unmarked graves. You’ve gotta be smarter than that, smart all the time, smart every minute of the day. If you were the son of a cotton merchant it wouldn’t matter, you could afford your youth. But you aren’t, you’re ghetto trash, and don’t ever forget it-because Sakra knows they won’t.”
He was still angry but he was listening. I rubbed sleet out of my hair, water melting against my brow and running down my cheeks. Then I extended a hand and helped him back to his feet.
“What did you see?” I asked, surprised at how quickly my temper had cooled, surprised that it had run so warm a moment earlier.
He seemed as willing as I was to return to the calm back-and-forth we’d perfected. “I saw one noble kill another, and I saw you walk off with him. That was the Blade, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He suggested it was unlikely I would die in my sleep.”
Wren sneered at that, still convinced I was invincible. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him folk queue to put me down, and if he doesn’t step up he might find himself late to the party.” Wren smiled, and despite what I’d said earlier, I was glad I left him his illusions, maybe even a little proud that he thought so well of me. “Where does Adolphus think you are?”
“I told him you sent me round to Yancey’s, that you wanted to get something else on Beaconfield.”
“Try not to lie to them.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
The snowfall was getting worse. I was starting to shiver. “If I let you trail along for a while, you promise to head back to the Earl when I tell you?”
“I promise.”
“And is your word any good?”
He narrowed his eyes, then gave a quick up and down with his chin.
“All right then.” I set off down the alley, and after a moment he caught up with me.
“Where are we going?”
“I need to see the scryer.”
“Why?”
“Now would be the part of the morning where you walk next to me in silence.”
We reached the Box thirty minutes later, and when I told the boy to wait outside he nodded and stretched against the wall. Happily the Islander who let me in last time was manning the door, and despite his age he was sharp enough to recognize me, and decent enough to let me in unaccompanied.
Marieke was bent double at her desk when I entered, raking over a weathered, leather tome with an intensity that would have frightened a syndicate heavy. I slammed the door shut and she whirled her head around, preparing to excoriate whatever poor bastard was foolish enough to intrude upon her work. When she saw it was me, she breathed out slowly, a little bit of her seemingly inexhaustible anger draining away with it.
“You’re back,” she said, careful to make sure she didn’t sound happy about it. “Guiscard stopped by earlier. I figured you would have come with him.”
“We had a falling out. I needed my freedom, and he’s a one-man sort of gal.”
“Do you think that was funny?”
“Give me a few minutes and we can try again.” On the slab in the center of the room a shroud covered a body about the size of a child. Beneath it Avraham lay in permanent repose, soon to be set beneath the ground. For him there would be no grand funeral, no public outpouring of grief, and the weather being what it was, I doubted the High Priest would manage the trip from his chapel to the plot of land near the sea where the Islanders buried their people. Low Town had enjoyed the autumnal pathos, a moment of communal mourning amid the vibrant foliage, but with the mercury falling no one was in any great hurry to leave his house just to pay sympathy to the family of a little black boy. And anyway, at the rate children were disappearing from Low Town the whole thing had lost its novelty.
“I assume you didn’t have any more luck reading this one than you did his predecessor?”
She shook her head. “I’ve tried every trick in the book, worked through every ritual, meditated over every scrap of evidence, but-”
“Nothing,” I finished, and for once she didn’t seem to mind being interrupted.
“You come up with anything solid on your end?”
“No.”
“You keep talking like this and I’m never gonna get a word in edgewise.”
“Yeah.” Thus far our conversation had been within a stone’s throw of pleasant-I could almost fool myself into thinking the scryer had taken a shine to me.
“Does the Bureau of Magical Affairs know about the talisman you’ve got sewn into your shoulder?” she asked.
“Of course. I make a point of telling the government every time I do something illegal.”
The beginnings of a smile worked themselves through Marieke’s growl, but she snapped its neck before it could mature. “Who put it there?”
“I can’t remember. I’m high a lot.”
She set her hands against the desk behind her and arched her spine backward, a startlingly uninhibited display given her almost pathological self-consciousness, the rough equivalent in a normally functioning human of dropping her drawers and taking a shit on the floor. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
That was my preference anyway. “If I slipped off this covering and checked the boy for spots,” I asked, “would I find any?”
She gave a conspiratorial glance around, unnecessary, given that we were in an enclosed room, but understandable all the same. “Yes,” she said. “You would.”
It was what I expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. The Blade had done another child, taken him from beneath my nose, hidden him somewhere in the catacombs beneath his mansion, drained his life, and left him facedown in the river. And as if somehow these blasphemies were insufficient, he’d infected the boy with the plague, weakened the wards that protected the city from its return-all because he couldn’t stand the thought of honest labor or forgoing a few exotic debaucheries.
“If you took off the sheet and saw the rash,” she responded, “would you have any idea why it was there?”
“I’m looking,” I said, though my effort would mean little enough if the city again found itself awash in Red Fever.
Her eyes, normally as bright as the unclouded sky, fogged up. Uncertainty was a guise Marieke wore infrequently, and with more than her usual discomfort. “Right now, you’re the only one who knows. I don’t trust Black House, and I didn’t want to start a panic. But if another there’s another…”
“I understand,” I said. After a moment I asked the obvious question. “Why tell me?”
“I flashed something off you the first time we met, who you are and where you’re going. Something that told me I ought to let you in on it.”
That would explain the fit. That would explain, for that matter, why someone so congenitally incapable of kindness would even take the time to speak with me.
“Don’t you want to know what I saw?” she asked. “Everyone always wants to know what’s ahead of them.”
“People are fools. You don’t need a prophet to tell the future. Look at yesterday, then look at today. Tomorrow is likely to be the same, and the day after.”
It was time to leave. Wren was outside in the cold, and I had a ways left to go before I’d earn my day’s rest. I took a long look at Avraham. He’d be the last, I told myself, one way or another.
Marieke interrupted my thoughts. “Did you survive it, the first time?”
“It killed me,” I said. “Can’t you tell?”
She blushed a little, and rushed forward. “I meant did you…”
“I know what you meant,” I said. “And yeah, I survived it.”
“What was it like?”
People asked me that sometimes, if they knew I’d been in Low Town during the worst of it. “Tell me about
