Steel's Edge (The Edge 4)

Charlotte stared at her. “The function of a noble title is to serve the people. Seven blocks from here, there’s a body of a boy whose eyes have been gouged out with his mouth sewn shut. He was still alive when they did it. What is wrong with you? Are you human at all?”

“A regrettable but necessary casualty.” The bookkeeper crossed her thin arms on her chest. “But you are right, perhaps we should’ve left him with his lovely family to live in squalor while his parents drank themselves senseless in an effort to forget their own laziness and beat him when his existence reminded them of their baseness. Those who are capable act. They amount to something in life. They don’t live in filth, gorging themselves on cheap food, drowning in addictions, and rutting to produce yet more of their ilk. We rescue children from that. We provide a valuable service.”

Unbelievable.

Charlotte made a choking noise.

“Your condemnation means nothing,” the bookkeeper said. “This enterprise was conceived by a mind far superior to yours or mine. Think about it, when a blueblood buys a pretty young girl, she has a shot at a better life. If she’s smart, she will elevate herself by having his child. Just the other day, we fulfilled a special order for a childless couple. They wanted a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, between the ages of two and four, resembling both of them. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to find suitable children? Yet we’ve managed. Slavery is an opportunity. It’s regrettable you can’t understand that.”

Nothing either Charlotte or Richard could say would ever make this woman see reason.

“Kill her,” Charlotte said. “If you don’t kill her now, I’ll do it myself.”

“We need her testimony and information.” He approached the table. He had no idea how they would make it down the hill and to the port with a captive, but by gods, he would try.

“Killing me won’t be necessary.” The woman raised her chin. “Unlike you, I know my duty to the spear.”

She grasped her pendant.

Richard lunged to stop her.

The stone crunched under the pressure of her fingers. A blinding spike of light shot out into her chin, through her head, and out of her skull.

Charlotte gasped.

The bookkeeper sagged in her chair, dead, her head drooping to the side. The whole thing took less than a second. She had been wearing an Owner’s Gift necklace. He should have seen it, gods damn it.

The world screeched to a halt. He felt like he was falling.

All this time, all this work, and the arrogant scum killed herself. Was there no justice in the world?

Maybe Charlotte . . . He pivoted to her.

“Very dead,” she said, her face disgusted. “Irreversibly dead.”

“Damn it.”

His mind whirred, trying to reassess the situation. Wallowing in defeat never served any purpose. No, he was kidding himself. Even if they had managed to take her alive, neither of them could have gotten her to the ship in their present condition, and if they did, by some miracle, manage it, she would never testify. But it wasn’t over, he reminded himself. Not yet. They might not have the bookkeeper alive, but they still had her office and everything within it.

Duty to the spear. Only one spear came to mind. “Gaesum,” he thought out loud. The symbol of the Adrianglian royal family.

“That would explain her devotion,” Charlotte said. “If she thought she was serving the crown in some capacity, she couldn’t permit herself to acknowledge that they could do something base, or her entire worldview would come crashing down.”

They looked at each other. In Adrianglia, the crown was revered. The power of the royal bloodline had its limitations, but the monarch still held the presiding position over the Council, wielding much of the power within the executive branch. The royal family was looked upon as the epitome of behavior and personal honor. The idea that the crown could be involved in the slave trade was unthinkable.

“There has to be a trail somewhere. She was a bookkeeper; she had to have kept financial records.” Richard strode to the shelves and pulled a stack of books out. He handed them to Charlotte. She leafed through them while he rummaged through the desk. His search of the drawers turned up a wooden box, unlocked. Inside, necklaces lay in a row, each with a simple large gemstone in a variety of colors. Unlike the bookkeeper’s pendant, their chains were short. Once fastened around the neck, they couldn’t be removed by slipping them over the head.

“Is that what she used to kill herself?” Charlotte asked, her voice dry.

He nodded. “They’re called Owner’s Gifts.” He picked one up, dangling the false ruby pendant. “They’re given to young attractive slaves who are used for sexual gratification. They have a one-time lock: once fastened, they’re impossible to take off without cutting through the chain. Each contains a small magic charge designed to kill the wearer. The necklace detonates if the chain is cut or the stone is damaged. A pointed reminder that if you disobey or displease, your life can end in an instant. They work much better than shackles and are a lot less obvious.”

She clenched her teeth, and he read a mix of horror and disgust in her face. “Every time I think I’ve reached the limit, this place shocks me.”

And that was true, Richard realized. He thought she’d grow callous or numb, but every new evidence of cruelty cut a new wound into her. Again, he wished he hadn’t brought her here. There were only so many wounds one could take.

“What do you make of this?” Charlotte showed him a hollowed-out book.

Hope stirred in him. “Was there anything inside?”

“No.”

And the newborn hope plummeted to its death. “We have to keep looking.”

Twenty minutes later, they looked at each other across the table. The office was a wreck. They had left nothing untouched. The ledgers, if they existed, eluded them.

Richard braced himself on the table. He felt another bout of dizziness coming on. He’d gotten through the first one a few minutes ago, but now the vertigo was back. Taking wounds came with a price.

“Richard,” Charlotte said.

He turned.

A bloody figure stood in the doorway, his hair and clothes stained with gore and soot. His eyes were tired, and he was carrying a bloody crowbar. A huge black dog panted by his side.

“Jack?” Richard said.

“Hi.” Jack dropped the crowbar. It clanged on the floor.

“How are you?” Charlotte asked.

“Good,” he said, his voice dull. “I’m all funned out. I think we should go to the ship now. The city is burning, the fire’s coming this way, and the smoke is making my throat itch.”

“We can’t leave yet.” Charlotte sighed. “We’ve looked everywhere, but we haven’t found the ledgers. We have to find them, or all this was for nothing.”

“Did you look in the safe?” Jack asked.

“What safe?” The room had no safe, only a table and the shelves, and he had knocked on all the clear walls looking for a hollow spot.

“In the fireplace.”

Richard turned to the fireplace. It was a typical Weird limestone fireplace without a mantel. No fire was laid out and the fire pit was perfectly clean. No soot marks. It definitely hadn’t been used, but this far south it might have been conceived as decorative. Richard moved to it, probing the stones with his hand. “What makes you think there is a safe in it?”

Jack sat by Charlotte on the floor. “There’s no chimney. It smells like the dead woman’s perfume—I can scent it from here. Also, there’s a doorstop.”

“Where?” Charlotte asked, brushing debris from Jack’s hair.

Jack pointed to the ground. A small ornate doorstop designed to be slid under a door sat by the desk. If the front of the fireplace swung open like a door, it was in the perfect position to be grabbed and wedged under it.

There was no reason for the bookkeeper to spend time at the fireplace. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it. Richard knocked at the stones. If there was some mechanism to unlock it, he couldn’t see it. He picked up his sword.

“Maybe there is a hidden switch,” Charlotte said.

“It would take too long.” He concentrated, feeding magic into the blade, forcing it toward the tip of the sword. The flash-coated edge glowed brighter and brighter, until it blazed like a tiny star. Richard raised the sword and forced the tip into the limestone, testing it. The blade sank into the fireplace, cutting through the rock with surprising ease. No more than half an inch, he decided. If there was a safe, he didn’t want to damage the contents. He dropped to one knee, slashed horizontally across the fireplace, rose, and slashed again at his eye level.

The front of the fireplace slid half an inch. Richard stepped back. The cut section crashed down and fell with a loud thud, its back exposed—wooden boards with a thin layer of limestone affixed to its front. Inside the gutted fireplace, shelves gaped, containing five small black books and one red one.

He turned to Jack. “Well done.”

“You’re a genius.” Charlotte hugged the boy.

Richard pulled out the books and brought them over to Charlotte. His hands shook.

She opened the first black book, and her eyes widened as she read.

He flipped through the red volume, scanning the pages filled with neat rows of accounting figures. Investments and payments, to and from five names. Here they were, the people directly profiting from the sale of human beings. Lord Casside, a rich blueblood who’d made his money in the import and export trade. He’d seen him once at Declan’s house during a formal dinner. Lady Ermine. He had no idea who she was, but he would find out. Baron Rene, another unfamiliar name. Lord Maedoc, a retired general, a decorated war hero. And . . .

“Viscount Robert Brennan.”

“The king’s cousin?” Charlotte asked.

Richard nodded. So it was true. The bookkeeper truly served the spear. Robert Brennan, the seventh person in line for the throne. Never in his calculations had he ever thought that the chain of command went that high.