“What?”
“I haven’t thought of it yet,” Asa said, and picked the pigeon back up.
Steppan’s mouth opened and closed like a marionette’s. The point of the blade slipped down toward the floor, and he laughed once and mirthlessly. They ate in silence while outside the sun fell and darkness crept through the filthy streets. The wailing woman’s cries turned to a shouting match in a language Asa didn’t know and then ended abruptly. Steppan fed the smoky little fire, went to piss out the window at the end of the hall, and then came back and collapsed onto his mattress. Asa sat up, resting against the cold and creaking wall.
The best plan, of course, was for somebody—anybody, really—to outgrow their naive illusions about love, but since that was going to be tricky to whistle up, they needed a fallback. Otherwise, Steppan really would do something desperate and florid and suicidal. The idea of buying the girl’s freedom wasn’t bad, but the part about how to get the coin was terrible. So perhaps there was another way. Across the tiny room, Steppan’s breath slowed and deepened, his hands folded under his neck like a child’s. In the dim glow, his cheeks were a lighter shadow, the curve of his lips all but lost in the darkness of his little beard. How much did the workhouses pay, anyway? Without knowing what the price would be, it was hard to think of a concrete solution. Asa thought of the hunters looking for the supposedly dead Councilor Rouse and the joke about a reward. For most of the people of Sovereign North Bank, life was pretty damned cheap.
Life was cheap, and corpses were inexpensive.
Steppan’s eye flew open. “What?”
“What what?”
“You laughed.”
“Did I? Well, I thought of something funny.”
Steppan’s smile was as much a sound as anything. “You thought of something?”
“I’ll look into it in the morning while you put that thing back in hiding, eh?”
“Of course. Thank you, Asa. For everything. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Die, most likely, Asa thought.
The Temple sat beneath the city, its deepest chambers dug into the damp soil of the riverside. A great net of ropes hung suspended above the building itself, and the trash and garbage and bird’s nests and dead animals that had built up on it over the course of the years blocked what sunlight struggled down through the taller structures surrounding it. Dim beams caught the dust and filth that hung in the air, and also glimmered off tilework of scarlet and gold, ancient and ruined glasswork, pathways of yellowed marble kept clean by monks and priests. The effect was often compared to being under the overhanging trees of a jungle, but Asa thought it looked more like something underwater. The ruins left beneath the waves after a vast and sludgy flood.
Torches and lamps heated the air, even at midday, and the vast central hall with the statues of seven gods smelled of sweet incense. The priests and physicians who peopled the dark halls and worshipped the gods in the dimness were an equal mixture of saints dedicated to serving the most wretched in the worst places of the world and monsters who had fouled every more pleasant nest. Sometimes—rarely—the two classes overlapped.
Asa sat in the back pew, watching the vast bulk of the priest as he made his way down the aisle. The years had grayed his hair and thickened his jowls, but anyone who looked closely would have recognized him as the man the hunters sought. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough as a landslide.
“Asa.”
“Chancellor Rouse.”
“That is not my name any longer,” the priest said, lowering himself into the pew in front of Asa’s and twisting around to look over his massive shoulder. “But you know that. And so I have to think you are saying it for effect?”
“I’m nothing if not affected. But I’m not the only one saying that name recently. I talked to a magistrate’s hunter yesterday in Hafner’s Choke. He had a picture of you.”
Rouse pressed his lips together and heaved a sigh. “I’ve heard.”
“Then I assume you’ve got some plan for removing yourself from danger.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps it is time to surrender myself to the judgment of the council.”
Asa laughed once. Rouse looked injured.
“You don’t think so, friend Asa?”
“I think you’re as much the ice-hearted killer now as you were when you were in power, and you wear the priest’s collar well because you never thought anyone less than a god had authority over you.”
“True. All true.”
“So you have a plan.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, if you don’t, I do. And the price for my help is profoundly reasonable.”
Rouse was silent for a long while. The seven gods stared back at them with empty stonework eyes. Somewhere not too far away, an unseen choir lifted their dozen voices in the midday chant. Asa fought the impulse to fidget. There were stories of Chancellor Rouse slitting a man’s throat and pulling the tongue out through the hole as punishment for interrupting. Chances were good it was an exaggeration, but the stakes were high if it wasn’t.
“What would you have from me?” Rouse asked.
“Your help in a problem I’ve got. Your expertise. Nothing you haven’t done before. And in return, I’ll help you pull the hunter’s teeth and get rid of them for you, and they don’t even have to know you were involved in it.”
“That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”
“I can be reasonable.”
“Tell me precisely what it is you have in mind,” Rouse said.
Asa did, adding fewer embellishments than usual along the way. Rouse listened with an intimidating ferocity. By the end, he was laughing silently and with a violence that left the pew creaking under him.
“They will be missed,” he said when he’d regained himself.
“Perhaps, but that was always going to be a problem. Be honest, you were going to kill them.”
“I was.”
“So they’d have been missed anyway. This way, they stop stirring up the deep mud, you aren’t implicated, and we both make a little money. And if they do make their way back to the world, the danger of it falls on me. No one even knows for certain you were here at all.”
The choir resolved the chant on an ambiguous harmony, as if the gods were better honored by something that stayed open and unfinished at the end.
“My way is simpler,” Rouse said.
“My way doesn’t kill anyone.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“You’ve killed a lot of people, friend, and it’s gotten you here. Not a resounding argument for the strategy.”
The man who had once driven nations before his whips sat with the thought.
“Someday it will all go too far. The magistrates will come. Or the soldiers. They will burn this all to the waterline and call the world cleaner for it.”
“Probably,” Asa agreed. “But they aren’t doing it today, so why talk about it?”
A moment later, Rouse sighed. “Let us try your way.”
The rest of the day was spent preparing. Rouse’s list of herbs and poisons was shorter than Asa expected and also harder to put hands to. Dried lobelia and apron grass, distilled wine and arsenic powder. Asa traded one thing for another, talked sweetly, made promises and threats, wheedled, begged, wept, and stole. By sundown, Rouse had everything he’d asked for and a bit more, and Asa felt like the rope in a pulling contest. But it was done for the moment.
Sovereign North Bank did not sleep, but it did drowse. The ruddy light of sunset deepened the shadows, reddened the towers and walkways. Fires began to glow and flicker in the windows and on the rooftops, smoke stinking of coal and wood and dried dung filling the air. Some nights, mist rose from the dark water of the Taunis and mixed with it, and Nevripal across the water faded into nothing. On those nights, Sovereign North Bank seemed to stand on the edge of an endless sea, shrouded and silent. Friends and conspirators gathered to sing or complain or plot their escape. Those without shelter begged for warmth and food or else died in the corners, unlamented. People fell in bed or fell in love, shouted and wept and danced. It was like any great city, only more so, and that was part of why Asa loved it, but only part.