Chapter 17: Wraps

On Thursday night, the Tanners waited.

Aren heard about it the next morning from a fish seller in the lower market, who had heard it from her cousin, who drove a cart on the east bank. Every Tanner in the city had been called out to guard the three warehouses. They had stood on the riverbank all night with torches and clubs and crossbows, staring at the black water under the Salt Bridge, waiting for boats that never came. At dawn they had gone home cold and tired and laughing loudly. Rook lost his nerve, they said. The old crow’s finished.

"They’re celebrating today," the fish seller said, wrapping a herring in old paper. "Free beer all afternoon. You’d think they had won a war!"

Aren paid for the herring and walked off without a word, smiling faintly.

’Enjoy it. Really. Drink a lot.’

On Friday night he stood in the old drain with forty men behind him and a lantern in his hand.

It was worse than he remembered. The tunnel was so low he had to walk bent nearly in half, and the water at the bottom came over his ankles and smelled like everything the city had ever thrown away. The men behind him cursed under their breath, and somebody was quietly being sick.

Rook walked right behind him. He didn’t curse, and somehow he didn’t bend nearly as much as the others either, though he was taller than all of them. He moved through the tunnel as if it were a palace hallway, his long black coat held above the water in one hand.

"How much farther, stone-seller?"

"Two hundred paces. Then a grate. It comes up in the yard behind the third warehouse, under the dye vats."

"And if the grate is locked?"

"It isn’t. The kids of the lower city broke the lock four years ago. Nobody’s noticed."

"Hm." A few steps of silence. "You know a great deal about stealing leather for a boy who goes to the Academy."

"I grew up stealing leather, my lord. The Academy came later."

The tunnel bent left, then right, and Aren counted his steps and thought uneasily about the problem he hadn’t mentioned to Rook.

On Wednesday, after Rook let him go, he had walked past the Tanners’ hall with a basket of bread on his arm like any errand boy, and he had seen new men going in and out of the side door. They weren’t Tanners. They were far too clean, with real armor under their coats, and they moved like soldiers. He had counted twelve.

Rook didn’t know about them. If those twelve came down into the yard during the fight, Rook would probably still win easily. He was Rank C, and nobody on the east bank could stand against him. But a lot of his men would die, and Rook would remember that his clever stone-seller’s plan had cost him half his gang. Men like Rook never stayed grateful for long.

Aren needed this to look easy. And he couldn’t do a thing about it with forty of Rook’s men watching.

The grate appeared ahead in the lantern light, rusted iron bars in the roof of the tunnel, with a patch of black sky and the dark shapes of the dye vats beyond.

Aren stopped, set the lantern on a dry ledge, turned around and pulled a face.

"My lord," he said weakly. "Sorry. I think I’m going to be sick."

He didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed hurriedly back past the first few men and around the bend, and made loud, very convincing noises. Behind him someone laughed. The great genius, somebody said. Can’t handle a little smell.

Then he was alone in the dark.

There was a second way out of the drain. He had known about it since he was nine: a narrow pipe, much too small for a grown man, that came up behind the Tanners’ rope shed on the far side of their yard. He wasn’t quite a grown man yet, and he was painfully thin from a lifetime of not eating enough.

He pulled out the roll of grey bandages Old Mag had given him for his arm and wound them around his head as he crawled. Over his mouth, his nose, his hair, around and around until only a thin gap was left for his eyes.

The System settled over him, cold and slippery, like water closing over his head.

[False Face: Concealment active.]

He crawled out behind the rope shed on his stomach, covered in mud, and lay perfectly still in the shadows.

The yard was a square of packed earth between long wooden buildings, the great stone dye vats steaming in the middle. Most windows were dark. After a night on the riverbank and an afternoon of free beer, the Tanners were asleep.

Not all of them. On the second floor of the building to his right, four windows were lit, and he could hear voices and the clink of armor. A wooden staircase ran up the outside to a single heavy door.

’The barracks. Twelve hired swords, awake, in armor.’

He had no plan for fighting twelve trained soldiers. He didn’t need one. He only needed them to stay where they were.

He crept carefully along the wall of the rope shed in the shadows. His feet made no sound now, and the Moonlit Step came without thinking, sliding him from shadow to shadow. At the bottom of the staircase he started up, one step at a time, keeping to the edges where the old boards wouldn’t creak.

At the top, beside the heavy door, a long wooden beam leaned against the wall. The bar for the door, the kind that dropped into iron brackets to lock a building from outside.

He lowered it into the brackets so slowly that it didn’t make a sound.

Then he went back down and around to the little room at the bottom where the Tanners kept their alarm bell. A rope ran from the bell up through a hole in the ceiling, so someone in the barracks could ring it without coming down. He cut the rope.

He was turning to leave when the door suddenly opened.

A young Tanner stood there, maybe fifteen, lantern in one hand and trousers half buttoned, clearly on his way to relieve himself. He stared at the grey shape in front of him, the bandaged face, the knife, the cut rope, and his eyes went strange and unfocused, as if they kept sliding off something they couldn’t hold.

He opened his mouth to shout.

Aren hit him once, fast, in the soft spot under the ribs the old men of the lower city had shown him when he was seven. The kid folded without a sound. Aren caught the lantern before it hit the floor and dragged the boy into a warm corner. He would wake in an hour with an awful stomachache and a story nobody would believe.

[Investment recorded.][Type: Hidden aid. Anchor unaware.]

He came back around the bend of the drain wiping his mouth on his sleeve, bandages stuffed deep in his coat, mud all down his front. Forty men looked at him in the lantern light.

"Better?" Rook asked mildly.

"Sorry, my lord."

Rook’s dark eyes moved over the mud on his coat, the scratches on his hands, the dirt in his hair. If he noticed Aren was a good deal dirtier than a boy who had only thrown up in a tunnel should be, he kept it to himself.

"Open the grate."

It was over in less than an hour.

Rook’s men came up out of the ground in the middle of the yard and went into the dark buildings like water into a sponge. Tanners woke to men already standing over their beds. Somebody ran to the bell room to sound the alarm, pulled the rope, and the rope fell down around his shoulders with its cut end swinging.

Upstairs, the twelve hired swords heard the noise and ran for the door, which didn’t open. They threw themselves at it again and again, shouting furiously, while the old wood groaned. By the time they broke through, the yard below was full of Rook’s men with crossbows, and the fight was over.

The leader of the Tanners came out last. A huge woman with short grey hair and arms like ship’s ropes, a Rank C with an axe in each hand. Mother Hesk. Aren had been terrified of her his whole childhood. She walked out between the steaming vats and called Rook’s name.

Rook went to meet her.

Watching Rook fight was like watching a storm decide to become a man. Mother Hesk had thirty years of street fighting behind her, and her axes were fast and brutal. Rook moved around her in a rush of black feathers, never where she aimed, and his long pale hands found every gap in her guard as if she had drawn him a map.

Three minutes. At the end of them, Mother Hesk knelt in the mud with both axes gone, and Rook stood over her without even breathing hard.

"The east bank is mine," he said.

She looked up at him for a long breath. Then she bowed her head.

[Anchor progressed: Rook has defeated a Rank C opponent.][Rook. Rank C: Core Condensation. Progress: 31% → 34%.][Anchor’s skill evolved: Gutter Instinct (Grade D): Stage 1 → Stage 2.][Source: Investment recorded. Hidden aid.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel appeared at the edge of his vision while the whole yard cheered. It passed x10. It passed x100. It slowed at the edge of the narrow red segment, hung there, and slid back into x100.

’So close! Again!’

[Result: x100.][Return: Gutter Instinct. Grade D +3.][Skill acquired: Street Fighter’s Instinct (Grade A).]

It came into him like a cold wind, and suddenly the yard looked different. He could see the way Mother Hesk was kneeling and knew, without knowing how, that her left knee was ruined and she would never fight properly again. He could see Rook’s shoulders, his balance, the small hitch in his right side where something had once broken and healed wrong.

He looked away from Rook very quickly indeed.

By the next day the whole lower city was talking about two things. The first was that Rook had taken the east bank in one night without losing a man. The second was a fifteen-year-old Tanner with a bad stomachache, telling anyone who’d listen about a man in the bell room. Wrapped in bandages from head to chin, he said, like a burn victim, or a corpse that had climbed out of its grave.

By evening, every tavern on both banks had a joke about it.

Watch out tonight. Old Wraps might get you.

Aren heard the name for the first time in Old Mag’s shop while she counted out silver for three new cores. She said it with a little smile and a long look at the bandage still wrapped around his left arm.

He took his money and left.

That night, Rook sent for him.

Rook was in his tall chair with the same book and a cup of black tea. The map on the table now showed the whole river, both banks, with nothing circled. It was all his.

"Ten percent," Rook said, without looking up.

"My lord?"

"Of everything the east bank makes. Every month. For as long as you keep being useful." He turned a page. "You come when I call. You tell me what you see. You tell no one else." Then he did look up, and his eyes were very calm and very cold. "You belong to me now, stone-seller."

[Rook. Hostility: 81% → 88%.]

Aren bowed low, exactly like a good servant.

"Yes, my lord."

He walked home through the dark with ten percent of a gang war in his future and a new name being whispered in every tavern behind him.

’Belong to you? Sure. For now.’