Chapter 3: The Duskling Who Made Monsters Kneel
Six Nocturnes had Brynn boxed in at the end of Cutgill Alley, where the fish market backed onto the canal and the cobbles were slick with scales.
Two blocked the mouth of the alley. Two stood on the stacked crates to her left, where they had the height. One leaned on the wall with his hands in his coat, which meant he was the one with the knife. The sixth was the largest, and he was smiling at her the way men smiled when someone had paid them in advance.
Brynn was deciding which of them to put down first when Emrys, standing behind her with his back to the wall, sneezed.
All six of them flinched. Not at the noise. At something under it, something that went through the alley like a dropped bell, and for a moment every one of them looked at Emrys instead of at her.
Then it passed, and the large one laughed, and they came in.
* * *
They had come to Cutgill Alley because the eel-seller's brother had seen the men who took his sister go that way. He was fourteen and furious and had walked them to the corner himself before Brynn sent him home. The alley was a dead end. Nobody had gone into it and come out again, he said, and Brynn had thought that meant there was a door she hadn't found. It had not occurred to her that it meant someone was waiting.
Now she lifted her right hand, and Saltlight came up through it like water through a spring.
The first two reached her together. She put a wall between them and her, a flat plane of white-gold light the width of the alley, and they hit it and rebounded with their forearms smoking where they had touched it. The two on the crates jumped. She met the first in the air with a Flare, a short hard burst from her palm that blinded him and sent him backward into the canal with a flat splash. The second landed badly and she swept his legs.
The one with the knife had gone for Pip.
Pip was a Flicker-rank Wick with nine months of training and a good heart. He managed a spark the size of a coin before the man's shoulder hit him and drove him toward the edge of the quay, where the stone dropped six feet to black water. He went over the edge backward.
He did not go in. Emrys had reached him first. Brynn saw it from the corner of her eye: Emrys, who could not climb three flights of stairs, crossing four yards of wet stone faster than she would have thought him able to cross a room, catching Pip's collar with both hands and throwing his weight back. They went down together on the cobbles. The knife-man turned toward them.
"Stop."
Emrys said it from the ground. He did not shout it, quite. It came out low and rough, as if torn from the bottom of his chest, and something in the alley answered it.
The knife-man stopped. His knees hit the stone. Behind Brynn, the large one who had been circling for her back stopped mid-stride and went down beside him, and the one she had swept, and the one who had crawled out of the canal on the far ladder. All of them. Heads bowed. Hands flat on the ground. Shaking.
In the silence Brynn could hear the canal slapping at the quay.
She looked at her own raised palm, which was still glowing.
Well, she thought. That's new.
"Stay down," she told them, and they did, which was also new. She crouched in front of the large one. "Who paid you?"
He did not look up. "Don't know her name. Never saw her face. She sent a runner with the coin and the orders. Scare the Warden off the eel girl. Don't kill anyone."
"Her."
"The runner said her. And the purse." His nostrils moved, as if remembering it. "The purse smelled of chamomile."
Brynn wrote it down. Then she stood up and let them go, because six Nocturnes in the Undercroft for a failed scare would take a week of paperwork she did not have. They left fast, and they did not look at her once on the way out. They looked at Emrys.
Pip sat up, soaked on one side, his spectacles hanging from one ear. He looked at Emrys for a long time.
"You pulled me out," he said.
"You were going in."
"You can't lift a kettle."
"I know." Emrys was grey in the face, breathing in short pulls. "I'd like to sit down now, I think."
Pip took his arm before Brynn could. He did not say anything about spies, then or afterward.
They walked the length of the fish market toward the canal bend, Pip on one side of Emrys and Brynn on the other. Halfway there Brynn realised her right hand had gone numb from the wrist down. She flexed it inside her glove until the feeling came back in pins, and she said nothing, because a Pyre-rank Wick did not go numb from one wall and two Flares. She had done forty in a night during the dock riots and slept well afterward.
She glanced sideways. Emrys was watching her hand.
"Cramp," she said.
"All right," he said, in the voice of a man who did not believe her and had decided not to argue yet.
"I've never done a Flare that made them kneel," Brynn said, looking at her hand again. "Must be the angle."
Emrys said nothing at all.
* * *
The Crooked Kettle stood at the bend of the canal where the Dusk Quarter's red lanterns began, a crooked wooden house on stilts with a tea room on the ground floor and a great many cats. Lisette Corvo had owned it for a hundred and eighty years and had been rude to Wardens for all of them.
She wore a wide purple hat indoors, her white hair in a braid down to her waist, and her eyes were the dark red of old wine. She put a list on the table in front of Brynn without being asked.
"Eleven names in a year. The Patrol has seven. The other four had no family to report them, so they don't exist." She tapped the paper. "All Dusk-born. All unregistered, or registered so recently the ink's wet. All taken at night, near water."
Then she looked past Brynn at Emrys.
She looked for a long time. Long enough that Brynn noticed. Long enough that Pip, drying his spectacles on a tea towel, noticed and stopped. Then Lisette turned, went behind her counter, and came back with a small iron pot that she did not serve to anyone else.
"Drink this," she said to Emrys. "All of it."
"What is it?"
"Tea. Drink it." She went back behind the counter. She did not explain.
* * *
Emrys drank it. It was dark and bitter and warm all the way down, and by the bottom of the cup his hands had nearly stopped shaking.
That was when he began to hear them.
Not with his ears. The tea room was full: dockworkers, a pair of old Nocturne women playing cards, a young clerk in Compact grey reading a paper he did not want to be seen reading. And under the ordinary noise, Emrys became aware of something else, as if every Nocturne in the room had a small bell inside them and each bell had its own note. The card players rang low and close together, like sisters. Lisette, behind the counter, was a single deep tone, very old. The clerk was thin and bright and very young.
He had always known when someone was Nocturne. He had put it down to the half of him that was. But he had never heard it before.
And far off, past the walls, past the canal, somewhere toward the centre of the city, there was a note that was wrong. It did not ring. It pulled, like a rope drawn too tight around something that did not want to be tied.
Chain, he thought, and his hand went to his collar, where the Heartwick used to hang and now did not.
He missed it more than he had expected to. One night was all he had had it, and he had fallen asleep listening to it, and now the place where it had lain against his collarbone felt cold.
He looked across the table at Brynn, who was reading Lisette's list with her finger moving down the names. In the alley she had put up a wall of light as wide as a street, and afterward her hand had shaken for the whole length of the fish market. There were two dull streaks at her temples where her hair had lost its colour. She thought he had not seen them. She did not seem to understand that he had spent three weeks with very little to do except look at her, and that he had become very good at it.
She is paying for something, he thought. And she is not telling anyone what.
On the windowsill outside, the cats of the Crooked Kettle had arranged themselves in a row, nine of them, sitting upright with their tails around their feet. All nine were looking at him.
Brynn saw them too. "Lisette, your cats are being strange."
"My cats are always strange," Lisette said, without turning round.
The door flew open.
The girl who came through it was perhaps twenty, all ash-blonde ringlets and a black dress trimmed in white lace, with a black bow in her hair the size of a dinner plate. Her eyes were red, but bright red, new red. Emrys heard her before he saw her properly: a clear high note, like a glass struck with a spoon, and under it the deeper tone of an old and large House.
She stopped in the middle of the room. She was out of breath. She had been running, he realised. Running toward something.
Toward him.
"You," she said.
Brynn stood up. She did not reach for her lantern-chain, but she stood in a way that put her slightly in front of his chair, and he noticed that she did it without thinking about it.
"Can I help you?"
The girl did not look at her. She did not seem to know Brynn was there. She crossed the tea room, stepped round Brynn as if she were a coat stand, and stopped in front of Emrys. Her lip was trembling. She took both his hands in hers, gloved lace over his ink-stained fingers, and held them as if she had found something she had been told was lost.
Brynn looked at the hands. Then she looked at the girl. Something tightened under her ribs, small and irritable, and she filed it under security concern and kept it there.
Beside him, Pip had frozen with the tea towel in his hands. The card players had put their cards down. Behind the counter, Lisette had closed her eyes.
"Excuse me," Brynn said, a little more sharply.
The girl in black lace went down on both knees on the tea room floor, in front of everyone. She bowed her head until the great bow touched his shoes, and when she lifted it again her eyes were wet.
"My House has waited twenty-three years," said Lady Vesper Dray. "Welcome home, Progenitor."