Half on Delivery | The Whispering Edge - Book I

Part One

The Other Blade

The Keel and Cable

Saltgate stank of fish guts and bad bargains, and Carys Fenn had come down the hill with something worse to sell. Eleven days since the sword last drank. Night after night she had drowned in her sleep, black water filling her mouth and the lamps of the city going out above her one by one, and every morning she had woken soaked and shaking with her left hand clawed shut so hard she had to pry the fingers open with her right. Now the fog was up off the Sallow, thick as a drowned man’s breath, and every lamp in the fish market wore a halo like a cheap saint. She wore silver filigree, a braid full of pins she had taken off the dead and the satisfied, and a sabre on her hip that had killed more men than the pox. She was looking for a man who would try something. In Saltgate, after dark, that never took long.

The market died the way it always died, from the water inward. The boats at the Saltgate stairs had been gutted and scrubbed, the gulls had been beaten off the offal twice and come screaming back twice, and the fishwives at the long stone tables were sluicing their boards with buckets of river water that ran across the cobbles pink with slime and scales and found every low place. The smell came up off it thick and coppery, cod blood and herring blood and the black jelly from the bottom of the barrels, and Carys’s mouth flooded.

She swallowed. It came again. Her body knew what it wanted and had stopped caring where it came from; that was the part the ballads left out, the stretch when the Tooth’s hunger got down into the meat of her and a gutting board started to smell like supper. She stepped over the pink fan of it at the corner of Herring Row and made herself breathe through her mouth, and the cold of the stones came up through her boot soles and into her shins like it meant to stay.

She walked slowly. Slowly was the point, and her knees had begun to grind on the steps down from Candlemarket and had not stopped.

‹You are favoring the left,› Tooth said. ‹Very slightly. A man who studies women walking would see it, and there are a great many men here who do nothing else.›

A fishwife near enough to hear was knocking scales off her board with the side of her hand. Carys kept her mouth shut and kept walking and flexed her left hand inside its glove. The leather creaked. The fingers went most of the way to a fist and stopped dead, the joints packed with ground glass, and the headache that had lived behind her eyes since noon answered her knuckles with a bright hot pulse, and under the leathers, in the raw cold of a Saltgate dusk, a line of sweat crawled down her spine and soaked into her shift. Even her teeth hurt. The crooked eyetooth throbbed in its socket as though something were trying to push it out from underneath.

The chandler in Tallow Yard had been the night the lamplighters started coming round early. She could still see him if she wanted to: the tallow grease on his cuffs, the shop bell jangling on its spring as he went down behind his own counter. She had slept the whole of the next day, fat and warm and dreamless, and woken strong enough to carry a barrel up her stairs, and she had thought it would last. It never lasted. ’Was it always this quick?’ Last year a man like the chandler would have carried her a good deal further. She disliked the answer to that, and left the question lying where it fell.

She had dressed for this, and it had taken her an hour and a steady hand she didn’t have. The leathers with the silver filigree down every seam, because filigree caught what light there was and made her look like money that had wandered down the hill and lost its keeper. The cloak thrown back off her right shoulder and pinned, so the hilt of the Tooth showed plain at her hip; a woman who wore a sword that openly was either very dangerous or very stupid, and in Saltgate at dusk the men who mattered always bet stupid. The braid over her left shoulder with the pins in it, the jet and the garnets set high where the lamps would find them. Her ears bare. Nobody in Saltgate had ever seen an elf, and they had all heard the ballads, so they looked at her ears first and her face second and her purse third, which was exactly the order she wanted.

They were looking now. A cooper’s boy wheeling a barrow of empty half-barrels stopped dead at the top of Pudding Stair to gawp at her and very nearly sent the lot bounding down the steps. A pair of lightermen under the arch of the old Fish Hall quit their argument in the middle of a word. A girl selling mussels from a basket looked at Carys’s gloves, then at her own chapped red hands, then away, and Carys gave her the smile she kept for shopgirls, closed and pleasant and a little sorry for them, and went on by.

‹The oyster man,› said Tooth.

He was on the corner by the conduit with his barrel and his knife, a young man with a beard that had not made up its mind, and he had been watching her since she came out of Herring Row. He had stopped shucking to do it. The oyster lay open in his palm, grey and wet and trembling a little with his pulse, and he had forgotten it was there.

‹He has looked at you the way a dog looks through a butcher’s window since you turned the corner. By the terms of your little rule, surely that is a beginning. He is alone. He has a knife. He will close his stall within the quarter hour and walk home along the river in the dark, and you could be walking the same way.›

“No,” she said, into the fur of her collar.

‹Why not?›

She didn’t answer that. There were people all round her; the mussel girl was near enough to hear a woman muttering into her own cloak, and a woman who talked to herself was a woman people remembered. She passed the oyster man close enough to smell the brine on his apron, and he said, “Evening, my lady,” in a voice that cracked on lady, and she tipped her head to him the width of a finger and didn’t stop. Behind her she heard him let out his breath.

Looking was nothing. Every man in the market looked; she had spent an hour at her mirror on Wick Street making sure of it. Looking was what she was for. What she hunted was the second thing, the one that came after the look: the moment a man decided that because he wanted something he was owed it. She had watched that moment crawl into men’s faces since she was twelve and carrying trays at the Heron, and she knew it the way a card-sharp knows a marked deck, by feel and at once and without ever being able to say which corner was bent. Paid contracts, or people who deserved it. That was the rule. She had made it herself, three years ago, sitting on the floor of her room with her palm bleeding into a towel and Tooth saying, with enormous patience, ‹Your own blood is no more use to it than water, Carys. Less. Water at least would clean the floor.› She kept the rule the way she kept all her promises: because she had made it, and because it was hers, and because without it she was only a hungry thing in a good coat.

‹You are deciding,› Tooth said, ‹that a man who calls you my lady is too polite to die. I have known magistrates hang men for less evidence.›

Past the Fish Hall the market gave out and the backs of the warehouses began, big and blind in the fog: Gammon’s, the Salt Guild’s long brick shed with its crane arm hanging somewhere overhead like a gibbet nobody had finished, the salt store with a white crust along its footings where the winter tides came up to lick it. Between them the lanes ran crooked down to the river, too narrow for carts, cobbled once and mud now, and the taverns squatted at their heads like toughs at the mouths of alleys. The Keel and Cable. The Anchor Cross. The Three Tuns, which had lost a tun off its sign in some old storm and never bothered to replace it. Light and noise fell out of their doors in lumps whenever somebody opened one. Somebody inside the Anchor Cross was murdering “The Weaver’s Daughter” and the rest of the room was helping him hide the body.

At the head of Cooper’s Stair the world tipped.

It was only a little: the lamps swung on their halos, the cobbles leaned, and a sour wave came up out of her empty stomach and hung at the back of her throat. She put out a gloved hand and caught the rail and held on and waited for it to pass, and it passed, slowly, the way the tide goes out of a bad harbor. When she looked down at her hand on the iron it was shaking. Not much. Enough. She pressed it flat until it stopped and made the rest of her into a lost woman looking at nothing, which was easier, because that was nearly what she was.

‹There,› said Tooth, and for once he said nothing more.

He was outside the Keel and Cable with two others, on the bench under the window, a quart pot on the step by his boot. A big man, going soft at the middle the way strong men do after thirty, in a lighterman’s oilskin gone grey at every fold and a knitted cap shoved back off a broad red forehead. Fair hair, cropped short. A gold ring in his left ear that winked in the tavern light when he turned his head. As Carys watched, the serving woman came out through the door with a tray of empties on her hip, a tired woman with grey at her temples and red forearms, and he reached out without looking and closed his hand round her wrist.

“Come here, Nance. Settle a thing for us.”

“Let go, Hob, I’ve got the tray.”

“Dickon says you’ve a man in Dunnock Row. I say you haven’t. Which is it?”