Silence fell, and Marcus could hear his own rapid, ragged breaths. Giforte still held the staff in front of his face, unmoving. His eyes were closed, and his throat worked rapidly.
“Vice Captain?” Marcus said. “Are you all right?”
There was a long pause before Giforte opened his eyes, blowing out a deep breath. “I’m fine,” he said. “Eisen? Jones?”
“I’m all right, sir,” Eisen said, voice a little shaky. “Right through my arm. But I think Jones is dead.”
A moment’s investigation showed that he was right. Marcus tried to shift the huge wooden thing off Jones, the other Armsman, but found that he couldn’t even budge it. Opening the wardrobe door, he found the whole thing was stuffed with sacks of bricks. It must weigh a ton.
He indicated the bricks to Giforte.
“They were waiting for us,” the vice captain said.
“Or waiting for someone,” Marcus said. “There might be a lookout upstairs.”
They looked at each other, sharing the image of a man with a pistol trained on the stairs, just waiting for someone to ascend. Marcus took a deep breath.
“I’ll take a look,” he said. “See if you can get this door open.”
“Sir-”
Marcus was already crossing the room, bloody saber still in hand. The right move would have been to wait until the others could get inside, but one man was dead already; he couldn’t stomach the idea of sending another into what might be a trap. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. Light flickered against the flaking plaster of the roof. Someone has a fire lit.
He paused, considering his options, then raised his saber and took the stairs at a run, hoping to startle anyone who might be waiting into a hasty shot. The wood creaked alarmingly under his boots, but he cleared the last step and immediately threw himself sideways, out of the line of fire, landing in a crouch.
The second floor was another large room, this one unfurnished except for three dingy straw pallets. At one end of the room was a heavy iron cauldron, with a merry firelight coming from inside it. Standing next to it was a young man in worn leathers, in the act of dropping a small bound notebook into the flames.
“Don’t move!” Marcus growled, hurrying over. The young man raised his hands, no surprise evident in his features, and stepped back. A glance into the cauldron confirmed Marcus’ fears. It was a mass of glowing paper. Those bastards downstairs were buying time.
“You’re under arrest,” he said, awkwardly aware that there was probably a proper way for an Armsman to arrest someone, and that he didn’t know it. “Keep your hands up and don’t try anything.”
The young man smiled. He had a thin, expressive face, with a neat beard on his chin but smooth cheeks. When he spoke, Marcus could hear just a trace of a gravelly Murnskai accent.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and smiled a little wider. “It’s good to meet you, Captain d’Ivoire.”
CHAPTER FIVE
WINTER
In an effort to calm her jangling nerves, Winter was trying to make an inventory of all the things that were making her anxious. This didn’t help, but once she’d started she found she couldn’t stop.
First and foremost was the dress, or “the damned dress” as she thought of it. It had been uncomfortable to begin with, but she’d assumed that it wouldn’t take long before old habits reasserted themselves. Now it had been two days, and while she was able to go for minutes at a time without thinking about it, sooner or later she would turn around quickly or get hit by a gust of wind, and the feel of the long skirt’s fabric brushing against her legs would have her grabbing for it in a panic.
The top was nearly as bad. It was by no standards indecent, but the short sleeves and billowing fit made her feel half-naked. The figure it draped was, while not generous, still clearly that of a young woman, and every time Winter caught sight of her reflection in a shopwindow she had to fight a powerful urge to find something with which to cover herself. She even found herself missing the tight pinch of her self-tailored undershirts. At least she still had a hat, even if it was a slouching felt thing instead of the brimmed officer’s cap she’d grown used to.
Second-or maybe it was part of the first-was the constant dread of impending discovery. Winter had lived for two years among the men of the Royal Army, knowing that any slip that led to someone finding out her true gender would lead to her being locked up and sent home at the very best. Walking around a crowded city, dressed like this, was worse than walking around naked. She felt like the most brazen of whores, shouting out her most closely held secret for all to hear. The apparent unconcern of those around her would be shattered at any moment by-someone, some authority, who would drag her away somewhere to answer for her crimes.
Third was the more mundane anxiety that she was not getting anywhere with her assigned task. She had given herself a day of simply walking around in her new garb, getting used to the idea. She’d somehow expected to attract stares from every eye, as though the news would race out ahead of her that here was Winter Ihernglass, dressed as a girl! In fact, nobody paid her the least attention, aside from a few street vendors who took her relatively well-washed appearance to mean that she had money.
Walking through the streets of a city unobserved was a new experience for Winter. A few vague early memories aside, she’d spent her entire childhood at Mrs. Wilmore’s and had gone more than a decade without venturing farther from the old manor house than the neighboring estates. Then she’d run away to Khandar. The Colonials had had the run of the city before the Redemption, but their uniforms and skin color meant they would always be objects of attention.
It was something they’d all gotten used to, and she’d stopped noticing the feeling until it was suddenly gone. Here she was just a girl, one among thousands, a little out of the ordinary for this neighborhood but no more so than dozens of others. She felt as if some sorcerer had turned her invisible.
The second day, she’d resolved to get down to work. Janus had supplied her with plenty of coin, and she’d rented a room at a hostel, then set about canvassing the town for some sign of the Leatherbacks, the revolutionary group she was supposed to be joining. This proved to be less than successful. Winter found that while people didn’t pay her any mind walking by, the minute she opened her mouth she was irretrievably marked as an outsider. Quite apart from her not knowing any of the locals, her voice lacked their twanging accents, and she was so ignorant of the local dialect that she found some of the patois borderline incomprehensible.
The district was loosely referred to as the Docks, a poorly defined area covering roughly half of Vordan’s Southside. It was bounded in the north by the bank of the Vor and in the south by Wall Street, a broad thoroughfare that was all that remained of Vordan’s medieval city wall. There were more houses beyond Wall Street, but that was widely agreed to be where the Bottoms began, a swampy, unhealthy district that even the Docks looked down on. In the west the river and the street met at the southern water battery, forming a section of city shaped like a wedge of cheese. To the east, though, the Docks gradually petered out, residential buildings, shops, and wine sinks gradually transforming into the warren of dirt roads and vast warehouses that surrounded the Lower Market.
Life in the Docks had three poles, one of which was those warehouses. Every day, thousands of tons of goods-produce, meat, cereals, animal fodder, and other foodstuffs for the most part-were brought into the city via the Green Road from the south, the wagons forming a line miles long down the swamp-bound causeway. Thousands more tons-almost anything that could fit aboard a ship, including silk and coffees that had originated in Ashe-Katarion-entered the city from the west, shipped upriver by barge from Vayenne at the Vor’s mouth or from another city on one of the river’s many tributaries. More barges, narrower and shallow-drafted, brought stone, cheeses, and wool from upriver. All of these things needed to be moved from boat to wagon, wagon to boat, boat to warehouse, or any combination of the three, and a substantial portion of the people living in the Docks made their living doing exactly that.