Charlotte nodded and they trotted down the highway toward the city. She could see between the towers now, and from her vantage point in the saddle, the interior of the city looked like a mess of roofs, balconies, and bright, frayed banners. A human hive, just as Richard had described it: messy, chaotic, filled with strangers. A vague anxiety rose in her. From here, the city appeared too large, too full of people. While at the College, she had dreamt of traveling, but once she left it, the marriage and the house had taken precedence.
Now she was riding toward this teeming city through the night, accompanied by a man born between the worlds who cut steel with his sword and had flawless manners. It felt surreal.
“My brother says the Broken has a city in this exact same spot. According to him, its citizens have an unhealthy fascination with pirates,” Richard said.
She found his voice strangely reassuring. “The same brother who stole your ballad?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“What does he do?” she asked to keep the conversation going.
“He’s an agent of the Mirror.”
Charlotte turned to him. “He is a spy?” The Mirror was Adrianglia’s intelligence and espionage agency, the realm’s main weapon in its cold war with the neighboring Dukedom of Louisiana. It operated in the shadows, and the exploits of its agents were legendary.
Richard grimaced. “He steals anything that’s not nailed down, cons people into going along with his improbable schemes, and possesses a unique talent that lets him win when he gambles. It was the Mirror or a prison cell.”
His distaste had a false, put-upon quality about it. “You’re proud of him,” she said.
A narrow smile lit Richard’s face. “Extremely.”
“I’ve never been to the Broken,” she told him. “I tried, but my magic was too strong.”
“Neither have I,” he said. “I also tried to cross and nearly died. The Edge is my limit. I would love to see the Broken.”
“I would, too.”
The Broken’s gadgets fascinated her. Some, like microwave ovens, had their equivalent in the Weird, but others, like plastic wrap and cell phones, were completely new to her. When she had received de Ney manor, she had climbed into the attic. It was filled with strange things from the previous owners’ travels, and she loved to sort through their abandoned treasures. Each item was a little discovery, wrapped in echoes of adventure. She felt the exact same way about the swap meets she’d gone to in the Edge. She rarely bought things, but accompanying Éléonore on one of her treasure hunts was an experience in itself. Éléonore would find some strange gadget from the Broken, and her face would light up.
Grief stabbed her. Charlotte stared ahead at the city. She would make them stop. They would regret the day they ever came to East Laporte.
“Do we have a plan?” she asked.
“The slaver ship docks tomorrow night,” Richard said. “They will expect a crew of at least ten men and a group of slaves, usually twelve to fifteen, typically adolescents and young adults. If they don’t see that on the shore, the ship may not dock. It’s imperative we get on that ship.”
“Because it goes to the slave market?”
“Yes. The slavers are run by a board of trustees, like a business. The individual slaver captains don’t know who the trustees are.”
“You seem very sure of that,” she said.
“Once you hang a man over an open fire, he usually answers your questions honestly,” Richard said. “The slavers don’t know the identity of the trustees, but they do know that once the slaves board the ships, they are taken to an island. There are sixty-seven islands along the Adrianglian coast. The slaves are sold at the market, and the sales are recorded and presided over by a bookkeeper. He’s directly accountable to the trustees. He will know their identities and faces.”
“So where are we going to get a crew of slaves and slavers?” she asked.
“We’re going to bargain with Jason Parris,” Richard said.
“Who is he?”
“The most vicious crime lord in the Cauldron.”
The anxiety she’d been feeling since coming into view of Kelena returned full force. “Ah,” Charlotte said, forcing her voice to sound light. “I’m so relieved. I thought we would be doing something dangerous.”
* * *
RICHARD strode down the wooden boardwalk along the Cauldron’s Sharkmonger Canal, aware of Charlotte walking next to him and the dog trotting a few yards behind. To the right, two-story buildings rose in a continuous wall, built of anything from stone to discarded lumber, each story with its own faded, weather-beaten awning. The awnings hung over the boardwalk, shielding it from the rain and sun. It was late evening, and the numerous colored lanterns hanging from chains and ropes seemed almost to create more shadows than they banished.
Beyond the buildings, even higher structures stretched upward, making the canal resemble a river running along the bottom of a deep, man-made canyon. The water, the color of milk tea, was completely opaque. Small docks punctuated the canal here and there, marked with bright orange-and-green sail-like banners that stretched all the way from the top story to the ground.
The air smelled of bitter salt, seaweeds, smoke, and a confusing, slightly nauseating amalgam of odors particular to the Cauldron: incense; cooked meat; alcohol fumes; the distinct reek of sumah, an illegal narcotic; and the ever-present stench of fish guts.
They passed a small square dock. A body floated facedown, bumping against the wooden supports. Next to him, Charlotte stopped for a short moment and then kept walking.
She had probably never been to a place like this before, but if she had, he wouldn’t know. She obviously didn’t belong here, in the vicious human gutter. In her place, Cerise, his cousin, would’ve put her hand on her sword and stalked like a predator in unfamiliar territory. Rose, Declan’s wife, would’ve been wary, alarmed, at the very least cautious. Charlotte floated. The way she held herself with assurance and slight indifference, as if she were strolling through a garden listening to the slightly boring droning of a friend, made it impossible to question her right to be here. She made herself belong, and when she saw a bloated corpse in the water, she’d merely paused for a moment, as if it were an odd flower, and resumed walking.
Her training was so strong that even here her poise was flawless. Charlotte must’ve had a mentor, someone with an ancient bloodline and an instinctual understanding of etiquette. He recognized it because despite being a poor Edge rat, his own education had come from such a man. His mentor was his granduncle, an exile from the Dukedom of Louisiana, and he was sure that if Vernard were still alive, he would’ve offered Charlotte nothing but praise.
Who could’ve hurt her so much that she had abandoned everything and fled to the Edge?
* * *
DAWN Mother, there was a dead person floating in the water.
Ice rolled down Charlotte’s spine, an alarming mix of revulsion, fear, and anxiety. The sight of a single corpse after she had created so many shouldn’t have been so unsettling, but somehow this lone bloated body, discarded like garbage and ignored by everyone, nearly made her gag.
“Tell me about this crime lord,” Charlotte said, hoping for a distraction before her stomach rebelled and emptied itself on the boardwalk.
“Jason Parris was born in the Broken, in a small mountain town,” Richard said. “His family was poor, so after he finished high school, he joined the Marine Corps. It’s one of the elite branches of the Broken military. He survived a war in a foreign country and decided to leave after his four-year term of service was completed. When he returned home, he couldn’t hold a job. He worked for a series of businesses doing manual labor and was either fired or quit—he didn’t last long at any of them.”
“Why? Wouldn’t being in the military teach him discipline?”
“Oh, he has discipline.” Richard shrugged. “He also has very definite ideas about who is and isn’t worthy of his loyalty. He listened to his sergeants and officers because they had done what he did and he was smart enough to recognize that they were trying to keep him alive. In his mind, they had earned the right to give him orders. His civilian employers weren’t worthy of the same respect. They understandably took a rather dim view of his attitude. Jason found himself often unemployed. He was used to having his own money, and suddenly he had to depend on relatives for a roof over his head. It made him angry. One night, in a bar fight, that anger boiled over, and he severely injured a man. A relative took him to the Edge to keep him out of jail. He was just coming to terms with the idea that magic existed when slavers raided the Edge settlement. Jason was fit and healthy, prime merchandise from their point of view. They overpowered him. He proved to be a difficult captive and attacked them every chance he got. Voshak tried his best to break him but couldn’t. Jason went through the Market and was sold to a garnet mine. A month later, I raided that mine and found him in a hole in the ground. It was my second raid, and knowing what I know now, I would’ve had doubts about pulling him out of that hole.”
“He didn’t want to go home?”
Richard grimaced. “No. He asked for directions to the nearest city instead. I dropped him off at Kelena. He started calling himself Jason Parris and said that this city would become known as his island. An allusion, if you will, to the place where he first received his military training. Now, a year later, he owns everything you can currently see. The old crime lords that ran the Cauldron had established certain boundaries. They had families and business interests, and were unwilling to risk them. Parris had nothing. He tore through them and took over all of their territory. He kills whoever whenever however he feels necessary, without reservation or remorse.”
“Why would anyone follow him?” Sooner or later, someone like that would turn on his own people.
Richard shook his head. “Jason isn’t a psychopath. He’s vicious, but he kills selectively, with a strategy in mind. His people fear him, yet they also know that as long as they comply with his demands, they will be safe and rewarded. He respects strength. He can be charming, but no matter what he says or how he greets us, don’t trust him or his second, Miko. In fact, don’t trust anyone in that building. Jason is the drive and the muscle, but Miko is his mind, and that mind dreams up plans with high body counts.”