When I finally looked up again, the Countess’s acolyte was gone. Her light faded, leaving me in darkness. I scrambled around until I found some underwear and trousers. The underwear had splinters in it. I shook it out, pulled on the trousers, and crawled to the window to throw open the shutters. The sun had already set over the mountains, but when I leaned out and peered south, I could still see its light glittering on the waters of the Erastes Bay.
My bedroom was a wreck. Everything had been smashed. If I hadn’t known what it was, I wouldn’t have recognised my chest of drawers. One wall and the ceiling were dented and cracked. I hoped they would hold, because I couldn’t afford to repair them and I was avoiding my landlord until I could pay my rent. My bed was split almost across the middle. I dragged the mattress off. At least that was mostly intact.
I searched around until I found a shirt that was vaguely clean. My mage’s cloak seemed to have survived without any real damage. Damned thing. I shook off the plaster, wood dust, and the splinters. I would have to put up with looking like a twat, because I needed something to cover my shirt, which had a rip down the back.
On the plus side, the Countess didn’t seem to know I had used her name to get to Silkstar. Otherwise, that could have gone a whole lot worse.
I was already running late as I made my way along Bell Street. The fight (well, fight might have been too kind a word for it) with the Countess’s acolyte had left me sore and bruised, and by the time I had dragged myself out of my apartment it was almost dark. Every step of the mile-and-a-half walk from the Grey City to the Tanneries just seemed to highlight a different bruise. Hurrying was out of the question.
Once, a hundred years ago, tanneries had filled an entire district above the docks in the southwest corner of the Warrens, and the foul smell of decaying flesh and urine had lain like an unwelcome and persistent smog over the lower city. When the wind blew the wrong way, the smell often reached the Upper City and Horn Hill, and sometimes even the summer palaces in the hills of the Erastes Valley. That was quite unconscionable to the wealthy citizens of Agatos, who thought stenches were strictly for the poor. So Agatos’s rulers had put an end to most of it. Now the majority of Agatos’s leathers came in by ship from Dhaja or Pentath or down the Lidharan Road, the great trade route from the northern cities like Rannoni and Khorasan. As long as it was someone else’s problem, the great and the good of Agatos were happy.
The district wasn’t what it once had been, but there were still a few small tanneries in operation. The stink of a tannery as you approached it was a disgusting, acrid, biting wall of smell, but it was a familiar one from my childhood, and it always brought back memories. You could tell someone who hadn’t grown up in the Warrens from the bundles of fresh mint pressed against their nose when they passed this district. Benny and I used to dare each other to see who could get closest to the tanning pits without throwing up. When Mica had been old enough, she had trundled after us on her little legs and kept going even when she was streaked with her own vomit. Mica had always been a determined kid. Of course, my mother had found out, and that had been the last time we had played that game.
I wasn’t going so close to the tannery pits this time, and a good thing, too. I’d done enough throwing up today, and this outfit was already on the wrong side of respectable.
The Tanneries end of Bell Street was on the way from nowhere to nowhere. It was where the city tossed up its hands and resigned. After all the elaborate planning, graceful plazas, and elegant homes, there was this leftover, swept into the corner.
But that didn’t mean it was deserted. It was the kind of place where a certain type of person came to lean against a wall, hands in pockets, for no discernible reason. Benny and I had been that type of person for a year or two when we’d been kids, right up until I’d started training as a mage and Benny moved on to if not better, then more dubious things. I still didn’t know why we’d done it. In retrospect, it hardly seemed like entertainment.
There wasn’t much light in the Tanneries, certainly none of the morgue-lamps that illuminated the better parts of town, just a few gas lamps on corners, even fewer of which still worked, running on the gases produced from the remaining tannery pits. But eyes soon became accustomed to the dark, and there was ambient light from the city and the night sky.
I looked around and spotted a pair of young men lounging against a wall. They looked bored enough to have been settled there for a while.
I approached, pushing my hood back in the hope it would make me look less mage-y.
“I’m looking for a man,” I said.
The young guy on the left, light-skinned and blond enough that he must have had some Brythanii in his ancestry, smirked.
“We don’t do that sort of thing. You want the Street of Gods. Someone there will do you if you’ve got the coin.”
I ignored that. “His name is Uwin Bone. He was supposed to meet me around here half an hour ago.”
“You’re late then, aren’t you?” The second young man said. “Guess he didn’t want to wait.”
For some reason, that made them both snigger. Little shits.
I was going about this all wrong. I had been out of the Warrens too long. The only thing I was achieving here was entertaining these two idiots for a minute or two.
I should have kept my hood up.
I conjured seething mage light around my hands. The two young men stumbled back, bumping into the wall, all humour suddenly drained from their faces. The mage light wouldn’t harm them, but they didn’t need to know that.
“Do not try my patience,” I growled. Right now, I felt so battered this was about as much magic as I could manage — any spell put a strain on your body, and in my state it felt like some quack physician was having a good poke at my every scrape and bruise. If they didn’t go for this, I was going to get a right kicking.
Luckily for my ribs, the stories of mages who could set your lungs on fire or turn your guts into a nest of living snakes had clearly had some impact here.
“That’s his place,” the blonde one said, pointing at a warehouse on the far side of the street. “Honest. But we haven’t seen him. Have we?” He turned to his friend, who nodded, then quickly shook his head, then nodded again, as though he didn’t know what the best answer would be.
I loomed closer, despite the twinges in every part of my body.
“You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“No,” the second man said, spitting in fear, then looking terrified as a couple of stray spots of spit sprayed my cloak. To be honest, they could only make my outfit cleaner at this stage.
I held their gazes for a few seconds, then nodded. They turned on their heels and fled. I let the mage light fall.
Ow. That had almost been too much for me. I was in a bad state.
I might be aching, but that’d been the most satisfying thing that had happened to me all day.
I turned to look at the warehouse. If my new friends had been telling the truth, Uwin Bone hadn’t shown up, despite his appointment with Benny. Hopefully, that just meant he had heard that Benny had been arrested and the job had failed. If not, it could be bad news.
I shouldn’t have let the two men go so quickly. They had said that was Uwin Bone’s place, but had they meant the corner or did they mean the warehouse itself?
The small warehouse windows were blacked out with paint or tar on the inside, and when I tried the door, it was locked. I stood back to consider it.
Maybe the best way in would be through the delivery doors facing the docks, but those would certainly be watched.
Anyway, I was a mage. Doors meant nothing to me. I resisted the urge to laugh in a hollow and dramatic manner. Putting on my most innocent expression, I leaned against the door and placed my hand over the lock. I drew in magic — ow, again — and released the lock.
Or tried to, at least.
It didn’t click, and I didn’t feel anything give.
I let my eyes lose their focus, breathed in slowly, and peered towards the lock.
A tight cluster of red sigils were clamped around it. A mage-lock. Bannaur’s balls!
A mage-lock was a type of ward specifically designed to counter any magic that might be brought against it. Even at my best, I wasn’t sure I could have broken it, and if I had, it would have set off an alarm. But I was a Warrens boy still, and while I might not have Benny’s aptitude with locks, I had picked up a few tricks. The lock was not the weakest part of any door. That was the hinges, and while the solid wood of the door might have blocked me from physically reaching them, solid objects were no barrier to magic.
I reached in and wrapped my magic around the hinges, then sent a surge of pure heat into them.
I staggered with the effort and almost fell to the cobblestones. The heat sheared through the hinges, sending trickles of smoke into the air from the surrounding wood. The door toppled backwards, hitting the warehouse floor with a crack and a cloud of dust.
Subtle, Nik.
Any idea of sneaking in was now gone, so I decided to make the whole thing public.
“Hello!” I shouted. “Anyone there?”
Contrary to popular belief, mages weren’t bulletproof, and the last thing I needed was a musket ball through the head.
There was no answer from the warehouse, so I edged my way in. The air was full of grain dust, and I soon saw the reason. A pile of grain sacks had toppled over and burst. I was immediately grateful that someone had paid for morgue-lamps in here. A naked flame could have sent the whole place up in an explosion, and that would have been the end of everyone’s favourite freelance mage.
But why hadn’t someone tidied up the mess or at least tried to re-bag the grain? That was wasted profit lying there, and no merchant wasted profit.
I moistened my dry lips. This isn’t right.
I made my way around a wall of tea chests, holding as much magic within me as I could without turning every bruise into a flaming pit of needles. There was nothing less intimidating than a bent-over, limping mage muttering, “Ow, ow, ow,” with every step. I was all about the look, me.
Behind the tea and the fallen sacks of grain were the kind of second-hand goods that were only second-hand because they had been liberated from their original owners by that great cult of redistribution otherwise known as the Wren’s criminal empire. I noticed a couple of fine examples of Mycedan-tat that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Thousand Walls.
Silence always seemed louder in a large space. It was like the silence itself echoed back from the walls. I was preternaturally aware of my own breathing, the brush of my wool cloak against my skin and shirt, and the shuffle of my shoes across the floor.
Even if Uwin Bone was up to no good elsewhere, surely someone should be here? Mycedan-tat apart, there were a good few items here that an ambitious thief might make off with. I doubted that even the Wren’s fearsome reputation would be enough to scare off the stupider members of Agatos’s underworld.
“Hello?” I called again. “I’m looking for Uwin Bone.”
The sound of my voice in the voluminous space freaked me out.
He’s here, a voice whispered in my head. He’s just not answering.
Pity, Nik. Stop it!
I crossed the warehouse, stepping carefully around liberated valuables, my senses open to the magic surrounding me, searching for wards or traps or furious high mages. A couple of objects were obviously cursed, and strange, sickly-yellow magic swirled slowly and ponderously around a box. I gave it a wide berth. There was no sign of the light green of life nor of the flow of raw magic towards a point, which would indicate a hidden mage drawing in power.
Behind the dust and the grain and the smell of sacks, boxes, and spices, another smell was asserting itself, a sharp, bitter, cloying smell that caught in my throat and clung there.
I kept moving, one pace at a time.
Uwin Bone was behind a second wall of chests. What was left of him. He had been attacked with the same animal ferocity as Silkstar’s Master Servant.
“Denna have mercy,” I whispered. The words tasted like bile. I felt my stomach turn. I clenched my hands so hard they hurt. I should have been numbed to this after this morning, but I wasn’t. Maybe nobody could be. All I could do was stare as my legs shook under me.
There were those four parallel slashes again, clearly made simultaneously, but Uwin Bone’s head had been taken completely off. The slashes across his torso had cut all the way through to his spine. I couldn’t even see one of his lower legs. There was blood everywhere, coating the desk and papers on the far side of his body, soaking the rug, beneath my feet…
I stumbled back, leaving thick, tacky footprints on the clean floor beyond the rug. I kicked and scraped my shoes on the nearest clean rug. Get it off. Get it off! But it was too sticky and viscous.
Old blood, I thought. That much blood wouldn’t dry fast even in the hot, dry air of the warehouse. And there was so much of it, everywhere. In pools, in sprays… I forced myself to look away, keeping my eyes focused on the far wall.
I had to think. I had to get my mind clear. First, the Master Servant, then Uwin Bone. Both killed in the same way. Why? And how?
And if the blood was old, Bone could have been killed while Benny and I were still under arrest, or at least not long after I had visited Benny in gaol. Perhaps even soon after Master Servant Rush had been killed. Someone — something — had covered up their tracks quickly. A loose end, cut away.
I couldn’t help it. My eyes drifted back down to the body. Were Benny and I loose ends, too? Were we next?
What the Depths had we got ourselves into?
And what in the names of all the dead gods was I doing standing around here looking as guilty as a dog next to an overturned bin?
Being found with one torn apart body could be seen as bad luck. But two? People had seen me coming here. I hadn’t been subtle with the door. Some lowlife would have gone scurrying off to alert the Wren the moment I popped the door off its hinges.
Pull yourself together. Move! Get out of here.
If I hadn’t been caught up in the Wren’s affairs before, I was now.
My legs took some convincing to get moving, but when they did, I shambled like the summoned dead towards the broken door as fast as I could manage.
And not a moment too soon. I was scarcely out of sight around the corner from the warehouse when I heard angry shouts arise behind me.
You idiot. You bloody, stupid idiot! I told myself.
I had lost my only lead and got myself into even more trouble.
Forcing myself up, I headed along an alley, away from the Tanneries and the body that lay there, mute but accusing.