Chapter 82

Chapter 82: Chapter 82

Kaelen went over the plank table in a low, silent vault without kicking a single tin pot onto the floor. As the teamster shoved his shoulder against the hatch door, Kaelen landed squarely behind him, looped two feet of braided steel wire over the man’s thick right wrist before the cobbler’s awl could come around, and yanked the teamster’s arm high up behind his own shoulder blades until the joint locked.

The teamster bit down on his own lip to keep from yelling as the awl dropped onto the floorboards, though he immediately swung his closed left fist toward the crack of the hatch door to drop the rolled tracing paper down into the dirty brown canal water between the barge and the pilings.

I crossed the six feet behind Kaelen in one stride, reached over the teamster’s shoulder with my left hand, and clamped my fingers around his thick thumb and wrist two inches before his knuckles cleared the hatch sill.

"Open your hand," I whispered against the side of his hairy ear, while resting the cold flat edge of Bram’s dwarven dagger right across the big artery under his jawbone. "If that paper hits the water, I’m pushing you in after it with your boots tied together."

The teamster froze, his chest heaving against the back of Kaelen’s tunic, smelling of sour gin and coal dust. After two seconds, his stubby fingers slowly uncurled.

I plucked the tight little cylinder of oiled paper out of his sweaty palm, slipped it into the inner breast pocket of my coat, and reached down to the table to pick up the hollowed-out two-inch brass harness buckle as well.

"Who else is on the barge?" Kaelen breathed, keeping his knee pressed against the back of the teamster’s thigh so the man couldn’t kick the wooden wall.

"Just the pole-men," the teamster rasped through his teeth. "They don’t know nothing. I just pay the skipper two silver marks to drop the boat-hook off at the third lock house above Red Ford."

I looked down at the workbench where the glue pot was cooling. Lying beside the hollow boat-hook handle, tucked under a pair of iron horseshoes to keep the draft from blowing it away, was a second slip of paper—not thin yellow tracing paper from Lord Lorenzo’s clerk, but a heavy, square corner torn off a standard cream-colored Imperial ledger sheet, stamped in purple ink with a triangular warehouse mark.

I picked it up with two fingers and tilted it toward the red glow of the stove grate.

Written across the cream paper in neat, round clerk’s numerals was a list of four wagon serial numbers: W-104, W-109, W-112, W-118. Beneath the numbers were two words in the same purple ink: Rear axles — unpinned.

I looked from the torn ledger corner back to the bearded teamster’s face.

"Marta Vane-Sule didn’t write this one," I said quietly. "Sospurro clerks don’t use purple arsenal ink, and they don’t have the serial numbers for the Imperial artillery wagons three weeks before they leave the city. Who brought you this slip?"

The teamster shut his mouth tight, staring straight ahead at the tar-paper wall.

I didn’t raise my voice, and I didn’t press the knife harder into his neck. I just turned my head slightly toward Kaelen. "How long does it take the Imperial Guard to row across from the prison hulk when somebody reports an unlicensed Viganator saboteur on the canal?"

"Ten minutes," Kaelen said calmly. "And since there’s no war declared yet, sabotage on an artillery wagon falls under the Maritime Piracy Act. They don’t even bother with a magistrate—they just hang you from the lock crane before supper so the barge crews can see you."

The teamster swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bumping against the flat of my grey steel blade. "I never saw his face," he whispered hoarsely. "Swear to God. A boy drops it in the coal chute on Friday afternoons when the Academy laundry sleighs come down to the wash-houses by the bridge. All I know is the paper comes straight out of the third-floor bursar’s annex on the island."

The third-floor bursar’s annex.

Right below the faculty archives—where the academy clerks kept the supply requisitions, the mineral transfer forms, and the cadet service files.

Outside in the coal yard, fifty feet away, Luckas’s voice rose loudly again as he walked back toward the front gate alongside the bald yard clerk.

"—and tell your master that if the next four tons aren’t screened through a half-inch mesh before Tuesday, Lady Vance will buy her winter coke from the Dockstreet guild instead! Good day to you!"

That was our warning signal.

Kaelen pulled a length of tarred hemp baling twine off a peg on the wall, tied the bearded teamster’s wrists tightly behind his ankles around the base of the heavy workbench leg, and stuffed a clean corner of a canvas oat-sack between his teeth, tying it behind his head with a leather bootlace while I bound Grist’s hands and feet in the corner with a spare mule halter.

"They won’t get loose before noon," Kaelen said, checking the knots once and sliding the wooden drop-bar back into its bracket from the outside edge before we slipped out the plank door into the cold grey fog of the yard.

The bald yard clerk was still standing over by Bin Three, scratching his head with his iron testing hammer and staring down at three cracked lumps of perfectly good anthracite coal while Luckas strolled casually out through the brick arch onto the towpath.

Kaelen and I ducked out behind the back tailgate of the parked coal wagon and fell into step ten paces behind Luckas as we turned east toward the cliff stairs.

We didn’t stop to look at the papers until we were halfway up the four hundred stone freight steps, sitting on a dry stone landing inside one of the covered wind-shelters built into the cliffside, out of sight of both the canal below and the upper terrace above.

Luckas pulled a small paper parcel wrapped in greased butcher’s paper out of his deep overcoat pocket and set it between us on the stone bench—four hot fried herring rolls with pickled onions that he had somehow managed to buy from the corner stall while waiting for us to come out of the yard.

"Nobody followed you out of the arch," Kaelen reported, peering down through the narrow arrow-slit in the stone wall toward the canal towpath below. "And the barge just cast off its bow lines without the boat-hook."

I pulled the hollowed-out brass buckle, the rolled tube of oiled tracing paper, and the torn corner of purple-stamped cream ledger paper out of my coat pocket and laid them out on the flat stone beside the fish rolls.

Luckas picked up a roll, took a big bite, and squinted down at the two different pieces of paper.

"Okay," Luckas said around a mouthful of fried fish. "The yellow tracing paper is the map we heard Marta talking about last night—shows the twenty cartridge wagons and the four mountain guns going down the valley road through Red Ford on January twelfth. What’s the cream one with the purple stamp?"

"Wagon serial numbers from the Crown Jewel artillery park," I said, tapping the four numbers with my bandaged index finger. "W-104, 109, 112, and 118. Those are the four limber carriages that haul the six-pounder mountain guns. Somebody inside our own quartermaster registry isn’t just telling Viganator which road the guns are taking—they’re having the arsenal wheelwrights file halfway through the iron linchpins on the rear axles before the wagons leave the capital."

Luckas stopped chewing, lowering his bread roll slowly. "If the linchpins snap when the wagons hit the mud ruts at Red Ford—"

"The rear wheels come off in four feet of mud," Kaelen finished quietly. "Even if the drivers spot the Viganator ambush on the ridge and try to whip the horses through at a gallop, the gun carriages collapse in the middle of the ford, blocking the whole narrow road so the twenty ammunition wagons behind them can’t turn around or drive past."

I picked up the square of cream paper and held it slanted toward the grey winter daylight coming through the arrow-slit.

Running right through the middle of the paper was a faint watermark pressed into the linen pulp by the paper mill—an owl perched on an open book above the Roman numeral III.

"Bursar’s Annex, Third Floor," Luckas said, recognizing the watermark immediately. "That’s the exact same paper they printed our tournament mineral vouchers on yesterday afternoon. Only the four senior registry clerks and the faculty proctors have keys to that stationery cabinet."

"And the teamster said a boy drops the notes down the laundry chute on Friday afternoons," I said, folding both slips of paper neatly back into the hollow brass buckle and sliding the buckle into my pocket. "Which means Lord Lorenzo’s clerk handles the Sospurro side of the trap, while somebody wearing an Academy staff badge handles the Imperial arsenal side."

Luckas wiped the grease off his fingers with his handkerchief, his playful nobleman’s act from the coal yard completely gone. "We take this straight to Headmaster Corvus as soon as we get back over the bridge."

"No," I said.

Luckas blinked at me. "What do you mean, ’no’? Elvit, we have the brass buckle and the watermarked paper right in your pocket!"

"Think about it for five seconds, Luckas," I said, picking up one of the warm herring rolls so it wouldn’t go cold on the stone. "If we hand this paper to Corvus today, he locks down the third-floor bursar’s office tonight and arrests Marta Vane-Sule. What happens tomorrow morning?"

"The traitor in the bursar’s office burns his ledger books before the guards reach the third floor," Kaelen said, taking his own fish roll from the paper, "and Lord Lorenzo claims Marta was acting alone, apologizes to the War Ministry, and simply routes the January wagons through a different trap next month using a new clerk we don’t know about."

"And the four tampered gun carriages sitting in the city arsenal haven’t had their linchpins swapped yet," I added. "The shipment doesn’t leave until January twelfth. If the clerk on the third floor thinks his Friday laundry drop went through smoothly on the barge today, he’s going to put the next manifest into the laundry chute this Friday at four o’clock."

Luckas looked from me to Kaelen, then let out a slow breath that turned white in the cold shelter. "You want to catch the Academy clerk red-handed with his arm in the laundry chute."

"I want to know which noble house is paying him before we hand him to Corvus," I said. "Because a third-floor registry clerk doesn’t have the authority to walk into the royal artillery park down in the city and tell the wheelwrights which gun carriages to sabotage. Somebody much higher up on the Military Appropriations Committee is stamping his passes."

I stood up from the stone bench, wrapping the last herring roll back up in the greased butcher’s paper and tucking it into my coat pocket so it would stay warm for Nia until we reached the library.

"Come on," I said, starting back up the steep stone stairs toward the upper tiers. "Let’s get back to the island before the noon bell rings. Tonight we take our first dose of marrow oil and red quartz—and on Friday afternoon, Squad Seven is doing laundry."