CHAPTER
One
Draped in beggar’s rags and leaning on a cane, Jean-Claude lurked at the entry to Three Brick Alley, awaiting his quarry. Loose strips of transparent linen covered his eyes, and his face itched under layers of the best stage makeup alchemy could provide. He’d been here through the tolling of an hour, precious time slipping through his fingers. Apprehending a shape-shifting spy was not something one could jot down on an agenda, but he had only one day left to manage it.
Passersby went about their business, steering well clear of the blind and stinking beggar. Jean-Claude trusted that his young co-conspirator, lurking in an even narrower alley across the way, had not become distracted. She had proven herself a professional despite her tender age.
The chatter on the street rippled, like a herd of cows muttering to one another at the scent of predators nearby, a swift rumble of noise and then watchful silence.
From up the street came a surly mob of Last Men, a particularly desperate breed of doomsday cultists. Young, lean, and angry, they wore long feast-day robes, but went with hoods thrown back to display shaved heads tattooed with row upon row of saintly icons, each one defiled. Their leader had a disfigured omnioculus—the Builder’ eye, blind and bleeding—emblazoned on his forehead.
Jean-Claude stumbled from the alley wheezing, “Alms for the blind.” He held out a tin cup and blundered headlong into the nearest tough. The cultist fell, Jean-Claude collapsed backward on purpose, and “accidentally” barked the leader’s shin with his cane.
“Filthy whoreson!” the leader growled. “Break his legs.”
His bodyguards stepped in to give Jean-Claude a kicking.
“Builder bless,” Jean-Claude said, holding up his hands defensively and rocking wildly. “Builder bless. I mean no harm.”
“The Builder’s dead, vermin.” The mob piled on Jean-Claude, punching and kicking, blows that would leave bruises but no worse thanks to his failing to be a easy target. Jean-Claude wailed quite piteously.
“Stop!” came a high, shrill voice. “Please stop! Don’t hurt my papa!” A young girl, somewhere between eleven and thirteen squeezed through the press of men, fell to her knees, and covered Jean-Claude with her body.
“Out of the way, girl.” One of the brutes grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off Jean-Claude. “You’ll get yours next, I—Breaker’s breath!” He leapt back and shook his hand, recoiling from the field of open sores and blisters that covered her face.
Jean-Claude sat up, the bandages on his face falling away to reveal blackened skin, cracked and rotting, dripping with pus. “Pox and plague take you all.” He spit up the wad of rice and curds he’d been holding in his cheek.
“Pest! They’ve got the pest!” shouted one of the Last Men.
Jean-Claude lurched to his feet. “Boils and blisters on your balls!”
The first ruffian bolted, and the rest followed like a shoal of aerofish fleeing a leviathan.
Jean-Claude nodded to his young accomplice. They withdrew down Three Brick Alley until they came to a dark junction where several buildings didn’t quite line up.
Jean-Claude’s heart raced and his lungs burned from the exertion, but he looked down at the girl, Rebecca, and asked, “Package delivered?”
Rebecca was on loan from St. Josephine’s Home for Foundlings, which was a front for the most lucrative urchin gang in the city. An incomparable pickpocket, Rebecca could steal a man’s wooden teeth if he smiled at her. Alternately, she could play the part of a putpocket and plant a prize on a person.
Rebecca was already scrubbing the makeup off her face, or at least smearing it more evenly. “Of course. They was distracted enough I coulda taken their boots.”
Jean-Claude pulled at a small vial of wood spirits and started scrubbing off his makeup goo. The stinging liquid chilled his face and left his skin raw. He handed the spirits to Rebecca. “Don’t get it in your eyes.”
Her nose wrinkled but she splashed it on her face and got to work peeling off boils and blisters to reveal a face full of freckles. “What’s that marble thing for anyway?”
The contraband in question was a contraption that Capitaine Isabelle had contrived: small metal sphere, not much bigger than a marble, with a tiny sliver of chartstone inside. She’d actually gone on at some length to explain to him how it worked, showed him some very detailed technical drawings which he nodded at politely and completely failed to comprehend.
Jean-Claude arched an eyebrow at her. “Why do you want to know?”
Rebecca shrugged. “Weren’t too long ago the Last Men was just a pack of nutters standing on street corners screaming, ‘Builder’s dead!’ Used to throw rocks at ’em. Never bothered with their pockets ’cause they never had anything worth taking. Since Burning Night, they ganged up. Started recruiting hard and beating up folks who won’t pay bribes. Makes lean pickings for me. Now you show up, la reine’s man, and says, how ’bout we put these marbles in their bags. So I think what’s they done to get the nobs mad at ’em?”
Jean-Claude grunted approval at this line of reasoning. Orphans grew up fast on these streets, but Rebecca was quick and bold even by those standards.
Jean-Claude drew forth his hunter’s eye, a device that looked like a timepiece the size of his hand. He flipped open the lid and showed her the face. Instead of watch hands there were three needles with beads that could slide along their length showing distance and direction. All pointed in the general direction of Uptown, and the third bead was catching up with the first two.
“The marble was a prey marker,” Jean-Claude said, which was more evocative to his mind than sympathetic resonance nodes, which was what Isabelle called them. “Works on the same principle as a ship’s orrery. That black needle points to the prey marker you just dropped off. The other two are the ones we planted earlier.”
“The ones I planted.” Rebecca looked rather more skeptical than impressed at this fine bit of engineering. “If you want to know where they’re going, why not just follow ’em?”
“I’ve been following them,” Jean-Claude said. “The problem is, I can’t be everywhere at once. Also, their new leader, Hasdrubal, is a Seelenjäger. He can hear you and smell you and get away before you ever catch sight of him.” Jean-Claude wasn’t fond of shapeshifters at the best of times, but since he’d started hunting Hasdrubal, he half believed he was chasing a ghost. Now he was running out of time. After months of preparation, Isabelle’s ship was scheduled to loft tomorrow on an expedition to the top of the world, and Jean-Claude would be damned if he’d be left behind.
“So why’s la reine care about the Last Men?” Rebecca asked.
“Because their leader is one of the men behind Burning Night,” Jean-Claude said. A foreign spy and agent provocateur, Hasdrubal had helped the old roi’s estranged son depose him. The usurper had come within a heartbeat of claiming the crown before Isabelle had stopped him.
Since Burning Night, all the rest of the conspirators had been captured, killed, or chased away, but Hasdrubal remained at large. Spymaster Impervia wanted him interrogated for his knowledge of the Skaladin spy network, and la reine herself wanted to mount his head as a trophy and send it to his master, the Tyrant of Skaladin, as a warning.