Chapter 5 #2
Sander pulls a dagger from a sheath strapped to his calf.
Short blade, good steel, recently sharpened, maintained with the habitual attention that comes from frequent use and not always for cutting rope.
He turns it once in his hand, a gesture that is probably meant to be threatening and succeeds, and holds it out to one of the men flanking Emery.
The man takes it without expression, the blank-faced obedience that comes from either absolute loyalty or absolute fear, and Emery suspects it's the latter because loyalty doesn't usually look that tense around the mouth.
The other man grabs Emery's shoulder from behind.
The grip is heavy and final, communicating stay without bothering with the word, and Emery stays because standing up with his hands bound and no weapon while surrounded by armed men is a good way to die faster than necessary.
Emery intends to die eventually, probably, in the general way that everyone does, but he has specific objections to doing it on the floor of a room he was carried to while wearing dancer's pants.
His mind goes very quiet and very fast.
He cannot fight his way out, not bound, not barefoot, not with four armed men and a one-armed bastard who has clearly been doing this long enough to know exactly how many men it takes to keep a problem contained.
He cannot outrun them. He doesn't know where he is.
He counted the turns but he doesn't know the starting point, doesn't know the depth, doesn't know whether the corridors between here and anywhere safe are guarded or collapsed or both.
His only leverage is information, information about Bastian, about the guild, about the Hollow, about the layout of a Vesper's habits, and the moment he becomes more trouble than that information is worth, the leverage evaporates and so does he.
But Sander has not killed him yet.
He is making a show of the knife, of the handoff, of the men holding Emery in place.
He is performing the decision rather than making it, which means he is either the type who enjoys theater or the type who wants to be talked out of it.
Emery has met both kinds. He has killed both kinds. He can work with both kinds.
"I have intel on one of his safehouses," Emery says.
The room pauses. Not dramatically. There is no collective intake of breath, no shift in posture that would signal genuine surprise. But the man with the dagger looks to Sander, and that half-second of deference, that fractional turn of the head that says should I wait, is enough.
Sander turns back to him. His scowl has not changed, but something behind it has shifted, a recalculation, the rearrangement of priorities that happens when someone about to throw something away considers the possibility that it might still be useful.
"Go on," he says.
"One of his storehouses," Emery continues.
His voice is calm and precise and entirely full of shit, because he does not know where Bastian keeps his storehouses and has been inside his operation for a total of zero hours.
But he knows the northeast corridor. He knows the third bridge market.
He knows the geography of this city intimately, with the specific awareness that every inch of it has, at some point, been required for his survival.
"Northeast corridor, below the third bridge market.
Rotating guard, four-man shifts. He uses it for high-value goods between shipments. "
None of this is true. It doesn't matter if it's true. It matters that it sounds true, and Emery has spent his entire career making things sound true because the gap between a convincing lie and a real knife is measured in seconds and he has always lived in that gap.
"I can finish the job," he says. "I have access now. The storehouse, his habits, his schedule. I just need more time."
Sander's eyes narrow. He does not look convinced.
He looks to be weighing the cost of patience against the satisfaction of violence, and Emery can see the scales moving and they are not tipping in his favor.
The man with the dagger is still holding it.
The man behind Emery still has his shoulder in a grip that is going to leave bruises in the shape of fingers.
"What is to stop you from betraying me?" Sander asks.
"I have never had a failed contract on my record," Emery says.
He holds the man's gaze. This is the truth.
Every word of it is the truth, which is the only reason it lands with any weight, because lies are Emery's profession but the truth is his reputation and his reputation is the only thing he owns that is worth more than the three books sitting in a room he can't go back to. "And I do not intend to start."
It sits there between them. The simplest, most honest thing Emery has said in days, offered to a man who deals in dishonesty the way Emery deals in death.
Fourteen tokens taken. Fourteen tokens fulfilled.
The number means something in the guild.
It means something to the handlers who pass contracts down the chain.
It means the person holding the token will finish the job or die trying, because their identity is welded to the record and the record does not allow for failure.
Sander studies him.
The lamplight catches the scars on his remaining arm, old and layered, damage accumulated over years rather than arriving all at once.
The deep lines around his mouth. The pale, cold eyes that come from surviving long enough in the Underground to lose a limb and keep going, which is not nothing.
Losing an arm down here means someone got close enough to take it and you were good enough to walk away from the encounter alive and angry enough to build something out of what was left.
Emery cannot tell if he's considering the offer or considering where to put the knife.
A crash sounds from somewhere beyond the walls.
It is distant but unmistakable, the heavy percussion of something structural giving way, stone against stone, the deep concussion that happens when a wall or a door or a support beam is hit with enough force to rearrange its relationship with the floor.
It is followed by the sharper sound of voices raised in alarm, shouting that is too muffled by stone and distance to make out the words but clear enough in tone to say something is very wrong.
Not close, but not far enough to ignore.
The man with the dagger looks to Sander. His grip on the blade hasn't changed but his weight has shifted toward the door, leaning involuntarily, instincts telling him to go while orders tell him to stay. Sander's scowl deepens, which Emery would not have thought possible, and yet here they are.
He jerks his chin at the man. "Check it."
The man goes. His footsteps are quick and professional and he does not look back, which tells Emery that whatever hierarchy exists in this room, the dagger-man is high enough in it to be trusted with initiative and low enough in it to be sent first into whatever is making that noise.
Emery has been that position in every hierarchy he's ever occupied, and he does not recommend it.
Another sound, closer this time. A shout that starts as a word and ends as something else entirely, something wet and truncated and wrong, cut short.
The silence that follows is worse than the sound that preceded it, because silence after a scream means either the problem has been solved or the person who had the problem has been.
Sander's jaw tightens. He points at the two men still flanking Emery.
"Stay with him."
Then he follows, his stride clipped and purposeful, one hand on his sword pommel and the other hand absent because it doesn't exist, and the door shuts behind him with the heavy finality of a lock engaging.
Emery is on his knees on a stone floor with his hands bound behind his back and two armed men standing over him, and something is happening beyond that door, something that has made a paranoid, methodical, one-armed crime boss leave the room.
He doesn't know what it is. He knows what a building sounds like when it's being taken apart, because he's been in buildings that were being taken apart, and the sounds filtering through the stone are getting closer and more frequent and less contained and more inevitable, a force of nature working its way through a floor plan.
He breathes in. He breathes out.
Two men and his wrists are bound. The cord is tight but not complex, a simple wrap, quick and brutal, the binding you use when you expect the subject to be dead before the knots matter.
The rope has enough slack for his hands to move maybe two inches in any direction, which is not enough to slip free but is enough to work with if he's creative.
Emery has always been creative. Creativity is what happens when you can't afford proper tools.
The man to his left has a short sword at his hip and is watching the door.
His attention is split between Emery on the floor and the sounds coming through the wall, and the sounds are winning, because the sounds are getting louder and the sounds are deeply concerning and Emery is just a half-dressed dancer on his knees who poses no visible threat to anyone.
The man to his right has the dagger Sander handed off and is watching Emery, but loosely, the unfocused gaze of having already dismissed what he's looking at, confident enough in the restraint that he's stopped watching the prisoner and started watching everything else.
Emery has been underestimated by better men than these. It is, in fact, the thing he is best at.
Another crash, close enough that dust sifts from the ceiling and one of the lamps shudders on the desk. The man on the left takes a step toward the door. His hand goes to his sword hilt.
The man on the right glances at his companion.
Emery moves.