15: The Blackwater

There’s a reason they call it the Blackwater. It’s not because of the city’s refuse washing into the bay—that’s a dark brown. It’s not the algae that blooms in the summer heat, feeding off that waste to form a mat so thick ships plow drifts as they come in—that’s a brilliant purple. It’s the goatfish that feed on the waste, the algae, and anything else that gets thrown in the bay. Sharp-toothed and black-finned, they feed in such giant schools that they blacken the water—and this boiling, tooth-mad mass gives the lowest part of the city its name. That, and the stories of what gets thrown to them.

Gaxna and I are selling twists of cloveleaf on a rotting pier the day after I talked to the crier, watching pale-skinned Bamani and nut-brown Ujeians sweat under heavy casks, loading and unloading ships from all over the world. The Bamani bring mostly produce and meat, hauling them across the strait in barges so old and patched they look ready to collapse. Traders from the inner crescent bring skins and spices and oils and pearls, and Daraa down from the ironway bring salt and cotton and coal, all meeting to shout and barter and strike deals under the ragged red canopies of the docks.

Scattered among them are the tall and thin Seilam Deul, milky-white eyes eerie behind their head coverings. Wrapped in dark shawls and clad in a clinging fabric they refuse to sell, they speak seldom and selectively, their steps usually dogged by two or three merchants alternating between shouting and pleading. They trade in metals and cloth and foods like everyone else, but their real exports are inventions, strange devices like hourglasses that follow the moon, or exploding shot for catapults, or the astrolabes that now chart the oceans. Their ships are sleek and black and clad in iron, like predators slinking between the stockier wooden vessels.

The Deul had no ships or ports only a few decades ago, but now they trade as widely as any other coastal nation, selling a crate of inventions to fill a ship full of goods. Rumor has it their mountain cities are full of wonders, that they keep many more innovations than they sell, but already their technology has changed the world. Some say the aqueducts that make Serei possible were originally Deul inventions, though that is too far in the past for anyone to know.

“Stop staring,” Gaxna mutters, lighting another cloveleaf. The smell draws in customers, she says, but I think it’s nerves.

We’re not here to sell cloveleaf. We’re here to steal fortunes.

“I’m not staring. Just trying to get a feel for the Deul.” One of their warehouses is our target tonight. It isn’t lost on me that Nerimes is getting married to one, that there could be something to learn here. Mostly, though, we’re trying to make enough money in one shot to get my eyes stained and fund another batch of Gaxna’s theracant rescues.

“Well, you won’t. Most flooding secretive people you’ll meet. Stay on their ships unless they absolutely have to.”

“Think any of them will be in the warehouse?” Gaxna’s informant—the same one that bought the statue from us—said the target is in their cavernous warehouse just down the dock.

Gaxna blows smoke. “Maybe. You can handle them, though.”

This is part of the reason Gaxna never tried this burglary alone: there’s no way to do it without running into some guards, and she’s no good at fighting. The payout is big enough I suspect she was thinking of this back when she first offered our trade. I’ve never asked why she didn’t partner up with someone else, but I think I know: because she’s never trusted anyone enough. It’s not lost on me that she sees me differently.

“I can deal with them.” The Seilam Deul may be known for their technology, but Serei is known for its fighters, and I am the best of my class.

Though I’d feel better with water under me and a staff in my hands.

Gaxna straightens up, and I see a tanned dockworker approaching us, one of the few Ujeians on this part of the docks. Gaxna puts on a crooked smile. “Smoke for ya, sailor?”

“Aye,” the woman says, handing over a few coins.

“How’s trade?” I ask, trying to mirror her rough accent.

She snorts, then leans in to light her stick from Gaxna’s. “Same as ever. Hard work and no pay.”

“Picked up from last year though, innit?” My grammar teachers cringe inside, but this is how I need to talk. It’s kind of fun, actually.

The woman draws deep and lets out a lungful of fragrant smoke before she answers. “Is at that, I s’pose.”

I lean forward. “Why’s that, you s’pose? That new Chosen up there got something to do with it?”

“Chosen,” the worker says, and spits uncomfortably close to my shoe. “Nothing to do with the flooding Chosen. It’s the frost-eyes.”

Gaxna eyes me, but I press on. Nerimes mentioned trade slumping at the end of my father’s reign, and the salt merchant seemed to confirm that, but something’s off about it.

“The Deul? How’s that?” I ask.

“Trade was piss poor, yeah, for everybody but the Deul. Their houses were stock full, ships low in the waters! They just weren’t selling. Oughta ban ‘em all, if you ask me, stick to the Daraa and Bamani. Them at least a person can talk to.”

Their warehouses were full? Was Arayim funding them too? Or does this have something to do with the Seilam Deul Nerimes is planning to marry? I start to ask another question and Gaxna kicks me under the table.

“Right you are,” the thief says. “Flooding frosteyes ought to stay in their mountains. ‘Night to ya.”

The woman nods and walks off, pulling on her cloveleaf. Gaxna turns on me. “What are you doing?”

I frown. “Looking for information. I could learn something here.”

“You’re calling attention to us is what you’re doing. That sailor will remember us for days. Remember the violet-eyed girl who was asking questions about the Seilam Deul.”

I shift. “So?” I know she’s right, that if I want to stay undercover, I should shut up, but it’s a risk I have to run. What’s the point of staying in the city if I can’t get the information I need? “Okay, I’ll shut up.”

But I don’t. I ask the next two workers that come up about the trade slump and the Deul. One of them is too tired to say much, but the other one backs up the woman’s claims: the Deul warehouses were full when everybody else’s were empty, they just weren’t selling.

“Why wouldn’t they sell?”

Gaxna kicks me again. I ignore her. This worker has a thoughtful air, his facial hair trimmed in careful lines, so I’m hoping he’ll have some insight. “Drive up prices. Create a shortage so they can profit from it.”

I nod. That’s what my teachers would have said too—part of our education was in economics, because some of us would end up as theocrats with direct control over Serei’s trade laws. “But to do it for months? Seems like they coulda sold sooner.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

The sailor cracks his knuckles, strong hands thick with callouses. “Shoulda. But with the frosties?” He shrugs bronze shoulders, shifts his feet, and something about him reminds me of Dashan, standing next to me in the kitchens below the temple. I miss him. “You ladies got plans for the night? I know a great brewer down Wetleg Alley.”

“Charming,” Gaxna says before I can answer, “but no.”

His eyebrows go up, but he shrugs again and walks off.

“Gaxna.”

“What?”

“You didn’t have to be rude.”

She narrows her eye at me. “You think he was cute or something?”

“What? No! I—he’s not, not my type, at all. But—”

“No harm done then.”

I pull out the sleeves on my blouse, adjusting the cuffs. “Well, we could have gotten his name, at least.”

She gives me a dirty look. We keep waiting as the shadows deepen, until the workers have gone home and the lanternworker makes his rounds. Then we change in the shadow of a Pearler ship and slip toward the largest of the dockside warehouses, its doors reinforced steel and walls oiled stone. This is the first obstacle to getting in—or would be if we didn’t have ropes. Gaxna hooks the rafter of a neighboring building, and from there I get my rope through a ventilation hole high up in the Deul warehouse. We untie Gaxna’s rope and shimmy across, then use hers to drop to the teakwood floor.

The trick once inside is not to take too long. According to Gaxna’s informant, they don’t keep a heavy guard—no one does in the City of Justice, where overseers catch most thieves in a matter of hours—but they do make the rounds every half hour or so. Which is an issue, because they’re also said to have strange new weapons.

Gaxna waves me forward, and I take a minute to ice my anxiety. We need this money, and this might be the only chance to see if the elusive Deul were involved in my father’s death, something I’m even more curious about after talking to the dock workers.

It’s just dangerous as hell, is all.

We stalk forward, the giant hall full of looming shadows from the lanterns burning along the wall. Stacks of crates and barrels block my view in every direction. It smells of wine and leather and cinnamon, normal warehouse smells, but also oil, and metal, and something sour.

The next issue will be the lock. It’s not even a lock, actually, but some kind of series of rooms set into the back wall. According to Gaxna’s patron, the first door locks behind you before the second will open. It means I will have to wait outside the vault while Gaxna gets whatever we came for, then let her out when she’s done. The key changes nightly, but the vault guard is supposed to have a copy.

It’s the waiting for Gaxna while frost-eyes with advanced weapons make the rounds part I’m not excited about.

There is only one guard posted outside the vault, like her patron said. In his hand he holds something like a bent lute, almost pretty except for the long row of gleaming silver spikes on one end. I don’t want to find out what it does.

Good thing I spent my youth sneaking through a temple of meditating seers. I climb the nearest stack of crates in dead silence while Gaxna waits below, working at her hands. I would be doing that too, if I didn’t keep icing the fear as it comes up. It’s about a ten-foot fall. If I judge it wrong, I’ll land on the weapon instead of the guard.

I jump.

It’s over mostly before it begins. I come down with a foot on his weapon arm, another on his shoulder, and deliver a blow called Shifting Tides to the side of his head. He manages only a soft yelp before toppling to the floor.

I tense anyway, catching his strange weapon before it can clatter, listening for any reaction, any shouts of alarm. None come. Gaxna runs up, gets a large square key from his pockets and works it into the door.

I get a good look at it for the first time: this is no ordinary door. I saw the inside of a safe once, the strange toothed wheels and levers that ran the mechanism behind the dial. This is like a fever dream of that, twisted and complicated and ten times as big. Giant bands of metal run on the outside of doors wider than I am tall, concealing a tangle of wheels and straps and things I have no name for. Gaxna fits the key in with a metal snick, and I hold my breath.

It turns.

The gears and levers and pulleys all spin, smooth as knives through fat, and she slips inside. I close it behind her, icing a bolt of fear as the mechanism spins the opposite direction, locking her in. If anything happens to me, Gaxna has no way out.

So I retreat to a hiding place and watch the door, hoping no one heard us. The smart thing to do would be to stay put until she’s done, get her out and go. But there’s a Seilam Deul man down there, unconscious and unable to block watersight.

I wait one hundred breaths then slip down to him, flicking his ears to wake him up while I keep a hand over his mouth to stifle any cries.

One amazing thing about watersight is it doesn’t depend on language. In the temple they had us practice on people from Daraa, Bamani, the north shore, the wastes, and people who spoke no Ujeian at all. We never worked on a Seilam Deul, but the experience is much the same: I hear his thoughts, understand them, but it’s like a picture with the colors reversed, or a sentence said out of order.

His disconnected thoughts rove over my attack and what he should have done to me. Interesting, but not what I’m here for. I flick harder, waking him all the way up. He jerks, then stills as I press a knife to his throat.

“There,” I whisper in his ear. “Do you understand Ujeian?”

He doesn’t answer—can’t, really, given the position of the blade—but I hear from his thoughts that he does.

“Good. I need to ask you some questions.”

That certainly sparks a flood of thoughts, not least of them superstitious fears of Uje seers and our magical powers.

I smile. “Who is Arayim?”

Confusion. Damn. Guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow for Arayim. But this man will still know more than those workers about these warehouses being full, and maybe that connects to Arayim and how he was manipulating trade in the city before my father’s murder.

I try again. “How long have you worked at this dockhouse?”

The answer comes in a garbled form of time—not years or seasons, but something close enough that I make it out. About four years.

“And you were here when the former Chosen was deposed?”

Yes.

“Were your warehouses full?”

An image comes of this warehouse filled to the rafters with goods, along with a lot of memories of hard work and boredom and careful stacking.

“Why?”

Another image-garbled sentence, this one of Seilam Deul trading at ports up the coast, buying goods before they could reach Serei.

I shake my head. “Okay, you were buying up goods so no other traders would come to Serei. But why?”

I see a woman then, a tall Seilam Deul woman, a dark scar standing out on her pale skin, twisting the corner of her mouth upward in a sneer. Images of her giving orders, inspecting manifests.

Cold certainty suddenly hits me. “Her name. What’s her name?”

“Ieolat,” the man croaks.

Ieolat of the Seilam Deul—Nerimes’ bride.

The puzzle pieces spin in my mind—the money needed to bribe the crier’s guild, to float the merchants, to get Nerimes in power. It came from the Seilam Deul, by far the richest nation in the world. Of course. Wealth they also used to buy up goods without selling them, depressing trade and making my father look bad. The merchants and their guilds had nothing to do with this—they were pawns. But Nerimes’ marriage suddenly means a lot more sense: he must have struck some kind of power-sharing deal, his power in exchange for their money.

And my father’s death, of course.

The guard yelps under me, and I realize I’m pressing the knife a little too sharply into his throat. “Sorry,” I mutter, then finger the three points of Diver’s Bind, knocking him out for real.

Surely this is proof enough. Surely the fact that Nerimes’ bride was involved in manipulating trade will be proof enough the traditionalists were involved in setting my dad up. That Nerimes has sold out the temple to get himself in power. I have no doubt this is where the money came from. Arayim will tie it together, when I meet him.

No wonder I didn’t recognize the name. He’s probably a Seilam Deul.

I force myself to focus on my surroundings. None of this matters if I get caught unawares, or something goes wrong with the heist. There’s no sound from Gaxna inside—she was going to tap on the walls when she was done. Hopefully before I have to knock out another guard, if there is one.

The rest of the warehouse is quiet, though sound alone doesn’t tell much. Not for the first time, I wish the floor was properly doused in water. Then I’d really be able to keep watch.

For now, I drag the guard into a corner and strip him.

It’s nothing personal: I just need his clothes. Mine don’t fit him well, but I leave his underpants on and get my loose trousers over them, so he isn’t naked at least. The blouse I leave beside him, unsure if he’d be as embarrassed wearing it as a Serei man would.

The Seilam Deul fabric is strange against my skin, clinging but easy to move in, like nothing I’ve ever worn before. I wrap the man’s scarf around my head, aware I’m probably doing it wrong, and my skin is too dark anyway, but it might buy me a second or two if things go wrong. I take my thief’s rope too, then climb a stack of crates and wait for Gaxna’s signal. Wait for a guard making the rounds. Wait for any sound, really.

There’s none. You’d think there would be some kind of sound. If nothing else, the scratching of Blackwater’s infamous rats.

When it comes, it is almost too soft to make out—or would be, if it wasn’t so familiar. The swishing of robes.

Overseers.