The Fixer's Ledger

They had two prisoners and one rented room, so Randy took a second and put them in separate chambers.

The Fixer came round groggily, looked about her, and said, "Well, this is new." Randy told her that her cooperation would dictate how gently she was handed to the city guard. She would not give up her employer — "my clients pay me a hefty sum to remain secretive, and I will reserve the right to do just that" — while beneath the words Aelion, reading her, caught the rest of it: not that it really matters, I think I'm dead either way. He pressed deeper and got what she was actually carrying. House Betony had put her up to Dale Ashveil's murder, and she did not much care about that. What she cared about was V.

In the other room Biz charmed the bound rogue, who turned friendly as anything, drank the grey water she was offered, complained mildly that it was grey and not brown, and gave her name as Sable. She had been working for the Fixer about three months — her predecessor, she assumed, had ended up dead in an alley for asking too many questions. She did not know who the contracts were for. Vielle had known more, and Vielle was dead. She did give them one thing: the Fixer's name is Giovanna.

Pressed on V, Giovanna said the little she would. "He can essentially just impose his will, and what he wants to happen happens." She had heard the name from time to time. Her one sliver of survival, as she saw it, was to run and find refuge, and she offered to trade for a head start. They did not take the trade. What she gave up in the end, resigned to it, was a direction: "You are best heading to Saltmoor and looking for a man named Octavian Drell. That's my contact for my rendezvous with V."

Her satchel held two things. The first was a brass instrument, circular, a disc set about it, a clouded crystal at its centre and runic symbols worked around the outside. The second was a note: two of six, the northern side is confirmed — retrieve the lens and bring it to the waypoint. Do not return to Aristonia. It was signed with a single letter. V.

They walked both women to a guard post where two men on the night shift were playing cards, and Randy laid out the confession. The guards took them in grudgingly, complaining about clerics and zones of truth at that hour, and told them not to let it happen again.

Back at the Boot, Aelion sat cross-legged on the floorboards with the instrument in front of him and stared at it. The rings began to turn without his turning them, and the clouded crystal cleared — not at once, but the way fog clears out of a valley at sunrise. Then he was not in the room. He was standing in the field of lavender beneath the blue moon, where he had been before, but the field had changed: silver lines were burned faintly into it in a pattern with some order to it, marking six points. He stood at one. He could see another across the field, glowing the same colour as the pendant at his throat, and felt four more in the other directions. And a presence spoke in his mind — from the moon, his intuition told him — and said only: Not finished. He looked down and the crystal was clear and the rings were still slowly turning, and he understood that this was a piece of something, that there were five others, and that someone was collecting them.

He told the others in the morning, and they took it seriously. Worm could make nothing of the runes, but Randy looked over his shoulder and found them familiar after all — cardinal directions, worked in a very old script of dwarvish. Whatever else it was, the thing had a compass in it.

They went to the Ashveil estate to collect. Maren asked whether they had killed the Fixer, and was assured repeatedly that they had not. When Randy told her that House Betony had ordered her husband's death, a look of betrayal crossed her face — small, brief, quickly composed away. She would not move against them. "As one widowed noblewoman, I don't see myself in the position to combat a political force as great as the Betonys. So I will have to harbour this grudge." She paid an additional fifty gold, said their conventions were perhaps a little unorthodox but that the work had been done, and offered them something better than coin: passage. Her late husband's canal business kept a ship at the harbour, the Brass Heron, under Captain Voss. Tell her I sent you.

Captain Voss was a short dwarvish woman who made it plain she had no intention of lingering in Saltmoor long enough for anyone to conduct business and come back. One way, then, below decks, and stay out of the crew's way. They were a week at sea in high summer with the days long and the horizon in every direction. Biz sent a double of himself over the side and stood behind the sailor who cried man overboard; Worm, a moment later, made it sound as though the same sailor had loudly disgraced himself. The crew agreed he had been got good.

On the evening of the last day the Brass Heron came around the headland on the tide, and the wind that had been behind them the whole crossing quit against the cliffs. Ahead was a deep horseshoe cove of black wet rock that glittered in the failing sun, and Saltmoor at the back of it — not built on the land but cut into it, three terraces of lantern-light stacked up the cliff. Two towers older than the city stood at the mouth of the cove with massive iron chains slung slack between them, which could plainly be raised to close the water to anything unwelcome. It smelled of fish and tar and wood smoke.

Captain Voss gave them her parting advice on the way off: stick to the Lamp Way, the middle tier. Beyond it to the north are caves called the Harrows, and she would not go into the Harrows. Don't lie to Captain Mireval, who leads the council here. And pay your tab before you leave.

They climbed a hundred steps from the wharves to the Lamp Way, where lanterns hang from every doorway and crossbeam and the street runs in a long curve along the contour of the cliff — taverns, boarding houses, bakeries, a shop that sells nothing but rope, a shop that sells nothing but knives, a theatre advertising three performances nightly. Nobody looked at them twice. Strangers come off every ship and leave on the next.

They took two rooms at an inn called the Rusted Mermaid, three hammocks to a room, a silver a night, from a barkeep in his sixties named Dorrit who was missing three fingers on his left hand and whose drinks came in brine, black and brown. Aelion asked for clear water and was asked in return whether he meant vodka.

Dorrit gave them two things. Octavian Drell, down on the wharves, handles the serious pieces. And the Vex Caves — a legend in these parts, somewhere in the Harrows north of the city, where the story goes a mage built a whole workshop inside the cliff. Anyone who has found the caves has not come back to brag about it. The Harrows can only be entered at low tide, and when the tide rises you are in there until it falls again.

Asked whether any relic hunters were in that night, Dorrit nodded at a table of five in the far corner — people who plainly lived outdoors and wore their weapons like tools. The party carried a round of drinks over. One of them looked up, past Biz, and said, "Holy shit. Is that the kid?"

They were Worm's old crew. They had thought him dead. They had sent him into ruins outside Aristonia, waited — an hour, they said, or two, or three, the number kept moving — and gone. And standing in the corner facing the wall was a small boy of about twelve whom they had picked up off the streets afterward because he reminded them of Worm, and whom they had named Worm.

Randy set that right in his own way. He took one of the brown waters they had brought over, poured it out on the floor, told the crew's leader better not let us catch you in the Harrows, and walked away.

Down on the wharves they found Bay 14. Flint conjured a small noise and the smell of skunk directly behind Octavian Drell, who looked round, saw his own subordinate backing away and disclaiming it, and came over thoroughly unimpressed. He had no patience for another crew of hopefuls asking a fence to do their job for them. Then Biz mentioned Giovanna, and the man's whole face changed. "Oh. You know Giovanna, do you?"

After that he was almost apologetic — he had been on edge lately, he said, and clients are clients. The caves lie about six miles northwest along the coast. There is a path, but the entrance wants a boat. Low tide only, and the tide comes in faster at the end than anyone expects, so the window is shorter than it looks; people drown in there believing they can find high ground. He thought the place a death trap and the mage's workshop an old wives' tale, and said so. He also told them what fetches a price: brass or steel, faintly magical, and dwarvish sigils on it — that last is a good sign.

They climbed back up to the Rusted Mermaid. Aelion spent an hour with the lens before bed, tapping his pendant against it to no effect, and finally holding it up toward the moon — which gave him a fisheye view of the craters and the bluish cast around its edge, and nothing more. Flint's cat pawed at the door until it was let in, went out, came back in, went out again, came back, looked at him and meowed. Then it batted at the lens, and nothing happened either.

They slept well, on hammocks that did not sway, with a tide schedule to ask after in the morning.