The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns (4 page)

She was immediately assaulted by a blast of heat and a blaze of light. It was well past sunset, but the streets were as crowded as if it were noon, and nearly as bright. The torches and braziers burning in front of every open establishment were traditional, as were the lanterns carried by some passersby, but Professor
Roetig’s new-pattern gas lamps outshone them all with a steady, unceasing radiance, standing tall atop their high steel sconces. They gave an oddly manic cast to the whole scene, as though the scurrying nighttime revelers were flouting some celestial law.

Carriages were rare in that part of town, and those that were visible were all hired cabs. The three or four miles of Old Street that ran across the front of the University were mostly fronted by shops and drinking establishments catering to the student body, but above and behind these places of business were innumerable second- and third-floor rooms and tumbledown tenements. Here lived those scholars not wealthy enough to secure living space on University grounds, alongside the hawkers, publicans, and prostitutes who worked on and around the nearby streets.

Raesinia loved the Dregs because it was a contradiction in terms. It was on the north side of the river—that was to say, the correct or fashionable side—and only a stone’s throw from the respectable brick-fronted town houses of Saint Uriah Street. And, in theory, the students of the University were mostly the scions of gentle families, or else the very best and brightest the lower orders had to offer. On the other hand, that student body consisted almost exclusively of young men, and wherever young men gather together with money in their pockets, an industry will arise, as if by magic, to provide them with what they need in terms of wine, women, and song. The paradox gave the whole area a kind of reputable disreputability that attracted exactly the sort of person Raesinia was looking for.

Most of the taverns and restaurants had signboards displaying their names and painted crests for the benefit of the illiterate, in accordance with ancient tradition, but in more modern times some bright storekeeper had come up with the idea of erecting a flagpole, cantilevered diagonally out over the heads of the pedestrians, to fly the banner of his establishment. Like any good idea, this had been rapidly copied, and so the gaslights shone on rows of hundreds of triangular flags, now hanging limp in the hot, windless air. Tradition had grown up surprisingly quickly here as well, giving the flags a uniform shape and design—three simple bars of horizontal color, different combinations marking the various shops to the eyes of the cognoscenti.

A trained observer could gather quite a bit from those colors. In a crowded market, the wine sellers had specialized, and by now their particular combination of colors marked them as surely as a count’s heraldry. The top bar usually represented the political affiliation of the clientele, or at least the primary language
spoken within. The University drew its students from half the continent, and so while the majority of the flags Raesinia could see were topped by solid Vordanai blue, she could also spot the muddy red of Borel, the yellow of Hamvelt, the dove gray of Noreld, and even a few spots of white for lonely Murnskai scholars, hundreds of miles from home.

Nor were the triple-striped emblems confined to the flags. Quite a few of the young people on the street wore armbands blazoned with the symbol of their preferred establishment. Others showed the colors as a band around their hats, or, in the case of the more well-heeled students, in jeweled pins on their breasts or at their collar. Thus one could tell at a glance who was who, since where someone drank conveyed a great deal about his views and affiliations, and Raesinia’s practiced eye automatically sorted the crowd into Republicans, Utopians, Redemptionists, and a hundred other factions, sects, and splinter groups.

The pin she wore at her own collar was a delicate butterfly wrought in silver, its wings colored in blue, green, and gold. She sought out the flag that matched it, and found it floating lazily over the warm updraft from a torch stand. The windows of the Blue Mask blazed with light, and as she walked toward it she could smell the familiar cocktail of sawdust, charring meat, and cheap liquor. Raesinia looked over her shoulder at Sothe.

“You
can
come in, you know,” she said. “You don’t need to follow me out in the dark like some kind of voyeur.”

“Safer not to,” Sothe said. “You know I’ll be nearby if you need assistance.”

“Suit yourself.” Privately, Raesinia thought Sothe simply preferred lurking alone in shadowy corners to sitting with friends by the fire, but it wasn’t worth the argument. She squared her shoulders, pushed aside the curtain that blocked the doorway—the door was wedged open to admit the summer air—and went inside.

—

The common room of the Blue Mask was a miasma of wood smoke, tobacco fumes, and delicious-smelling steam wafting from a couple of big cauldrons over the fire. The tables were crowded tonight, and the pair of serving maids were having difficulty threading their way past the tight-packed patrons. In other taverns, in other places, there might have been games of dice or cards, discussions of merchant shipping or criminal enterprise, even poetry and literary criticism. Here at the Blue Mask, the overriding obsession was politics. Raesinia could hear a half dozen arguments in progress, overlapping and occasionally interrupting one another in a nonstop babble of voices.

“—the natural rights of man demand—”

“—you can’t just
assume
equity. You’ve got to—”

“—don’t give me ‘natural rights.’ I—”

“—Voulenne says—”

“—the parliament in Hamvelt resolved to do something about—”

“—Voulenne can suck my cock, and so can you—”

Raesinia breathed this atmosphere in with the air of a creature returning to its natural environment, or a man surfacing after a long dive. A few patrons noticed her, and waved or shouted inaudibly in her direction. She waved back and threw herself into the throng, working her way past the crowded tables and stepping nimbly out of the way of wildly gesticulating limbs.

Here and there a catcall followed her, but she was used to that. Barely one in a hundred University students was female, and while the ratio was somewhat redressed by visitors who didn’t actually attend the school, Old Street still felt like the eye of a raging storm of indiscriminate masculine humors. When she first came here, Raesinia had taken such things personally, but she’d since come to understand they were more of an automatic reaction, like dogs barking at one another when they meet in the park.

At the rear of the common room was a flimsy door, leading to a short corridor off which there were a number of dining rooms where one could talk with at least the illusion of privacy. Raesinia headed for these and knocked twice on the second door along. Inside, a barely audible conversation was suddenly silenced.

“Who is it?” someone said, a bit muffled.

“It’s me.”

The door opened, slowly.

“We ought to have a secret knock,” someone said from inside. “It’s not a proper conspiracy without a secret knock. I feel stupid just shouting, ‘Who is it?’”

“You and your secret knocks,” someone else said. “And codes and signals with dark lanterns and God knows what else. If you had your way we’d spend all day memorizing the damned things and never have time to get anything done.”

“I just think it adds tone, is all. You wouldn’t catch Orlanko’s people just shouting, ‘Who’s there?’ through the damned door—”

“Raes!”

Something small and fast-moving hit Raesinia around the midriff, and a pair
of arms locked behind her and made a spirited effort to squeeze the air from her lungs. For Raesinia this was actually not much of a handicap, but she staggered under the impact of the ballistic hug and had to throw an arm against the doorway for support. She hoped that Sothe, no doubt watching from somewhere, would not conclude that she was under attack and charge in with guns blazing.

“You did it!” her assailant squealed. “You did it, you did it, you did it! It worked!”

“Did I?” Raesinia managed, in a croak.

“Cora,” someone said, “I think Raes might be in a better state to appreciate the news if you let her breathe.”

“Sorry.”

Cora detached herself reluctantly, like a barnacle peeling away from a ship’s hull. She still had to look up to meet Raesinia’s eyes, but only just. Cora was fourteen, with the gangly, broad-shouldered frame of a girl still growing like a weed. She had straw-colored hair bound back in a thick ponytail and a face that looked like the site of a pitched battle between freckles and acne. She had a tendency to bounce on the balls of her feet when she was excited, and she was bouncing now, her green eyes blazing.

“And close the door,” Faro said, from the direction of the sofa. “Unless you want to share our secrets with everybody in the common room. Honestly, you’d think that none of you had ever been part of a cabal before.”

The back room was a bit cramped but cozy. The fireplace was cold and dead, but the night was quite warm enough already. The battered old sofa and chairs had been dragged from their ordinary positions into a rough circle. Faro had claimed the entire couch for himself, legs propped up on one arm and head hanging off at the other, upside down. It was a testament to Faro that he could make even this awkward position look graceful, if not particularly dignified. He was a slender youth, with short dark hair and a face like a hatchet, dressed in well-tailored gray velvet.

Behind him, Johann Maurisk—whom, for reasons Raesinia had never quite understood, everyone addressed by his family name—paced beside the window. He was as thin as Faro, but where Faro was lithe and graceful, Maurisk had the sunken-eyed look of a desert hermit. He was constantly in motion, walking back and forth, toying with his shirt or rapping out an unconscious rhythm on the windowsill with long, bony fingers.

Cora stepped back, took a deep breath, and made a visible effort to get control of herself.

“It worked!” she said. “I mean, I knew it would work, if everything went the way you said it would, but now everything has, and I’m having a hard time believing it. Do you have
any
idea what’s going to happen when the markets open again on Monday?” She giggled. “The whole Exchange is going to be swimming in coffee beans! I know at least three firms that have been hoarding for months, waiting for bad news, and now I hear they’re clearing out the warehouses. You won’t be able to sell the stuff for two pennies a bushel!”

“I’m thinking of putting up nets below the Grand Span,” Faro said. “We could fish the jumping bankers out of the river and go through their pockets.”

Maurisk slapped the windowsill and turned to glare at Faro, who smiled back impishly. Maurisk appeared to completely lack a sense of humor, which left him ill at ease in Faro’s company.

“I take it the news has reached the market, then?” Raesinia said.

“This afternoon,” Cora said. “We saw De Borg himself strutting about like the top peacock, rubbing everyone’s faces in it.”

“And we did well?”

Cora gaped, made speechless by this colossal understatement. Faro, grinning upside down and head lolling like a corpse, said, “Quite well, apparently. I don’t pretend to understand the specifics of it, but I gather we’ve just about hit the jackpot.”

“It’s not
that
complicated,” Cora protested. “I bought De Borg’s paper at ten pence, on a ninety-five-point margin, and as of close today it was back to par. After fees and so on, that gives us a return of about a hundred and eighty to one.”

Truth be told, Raesinia didn’t follow the specifics, either, but she trusted Cora’s assessment.
She’s a prodigy, after all.
That last number made her sit up and take notice, though. Raesinia was no financier, but she could multiply, and a hundred and eighty to one meant that the little pool of money their circle had laboriously accumulated had been transformed overnight, as if by alchemy, into a substantial fortune.

“I’m not really recommending it,” Faro said, “just throwing the idea out, really, but you realize that we
could
just take the money and run. Go to Hamvelt and live like princes for the rest of our days.” He looked around the room, from Maurisk’s burning eyes to Raesinia’s guarded ones, and sighed. “Fair enough. I’m just saying.”

“It’s not about the money,” Raesinia said.

“Of course it’s not about the money,” Maurisk said. “I’ve always said money
is only a distraction. We should be out there”—he stabbed a finger at the window—“raising the awareness of the common—”

Faro laughed and slid off the couch like a cat, landing in a crouch and rolling his shoulders before straightening up.

“I think awareness is not our problem,” he said. “Everyone is perfectly
aware
of what’s going on. They just don’t see anything they can do about it.”

“Then we need to tell them—” Maurisk began.

“In any case,” Raesinia said, raising her voice before the usual argument could get started, “we’re on our way.”

“We certainly are,” Faro said. “Though God knows to where.” He slapped his thighs. “This calls for a drink, I’d say. Let me go and get something.”

He went out, and Raesinia turned to Maurisk. “What about Ben and the doctor? Are we expecting them?”

“Not tonight,” he said, with a glower. “They’re in Newtown. Reconnaissance, Ben calls it, though he wouldn’t tell me what he’s expecting to find.”

Cora waggled her eyebrows and gave a lewd giggle, and Maurisk snorted. This was a joke; neither of the last two members of their cabal was likely to be found in any of the South Bank’s notorious brothels.

“Well, I’ve got news. I suppose we can fill them in later.” Raesinia paused as the door opened and Faro returned, with two bottles under each arm. “I’ve had word from my contact at the palace.”

“Oh?” Cora perked up. “Anything I can take to the Exchange?”

“I’m . . . not sure. The king is going to name Count Mieran to the Ministry of Justice.”

There was a pause. Faro uncorked one of the bottles and started setting up mugs on a side table.