“Not here,” said Seven, before Wick had got his mouth open. “Walls have ears, and this one has a cat.”
It was true. Hettie’s cat, a scarred ginger thing called Admiral, sat on the beam over the hatch with its tail round its feet, looking at them both as if it had been paid to.
“Tomorrow. Dawn. The roof.” Seven’s dark eyes went to Wick’s hands again. “Put those in cold water tonight, not warm. Warm will make them worse. And do not do it again.”
“I didn’t do—”
“I know.” A small gold leaf detached from Seven’s shoulder and drifted down through the hatch. “That is why we should talk.”
Then its head sank out of sight, slow as a tide, and Wick was left with the candle and the cat and about four hundred questions.
He put his hands in the washbasin. The water went milky with cold, and after a while the ache eased. He did not sleep much.
Morning came up grey and rinsed, the storm gone out to sea and the city steaming. Seven was gone before light, on some business of Brakka’s at the Wharves; the roof, Hettie said, would keep. Hettie had three messages to run before breakfast and Wick ran them, because that was the job and because it was better than sitting still.
The first was to the harbourmaster on the Wharves, where the fog bells were silent now and the gulls were doing the screaming instead. He went past the harbour wall where the tide tables were chalked up fresh each morning in the harbourmaster’s crabbed hand, high water 7 past 9, ebb to 3 past 4, and he read them without meaning to, as he read everything. Aldo had taught him off that wall. Letters first, then numbers, then the shape of the whole table, sitting on the cold stone with their legs hanging over the water and Aldo’s finger moving along the chalk. That’s a six, Wicky, it’s got a belly.
The second message was to a chandler in Ratchet Row, up through the Pell quarter, where every house leaned on its neighbour and the air smelled of solder-smoke and hot oil. Pell rebuilt what the sea threw away. That was the saying in Saltmire. The sea threw a great deal away.
The third message was to nobody, and he ran it anyway, because it was the one he ran every week.
The Saltings lay south of the city wall, a mile of mudflats and shanties and old tide-posts stuck in the ooze like the ribs of something drowned. He had grown up here. He knew the paths across the mud by heart, which boards held and which did not, and he went out along them at a fast walk with the wind flattening his hair, until he reached the ninth post from the shore road, the one with the lean.
It was just a post. Black oak, salt-silvered, tide-scummed to the height of his chest. Near the top, where the high water did not reach, was a scratched line of waves with notches above it.
He and Aldo had made the marks up the summer Wick was nine, when Aldo had started working the boats and was gone for days. It was a code built on the tide tables: a wave with notches, the notches counting hours; a bar under the wave meant hidden here, look at the foot of the post; a cross meant danger, don’t come; a circle meant safe. Aldo had left him messages here for four years. Little ones. Back Thursday. Bread under the stone. And then the Grey Hounds had taken the contract in the Thornwood, and Aldo had scratched a wave with three notches and a circle, safe, three days, and the Grey Hounds had marched out of the landward gate, and that was fifteen months ago.
Wick crouched and looked at the foot of the post, under the stone, where the bread used to go.
Mud.
He had known it would be mud. He put his fingertips, still faintly white, against the old circle for a moment, and then went back to the city at a run because he was late and because running helped.
He heard the shouting before he was properly into Ratchet Row.
“STOP HIM! My SATCHEL! It’s got PIP in it!”
Oswin Tallowby came out of a chandler’s doorway like a cork from a bottle, frill flared right out round his head like a dish, goggles bouncing on their strap. Something small and fast and grey-brown shot across the street ahead of him with a leather satchel clutched to its chest in both webbed paws, went straight up a drainpipe in four swarming movements, and was on the roof.
Wick had never seen a Skitter so close. Up-top they were a rumour and a curse: the otter-folk who lived under the piers and in the drains, who came out at night and took whatever was not nailed down. This one was child-sized and sleek and whiskered, with a torn left ear, and it paused on the gutter for one instant to look down at the street with bright black eyes, and Wick saw a tin button glint on a string round its neck.
Then it was gone over the ridge.
“Why,” said Ilsa Quire, arriving at Wick’s shoulder with a loaf under her arm, “is it always him.”
“It’s got Pip,” Oswin wailed. “My moth. And the glue-pots, and — oh, stars, the glue-pots, if it drops that on its head it’ll stick to the roof till spring, which, actually, hmm—”
Ilsa had already dropped the loaf in his arms and was going up the drainpipe.
Wick went up after her. He could not have said why. He climbed; it was the thing he was good at. He had climbed every post on the Saltings and once, for a bet, the fog-bell tower, and the drainpipe was nothing, and he came over the ridge on his hands and knees and saw Ilsa already three roofs ahead, running the ridge-tiles like a cat, and the Skitter two roofs beyond her, going like a thrown stone.
“Go home, Saltings boy,” she yelled back without turning her head.
He did not go home.
Ratchet Row’s roofs ran into each other for a quarter of a mile, a jumble of slates and leads and tarred felt and Pell wind-vanes made of scrap. The Skitter went over a gap between two houses without breaking stride, and Ilsa went over after it, and Wick came up to the gap and looked down at four floors of nothing and jumped, and landed badly, and rolled, and was up again with his palms stinging.
“You’re going to die,” Ilsa shouted.
“I’m fine!”
“Nobody asked!”
The Skitter dropped off the end of the row into a lead gutter that ran along the back of a tannery, a long sloping trough a foot wide with the stink of the pits rising off the yard below. It ran the gutter like a path. Ilsa went into it a few yards behind and ran it too, arms out, boots slapping on the lead. Wick saw she was going to catch it, she was faster, she was much faster, and then he saw the Skitter glance back, and reach down with one webbed paw without slowing, and flip up a loose length of guttering so that it stood on end for a moment like a trap-door.
Ilsa went into it at a dead run.
She did not fall. She was too good for that. But she hit it, and sprawled, and lost four strides, and said a word Wick had only ever heard from sailors.
He had not followed her into the gutter. He had gone up instead, over the tannery ridge, where he could see the whole yard and the grey chop of the harbour beyond. He saw the Skitter come to the end of the gutter where it emptied into a drain mouth, a black pipe in the yard wall as wide as a barrel, and dive in head first with the satchel, and he thought: drains go to the water, and he knew where the water was.
He went down the far side of the tannery roof on his backside, dropped to a shed, dropped to the lane, and ran for the Wharves.
He got there first. It was the only time he ever beat Ilsa Quire at anything, and he was too out of breath to enjoy it.
The drain came out under the fishmongers’ pier, a stone mouth dribbling into the harbour, and a barnacled stair ran down beside it to the water. Wick stopped at the top of the stair with his chest heaving and heard splashing below in the dark, and then a small grey-brown shape came scrambling out of the pipe onto the lowest step with the satchel in its teeth, shaking water off its fur, and looked up, and saw him, and went still.
Ilsa dropped off the pier edge above and landed on the step behind it with a knife in her hand.
“Right,” she said. “End of the line, drain-rat.”
The Skitter looked at her, and at the water, and at Wick, and sat down. Up close it was thin. Its ribs showed through its wet fur. The torn ear had healed badly. The tin button on its string was the brightest thing about it; it had been polished until it shone.
“Skritch didn’t take nothing valuable,” it said. Its voice was quick and high, like a whistle. “Just the bag. Big-folk’s got lots of bags. Skritch looked inside and it’s only a tin bug and some pots that smell no-no, nothing shiny, nothing to eat, Skritch would’ve given it back—”
“Course you would,” said Ilsa. “Captain Osei’s on the quay. She can have you.” She said to Wick, not taking her eyes off the Skitter: “Watch catches a Skitter thieving, they brand it. Here.” She touched the inside of her wrist with the knife-point. “Does the warren a favour. Means they can see which ones to throw out.”
The Skitter’s whiskers went flat against its face.
Wick looked up the quay. He could see her: Captain Ruth Osei of the Tidewatch, a tall dark tired-looking woman in the blue-grey coat, standing with two of her men by the weighing-house fifty yards off. He could have called out. Ilsa was waiting for him to.
“Give the bag back,” he said instead.
The Skitter looked at him for a moment. Then it climbed two steps, slowly, and put the satchel down by his foot, and backed off again.
Wick crouched and opened the flap. Inside, among stoppered jars wrapped in rags, something stirred: a moth as big as his palm, made of brass and clockwork and painted tin, with a tiny glass bead in its thorax that glowed a sleepy green. It crawled up onto his thumb and opened and shut its wings, tick, tick, and he felt a stupid lump in his throat.
“It’s all there,” he said. “Let him go.”
“What?”
“Let him go. He gave it back.”
“He gave it back because I’ve got a knife at his neck.” Ilsa’s voice had gone flat. “You know what you’re doing? You’re teaching him it works. Next week it’s somebody’s purse and the week after it’s a child’s shoes off its feet, Saltings boy, I’ve seen it—”
“He’s starving,” Wick said. “Look at him.”
“Everybody’s starving.”
“Then one less.” He straightened up with the satchel under his arm and the moth on his thumb and looked at the Skitter, who was looking at him with an expression he could not read at all. “Go on. Go.”
The Skitter did not go at once. It stood on the stair with the harbour slapping at its feet, and put one webbed paw flat on its chest, over the button.
“Skritch owes you,” it said. “Squeak true.”
Then it turned and went into the water without a splash and was gone under the pier.
Ilsa put her knife away so hard it clicked.
“You,” she said, “are going to get somebody killed.” And she went up the stair without looking back, and he followed, and neither of them said anything all the way to Lampwick Lane, except that at the corner she said, “I’d have had him if he hadn’t flipped that lead,” and Wick said, “I know,” and that was true, so it did not help.
The Archivist was already in the Drowned Lantern when they got back.
Wick knew him at once, though he had only spoken to him once: a thin stooped old man at the Lanterns’ table by the hearth, in a black scholar’s coat gone green at the seams, with ink-stained fingers and little round spectacles and a cough he turned politely into his sleeve. Benedek Quill, Keeper of the Compact Archive. On the table in front of him lay a sheet of paper with a great blob of red wax at the bottom, and Brakka was looking at it the way a very hungry person looks at a pie.
“Three hundred marks,” she said, as Wick came in.
“Three hundred,” Quill agreed, “on return. Whatever you find. That is the Compact’s seal, Captain, not mine; the Archive is the Compact’s memory, and the Archive’s purse pays it. We want to know what became of the Grey Hound Company. The Compact wrote them off a year ago and a year is long enough for a bad conscience.” He coughed, and took a paper twist from his pocket, and sucked a lozenge. Camphor. “Their captain filed a route. We want the route walked, their camp found if it still stands, and their records brought home, if there are any. Fifteen people, Captain. Fifteen families.”
“And a barrow of nothing at the end of it,” said Ilsa, dropping onto a stool.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. The Grey Hounds were in the Thornwood on a salvage contract. Carrovan ruins. Something took them. I should like to know what.” The old man’s gaze went round the table and came to rest on Wick, and stayed there, and warmed. “And this is the Marsh boy. Good morning, Wick. Mistress Dunmore tells me you had an exciting night.”
“Morning, sir.” Wick put the satchel down by Oswin, who seized it and began counting jars under his breath. Pip flew off Wick’s thumb and landed on the Pell’s goggles and sat there, ticking.
“Your brother spoke of you, you know.” Quill smiled. “Before he marched. Two years ago, a little more, he came to my Archive asking about old maps, Carrovan maps, which not many do. A serious young man. He said his little brother could read the tide tables better than the harbourmaster, and that he was going to make sure the boy never had to go on the boats.” He took out the paper twist again and held it across the table. “Lozenge? For the cold. It gets into the chest, this weather.”
Wick took one. It was sharp and medicinal and made his eyes water, and under it his throat went tight, because I’m going to make sure you never go on the boats was a thing Aldo had actually said, in the attic, the night before he marched. Wick had never told anyone that.
“Which brings me to the clause,” Quill said, turning back to Brakka, and his finger went to a line on the paper. “Six hundred, if the boy goes with you.”
The table went quiet. Oswin stopped counting.
“He knows his brother’s hand,” Quill said, gently, as if explaining to a child. “He knows how the Grey Hounds marked a trail; his brother would have used what they used. Papers, scratched signs, a cache. Your company could walk past a hundred of those, Captain, and never see them. He would not.” He coughed, and smiled a little, ruefully. “And I will be honest, since it is my purse. I have read a great deal about what happens to people who go looking for Carrovan doors. Double is what it costs to be sure that whoever walks that road has a reason to walk back. A brother is a reason. I know of nothing that holds a company together like one.”
“No,” said Brakka.
“Six hundred marks would—”
“I know what it would. No children. Children die.” She said it flatly, the way you state the weather. “That’s not a price, Archivist, it’s a rule.”
Quill inclined his head. “Then three hundred. The offer stands either way.” He coughed, folded his hands, and looked up at the lamps over the bar, which were burning ordinary and yellow. “Your lamplighters are worse than my clerks, Mistress Dunmore,” he said, to Hettie, mildly. “I had the whole of it on the Terraces before my breakfast. Frost on the windows and every lamp in the house burning white.” He shook his head. “I did not know one weaver could do that.”
Nobody at the table had said anything about the lamps.
Wick looked at Hettie, behind the bar. Hettie was wiping a jug and not looking at anyone. He looked at Seven, standing by the hearth with its hands folded, and Seven’s face gave nothing. And he thought: it was last night. It was raining. How does a thing get up the Terraces that fast?
“Watch sergeant drinks here,” Brakka said, following his look, and shrugged. “Saw it. Half of Lampwick Lane’s heard by now, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Half of Lampwick Lane,” Quill agreed, “and all of my clerks.” He gathered his coat about him and stood, slowly, a hand on the table. “I shall want your answer by tomorrow night, Captain. The Compact’s patience is not long. Mine is longer, but it is not what it was.” He nodded to Wick, kindly. “Look after those hands, young man. They are the only pair you get.” And he went out into the fog.
When he had gone, Brakka sat and looked at the red seal with her tusks showing.
“Three hundred keeps the licence,” Oswin said, very quietly. “Just. If Hettie forgives the window.”
“I know what it keeps.”
“I’d like to—” Wick heard his own voice and could not stop it. “I’d like to go. Captain. I can read. I know the marks. I know his marks. If there’s anything of Aldo’s out there—”
“No.”
“I’d carry. I’d cook. I’m not asking for a share—”
“Sprat.” Brakka turned her head, and her face was not unkind, and that was somehow worse. “I had a crew once. Not this one. Before. I led them somewhere on a stranger’s say-so for a stranger’s coin, and I brought back six out of thirty, and three of the ones I didn’t were younger than you.” She tapped the table once with one enormous finger. “No children. I’ll go and find your brother, boy. That’s a thing I’ll do for you, and it goes in the Ledger. But you’ll be here when I bring him.”
She picked up the contract and went out to the yard to think, which for Brakka meant hitting a fence-post with Auntie until it fell over.
Wick stood by the table with the lozenge burning on his tongue and his white-tipped fingers curled into his palms.
“Well,” said Ilsa. She had got up, and was pulling her coat on, and she stopped beside him on her way to the door and looked at him with the scar through her eyebrow and no particular expression. “That’s that, then. You’re not coming, Saltings boy.”
“Yes I am,” said Wick.
She looked at him a breath longer. Then she snorted, and went out.
He stood where he was until the camphor was gone from his mouth. Then he went to the contract board, and put his hand flat on the Grey Hound notice, over the fourth name, and started to work out how.