Chapter 27
CHAPTER
Azrian
Azrian moved through the fish market in the Harbor District as dawn painted the sky shades of pearl and smoke, the smell of brine tickling his nostrils. In a roundabout way, the place reminded him of Corven’s dockside markets, though with less color and life.
Stone colonnades cast long shadows over marble-topped tables where vendors arranged their silvered catches. He found the stall he sought at the market’s edge, tucked into one of the deeper alcoves where the colonnade’s shadow fell heaviest.
A man hunched over a marble table, gutting fish with mechanical precision. Salt and sun had carved deep lines around his eyes, and his hands moved with the particular economy of someone who’d learned to work quickly in the shadows.
“We ain’t opened yet, m’lord,” the Handler said without looking up, his knife sliding through pale flesh with practiced ease. “Come back in an hour or two.”
The sharp scent of fish blood mingled with the salt air.
“I’m not here for the catch. I’m here for what slips the nets.”
The blade paused.
The Handler’s head lifted slowly, taking in Azrian’s appearance, from his fine coat to the pin at his lapel. His weathered face went slack for a heartbeat before his shoulders drew back, every muscle taut. “Apologies, m’lord, I didn’t realize…”
“It is no matter. May we speak privately?”
The Handler glanced around the early morning market, cataloguing the vendors still arranging their wares. With a grunt, he slid the display table aside, creating space for Azrian to slip into the alcove’s cramped confines.
A red canvas curtain fell across the opening, muffling the market’s rising chatter and trapping the metallic tang of blood within their makeshift privacy.
“What’s a rat like me got that Death Incarnate can’t take for himself?” the Handler asked.
The crude directness should have offended Azrian.
In the Gilt’s polished halls, no one would dare speak so plainly.
Their hypocrisy demanded prettier words, gentler euphemisms for the violence he represented.
But here, among those who dealt in life’s sharper edges, people called a spade a spade.
Azrian found himself oddly grateful for the honesty.
He said nothing, letting the silence settle like fly-laden gauze over the gutted fish as the Handler worked, letting him stew in his suspicion.
At last, the Handler risked a glance up. “If you’ve got to make someone disappear, surely, you can handle that yourself? With that magic of yours?”
Azrian smiled, but there was nothing warm in it. “Do you know anything of the two Gilt couples who’ve recently died?”
A muscle in the Handler’s jaw ticked. “I might’ve heard rumors.”
Azrian picked at imaginary dirt under his fingernails. “Go on, then. Tell me more of these… rumors.”
“What’s there to say?” The Handler dropped his cleaver on the counter, then ran his blood-soaked hands on his own apron, staining it crimson. “I’m sure the Emperor’s faithful hound knows more than us, mere mortals.”
The epithet itched against Azrian’s skin, tighter than a collar.
If he’d been honest with himself, his faith in the Empire had been on shaky ground since Evara’s death.
Now, he was one step away from becoming a traitor.
If the Emperor knew he was down here, investigating murders the Registry had wished to erase… “Just amuse me.”
“Newlywed, the both of ‘em. Gilt, like you said. Unfortunate, but the Registry’s already claimed ‘em failed blood vows, so they don’t have to go do any diggin’. Mighty convenient on their part.”
“So I see.” Azrian thrummed his fingers on the counter.
The Handler scoffed. “Don’t get it twisted, m’lord. That ain’t why they died. I heard one of ‘em got poisoned and the other smothered. But we know how the Registry operates, down here in the gutters. If it’s inconvenient, it’ll be gone.”
“And why is it,”—Azrian said, leaning closer to the Handler—”that you seem to know so much about all of this?”
The Handler narrowed his eyes. “I know what you’re implyin’. It ain’t true. It’s my business to know, that’s all.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The Handler picked up his cleaver again, threw it a hair past Azrian’s shoulder, past the narrow opening in the curtain, right onto the display table outside. Azrian didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as blink. The scent of rotting kelp drifted through the widened gap.
“If I’d killed those couples,” the Handler said, “the corpses would be gone. The weapons would be gone. I would’ve handled it —none of this butchered mess some newcomer left behind.”
“A… newcomer?”
“Obviously, m’lord. Murder a couple at a public event? No room for cleanup. Smother another to death? Too messy, too much room for failure. And above all, why no magic?”
“Maybe they are unbonded.”
Was he really discussing a murder case with a known murderer for hire? Then again, Azrian himself murdered at the Crown’s pleasure. They were not that different, the two of them.
“Then they should not go ‘round murderin’ people.” The Handler grunted. “Specially bonded ones, who can overpower ‘em with magic.”
Azrian leaned back against the alcove wall. “So if you didn’t murder those couples, and you don’t know who did, then I assume you also don’t know why they’re dead?”
The Handler looked around, ears perked as if listening for sound. Outside, a vendor’s voice rose above the others, hawking fresh mackerel. “I ain’t sayin’ that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
The Handler shrugged. “Whatever I might say, it won’t be for free.”
A long silence stretched between them. Then, Azrian reached into his coat and produced a leather pouch heavy with coin.
It landed on the marble table beside the gutted fish with a satisfying thunk.
The Handler’s eyes widened. Scales and blood smeared across the marble as the man lunged forward, loosening the drawstrings with eager fingers before swearing at the contents.
“You sure you didn’t make a mistake?” His fingers worked through the coins, lifting them to catch the pale morning light. “Ain’t no information worth this amount of coin.”
“I’ve made no mistake. Now answer my question.”
The Handler looked up sharply, eyes searching Azrian as if he were reading a ledger. “Did the Emperor send you down here? Is he the one askin’?”
“The Emperor knows not of my visit. And the money is not his. It’s mine. Will you answer, now?”
The Handler whistled, testing the weight of the pouch. “You really are as wealthy as they say, m’lord.”
Azrian tightened his fists. Threads of ashen magic gathered at his fingertips. The Handler stepped back, gripping the pouch tightly against his chest.
“A’right, a’right. Those two couples won’t be the last bodies to fall, I’ll tell you this much.” The Handler’s gaze dropped to Azrian’s collar, where the edge of his mark was barely visible above the fabric. “As long as people like you exist, bodies will fall.”
“People… like me?”
“Marked.”
“By the Registry?”
The Handler’s eyes stayed fixed on Azrian’s throat. “Surely you, of all people, don’t still believe the Registry’s lies?”
Those words lodged in Azrian’s mind like a splinter, refusing to be dismissed. But if the marks did not belong to the Registry, then… where did they come from?
“If you think the Registry is lying about the marks, then you must know something about them that the rest of us do not.”
The man shrugged. “All I’m sayin’ is that when you meet as many different people as I do, you learn a thing or two about ancient legends.”
He set the pouch down on the table between them like evidence in a trial.
Outside the alcove, someone dropped a crate of ice.
“Because you paid so handsomely, I’ll tell you this: the people you been huntin’ ain’t the ones hunting you.
They could even help you. You might want to stop throwin’ ‘em in the Registry dungeon first, though.”
Azrian didn’t know what to make of the cryptic advice. Or maybe he did, but needed the safety of his own space to unpack its implications. “Very well, then.”
He turned to leave, pushing aside the red curtain. Morning sun had strengthened, casting the fish stalls on the edge of the colonnade in harsh relief as vendors shouted their wares to the flock of early customers. The smell of brine filled his lungs, clean after the blood-thick air of the alcove.
“M’lord.”
Azrian paused, but did not turn back.
“For what it’s worth, if those ancient legends were true and I were the Registry, I’d worry about the marks, too. Especially when they might make the Emperor’s precious weapon infinitely more powerful.”
The words followed him as he walked away, threading through the maze of tables and hanging nets. The advice was hardly a map. But the mention of Royal dungeons, of ancient legends and infinite power… he’d heard similar musings from the Children he’d interrogated, and had dismissed them as heresy.
And now, for the first time since this nightmare began, Azrian wondered if he’d been asking the wrong questions entirely.
Azrian paused before the doors to his parlor. His pulse stumbled.
Miss Almarien sat curled in one of the parlor’s bergère chairs— his chair, in fact, the one beneath the window.
Her slippers lay discarded on the rug, her feet tucked beneath her like a nesting bird.
Her hair fell in a wild, accidental tumble, half-lit by the shifting gray outside.
She was bent over what looked like a pile of battered documents, the pages splayed across her lap and the wing of the chair, her concentration knife-sharp.
Her lips moved silently as she read, and every now and then she tapped a nail against the margin or cocked her head.
There was a looseness to her posture entirely at odds with how she held herself around the Gilt; here she seemed unguarded, almost girlish.