Page 12 of Six of Crows (Dregs 1)
Rojakke touched his fingers to the ugly bruise forming on his cheek, looking surprised and a bit betrayed. “I thought we was friendly,” he protested.
The sad part was that they were. Inej liked Rojakke. But right now, he was just a frightened man looking to feel bigger than someone.
“Rojakke,” she’d said. “I’ve seen you work a deck of cards. You can get a job in almost any den. Go home and be grateful Kaz doesn’t take what you owe him out of your hide, hmmm?”
He’d gone, a bit wobbly on his feet, still clutching his cheek like a stunned toddler, and Jesper had sauntered over.
“He’s right, you know. Kaz shouldn’t send you to do his dirty work.”
“It’s all dirty work.”
“But we do it just the same,” he said with a sigh.
“You look exhausted. Will you sleep at all tonight?”
Jesper just winked. “Not while the cards are hot. Stay and play a bit. Kaz will stake you.”
“Really, Jesper?” she’d said, pulling up her hood. “If I want to watch men dig holes to fall into, I’ll find myself a cemetery.”
“Come on, Inej,” he’d called after her as she passed through the big double doors onto the street. “You’re good luck!”
Saints, she’d thought, if he believes that, he really must be desperate. She’d left her luck behind in a Suli camp on the shores of West Ravka. She doubted she’d see either again.
Now Inej left her tiny chamber in the Slat and headed downstairs by way of the banisters. There was no reason to cloak her movements here, but silence was a habit, and the stairs tended to squeak like mating mice. When she reached the second-floor landing and saw the crowd milling below, she hung back.
Kaz had been gone longer than anyone had expected, and as soon as he’d entered the shadowy foyer, he’d been waylaid by people looking to congratulate him on his routing of Geels and asking for news of the Black Tips.
“Rumor has it Geels is already putting together a mob to move on us,” said Anika.
“Let him!” rumbled Dirix. “I’ve got an axe handle with his name on it.”
“Geels won’t act for a while,” said Kaz as he moved down the hall. “He doesn’t have the numbers to face us in the streets, and his coffers are too empty to hire on more hands. Shouldn’t you be on your way to the Crow Club?”
The raised eyebrow was enough to send Anika scurrying away, Dirix on her heels. Others came to offer congratulations or make threats against the Black Tips. No one went so far as to pat Kaz on the back, though—that was a good way to lose a hand.
Inej knew Kaz would stop to speak to Per Haskell, so instead of descending the final flight of stairs, she moved down the hallway. There was a closet here, full of odds and ends, old chairs with broken backs, paint-spattered canvas sheeting. Inej moved aside a bucket full of cleaning supplies that she’d placed there precisely because she knew no one in the Slat would ever touch it. The grate beneath it offered a perfect view of Per Haskell’s office. She felt slightly guilty for eavesdropping on Kaz, but he was the one who had turned her into a spy. You couldn’t train a falcon, then expect it not to hunt.
Through the grate she heard Kaz’s knock on Per Haskell’s door and the sound of his greeting.
“Back and still breathing?” the old man inquired. She could just see him seated in his favorite chair, fiddling with a model ship he’d been building for the better part of a year, a pint of lager within arm’s reach, as always.
“We won’t have a problem with Fifth Harbor again.”
Haskell grunted and returned to his model ship. “Close the door.”
Inej heard it shut, muffling the sounds from the hallway. She could see the top of Kaz’s head. His dark hair was damp. It must have started raining.
“You should have gotten permission from me to deal with Bolliger,” said Haskell.
“If I had talked to you first, word might have gotten out—”
“You think I’d let that happen?”
Kaz’s shoulders lifted. “This place is like anything in Ketterdam. It leaks.” Inej could have sworn he looked directly at the vent when he said it.
“I don’t like it, boy. Big Bolliger was my soldier, not yours.”
“Of course,” Kaz said, but they both knew it was a lie. Haskell’s Dregs were old guard, con men and crooks from another time. Bolliger had been one of Kaz’s crew—new blood, young and unafraid. Maybe too unafraid.
“You’re smart, Brekker, but you need to learn patience.”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man barked a laugh. “Yes, sir. No, sir,” he mocked. “I know you’re up to something when you start getting polite. Just what have you got brewing?”
“A job,” Kaz said. “I may need to be gone for a spell.”
“Big money?”
“Very.”
“Big risk?”
“That, too. But you’ll get your twenty percent.”
“You don’t make any major moves without my say-so, understood?” Kaz must have nodded because Per Haskell leaned back in his chair and took a sip of lager. “Are we to be very rich?”
“Rich as Saints in crowns of gold.”
The old man snorted. “Long as I don’t have to live like one.”
“I’ll talk to Pim,” Kaz said. “He can pick up the slack while I’m gone.” Inej frowned. Just where was Kaz going? He hadn’t mentioned any big job to her. And why Pim? The thought shamed her a bit. She could almost hear her father’s voice: So eager to be Queen of the Thieves, Inej? It was one thing to do her job and do it well. It was quite another to want to succeed at it. She didn’t want a permanent place with the Dregs. She wanted to pay off her debts and be free of Ketterdam forever, so why should she care if Kaz chose Pim to run the gang in his absence? Because I’m smarter than Pim. Because Kaz trusts me more. But maybe he didn’t trust the crew to follow a girl like her, only two years out of the brothels, not even seventeen years old. She wore her sleeves long and the sheath of her knife mostly hid the scar on the inside of her left forearm where the Menagerie tattoo had once been, but they all knew it was there.
Kaz exited Haskell’s room, and Inej left her perch to wait for him as he limped his way up the stairs.
“Rojakke?” he asked as he passed her and started up the second flight.
“Gone,” she said, falling in behind him.
“He put up much of a fight?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Not what I asked.”
“He was angry. He may come back around looking for trouble.”
“Never a shortage of that to hand out,” Kaz said as they reached the top floor. The attic rooms had been converted into his office and bedroom. She knew all those flights of stairs were brutal on his bad leg, but he seemed to like having the whole floor to himself.
He entered the office and without looking back at her said, “Shut the door.”
The room was mostly taken up by a makeshift desk—an old warehouse door atop stacked fruit crates—piled high with papers. Some of the floor bosses had started using adding machines, clanking things crowded with stiff brass buttons and spools of paper, but Kaz did the Crow Club tallies in his head. He kept books, but only for the sake of the old man and so that he had something to point to when he called someone out for cheating or when he was looking for new investors.
That was one of the big changes Kaz had brought to the gang. He’d given ordinary shopkeepers and legitimate businessmen the chance to buy shares in the Crow Club. At first they’d been skeptical, sure it was some kind of swindle, but he’d brought them in with tiny stakes and managed to gather enough capital to purchase the dilapidated old building, spruce it up, and get it running. It had paid back big for those early investors. Or so the story went. Inej could never be sure which stories about Kaz were true and which were rumors he’d planted to serve his own ends. For all she knew, he’d conned some poor honest trader out of his life savings to make the Crow Club thrive.
&nb
sp; “I’ve got a job for you,” Kaz said as he flipped through the previous day’s figures. Each sheet would go into his memory with barely a glance. “What would you say to four million kruge?”
“Money like that is more curse than gift.”
