When the Sea is Rising Red (12 page)

“Shite,” says Esta from her spot near the window. “Dash? Come here.”

Dash picks his way over the debris and joins Esta by the little stove. They both stare out the window for a few seconds, then Dash hisses under his breath, swearing. He puts one sticky hand to his face and grimaces. “Verrel, start moving everything next door.”

“Sharif?”

Dash nods. There’s a black mark on his face left there by the gummy residue from his fingers.

I’m going to vomit. Verrel must see the panic on my face because he rests one hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Help me gather this.” He points at the sheet where we’ve been throwing all the waste leaves. I nod hurriedly and knot it together into a bag, while Verrel grabs as many jars as he can carry. “This way.”

He leads me to the cracked and tiled washroom and through a broken panel into a cramped, gloomy passage.

“Where are we going?”

“Up,” he says, and jerks his head at the ceiling. There’s a small square piece of board, and Verrel uses a length of broken timber to push it away to reveal a hole. “Up you go,” he says, and cups his hands for a footrest.

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all. I’ll boost you and then hand everything up.”

The hole is pitch-dark, and I stare at it in dismay.

“Come on, time’s wasting.”

My fear of being found by the sharif and sent back to my House in disgrace overrides my fear of the dark. I scramble up into a narrow attic space with sloping walls. After a few blinks, the gloom takes on shape and shadow. I reach down and start hauling up all the contraband.

We work fast and quiet, and in a surprisingly short time, all the jars of ’ink have been transferred into the attic.

Dash gives Verrel a lift into the loft and then slides the board shut, enveloping us in utter darkness.

“Now what?” I whisper. “We just sit here until they leave?”

“Not a chance.”

“What?” My eyes adjust again, and I can make out Verrel’s face near me, calm and expressionless. “What then?”

“We’re moving it across.” He shuffles off on hands and knees, one jar clamped under his arm. “You need to be careful and stay on a beam or else you’ll go right through the ceiling,” he says. “Now follow me.”

Obediently, I gather as much as I can and crawl after Verrel, my fingers gripping the wood so tightly that I’m probably going to be picking splinters out from under my nails for weeks.

What was I thinking? I should have bloody well run back home to Mother the day I left and hoped for the best.

At the end of the loft, Verrel shifts a segment of broken wood out of the way, and we crawl into the sunlight-dappled attic of the adjoining house. The beams creak ominously as we settle our stolen ’ink here.

“It’s not going to fall down, is it?” I look up at the straining wood beams of the ceiling, at the huge gaps between the slate tiles.

“Not today,” says Verrel. “Hopefully.”

After several excruciatingly slow trips, we’ve moved everything across. Verrel seals the join between the two houses and leans back with a sigh.

The house groans in the wind, creaking and snapping. “Oh sweet Gris,” I say. “If this place collapses and I die, I’m going to come back and haunt that little bastard like a boggert.” I shiver and pull my legs up to my chin. “What are we supposed to do?”

Verrel laughs softly. “Now we sit tight until Dash gives the all clear.”

“What about the others?”

“Dash can talk his way out of just about anything, don’t you worry about him. He knows half the bloody sharif by name and what they had for breakfast. Right now he’s probably giving them the grand tour and asking them about their mams’ gout.”

“I’m not worried about
him
,” I snap, and hug my knees tighter.

The minutes barely scrape by. A sharp wind blows through the dilapidated roof, and I shiver. I hear dogs barking, the distant rumble of the sea, the rag-and-bone man’s desultory handbell. But for all I strain my ears, I can hear no voices, no sharif calling out. No Dash. In the silence, I’m left to thinking, and all my thoughts are either about scriv or that damn bat Jannik. As much as I try to think about something else, my mind keeps wandering back to them. I miss magic.

I breathe out slowly, imagining that my lungs are full of power, that all around me the air is gathering, ready to do as I say. It does nothing to rid me of the dull itch in my mind. I need to taste scriv—citrus bright—in my throat or feel the teasing prickle of the bat’s magic.

Below us come scritching noises, rustles and scratches.

“What’s that?”

Verrel shifts. “Hmm? Rats, most likely.”

Wonderful.

“Kirren’s probably chasing them about down there. Having a whale of a time while we sit here with our arses going numb.” He rubs gum off his fingers onto his coat, then pulls a packet of tobacco out of his pocket. “Want?”

I shake my head.

“You’re like Esta then? Got a sweet tooth?”

“Not particularly.” I sigh, scratching patterns in the dirty wood with my thumbnail. “I like MallenIve salt licorice.” I think of the delicacies we sometimes got from the capital city. Things I am unlikely to ever taste again.
Scriv
. Stop it, I tell myself, and flex my fingers against my stomach as if that will still the hunger. “Ama seeds.” Hot and bitter, and small as fingernail parings. I used to eat them while reading, popping the tiny burning seeds onto the tip of my tongue to see how long I could stand it before swallowing them.

That surprises a laugh. “Expensive and odd tastes you got there,” he says.

“Reminds me of my father.” There are other things that make me think of him, although I keep these to myself. The smell of tobacco and vai. Leather and hounds. I squeeze my eyes shut. “Tell me about Dash.”

All I can hear is Verrel’s slow exhale. Then: “There’s not much to say. He keeps secrets, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Secrets?”

“Well they wouldn’t be secrets if I was going about telling them, now would they?”

I laugh softly. “So how did you end up here?”

“I knew Esta and Rin, and they needed a safe place to hide, so I brought them here. Didn’t want to leave them alone, so I asked Dash if I could stay on.”

“And he just said yes?”

“Not hardly. Then he found out I work the street theaters and he became a bit chummier.” He coughs. “Now I’m his glorified message boy, but it’s all right, ’cause, whatever else, Esta’s safe. There’s no one in Stilt City or Old Town that would even think of crossing Dash.”

“Why’s that?”

Verrel shrugs and flicks ash down between the beams. “Long story.”

“I think we have time.”

“Ah, was long before I met him, right. Back when he was just a Hobling, him and Lils, well, they were neighbors, and Lils—well, there’s something about her, and—” He suddenly looks uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t say nothing.”

I keep quiet, and he apparently takes that as reason enough to trust me, at least a little. “So anyway, there’s some stupid Hob, just gone old enough to want to be bringing in some money for his family but still young enough not to realize you don’t sell out your own people. And he thinks he’s going to turn our Lils over to the sharif.”

I squirrel this information away, wondering what fish-market Lils, common as anything, can possibly be hiding that would warrant the interest of the sharif.

“Now, Lils and Dash—I mean, they’re just barely turned nine—they don’t know how to stop this when they hear him say he’s gonna go turn her in. Lils thinks to go to her mam and hope that she can talk some sense into this Hobling lad. So she goes home, and that’s that, because the next day the Hobling is gone.”

“To the sharif?”

“Well, that’s what everyone thinks. And all the neighbors are talking in whispers, and Lils’s mam is getting ready to take her into the deep marshes and go into hiding and live on raw fish and crabs, and Dash is just being all Dash, grinning like it’s all some huge mucking joke. That’s how I heard it told, anyway.”

“He thought it was funny?” I can’t keep the disgust out of my voice.

“He
knew
it was funny, because not two weeks later, someone pulls this half-eaten body out of the marshes and the only way they could identify him was from his boots and shirt.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in. “I’m sorry—are you saying Dash at age nine killed another person to keep Lils safe?” There’s no disguising my disbelief.

Verrel laughs. “Nothing of the sort. Dash never gets his hands dirty. What he does do is put the right word in the right ear and do a favor for this one or that and the next thing you know … things happen.”

“At age nine?” I repeat. Then I shake my head. “You must think I’m an imbecile, telling me that and expecting me to fall for it like a little fish with a fly.”

“Believe what you want,” Verrel says. “There’s others who could tell you better tales. And maybe they’re truer, and maybe they’re not.”

I think of the Hob downstairs, a gadabout, a skinny boy barely older than me, and all the things Verrel seems to think he’s done or is capable of.

“Secrets, huh?” I say after a while. I have run to a house tangled with secrets and deceptions, bringing my own with me. The light falling through the holes in the slate roof is growing fainter, and the air has the smell of rain. I tuck my feet close to my body, wondering how much longer we’ll be forced to stay up here.

Three ’grits later, a voice calls from the other attic. Verrel sighs in relief, pulls the board back, and shoves his head through. “We’re all right, then?”

“Right as rain,” says Dash cheerfully. “Sharif have sailed off for fishier waters.”

I grit my teeth and wonder if it would matter if I strangled Dash in his sleep. Or poisoned his tea. I wonder what his neck would feel like under my fingers.

We crawl out across the roof beams and back into the squat. I’m just passing down the last of the glass jars to Verrel when I hear a familiar gruff voice from the main room.

“What bloody happened here?” Lils says. “Market’s bloody crawling with sharif, all asking nosy questions.”

“Tea?” says Dash.

Lils mutters something I don’t catch.

“It’ll all be gone by afternoon. Charl and his lads are coming to collect it.”

I ease my legs and body through the hole and then let go to land lightly on the passage floor. Verrel grins and holds out two jars. “It doesn’t happen that often,” he says. “It’s all part of Dash’s grand plan, he needs the money.”

“What grand plan?” I mutter as I brush dust and cobwebs and shreds of poisonink leaves off my dress, then grab the jars out of his hands.

“His plan to destroy Pelimburg, of course.”

Of course.

10

A
FTER MY UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER
with Dash and the wrong side of the law, I’ve been wandering through the market on what’s left of my day off, keeping an eye open for a vendor who will neither look twice nor ask questions about my old hair clips and jewelry. Even though it’s rather quiet, there is a crowd under the vast tree that shades the center of the market, and the air is thick with nervous excitement.

I follow the people toward the center, to the old tumbled stone stage where they used to stake and burn bats, before the Houses gave them citizenship. Public punishments are still a spectacle, with people gathering to watch the condemned suffer for their crimes. Usually it’s a thief, bound in place while the sharif use an iron ax to relieve him of a finger. There’s a punishment to suit every crime, and the sharif seem to take no small pleasure in putting out an eye or slitting a tongue.

The crowd is made up mostly of gawkers, bystanders, and the kind of old women who revel in the suffering of others. There’s a girl on the stone stage, held in place with iron manacles. I can smell how they burn the skin at her wrists.

“What did she do?” I ask the man standing next to me, and he grunts, then shrugs. Another Hob overhears my question.

“Spoke out agin House Pelim—her lad was washed over. One of the
Silver Dancer
’s crew. Said it weren’t right that all they get is a few brass bits. She’s got little ones to care for—”

“Oh hush,” says the older man. “’Less you feel like getting up there with her.”

I stare at the girl. So she’s spoken out against my House. She’s not all that many years older than me, but her poverty and the children she’s borne have sucked her dry, left her withered. Only her eyes are bright and fierce.

A sharif steps up to her, an iron blade in one gloved hand. In his other hand is a contraption for holding the jaw open.

She stands straighter. “Fuck you, an all,” she says. “House dog.”

One of the sharif holding her clouts her jaw, and she laughs. It’s a manic sound. “I stand by it. Everyone knows it’s true. What’s a life to a House, handful of brass and thank you very much—” She doesn’t get to finish what she’s saying. They force the mouthpiece in and pull her tongue straight with iron pliers. She shrieks, a ululating sound, the howling of a struggling cat.

Angry mutters sweep through the crowd, and I force myself to watch while they split her tongue in two like a viper’s.

Before they are done, I’m pushing through the crowd, desperate to be away. I’ve only ever heard of these punishments, never before witnessed them. The way Owen spoke, he made it sound like they deserved it.

They don’t.

Gris. No one does.

*   *   *

O
NCE
I
’VE EXCHANGED MY FEW TRINKETS
for a handful of brass, and bought new comfortable boots for working in and a dark blue summer dress that won’t show tea spills and dirt, I decide to treat myself to an ice-cone.

The day has turned hot and muggy, and midges are swarming in clouds about the fruit stands, a sure sign that the last of spring will soon give way to summer and we’ll have days of clear skies if we’re lucky. My face is flushed from walking and haggling. There is still a feeling of sticky anger and resentment in the air even though the blood has been washed from the stones. With my cone in hand, I sit on a rough-hewn bench near the center stage and listen to the news criers read from the
Courant
. They call out the day’s weather predictions, gossip, and news from the surrounding towns. Even news from as far upriver as MallenIve.