“You’re standing on my roof.”
Lucian looked down. He was standing, waist-deep in black water, on what he had assumed was a sunken cart. It had shingles.
He looked up. A boy of maybe eleven crouched on the windowsill of the building opposite, holding a long pole with a wire noose on the end. Two more children perched on the next sill along, and a third hung upside down from a drainpipe, grinning at him with exactly four teeth.
“My apologies,” Lucian said. “I’ll get off it.”
“You’ll pay for it.”
“I’ll pay for it,” Lucian agreed, “and then I’ll get off it.”
The water was rising. He could feel it climbing his ribs, a finger’s width at a time, cold enough to make his teeth want to chatter. Behind him, somewhere up the long stairs from Tanner’s Cut, a lantern was coming down. He did not need to turn around to know whose.
The boy noticed it too. His eyes flicked past Lucian’s shoulder and back.
“Navy,” the boy said.
“One navy,” Lucian said. “Very determined. Bad at taking hints.”
“She yours?”
Lucian considered several answers and discarded all of them. “I need to see the Rat King.”
The children went quiet. The one on the drainpipe stopped grinning.
“Nobody sees the Rat King,” the boy said.
“I’ve seen him twice. He cheats at cards and he smells like eels.” Lucian fished in his pocket and held up a silver crown so it caught the distant lantern light. “Tell him the man who still owes him a boat would like to discuss the debt.”
The boy studied the coin. Then he whistled, two notes, low and high.
A plank slid out from the window above Lucian’s head. It was just wide enough for one wet man who didn’t look down.
Drowned Row had been a respectable street once, a hundred years ago, before the harbor wall settled and the sea began coming up through the cellars every night like a tenant who had never been told to leave. The people who could leave had left. The people who stayed had learned to live on the second floor.
The Rat King held court in what had been a chapel.
The pews were gone, burned for firewood generations ago. The nave was flooded to the knee, and the altar stood above the waterline like a small island, heaped with blankets, ledgers, iron cages, and a brazier that smoked more than it burned. Rats moved in the cages. Rats moved in the rafters. A few, apparently trusted, moved freely across the altar cloth.
The Rat King sat in the middle of it all in a velvet chair that had lost most of its velvet. He was perhaps seventy, small and hunched, with a ring of keys on a cord around his neck and a skewer of grilled eel in his hand. He did not get up.
“Lucian,” he said. “I heard a story tonight. Somebody blew up the Rusty Cutlass.”
“Terrible business.”
“Somebody’s paying drunks a silver crown to shout his name at marines.”
“The economy is a mystery to me.”
“Somebody,” the Rat King went on, chewing, “still owes me a boat.”
“That,” Lucian said, “is the part I came to discuss.”
He climbed the altar steps, dripping, and stood by the brazier without being invited. The old man let him. That was a good sign. Last time, there had been a knife involved.
“I need to be on the other side of the harbor wall before the bell stops,” Lucian said. “Without using a gate.”
“The sluice tunnel.”
“The sluice tunnel.”
The Rat King bit off another piece of eel. “Tide’s coming in. Another hour, and that tunnel’s full to the roof. You go now, you’ll have air the whole way. Maybe.” He pointed the skewer at Lucian’s chest. “What’s in the oilcloth?”
Lucian did not look down. He did not put his hand to his ribs. He had taught himself not to, a long time ago, and the lesson held.
“Laundry,” he said.
“Give it to me and we’re square on the boat.”
“Not for sale.”
“Everything’s for sale.”
“Then it’s not for sale to you.” Lucian took out his purse and turned it over above the altar cloth. Four silver crowns, a scatter of coppers, and a brass button from a coat he didn’t own anymore. A rat came over and sniffed the button. “That’s all of it. And a promise.”
“Your promises,” said the Rat King, “are worth what my eels are worth after a week.”
“Then here’s a better one.” Lucian crouched so they were eye to eye. “The Commander is coming down your stairs right now. Alone. She’s going to offer you money for me.”
“I know.”
“Take it.”
That got a reaction. Not much of one. The old man’s chewing slowed, and one of his white eyebrows climbed half an inch.
“Take her money,” Lucian said, “and tell her the truth. Tell her exactly where I went and how. Don’t lie to her. She’ll know if you lie.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because you’ll get paid twice tonight, and you’ll never have to tell anyone a story you can’t keep straight.” Lucian smiled. “And because the truth is going to take her exactly nowhere.”
The Rat King looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at the waterline on the chapel wall, where generations of high tides had left a ladder of green stains in the plaster.
He laughed. It was a horrible sound, like a gate that needed oil.
“Pip,” he called. The boy from the windowsill appeared at the chapel door. “Take him to the sluice. And give him back his button. A man should leave with something.”
Valeria came down the last of the stairs with the lantern held high and her other hand on the hilt of her rapier.
The water took her at the knee and kept climbing. She did not slow down. She had ordered the sergeant to hold the top of the stairs with six men and let no one up or down, and she had not looked back to see whether he was relieved. She knew he was.
Drowned Row watched her come.
She could feel it. Shutters open a finger’s width. Shapes in the second-floor windows. A child on a drainpipe, who swung out of sight the moment her lantern touched him. Nobody threw anything. Nobody called out. She had walked through mutinous gun decks that felt friendlier.
At the end of the street, the chapel door stood open. Firelight inside. That was not an accident. Someone wanted her to come in.
She went in.
“Commander,” said the old man on the altar, without rising. “Welcome to my house. Mind the rats. They bite navy.”
“I’m looking for a man.”
“Everyone is, tonight.” He wiped his fingers on a rag. “Dark hair. No coat. Talks too much.”
Valeria set the lantern on the altar steps. She took a silver crown from her coat and placed it beside the lantern. Then a second. Then a third.
“Where is he?”
The Rat King looked at the coins. He looked at her. He seemed, for a moment, almost disappointed by how easy it was.
“He went under the harbor wall,” he said. “Through the old sluice tunnel, at the end of this street, past the sunken bakery. You’ll see the grate. He went maybe a quarter hour ago. He paid me four crowns and a button to show him the way.” He shrugged. “That’s the truth, Commander. Every word.”
It was. She could hear that it was. Liars in Crimson Bay always added something, a detail too many, a little flourish to make the story shine. This had no flourish at all.
Which was why she turned, slowly, and looked at the chapel wall.
The ladder of green stains. The waterline, already lapping at the second rung from the top. She looked at the water around her own legs, higher now than when she’d come in, and she did the arithmetic.
The sluice tunnel ran below the street. If the water was at her thighs here, the tunnel had been full for ten minutes. Anyone who went in after her would drown halfway. Anyone who went in a quarter hour ago would have come out the other side with seconds to spare.
The truth was a door, and the tide had just shut it.
“He told you to tell me,” Valeria said.
The Rat King said nothing. He didn’t need to. He picked up the three silver crowns and dropped them, one by one, into a tin box at his feet. Each one made a small, bright sound.
Valeria picked up the lantern. Her hand was steady. She made sure of that.
At the door, she stopped.
“When he comes back through here,” she said, without turning around, “and he will, give him a message.”
“Paid messages cost extra, Commander.”
She took out a fourth crown and tossed it over her shoulder. She did not hear it land. She assumed one of the rats had caught it.
“Tell him,” she said, “that next time I won’t give him five steps.”
The sluice tunnel spat Lucian out on the far side of the harbor wall like a seed from a lemon.
He came up through a rusted grate into an outflow ditch behind the tanneries, choking, shaking, and laughing at the same time, which hurt. The water behind him roared through the grate for another ten seconds and then went flat and still. Full to the roof. He had come out with perhaps a breath and a half to spare, which was a breath more than he usually allowed himself.
He lay in the mud for a while and listened to the harbor bell. Three strokes. Pause. Three strokes.
Still ringing. But he was on the wrong side of it now. Her side of the wall was sealed tight, sixty marines and forty boats and every alley watched, and he was not inside it anymore.
He pressed his hand to his ribs. The oilcloth packet was there, sodden on the outside, dry within. He let himself breathe.
Then he reached into his pocket for the die. His fingers closed on something else first: the brass button. Pip had pressed it into his palm at the mouth of the tunnel, along with a whispered address and a look of enormous professional pride.
“The King says this is the last thing he’ll ever tell you for free,” the boy had said. “Your old bosun. The big one with the burned hands. He’s up past the lime pits, in the rooms over the glue works. Drinks gin out of a bucket. Doesn’t like visitors.”
“He never did,” Lucian had said.
He sat up in the ditch now and looked across the tannery yards. The lime pits glowed faintly white in the dark. Beyond them, a row of leaning tenements, and above the glue works, a single window with a lamp still burning.
He turned the die over in his fingers until his thumb found the notch, and held it there.
Garrick had sworn, the last time they’d spoken, that if he ever saw Lucian’s face again he would break it.
Lucian got to his feet, wrung out the hem of his shirt, and started walking toward the light.