No one is more patient than the dead.
—Auverrani proverb
Every month, Michal claimed he’d struck a deal with the landlord, and every month, Nicolas sent one of his sons to collect anyway. The sons must’ve drawn straws—this month’s unfortunate was Pierre, the youngest and spottiest of the bunch, and he trudged up the street of Dellaire’s Harbor District with the air of one approaching a guillotine.
Lore could work with that.
A dressing gown that had seen better days dripped off one shoulder as Lore leaned against the doorframe and watched him approach. Pierre’s eyes kept drifting to where the fabric gaped, and she kept having to bite the inside of her cheek so she didn’t laugh. Apparently, a crosshatch of silvery scars from back-alley knife fights didn’t deter the man when presented with bare skin.
She had other, more interesting scars. But she kept her palm closed tight.
A cool breeze blew off the ocean, and Lore suppressed a shiver. Pierre didn’t seem to spare any thought for why she’d exited the house barely dressed when mornings near the harbor always carried a chill, even in summer. An easy mark in more ways than one.
“Pierre!” Lore shot him a dazzling grin, the same one that made Michal’s eyes simultaneously go heated and then narrow before he asked what she wanted. Another twist against the doorframe, another seemingly casual pose, another bite of wind that made a curse bubble behind her teeth. “It’s the end of the month already?”
Michal should be dealing with this. It was his damn row house. But the drop he’d made for Gilbert last night had been all the way in the Northwest Ward, so Lore let him sleep.
Besides, waking up early had given her time to go through Michal’s pockets for the drop coordinates. She’d taken them to the tavern on the corner and left them with Frederick the bartender, who’d been on Val’s payroll for as long as Lore could remember. Val would be sending someone to pick them up before the sun fully rose, and someone else to grab Gilbert’s poison drop before his client could.
Lore was good at her job.
Right now, her job was making sure the man she’d been living with for a year so she could spy on his boss didn’t get evicted.
“I—um—yes, yes it is.” Pierre managed to fix his eyes to her own, through obviously conscious effort. “My father… um, he said this time he means it, and…”
Lore let her expression fall by careful degrees, first into confusion, then shock, then sorrow. “Oh,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around herself and turning her face away to show a length of pale white neck. “This month, of all months.”
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. If there was anything Lore had learned in twenty-three years alive, ten spent on the streets of Dellaire, it was that men generally preferred you to be a set piece in the story they made up, rather than an active player.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Pierre’s pale brows draw together, a deepening blush lighting the skin beneath his freckles. They were all moon-pale, Nicolas’s boys. It made their blushes look like something viral.
His gaze went past her to the depths of the dilapidated row house beyond. Sunrise shadows hid everything but the dust motes twisting in light shards. Not that there was much to see back there, anyway. Michal was still asleep upstairs, and his sister, Elle, was sprawled on the couch, a wine bottle in her hand and a slightly musical snore on her lips. It looked like any other row house on this street, coming apart at the seams and full of people who skirted just under the law to get by.
Or very far under it, as the case may be.
“Is there an illness?” Pierre kept his voice hushed, low. His face tried for sympathetic, but it looked more like he’d put bad milk in his coffee. “A child, maybe? I know Michal rents this house, not you. Is it his?”
Lore’s brows shot up. In all the stories she’d let men spin about her, that was a first—Pierre must have sex on the brain if he jumped straight to pregnancy. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. She gently laid a hand on her abdomen and let that be answer enough. It wasn’t technically a lie if she let him draw his own conclusions.
She was past caring about lying, anyway. Lore was damned whether or not she kept her spiritual record spotless. Might as well lean into it.
“Oh, you poor girl.” Pierre was probably younger than she was, and here he went clucking like a mother hen. Lore managed to keep her eyes from rolling, but only just. “And with a poison runner? You know he won’t be able to take care of you.”
Lore bit the inside of her cheek again, hard.
Her apparent distress made Pierre bold. “You could come with me,” he said. “My father could help you find work, I’m sure.” He raised his hand, settled it on her bare shoulder.
And every nerve in Lore’s body seized.
It was abrupt and unexpected enough for her to shudder, to shake off his hand in a motion that didn’t fit her soft, vulnerable narrative. She’d grown used to feeling this reaction to dead things—stone, metal, cloth. Corpses, when she couldn’t avoid them. It was natural to sense Mortem in something dead, no matter how unpleasant, and at this point she could hide her reaction, keep it contained. She’d had enough practice.
But she shouldn’t feel Mortem in a living man, not one who wasn’t at death’s door. Her shock was quick and sharp, and chased with something else—the scent of foxglove. So strong, he must’ve been dosed mere minutes before arriving.
And he wanted to disparage poison runners. Hypocrite.
Her fingers closed around his wrist, twisted, forced him to his knees. It happened quick, quick enough for him to slip on a stray pebble and send one leg out at an awkward angle, for a strangled “Shit!” to echo through the morning streets of Dellaire’s Harbor District.
Lore crouched so they were level. Now that she knew what to look for, it was obvious in his eyes, bloodshot and glassy; in the heartbeat thumping slow and irregular beneath her palm. He’d gone to one of the cheap deathdealers, one who didn’t know how to properly dose their patrons. The veins at the corners of Pierre’s eyes were barely touched with gray, so he hadn’t been given enough poison for any kind of life extension, and certainly not enough to possibly grasp the power waiting at death’s threshold.
He probably wasn’t after those things, anyway. Most people his age just wanted the high.
The dark threads of Mortem under Pierre’s skin twisted against Lore’s grip, stirred to waking by the poison in his system. Mortem was dormant in everyone—the essence of death, the power born of entropy, just waiting to flood your body on the day it failed—but the only way to use it, to bend it to your will, was to nearly die.
If you weren’t after the power or the euphoric feeling poison could give you, then you were after the extra years. Properly dosed, poison could balance your body on the cusp of life and death, and that momentary concession to Mortem could, paradoxically, extend your life. Not that the life you got in exchange was one of great quality—half-stone, your veins clotted with rock, making your blood rub through them like a cobblestone skinning a knee.
Whatever Pierre had been after when he visited a deathdealer this morning, he hadn’t paid enough to get it. If he’d gotten a true poison high, he’d be slumped in an alley somewhere, not asking her for rent. Rent that was higher than she remembered it being, now that she thought of it.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Lore murmured. “You are going to tell Nicolas that we’ve paid up for the next six months, or I am going to tell him you’ve been spending his coin on deathdealers.”
Fuck Michal’s ineffectual bargains with the landlord. She’d just make one of her own.
Pierre’s eyes widened, his lids poison-heavy. “How—”
“You stink of foxglove and your eyes look more like windows.” Not exactly true, since she hadn’t noticed until she’d sensed the Mortem, but by the time he could examine himself, the effect would’ve worn off anyway. “Anyone can take one look at you and know, Pierre, even though your deathdealer barely gave you enough to make you tingle. I’d be surprised if you got five extra minutes tacked on for that, so I hope the high was worth it.”
The boy gaped, the open mouth under his window-glass eyes making his face look fishlike. He’d undoubtedly paid a handsome sum for the pinch of foxglove he’d taken. If she wasn’t so good at spying for Val, Lore might’ve become a deathdealer herself. They made a whole lot of money for doing a whole lot of jack shit.
Pierre’s unfortunate blush spread down his neck. “I can’t— He’ll ask where the money is—”
“I’m confident an industrious young man like yourself can come up with it somewhere.” A flick of her fingers, and Lore let him go.
Pierre stumbled up on shaky legs and straightened his mussed shirt. The gray veins at the corners of his eyes were already fading back to blue-green. “I’ll try,” he said, voice just as tremulous as the rest of him. “I can’t promise he’ll believe me.”
Lore gave him a winning smile. Standing, she yanked up the shoulder of her dressing gown. “He better.”
Pierre didn’t run down the street, but he walked very fast.
As the sun rose higher, the Harbor District slowly woke up—bundles of cloth stirred in dark corners, drunks coaxed awake by light and sea breeze. In the row house across the street, Lore heard the telltale sighs of Madam Brochfort’s girls starting their daily squabbles over who got the washtub first, and any minute now at least two straggling patrons would be politely but firmly escorted outside.
“Pierre?” she called when he was halfway down the street. He turned, lips pressed together, clearly considering what other things she might blackmail him with.
“A word of advice.” She turned toward Michal’s row house in a flutter of faded dressing gown. “The real deathdealers have morgues in the back. Death’s scales are easy to tip.”
Elle was awake, but only just. She squinted from beneath a pile of gold curls through the light-laden dust, paint still smeared across her lips. “Whassat?”
“As if you don’t know.” Lore shook out the hand that had touched Pierre’s shoulder, trying to banish pins and needles. It’d grown easier for her to sense Mortem recently, and she wasn’t fond of the development. She gave her hand one more firm shake before heading into the kitchen. “End of the month, Elle-Flower.”
There was barely enough coffee in the chipped ceramic pot for one cup. Lore poured all of it into the stained cloth she used as a strainer and balled it in her fingers as she put the kettle over the fire. If there was only one cup of coffee in this house, she’d be the one drinking it.
“Don’t call me that.” Elle groaned as she shifted to sit up. She’d fallen asleep in her dancer’s tights, and a long run traced up each calf. It’d piss her off once she noticed, but the patrons of the Foghorn and Fiddle down the street wouldn’t care. One squinting look into the wine bottle to make sure it was empty and Elle shoved off the couch to stand. “Michal isn’t awake, we don’t have to pretend we like each other.”
Lore snorted. In the year she’d been living with Michal, it’d become very obvious that she’d never get along with his sister. It didn’t bother Lore. Her relationship with Michal was built on a lie, a sand foundation with no hope of holding, so why try to make friends? As soon as Val gave the word, she’d be gone.
Elle pushed past her into the kitchen, the spiderweb cracks on the windows refracting veined light on the tattered edges of her tulle skirt. She peered into the pot. “No coffee?”
Lore tightened her hand around the cloth knotted in her fist. “Afraid not.”
“Bleeding God.” Elle flopped onto one of the chairs by the pockmarked kitchen table. For a dancer, she was surprisingly ungraceful when sober. “I’ll take tea, then.”
“Surely you don’t expect me to get it for you.”
A grumble and a roll of bright-blue eyes as Elle slinked her way toward the cupboard. While her back was turned, Lore tucked the straining cloth into the lip of her mug and poured hot water over it, hoping Elle was too residually drunk to recognize the scent.
Still grumbling, Elle scooped tea that was little more than dust into another mug. “Well?” She took the kettle from Lore without looking at her and apparently without smelling her coffee. “How’d it go? Is Michal finally going to have to spend money on something other than alcohol and betting at the boxing ring?”
“Not on rent, at least.” Lore kept her back turned as she tugged the straining cloth and the tiny knot of coffee grounds from her cup and stuffed it in her pocket. “We’re paid up for six months.”
“Is that why you look so disheveled?” Elle’s mouth pulled into a self-satisfied moue. “He could get it cheaper across the street.”
“The dishevelment is the fault of your brother, actually.” Lore turned and leaned against the counter. “And barbs about Madam’s girls don’t suit you, Elle-Flower. It’s work like any other. To think otherwise just proves you dull.”
Another eye roll. Elle made a face when she sipped her weak tea, and sharp satisfaction hitched Lore’s smile higher. She took a long, luxurious swallow of coffee and drifted toward the stairs. There’d been a message waiting for her at the tavern—Val needed her help with a drop today. It was risky business, having her work while she was deep undercover with another operation, but hands were low. People kept getting hired out from under them on the docks.
And Lore had skills that no one else did.
She’d have to come up with an excuse for why she’d be gone all day, but if she woke Michal up with some kissing, he wouldn’t question her further. She found herself smiling at the idea. She liked kissing Michal. That was dangerous.
The smile dropped.
The stairs of the row house were rickety, like pretty much everything else in the structure, and the fourth one squeaked something awful. Lore winced when her heel ground into it, sloshing coffee over the side of her mug and burning her fingers.
Michal was sitting up when Lore pushed aside the ratty curtain closing off their room, sheets tangled around his waist and dripping off the mattress to pool on the floor. It was unclear whether it was the squeaking stair or her loud curse when she burned herself that had woken him.
He pushed his dark hair out of his eyes, squinted. “Coffee?”
“Last cup, but I’ll share if you come get it.”
“That’s generous, since I assume you need it.” He grumbled as he levered himself up from the floor-bound mattress, holding the sheet around his naked hips. “You had another nightmare last night. Thrashed around like the Night Witch herself was after you.”
Her cheeks colored, but Lore just shrugged. The nightmares were a recent development, and random. She could never remember much about them, only vague impressions that didn’t quite match with the terrified feeling they left behind. Blue, open sky, a churning sea. Some dark shape twisting through the air, like smoke but thicker.
Lore held out the coffee. “Sorry if I kept you awake.”
“At least you didn’t scream this time.” Michal took a long drink from her proffered mug, though his face twisted up when he swallowed. “No milk?”
“Elle used the last of it.” Lore shrugged and took the cup back, draining the rest.
Michal ran a hand through his hair to tame it into submission while he bent to pull clothes from the piles on the floor. The sheet fell, and Lore allowed herself a moment to ogle.
“I have another drop today,” he said as he got dressed. “So I’ll probably be gone until the evening.”
That made her life much easier. Lore propped her hips on the windowsill and watched him dress, hoping her relief didn’t show on her face. “Gilbert is working you hard.”
“Demand has gone up, and the team is dwindling. People keep getting hired on the docks to move cargo, getting paid more than Gilbert can afford to match.” Michal gave the room a narrow-eyed survey before spotting his boot beneath a pile of sheets in the corner. “The Presque Mort and the bloodcoats have all been busy getting ready for the Sun Prince’s Consecration tomorrow, and everyone is taking advantage of them having their proverbial backs turned.”
It seemed like Gilbert was doing far more business during the security lull than was wise, but that wasn’t Lore’s problem. That’s what she told herself, at least, when worry for Michal squeezed a fist around her insides. “Must be some deeply holy Consecration they’re planning, if the Presque Mort are invited. They aren’t known for being the best party guests.”
Michal huffed a laugh as he pulled his boots on. “Especially not if your party includes poison.” He rolled his neck, working out stiffness from their rock-hard mattress, and stood.
“Be careful tonight,” Lore said, then immediately clenched her teeth. She hadn’t meant to say it. She hadn’t meant to mean it.
A lazy smile lifted his mouth. Michal sauntered over, cupped her face in his hands. “Are you worried about me, Lore?”
She scowled but didn’t shake him off. “Don’t get used to it.”
A laugh rumbled through his chest, pressed against her own, and then his lips were on hers. Lore sighed and kissed him back, her hands wrapping around his shoulders, tugging him close.
It’d be over soon, so she might as well enjoy it while it lasted.
Despite Michal’s warmth, Lore still felt like shivering. She could feel Mortem everywhere—the cloth of Michal’s shirt, the stones in the street outside, the chipped ceramic of the mug on the windowsill. Even as her awareness of it grew, a steady climb over the last few months, she was usually able to ignore it, but Pierre’s unexpected foxglove had thrown her off balance. Mortem wasn’t as thick here on the outskirts of Dellaire as it was closer to the Citadel—closer to the Buried Goddess’s body far beneath it, leaking the magic of death—but it was still enough to make her skin crawl.
The Harbor District, on the southern edge of Dellaire, was as far as Mortem would let her go. She could try to hop a ship, try to trek out on the winding roads that led into the rest of Auverraine, but it’d be pointless. The threads of Mortem would just wind her back, woven into her very marrow. She was tied into this damn city as surely as death was tied into life, as surely as the crescent moon burned into the bottom curve of her palm.
Michal’s mouth found her throat, and she arched into him, closing her eyes tight. Her fingers clawed into his hair, and his arm cinched around her waist like he might lift her up, carry her to their mattress on the floor, make her forget that this was something finite.
The fact that she wanted to forget was enough to make her push him away, masking it as playful. “You don’t want to be late.”
He lingered at her lips a moment before stepping back. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
She just smiled, though the stretch of her lips felt unnatural.
Michal left, that same step squeaking on his way down, the windows rattling when he closed the door. Lore heard Elle heave a sigh, as if her brother’s job were a personal affront, the thin walls making it sound like she was right next to Lore instead of all the way on the first floor.
Lore stood there a moment, the light of the slow-rising sun gleaming on her hair, the worn silk of her gown. Then she dressed in a flowing shirt and tight breeches, made her own way down the stairs. She had a meeting with Val to attend.
Elle was curled up on the couch again, a ragged paperback novel in one hand and another mug of tepid tea in the other. She eyed Lore the way you might look at something unpleasant you’d tracked in from the street. “And where are you going?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear? I received an invitation to the Sun Prince’s Consecration. I wasn’t going to go, but rumor has it there might be an orgy afterward, and I can’t very well turn that down.”
Elle rolled her eyes so hard Lore was surprised she didn’t strain a muscle. “There is something deeply off about you.”
“You have no idea.” Lore opened the door. “Bye, Elle-Flower.”
“Rot in your own hell, Lore-dear.”
Lore twiddled her fingers in an exaggerated wave as the door closed. Part of her would miss Elle when the spying gig was up, when Val had a different running outfit she wanted watched instead of Gilbert’s.
But not as much as she’d miss Michal.
She couldn’t miss either of them for long. People came and went; her only constants were her mothers—Val and Mari—and the streets of Dellaire she could never leave.
That, and the memories of a childhood she was always, always trying to forget.
With one last glance at the row house, Lore started down the street.
Those born to darkness will carry it in their nature; they will carry sin in their very selves, body and mind and soul.
—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 7
Dellaire was easy to navigate. Lore had heard tales of other cities—chaotic and winding, byways butting into themselves—and the concept seemed entirely foreign to her after half a lifetime spent in Dellaire’s well-organized roads. The Four Wards at ordinal directions, the western two coming up against the sea while the eastern led to Auverraine’s rolling farmland. The Church in the city’s center, built in a circle, guarding the Citadel within.
But if Dellaire was a grid, the catacombs beneath were a tangled web.
Weak sun radiated over the back of Lore’s neck as she stood at the entrance to a dilapidated building a few blocks from Michal’s row house. It had the look of a construction that had been many things in its time, so many that they’d all canceled one another out, so now it was nearly featureless. A slight wind off the sea rippled the torn cloth hanging in the windows.
Lore cursed softly. Being this close to the catacombs always made her twitchy.
They were empty. She could sense it, even now, standing yards away from their entrance. There was no one in the tunnels, at least not for a couple of miles.
Still, her skin prickled.
This was the skill that made her invaluable. The one she’d shocked Mari with on that day ten years ago, when she was a thirteen-year-old wandering in the streets with blank eyes and a fresh burn scar on her palm. Val’s wife had been heading to the market and had come across a young Lore staring at a ragged hole in the side of a derelict building, one that led to the catacombs.
Lore still remembered it. She’d blocked out nearly everything that came before this moment, thirteen years of life spent almost entirely underground, but her recall of meeting Mari was crystalline, perfectly preserved, as if her mind could wash over everything that had come before by saving this memory in vivid detail.
“Are you all right?” Mari’s voice was soft and low, her long, dark braids twisted up on top of her head. A moment of hesitation before her golden-brown hand settled on Lore’s shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
Lore had stared at the hole and concentrated on the sting of the still-healing burn on her palm, on the darkness beyond and how it stretched out into what had been her forever. She blinked, and the layout of the tunnels overlaid the back of her eyelids. “No one is coming,” she’d said. “Not right now.”
In the present, Lore shook her head. She’d gotten better at only tapping into her awareness of the catacombs when she needed it—even now, as the strange skill seemed to be growing in strength alongside her sense of Mortem—but standing so close made it nearly impossible to ignore, made it seep through her thoughts like ink in water. She felt the tunnels like phantom limbs, like the catacombs and the Mortem within them were part of her. Sometimes Lore thought that if you peeled off her skin and turned it inside out, there’d be a map on the slick underside, pressed into the meat of her.
With a sigh, she leaned against the side of the building. She was a little earlier than Val had told her to be, and Val was nothing if not punctual.
A minute later, Val was striding down the street toward her, with the same determined gait that equally served for a casual stroll or a charge into a knife fight. A middle-aged woman more severe than traditionally pretty, with a paper-pale face, bottle-green eyes, and a scarf that had faded to near colorlessness holding back her gold hair.
Lore raised a hand in greeting. Val took hold of her fingers and pulled her into a hug instead. “You keeping out of trouble, mouse?”
“Only the kind you don’t want me in.” Lore hugged her back, the familiar scent of beeswax candles and whiskey a soothing weight in her lungs. Val and Mari had raised her since that day when she’d emerged from the dark into a world she didn’t know. They’d protected her and given her purpose, even when it was a risk. Even when the effects of her strange childhood had manifested in terrifying ways.
None of them talked about that, though.
Val snorted and straightened her arms, hands still on Lore’s shoulders. Her gaze had always cut like a scalpel, and now was no different. “I’m pulling you out,” she said with no preamble.
Lore’s brow knit. “What?”
“We have all the info we need on Gilbert’s outfit; if he’s moving as much contraband this week as you say, he won’t be running poison for much longer, anyway. There’s always a rush of religious feeling after a royal Consecration. The Presque Mort might be distracted now, but after that ceremony, they’ll have their noses to the ground like you won’t believe.”
For all that Lore loved her surrogate mothers, there was no denying that they were cutthroat. Val and Mari had visions of being the only poison suppliers in Dellaire—once they were, they’d be nigh untouchable. Bloodcoats took any bribe you threw at them, and even the Presque Mort and the rest of the Church turned their backs sometimes. The criminal underbelly of Auverraine was only criminal until the right amount of gold crossed the right palm.
Still, Lore shook her head, telling herself that her reluctance to leave was a business decision that had nothing to do with Michal. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. There’s still more I can learn.”
One pale eyebrow rose. Val cocked her head, that scalpel look delving deeper. “You like him.”
“No.” Yes. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Oh, mouse.” Val sighed. “I’ve told you before. You have to keep yourself apart.”
But she was always apart. The power in her veins, the awful things she was capable of kept her always, always apart. And it was nice to let the pieces of herself that could be liked—loved, even—have just a little comfort, sometimes.
Val patted her on the shoulder again. “It’s for the best, Lore. Trust me.” A pause, her teeth digging into the corner of her bottom lip. “It’s all for the best.”
And she was right. Val always was. Lore sighed, nodded.
It wouldn’t be difficult. She had scripts for this, lists of excuses she’d given other lovers over the years, lovers she’d similarly been cautioned against taking when she infiltrated their lives to find the secrets of their employers. There was the sick aunt she had to tend, the jealous spouse who’d finally found her, the sudden desire to move to a new city and start over. Typically, the excuses weren’t questioned, and Dellaire was big enough that she rarely saw those people again. On the rare occasions she did, they didn’t notice her. Lore kept her affairs quick, and poison runners moved on even quicker.
“Tell me about this drop,” Lore said, eager to change the subject.
“It’s simple.” Val’s eyes flicked away from Lore’s. “Normally, I wouldn’t bother you with it. But the client requested that the boxes be left at the catacombs entrance in the Northwest Ward’s market square.”
“So you need me to watch it and make sure no one comes near before the client can pick it up.” Vagrants often used the outer tunnels of the catacombs to move around Dellaire. Leaving anything in them was a risk.
“Shouldn’t take long,” Val said. “If you leave now and cut by the dock roads, you should get there by the time the guard is changing. It’ll be chaos, since it’s the day before a royal Consecration. Jean-Paul is bringing the contraband to the square, and if he arrives during the changeover, he should be able to slip through without getting searched. Then you can help him unload.”
Get to the square, unload the drop, watch the poison until it gets picked up. Clients didn’t like to leave their contraband sitting for long, so she shouldn’t have to be there for more than an hour. Then she could go back to Michal’s row house, jump in the rusty claw-foot tub to wash off the itchy feeling of being near the catacombs, and decide which of her lies she was going to use to break whatever they’d built between them.
She gave Val a decisive nod. “I’ll head that way, then.”
The old poison runner watched her for a moment, expression unreadable. Then she pulled her forward again, a crushing hug that made Lore nearly yelp in surprise.
“We love you like our own daughter,” she murmured into Lore’s hair. “Mari and I do. You know that, right?”
Bewi
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
