“You snore like a capstan with a cracked pawl,” Garrick said.
Lucian opened one eye. He was on the floor beside the dead stove, wrapped in a sack that had once held bone meal, and the boatswain was standing over him with a tin cup of something black.
“I don’t snore. I hum. There’s a difference, and it’s mostly musical.”
“Drink.”
It was coffee, or it had been introduced to coffee once. Lucian drank it anyway and sat up, counting the morning by habit. Gray at the shutter cracks. The tannery whistles across the lime pits had already blown. Somewhere below, a cart rolled over cobbles with one bad wheel.
He frowned.
“What?” Garrick said.
“The bell.”
“What bell?”
“Your glue works has a bell. Yesterday the foreman rang it at six. Eleven strokes, then a pause, then one more because he lost count. A man like that rings his bell every morning until the day he dies.” Lucian set the cup down. “It’s half past six, and nobody’s rung it.”
Garrick looked at the door. Then at the shutter. Then at Lucian, slowly, the way a man looks at a dog that has eaten something off his plate.
“He saw you,” Garrick said.
“He saw a poster with my face on it, nailed to his own gate. And yesterday he saw a stranger in a borrowed shirt go up your stairs.” Lucian stood and stretched until his spine cracked. “If I were him, I’d have walked to the new outpost on the outer quay before sunrise. It’s a long walk. Marines like to be thanked for their time.”
“You said one day.”
“I did.”
“It’s been one night.”
“I’m a disappointment in all things. Ask anyone.” Lucian tucked the blue shirt tighter into his belt and checked himself the way he always did, with his palms. The oilcloth packet against his ribs. The die in his left pocket. In his right, the last brass button from a velvet coat that was probably still hanging from a broken hook in the Rusty Cutlass, if Hollis hadn’t sold it by now. “I’ll be gone before they reach the lime pits. You never saw me. I punched you, if anyone asks. You’ll look heroic.”
Garrick didn’t move from in front of the door.
Then, from far off, past the tanneries and down toward the outer quay, a dog barked.
Another answered it. Then a third, deeper, the sound a big animal makes when it has been held on a short leash for too long and smells something it wants.
Lucian went still.
“Hounds,” Garrick said. “Navy keeps four at the archive. Never seen them outside the walls.”
“No,” Lucian said quietly. “You wouldn’t have.”
He went to the shutter and put his eye to the crack. Nothing yet but smoke from the rendering chimneys and a line of washing two roofs over. The barking came again, closer, and with it a whistle, short and sharp. A handler.
“She kept my coat,” Lucian said.
“What?”
“The velvet coat. I left it at the Cutlass when I blew up the fireplace. She must have picked it out of the rubble and handed it to a man with four dogs.” He rubbed his thumb along the notch on the die without taking it out of his pocket. “That’s almost sentimental.”
“That’s almost a noose,” Garrick said. “Those dogs will come up my stairs whether you’re in here or not. They’ll smell you in the floor. In my hammock. In my cup.”
“Then I’d better not be in your cup.”
“Luce.”
The name stopped him. Garrick hadn’t used it that way since the first night, not as a curse.
“You run out that door,” the big man said, “and they’ll follow you from my step. Every dog in Crimson Bay knows the way from a man’s bed to wherever he went next. You want them to lose you, you need something louder than you are.”
Lucian looked at him. Then he grinned, and it was the first real grin he’d worn in three days.
“The boiling house.”
“The boiling house,” Garrick agreed, and hated himself for it visibly.
They went down the back stairs, the rotten ones, with Garrick testing each step before he put his three hundred pounds on it. At the bottom was a yard of trodden mud and stacked hide bundles, and beyond that a long brick building with its doors open and steam rolling out of it in slow gray sheets.
The smell reached Lucian before the steam did. He had been born to a family that kept rosewater in the guest rooms. He had served on ships that had been at sea for nine weeks with no fresh water. Neither had prepared him for the glue works of Crimson Bay at full boil.
“Gods,” he said, eyes streaming.
“You get used to it.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
Inside, twelve iron vats sat over brick fireboxes in two rows. Men in leather aprons stirred them with oar-length paddles, and what they stirred was hide scraps and hooves and things Lucian chose not to identify, all sinking slowly into a brown paste that bubbled like a swamp thinking about something. Nobody looked up. A man who worked the vats did not look at much except the vats.
“Here,” Garrick said, and stopped at a trough near the back wall. It was full of soaked hides, gray and heavy, waiting for the knives. The water around them was the color of weak tea and twice as thick.
“You’re not serious.”
“Shoes off. Wade it end to end. Then the paste.”
“The paste?”
Garrick dipped a wooden scoop into the nearest vat and held it out, steaming. “Not the hot stuff. The cooling pans. Rub it on your arms and your neck. In your hair.”
“My hair has never done anything to you.”
“Your hair,” Garrick said, “is the reason a girl in Saltmarch threw a bucket at me.”
Outside, closer now, the dogs found the bottom of Garrick’s stairs. The barking changed. It went from wide and searching to narrow and certain, three voices locking onto one note.
Lucian pulled off his boots and stepped into the trough.
It was cold, which was worse than he’d expected, and the bottom was slick with something that shifted under his feet. He waded the length of it, nine paces, the hides sliding against his shins like drowned animals. At the far end Garrick held out a fistful of half-set glue from a cooling pan, and Lucian took it without argument and worked it into his forearms, the back of his neck, the collar of the borrowed shirt.
Garrick picked up his boots from the floor and tucked them under one arm without being asked.
“I’m going to owe you a shirt,” Lucian said.
“You owe me a ship.”
“Get in line. There’s a man in Drowned Row who wants one too.”
Garrick nearly smiled. It passed.
The drying shed stood at the far corner of the works, three stories of slatted wood where the finished hides hung from beams in long, stiff rows to cure in the wind. Garrick took them up a ladder into the top loft, where the hides hung so thick that the light came through them brown, and two men could crouch behind a curtain of leather and see the whole yard through the gaps in the slats.
They had been crouching for less than a minute when the marines came around the corner.
Eight of them. A handler with four hounds, long-legged and liver-spotted, pulling hard at their leads. And behind them, walking as if the mud were a parade ground, Commander Valeria.
She wore no coat over her uniform. She held a lantern, unlit, the way some people hold a sword they haven’t drawn yet. Over the handler’s arm, folded with care, hung a coat of dark green velvet missing most of its buttons.
Lucian felt Garrick look at him and did not look back.
The dogs went straight to the bottom of the back stairs, circled, and took off across the yard toward the boiling house. Into the steam. The barking came out of the doors muffled and then broke apart, one voice at a time, into confused yelps and one long, offended sneeze.
The handler came out a minute later, dragging the lead hound by its collar. The dog was shaking its head as if it could knock the smell out through its ears.
“Lost him at the soak trough, Commander. They can’t hold anything in there. Might as well ask them to track a man through a fire.”
Valeria didn’t answer. She stood in the middle of the yard and turned in a slow circle. The boiling house. The lime pits. The hide stacks. The drying shed.
Her gaze went up the shed, floor by floor, and stopped at the top loft.
Lucian did not breathe. Beside him, Garrick had become a piece of furniture.
She looked for a long time. Not a minute. Lucian would remember later that it was not a full minute. Then she turned away.
“The room,” she said.
The foreman was there now, hat in his hands, standing well back from the dogs. He pointed up Garrick’s outside stairs. “That’s the one, Commander. Big fellow, name of Garrick. Keeps to himself. Drinks. I saw the other one go up with him, plain as day, same face as the paper.”
“Sergeant.”
The sergeant, a thick-necked man who had once made his feelings about stairs very clear on the Chandlers’ Steps, looked at the rickety flight leading up the side of the building and sighed through his nose. He took four marines and went up anyway.
They were up there a long time. Boots on boards. Something heavy dragged. The crash of the nailed crate being pried open. Then a pause, and the sergeant’s voice, muffled, saying something that sounded like found a hole.
He came back down holding something between two fingers. Lucian couldn’t see it from the loft. He didn’t need to.
He put his hand in his right pocket anyway.
The die. That was the left. The packet, against his ribs. The right pocket held nothing but a loose thread and a small tear in the seam where the cloth had worn through against the edge of a floorboard.
“Under the floor by the stove, Commander,” the sergeant said. “Space enough for a man. And this.”
Valeria held out her hand. He dropped it into her palm.
A brass button, embossed with a little anchor, the kind a tailor in the upper town sews onto velvet for men who want people to notice their coats. She turned it over once. Then she held it up beside the green coat on the handler’s arm, beside the row of empty threads where its brothers used to be.
She did not say anything for several seconds. When she did, her voice was lower than before.
“Garrick,” she said. “Big. Gray beard. Burn scars on both hands.”
The foreman blinked. “That’s him. You know him, Commander?”
“I know who he used to sail with.” She closed her fist around the button. “Lieutenant. When the printers open, I want a second name on the posters. Same reward for both, alive. Harboring is the same crime as the thing harbored.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“And take the blanket off his hammock.” She looked at the hounds, still sneezing in the mud. “Not everyone in this yard has been rolling in glue.”
They stayed in the loft until the marines were gone and the vat men had gone back to their paddles and the foreman had rung his bell, eight hours late, eleven strokes and then one more.
Garrick sat with his back against a beam and his scarred hands open on his knees, looking at them as if they belonged to someone else.
“That was a good room,” he said finally.
“I know.”
“Two years. I had the bottles lined up. I had the hammock strung right. You know how long it takes to string a hammock right?”
“Garrick—”
“And now my name’s going on a wall next to yours. And there’s a dog somewhere with my blanket in its mouth.” He laughed once, short and ugly. “You came here to talk me into something. You didn’t have to talk. You just had to show up.”
Lucian didn’t answer that. There wasn’t an answer that would help.
He took the die out of his pocket instead and turned it over in his fingers, the notch passing under his thumb and away and back again. Somewhere below them, the hounds started barking again, faint and far off on the other side of the lime pits. Not confused anymore.
Garrick heard it too. He lifted his head.
“That’s my scent they’ve got now,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And I don’t smell like glue.”
Lucian looked at the boatswain’s shirt, clean and dry, and at the soak trough far below, and at the slow brown water that would be cold and slick and full of drowned hides.
“Not yet,” he said.