Chapter 4
Emery bathes until the water goes cold.
He gets out. He dries off. He changes into his own clothes, the ones he arrived in, the shirt without the stain and the trousers without the patch.
The dancer's attire goes back on its hook.
The bangles go back in their dish. He straps the knife to his thigh, the one that spent twenty minutes on the floor of a brothel bedroom while its owner was otherwise occupied, and the weight of it against his skin feels different now.
Heavier. Or maybe lighter. He isn't sure which is worse.
Vella finds him on his way out. She is standing near the front curtain with a glass of something dark in her hand, her scales catching the last of the lamplight in soft green and gold.
She does not ask where he is going. She does not ask what happened upstairs.
She looks at him with those dark, slitted eyes and her forked tongue flicks against her lower lip, a gesture he has come to recognize as her version of consideration, and she tells him he is welcome back anytime.
"You have a gift," she says. Her lisp softens the consonants and makes the words sound warmer than they probably are. "And a place here, if you need it."
Emery thanks her. He means it. The sincerity of his gratitude surprises him, because he is not accustomed to being grateful.
Gratitude implies that someone has given you something, and the people in Emery's life have generally been more interested in taking.
Vella has given him a roof and a job and a set of rules that include the radical notion that he is allowed to say no, and she has done it without asking for anything except competence in return.
He files her kindness away in the small, carefully guarded part of himself where he keeps the things that matter, the part that used to hold three books and now holds slightly less.
He leaves the Hollow and steps into the corridor outside and the Underground closes around him.
The walk from the Velvet Hollow to the guild house takes roughly forty minutes through the lamp-lit upper corridors.
At this hour the tunnels are quieter than usual but far from empty.
The Underground does not sleep. It dims, banked embers still hot.
Black market vendors who operate on the night shift are setting out their wares on folding tables and canvas tarps: stolen jewelry, forged documents, potions in unlabeled bottles, weapons of varying legality and quality.
A dwarf with a braided beard and an eye patch is selling roasted nuts from a cart that smells of cinnamon and char, and the line stretches halfway down the corridor.
A pair of fae, tall and thin and luminous in the lamplight, are arguing in a language Emery doesn't speak, their voices musical even in anger.
The corridors widen and narrow without logic.
Some were carved by stone-singers, the smooth-walled passages with rounded ceilings that hum faintly if you press your hand to the rock.
Others were hacked out by human hands with iron tools, rough and angular and low enough that the half-giant from Bastian's crew would have to crawl.
The Underground was not designed. It accumulated.
Layer upon layer, generation after generation, each new arrival carving their space out of whatever rock was available and connecting it to what came before by whatever means seemed expedient at the time.
The result is a three-dimensional maze that defies mapping and rewards only those who have lived in it long enough to navigate by instinct rather than logic.
Emery has lived in it long enough. He walks the corridors without thinking, his feet finding the turns and the junctions and the narrow stairways that connect levels with the automatic certainty of muscle memory.
He passes the junction that smells of fried onions and despair.
He climbs the steep staircase carved into the gorge wall that takes him from the Hollow's level up two floors to the guild's territory.
He passes a boarding house with a cracked door and a tavern with no name and a shrine to a god he doesn't recognize, a stone alcove with candles and offerings and a carved face that watches him go with eyes that seem to track his movement, though that is probably the flickering light and the late hour and his own guilty conscience.
The guild house is three turns past the shrine. Emery lets himself in with the key he keeps on a cord around his neck, the one piece of property the guild issues that is not negotiable or replaceable, and walks down the narrow hallway to the briefing chamber.
Greaves is awake. This is not surprising.
Greaves operates on a schedule that seems to have no relationship to daylight, which is fitting for a man who has not seen daylight in approximately fifteen years.
He is sitting at the stabbed table with a cup of tea and a stack of papers and the expression of weary competence that defines his entire professional identity.
He looks up when Emery enters and his eyebrows do something complicated.
"You look like you've been in a fight," he says.
"I need more time on the Kane contract."
Greaves sets down his tea. He does not ask why.
He does not ask what happened. He is a handler, not a therapist, and the guild's position on the personal lives of its operatives is that they are irrelevant unless they interfere with the work.
He studies Emery for a long moment, taking in the damp hair and the flushed skin and the bruise on his throat that Emery should have covered and didn't because he is exhausted and careless and still, god help him, thinking about the mouth that put it there.
"How much time?"
"I don't know. He's careful. His compound is unknown. His crew is loyal."
"You've made contact?"
"Yes."
Greaves nods slowly. "The client won't be pleased."
"The client can be patient or the client can find someone else."
"There is no one else," Greaves says, and the flatness of it tells Emery everything he needs to know about how many assassins have been offered this contract before him and how many have turned it down. He is not the first choice. He is the only one stupid enough to say yes.
"I'll relay the request," Greaves says. "Go sleep. You look terrible."
Emery goes to his room. The door is the same.
The lock is the same. The cot with the thin mattress and the blanket that was probably white once and the washbasin with the chip in the rim and the chest with the broken clasp.
His three books are on the table, spines aligned, exactly where he left them, the romance and the poetry and the knight's tale, three stolen comforts that make up the sum total of his possessions that matter.
He lies down without undressing. He pulls the blanket over himself and closes his eyes and he dreams of charcoal skin and white hair and a voice that vibrates in the marrow of his bones.
He wakes up irritated about it.
Morning in the Underground is a relative concept.
There is no sunrise, no shift in light, no birdsong.
There is only the changing rhythm of the corridors: the vendors switching shifts, the taverns transitioning from the night crowd to the morning crowd, the quality of noise that distinguishes a population waking up from one going to sleep.
Emery registers the shift through the wall of his room as the sound of the Grith, which is always there, always murmuring, takes on a slightly different quality in the hours when the corridors quiet down enough to let it be heard.
He sits on the edge of his cot and rubs his face and thinks about Bastian Kane's thumb on his lip and how it felt less like being appraised and more like being seen, and he is furious at himself for thinking about it again.
He has a job to do. A contract. He had his target naked and unarmed and pliant beneath him and he did not kill him.
He did not even try. He let the man dress and leave and he lay in the bed afterward and thought fuck three times and then fell asleep, and this morning he is going to figure out a plan that does not involve being within arm's reach of Bastian Kane because apparently his professionalism has a structural weakness and that weakness is six foot two with a scar and a voice that could melt iron.
He does not examine the failure too long.
Examining it leads to questions he doesn't want to answer, questions about why his hand never moved toward the blade, about why the word lovingly appeared in his head uninvited and wouldn't leave, about why the sound Bastian made against his throat is still echoing in his blood ten hours later.
He does not examine it. He gets dressed and goes to find Doss.
Doss is in the mess hall, which is a generous name for a room with three long tables and a kitchen window through which a perpetually annoyed cook serves porridge that seems to have been made with spite and oatmeal in equal measure.
Doss is a year older than Emery and six inches shorter and has the energy of a man who is compact, alert, and always vibrating at a frequency slightly above normal.
He is Emery's one reliable contact in the guild, which is to say he is the one person Emery trusts to give him accurate information without immediately selling that information to someone else.
The trust is not unconditional. Nothing in the guild is unconditional.
But Doss has been reliable within the limits of what the guild structure allows, and in the Underground that is the best you can hope for.
"I've got something," Doss says, barely waiting for Emery to sit down.
He slides a folded piece of paper across the table.
"A name. Former member of Kane's crew, left about two years ago.
She sells information now. Might know something useful about his operation, weak points, access routes, anything you can use. "