Cassian unfolded the letter on the chart-table, in the cabin of the Grey Tide, an hour after returning from the Second Port.
The paper was good. Academy paper — thin, close-woven, the kind the Academy used for indexing work meant to last three hundred years and not a day less. Sethra had stolen a sheet, because Sethra had stolen nothing in her life until the morning she’d decided she was willing to die, and then she had stolen everything.
Cassian registered the theft. Two days ago he would have registered nothing at all.
The letter itself was short.
Cassian —
She will find you. Take the commission. Do not tell the Academy.
I am sorry about the charts. I am sorry about most of it.
— S.
He read it twice, then a third time. Then he sat with it in his hand and stopped reading it.
She will find you. Not might. Not may. Sethra had never been careless with her verbs, and she had not started now.
Which meant Sethra had known, before she died, who the woman was who would be coming for him. She had known where that woman was. She had known what she was walking toward. Sethra had not been guessing when she put the fragment on his deck yesterday afternoon. She had been throwing him a rope.
He turned the letter in his fingers. Outside, the harbor was fully light now — the morning he’d walked through in the dark had become a Karath winter day, grey and cold and ordinary. Through the porthole he could see the pier traffic of Third Port beginning — dockworkers arriving, a loading crane starting its first lift, the small daily economy of people who hadn’t been summoned by the Watch to identify a body.
He held the letter over the lamp.
He hadn’t lit the lamp last night, following Sethra’s instruction, but he lit it now. The Academy weave took the flame with a slow, even hunger — not the ragged flare of cheap paper but a deliberate consumption, the mineral treatment burning cleanly. He turned the sheet in his fingers so the part that read I am sorry burned last. The ash fell into the basin with the morning’s washing water and became nothing.
He had made his decision last night, standing on the deck after the two strangers left. Now he was closing the door.
He stood. His legs had opinions about standing. He told his legs their opinions were noted and not of interest.
He still had to move the charts.
The chart-table drawer had a hasp he’d never used. In the bottom of his sea-chest was a small brass padlock he’d bought for a voyage he’d never made, three years ago, back when he’d still been the kind of captain who bought padlocks in anticipation of voyages. He took it out now. It was cold in his hand, and heavier than he remembered.
He folded the oiled cloth back over the fragment, put the cloth in the drawer, closed the drawer, and locked it.
A locked drawer was a drawer the Watch wanted to open, yes. But an unlocked drawer that contained a forbidden Academy chart fragment was worse. If the Watch came back today — if Kann decided to require the written statement after all — an unlocked drawer would be the first thing they opened, and the fragment would be in Watch custody within the hour.
A locked drawer bought him two minutes of warning. Two minutes was enough to get overboard with the fragment inside his shirt, if it came to that.
He pocketed the key.
The Anchor Stone was seven minutes from Third Port if a man walked. Nine if a man drank first. This morning he was going to drink first.
——— ◇ ———
The Anchor Stone had been carved into the basalt of the harbor wall a hundred years before Cassian’s grandfather was born.
The back wall of the tavern was the harbor itself — black rock unworked, seamed and wet, with the tide-line visible at about the height of a standing man’s shoulder. The rest of the building was ship-wood, salvaged, older than most of the ships it had been salvaged from. In winter the basalt sweated. In summer the room smelled of the sea whether the sea was in it or not.
It was winter. Late Siol, the last cold weeks before the turn.
Hettie was behind the bar when he came in — a wide woman with dockworker’s wrists and the face of someone who had made a careful inventory of every grief Harborside could produce. There was a clay pot on a shelf by the door, and regulars dropped things in it when they left. Coins. Buttons. Teeth, once. A small whittled bone that Cassian had spent three months wondering about. Hettie had never explained what the pot was for. Cassian had never asked. Some of the best things in Harborside were things nobody had explained.
“Captain,” Hettie said when he sat down. She looked at him once — fully, the way she looked at patrons who came in looking the way he was looking — and then she started pouring without asking. “You look like somebody died.”
“Somebody did.”
Hettie didn’t ask who. That was why men came to the Anchor Stone and not to the three louder taverns up the terrace. She set a cup of Tri-Port red on the bar in front of him and poured another for herself, which was unusual; Hettie did not drink in the mornings. Then she looked at him again, longer this time, and registered something she didn’t say.
“Bread’s on the house this morning.”
“Thank you, Hettie.”
“I’m not feeding you out of kindness. I’m feeding you because you’re on the first cup before you’ve eaten, and I’ve got a floor to mop, and drunk men on empty stomachs fall harder.”
“That is kindness.”
“It isn’t.”
She went back to wiping a spot on the bar that didn’t need wiping.
The fish-oil lamps had everything in that particular yellow light only fish-oil made — thicker than candle-light, faintly marine even with the shutters closed. Two fish-haulers at the corner table were arguing about whether a man named Bennet had swindled them or had only been unlucky. An old regular at the end of the bar was pacing his drinks the way a man paced them when he had a schedule to keep. Cassian had seen him before without ever learning his name. He had stopped learning names years ago. The names didn’t stay.
He drank.
He drank a second cup. He drank a third.
The third cup was the one where Sethra came back.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Cassian, she said, inside his head, in the tone she’d used exactly three times in twelve years. Every time she had been right.
He set the cup down.
“Captain.”
A voice behind him, and to his left, and he knew it by the timbre before he’d turned.
Veren.
——— ◇ ———
The Harbor Master’s collector stood beside Cassian’s stool. Thick-shouldered, today without his ledger, wearing the face of a man who had come to inconvenience someone and did not expect to enjoy it.
“Veren.”
“End of the quiet day was today.”
“It was.”
“Master wanted a date.”
“I know what Master wanted.”
Veren didn’t sit down and didn’t step closer. He stood at the distance of a man who knew he didn’t need to come closer to say what he had come to say.
“I’m sorry about the woman, Captain.”
Cassian’s hand closed on the cup.
It was the wrong thing to say, and it wasn’t Veren’s fault. Veren had said it the careful flat way Harbor Master’s men were trained to offer sympathy — the way a man offered condolences to a captain on his ship after a hull breach, without pretending to know the ship. But Cassian was on his third cup, and Sethra was talking in his head, and the part of him that had spent two months holding himself together with bad wine had just been handed a match.
He turned.
“Veren.”
“Captain.”
“Tell Master he’ll have his date when I decide what the date is. Tell him the woman whose body I identified this morning is none of his concern, and none of yours. Tell him that the next time he sends a man into a tavern to collect on an overdue berth fee on the day I buried a friend, I’ll pay the fee.”
He looked at Veren properly for the first time.
“And then I will burn the pier it’s paid on.”
He said it level, without raising his voice. That was the part that made Hettie come out from behind the bar.
Veren looked at him for a long moment. His expression wasn’t anger or fear — it was something a collector kept for occasions when a debt was about to become more than money. Then he nodded, the small nod Harbor Master’s men used to acknowledge that a conversation was over, and he walked out of the Anchor Stone without finishing the cup he hadn’t ordered.
Hettie was already beside him.
“Out, Captain,” she said, quiet.
“Hettie —”
“Out. You can come back tomorrow. You can’t be here tonight.”
“I wasn’t going to —”
“You were going to be here as long as you were going to be here, and I’ve got fish-haulers watching you, and I know the difference between a man who’s had three and a man who’s had three on the day he buried somebody. You go home.”
Her hand was on his elbow. The hand was gentle. The hand was not optional.
He stood. He walked to the door, and at the door he stopped, because something in him wanted to say something that would make this right, and nothing he could think of would. He turned halfway back. Hettie was still watching him.
He reached into his coat, took out a small copper coin — one of the last two he had — and dropped it into the clay pot. The coin made a small sound against the other things in there.
“Tomorrow,” Hettie said.
“Tomorrow.”
——— ◇ ———
The fog had come up while he was inside.
Karath got fogs like that in late Siol — they rolled off the harbor in the middle of the day and flattened the sound of Harborside until even the Observatory bell had the muffled quality of a bell heard through a wall. Cassian’s head was not clear. It was clearer than it should have been, which was what third cups and shame did when they met in a man at the same time.
He took the long way home.
Home was a rented room above a rope-maker’s shop in the Middle City, ten minutes’ walk from the Anchor Stone by the direct route. He went the indirect route — past the First Port promenade, where the fog turned the pier lamps into hazy gold coins — because the direct route would have taken him past Second Port, and he was not ready to walk past Second Port yet.
He was three streets from home when he realized the footfalls he was hearing weren’t only his own.
He didn’t stop walking. He didn’t look back. He tracked the second set of footsteps the way he had tracked the fisherman yesterday afternoon: without turning his head, without breaking stride, letting the information arrive.
The second set matched his pace. When he slowed, it slowed. When he turned into the chandler’s lane, it turned.
At the corner of the rope-walk, the footsteps stopped.
Cassian walked three more steps. Then he turned.
The man was standing in the fog, twenty feet back. Cloaked, hood up. In the lamplight Cassian could see only his shape and the pale shape of his hand — which the man had lifted in something that was almost, but not quite, a wave.
Cassian didn’t wave back.
The man didn’t move.
After a moment, the man lowered his hand, turned, and walked back into the fog the way he had come.
Cassian stood at the corner for a count of twenty. The fog didn’t give the man back. He had been a shape, and now he wasn’t a shape, and that was all the information Cassian was going to get from that particular encounter.
Whatever the man had been, he had not been Academy. Academy watchers didn’t wave.
Which meant there was at least a third party in this, alongside the Academy and the Master.
He filed that, and he kept walking.
——— ◇ ———
The light was on in his room.
That was the first thing he noticed as he turned into the alley behind the rope-maker’s shop. The oil-lamp in his window was lit, and Cassian didn’t leave lamps lit when he went out — the oil for a lamp in a rented room was something a man on two months of bad credit bought every week and noticed every week. He hadn’t lit the lamp this morning. Nobody had a key to his room except his landlady and himself.
He climbed the outside stair slowly.
The third step from the top creaked. He stepped over it out of habit, and only after he had stepped over it did he realize that stepping over the creak meant whoever was inside wouldn’t hear him coming.
At the top he paused at the door and listened.
A chair creaked inside. One person. Seated.
He tried the latch. It turned. Whoever was inside had not locked the door from within, which meant either they weren’t trying to trap him, or they had no reason to think they needed to.
Both readings were bad.
He pushed the door open.
A woman was sitting in the chair he had stolen from a Middle City tavern six years ago. She wore Academy robes — dark blue in the lamp’s yellow light, with the small silver pin of the Languages department at her collar. She was in her late fifties. Her hair was grey at the temples; the rest of it was pulled back in the tight flat style older Academy women wore, the style that was unconcerned with being flattering.
Her hands were folded in her lap.
That was what Cassian noticed first — though he wouldn’t have been able to say why until later, when he was sitting across from her and saw her face properly in the lamplight. Her hands were folded the way a person folded their hands when they had been folding them, patiently, for a long time.
She looked up at him.
“I hope,” she said, in the quiet precise Academy register that hedged everything, “that you’ll not mind the intrusion.”
Her voice chose its words the way Sethra had chosen hers. Cassian noticed that before he knew why.
“My name is Pel,” she said. “I’d like to ask what Sethra said to you.”
Cassian didn’t answer. He closed the door behind him, and stood where he was, and looked at the woman who had made herself at home in his room.
“I’m not from the Watch, Captain.”
He still didn’t answer.
“I’m also not from the part of the Academy that took your archive access.”
That was a sentence that was meant to be heard.
Cassian had left the Academy twelve years ago. Three people in the world knew specifically which part of the Academy had taken his archive access on his way out, and one of those three was dead under a brown cloth at Second Port. Pel knowing which part meant Pel was one of the other two, or she had been told by one of them, and either way she had come up several rungs of the ladder that she did not want him noticing she had climbed.
He looked at her for another moment.
Then he crossed the room, sat down in the chair across from her — because sitting was the only way he was going to survive hearing what she had come to say — and he folded his hands on the table between them in a deliberate echo of hers.
“My answer to Sethra was going to be no,” he said. “Until about two hours ago.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Two strangers on my deck at dusk, Inspector Kann’s finger tapping a leather sheath, and your friend in the fog who almost waved.” He looked at her steadily. “Who are you, Pel?”
“I told you. My name is Pel.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.” Her eyes, in the lamplight, were steady as Sethra’s had been. “But it’s the one you get until you’ve told me what she asked you for. Sethra and I were working on the same problem. I’d like to know how far she got before she died.”
Cassian considered her.
Sethra’s letter had said she will find you. Not he will find you. Not they will find you. A specific pronoun for a specific person. Sethra, who was never careless with her verbs.
He decided.
“She gave me a chart fragment,” Cassian said. “She asked me to take a ship beyond the Inner Sea. She said if she didn’t come back by morning, the answer was supposed to go to the porter at the Academy gate.”
“You still have the fragment.”
“I have it.”
“Don’t give it to the porter.”
“I had no intention of.”
Pel let out a breath he hadn’t known she was holding.
“Good,” she said. “Because the porter at the Academy gate this morning is not the same porter who was there yesterday afternoon, and the man who is there today would have opened your oiled cloth before you were three streets away.”
——— ◇ ———
END OF CHAPTER 3.
