting in his chair. A drink, or the forceful offer parading as a request that resulted in one, had failed thus far to materialize.

  “Curious because?”

  “Jim’s gone missing.”

  “Jim? The red-beard?”

  Harald nodded.

  “I didn’t know you were friends.”

  “We’re not. The sonofabitch owes me money.”

  “Good enough reason to disappear.”

  Harald laughed. And shrugged. “Maybe. But he left everything at his place pretty much untouched.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I broke his door down and rifled through his stuff.”

  “I take it he owes you less, now.”

  Harald’s smile was thin. “He has a girl there. Maybe had. Fiona. You know her?”

  Rath shook his head.

  “She’s got a temper.”

  “So did Jim.” He paused and then shook his head. “I take it she was in Jim’s place when you kicked the door in?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You’re still walking.”

  “She slammed the side of my head with a pan.”

  “You’ve got a thick head.”

  “That was one of the kinder things she said. She seemed to think I’d have to pay for the door.”

  “You corrected that misunderstanding?”

  Harald shrugged. “Would have. But Jim’s been missing three days. He didn’t take a lot of money with him, not that he had much. He also didn’t take more than a dagger or two. Wherever he was going—and she thought it was the Common—he didn’t go expecting to stay a few days.”

  “She told you that?”

  Harald frowned. “You’re sure you haven’t been drinking?”

  Rath nodded; it was a stupid question. “What did she want you to do?”

  “Find him, more or less.”

  “She went to the magisterial halls?”

  Harald nodded. “Two days ago.”

  “They find a body?”

  “They took a report.”

  “A report?”

  Harald nodded.

  “That’s more paperwork than they’d do in a year, in these parts.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He emptied his mug and dropped it on the table; it rolled in a clumsy circle, trailing the last of the ale.

  “I take it there were no bodies?”

  “If there were, they didn’t offer to show ’em to her.”

  “All right. That’s unusual.” It was. Missing people weren’t uncommon in the older holdings. They weren’t entirely common; the rule of law, if shoddy, was still in force. But if someone came to report a missing person, the magisterians usually took them to look at the bodies that had been retrieved from either the river or the streets.

  “You said her name was Fiona?”

  Harald nodded.

  “Which holding?”

  “The thirty-fifth.”

  “But if Jim was on his way to the Common—” Rath stopped. He didn’t have a map of the holdings, but he didn’t need one; he knew where Jim lived. Knew, as well, what the route to the Common from Jim’s place looked like, unless Jim was trying to lose someone, in which case it was anyone’s guess.

  “This along the lines of what you came here looking for?”

  “No. Who was Jim working for?”

  “Judging by his debts? No one.” He shrugged.

  “Was he planning to?”

  “At the Common?” They both knew it was the wrong season for press-gangs. If Jim went, that wasn’t the method of his departure.

  Rath nodded. With a forced wry grin, he added, “Too early in the morning for thinking.”

  Harald raised a brow. “What did you come here for?”

  “Word,” Rath said quietly. “Of anyone new in the holdings.” Quiet was relative in The Den.

  Harald’s voice dropped. “Maybe,” he said at last. “You have someone in mind?”

  “Not by name. Money, maybe,” Rath added, after a pause. “And a number of very competent men.”

  “Competent how?”

  “About how you’d expect.”

  Harald looked uneasy. Given his size and his general demeanor, this was two things: Nigh impossible and bad.

  “I’ll take that as a provisional yes.”

  “Take it as you like. Don’t attach my name to it.”

  “Anyone in The Den working for someone new?”

  Harald said nothing, loudly. It was enough. As a drink failed to materialize, Rath looked at the doors; watched people entering.

  “You working?”

  Harald shrugged.

  “I’ll take that as a provisional no.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Rath told him.

  To Jewel’s surprise, Rath was home before dinner. He knocked at her door, and both Lefty and Arann tensed; Jewel got up quickly, more for their comfort than Rath’s. She left her room, the two slates in use a reminder that she wasn’t technically supposed to pillage Rath’s quarters. The door, she shut quietly and firmly behind her.

  Rath was covered in a fine patina of damp dust; she knew where he’d been for at least part of the day. His backpack hung flat and limp against his shoulders, though; if he’d found whatever he’d been looking for, he hadn’t brought it with him.

  “Jay,” he said softly. He removed the velvet jacket as he spoke, glancing at it with mild dismay. This was as much expression as he ever showed. She took it from him as he turned back to the door and bolted it.

  She nodded.

  “I need your help.”

  She nodded again. “I can’t wash this—”

  “Not with that,” he snapped. His eyes were almost glittering in the pale gloom of the hall as he held out the magelight he always carried with him. “Hang the jacket up in my room. Over the chair back,” he added. “Not the armchair.”

  “You’ve eaten?”

  His expression made clear how endearing he found being mothered. She backed off. Given his current mood, she also backed away. It was involuntary, and it caught his attention.

  He closed his eyes and drew a long breath, straightening his shoulders and schooling the lines of his face. Eyes still closed, he said, “I’m not angry at you, Jay.”

  “You are angry—”

  “Not specifically at you. I’m angry, yes. I’m also a sane man; I have no intention of throwing you out or beating you.” He opened his eyes, and held out his open palms, one still glowing brightly with magelight. The underside of his chin was lit with pale gold, and his eyes were ringed with shadow.

  There was a long pause that Jewel had no intention of breaking.

  Rath, to her surprise, did. His voice was softer, and there was something akin to regret in it. “I forget how much of a stranger you are. Or I am, to you. There are reasons I live alone, when I’ve the choice. This is one of them; I’ve never been known for an even temper.”

  She had seen him frustrated before. But anger was different. And he knew it.

  Still, his hands were open and empty, and he held himself still, as if she were the wild or injured creature. She tried to meet him halfway. “What—what did you want me to help you with?”

  “The maze,” he said curtly. There was edge in the words.

  There was wonder, momentary and not unalloyed, on her face, and her mouth was half open because he stared at her until she remembered and shut it. “You want me to go back to the maze?”

  Annoyance, a familiar twist of facial geography, answered the question. “No,” he said, just as curtly. “I don’t. But at the moment, I don’t see any good choice.”

  She said, “I’ll tell Lefty we’re going out.”

  “You won’t.”

  “But—”

  “We’re not going out.” He reached into his hidden pouch and pulled out a small key. “We’re going in.” His eyes nar
rowed. “Have you eaten?”

  “Everything on my plate,” she responded promptly. It would annoy him. But then again, on some days, everything did. He had promised he wouldn’t hit her. She chose to believe him, but she wasn’t against pushing the line a bit, just to be certain.

  “Good.” He failed—probably deliberately—to hear any cheek in the words. “Put your boots on.”

  She slid back into her room.

  Lefty and Arann were sitting side by side, just a few inches too close together. She smiled at them, and it was an encouraging smile.

  “He’s mad about the slates, isn’t he?”

  She shook her head. Bright smile, all around. “He’s just pissed off in general. Probably some deal went bad.”

  “Should we leave?”

  “And go where? No, don’t answer that. Arann,” she added, “If you leave, I’ll break your legs. I swear.”

  Given the difference in both their size and age, it wasn’t much of a threat, and it was taken as the sign of affection it was. He nodded. She bent and hooked the back of her boots on her fingers; they were heavy and solid, reminding her that Arann needed to visit the seamstress and the cobbler in the Common.

  “Keep an eye on Lefty.”

  “I’m not the injured one,” Lefty snapped.

  Both she and Arann turned to stare at him; his back was stiff, and although his right hand was cradled in his armpit, the left one was bunched in a loose fist.

  She almost laughed. Lefty had snapped at her. And Rath was about to take her back to the maze. The day had turned out so much better than she’d expected. Firsts all around.

  Arann muttered something to Lefty.

  “Well, I’m not,” Lefty replied, shoving his left hand under his right armpit and staring at his friend.

  “This,” Arann said heavily, “is what he’s really like.”

  Jewel laughed. “I like it better,” she told Arann.

  “You won’t,” was his dire warning. But she could see the half smile on his face, and the strain of hope. She could answer neither easily. “Stay in the room,” she told them both, “until Rath calms down.”

  That much, they could obey easily.

  Boots retrieved, Jewel joined Rath in the hall. He waited with more or less patience while she shoved her feet into them. In the apartment, she hated to wear them; they were stiff, and they rubbed the back of her ankles raw. After she stood up, she pulled her hair out of her eyes and tied it back over her head with a kerchief. It wouldn’t stay there, but it was as much as she could manage.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, although she suspected she knew the answer.

  “To the storage rooms,” he replied.

  Her point.

  After the incident with the statue, Rath had promised himself that he would not bring Jewel back into the undercity unless it were an emergency and her life depended on it. So many broken promises were the stones that formed the cobbled street his life had followed. This was just one more. But it held more weight than he would have liked, and he felt the breaking of it more keenly than he had any recent oath.

  Because it was silent, and offered to himself.

  He had two keys to the storeroom. They were the last keys that he had had made; the last lock that he had overseen. Although the mechanism had been left with him, he had not chosen to install it while Jewel was awake, and it had taken three days of surreptitious work to achieve some semblance of secrecy, as she was always underfoot.

  So much for his work, his secrecy.

  He reminded himself that she was a child. This did not have the desired effect. Looking at her—looking down on her—he could see both vulnerability and determination, and it was a combination that was unsettling in its familiarity. Her eyes, the standard brown of Southern descent, were wide and almost unblinking as she watched him turn key in lock; they burned, in their own way.

  And he would have let them burn quietly, in the safety of his home, had she not introduced the two orphans. Arann, almost Rath’s height and width, and Lefty, smaller than she. The ghost of a girl he had never seen was wrapped up in the mystery of Jewel. Finch, she had called her.

  “This,” he said grimly, “is for Finch. I hope she’s worth the risk.”

  Jewel’s eyes widened. She bit her lip. Pushed her hair out of her eyes—although it wasn’t in them. All her nervous habits came and went in the moment between the lock’s welcome click and the silent movement of the new door.

  “I don’t know,” she told him, as he stepped into the dark, lifting his hand so that the light reached its greatest height. He had called this room a storeroom, as had the building’s owner, but he had chosen to store nothing in it. The floorboards, as the owner had implied, were in poor repair. Where poor repair meant they wouldn’t hold the weight of anything heavier than a starving mouse. He tested the floor almost gingerly, regretting the lack of a pole.

  “What don’t you know?”

  “If she’s worth the risk.”

  Rath shook his head. So much potential power in that child, and none of it understood. Not by Jewel herself. He let his breath leave him in a forced, loud exhalation, the only other sound in the room save for quiet breathing.

  “She’s worth the risk,” he told her, without looking back. “Stay to the side of the room; keep to the walls.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The floor is—”

  “About Finch?”

  “How could I not?” He countered, taking his own advice. “You had the vision,” he added. “We’ll need rope here. Do you know where the rope is?”

  “In your pack?”

  “Not the one I was wearing. The older one.”

  “The big one?”

  “Yes. That one.”

  He heard her leave, and waited, continuing his cautious examination of the floor. She returned quietly. Good girl.

  “Rath?”

  “Yes?”

  “What did you mean? About how I could not know, I mean.”

  “You’re not going to let her go,” he replied evenly. It was hard to do it; he wanted to snap. But in the darkness, in the sudden danger of eroded architecture, he hoarded his impatience. “No matter what I tell you, no matter how much danger you’ll wind up facing, you’re not going to let her go.”

  Her voice was a child’s voice when she answered. “I can’t.” It was also a whisper.

  “I know. If I thought it would help, I would throw you out. You’ve been enough trouble as is.” Before she could stammer or freeze, he lifted the hand that didn’t contain the light, cutting off her words. “But you’ve also saved my life.”

  “We’re even,” she began.

  “In more than one way, Jewel. And I imagine, if you survive this, you’ll save my life again.”

  “Don’t.” The bitterness was heavy. It added years to her voice. “I’ve never been able to count on—”

  “I know. The holdings will kill me eventually.” He turned, then, exposing something he hadn’t realized was hidden until this moment. “I accept that. I chose this life. But you? You didn’t. Arann didn’t, and Lefty didn’t. And I expect you to survive the life you eventually do choose. Do you understand, Jay? Jewel?”

  She didn’t, quite. He could see it in the way the light played up the lines of her face. “No.”

  “I know. I want you to learn whatever I can teach you because I want you to have the choice that I did.”

  “And make the same choice?”

  He could not answer the question. He would never answer that specific question, not directly. “And make the choice that seems wisest to you at the time,” he told her, but the words were thick.

  She was a danger in too many ways. He longed, deeply, viscerally, to be rid of her. And he knew, at this moment, that it would almost kill him.

  “Help me,” he said, trying to bury emotion, trying to deny attachment. “Those boards.”

  She started toward them and he snapped her name; she froze. “Lie down,” he
told her. “Lie as flat as possible. I’m going to tie the rope around your waist; if you fall, you won’t fall far.” He knelt by the wall and placed the magelight on the ground, passing his hand over it and whispering the word that would brighten its glow.

  She waited as he wrapped the rope twice around her almost negligible width, and knotted it with care. Then she did as he had bid; she lay flat against the creaking, unfinished planks. She didn’t wait to be told to move; she moved, deliberately, toward the center of the floor, sliding on her stomach, the dust and damp the only scent in the room. Rath braced himself, one foot on the floor and one knee for balance; he also looped the rope several times around his right arm, and he spoke to her, not giving orders, but giving instead the slow encouragement of an even, smooth tone of voice.

  The floor gave, as he expected, the boards suddenly tilting toward the darkness of the nothing beneath them. They creaked; something snapped. Jewel didn’t fall, but she slid forward, her palms against rough grain. She’d have splinters for sure, but he could remove them later; splinters didn’t kill. Infection, on the other hand, cost limbs.

  The floor here was so damp it took a while for the boards to snap, and they didn’t so much snap as disintegrate in sharp pieces. Jewel did fall then, and Rath felt the rope around his arm go taut, instantly cutting off all circulation. He heard the whoof of her breath as it left her in a rush, felt the rope twist as she momentarily struggled with the sensation of suspension.

  When she stilled—as much as she could—she was a weighty pendulum with a slow arc. He inched forward, lowering himself to the floor and giving the rope some play. It, too, was rough, and it scraped the skin off his arms, pulling the pale cream of undyed linen against his skin. He reached for the magestone with his free hand.

  “I’m throwing the light down,” he told her. “If you can catch it, that’s good; if you can’t, let it drop.”

  “But what if it—”

  “We have the money for another,” he told her, “and I’m not without backup.” Again, he kept his voice soothing and calm.

  She impressed him; there was no panic in her voice when she told him she was ready. He rolled the stone toward the large hole she’d made in the floor, and managed not to wince as it followed the incline of that hole and disappeared, taking most of the room’s light with it. The storeroom had no window wells, no external light.