Chapter 3

The Bluebell was a sturdy old cog, its sail painted the black of the Watch.

Tristan was the first to arrive, which went against him. The sailors on watch were asleep at their posts, napping on crates yet to be loaded, and they’d not been pleased to be woken up. Even less pleased had been their officer, a one-armed crone named Celipa who’d had to be fetched from her bed since she was the one with the roster.

“You look like you’re fresh off the street, rat,” she glared.

“You have the eyes of an eagle, tia,” Tristan flattered. “A rat is what I am, and like one I will disappear quietly into your hold should you let me.”

Her mood was not improved, sadly, and neither was his since Fortuna was now snickering behind him.

“If his name isn’t on the roster, throw him into the sea,” Celipa ordered her men. “I don’t care if you beat him first. Or take his cabinet.”

By the unpleasant smiles on the face of those two well-built sailors, he would be beaten bloody given half a chance. Charming. It was still better than to stay out in the Murk and risk the Hoja Roja catching his tail. They wouldn’t stop at bruises.

“Who are you supposed to be, rat?” the crone asked.

“Tristan Abrascal,” he charmingly smiled.

She was, again, visibly unimpressed. Her lips quirked into a nasty little number as she trailed her finger down the roster, sneaking an expectant glance at him, but then she froze.

“On there, yes?” Tristan pressed.

The old woman looked him up and down, disbelieving.

“Whose brat are you?” Celipa asked. “You must have blood in the black.”

“My blood is buried shallow, tia,” Tristan replied, smiled turned sharp. “May I come aboard or not?”

The crone snorted, but he knew put-on when he saw it. Something had spooked her.

“Go on, then,” Celipa said. “Down in the hold, you can claim a cot if it’s on the ground.”

“Much obliged,” the thief smiled.

She turned to spit into the waters of the Shoal.

“If I see you try to get into a crate, rat, you’ll get that beating you just ducked,” the crone warned.

It was not the warmest welcome Tristan had ever received, but it was far from the worst. The cog was mostly empty, its crew out in the city, but an armed man pointed him down the two sets of stairs to the hold after eyeing him suspiciously. There were a few sailors sleeping on cots down there, but otherwise it was only a few crates and empty room. Cogs were trading vessels, but this one looked made to ferry men instead. Tristan stepped about quietly, looking for an empty cot with a wall at its back. Fortuna had been pleased with the amusement of watching him get browbeaten earlier, but now that it had passed the goddess was remembering to be offended on his behalf.

“At her age,” Fortuna mused, “it would take only a slip to break her hip.”

“So I can sprain an ankle before taking the trials?” Tristan murmured, careful not to wake a sailor as he shrugged off his cabinet’s leather straps and set it down. “I think not.”

The luck always went hardest after him when it was used to hurt another.

“Every slight should be avenged, no matter how small,” Fortuna said, tone disapproving.

He rolled his eyes at her. Even destitute gods breathed arrogance, never learning the beggar’s virtues. It was in their nature, Tristan had come to suspect, and the nature of gods did not change. Fortuna was the same now as when he’d first met her, nothing more than a terrified boy on the run. The years they’d shared had changed her not a whit.

“I’ll think on it,” he lied.

She huffed.

“Sometimes I think your blood is cold as a lizard’s,” she complained. “Does nothing move you to revenge?”

Tristan smiled without joy, thinking of the five names carved into the marrow of his bones. His List.

“Only the one thing,” he answered. “And it is very far from this boat.”

He cast a look around after, wary of having spoken so long into what others would see thin air. The few sailors down here were still asleep, to his relief. Talking at the unseen was a good way to out yourself as a contractor – or a lunatic, though admittedly some days that line was razor thin. Fortuna sighed, then gestured for him to settle down in the cot. She would, as she’d had for years, keep watch over his sleep. He smiled again, meaning it this time, and slipped under the bedding. Back to the wall and a goddess watching over him, the thief fell straight into slumber.

—

Tristan woke to the sound of a man coughing.

“Company,” Fortuna whispered into his ear.

It could not have been more than a few hours since he fell asleep, early in the morning. Yet the light of a lantern – the cold glow a sure sign the oil was mixed with palestone powder to lend an echo of the Glare’s pale light – was licking at the sides of the hold, held up by a bearded sailor ushering in a ragged band. The one who’d coughed was the first to limp into sight, a toothless old man still clutching his mouth. He was jostled aside by a scowling mass of a man whose leather vest left the arms exposed, revealing intricate patterns of ink. Menor Mano, Tristan recognized, eyeing the tattoos. This one had been a legbreaker.

“Careful,” the sailor warned the big man in a low voice. “Any fighting on the Bluebell will get you shot and thrown overboard. No warnings, no second chances.”

The legbreaker’s scowl deepened and he glared at the sailor.

“Keep walking, blackcloak,” he said.

The sailor snorted, reaching for the pistol at his side.

“You’re one of the paid seats, not the recommended,” he replied. “Mouth off to me again and I’ll put a shot between your eyes.”

The big man’s face contorted in anger, laying bare his broken nose and the flat Aztlan look of his face, but with a snarl he turned away and stalked off.

“Thought so,” the sailor muttered, then turned a cool gaze on the rest. “The same rules apply to you lot. Don’t make me say it again.”

None of those remaining seemed inclined to challenged him. A pair that must be a couple, given how closely they held each other, shied away from the sailor’s gaze as if afraid of being hit while a girl around Tristan’s age looked like she might start crying. It made the two who seemed unconcerned with argument stand out all the more. A bespectacled old woman looking half asleep and past paying attention to much of anything, then to her left a Tianxi of middle age who looked unimpressed. Tristan studied the cast of the man’s shoulders and the way he stood ramrod straight, lips thinning. Soldier.

“Go on, then,” the sailor grunted. “Find somewhere to sleep. The rest will arrive in a few hours.”

They shuffled in tiredly, revealing the last three who’d stood behind. A blond youth with the City’s look about him, looking at his surroundings with polite curiosity, and a pair of short Tianxi twins in their forties. Women both, their dark hair kept in low ponytails with the side of their heads shaved. The cut would have outed them as Meng girls even if their smiles had not revealed blue-tinted teeth. It was a custom of Meng-Xiaofan members to chew strands of dewroot, a sweet-smelling herb said to soothe pains and sharpen wits – at the price of dyeing teeth and sometimes even tongues blue.

As the newcomers settled across the hold, some of them waking disgruntled sailors, one of the twins caught him looking and shot back a quick once-over that led into a snort. She leaned close to her sister for a whisper, the two of them then turning to offer him that Meng grin of porcelain in white and blue. Tristan straightened, muscles tensing as they moved towards him and the blue open robes in Tianxi style they wore over practical City tunic and trousers trailed.

“Pinch me, Ju, I must be dreaming,” the closest twin grinned. “Look at what we’ve got here.”

The other twin looked him up and down, making a show of it.

“Back to the wall, dirty fingernails and a crow’s nest for hair – oh my, Lan,” she snickered. “Smells like rat in here, doesn’t it?”

“She’s not wrong,” Fortuna conceded, ever the traitor.

Yet Tristan’s shoulders loosened, for all that the words were close to insult. It was to be that kind of a conversation; he was back on familiar grounds. Putting on a wicked look, he snorted back. Sniffing the air theatrically, he the gasped in surprise.

“And here I thought it smelled like dust and floating corpses,” he told them. “But I suppose it might just be that foul herb you’ve been chewing.”

There was no need for either side to make the Sign of the Rat, not when the two had the Meng look good as a branded and they’d sized him up in a breath, but it was worth establishing neither were mere mud from the Murk: they were proper gutter, from the wrong side of men’s laws. The tacit admission on his part he knew the main trades of the Meng – drugs and paid deaths – visibly put the sisters in a good mood. Only a fool would talk of trust between rats, but the gutter was a shared tongue. The thief invited them to sit, smile still on his face, and noted the elegant fold of their legs as they did. Sellers, he decided, or someone facing the front. That kind of presentation was learned.

“Tristan,” he introduced himself.

“You have our names,” Ju said.

Not likely the real ones, but he was hardly offended. It was only good sense on their part and he might have tried the same if he’d not had his own written true on the Watch’s passenger list.

“So I do,” Tristan said. “And the pleasure of your company, at an unexpected hour no less.”

He got twin inscrutable looks at the implied question there.

“More interesting is that you were already here, Tristan,” Lan replied. “We were given a precise hour to arrive, see, after coin talked.”

An implied question of her own, with an offered trade tacked on. Given how little he knew of this whole business, the thief had no qualms in trading: it could only be to his advantage. As was only proper between rats, he paid up front.

“A teacher had my name placed on the list,” he told them. “I am uncertain if it is reward or punishment.”

One of the twins – Ju – had a small nick in the skin near her left ear, he noticed. Looked a little deep for a shaving miss, which was interesting, but mostly it would let him tell them apart in a pinch. Both sisters grimaced.

“A hard teacher, if they might think the Dominion of Lost Things a reward,” Ju said. “But also not just anyone, if they could get you on this ship with only their word. We paid for it, see. We need the prize.”

He chewed the inside of his cheek. The ‘prize’ to passing the trials, aside from not dying a horrible death, was to be inducted straight into the ranks of the Watch. They must have had death dogging their shadow, to believe being part of the Meng-Xiaofan would not be enough to assure their safety.

“I have left a burning bridge behind myself,” he carefully admitted. “Unknowingly, I earned the Roja’s ire.”

Lan leaned in, suddenly grinning again.

“Well now, that makes you a friend to these poor sisters,” she said. “No admirers of ours, the Hoja Roja. Not since we were sent to open a shop in the Murk.”

Tristan cocked his head to the side, curious, and lightly traced a finger across his throat. Ju shook her head.

“Merchandise,” she told him. “Dust, whalechew and pipe poppy.”

He let out a low whistle.

“The Roja runs the parlours for those in the Murk,” he said. “I thought the Meng stuck to the docks?”

“Noise was made back in the Republics that we should cut out the middlemen,” Lan said, tone bitter. “We warned against it, told them it was a mistake, but why listen to us? We just live here.”

“Then when the Roja went blood-mad, they cut their losses,” Ju cursed. “The lizard sheds the tail in the tiger’s jaws, they told us.”

It was Tristan’s turn to grimace. Reading between the lines, the Meng-Xiaofan had cut loose the people they’d sent into the Murk as an ill-fated attempt to cut into the Hoja Roja’s trade. Tossed in their heads as appeasement so knives could be sheathed and business return to usual.

“There can’t be many of you left,” he said.

“Two,” Lan replied, tone curt.

And he was looking at them. No wonder they were desperate enough to take the trials as a way out. It was grim talk and he was at a loss as to where to go from there. With grace that only further convinced him they’d had front-facing roles, the twins guided the conversation away from the pit.

“You’d think that for the ramas we paid the accommodations would be nicer, at least,” Ju sighed, looking around.

Tristan hid his surprise. A gold rama was worth three silver arboles, each of which were worth thirty-four copper radizes: he’d only rarely had truck with arboles, much less their golden sisters. And so he sniffed a detail of interest, for though he could believe sisters that’d been in the Meng could scrape together ramas the twins were not the only one who’d come tonight. The thief’s gaze moved to the remainder of the ten that’d been guided in, skimming over the legbreaker and the woman with spectacles, lingering instead on the toothless old man, the shivering girl and the couple. The latter’s clothing was threadbare, shabby. All were thin. Tristan doubted they could scrape a silver together between the lot of them.

“There are other ways to get in,” he deduced.

Lan followed his gaze to the old man and she chuckled.

“That one you have wrong,” she said. “We saw him settle with our own eyes, though he paid in books instead of coin. You’re not wrong about most the rest.”

“They’re paid for,” Ju smiled, mirthless. “It’s for bets, you see. How far they’ll get, how well they’ll do. Large sums by large men.”

Tristan’s hands clenched. An old and familiar anger flared in his belly.

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“Palace side?” he asked.

Lan shook her head.

“Gutter,” she said. “The Menor Mano went heavy this year, I hear, but there’s others.”

The anger simmered down. It was not infanzones making sport of gutter lives, only monsters doing as monsters did. The thief hummed, considering the arrivals with fresh eyes.

“So who was I wrong about?” he asked.

Ju cocked a plucked eyebrow.

“Burned a bridge, you said,” she invited.

Fair, Tristan thought. He’d gotten more from them than the other way around.

“Robbed someone out on a contract for the Orelanna brothers,” he said. “It ended in a corpse.”

He saw the shift in the way they sat, the rise in wariness but also the birth of a degree of respect. He’d been a resource, before. Now he was a potential asset.

“That’ll get a man killed, sure enough,” Lan amiably said.

Ju cleared her throat.

“The pretty blond, he’s the other one that paid his way onboard,” she said. “His name’s Brun.”

It took a moment for Tristan’s eye to find the youth in question, as he was tucked away between crates. Back to the wall, with an angle on most the room that let him look in without being seen in return. Not exactly shopkeeper’s habits, these. Brun caught his look, offering a smile in reply. The thief looked away first.

“That one’s dangerous,” Fortuna murmured, leaning against the wall. “And he’s got someone with him. They’re loud.”

Tristan stiffened. Someone, to the Lady of Long Odds, would mean someone like her. Another god. He’d known there would be others with contract on the ship, but it was not a pleasant surprise.

“Someone to be careful of,” the thief warned the twins.

They traded a look, then Ju nodded thanks for the warning. They did not ask why he would give such warning. Asking about someone’s contract was the cat-killing sort of curiosity.

“They let in the desperate at night,” Lan said, “but the rest will be coming soon. The real contenders.”

“The infanzones,” Tristan evenly said. “They have seats promised to them under old accords.”

Even a rat like him knew that, mostly because the infanzones themselves trumpeted it about. The yearly trials on the island were a way for young aristocrats to prove themselves skillful and daring, to jostle with each other for pre-eminence. The names of those who had gone and how far they’d made it were made public, spread around by criers at the Vermilion Festival every year. Rumour had it that making it as far as the third trial could get you bumped up in the line of succession.

“Fifteen,” Ju agreed. “Mind you, noble asses won’t even fill half of those. They bring guards and servants.”

He wrinkled his nose. Another pack to steer clear of.

“They aren’t worth a worry,” Lan dismissed. “Nobles will play it safe, make it to the beginning of the third and then take the way out.”

There were two of those. The trials on the Dominion of Lost Things were meant to forge recruits for the Watch, but your average infanzon had no intention of renouncing titles and wealth to join the blackcloaks. So instead they took the paths of retreat the Watch had arranged on the island, safe places where a participant could desist from going any further.

“It’s the recommended candidates that’ll be dangerous,” Lan continued. “They’re here for the prize and they won’t be afraid to kill to make it.”

Tristan thinly smiled and the older woman looked somewhat abashed. He was, after all, almost certainly one of these recommended candidates.

“I hear most are foreigners, usually,” the thief said, returning the earlier grace.

“Heard that too,” Ju hastily agreed. “Though I’m not sure how many there will be.”

“There’s at most a hundred seats open every year,” Lan noted, “and we heard seventy-three were filled this time. There are two ships, though, and one sailed off yesterday.”

The other twin cocked a brow at him.

“Did you get a look at the passenger list?”

Tristan shook his head.