Four boots. Two lanterns. One sergeant who hated stairs.
Lucian counted them from beneath the Chandlers’ Steps, folded into the gap between a rain barrel and a wall that had last been whitewashed during some other emperor’s reign. Above him, the sergeant stopped on the third landing and wheezed like a punctured bellows.
“He’s not up there,” the sergeant said. “Nobody runs uphill in Crimson Bay.”
“The Commander said check every stair.”
“The Commander isn’t the one climbing them.”
Lucian decided he liked the sergeant. A man who resented his orders was a man who searched badly.
He waited until the lanterns swung back toward the harbor, then slid out and went the other way, keeping to the drainage channel where the cobbles dipped and the water ran ankle-deep. His linen shirt had gone transparent ten minutes ago. His boots were full. Somewhere behind him, the bell on the harbor wall had started ringing in sets of three.
Port closed. Every marine in the city now had a reason to be outside in the rain, and a grudge about it.
He pressed a hand flat against his ribs. The oilcloth packet was still there, still bound tight, still dry. Still worth more than his life.
Not a high bar tonight, admittedly.
The trouble with a closed port was arithmetic.
Valeria would have sixty marines ashore, give or take, and another forty on the patrol boats. Crimson Bay had maybe three hundred alleys worth the name. She couldn’t cover them all.
She didn’t need to.
Every alley in Crimson Bay ran downhill to the water eventually, because the whole town had been built by people who liked a quick exit. So she would close the top of the hill, close the waterfront, and walk the middle until something fell out.
Lucian had known her to be patient for six hours straight. He did not plan to be in the middle for six hours.
He turned left at a cooperage and walked directly into three marines sharing a pipe under its eaves.
They looked at him. He looked at them.
“Evening, gentlemen.” He swayed, caught the doorframe, and gave it a grateful pat. “Which way to the harbor? I’ve misplaced my ship. Big thing. Sails on it.”
The tallest one took the pipe out of his mouth. “Harbor’s closed.”
“Closed.” Lucian squinted at him with the deep, personal hurt of a man betrayed by geography. “Who closes a harbor? It’s water. You can’t close water. It goes around things.”
“Go home, friend.”
“I would. That’s my entire complaint.” He patted his pockets, found a copper, and held it out with enormous dignity. “For your trouble. Buy yourself a dry pair of socks. You look like a man who’s never owned a dry pair of socks.”
The tall marine didn’t take the coin. His gaze had dropped to Lucian’s shirt. Then to his empty hands. Then back up to his face.
“Commander said a man with no coat,” he said slowly.
“Half the drunks in the Bay lost their coats tonight, Dav,” said the one on the left.
“Commander said dark hair, no coat, and talks too much.”
All three of them went quiet.
Lucian sighed. “That’s hurtful. Accurate, but hurtful.”
He flicked the copper at Dav’s face.
It was a bad throw on purpose. Dav flinched anyway, the way everyone flinches at something small and shiny coming toward the eyes, and in that half second Lucian was through the cooperage door.
The inside was a forest of barrels, stacked three high on racks that ran back into the dark. He went low and fast down the second aisle, counted four racks, and yanked the wooden peg that held the fifth.
The rack had been leaning for years. It had only been waiting for permission.
Thirty empty barrels came down behind him like a rockslide. Someone shouted. Someone else swore in a way that suggested a barrel had found a shin. Lucian was already out the back, over a low wall, and into a courtyard where a dozen people in black were trying to lift a coffin onto their shoulders.
It was a wake, and from the look of it, a long one.
The mourners were soaked through and at least four drinks past grief. Two of them were singing a hymn. A third was singing a different hymn, louder, as if it were a contest. The coffin was plain pine, and the man at its front left corner was swaying so badly that the whole thing tilted every time he breathed.
“Whose is it?” Lucian asked the nearest mourner.
“Old cooper. Owned the shop.” The man jerked his chin at the wall Lucian had just climbed. “Mean as a gull. Owed everybody money.”
“My condolences.”
“Don’t. We’re only carrying him to the chapel because his widow’s paying for the drinks.”
Behind the wall, barrels were still rolling. A marine’s voice rose over the noise, demanding to know which way.
Lucian looked at the courtyard. Three exits. Marines would be at two of them within the minute. The third led down toward Tanner’s Cut, where the bigger lanterns were, which meant that was where Valeria had put herself.
He reached into his pocket. His thumb found the die by habit and slid across its faces until it caught the small notch on the sixth. He held it there for one breath.
Then he took out his purse instead.
“Friends.” He raised his voice just enough to cut through both hymns. “Who here wants to earn a silver crown for shouting one sentence?”
That got their attention. A silver crown was a week’s wages in Crimson Bay. It was two weeks’ wages for anyone who’d ever worked for the cooper.
“Easy work,” Lucian said. “Go out any gate you like. When you see a marine, throw your arms up and yell, ‘I’m Lucian! I surrender!’ Then sit down and wait for them to figure out you’re not.”
A big man with a red beard frowned. “Who’s Lucian?”
“Nobody important. A friend of mine. He owes me a favor, and I’m collecting it on his behalf.” He dropped a coin into the man’s palm. “Half now. Half when I hear you.”
“How will you hear us?”
“Shout loudly.”
Three men took the coins. Then a fourth. Then a woman with a shawl over her head, who said she could shout louder than any of them, and Lucian believed her. They scattered through the side gates, giggling like schoolboys.
That left the coffin, and the front left bearer, who had his eyes closed and was humming.
Lucian tapped him on the shoulder. “Sit this one out, friend. You’ve done enough.”
The man surrendered the pole without opening his eyes and lay down on a bench. Lucian took a black mourner’s hood off a peg by the door, pulled it low, and set his shoulder under the coffin.
The dead cooper was heavier than he looked.
“Onward,” Lucian said solemnly. “He’d want us to hurry. He was always late paying, but never late to a drink.”
Someone sobbed with laughter. The procession lurched out the front gate, toward Tanner’s Cut.
“Commander! We have him at the fish market!”
Valeria didn’t turn around. “Description.”
The runner hesitated. “Red beard, Commander. About two hundred and sixty pounds.”
“Then you don’t have him.”
A second runner splashed up from the left. “Commander, he surrendered at the chapel steps. A woman, Commander. She says she’s Lucian. She’s very insistent.”
A third, from the rope walk. Then a fourth.
Valeria stood very still beneath the lantern at the head of Tanner’s Cut, rain running off the brim of her hat, and listened to the reports multiply. Five Lucians now. Six. Every one of them drunk, every one of them delighted to be arrested.
“He’s paying them,” she said.
Her lieutenant blinked. “Commander?”
“Pull your men off every surrender. Leave one marine at each to take names.” She looked up the narrow street. “He’s using the noise to move. Nobody walks through this checkpoint without my eyes on them.”
Up the street, singing.
A funeral procession came around the corner, a dozen mourners and a pine coffin swaying on four shoulders. Two hymns at once, neither in tune.
“Halt,” Valeria said.
They halted. Not well. The coffin tipped forward and back before it settled.
“Open it.”
A woman near the front gasped. “Commander, please, he’s only just—”
“Open it.”
Two marines pried up the lid. Inside lay a gray old man in his best coat, hands folded, his face set in an expression of permanent disapproval. One of the marines made a small sign against bad luck and stepped back.
Valeria looked at the corpse for exactly as long as she needed to. Then she looked at the bearers.
Lucian kept his eyes on the cobbles.
From under the hood he could see her boots. Navy issue, polished that morning, ruined by now. The hem of her coat, dark with rain. The point of her scabbard, motionless.
She walked down the line of bearers. Front right. Back right. Back left.
She stopped in front of him.
He did not move his hands. That was the rule. Liars fidget with their hands, so you put your hands somewhere they have a job to do. His were wrapped around the coffin pole, and they would stay wrapped around the coffin pole if she stood there until morning.
He was aware, distantly, that the die was in his pocket and that his thumb wanted it very badly.
Valeria looked at his hands for a long moment. Clean nails. No tar in the creases. No cooper’s calluses, no rope burns. The hands of a man who had spent his life holding cards and pens and very little else.
Somewhere behind her, a voice bellowed joyfully, “I’m Lucian! Don’t shoot! I’m Lucian!”
“Close the lid,” Valeria said. “Let them through.”
The procession lurched forward.
One step. Two. The coffin rocked. The hymns started up again, ragged. Three steps. Lucian kept his pace even, his head down, the dead cooper’s weight settling into his shoulder like an old debt.
Four.
Halfway down Tanner’s Cut, between a chandler’s shop and a shuttered boarding house, there was a gap barely wider than a man. Beyond it, a set of slick stone stairs ran steeply down into the dark, toward the part of town the lanterns didn’t reach.
Five.
Lucian slid his shoulder out from under the pole, laid the hood neatly on the coffin lid, and stepped sideways into the gap.
Five steps, he thought, already running. She used to give me a full minute.
“Sergeant.”
The sergeant who hated stairs came hurrying over. “Commander?”
“The fourth bearer.”
He turned. The procession had stopped again, the coffin listing badly to one side, three bearers staring at the empty corner. A black hood lay folded on the lid as though someone had left it there for a servant to collect.
The sergeant’s face went the color of wet paper. “He was right in front of you, Commander.”
“Yes.”
“You let him walk.”
“I let the procession walk.” Valeria crossed to the gap between the buildings and looked down. The stairs fell away into blackness. Far below, there was no lamplight at all, only the sound of water lapping at doors where water had no business being.
The sergeant came up beside her and looked too. Then he took a step back.
“Commander, that’s Drowned Row. Even the patrols won’t go down there after dark. The tide comes up through the streets, and the people who live there—”
“I know what it is.”
She held out her hand. After a moment, he understood, and gave her his lantern.
Valeria started down the stairs.