Chapter 84

Chapter 84: Chapter 84

I stepped back behind the hanging wet canvas curtain beside the third iron mangle, letting the damp linen drape fall straight in front of my face.

The oak door opened six inches, letting a long tongue of freezing white winter air cut across the soapy stone floor, and then closed softly with the wooden bolt sliding home on the inside.

It wasn’t a stable boy.

Marta Vane-Sule stepped out of the cold draft wearing his plain brown Sospurro clerk’s coat, though he had pulled his trousers into high canvas gaiters and wore thin, tight pigskin gloves on both hands.

He didn’t walk straight to the bin. He stopped two paces inside the door, his head tilted slightly toward the front of the cellar where the two old washerwomen were banging their wooden paddles against the copper cauldrons thirty yards away beyond the curtains, making sure they hadn’t looked up.

Then he walked to the wooden bin and grabbed the neck of the blue-striped sack.

His fingers touched the cut red thread on the canvas cuff.

Marta didn’t curse, and he didn’t look back down into the bin to see if the packet had fallen off. The instant he felt the clean knife-cut on the thread, his left hand dropped into his brown coat pocket and came out holding a six-inch glass tube filled with two separated layers of yellow and black liquid, while his right hand drew a narrow, fourteen-inch triangular trench-stiletto from inside his lapel.

"Don’t smash the glass, Marta," I said quietly, stepping out from behind the wet canvas curtain six feet behind his right hip so I stood squarely between him and the bolted oak door. "The ceiling’s nine feet high down here. If you set off a Viganator flash-tube in this steam, you’ll blind yourself just as fast as you blind me, and the pressure will blow the boiling lye vats right back over both of us."

Marta turned slowly on the balls of his feet, keeping his elbows tucked tight against his ribs and the glass tube held two inches from the iron frame of the nearest box mangle, ready to rap the glass against the metal.

Up close in the yellow lantern light, he looked older than he had in the dark stable alley—around forty, with deep vertical creases beside his mouth and a faded white shrapnel scar cutting through his left eyebrow. He wasn’t a clerk at all; he had the flat, steady eyes of an old trench sapper who had spent ten years lighting fuses under fire.

"The 7th Legion girl," Marta said in his hard, clipped Viganator highland accent. "When the Monday barge got stuck in the ice at Lock Two without the boat-hook, I told Lorenzo’s people it was just a drunk barge skipper. I should’ve known better."

"Your teamster had a very nice brass buckle," I said, keeping my weight low on my heels on the soapy flagstone floor, the oak laundry paddle held loose in my left hand and Bram’s grey dagger in my taped right fist. "He told us all about the Friday drop before the harbour patrol locked him in the hulk."

"Did he?" Marta’s eyes flicked past my shoulder toward the narrow stone spiral stairs in the corner that led up to the third-floor service hallway. Above us, forty feet up the stone steps, a door banged loudly, followed by the frantic, stumbling clatter of leather shoes running down the stairs—and a much heavier, faster set of boots coming down behind them. "Then you know Ross is just a frightened bookkeeper who owed three hundred marks to a dice house in the lower city. The moment your friends upstairs scared him at the chute, he ran for the cellar steps."

"Kaelen’s right behind him," I said.

"I don’t need Ross," Marta said calmly. "In fact, it saves me the trouble of paying his January stipend."

He didn’t throw the glass tube at me.

Instead, he flicked his left wrist sideways and smashed the glass cylinder hard against the cast-iron roller of the box mangle two feet to my left—right where a heavy wet canvas sheet was hanging halfway through the iron wringers.

I didn’t try to catch the glass; I threw my left arm up across my eyes and dropped into a low crouch behind the wooden frame of the mangle just as the yellow and black liquids mixed.

CRACK-WHOOSH.

It wasn’t a black-powder bomb—it was a magnesium-phosphorus flare meant for burning supply tents in the rain. A blinding, spitting ball of white fire erupted across the iron rollers, instantly turning the wet water on the canvas sheet into a hissing, suffocating wall of scalding white steam and thick grey phosphorus smoke that filled the back corner of the wash-house from floor to ceiling.

In the front of the cellar, one of the old washerwomen shrieked as the white flash lit up the curtains.

Marta didn’t run for the oak coal-door behind me. He knew I was blocking the door.

Instead, he lunged straight through the edge of the blinding white smoke toward the bottom of the narrow stone spiral staircase—right as Deputy Auditor Ross came stumbling down the last four steps into the cellar with a tin strongbox clutched against his waistcoat and his round spectacles sliding down his sweaty nose.

"Marta!" Ross gasped, coughing in the phosphorus smoke as he saw the brown-coated figure materializing out of the steam at the bottom of the steps. "Thank God—the Vance boy was at the counter asking for the mineral ledgers, and somebody locked the upper door when I went to the chute! We have to get to Lord Lorenzo’s sleigh—"

Marta didn’t say a word. He didn’t reach for the tin strongbox.

He stepped right up to the bottom step as Ross reached out a hand to him, and drove the fourteen-inch triangular steel stiletto straight forward at the center of Ross’s throat to shut the bookkeeper up forever before he could name his capital contacts to Headmaster Corvus.

Ross froze on the bottom stone step like a rabbit in front of a wagon wheel, his mouth open and his hands still clutching his tin box.

Marta’s point never reached his collar.

Because I hadn’t stepped backward when the magnesium flare went off—I had ducked under the iron mangle frame—I was only four feet to Marta’s right when he lunged for the stairs.

I couldn’t see clearly through the white phosphorus smoke watering my eyes, and I didn’t need to. I swung the heavy two-foot oak laundry paddle in my left hand blindly at waist height, catching Marta’s right forearm three inches behind his wrist with a loud, solid crack of wet oak on bone.

The fourteen-inch stiletto deflected six inches to the left, punching two inches deep into the soft lime mortar of the stairwell wall right beside Ross’s ear and snapping the brittle triangular tip off in the stone.

Ross let out a high, thin squeal and fell backward onto his backside on the stairs, dropping his tin strongbox with a loud clatter across the steps.

Marta spun on me instantly in the swirling white smoke.

He didn’t waste half a second trying to pull his wedged stiletto out of the mortar. As he pivoted on his heel, he pushed a sudden, violent burst of Swelled Bud heat down into his legs and drove the steel-plated heel of his canvas gaiter straight at my kneecap while his left hand whipped a short, curved brass knuckle-duster with a four-inch folding blade out of his belt.

He was fast, dirty, and didn’t fight like any student in the Academy pits; he fought like a trench raider who had killed twenty men in narrow mud ditches where there was no room to swing an elbow.

His boot heel grazed the outside of my left thigh as I twisted my hip away, bruising the muscle hard enough to make my leg go numb to the ankle, while his brass knuckle-knife slashed horizontally toward my throat through the steam.

I dropped the wooden laundry paddle, caught his left wrist against the stiff linen splint on my right forearm to block the knife two inches from my chin, and slammed my back against his chest to pin him against the heavy cast-iron frame of the box mangle.

For two seconds, we strained chest-to-elbow in the scalding white fog, our boots sliding half an inch at a time on the greasy lye water covering the flagstones while the phosphorus flare sputtered and hissed on the wet canvas three feet from our heads.

Marta was forty pounds heavier than me, and because my right wrist was splinted straight and my left forearm was still raw from Aurio’s sword burn on Saturday, my grip started slipping on his wet brown sleeve as he forced the four-inch brass blade closer to my jawbone.

"No runes down here, Lieutenant?" Marta hissed through his teeth, his scarred eyebrow dripping soapy sweat onto my glove as he leaned his chin into my shoulder to force my head back against the iron mangle wheel. "Where’s that four-foot lightning sword the papers bragged about?"

"Upstairs," I grunted, feeling the iron teeth of the mangle’s side-gear digging into the small of my back.

I stopped trying to push his knife arm upward with my burned left forearm.

Instead, as Marta leaned all his weight forward to drive the knife down into my collarbone, I hooked my right boot behind the wooden brake-lever at the bottom of the cast-iron mangle frame and kicked the wooden catch loose.

Above our heads, the two-hundred-pound granite counter-weight sitting on top of the iron rollers dropped four inches onto its iron ratchet gear, causing the big spoked iron hand-wheel on the side of the mangle to spin half a turn backward with the force of a falling boulder.

I didn’t push Marta away from me. I yanked his right lapel inward past my hip and shoved his left elbow—the one holding the brass knuckle-knife—three inches backward straight between the heavy cast-iron spokes of the spinning hand-wheel.

CRUNCH.

The heavy iron spoke caught his forearm cleanly between the wheel rim and the oak upright post before the ratchet locked.

Bone snapped with a dull, wet sound inside his brown wool sleeve.

Marta’s teeth clicked together so hard he bit through his own tongue, blood spraying across his chin as his fingers went limp and the brass knuckle-knife clattered onto the soapy stones.

Before he could pull his broken left arm out of the iron wheel spokes or reach into his pocket with his right hand for a suicide capsule, Kaelen came flying down the last six stone steps of the spiral staircase right over the weeping Deputy Auditor Ross’s head.

Kaelen didn’t use a blade. He landed with both knees squarely in the middle of Marta’s back as I pulled the sapper’s shoulders down toward the floor, driving Marta’s face flat into the wet stone flags while Kaelen’s right hand jammed a folded thick leather glove straight between Marta’s back teeth so he couldn’t bite down on anything hidden in his cheek.

Thirty seconds later, the front door of the cellar banged open behind the copper cauldrons, and Luckas came sprinting through the hanging canvas curtains with his silver longsword half-drawn and Nia right behind him carrying a heavy brass inkstand she had grabbed off the bursar’s counter.

Luckas skidded to a stop on the soapy flagstones, looking from the sputtering white flare on the mangle rollers to Ross sobbing on the bottom stair, and down at me and Kaelen kneeling on Marta Vane-Sule’s back while I tied the sapper’s right thumb to his belt buckle with a piece of wet sash-cord.

"Ninety seconds," Luckas breathed, sliding his sword back into its sheath and grabbing a bucket of cold rinse water to dump over the burning canvas on the mangle before the smoke set off the tower bells. "You said you were going to hold the door for ninety seconds, Elvit. You broke his arm in a laundry press."

"He had a knife," I said, standing up and shaking my bruised left leg to get the feeling back into my knee while wiping a speck of Marta’s blood off my cheek with my sleeve.

On the bottom stair, Deputy Auditor Ross was sitting in two inches of grey soap-water with his sleeve-protectors soaked black, staring in horror at the broken triangular tip of Marta’s stiletto sticking out of the lime mortar right where his throat had been ten seconds ago.

"He tried to kill me," Ross whispered, his voice shaking so badly his spectacles fell off his nose into his lap. "I gave him the arsenal numbers for four months, and he didn’t even say a word—he just tried to stick me like a pig!"

I walked over to the stairs, picked up the fallen tin strongbox and the packet I had cut out of the laundry sack, and held them out to Ross without helping him up.

"Who on the Military Appropriations Committee signed the pass that let you walk into the city artillery park, Mister Ross?" I asked quietly. "Tell me right now before Headmaster Corvus walks down these stairs, and I’ll make sure the Imperial Guard locks you in a cell on a different floor from your friend here."

Ross looked at Marta glaring up from the flagstones with the leather glove jammed in his jaws, then up at the four of us standing in the drifting steam.

"I didn’t go to the artillery park," Ross babbled, grabbing the hem of Luckas’s overcoat with ink-stained fingers. "I swear by the Goddess—I’m just a third-grade registry clerk! I don’t have city arsenal clearance! I only copied the serial numbers off the requisition duplicates that came across my desk and stamped the blank transfer slips with the third-floor seal!"

Luckas frowned down at him. "If you only provided the blank Academy slips and the serial numbers, who took them down to the Crown Jewel artillery park to order the wheelwrights to file the axle pins?"

"Lord Lorenzo’s carriage driver!" Ross cried out, pointing a trembling finger at the spilled papers inside his open tin strongbox. "Every Tuesday morning, Lorenzo’s private town-coach goes down to the War Ministry annex in the city with a diplomatic pass signed by Colonel Hadeon of the Logistics Board! Hadeon is thirty thousand silver marks in debt to the Sospurro mining syndicate—he gives Lorenzo’s people direct access to the city wagon yards in exchange for mining shares in the southern hills!"

Kaelen looked up from knotting the rope around Marta’s ankles, his storm-grey eyes meeting mine through the thinning steam.

Colonel Hadeon of the Logistics Board.

The exact same elderly, smiling Imperial general who had sat right beside Lord Lorenzo in the crimson box during the tournament, and who had laughed over burgundy with Duke Ramiro at the Solstice feast while signing our independent scouting warrant.

"Nia," I said, turning toward the stairs. "Stay at the top of the cellar steps with Luckas and don’t let anyone except Headmaster Corvus and Master Bram come down this hallway."

"Where are you going?" Luckas asked as I bent down to pick my wool cloak up from behind the wicker baskets.

"To the Headmaster’s spire," I said, tucking Ross’s cipher book and the cut laundry packet under my arm. "If Colonel Hadeon is on the Logistics Board, he has a seat on the telegraph line to the western forts. If we don’t get Corvus to lock the south bridge in the next fifteen minutes, Lord Lorenzo is going to be halfway out of the capital before the sun goes down."