Prologue

Three kinds of business ran out of the Attravi dyeworks in Froghole. There was the legitimate kind that stank of urine and starch, overseen by workers with faces steamed red and rough from the dye vats. There was the illegal kind that took advantage of the stench and proximity to the fouled West Channel to smuggle aža, saltpeter, papaver, and other illicit goods into Nadežra.

Then there was the business that came with no questions asked.

Vargo learned about the third sort the afternoon a foreign-sounding cuff came to the dyeworks.

His head was shaved bald like a plague victim, but he dressed as fine as any man from the Pearls, in a velvet coat dyed a plum so dark it could have been mistaken for black. The gaze that fell on Vargo when he darted forward at the foreman’s snap was like a fen vulture’s: dark and void of emotion. “This isn’t your usual boy.”

“Jaršin came down with the shivers. En’t getting back up again,” the foreman said, scowling at the rudeness of Vargo’s predecessor, dying like that. “This one’s solid, though. Running three months and he en’t filched or scarpered yet.”

Not that the foreman knew, anyway. Vargo stood straight and did his best to look trustworthy.

“I see.” That black gaze narrowed at him. “How old are you?”

“Near eleven,” Vargo said. It wasn’t quite a lie; for many rookery kids, guessing took the place of knowing.

“Good enough.” The man handed Vargo a tightly wrapped bundle, the strings webbing it sealed with wax, and a letter tucked under the bindings. “Eastbridge, along the Pomcaro Canal, number seventy-one. It’s from Balmana and Schiamori. You’re not to leave until he’s tried it on, understand?”

No, but who could suss out the strange demands of cuffs? Easier to just nod. So Vargo did, and the cuff left, and the foreman sent Vargo off to the Upper Bank.

And if Vargo made a stop on the way, wasn’t anyone going to be the wiser.

Even before he’d started running contraband for the dyeworks, Vargo knew the uses of steam—one of many secrets shared among the runners of Nadežra. Like reading. If delivering a message could only hook you a mill, knowing its contents might earn you a decira. Someday, someone at the top of the heap was going to realize the untapped potential of the runner network, and there wouldn’t be a secret in Nadežra that was safe.

But for now, Vargo only cared about the secret of the day. Hunched in his squat on the roof of a dumpling shop, he held the letter next to a vent and waited for the steam to soften the sealing wax enough to peel it open.

“Who do you think that was, Peabody?” he asked the bottle tucked away in an inner pocket of his coat. He’d lifted it from a merchant last month, hoping for some zrel to warm him against the spring rains. Instead he got a baby king peacock spider no bigger than a pea, living in a little glass world of twigs and moss. Better than zrel in the long run, even if Vargo was the one doing the warming.

The spider couldn’t answer, of course, and the letter didn’t explain much more: thus-and-such merchant wanted some cuff’s custom, and please accept this token blah blah. Vargo sealed it back up and went to work on the strings of the package.

A bit of wiggling got him a corner of midnight velvet, with onyx and smoke-dark topaz worked into the embroidery. Before he’d slipped into Jaršin’s old job at the dyeworks, Vargo had run packages for a laundry in the Shambles. Before that, it was a tailor in Westbridge. If they had anything in common, it was that customers rarely noticed a few loose gems… and if they did, it wasn’t the messenger who took the blame.

“You’ll be dining on the finest grubs in Nadežra tonight,” Vargo told Peabody. Drawing his thumb knife, he carefully snipped the edge of the embroidery, taking his cut of Nadežra’s wealth.

“Where did you say this comes from?”

The townhouse Vargo stood in was like nothing he’d ever seen. Books lining every wall, a desk messy with scribbled-on papers, and spiraling around the slate floor, enough prismatium to keep Vargo in porridge and dumplings until the day he died.

The cuff seemed surprised to be receiving anything, and baffled at Vargo’s insistence on waiting for a response. “Balmana and Schiamori,” Vargo repeated.

“And you’re an… apprentice there?”

At the cuff’s skeptical look, Vargo stood taller. His trousers were well-darned, his coat shapeless and oversized. Nobody with sense would mistake him for a tailor’s apprentice. “Hope to be, altan,” he said, doing his best to scrub the rookery stain from his accent.

It must have worked, because the cuff nodded absently and said, “There is no shadow so deep, nor ignorance so embedded, nor sin so great that it cannot be revealed and redeemed by the Lumen’s light. But one should strive to improve oneself in this life.”

His yammering faded as he snipped the last of the cords and midnight velvet spilled out of the package. Vargo had only seen a corner; the whole was like the starlit Dežera on a summer night, flowing through the cuff’s gloved hands. Almost made Vargo wish he was apprentice to a craftsman who could make something so beautiful.

He wished even more that he could punch the critical frown off the cuff’s face. “You should inform your potential masters that cloaks of this cut haven’t been in fashion for at least a decade.” The man lifted it to the light to get a better look at the embroidery. “And their attempt at numinatrian figures are muddled and ill-informed. These lines here—completely unnecessary.”

Ass. Vargo pasted a stupid look on his face. “En’t supposed to leave until you try it on.”

The cuff glared as if a dirty look was enough to push his unwanted visitor out the door. He sighed when Vargo stood firm as the Point. “Very well.”

Swinging the cloak around like a Vraszenian veil dancer, he settled it on his shoulders and fumbled with the two halves of the smooth enameled clasp before clicking it into place. The light caught the scatter of gems as the cloak settled, flashing and winking at Vargo like a fall of meteors. “Now will you—”

His words choked off. Coughing, the man clawed at the collar like someone had stepped on the trailing hem. His chalk-pale face darkened to a sickly purple as he dropped to one knee. The gems burned like stars.

“What did you do?” the cuff rasped. He caught Vargo’s wrist before Vargo could bolt, his grip surprisingly strong for someone who lived among books. “Get it off. Get it off me!”

Vargo did his best. But the clasp seemed fused together, burning his fingers when he tried to pry it open. “Maybe if we cut it off?” he said. Panic beat in his throat. He’d done this. He’d mucked up some numinat in the embroidery, and now the man was going to kiss Ninat good night.

“Cut off what, my head?” the man snarled.

“No, the cloak!” When Vargo wedged his thumb knife into the collar, though, the velvet held like woven steel. The only thing he cut was the skin of the cuff’s throat.

The cloak wasn’t strangling the man, not if he could still breathe enough to berate Vargo. But something was badly wrong; the plum bruising his cheeks was burning into grey ash by the moment. Something dangerous and desperate bled into the man’s eyes. “I have an idea—I’ll need your help. Open your shirt.”

Any other time, Vargo would have told him to shove his glove up his own ass, but fear and guilt drove him to comply.

Snatching a pen and inkpot from his desk, the man said, “Hold still.” His hand trembled as he inked a numinat onto the skin of Vargo’s chest.

“How’s this gonna help?”

“Don’t distract me.” The man lurched over to a mirror and repeated the process on himself. Then, slopping ink onto a tiny chop, the cuff pressed it to the center of the figures: first his own, then Vargo’s.

Pain erupted through Vargo from the hot core of the numinat. The smell of flesh burning singed his nose. Someone caught him before he crashed into the ground, dragging him toward the prismatium spiral laid into the floor. He blinked up at the cuff, whose ashy pallor had broken into a flush. Sweat shone on his brow. “I promise, this is only temporary. I just need you to share the burden of the effects until…”

He trailed off as he moved about, the ominously twinkling cloak still sweeping behind him. Now the whole floor was his canvas, chalked with an increasingly complex web of lines. Vargo tried to move, tried to watch, but he kept fading in and out of consciousness. When he reached for the brand burning on his chest, his hand bumped against something hard in his coat. The flask, with Peabody inside. Vargo clutched it tight to the burn, wishing the cool glass could leach away the pain.

Finally the man lurched to a halt and knelt, chalk in hand, straining to reach the outer circle so he could close it without moving from his place.

Primordial agony engulfed Vargo. Worse than any burn, than any cut; it felt like the flask had shattered, driving shards of glass into his heart. His vision went black. Vargo screamed. He’s killing me. He’s killing me to save himself.

And then the world was gone.