It was a man standing by the shuttered window, his arms folded across his burly chest. He had a pipe in his mouth, and a peaked cap on his head cocked over one eye.
‘I do.’
‘And you are?’
‘They call me Swan.’
‘Well, Swan, they call me Gant. And this is a peaceful assembly. We’re doing nothing wrong here.’
Her brother snorted. ‘I would say that planning dissent amongst your fellow chattel is very wrong indeed.’
Chairs began to scuff against the floor. People were standing, moving back towards the walls. A handful of men were taking up positions around them.
‘No trouble,’ Swan said with her empty palms raised. She nodded to the man Gant. ‘Good evening to you, then. Or what remains of it.’
Slowly, with caution, they both backed out of the room, their task here complete. Swan took a final glimpse of Gant’s curious expression then pulled the door closed behind her.
Instantly, her brother broke a bonding stick in half and used it to seal the door in its frame. The door handle rattled; someone trying to open it.
The voices grew loud again on the other side.
Swan and her brother hurried down the stairwell, racing each other. The Respite House was a tall building with many floors and rooms. Perhaps it had been an hostalio in its time, or one of the famous brothels of the district. People had scattered from the stairs and the landings when they’d first seen the two of them go up. Now, mutters sounded from behind closed doors, children’s cries stifled suddenly. Swan broke her own bonding stick in half, and helped Guan close the main exit of every landing as they descended, sealing each one in turn.
Her brother wouldn’t meet her eye as they did it.
Outside in the cobbled street, a stinking breeze was blowing down the narrow stretch of the Accenine – the only river on the island of Q’os – and amongst the twisting, diabolical streets of the slums that were the Shambles. The fumes from the nearby steelworks caught in the back of her throat, dark smokestacks pouring their affluence into the evening sky. Guan worked quickly to seal the main front door while Swan thrummed to her inner music, and observed the figures scurrying from the sight of their robes.
She stared at the distant Temple of Whispers above the skyline, a tall, warped sliver amongst smaller skysteeples. It was more brightly lit than before. She knew that the second night of the Caucus must be starting by now; felt a moment’s relief that they did not have to be there again tonight.
Much closer, on the opposite bank of the fast river, the Lefall family fortress stood in a brilliance of focused gaslights. Barges were filling up with soldiers along the quayside: General Romano’s own private troops, shipping down to the harbour for the fleet’s departure tomorrow. Swan still had to pack, she recalled, and see to it that her new house-slave understood how to care properly for her animals.
Guan nudged her side, and she returned to the business at hand.
He took out his pistol and stood watch as she lifted one of the unlit brands they’d left leaning against the wall. Swan aimed her own pistol at it and fired.
The oil-soaked wood ignited and a blue-orange flame sputtered in the breeze. Quickly now, Swan ran the torch along the side of the wall, leaving a trail of fire that quickly climbed upwards where they’d splashed it with oil.
She circled the building, leaving her brother where he stood, passing the two other doors they’d already sealed. By the time she returned to him, the entire structure was sheathed by flames.
Banging on the front door now. People trying to get out.
‘Remind me again: why aren’t the Regulators handling this one?’
‘Because, sister, the Matriarch’s family owns half the linen mills in the Shambles. No doubt she wanted the job done right.’
The sounds of panic were starting to compete with the roaring of the flames. Shutters were being thrown open across the building, people hanging out amongst spumes of smoke.
‘You think this will work?’
‘Maybe at least they’ll stop banging on about rights for a while. To hear their talk, you’d think that rights were handed to each and every one of them when they were born.’
Someone shrieked, and then a smoking body landed before them with a thud against the cobbles with a thud. More people began to rain down; crack crack crack went the splintering of their legs.
Swan hopped back as a skull spattered its contents out across the street. She stared at the gory mess in fascination.
A baby was crying close by. She spotted it amongst the moving bodies, still wrapped in the arms of its broken mother. For all she knew, it was the same infant she’d seen in the room at the very top.
‘Lucky you,’ Swan said to it as she bent down for a closer inspection. To her brother: ‘They cry so quietly, these children of theirs. Have you noticed?’
‘No,’ he replied amidst the screams and the roaring of the flames. ‘Let’s go.’
She nodded, then left it there bawling; someone else’s problem.
Pedero glanced behind him as he knocked on the heavy door of tiq. His hand was shaking as it fell to his side, and he felt the wetness of his armpits where they had bloomed as stains against his priestly white robes.
In his belly lay a sense of dread so intense he thought he might throw up from it.
Get a grip on yourself, the spypriest commanded, and took a deep breath, and exhaled, and clenched his fists tightly.
He was admitted into the room by an Acolyte in plain clothing. The man frisked him roughly, his gaze sweeping over Pedero’s appearance in displeasure. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed, then walked the length of the large room to where a wooden stall was fitted against the far wall; a house-slave stood next to the open doorway of the stall with a bowl of sponges in his hand.
Pedero tried to calm himself as he waited in front of the heavy desk. The rest of the space was crammed with various boxes of files still waiting to be unpacked, much like his own office in the other wing of the building, following the yearly move of the Elash order to its new anonymous premises. A half-eaten breakfast lay amongst the documents on his superior’s desk. Through a doorway behind the desk, he noticed the heavy travelling chest on the floor of the other room, sealed tight by a leather latch and a wrapping of hairy rope.
‘Make it quick!’ came Alarum’s rough voice from his personal privy. ‘I must leave soon for the harbour.’
Pedero’s head jerked around at the spymaster’s sudden announcement. ‘I have a report for you, sir. I think – I think it best that you read it.’
‘Is that you Pedero?’
‘Yes. Yes it’s me.’
‘Well, can’t it wait?’
Pedero looked down at the report he clutched in his trembling hand. The ink of the small, neat handwriting had smudged in places from the sweat of his fingers. ‘I don’t believe so. It’s from one of our listening posts. Concerning a Diplomat by the name of Che. I understand he’s accompanying the Holy Matriarch on her campaign.’
A hand emerged from the open doorway.
Pedero sidestepped towards it, stuffed the document into the waiting hand without looking. He bowed his head as he stepped back to a respectable distance, clasping his own hands behind his back.
After some moments: ‘He said this? To his damned house-slave?’
‘Yes, sir.’
A mumble of oaths ensued. Alarum wasn’t normally a bad-tempered man. Since declaring that he was to accompany the Holy Matriarch as her personal intelligence adviser, though, he’d been waspish with everyone around him.
‘The time stamp is dated for last night. Why am I only hearing of this now?’
Pedero coughed for air. ‘There was some confusion,’ he began, wincing, ‘concerning the paperwork.’
‘You mean it’s been sitting on your desk all this time, and you didn’t bother to read it until several moments ago.’
He couldn’t deny it. He’d already tried to think of a way that he might push the blame of his own error
