Wrackbird

Chapter One: The Floating Settle

The tide was going out of Pellanock, and Tamsin Redpath went with it, down the long slick of Cobble Stair to the harbour where the war-barge sat like a fat black hen on the water.

It had been a warship once, in a war nobody remembered fondly. Now the gun-ports were shuttered with shop boards and the deck was roofed over with tarred canvas, and lanterns burned along its rails all night in green glass so that the whole thing glowed like something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Everyone in the city called it the Floating Settle, because that was where debts got settled, one way or another.

Tamsin stopped at the foot of the gangplank and made herself breathe. The harbour stank of tar, fish scale, and wet rope. Below her the water slapped the pilings, patient as a clock.

Three months. That was what the tally-clerk had told her at midsummer, in a voice as flat as a ledger line. Three months to find four hundred gold owls, and then the forfeit clause came due.

The forfeit clause was her tongue.

She had read the contract. She had signed the contract, in her own blood, with a steel nib in a back room that smelled of candle grease, because she had been twenty-six and clever and certain she would never be the kind of fool who needed to read the small print. The small print said that in the event of default, the creditor might take from the debtor's body such parts as were traditional to the trade. In courier work, the traditional part was the tongue, because a courier's whole worth was her word.

"Redpath."

Motten stood at the top of the gangplank. He was not a big man. That was the thing people got wrong about him when they told stories in taprooms — they made him seven feet of muscle, when in truth he was middling height and narrow-shouldered and dressed like a modest clerk, and the only strange thing about him was his stillness. He did not shift his weight. He did not scratch. He stood exactly as he had been standing when she first saw him a year ago, as if between tasks he simply stopped being.

He had a soft scar across his throat where somebody had once opened it. He had not spoken a word in the whole time Tamsin had known him.

"Evening," she said. "I was invited."

Motten turned and went inside, which was as close to a welcome as she was going to get.

The inside of the Floating Settle had been a gun deck. Now it was a counting-house, low-beamed and warm, lined with strongboxes and ledger desks where clerks worked in green lantern-light with their sleeves pinned back. It smelled of ink and coal smoke and, underneath, of old wood that had been at sea. Men and women waited on benches along the wall with their hats in their hands. Nobody looked at anybody.

At the far end, where the captain's table would once have stood, Marta Devick was eating a pear.

She was a broad, comfortable woman in her sixties with grey hair pinned in a plain coil, and she wore a good wool dress the colour of dried blood, and she looked exactly like somebody's aunt who did well out of a bakery. Tamsin had watched her order a man's hands broken while wearing that same expression of mild domestic interest.

"Sit," said Devick. "Have you eaten?"

"I've eaten."

"You haven't. You've got the look. Sit down anyway."

Tamsin sat. There was a chair, which was itself a message: people who were only there to be threatened stood.

Devick set down the pear, wiped her fingers on a cloth, and folded her hands. "Four hundred owls and thirty in accrued interest. You've paid me eleven owls since spring, which I want you to know I noticed, because it means you tried. I've a soft spot for trying. It's the ones who don't try that I find tiring."

"I'm going to have it," Tamsin said.

Devick's eyebrows rose gently. "Are you? From where?"

And there it was. There was no lie Tamsin could tell in that room that would survive the crossing of the table. She had been running the same set of small jobs since the spring — carrying letters, walking gamblers' winnings, once, humiliatingly, delivering somebody's laundry — and eleven owls was what a year of it came to after she'd eaten.

"Nowhere," she said.

"Nowhere," Devick agreed, pleasantly. "So we'll talk about the other thing."

She drew a page from a folder and turned it around. It was a map of the north road, hand-inked, good work. A line ran from Pellanock up through the farm country, through the river town of Coppermouth, and on into the grey hatching of the Gralloch Mountains, four hundred miles of it, ending at a small drawn circle with a bird's foot marked beside it.

"A delivery," said Devick. "One item. Small — you could carry it under one arm, though I'd advise a pack. From here to that mark, which is a cave shrine above the Gralloch pass. There are people waiting there who will take it off your hands and give you a receipt. Bring me the receipt and your contract goes in the fire in front of you. Not paid down. Burned. You walk out of here owing me nothing, with your tongue in your head and your name your own."

Tamsin looked at the map for a long moment, because looking at Devick would have shown too much.

"Time?" she said.

"It must be in the circle before the autumn equinox. That gives you eighteen days from tomorrow's dawn. It can be walked in fifteen by somebody who doesn't stop to be charming."

"And what is it?"

"That," said Devick, "is the part of the arrangement where you say nothing and I say nothing and we both stay fond of one another."

"Marta. I've carried unmarked cargo for you before. I've never asked. I'm asking now because eighteen days for four hundred and thirty owls is not a price, it's a bribe, and I'd like to know what I'm being bribed to walk into."

Devick considered her. Somewhere behind, a clerk's pen scratched.

"You're not a fool," she said at last, "which is why I'm using you and not one of the eager boys. So: it's a reliquary. Sealed iron, a hand's width across each way, cold to hold. It hums a little in the quiet. It has been in my vault, and in my mother's vault before me, for forty years, and I have been paid handsomely and quietly for keeping it, and now the person who pays me wants it moved."

"Crown business."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. Nobody else pays a fee for forty years without asking after it once."

Devick smiled, which was worse than her frowning. "Here is what you need to know and no more. You will not open it. You will not sell it, pledge it, wager it, or show it. You will not set it down anywhere it can be picked up by anyone but you. And you will not," she said, "talk to it."

The last clause hung there in the warm green air.

"Talk to it," Tamsin repeated.

"It's an old thing. Old things make noises. Carters hear voices in wheel-squeak, sailors hear singing in the shrouds. Ignore it and it's nothing." She picked up her pear again. "Now. If you fail — if you sell it, or lose it, or you get sentimental and open it, or you simply don't get there — I'd like to be very clear, because clarity is a kindness."

She glanced past Tamsin's shoulder. Tamsin did not need to turn to know that Motten had come to stand behind her chair, silent as a coat on a hook.

"He'll find you," Devick said. "Not in a week. Whenever. He's patient in a way I've never entirely liked. He'll take the tongue, because that's contractual. After that he'll take fingers, because I've found it discourages the others. And then whatever else takes his fancy, because I've stopped asking about that part."

Tamsin's mouth had gone dry. She thought about the ninety-two days left in her own private tally, and about Drenn Gosford lying in the wet grass at the Vosserheim border with a soldier's boot on his shoulder, and about the fact that she had run.

"I want the contract burned in front of me," she said. "Not filed as discharged. Burned. And I want it witnessed by your tally-clerk."

"Done."

"And I want fifty owls up front for the road. Food, boots, a mule south of the river."

"Twenty," said Devick, "and you'll ride in the back of a fish cart if you need to. I'm not making you comfortable, Redpath. I'm making you desperate. Desperate is faster."

Tamsin looked at the map, at the little bird's-foot mark on the mountain. Four hundred miles. Eighteen days.

She thought: this is the kind of offer that gets made to people nobody will miss.

"Yes," she said.

"Good girl." Devick set down the pear core, precisely, in the middle of the map. "One more thing, and then you can go and buy your boots. You won't be travelling alone."