A Breath Caught in Bone (The Maw #1)

Chapter 1

The token is remarkably small, considering the magnitude of what it is asking him to do.

Emery turns it over between his fingers, feeling the familiar weight of it, and noticing that it's not as well worn as the others he's received in the past. Which, of course, means that it hasn't passed through too many hands, if any, other than his own.

It's a contract token, with a kill order stamped onto the back in the guild's cipher.

It's the kind of shorthand that only means something if you've spent long enough in the dark doing someone else's dirty work to learn it.

He, of course, has done exactly that. He's been reading ciphers from the guild since he was sixteen and starving, crawling his way through the streets to find something close to a home, and by now the symbols come to him faster than letters on a page.

The cipher reads: Bastian Kane. Vesper. Underground territory: southeast quarters through the Depths. Crime lord. Black market goods, merchant protection, extortion. Approach with extreme caution.

The last part, the warning, is something he's never once seen on another token. That's probably the reason why it hasn't passed through many hands.

He looks up from the metal disc at the three men sitting across from him in the guild's briefing chamber, which is a generous name for a room that smells of damp, old tobacco and the rotten leather of the armchair in the corner that's older than he is.

His handler, Greaves, is watching him with the kind of neutral look that he wears when he's already decided something is a very bad idea, but lacks the authority to voice his opinion.

The other two men are senior operatives whose names Emery has never learned and still doesn't care to.

They exist purely to witness his acceptance, or decline, of the token and to ensure it stays within the guild.

"You want me to kill a Vesper?" Emery asks the room at large, but he's looking directly at Greaves.

Greaves nods once.

The room is quiet. It's usually quiet, but today the quiet is heavy and yielding under the weight of the feeling when everyone in the room knows something that no one wants to say out loud.

He wonders how much the client had to pay for them to even accept this token.

They've never accepted one for Bastian Kane before, and it's not that there isn't a list of people who'd want him dead.

The problem is not the wanting, is it? It's the fact that you're going against a creature who can breathe you to death before you touch him, and that's a factor Emery should probably consider before he does anything rash.

"Alright," he says, pocketing the token. "Give me a week."

One of the senior operatives shifts in his chair.

Greaves opens his mouth, hesitates, and then closes it again.

Emery can see the words he's swallowing.

Something about reconsidering. Something about the risk.

Greaves has always been the closest thing Emery has to someone who gives a damn about whether he comes back, which is to say he occasionally looks mildly concerned before sending Emery off to do something that could kill him.

"You're sure," Greaves says. It isn't a question, not entirely, but it leaves room for Emery to change his mind.

"I've never turned down a contract."

"There's a first time for everything."

Emery doesn't laugh, but the thought that he has a choice is funny. "Not for me."

He stands and catches a look between the two senior operatives as he pushes back from the table.

It could be pity, or the discomfort of men who are watching someone walk into a furnace and lack the inclination to grab his arm.

Either way, it doesn't matter. Emery's record is clean.

Fourteen tokens taken, fourteen tokens fulfilled, not a single mark still breathing.

It is the only thing in this world he can point to and say that's mine, I did that, it's worth something. He intends to keep it that way.

He walks out of the briefing chamber and into the narrow hallway that threads through the guild house.

The walls are close here, and the ceiling low, and the air carries the staleness of a place that exists entirely underground and has never once tasted sunlight.

The guild house sits three levels below the gorge floor of the Maw, carved into the rock by hands that predated the guild itself and repurposed in a way that defines most things built in the Underground.

It serves its function. It doesn't need to be pretty.

The Maw itself is a city that has taken on a life of its own.

A jagged split in the earth where an ancient river gorge widened into a chaotic vertical sprawl, never planned, never governed with any consistency, built by humans first and then by fae, beastfolk, stone elementals, and a dozen other species who laid their work on top of and beside and through what was already there until the whole thing became something livable.

Above, in the sunlit upper layers, the Merchant Council argues over trade licenses and temple permits and pretends they're in charge.

Below, in the Underground, the arguing is done with blades and debts and the understanding that the only law that matters is the one you can enforce yourself.

Roughly half the city is human. The other half is everything else. The Maw isn't tolerant so much as indifferent. It grew too fast for segregation to take hold. Its cruelties are economic, not racial.

Emery is human. It's never done him any favors.

His room is at the end of the hall, tucked into a corner that gets cold at night because the stone here is close to the Grith, the black river that carved the gorge and still runs beneath the city with something that feels close to a pulse.

He can hear it sometimes, through the wall, a low constant murmur that doesn't follow any rhythm he can predict.

Some people believe the river is sentient.

Emery doesn't have an opinion on that, but he does think it sounds hungry, and that's enough to keep him from sleeping too close to that side of the room.

He lets himself in. The lock is a joke, a rusted latch that would give way to a firm shoulder, but that's the nature of guild housing.

You don't get security. You get four walls and a door and the understanding that anything you leave behind is only as safe as the people you live with, and Emery lives with assassins.

The room is small. It holds a cot with a thin mattress and a blanket that was probably white once, a washbasin with a chip in the rim, and a chest with a broken clasp that contains his spare clothes, which is a generous plural for two shirts and a pair of trousers with a patched knee.

A table sits by the bed, scarred and uneven, with a candle melted into a dish and three books.

Three books, stacked carefully, spines aligned, comprising his entire library.

The one on top is a romance. A commoner and a princess, star-crossed and doomed and beautiful in their undoing.

The cover is so worn the title is barely legible and the spine cracked years ago, but the pages are still intact and that's all that matters.

Beneath it is a slim volume of poetry by a man named Guille, an eastern kingdom writer who loved so fiercely and so foolishly that his words make Emery long for things he doesn't understand.

He found this one in a gutter two blocks from a burned-out house, and it still smells of smoke.

The third, at the bottom, is about a knight who walks through a portal into a world that couldn't possibly exist and has adventures that would never happen to someone like Emery.

He stole two of them from dead marks. The knight's tale off a merchant whose throat he opened three years ago.

The romance from a woman who'd been killing her husband slowly with poison and whose own poisoned wine Emery had neglected to warn her about.

He tries not to think about the fact that the only beautiful things in his life came from people he killed.

In theory, he could buy more. In practice, Emery barely scrapes by enough to pay his keep at the guild and feed himself, and books are a luxury that falls somewhere between "frivolous" and "laughable" on the list of things he can afford.

The guild takes their cut. The guild always takes their cut.

What's left is enough to keep him alive and not much more, which is the guild's way of ensuring you keep taking tokens.

He lies back on the cot and stares at the ceiling, which is stone, and unremarkable, and has a crack running through it that he's been watching widen for the past six months with idle curiosity, having already accepted that the ceiling might eventually fall on him and having decided it wouldn't be the worst way to go.

He turns the name over in his mind. Bastian Kane. He's going to kill a Vesper.

Vespers are rare enough that most people in the Maw have never seen one.

Emery has seen one, once, from a distance, in the Thornwall market square.

He remembers the crowd parting. He remembers the way the air seemed to thicken, the atmosphere pulling tight around something that could unmake it.

He remembers thinking I never want to be in a room with that.

And now he's taken a contract to get into a room with one and put a blade in him.

He reaches up and runs his fingers along the edge of the token in his pocket. The metal is warm from his skin. Somewhere below, through the wall, the Grith murmurs in its bed.

He should probably be afraid, but he isn't. Fear is a luxury too, just the same as books, and Emery can't afford either one.

He spends two days gathering intelligence, which amounts to sitting in three different taverns in the upper levels of the Underground buying drinks for people who talk too much and sorting the useful information from the noise.