Page 60 of Crooked Kingdom (Dregs 2)
Up ahead, they could see stadwatch swarming over a bridge, two of their boats obscuring the passage beneath.
“They’re setting up blockades,” said Kaz.
They ditched the boat there and continued on foot.
Wylan knew they were headed to another safe house, but Kaz had said it himself: There is no safe. Where could they possibly hide? Pekka Rollins was working with Wylan’s father. Between them they had to own half the city. Wylan would be captured. And then what? No one would believe he was Jan Van Eck’s son. Wylan Van Eck might be despised by his father, but he had rights no Shu criminal could hope for. Would he end up in Hellgate? Would his father find a way to see him executed?
As they got farther from the manufacturing district and the Barrel, the patrols dwindled, and Wylan realized the stadwatch must be concentrating their efforts on the less respectable parts of town. Still, they moved in fits and starts, passing along alleys Wylan had never known existed, occasionally entering empty storefronts or the lower levels of unoccupied apartments so they could cut through to the next street. It was as if Kaz had a secret map to Ketterdam that showed the city’s forgotten spaces.
Would Jesper be waiting when they finally got wherever they were going? Or was he lying wounded and bleeding on the floor of the tomb with no one to come to his aid? Wylan refused to believe it. The worse the odds, the better Jesper was in a fight. He thought of Jesper pleading with Colm. I know I let you down. Just give me one more chance. How often had Wylan spoken almost the same words to his father, hoping every time that he could make good on them? Jesper had to survive. They all did.
Wylan remembered the first time he’d seen the sharpshooter. He’d seemed like a creature from another world, dressed in lime green and lemon yellow, his stride long and loping, as if every step was poured from a bottle with a narrow neck.
On Wylan’s first night in the Barrel, he’d wandered from street to street, certain he was about to be robbed, teeth chattering from the cold. Finally, when his skin was turning blue and he couldn’t feel his fingers, he’d summoned the courage to ask a man smoking his pipe on the front steps of a house, “Do you know where there might be rooms for rent?”
“Sign right there says vacancy,” he said, gesturing across the street with his pipe. “What are you, blind?”
“Must have missed it,” Wylan said.
The boardinghouse was filthy but blessedly cheap. He’d rented a room for ten kruge and had also paid for a hot bath. He knew he needed to save his money, but if he contracted lung fever the first night, he’d have problems beyond being short of cash. He took the little towel into the bathroom at the end of the hall and washed up quickly. Though the water was hot enough, he felt vulnerable crouching naked in a tub with no lock on the door. He dried his clothes as best he could, but they were still damp when he put them back on.
Wylan spent that night lying on a paper-thin mattress, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the rooming house around him. On the Geldcanal, the nights were so silent you could hear the water lapping against the sides of the boathouse. But here it might as well have been noon. Music flooded in through the dirty window. People were talking, laughing, slamming doors. The couple in the room above him were fighting. The couple in the room below him were definitely doing something else.
Wylan touched his fingers to the bruises at his throat and thought, I wish I could ring for tea. That was the moment he really began to panic. How much more pathetic could he be? His father had tried to have him killed. He had almost no money and was lying on a cot that reeked of the chemicals they’d used to try to rid the mattress of lice. He should be making a plan, maybe even plotting revenge, trying to gather his wits and his resources. And what was he doing? Wishing he could ring for tea. He might not have been happy at his father’s house, but he’d never had to work for anything. He’d had servants, hot meals, clean clothes. Whatever it took to survive the Barrel, Wylan knew he didn’t have it.
As he lay there, he sought some explanation for what had happened. Surely, Miggson and Prior were to blame; his father hadn’t known. Or maybe Miggson and Prior had misunderstood his father’s orders. It had just been a terrible mistake. Wylan rose and reached into the damp pocket of his coat. His enrollment papers to the music school in Belendt were still there.
As soon as he drew out the thick envelope, he knew his father was guilty. It was soaked through and smelled of canal, but its color was pristine. No ink had bled through from the supposed documents inside. Wylan opened the envelope anyway. The sheaf of folded papers clung together in a wet lump, but he pried each of them apart. They were all blank. His father hadn’t even bothered with a convincing ruse. He’d known Wylan wouldn’t try to read the papers. And that his gullible son would never think to suspect his father of lying. Pathetic.
Wylan had stayed inside for two days, terrified. But on the third morning, he’d been so hungry that the smell of frying potatoes wafting up from the street had driven him from the safety of his room. He bought a paper cone full of them and scarfed them down so greedily he burned his tongue. Then he made himself walk.
He had only enough money to keep his room for another week, less if he planned on eating. He needed to find work, but he had no idea where to begin. He wasn’t big enough or strong enough for a job in the warehouses or shipyards. The softer jobs would require him to read. Was it possible one of the gambling dens or even one of the pleasure houses needed a musician to play in their parlors? He still had his flute. He walked up and down East Stave and along the more well-lit side streets. When it started to get dark, he returned to the boardinghouse, thoroughly defeated. The man with the pipe was still on his steps, smoking. As far as Wylan knew, he never left that perch.
“I’m looking for a job,” Wylan said to him. “Do you know anyone who might be hiring?”
The man peered at him through a cloud of smoke. “Young dollop of cream like you should be able to make fine coin on West Stave.”
“Honest work.”
The man had laughed until he started hacking, but eventually he’d directed Wylan south to the tanneries.
Wylan was paid a scraping wage for mixing dyes and cleaning the vats. The other workers were mostly women and children, a few scrawny boys like him. They spoke little, too tired and too ill from the chemicals to do more than complete their work and collect their pay. They were given no gloves or masks, and Wylan was fairly sure he’d be dead of poisoning before he ever had to worry about where he should go with the tiny bit of money he was earning.
One afternoon, Wylan heard the dye chief complaining that they were losing gallons of dye to evaporation because the boilers ran too hot. He was cursing over the cost he’d paid to have two of them fixed and how little good it had done.
Wylan hesitated, then suggested adding seawater to the tanks.
“Why the hell would I want to do that?” said the dye chief.
“It will raise the boiling point,” said Wylan, wondering why he’d thought it was a good idea to speak at all. “The dyes will have to get hotter to boil so you’ll lose less to evaporation. You’ll have to tweak the formula because the saline will build up fast, and you’ll have to clean the tanks more regularly because the salt can be corrosive.”
The dye chief had merely spat a stream of jurda onto the floor and ignored him. But the next week, they tried using saltwater in one of the tanks. A few days later, they were using a mixture of seawater in all of them, and the dye chief started coming to Wylan with more questions. How could they keep the red dye from stiffening the hides? How could they shorten processing and drying times? Could Wylan make a resin to keep the dyes from bleeding?
A week after that, Wylan had been standing at the vats with his wooden paddle, woozy from the dyes, eyes watering, wondering if helping the dye chief meant he could request a raise, when a boy approached him. He was tall, lanky, his skin a deep Zemeni brown, and looked ridiculously out of place on the dying floor. Not just because of his lime p
laid waistcoat and yellow trousers, but because he seemed to exude pleasure, as if there was no place he’d rather be than a miserable, foul-smelling tannery, as if he’d just walked into a party he couldn’t wait to attend. Though he was skinny, his body fit together with a kind of loose-limbed ease. The dye chief didn’t usually like strangers on the dying floor, but he didn’t say a word to this boy with the revolvers slung across his hips, just tipped his hat respectfully and went scurrying off.
Wylan’s first thought was that this boy had the most perfectly shaped lips he’d ever seen. His second was that his father had sent someone new to kill him. He gripped his paddle. Would the boy shoot him in broad daylight? Did people just do that?
But the boy said, “Hear you know your way around a chemistry set.”
“What? I … yes. A bit,” Wylan had managed.
“Just a bit?”
Wylan had the sense that his next answer was very important. “I have a background.” He’d taken to science and math and pursued them diligently, hoping they might somehow compensate for his other failings.
The boy handed Wylan a folded piece of paper. “Then come to this address when you get off work tonight. We might have a job for you.” He looked around, as if just noticing the vats and the pallid laborers bent over them. “A real job.”
Wylan had stared at the paper, the letters a tangle in front of his eyes. “I—I don’t know where this is.”
The boy gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re not from here, are you?” Wylan shook his head. “Fine. I’ll come fetch you, because clearly I don’t have anything to do with my time but squire new lilies around town. Wylan, right?” Wylan nodded. “Wylan what?”
“Wylan … Hendriks.”
“You know much about demo, Wylan Hendriks?”
“Demo?”
“The boom, the bang, the flint and fuss.”
