Chapter Four — The Mariner

She went to the Anchor Stone on the seventh night.

She was not on duty. She had finished the second twelve interviews that afternoon — the cartographer’s-clerk who had refused to answer her at the door of the Office of Cartography, which she had recorded and would return to in the morning; the surgeon at the lower-Harborside who had wept because his wife had been Narri Calling’s friend; the merchant whose alibi was a Compact-court attestation Tessa would have to verify with a clerk she did not yet trust. Eleven of the twelve had alibis. The cartographer’s-clerk had not given her one. She had set him aside, not because she suspected him, but because the conversation had not been a conversation and she would need to come back.

She was tired in the way she had been tired for a week. The wind was still from the north. The fog had thinned. She walked from the precinct down through Harborside in the early dark and stopped at the Anchor Stone because she had not decided where else to go.

——— ◇ ———

Hettie was at the bar. Hettie had been at the bar of the Anchor Stone for as long as Tessa had been on the Watch, and possibly longer; Tessa had never asked. Hettie was somewhere between fifty and sixty, broad-shouldered, careful, the kind of tavern keeper who saw everything and said almost nothing. The Anchor Stone was the kind of place where people came to be unobserved and Hettie was the reason it worked.

The clay pot stood by the door. Tessa dropped a copper piece into it as she came in, the way the regulars did, and Hettie lifted her chin in greeting. Tessa hung her Watch coat over the back of a chair at the small corner table by the window. She sat. Hettie poured a Tri-Port red without asking and brought it to the table.

“Petra,” Hettie said.

“Yes.”

“She came in here sometimes.”

“I know.”

Hettie set the wine down. She did not say anything else. She went back to the bar. Tessa drank the wine slowly. The window beside her was beaded with the night’s wet. The lamps along the harbour street were lit and the light came through the wet glass softened and broken. The tavern was three-quarters full at this hour. Two dock-workers at the bar. A small group of merchants’ clerks at the long table by the fire. A woman alone with a book at the bar’s far end. Three Driftborn men at the table nearest the door, drinking and talking in the slower cadence Driftborn men used when they were not in a hurry.

Tessa drank the wine and did not think about the cartographer’s-clerk who had refused to answer her at the door. She did not think about the forty-three. She did not think about the notebook. She drank the wine.

——— ◇ ———

The Driftborn man who came to her table was the oldest of the three. Late forties. The salt at the corners of his eyes that came from a lifetime of squinting against the sea. He had seen the Watch coat on the back of her chair. He stood by the table for a moment, formal, waiting to be acknowledged.

She looked up at him.

“Officer,” he said.

“Yes.”

“My name is Carrik Solenna. I am the second-mate of the Brightwake, moored at Second Port for the season. I would speak to you, with your permission, about the killings.”

She gestured to the chair across from her. He sat. He did not ask for wine. He folded his hands on the table.

“I have heard,” he said, “about the seven.”

“Most of Karath has heard about the seven. The Watch has not been quiet about Petra.”

“I am told there will be an eighth.”

She did not answer. She looked at him.

“I do not say this to alarm you,” Carrik Solenna said. “I say this because the Driftborn have seen the pattern before. We do not say it to your Watch because your Watch does not hear it. I am saying it to you because you are sitting here drinking alone and you have the look of an officer who is already not hearing what her Watch is telling her.”

“What pattern.”

“This is not the right place to speak of it. Will you walk with me.”

She looked at him for a moment. She knew the rules. A Watch officer alone walking with a Driftborn man she did not know, after dark, without telling Errin where she was going, was a thing that could go wrong. It was also a thing that, if she did not do it, she would not learn what he had to tell her. She had been a Watch officer for fourteen years and she had a sense, by now, of which mistakes she could afford.

“I will walk with you,” she said.

——— ◇ ———

They walked down to the harbour wall. The wind from the north was still steady and the smell of harbour was thinner than it had been all week. There were lamps along the wall every twenty paces. The piers were lit. The ships moored at Second Port were dim shapes on the water beyond the inner basin.

Carrik Solenna walked at her side without speaking until they reached a place between two of the lamps where the light was thin. He stopped at the wall. He looked out at the water for a moment. Then he turned slightly toward her.

“The girl Bryn Kelt,” he said. “The third of the seven.”

“Yes.”

“She came through Second Atoll a season before she died. Through the port my company keeps a berth at. She passed her token through our records, the way a Driftborn-acknowledged person does. I saw the token. I remembered it. I had seen it before, in the records of another company, when I was a young man.”

“You knew her.”

“I did not know her. I knew her token. The token was older than she was. It had passed through three companies before it came to her, in the way Driftborn tokens pass when a child is acknowledged to a parent who is not their birth-parent. The provenance of the token I knew. I had wondered, when I saw her, what business had brought a girl carrying that particular token to Karath.”

“And.”

“And I read about her death in the Watch postings. And I went to your records office and I asked who was investigating, and they gave me a name that was not yours, and I did not pursue it further. I do not say this to apologize. I am saying it because I should have pursued it further. I had information your records officer did not have.”

“What information.”

He did not answer at once. He looked at the water again. Tessa waited.

“The killing pattern is wrong,” Carrik Solenna said.

“I know it is wrong.”

“You know it is wrong as a Watch officer knows it is wrong. I am telling you it is wrong in a way the Watch cannot see.”

She did not say anything to that. She had learned, in fourteen years, when to wait.

“There have been killings of this kind in Karath before,” he said. “Not often. Not in the lifetime of any Watch officer I have spoken with. But the Driftborn have records older than the Watch. And the records describe a pattern the records also describe as wrong.”

“What kind of wrong.”

“A wrong,” Carrik Solenna said, “that the Watch is not equipped to see, because the Watch is built to find a man with a knife who hates women, and what is killing your women is not a man with a knife who hates women, although it appears to be one.”

She felt the words go down through her in a slow way. She did not move. The wind off the harbour was cold and her hands inside her coat pockets had gone cold with it.

“What is it,” she said.

“It is not for me to say. I am a second-mate. I am not a voice-keeper. The voice-keeper of my company is the person who would be permitted to tell you, and she would not tell you on my recommendation. She tells what she tells when she has decided. I can take you no further than this. I am telling you what I am permitted to tell you, which is that the pattern is wrong in the way the records describe, and that if you wish the rest of it, you must go to her.”

“Where.”

“The Brightwake is at Second Port. We are moored there until the Tidewater closes. The voice-keeper’s name is Mariska Quill. She is old. She does not see strangers easily. You will need to be patient with her, and you will need to come without your coat.”

“Without my coat.”

“She will not speak with the Watch as the Watch. She will speak with you only as a person.”

“All right.”

He looked at her. The wind moved his coat-tail. He had said what he had come to say.

“Officer.”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry I did not pursue it further when Bryn Kelt died. I am only one man, and I am not the voice-keeper, and I tell myself that the choice was hers and not mine. But I was wrong to leave it to her. I should have come to your Watch then, and I did not, and three more women have died since.”

“Five,” Tessa said. “Five more. And there will be the eighth.”

“Yes.”

He looked out at the water. After a moment he turned and walked back along the harbour wall toward the lamp at the corner of the inner basin. He did not look back. Tessa watched him go.

She stood at the wall for some time after he was gone. The wet of the wall came through her coat against her hands. The lamps along the harbour were lit and the wind from the north was steady. She did not feel afraid in the way the words wrong in a way the Watch cannot see should have made her afraid. She felt instead the slow recognition of a thing she had already half-known and had not yet given a name to.

She walked back to the precinct through the late streets. The fog had come up again as she walked. By the time she reached her own street the harbour was lost behind her in fog.

——— ◇ ———

In her flat, by the lamp, she opened the notebook.

She wrote slowly. The pencil went into the rag-paper without resistance.

Brightwake. Second Port. Mariska Quill.

Then, on the next line, beneath:

Wrong in a way the Watch cannot see.

She underlined the last seven words twice. She closed the notebook. She set the pencil down beside it.

She did not sleep that night.

——— ◇ ———