A little, anyway.
* * *
Finally, they reached their destination: Porterfell, a small and unremarkable town, the economy, much like Young Lucy’s Grave, based almost entirely on fishing, although here on a much larger, industrial scale. As they approached port, Daud was surprised to find their clipper met by a pilot boat with the harbormaster himself at the helm, until he watched—through his spyglass—the clipper’s captain slip the harbormaster a satchel, presumably holding money or something else of value, as the two met inside the pilot boat’s tiny cabin. Of course, the Sixways Gang had total control of their smuggling routes and the ports along it.
Clever Jack.
Harbormaster bribed, the two crewmen continued with their almost studious disregard for Daud’s presence, and as soon as they were guided into dock, he left, and headed into the town, running the instructions given to him back at Young Lucy’s Grave through his head.
* * *
Eccentric was how some people described the geography of Porterfell. As he navigated his way throughthe complex network of ancient streets toward his rendezvous, Daud came up with several other words for the town’s layout that were far less polite. Porterfell was not large, certainly in comparison with somewhere like Dunwall, but it seemed to Daud that the town’s founders had tried to cram almost as many buildings as the imperial capital into a fraction of the space. The result was a dense municipality, the narrow streets and alleys lined with towering buildings of brick and wood that had an unnerving tendency to lean over the roadways beneath, dimming what little daylight managed to reach the streets. Although it was only late afternoon, the streetlights along the major thoroughfares were already on, casting an orange glow over the town and its inhabitants as they went about their business. The tight alleyways that branched off at intervals remained almost entirely dark, save for the occasional light spilling from a window.
Daud decided he liked Porterfell, even if the whole place did stink of fish.
He continued, following the directions given to him by Jack in his head. Soon enough, he found himself in a part of the town dedicated to the primary industry of the place: fishing. Gone were shops and houses, replaced by warehouses and wholesale markets, the street traffic having changed from citizens and shoppers to those employed by the fishing trade, running with barrows and carts over cobbled streets slick with sea water and slimy effluent running freely from the surrounding processing houses. While the more salubrious part of Porterfell had seemed relatively free of vagrants, Daud noticed the high number in this quarter, huddled in damp blankets around the market and warehouse drains, waiting for whatever scraps were thrown out.
The rendezvous was in a public house, the Empire’s End, at the corner of an intersection bounded by the main fish market and two warehouses. As Daud entered, he passed a group of three beggars slouched outside the pub’s doors. He felt rather than saw them watching him carefully.
He needed to be wary. While he was perfectly capable of handling himself, he was in unknown territory now.
* * *
The plan was simple. According to Eat ’Em Up Jack, Norcross’s agent used the Empire’s End as base of operations, keeping to a set of regular but rotating hours every other day in order to meet any potential clients of his employer. The pub was famous—locally, anyway—for the interior walls being covered in portraits not only of all the emperors and empresses of the Isles, but of the kings and queens who had ruled the various realms that had existed across the island of Gristol before they were unified. History was not Daud’s strong point—nor his interest—but he was to meet the agent under the portrait of Emperor Finlay Morgengaard I. As Daud crossed the pub’s threshold, he hoped that the paintings would be labeled.
The Empire’s End was very small and very busy, the whole place packed almost to standing room only by workers from the surrounding markets, warehouses and processing houses, the reek of fish covered admirably by the strong tobacco that most of the men—and they were all men, as far as Daud could see—seemed to be enjoying.
Daud approached the bar, where he discovered the selection of liquors on offer was meager, the shelves at the back stacked instead with boxes of tobacco.
The barman paid no attention to Daud, nor did any ofthe patrons, all too busy engaged in noisy conversation after a hard shift gutting and packing fish. Jostled on all sides, Daud turned his back to the bar and scanned the walls as best he could, trying to identify the meeting point. With so many people packed inside, he could hardly see any of the portraits, let alone identify one as Finlay Morgengaard I. But after a few minutes, he spotted a patron sitting at a corner table who looked so completely out of place among the muscular fish workers that Daud wondered why he bothered with the specific instructions in the first place.
The man was middle-aged with a thin face and razor-sharp cheekbones, his dark wavy hair crammed under an angled cap made of densely curled wool. He held a long, curved clay pipe—containing the only unlit tobacco in the pub—in his mouth, the bowl of which nearly reached the lowest of three large silver clasps that held his voluminous blue cloak in place.
The man was watching him, and as he and Daud looked at each other, the man extracted a hand from beneath his cloak and lifted a monocle on the end of a long ivory stem to his eye. He peered through the lens, and a moment later a small smile appeared. Lowering the monocle, the man nodded.
Daud got the message and walked over, taking a circuitous route through the unmoving patrons. Before reaching the table he paused
