Chapter 81

Chapter 81: Chapter 81

Sunday morning after the Solstice feast was the quietest I had ever seen the citadel.

When I walked down the dormitory stairs at seven o’clock with my civilian wool coat buttoned up to my chin, there wasn’t a single third- or fourth-year awake in the common rooms. The only sign of life was a pair of grumpy kitchen boys sweeping broken wineglasses off the courtyard steps into a wooden wheelbarrow.

Luckas and Kaelen were waiting inside the small arched gatehouse by the southern bridge, standing near the watchman’s coal stove to stay out of the lake wind.

Luckas was wearing his high-collared grey travel overcoat with the silver fox lining turned inward so it didn’t show, though there was no hiding the plum-colored swell under his right eye where Valen Dross’s shield rim had clipped him yesterday. Nia stood beside him with her winter shawl pinned tightly over her right shoulder to hide her black linen sling.

"I still say I can walk down to the canal," Nia said quietly as I came through the door. "My legs aren’t stitched, Elvit."

"Your right shoulder has five pieces of catgut holding it together," I said, handing her a small brass spyglass I had borrowed from Professor Orlov’s supply cabinet on Friday. "If somebody shoves past you on the dock stairs and tears that seam open, Madam Sorrel will lock you in the infirmary ward until New Year’s Day. We need someone up here watching the West Guest House."

"She’s right, Nia," Luckas said, adjusting a pair of dark suede riding gloves over his bruised knuckles. "Marta Vane-Sule sleeps in the servants’ attic above Lord Lorenzo’s quarters. If that teamster down at Wharf Four misses his midday drop—or if he gets nervous—he’s going to send a runner back up the hill to warn the clerk. Sit in the second-floor reading room of the library with Orlov’s glass. You can see the whole service lane behind the guest house from the bay window."

Nia took the brass spyglass with her good left hand, testing the focus wheel with her thumb before tucking it into her deep coat pocket. "And if I see Marta packing a saddlebag?"

"Don’t try to stop him yourself," Kaelen said. "Go down to the armory tunnel and tell Master Bram that a Sospurro servant walked off with one of his dwarven whetstones. Bram will have the gate guards turn his pockets inside out at the bridge before he takes ten steps."

Nia grinned faintly. "That’s wicked. I like it. Bring me back a fried herring roll from the canal stalls, Luckas—the ones with the pickled onions."

"If I smell like pickled onions in my good coat, you’re washing it," Luckas muttered, pulling his flat wool cap down low over his forehead as the three of us showed our weekend liberty passes to the sleepy corporal at the gatehouse and stepped out onto the grand southern bridge.

Walking down into the Crown Jewel at seven-thirty on a cold December Sunday was nothing like the night of the festival.

The gold and green banners were long gone, taken down before the first November sleet. Above the third tier, the marble avenues of the merchant district were empty except for church bells ringing across the frosty roofs and street-sweepers scraping frozen horse dung out of the gutters with flat iron shovels.

We didn’t stop in the upper tiers. We took the steep stone freight stairs carved into the western cliff wall—the ones the brewery wagons and coal sleds used to haul heavy loads up from the water level—descending four hundred steps down through a permanent gray fog of coal smoke and river mist until we came out on the towpath of the Lower Canal.

Down here, the city didn’t sleep on Sunday mornings, because the western river barges didn’t care what day of the week it was when the ice was creeping out from the banks.

The canal was fifty feet wide, walled in by greasy black timber pilings and two-story brick warehouses with iron cranes sticking out of their upper loft doors. Along the stone quay, two dozen flat-bottomed river barges were tied up bow-to-stern, their crews using long iron-shod poles to break up the two-inch crust of brown ice floating between the hulls while steam winches clanked and hissed, hoisting wicker baskets of black anthracite coal up into the yard hoppers.

We walked three hundred yards west along the muddy towpath, stepping over frozen hemp hawsers and puddles of spilled mule oats, until Kaelen slowed down beside a brick archway painted with peeling white letters:

BARROW & SONS — ANTHRACITE, COKE & FOUNDRY COALWharf No. 4 — Western Lock Basin

Inside the open brick arch was a narrow, soot-blackened yard crammed between a three-story coal bunker and the canal water.

Three heavy four-horse coal wagons with iron-rimmed wheels sat parked under a tin roof on the left. At the back of the yard, right beside the wooden loading chute where a black-hulled canal barge called the Iron Maid was moored, stood a low timber harness shed with a tin stovepipe sticking out of its tar-paper roof.

And sitting right by the gatehouse door in the front office—with a ledger open on a high slanted desk and a double-barreled fowling piece leaning against the wall behind his stool—was a bald, thick-necked yard clerk in a greasy sheepskin vest.

"Only one door on the harness shed," I murmured, stopping by a closed fried-fish stall forty feet up the towpath while pretending to retie the leather lace on my boot. "No back window on the canal side. And the barge crew is already loading sacks onto the stern deck."

"If you two walk past that desk window, the clerk reaches for the shotgun," Luckas said, looking through the dirty glass of the front office. "Look at your boots, Elvit. You’ve got legion hobnails on your heels, and Kaelen walks like he’s trying to stab somebody in the kidneys."

"I am trying to stab somebody in the kidneys," Kaelen said mildly. "Or at least take his belt off."

"Wait until I get the fat man out from behind the window," Luckas said.

He pulled off his flat wool cap, stuffed it into his coat pocket, and ran one gloved hand through his dark blue hair to mess it up slightly. Then he unbuttoned the top three buttons of his overcoat so the silver-embroidered collar of his Vance house waistcoat showed underneath, and strolled right through the brick archway with his chin tilted up at forty degrees and his hands clasped behind his back.

Kaelen and I moved five seconds behind him, staying low behind the high wooden sideboards of the first parked coal wagon inside the gate.

"Oi!" the bald yard clerk barked, sliding open the wooden sash window of his little office booth as Luckas stopped in the middle of the yard and looked around with a wrinkled nose. "Yard’s closed to foot traffic on Sundays! If you want a hundredweight sack for your parlor grate, come back Monday morning!"

Luckas turned his head slowly toward the window, looking the clerk up and down from his bald head to his muddy boots the exact way Lord Lorenzo had looked at the soup line on Tuesday.

"Do I look like I haul parlor sacks in a wheelbarrow, my good man?" Luckas drawled, his voice loud and carrying easily over the clank of the barge winch down by the water. "I am here on behalf of Lady Genevieve Vance’s winter conservatory on the Upper Terrace. Your driver delivered four tons of supposedly smokeless hill-coke to our cellars on Thursday, and half of it was wet shale that ruined the flue in the orchid house. Who is the yard master here? You?"

The bald clerk blinked at the silver crest on Luckas’s waistcoat, his hand dropping six inches away from the wall where the shotgun leaned. "Lady Vance’s house? Hold on a second, young lord—we don’t send wet shale up to the Terrace. That was likely the Tuesday barge from the north pits. Let me check the weigh-bills in the back bin."

"I don’t want to look at your weigh-bills," Luckas said indignantly, walking away from the harness shed toward the tall brick coal bunkers on the opposite side of the yard and tapping his boot impatiently against a pile of timber props. "I want you to walk over to Bin Three right now with a shovel, crack open three lumps from the middle of the heap, and show me whether there’s sulfur in the seam before I have my father’s steward cancel the winter contract for all six town houses!"

"Six town houses," the clerk muttered, scrambling down off his high stool and grabbing a short-handled iron testing hammer off a nail by the door. "Right away, my lord—step over here out of the draft, I’ll crack you a lump from the dry chute myself."

The instant the clerk’s sheepskin back disappeared around the corner of the brick bunker with Luckas lecturing him loudly about his aunt’s orchids, Kaelen and I slipped out from behind the coal wagon and crossed the twenty feet of black slush to the timber harness shed.

The heavy plank door was latched from the inside with a wooden drop-bar, though there was a half-inch gap between the warped pine boards where the stovepipe heat had dried the wood out.

I didn’t knock. I slid the flat, stiff grey blade of Master Bram’s dwarven dagger straight through the crack at waist height, felt the edge bite under the bottom of the oak drop-bar, and lifted steadily with my left hand while Kaelen pressed his shoulder against the hinges so the iron wouldn’t squeak.

The bar cleared the iron catch with a tiny click.

We stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind our backs in the same motion.

The shed was twelve feet square, hot and airless from a small cast-iron potbelly stove glowing red in the corner, and smelled overwhelmingly of neat’s-foot harness oil, wet mule blankets, and cheap juniper gin. Heavy leather horse-collars and iron trace-chains hung from wooden pegs along all four walls like sides of beef in a smokehouse.

Sitting at a plank table under a smoky whale-oil lamp at the back of the shed was the grey-bearded teamster we had seen behind the Academy stables last night.

His sheepskin vest was lying over the back of his chair, and his thick leather belt—with the heavy two-inch brass harness buckle still threaded onto the tongue—was unbuckled and lying right in the middle of the table beside a tin pot of hot glue and a hollow wooden handle from a canal boat-hook. He had just pulled the folded square of oiled tracing paper out of the hollow back of the brass buckle and was rolling it into a tight tube to slide inside the bored-out shaft of the boat-hook before sealing it with a wooden plug.

And standing two feet behind his right shoulder, holding a heavy iron crowbar ready to crate up a box of foundry parts by the canal hatch, was a second man—a younger, crop-haired dock tough with a faded blue anchor tattooed on the side of his neck and a twelve-inch butcher’s cleaver tucked into his rope belt.

Both of them looked up as the cold draft from the door made the lamp flame jump.

The bearded teamster didn’t waste time asking who we were. One look at Kaelen’s black sleeves and the grey wool under my coat was enough.

"Grist!" the teamster snarled, his thick hand shooting across the plank table not for the paper, but to tip the smoky whale-oil lamp straight onto the oiled tracing paper and the glue pot to burn the dispatch before we could cross the floor.

If that whale oil hit the red-hot stove pipe two feet away, the whole tar-paper shed would go up like a pitch torch with all four of us inside it.

I didn’t have room to draw my bastard sword between the hanging horse-collars, and my right wrist was taped too stiff to throw a knife accurately at ten feet.

Kaelen didn’t throw at the teamster’s hand. He flicked his left wrist upward as he stepped past the stove.

A single black throwing knife flashed across the cramped room and struck the glass chimney of the whale-oil lamp half an inch above the brass burner just as the teamster’s fingers touched the base. The heavy glass chimney shattered inward, dumping a cup of unlit, cold whale oil straight down over the cotton wick and drowning the flame instantly with a wet hiss.

The shed plunged into smoky half-darkness, lit only by the dull orange cracks around the cast-iron stove door.

The younger man—Grist—roared an oath and swung his three-foot iron crowbar in a flat, whistling horizontal smash aimed right at the side of my head.

Inside a twelve-foot shed hung with mule chains, you don’t step back from a crowbar; if you step back, you tangle your shoulders in the leather traces and get your skull caved in on the second swing.

I ducked my chin down behind my left shoulder and stepped straight forward into the swing, catching his thick forearm inside the crook of my bruised left elbow before the iron bar reached full speed, and drove the top of my wool-capped head hard into the bridge of his nose.

Cartilage crunched against my forehead. Grist grunted, his eyes watering blindly as his head snapped back against a hanging cluster of iron hames that clanked loudly against the pine wall.

Before he could pull his free left hand down to grab the butcher’s cleaver at his belt, I hooked my right boot behind his heel, drove my right fist—stiff linen splint, steel palm-plates, and all—straight into the soft hollow under his ribs where his diaphragm sat, and shoved him sideways onto the plank pile of dirty mule blankets in the corner.

He hit the blankets with all the wind knocked out of his chest, his mouth opening and closing like a landed carp without making a sound beyond a dry wheeze.

At the table, the bearded teamster hadn’t waited to help his partner.

The instant the lamp went out, he snatched the rolled-up tube of oiled tracing paper in his left fist, grabbed a heavy twelve-inch cobbler’s awl off the workbench with his right, and lunged backward for the small wooden loading hatch that opened straight out over the deck of the Iron Maid barge floating four feet below the shed wall.

He got the wooden hatch latch lifted with his elbow.

He didn’t get it open.