Chapter Five — The Brightwake

She left the precinct at the second bell of the morning and walked through the Lower City to Second Port wearing her civilian coat — the brown coat with the wooden buttons her late husband had given her, which she had not worn in months. The Watch coat stayed on its hook by the door of her flat. She did not know whether the Driftborn dock-watcher would have recognized it as a Watch coat. She did not want to find out.

The walk to Second Port took an hour. The morning fog had lifted by the time she reached the inner basin and the harbour was bright and cold. The lamps along the lower piers were dark. The Driftborn ships were moored four-deep along the outer wall, with their gangways lowered and their crew at the day’s work.

——— ◇ ———

The dock-watcher at the inner gate was a Driftborn man of perhaps thirty. He stopped her at the bollard and asked, formally, what business she had at Second Port. She told him, also formally, that she wished to speak with the voice-keeper of the Brightwake. He looked at her for a long moment.

“Your name, in case the voice-keeper asks.”

“Tessa Halder.”

“Your business, in case the voice-keeper asks.”

“A matter from the city.”

“You are Watch.”

“I am Watch. I am not here as Watch. I am here as a person.”

He looked at her again. Then he turned and called over a younger Driftborn — a girl of seventeen or eighteen, who came at his summons with the quick soft-footed walk Driftborn-born children used on a working pier. He spoke to her in the long-cadence tongue Driftborn used among themselves on their own ground. The girl listened, looked at Tessa briefly, nodded, and went down the pier.

“She will go to the Brightwake’s deck-mate,” the dock-watcher said. “The deck-mate will ask the company about you. The company will decide whether to speak to the voice-keeper on your behalf. The voice-keeper will decide whether to receive you. You will wait. The wait may be long.”

“How long.”

“As long as the wait is.”

“Where do I wait.”

He gestured to a stone bench beside the bollard, in the lee of the wall, out of the wind. She thanked him. She sat down on the bench. He went back to his post. He did not speak to her again. The wait took three hours.

——— ◇ ———

The girl came back at the noon bell with a man in his middle thirties — the Brightwake’s deck-mate, by the rope-knot fastening at his coat-shoulder. He stood in front of Tessa and looked at her for a moment in the way the dock-watcher had.

“You are Tessa Halder.”

“Yes.”

“You are Watch but not as Watch.”

“Yes.”

“What is your matter.”

She had thought about how to answer this. She had thought about it for the whole three hours.

“Eight Lower City women have died,” she said. “I am the officer working the case. I have heard, from a member of your company who came to me last night, that the Driftborn have records of patterns the Watch has not seen. I am asking for the part of those records that bears on what is killing my women.”

The deck-mate listened. His face did not change. When she had finished he looked at the harbour for a moment, then looked back at her.

“The voice-keeper will speak with you. Briefly. She does not promise more than that. You will come now. You will leave when she asks you to leave. You will not press her past what she gives. Are these terms acceptable.”

“They are.”

“Come.”

He led her down the pier to the Brightwake. The ship was a single-masted Driftborn coaster of perhaps sixty feet, painted dark, with the canvas furled and the deck swept clean. Three crew members at the rail watched her come up the gangway and did not greet her. The deck-mate took her aft, past a low cabin she did not look into, to a small after-cabin set into the stern. He opened the door for her. He did not enter.

“Voice-keeper,” he said. “The Watch officer is here.”

——— ◇ ———

The cabin was small and warm. The light came from a single beeswax lamp on a low table. The smell of the room was beeswax and old rope and something Tessa could not at once identify — something like the inside of an old cabinet, or the smell of paper that had been kept dry for a long time. The cabin was lined on three sides with low benches. On one of them sat an old woman.

Mariska Quill was perhaps seventy-eight. White-haired, the hair pinned up in a Driftborn knot at the back of her head. Her hands were thin and very still, folded in her lap on a coloured shawl. Her face — and Tessa took a moment with this, because it was the kind of thing Tessa took moments with — was the face of a person who had decided, a long time ago, that nothing would surprise her.

The deck-mate withdrew. The door clicked shut. Tessa stood for a moment by the door and then, because Mariska had not yet spoken, sat down on the bench opposite without being asked.

“Voice-keeper,” she said.

“Officer.”

“Tessa Halder.”

“Mariska Quill.”

She had thought about how to begin the conversation. She had thought about whether to start with the Watch’s procedural opening — I am the officer of record on a case that has produced eight victims to date — or to start with what she had come for. In the cabin, with Mariska’s still hands across the small space and the beeswax lamp between them, she did not start with either. She started where she had started with the deck-mate.

“Eight Lower City women have died,” Tessa said. “The first was two months ago. The seventh was Petra Ashe of the Harborside Watch. The eighth was last week. I have been the officer of record from the first body. I have not made progress that satisfies me. A member of your company spoke to me last night and told me that what I have been investigating is wrong in a way the Watch cannot see. He told me to come to you for the rest of it. I have come.”

She named the dead. She named them slowly, the way she named them in the notebook. Anne Telver. Ela Mosse. Bryn Kelt. Ren Holm. Imma Treld. Narri Calling. Petra Ashe. The eighth was a seamstress whose name she did not yet know. She would know it by the next day.

Mariska listened. Her hands did not move. Her face did not change. She did not interrupt. When Tessa had finished she let the silence sit for a moment that was longer than was comfortable. Then she spoke.

“Do you understand what you are asking for.”

“I understand I am asking.”

“That is not what I asked.”

The silence after that lasted longer. Tessa had thought, in the three hours on the bench, about what she would say if the voice-keeper asked her something difficult. She had not thought of an answer that would have served here. The honest answer was that she did not understand what she was asking for. She did not even know what category of thing the voice-keeper held.

“I do not know what I am asking for,” she said. “I know only that what I have is not enough to find the killer. I know that the Driftborn have something the Watch does not. I am asking you to share what you have, because if you do not, more women will die.”

“How many more.”

“I do not know.”

“Three. Four. The Tidewater season has weeks yet to run, and what is doing this feeds while the Tidewater is high.”

The way Mariska said the word feeds changed the room slightly. The small warm cabin was not quite the same after the word. Tessa did not move. She did not respond to the word. She kept her face the way she kept her face in interview-rooms.

Mariska looked at her for a long moment.

“You came here without your coat.”

“Yes.”

“That tells me something. You spoke to one of my men last night and you came here today. That tells me something also. You know what you do not know. That is a quality I have not always found in Watch officers.”

“Voice-keeper —”

“I will not teach you today, Officer Halder.”

Tessa said nothing.

“I will not teach you today because the teaching of what we hold is not a thing one teaches to a person who has come once and asked. I have given that teaching three times in my life. Each of the three came back twice before I gave it. Two of the three came back a third time before I gave it. You have come once. You may come back. If you come back I will speak with you again. I do not promise the second conversation will be the teaching. I do not promise the third or the fourth. I am telling you, so that you will not waste your time, that what you are asking for cannot be obtained by asking.”

“How is it obtained.”

“By the kind of asking that does not have asking in it.”

Tessa sat with that. The beeswax lamp guttered slightly. Mariska’s hands did not move. The room smelled of old rope and old paper and the small warm wax.

“Voice-keeper,” Tessa said. “Three more women will die before I have come the second and third and fourth time.”

“Yes.”

“And you will let them die.”

“I do not let them die. They die of what is killing them. I am one old woman in an after-cabin. The teaching of what we hold is a thing I am the keeper of, not the giver of. I keep it as it has been kept, and I give it as it has been given, and I give it as I have been instructed to give it by the keepers before me. I cannot give it on a different schedule because three more women would otherwise die. If I gave it on that schedule, it would not be the same teaching.”

“That is a thing one says to oneself.”

“It is.”

Tessa did not press her. She had been ready to press her. She did not.

After a while she stood. Mariska looked up at her from the bench.

“I will come back,” Tessa said.

“Then I will speak with you again.”

“Voice-keeper —”

“Yes.”

“What is it.”

Mariska did not answer at once. She looked at Tessa for a long moment. Then she looked at the lamp.

“Come back,” she said.

Tessa went out. The deck-mate was at the rail by the gangway, waiting. He walked her to the pier without speaking. At the pier he nodded once and went back to the ship.

——— ◇ ———

She walked back across the harbour at dusk.

The lamps along the lower piers were being lit one at a time as she came. The light shifted from the late-afternoon grey to the small warm orange of the harbour-lamps, which Tessa had always thought was the prettiest light Karath had to offer. She did not feel the prettiness today. She walked with her hands in the pockets of her civilian coat and the wind on her face from the north and the lamps coming on along the wall.

She had come away with nothing. She had asked for the most important thing she had ever asked anyone for and she had been refused. The refusal had been kind — she could not say it had not been kind — and the refusal had been correct, in some way she could not yet articulate. None of which made the refusal less.

She walked back through Harborside in the early dark. The Anchor Stone was bright at her left as she passed it. She did not go in. She walked up through the Lower City to her own street. Pell Ovrin had not started the morning ovens yet; the bread on the third stair would not be there until pre-dawn. She climbed past the empty stair to her flat.

She lit the lamp.

She did not sit at the table. She stood in the middle of the small room for a moment, not unbuttoning her coat, looking at the table where the notebook lay closed.

She did not open the notebook that night.

She unbuttoned her coat. She hung it on the hook. She put out the lamp. She lay down on the bed in the dark with her clothes on and she did not sleep, and she did not write, and the notebook stayed closed on the table until morning.

——— ◇ ———