The reception at Lord Verdan's had run long, and Tariq Thagirion was in a foul mood when he finally climbed into his carriage.
There was a man sitting inside it.
He sat on the far bench as if it were his own, hands folded in his lap, physically unremarkable in a dark, well-cut coat. The carriage lamps were lit. The shutters were down.
"Good evening, Lord Tariq."
Tariq's hand went for the door.
"Your driver has taken a short walk," the man said. "Paid, and unharmed, and he'll return when we're finished. I've come to make you an offer. It needs ten minutes."
"Do you know," Tariq said slowly, "whose carriage this is?"
"Of course. That's why I'm in it. My name is Thaumiel."
The name reached Tariq a half-second before its meaning did, and then the council chamber came back to him all at once: Alphonse's report, the murdered Supreme Judge, the Black Prison, Verdan roaring about his shipments. The most wanted man in the City of Gold was sitting in his carriage with his hands folded, and Tariq's mouth had gone very dry.
"I'll scream," Tariq said, "and twenty guards will be here before—"
"You won't, though, because you're a man who hears an offer before he prices it. It's the thing I like about you."
"You don't know me."
"I know the auction manifest lists an old mummy on the third day that your family has been hunting for two generations to add to their collection, and they gave you strict unforgiving instructions to win its bid" Thaumiel said. "I know Malthane refused you the catalog at his own table, in front of Verdan, and smiled while he did it. And I know that when your house speaks, it speaks through you, and yet when your house sits down to dinner, you sit below the salt." He paused. "Spokesman. It's a servant's word wearing a lord's coat. You want the seat itself. You want to be the head of your house. Don't you."
Tariq said nothing, which was an answer.
"Then here is the offer." Thaumiel counted it on his fingers, unhurried. "One. The Apex-Tier heart, the crown of the entire auction, leaves that ground in your hands. Two. The men who would outbid you for it find themselves, one way or another, unable to. Three. Within the year, your family has a new head, and it's you."
The carriage was very quiet. Somewhere outside, streets away, a bell rang the hour.
"And in exchange," Tariq said, "you'll want…"
"Information. That's all." Thaumiel spread his hands. "Malthane's plans. His movements. His decisions as he makes them, not after the city learns them. You sit at his table; I only ask that you listen at it." A small tilt of the head. "And you have a door into his house that no one else in this city has. His new wife is your kin. Isn't she?"
Tariq stared at him. "You want me to use Amara?"
"I want you to have every tool you own counted. Whether you pick one up is always yours to decide. That is the entire arrangement, Lord Tariq, I don't buy men. A bought man is worth exactly what you paid and not a copper more. Everyone who follows me chose it, and can unchoose it, and knows it. I'm not purchasing you." He let the silence sit for a moment. "I'm inviting you."
"To what? Thievery? Murder? I know what you're accused of."
"To the winning side of what's coming," Thaumiel said. "The auction is one small part of it."
Tariq looked at him for a long moment.
"The heart," he said. "Why not keep it for yourself? It's an Apex tier heart, you would be immortal and as strong as a Utopian General."
"I have no need of it," Thaumiel said. "There are things that interest me more."
"If I say no," Tariq said.
"If you say no, I leave," Thaumiel said. "It costs me nothing. Who would you tell?" He smiled. "But you're not going to say no."
Tariq let out a breath he'd been holding since the door.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
Thaumiel extended his hand across the carriage, and Tariq took it.
"If you prove yourself, you become one of us, Lord Tariq."
The man was gone a street later, out into the dark as easily as he'd come, and Tariq Thagirion rode the rest of the way home with his heart pounding, not with fear, he realized, and it startled him. For the first time in his life, someone had looked at him and offered him the seat itself.
In the streets of the City of Gold
The criers were out before the morning carts.
"—BY DECREE OF THE CROWN — the GRAND AUCTION — five days of wonders — hearts of the Eldritch — cursed objects, NEWLY AWAKENED, never before offered on any market—"
Adam stopped walking.
Zeren made it three more steps, realized he was alone, and came back. "What? It's just the auction again. It's on every wall since yesterday. Look, that's the fourth poster on this street alone—"
"Cursed objects," Adam said. "Plural."
"So?"
"So the only cursed objects in the world are supposed to be Solomon's Remnants. Twelve of them, that is what Selena said." He was still looking at the crier. "Selena knew everything, Zeren, and she never once said there were others. Not one word."
"Maybe she didn't know."
"That's exactly it. Newly awakened." Adam started walking again, faster now, thinking with his feet the way he did. "They're saying these things started appearing when the Epoch began. That's why she didn't know, there was nothing to know until I bit the apple. They're new. But this also means they didn’t appear in previous epochs, why this one specifically?"
Zeren jogged to keep up. "Is that good or bad?"
"It's a lead. If objects are waking up cursed the same way people are, then whatever they are, they might be the same kind of thing as the Remnants." They might hold a clue to the whereabouts of Kaiser. "I need to get my hand on one."
"And Lilly," Zeren said.
"And Lilly," Adam said. "And Evelyn. That hasn't changed. That never changes."
He spent the day asking with no avail.
By afternoon he'd started getting frustrated.
The pawnshop was the last stop, a narrow den off the metal-workers' row. He listened to Adam's questions and refused each one politely, and finally leaned on his counter and looked at Adam.
"Questions like yours don't live up here," he said. "They live in Nauz."
"What's Nauz?"
The pawnbroker snorted. "New to the city? Of course, you are." He jerked his thumb at the floorboards. "The undercity, a whole city of it, down in the dark under your boots. The mines gave out a hundred years ago and the poor moved into the holes. Everything the City of Gold doesn't want to look at, it sweeps down there." He was already turning away. "Stair behind the fish market, boy. They call them mouths. Mind which one you use."
Adam didn’t waste a single second and a few minutes later he was there.
The mouth behind the fish market was a stairway, worn to a shine in the middle of each step, and it went down a long time.
"Whoa," Zeren said, softly after they finally stepped foot on the Nauz grounds.
Everything the City of Gold doesn't want to look at.
They walked.
The first street off the mouth was a market, kettles mended with plates of three different metals. Boots resoled with belt leather. Coats turned inside out and sewn again, so the worn side faced the wearer's heart. The fish-stall at the corner sold what the market above them wouldn't, heads, tails, frames. Light itself was traded here: the lamps hung in locked wire cages, and a boy went from stall to stall selling candle stubs by the finger-length.
A hand slipped into Zeren's coat so smoothly that Zeren never felt it.
Adam caught the wrist without thinking. A girl, twelve at most, and the moment his fingers closed on her she went rigid and flinched down and away. Waiting for the blow like it was a price she'd already agreed to pay.
Adam took the purse back out of her hand and let go.
She stared at him. Then she was gone between the stalls, and a porter passing with a crate on his shoulder spoke without stopping.
"Keep your hands in front, topsider. New ones learn quick or go home light."
Further along there was a line, thirty people or more, outside a shopfront with no sign. Bread was coming out of it, loaf after loaf into waiting hands, and Adam watched for a while and saw not one coin go back the other way.
"Who pays for that?" Zeren asked the woman at the end of the line.
"The blesser provides," she said, and didn't turn around.
Adam looked at the line a moment longer. Somebody feeds a hundreds of people.
By then the day was gone somewhere above them, you couldn't tell down here, and Zeren's stomach had started making formal complaints. The only warmth in three streets was a doorway under a lantern dyed red.
Inside was long and low and loud, a counter of old ship-planking, a cook-fire, and a man behind it built like his own barrels, a miner's guild tattoo faded blue on one forearm.
"Topsiders?"
"Is it that evident?" Adam said.
"It's the boots." He jerked his chin at the counter. "Sit. You eat what's cooked."
What was cooked was fish-frame stew, and it was better than everything about it suggested. The bowls arrived on the arms of a boy about ten, quick as a sparrow, who set them down, looked Zeren dead in the eye, and said: "Bread's extra. A copper. For you, two."
"Why two for me?!"
"Topsider tax."
"That's not a real thing!"
"New tax," the boy said. "Very old tradition." And he was gone with their coppers before Zeren had finished being outraged, and came back grinning with the bread, and by the second trip he and Zeren were somehow in negotiations over a "genuine eldritch tooth" that was, to Adam's eye, a dog's.
"Nilo!" the barman barked. "Stop fleecing the customers."
Adam put coins on the counter anyway, good coins, and there was a fat irony in that, since every one of them had come out of Thaumiel's own performance purse.
"We're paying for this with his money," Zeren pointed out, not quietly at all.
"I know," Adam said, annoyed.
Adam ordered milk for Zeren with the second round of bread.
"Drink your milk, kid," Adam said.
"BUT why did you order milk for me though?" Zeren was even more annoyed than at the tax.
"So," the barman, Bakr, the runner had called him, said in the flat voice, wiping a clean patch of counter cleaner. "You're not buyers. Buyers know what they want. You're asking sideways. What are you hunting, topsider?"
"Information," Adam said. "There was a magician," Adam said. "Working a granary theater, topside. He called himself Thaumiel."
Bakr's rag stopped.
"You saw the bread line, coming in?" he said. "That's him. The blesser." He let that sit. "Thaumiel. You won't hear a bad word about him below, and you shouldn't say one either. Half this city eats because of him. The magistrates take, he gives. There are men down here who'd follow him through a wall, so I'll tell you what everyone knows and nothing more." He counted on two fingers. "There's a woman always at his shoulder. Young, fair, and mad in love with him. And there's a kid they keep with them. A girl. Quiet." He shrugged. "That's what I've seen with my own eyes. They say the Order's bigger, four at least, maybe more that nobody's ever seen. I wouldn't know."
Lilly is the kid.
"Do you have any idea where I can find…,"
The crash came from the door end of the bar.
Two big men had Nilo by the collar and the hair, hauling him toward the door while a third watched the room. Debt men. The boy wasn't crying, he was being dragged and he looked bored with the familiarity of it.
"His mother's in the book," the third man said to Bakr, not even loudly. "You know how it goes."
"He works my floor," Bakr said. "Take it out of my…"
"You're in the book too, old man."
And the whole bar did the Nauz thing, all at once. Every head turned away. Every conversation continued a note louder.
Adam was halfway off his stool when someone else got there first.
A young man had been eating alone by the wall, Adam's age, give or take a year, brown-skinned, travel-worn, his black hair cropped close and neat, shorter at the sides. He didn't shout and he didn't square up. He just stepped into the doorway with his bowl still in one hand and said, "Put him down. He works here."
"He owes," the third man said.
"He's ten."
"Move, or…"
The young man set his bowl down on the nearest table.
For the first time all evening, the bar went quiet.