Long Step Avenue was supposedly named as such because it was the main road out of the Warrens to the better parts of the city. A long step, they said, to better things. It was all very metaphorical.
That was what people outside the Warrens said, anyway. But then none of them ever went that far down Long Step Avenue if they could help it. In the Warrens there was a different story. If you walked west along Long Step Avenue, crossing the Royal Highway — which carried the trade from the port, through the city — leaving behind the better parts of Agatos until you reached the Warrens, and then you kept going for a couple of dozen paces to where the road began to narrow and the mean houses closed in, you would reach a place where one of the brick sewers running down from higher up in Agatos had collapsed or become blocked. As a result, the sewage came bubbling and lumping up here and flowed across the road. Over the years, either the force of the thick liquid had washed away the cobblestones to form a channel, or some hygienically-minded resident had hacked a way through. Either way, people in the Warrens said you needed a long step to get cleanly across.
From time-to-time, someone would lay planks across the gap to make the passage easier for carts, but as anyone there could tell you, if you left anything lying around in the Warrens, it soon got up and walked away.
Imela Rush’s parents’ house was on the good side of the long step. Elevation to Silkstar’s household had proven a boon to her family. It was a big house, the kind of place that was often occupied by three or four families. The walls were freshly whitewashed and the shutters painted neatly in woodland green. The red mourning banners that draped down the walls told me that this was the right place. The banners were cheap and worn, but clean. When I unfocused my eyes, I saw simple but effective wards set into the fabric of the building. A family that had moved up in the world, but not far. A family that might have risen higher, if their daughter hadn’t been brutally killed.
I stopped half way across the street. Sereh came to a halt a step past me and gave me a questioning look. A soldier, wearing his Agatos cloak and carrying his musket, moved around us with a curse.
I ignored both of them, my eyes fixed on the house. It might look clean and bright, but I had no doubt that inside it would be dark with mourning. I didn’t have any right to insert myself in there. I would be like a knife working my way between ribs. They wouldn’t want to see me.
But what choice did I have? I couldn’t afford to ignore leads. And, looking up at this neat, quiet house, for the first time I felt a pressing obligation to this family. They deserved to know who had really killed their daughter.
It still made me feel shit.
“Why are we here, Uncle Nik?” Sereh said. “We should be trying to get my dad out. We can’t wait forever.”
I glanced down and saw that she was playing with her small, sharp blade. I suppressed a shudder.
“I told you. We have to get your dad out legally or he’ll only get hunted down again. We have to find out who was really behind the whole thing.” I shook my head. “The Watch aren’t going to be interested in your dad if they can get a murderer. We’ll do a deal. Now put that away before you scare someone.”
Someone other than me.
She gazed at me emotionlessly for a moment before the knife smoothly disappeared.
“You’d better be right. I won’t let anything happen to Dad.”
“Me neither, kid. Benny is my friend, remember?”
I looked back at the house. I could try to justify this any way I liked, but I still had no right to be here.
Maybe if I gave them another day or two. Just enough time to come to terms with their loss.
Yeah? And how long do you think that’s going to take? You think they’ll be over that tomorrow? Or next week? Or next year?
People said that you never forgot something like this, but you did. You didn’t accept it. How could you? You didn’t grow used to it. You simply forgot, bit by bit, year by year. The memories sank deeper and deeper. That was the only way you could cope with a loss like this, and that was an even worse loss, because you weren’t even doing them the decency of really remembering them.
I hadn’t known my father, but Mica’s dad had been around for a few years. He had been a good man. A fisherman. He’d been the closest thing I had ever had to a father. Then, one day he had gone out in his boat, a fine, clear day with steady winds, and he hadn’t come back. They had found his boat in the end, broken on the rocks, but never him. Most days I didn’t even think of him anymore. You forgot.
A sharp pain flared in my back. I jerked forwards, thoughts scattering, and spun around. Sereh wiped her little knife on her sleeve before hiding it again.
She had snuck around behind and stuck me!
“What was that for?” I demanded.
“You seemed distracted, Uncle Nik.”
Pity! Yeah, I had been distracted, but what was wrong with a tap on the shoulder?
I could still feel the sharp sting of the knife, as well as a trickle of blood down my back. I didn’t dare check it, though, with Sereh standing there.
I gazed at the door again. There were roses on either side, buds about to open. There was a cracked cobble in front of the doorstep. The stink of the open sewer further down Long Step Avenue hung in the air.
If I stood here much longer, Sereh was going to stick me again.
I squared my shoulders, crossed the street, and rapped on the door. My palms were sweaty. I wiped them on my mage’s cloak.
It took a minute for anyone to answer. At first there was nothing, then an angry whisper and the sound of slippers on a stone floor.
I was just about to knock again when the door cracked open. It was gloomy inside, but I could see enough to recognise the woman who answered as a relative of Imela Rush. Like the Master Servant, she was tall and slim, with arched eyebrows and rich olive skin. There were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and her hair showed more grey than black, but otherwise, the resemblance was striking.
I saw her take in my mage’s cloak and saw the emotions race across her face: grief, shock, fear, then resignation. Without speaking, she stepped back, pulling the door open.
That was one of the reasons I didn’t like wearing my mage’s cloak: it opened too many doors. What kind of city must we be where a man or woman in a black cloak could just walk into a gaol or into the home of a grieving family and no one even thought of saying no? What was it? Fear? A misplaced sense of respect? Habit? Whichever, it wasn’t healthy. It didn’t stop me taking advantage, though. I felt like a complete arsehole stepping into the cool, dim house. The woman’s face showed confusion as Sereh followed me in, but she didn’t say anything.
Too nervous. Or maybe too traumatised. And here you are, Nik Thorn, coming to drive the knife in further. Bastard.
This was what mage’s games did to ordinary people. It was why I kept to breaking curses and spying on jilted lovers, and it was partly why I hadn’t wanted to remain one of the Countess’s acolytes. As an acolyte, I would have been expected to abuse my power and status for the wealth and glory of the blessed Countess. Not only was it wrong, but I couldn’t cope with the pressure and the guilt it brought. I had learned that from my mother: Pressure and guilt at my qualms and inadequacies.
Screw it. I had made my choices.
“You’re Imela Rush’s mother?”
She nodded. It was an uncoordinated, loose gesture, as though the tendons, bones, and muscles holding her body together had become slightly detached. Look at her.
She deserved the truth. She really did. I doubted it would help to hear it.
“You’re from the Wren?” she said.
In for a penny…
“We need to ask you some questions.” I wasn’t lying, as such. I was just choosing not to answer directly.
Maybe if I kept telling myself that, I’d believe it.
She led us through to the living room at the back of the house. Through the gaps between shutters, I saw a small vegetable garden shaded by orange and lemon trees. The room itself was centred around a low table surrounded by mats. A reclining couch had been shoved against the far wall, and a couple of comfortable chairs stood under the shutters.
In the Warrens, where Benny and I had grown up and where this family had come from, mats on the floor were the usual arrangement, with few families able to afford much furniture. Imela Rush’s family had clearly moved up enough in the world to afford the furniture, but equally obviously they still preferred the mats. The Warrens run deep. They didn’t readily let go. My little sister, Mica, had shrugged the Warrens off as easily as an old cloak, and looking at her now, you’d never guess she didn’t come from one of the White City’s great old families, but then she had been young when we had left the Warrens behind. I still found it hard not to revert to a Warrens mentality.
“You need to be careful of her,” Rush’s mother said, waving vaguely towards Sereh.
For a moment, I thought she was warning me that Sereh was dangerous — which I absolutely had noticed, ever since the kid had turned six — but then I realised she thought Sereh was my daughter. I didn’t disabuse her.
“We took her body to the Lady,” Imela Rush’s mother said. There was something about her expression that made it look like she was asking for approval or permission. Depths! This wasn’t a role I was comfortable with. I nodded anyway.
The Lady she was referring to was the Lady of the Grove. Most people who grew up in the Warrens paid at least lip service to the Lady. Her grove was a stand of cedar trees that grew on the slopes of the mountain behind the Warrens. Anyone might have expected the grove to have been chopped down for firewood and construction materials long ago and the land built upon, but it stood untouched, and that was down to the legend of the Lady of the Grove. The Lady was the goddess of that particular grove and supposedly looked down with favour on the Warrens. It wasn’t impossible. There had been gods and goddesses of far stranger things. But I had never seen her, and as far as I could tell, it had been a long time since the Warrens had received favours from god or man.
A stream flowed through the grove, and the more devoted residents of the Warrens left offerings on its bank. This was the Warrens, however, and despite the enduring belief in the Lady, those offerings were nicked back again by the end of the day. It was a custom among the more devout citizens of the Warrens to leave the bodies of the dead under the trees, beside the stream, for a few days before taking them to the burial shafts. What the fuck they thought the goddess was going to do, I didn’t know.
In the grove, the stream still ran clear and clean before pausing, taking a deep breath, and plunging into the filth of the Warrens, the Tanneries, and the docks, where it would emerge again as a toxic brown sludge.
I was starting to feel the same way.
“Did you find out who killed her?” the woman said, as she herded us towards the chairs beneath the shutters with vague flaps of her hands. “They say that mage in the Grey City did it. Someone hired him, and he killed her.” Her face twisted into such an expression of hate that I took a step back.
“No!” I blurted. I took a breath. If she worked out who I was, it would be like grinding glass into her wounds. I couldn’t do that to her.
You’re just making excuses to lie to her.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t him.”
I hadn’t sat, and Sereh had faded into the background in that disconcerting way she had. It wasn’t magic — I would have been able to detect that — but somehow she always seem to be able to insert herself into the shadows.
Just find out what the Wren wanted Master Servant Rush to do and get out of here. Leave this poor family in peace.
Rush’s mother moved to the door.
“Merkys! Jirima!”
A few moments later, an older man and a boy who appeared to be in his early teens appeared. The man looked ragged. If I had passed him on the street, I would have guessed he was sleeping in a doorway. His clothes were unwashed, his face unshaven, his eyes old and hollow. The boy, by contrast, seemed to have drawn himself in until he was as tight and rigid as an over-wound spring.
“What does he want?” the boy demanded, jerking his head at me.
“He’s from the Wren.”
The boy’s face spasmed. He turned his head and spat.
“Jiri!” His mother said, but only half-heartedly.
“Tell him to get out.”
Her eyes flicked towards me. “We can’t.”
I thought for a moment that the boy was going to come at me, and I braced myself, but he took control of himself with a shudder.
“This is all your fault!” he threw at me. He turned to glare at his parents. “And yours. If you hadn’t given in to Rella’s stupid whim, she would be fine.” Rella? That must have been Imela Rush’s real name, before the Wren had given her a new identity. Did it suit her? I still didn’t know anything about her. “But no,” the boy continued. “She had to have everything she wanted. Master Servant. What a joke! And then people like him come demanding payment and now she’s dead.” The last word was screamed.
It wasn’t me, I wanted to say. I didn’t demand payment. I didn’t kill her. But I was trading on the Wren’s name to be here, and that meant taking the punches.
“I want to find out who did it. I want to make it right,” I said. And I did. Not just for me and Benny, but for this boy and his broken family.
“How?” The boy demanded. “Can your high mage bring her back from the dead?”
“No,” I admitted. Not in any way you’d want her back. Magic could raise the dead, but when you brought them back, they came back wrong. They would remember their lives. They would look the same and sound the same. But they wouldn’t be same person, and they wouldn’t last. In the end, whatever was missing from them would draw them back. A lot of people thought they wanted their loved ones back, but what they got… No. I wouldn’t do it. It never ended well.
“Then what bloody good are you?” Tears ran down the boy’s face, even though he didn’t seem to notice. His arms wrapped around his body.
This was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have come. There had to be another way of finding this out. The Wren, for instance…
“We can kill them.” Sereh’s voice was soft and quiet, but it still seemed to startle the boy and his mother. “We can kill the ones who did it.” The father, I noticed, had settled himself on one of the mats as though waiting for his lunch, and he wasn’t reacting to any of it.
Something about the way Sereh spoke seemed to drain the fury from the air. I took my chance.
“I want you to tell me how Imela was recently. Had anything changed? Did she say anything?”
The mother glanced at her unresponsive husband, then nodded. “She was worried. I could tell. They trained her, but I’m her mother.” Her voice broke at the end.
“Worried about what?”
“She was loyal. She always was. Right?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“It was her employer. That Silkstar. The merchant? Something was bothering him. It wasn’t his trade, though. Not his money. I know that. Rella took care of most of that, and she was good at it. It was something to do with magic. He was a high mage, you know?” Her eyes had unfocused, like mine did when I saw the magic around me, but I reckoned she was seeing something else entirely. Maybe a memory of her daughter. “Something was happening, upsetting the balance. That was all Rella would say.”
Something had upset the balance all right. Or someone had. They had kicked a tangle of rattlesnakes, and I could hear the tail-rattling of the high mages from across the city.
But had Silkstar really been concerned about something magical, or had he just grown suspicious of his Master Servant? That would be enough to make her nervous, and a move by the Wren against Silkstar would certainly upset the balance.
“Imela owed the Wren a favour,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Did she ever tell you what he asked her to do?”
The mother’s face crumpled. “Is that why she’s dead? Did we—?” Her hands came to her mouth, cutting off the words.
“Why don’t you know?” the son demanded. He was peering at me suspiciously again.
Shit.
“I just need to know what she told you.”
The mother shook her head. “Nothing. She told us nothing.” She looked scared.
Damn it all. I had messed that up. Now she would never tell me, because she would think I would take it as her daughter betraying the Wren.
“There was that woman.”
For a second, I didn’t know where the voice had come from, then I realised the father had spoken for the first time. Haggard eyes gazed up at me.
“A woman?”
But his eyes had clouded again. I turned to the mother.
“A woman?”
She bit her lip. “She… A woman came to our door. Three days … four days ago. She wasn’t from here, not from the Warrens or from the Grey City. From the better parts of town. You could hear it in her voice. She was asking about Rella, except she called her Imela, like you did. She wanted to know if she was our daughter. Our name’s not Rush, you know that, right? It’s Cord. Your master gave her a new name when he … when he arranged everything for her.” Rella Cord. I wondered if Rella Cord was that different to Imela Rush. Rella Cord hadn’t been a Master Servant, that was for sure. Just an ambitious kid. “We didn’t say anything, though.” The mother’s eyes darted to me, as though she expected me to be angry at her for talking about this. I guessed if I had been one of the Wren’s men, I might have been, but I couldn’t bring myself to fake it. “We know we’re not supposed to say anything. We knew it would make things difficult for her.”
The son snorted contemptuously.
So, someone had been looking into the Master Servant. One of Silkstar’s people? It would confirm that Silkstar had been suspicious.
“What did she look like?”
The mother hunched her shoulders. “I … I don’t remember.”
I glanced at Sereh, but she didn’t seem to be interested in intervening. I guessed there were only a certain number of times you could be existentially menacing before it lost its edge.
“Tall? Short? Agatos native?”
The woman pulled her shoulders in, her chin down. She was still taller than me, but somehow she looked smaller.
“I don’t know.”
I looked across at her husband, but he wasn’t answering.
“You can’t remember anything about the way she looked? How about what she wore?”
A shake of the head.
Any competent mage could obscure their appearance — or, more to the point, interfere with the memory of their appearance. Silkstar could have sent one of his mages to poke around, but Silkstar didn’t employ female mages, and the one thing both of Imela Rush’s parents seemed sure about was that their visitor had been a woman. Of course, Silkstar could have imbued some object with an obscuring spell. It was harder to do than to perform the magic directly, but at a pinch, even I could do it. It would be child’s play for Silkstar.
Making you think you’d seen one specific thing when you’d seen another was harder, but just confusing things so you couldn’t remember was trivial. The brain was fairly stupid anyway, and people remembered less well than they thought they did. A spell like that was just helping along the natural order of things. All it had to do was chuck some interference into the short-term memory and stop the permanent memories being formed. It wouldn’t matter that you could see and even recognise the person in front of you. A minute or two later, the memory would be gone, flushed out by newer experiences. You could beat the spell — if you knew it was happening — if you had the mental discipline to keep that short-term memory front and centre until the spell had passed, but Rush’s parents had had no reason to do that.
There were even a few priesthoods who used similar spells as a matter of course. It was far easier to get someone to believe in your god if they were confused about what was real and what wasn’t.
The sound of the front door opening made me straighten. I glanced at Rush’s mother, but it wasn’t her who answered my questioning look.
“My brother,” the boy said. He must have noticed the brief beat of confusion on my face. “You don’t know him?”
I tried to keep my face neutral. Why would I know him?
“Mam?” A voice called. “Da? Jiri?”
The man who came through the living room door shared the same slim height as Imela Rush and her mother, although his skin was a shade darker. He was hardly an adult at all. His cheeks still had that slight kid’s roundness, and there was no hint of stubble. He was at most twenty years old, I guessed, probably younger. And he was wearing the black cloak and hood of a mage.
That explains the wards, I thought, randomly.
He came to a halt when he spotted me. “Who’s this?” He didn’t seem to have noticed Sereh, but then people rarely did when she didn’t want to be seen.
The mother glanced at me, her forehead crinkling. “He’s from the Wren.”
“No, he’s bloody not.”
This kid must be one of the Wren’s acolytes. That would teach me to take advantage of a misunderstanding.
“I never said I was.” I just hadn’t denied it.
“You’re him, aren’t you? The one who killed her.”
His fists came up. I took a step back, raising my hands placatingly.
“No. I didn’t. I’m just trying to find out who did.”
He wasn’t listening. I saw him pull in magic. He had some power, but no real control. I could throw a spell faster, knock him down before he could release, but I was already on thin ice. If I started a war with the Wren, it wouldn’t be a long one.
The kid was probably an apprentice. If he let that magic fly, someone could get hurt, and there was no telling who. He was too emotional, too unfocused.
“Don’t do it, kid,” I said. I took a step to the side, to circle around him to the door. “We’re leaving.”
The kid shaped his magic. It was almost painful to watch him struggle to get it right. A spear. It was one of the simplest of the Hundred Key Forms, not so different from the arrow, but it was easier to control and he wouldn’t have to throw it. It was still potentially deadly.
Then Sereh was beside him, her knife poised against his flank, ready to thrust into his kidney.
“We’re going,” I said again. I was quickly learning not to be embarrassed about being saved by an eleven-year-old. “Don’t try to follow.” I nodded to the family. “I really am sorry about what happened to Imela. I will discover who did it.”
I took Sereh by the shoulder, and together we backed out of the house.
“He’ll find you,” the older son shouted after us. “The Wren will find you and tear out your heart.”
And on that cheery note, Sereh and I hurried away as quickly as we could manage.