Chapter 16: Kneel

There were three of them, and Aren could have tried.

He seriously thought about it for ten whole seconds, standing in the wet alley with the canal behind the big man and two sets of boots closing in from behind. He was Rank E now. These men were probably F, maybe one of them E. He had a soldier’s sword on his hip that Mag had sold him ten minutes ago, a technique that could cut stone, and another that let him move without a sound.

He also had a face half the lower city knew, a sister in the healer house three streets away, and a story about being a Servant with a combat aptitude of zero. If the stone-seller cut three of Rook’s men to pieces in an alley tonight, then by morning Rook would know exactly what the stone-seller was. So would everyone Rook talked to.

’Not for three thugs. Not for a beating.’

So he put his hands up slowly.

"Smart boy." The big man hit him casually in the stomach with the club.

They brought him to a warehouse on the river with a sack over his head and his hands tied behind his back.

He knew it was the river from the smell, and a warehouse from the echo when they shoved him through a door. Inside it was warm and stank of lamp oil and tar and men who hadn’t washed in a long while. Someone kicked the backs of his knees so he dropped onto a wooden floor, and someone else pulled the sack roughly off.

The place was huge and full of crates. Lamps hung from the beams. A dozen men stood or sat around the edges of the room, some playing cards on a barrel, some cleaning weapons, some just watching him with the bored faces of people who had seen this plenty of times. At the far end, on a raised platform where a foreman must once have kept his desk, there was a long table covered in papers and maps.

Behind the table, in a tall chair, sat a man reading a book.

He wasn’t at all what Aren had expected. He was forty or so, slim, with dark hair going grey at the temples and a neat pointed beard. A long black coat of very good cloth, old now and patched at the elbows, but carefully brushed. Long pale hands. On his left little finger he wore a heavy silver ring with the crest scratched off, as if someone had taken a knife to it.

He turned a page calmly and didn’t look up.

"Is that him?"

"That’s him, boss," said the big man. "The stone-seller."

"Hm." The man closed his book, set it down carefully, and finally looked at Aren. His eyes were very dark and very calm. "You’re younger than I expected."

[Rook. Rank C: Core Condensation.][Hostility: 72%.]

Rank C, two full ranks above him. Now that he was close, Aren could actually feel it, a pressure in the air like the weight before a storm. It was the same thing he’d felt around Vivienne since her awakening, only heavier, darker and older. If this man decided to kill him, it would take less time than blinking.

’Okay. So fighting was never an option. Good to know.’

"You cost me a great deal of money, boy," Rook said. His voice was quiet and educated, the voice of someone who had grown up in a house with a library. "Every year before the Awakening Ceremony, the children of the Academy buy my charms. Every year, I make enough to pay my men through the winter. This year, a gutter rat with a sack of polished quartz walked into the east garden and took all of it." He tilted his head. "Do you know what happens to a man in my position when he loses face like that?"

"People start to wonder if he’s still worth being afraid of," Aren said.

Rook’s eyebrows rose a fraction, and then he nodded lazily to the big man.

The back of a hand caught Aren across the face and knocked him sideways onto the floor. Someone laughed.

"Kneel properly," Rook said.

Aren pushed himself back onto his knees with blood running from his lip, and he kept his eyes down.

"Better." Rook leaned back. "Now. I could have you thrown in the river tonight and nobody in this city would notice. That would make me feel better. It would not give me back my money, and I am, above all things, a practical man." He spread his long hands. "So tell me, stone-seller. What are you worth to me alive?"

Aren didn’t answer right away, because he was looking carefully at the room.

He had been looking at it since the sack came off, and not at the men but at the things around them.

The crates along the walls, for a start. Some were open, and inside were crossbows, short swords, jars of lamp oil with rags stuffed in their necks. There were far too many weapons for a gang that sold charms and collected debts. These were weapons for a fight, and a big one.

Then the long table. Under Rook’s book lay a map of the docks with the warehouses drawn in neat ink, and three of them, on the east side of the river, had been circled in red. Everyone in the lower city knew those warehouses. They belonged to the Tanners, the other big gang, the one that ran the leather trade and the east bank. Beside the map was a sheet of times and numbers with Thursday written across the top and underlined twice.

The men at the barrel had stopped playing cards to watch him get hit. Now they were talking again, low. ...boats come in under the Salt Bridge... midnight, when the bells ring... they’ll never see us coming...

And the man standing closest to Rook’s table, a narrow, nervous man with a scar on his chin, had been watching Aren with more interest than anyone else in the room. His hands were folded nervously in front of him, and his fingernails were stained a deep brown, right down to the cuticle. You only got stains like that from years around tanning dye.

It wasn’t even hard. It was simply paying attention.

"You’re going to hit the Tanners on Thursday night," Aren said.

The warehouse went quiet.

Rook’s face didn’t change. "Go on."

"Three warehouses on the east bank. Men across the river in boats, under the Salt Bridge, at midnight when the bells cover the noise." Aren licked the blood off his lip. "It won’t work."

"And why is that?"

"Two reasons." Aren lifted his chin toward the sheet of times. "Thursday’s the new moon. The river will be at its lowest of the whole month. I grew up three streets from the canal, my lord. On new-moon nights the water under the Salt Bridge is so low a loaded boat scrapes the bottom. Your boats will stick in the mud right under the bridge, in the middle of the river, with every one of your men sitting in them."

Nobody said anything, and Rook’s long fingers had stopped moving on the arm of his chair.

"And the second?"

Aren turned his head slowly and looked at the nervous man with the scar.

"Your man there has tannery dye under his nails. Not old stains. Fresh. That color only comes from the vats on the east bank." He paused. "He’s been working for the Tanners, my lord. Probably for a while. They already know you’re coming."

The nervous man went white. "That’s a lie! Boss, he’s lying, he’s just saying anything to..."

He didn’t finish.

Aren never saw Rook move, and neither did anybody else. One moment Rook was in his tall chair, and the next there was a sound like the wings of some enormous bird, a rush of black that filled the platform, and Rook was standing behind the nervous man with one pale hand resting on his shoulder. Black feathers drifted down through the lamplight like ash.

Rook took the man’s hand, turned it over and looked at the fingernails. Then he looked at the man’s face.

"Ah, Willem." His voice was soft and genuinely sad. "I was so fond of you."

He did something with his other hand that Aren couldn’t see. Willem made a small choked sound, folded quietly to the floor, and stayed there. The feathers went on falling around him after he’d stopped moving.

Rook stepped over him and came down from the platform until he stood right in front of Aren. Up close, he smelled of old books and black tea.

"Get up."

Aren got up carefully.

"The tide. You’re certain?"

"I’m certain."

"Then what would you do, stone-seller, if you were me?"

Aren met his eyes and held them, though every instinct in his body was telling him to look at the floor. Men like this only respected you in the moment you refused to look away.

"I wouldn’t go on Thursday," he said. "The Tanners think you’re coming Thursday. Let them. Let them pull every man they’ve got onto the east bank and sit there all night waiting for boats that never show up. By morning they’ll be tired and angry and sure you lost your nerve." He paused. "Then go Friday, at low tide, on foot. Not across the river. Under it. There’s an old drain that runs from the rope-makers’ sheds to the back of the third warehouse. Kids use it to steal leather scraps. It’s narrow and it stinks, but a man can get through bent over. You’d come up inside their walls while they’re all asleep."

Rook said nothing. His dark eyes moved slowly over Aren’s face as if reading a page in a language he’d once known well.

Then, quietly, he started to laugh. It was the laugh of a man who had just lost a game to someone he hadn’t known was playing.

[Rook. Hostility: 72% → 81%.]

’He hates being told what to do. That I can use.’

A new window opened at the edge of his vision.

[Hostility threshold met.][Anchor slot available: 1/2.][Anchor this target?]

He looked at Rook: the disinherited noble with the scratched-off crest, standing among drifting black feathers in a warehouse full of weapons. A man two ranks above him who killed his own people without raising his voice and would happily kill Aren too, the moment he stopped being useful. A man whose whole world was about to get much bigger if Friday went the way Aren thought it would.

’Yes. Him.’

[Anchor established: Rook.][Anchors: 2/2.]

Rook stopped laughing abruptly. He reached out and, almost gently, took Aren’s chin between two long cold fingers and turned his face to the light, like a man looking over a horse he was thinking of buying.

"Friday, then." "You’ll be here Friday night, stone-seller. You’ll stand beside me while we walk through your little drain. And if you’re wrong about any of it, the tide, the drain, the Tanners, anything at all..." He let go. "I’ll feed you to the canal one piece at a time, and I’ll make you watch."

He turned and walked back up to his chair, stepping over Willem as if he were a coat someone had dropped.

"Untie him. And somebody find him a cloth. He’s bleeding on my floor."