Right on schedule, the leviathan hunter fleet returned, unleashing a whirl of festivities all over Doskvol. After attending a welcome banquet at the Lord Governor’s stronghold in Whitecrown, the captains dispersed to their own homes to partake of loving family reunions – or shopping expeditions, in the case of Lady Clave.
Ash, Faith, and I had already thoroughly reconnoitered upscale Nightmarket furnishing stores before focusing on a clockmaker with a “Wanted: Seasonal Help” sign in his window, a job I got on the spot. For his part, Ash identified nearby toy and candy stores, then trained the Insect Kids to mimic middle-class children on a holiday outing. As for Faith, she darted from shop window to shop window, gushing over the displays and giving the perfect impression of an air-headed socialite while finding a good vantage point to monitor passersby.
Thus, when Lady Clave sallied forth in her goat-drawn carriage, we were ready.
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The week after the leviathan hunter fleet returned to port was always a city-wide holiday. For the middle class and nobility, that was. The dockers had to unload the ships, junior clerks had to process extra paperwork, and storekeepers had to work extra shifts to accommodate all the shoppers. As Doskvol’s premier commercial district, Nightmarket was thronged with pedestrians and goat-drawn carriages that fought their way through the crowds.
Outside the clockmaker’s shop, I was taking my time polishing the big glass window while keeping an eye out for our target. In the furniture store next door, Faith lounged on a sofa and gesticulated enthusiastically at the proprietor, who gaped at her as if he’d never seen anything like her and had no idea what to do now that he had. (Pretend she didn’t exist was the correct response, but obviously not one he’d come to quite yet.) Somewhere in the crowd, Ash was disguised as a panhandler with a crude sign that read, “Plees help the sailors.”
A little Severosi boy in a sailor suit broke out of the crowd and sprinted by, nearly crashing into me – Mantis, signaling Captain Clave’s arrival. “Sorry, miss!” he shouted over his shoulder.
“Careful, young master!” I called as he vanished. Stepping back into the shop, I started polishing the clocks in the window display.
Moments later, down Wood Street processed Captain Clave. Despite the horde on the street, her scowl and her military gait cleared a bubble around her and made it easier for the Insect Kids to track her. Innocent and adorable in their sailor suits, frilly dresses, and giant floppy hair ribbons, our little pack sauntered after the target. Here, they bought little flags from a street vendor; there, they bickered amiably over whether they should get candied mushrooms or mushroom pastries. From time to time, one of them would disappear briefly to report to Ash.
Unfortunately, the captain’s instincts told her that she was being tailed, even though her eyes skipped over the Insect Kids every time she scanned the crowd. Suspicious and on edge, she marched into and out of a few furniture stores as if checking them off a list, before she finally settled down enough to buy a new parlor set in the shop across the street. Still scrubbing away furiously at the clocks, I tensed in anticipation.
But when she came out, instead of striding towards me, she turned on her heel and headed for her carriage.
Dropping my rag, I bustled out of the shop and hailed her. “Captain! Captain Clave!”
At my call, she stiffened and spun around, ready to shoot any attackers.
I sank into a wobbly curtsey. “Captain Clave, milady! Begging yer pardon, but we spoke to your housekeeper about what you might like! My master put together a selection that might interest you.” It was a bit on the forward side, for sure, but I thought that a half-trained temporary shop girl on the verge of losing a valuable customer might well act forwardly.
Although Captain Clave hesitated for a moment and raked me up and down with her hard, dead eyes, she admitted to herself, “I was considering picking up a new clock.” She thought for another second, then made an executive decision. “Show me what you have.” Barely giving me time to scurry ahead and open the door for her, she stalked into the shop and planted herself in the center of the room, surveying all the clocks.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ash materialize and begin brandishing his sign and shouting about helping shell-shocked sailors. The crowd around him miraculously drained away. Shoppers studiously avoided even glancing in his direction, and mothers pulled their children close and hustled them to the other side of the street.
Still playing the timid shop girl, I bobbed another nervous curtsey at Captain Clave and gestured at a settee. “Milady, won’t you have a seat while I bring you some refreshments?”
Without bothering to glance at me, she did, her back ramrod straight as she scrutinized an array of grandfather clocks. I ducked into the back room, where the clockmaker, an absentminded, grandfatherly type, was hunched over a delicate repair. As I passed with a tray of tea and cakes, he blinked up at me and asked, confused, “Customer, Mara?”
“Yes, sir. Never you worry, sir, I’ll take care of her,” I assured him.
“Mmm. Good.” His attention had already returned to the tiny gears he was fitting into a clockwork music box.
I made sure to shut the door tight behind me.
In my absence, Captain Clave had discovered the collection of marine chronometers, which ranged in size from a pocket watch to a coffee table. Hands planted on her hips, she loomed over them until I coaxed her back onto the settee. Then I brought over nautical-related clocks one at a time, sliding easily into a shop girl’s patter about the merits and artistry of each.
She completely tuned me out and examined the pieces for herself.
In the distance, Ash’s shouts were growing louder, as if he were slowly making his way down the street. “Please help the sailors! You must think of the sailors!”
Like a herd of goats he was driving along, all the shoppers were walking more quickly than usual, barely even glancing into the shop windows. Across the street, the furniture store door opened a crack, and the proprietor peered out uneasily. Captain Clave, however, acted as if she ignored background shouting all the time (which, come to think of it, she probably had to on her ship).
Cutting me off mid-sentence, she stabbed a thick, scarred finger at a restored antique maritime chronometer. Nearly the size of a coffee table, it nestled in a gleaming wooden case with inlaid patterns – just the sort of piece that a leviathan hunter captain might want to display in her home or even on her ship. “I want this.” Her voice held no emotion whatsoever.
“Of course!” I gushed. “An excellent choice, milady!”
She tuned that out too, as a waste of her time. “Have it delivered to my house tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, of course – ”
She slammed down a card with her address, stood, and strode out the door, which slammed behind her with a discordant jangle of bells.
“ – milady,” I finished weakly. Only then did I allow myself a tiny smirk.
Stooping, I awkwardly wrapped my arms around the marine chronometer and made a show of struggling with the weight. Acting as if I might drop it at any moment, I staggered towards the storeroom where we kept pieces in preparation for delivery.
If all had gone according to plan, my crewmates should have swung into action as soon as Captain Clave stepped back onto the street. And indeed, the bells on the front door tinkled merrily and Faith swirled in. With a wink in my direction, she sang out gaily, “Yoohooooo! Is anyone there?”
A scrape of chair legs and footsteps in the back room indicated that the clockmaker was going to investigate. I hastily shut the storeroom door.
“Yoohoooo!” Faith’s shrill tones pierced the wood beautifully. “Are you the creator of these charming clocks?”
“Er…yes, miss?”
“Then I must congratulate such a clever craftsman!”
Leaving the clockmaker to his fate, I unscrewed the back of the marine chronometer, slid the bomb out of my pocket, and stared blankly at the wires and dangly bits. My brother hadn’t included any instructions for how to install it, and all I knew was that I needed to hook it up to the clock’s winding mechanism. Whatever that meant.
Let’s see. That handle on the outside of the case should be for winding, which meant that whatever internal bits moved when I turned it should be part of the winding mechanism, right?
Outside the shop, Ash’s voice bellowed, “Why is everyone ignoring their plight? This is the depravity of Doskvol! No one cares about the sailors! I will make a stand for them!”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Good, my other crewmate was also in place, scaring off potential customers.
“Save one of the orphans who was abandoned by his family!” I could just picture one of the Insect Kids – probably Locust – dressed in rags and cringing into Ash’s legs while he placed a protective hand on the child’s shoulder. “Won’t you think of the children?”
Apart from his roaring, the street had gone deathly still, so it sounded like crowd control was going well.
As opposed to bomb installation.
Untwisting a pair of wires that had snarled in my pocket, I glared at the device some more. Was I supposed to connect some of the wires to themselves? To the clock gears? The clock case? Seriously, would it have killed Sigmund to include a set of instructions? At this point, I could think of only one tutor who definitely knew how to set bombs and didn’t want the bomb traced back to Iruvia any more than Sigmund or I did.
Surrendering to the inevitable, I reached out with my mind and muttered, Grandfather, will you help me?
Instantly, wisps of black smoke twisted before my eyes. As if he’d been hovering over my shoulder the whole time, just waiting to see if I’d turn to him, Grandfather directed, Insert the explosive device into the cavity – careful! Don’t catch that wire –
Too late. The dangling end of one wire snagged on a brass decoration and yanked. Something inside the bomb gave a little click, and an ominous ticking filled the storeroom.
Don’t panic. Just ease it out, child, slowly, slowly, easy does it….
Willing my hands not to shake, I inched the bomb back out of the clock – only for a different wire tangle around a gear. The ticking grew faster and faster.
Granddaughter! It’s going to explode!
I know!
Panicking, I clutched all of the bomb’s dangly bits in one fist and ripped them out.
The ticking cut off.
Blessed, blessed silence in the storeroom.
That wouldn’t have been my first suggestion…but it appears to have worked, was Grandfather’s calm assessment.
I barely registered the reproof. Squeezing my eyes shut, I breathed shakily, in and out, in and out, until my heartrate returned to some semblance of normal. When I’d finally stopped quivering, I stared in dismay at the mess. What was I going to do now? We’d never failed on a score before, and I certainly didn’t want to confess to my crewmates, Oh, by the way, I broke the bomb, so we’ve wasted a week of preparations and will have to come up with an entirely different way to kill Captain Clave now…. They wouldn’t take it well. And neither would Irimina.
But it only got worse. Out in the front room, the clockmaker reached a sudden epiphany. “You’re not planning to buy anything, are you, miss? Mara? Mara, where are you? Can you watch the store?” His footsteps approached the storeroom where I sat with a partially disassembled clock and incriminating bomb components in my lap.
“That’s a gun!” Faith shrieked. “Watch out! He has a gun! Get behind cover!”
That ear-piercing scream was followed by a patter of slippered feet and a very loud thump, as if Faith had made a flying leap across the room and tackled the clockmaker to the floor.
“Stay down!” she screeched. “Stay down!”
“We have to call the Bluecoats!” he gasped.
“Shhh! Don’t let him hear you!”
She must have signaled Ash through the window, because a split second later, panicked yelling filled the street. “Gun! Gun! He has a gun!” “This way!” “Run!” “Get out of my way!” Far in the distance, whistles began to shrill.
Ash’s voice faded very slightly, as if he’d moved directly into the path of the fleeing shoppers so he could grab and shake them. “Here, you! Yes, you!” he howled. “Think of the children! Why won’t any of you think of the children?”
It was Grandfather who snapped me out of my trance. Let’s try again, granddaughter, he advised. Steady, steady….
With a great deal more patience than expected, he talked me through repairing the bomb, inserting it into the clock, and hooking the trigger to the winding mechanism.
There, all done. With something like a pat on my head, his smoke wisps evaporated.
Too tense to feel annoyed, I screwed on the back of the clock case, wrapped it tidily with brown paper and string, and wrote out a delivery label in loopy schoolgirl handwriting. Then, at last, I sagged against the wall.
Outside, the Bluecoats must have pushed their way through the stampede to confront Ash, because he was demanding imperiously, “You understand, right, officers? Only you can understand the horrors of what I’ve been through on the Void Sea!”
Feigning terror, I cracked open the storeroom door and peeked out. One Bluecoat had Ash by the arm, while the other stood about five feet away.
“Calm down, sir, just calm down,” advised the latter, his tone indicating that he didn’t make nearly enough to risk his life subduing madmen.
“Of course! I’m perfectly calm, officer!” roared Ash, making both Bluecoats jump.
“He don’t even have a gun,” complained the other Bluecoat, probably the junior partner, who got to risk his life patting down madmen. He sounded incredibly peeved at the civilians who’d caused a riot over nothing and interrupted their peaceful mid-afternoon patrol.
“You’ll have to come with us, sir,” the senior Bluecoat droned.
“Why of course!” Flinging aside his “Plees help the sailors” sign and radiating goodwill, Ash stuck out his wrists for the junior Bluecoat to handcuff. “I’m so proud of your service! You keep the streets so safe!” His voice faded away as these fine officers of the law bore him off to their precinct for a few hours of paperwork. Neither one noticed the tiny shadows creeping after them. The Insect Kids would make sure Ash got out safely.
After another few minutes of quaking on the floor, the clockmaker creaked to his feet and extended a hand to help Faith up. “Miss, perhaps we should continue this conversation at a later date.”
She made a show of patting down her skirts and brushing imaginary dust off them. (As if there’d be any dust on floors I’d swept!) In a perfectly sincere voice, she replied, “Yes, of course, I’m just glad you’re all right.”
Unseen, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t even need Ash to tell me she was lying.
The clockmaker nodded at her, jerkily. “You too, miss.”
The door banged shut behind her.
Tiptoeing out of the storeroom, I twisted my hands together and quavered, “Sir, is – is it safe now?”
Still dazed from his encounter with my crewmates, the poor clockmaker was rubbing his temples. “Yes,” he replied absently. “I think…I think I’m going to close up early today. Go spend some time with your family. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” From his morose tone, he wasn’t expecting much need for my presence – because he already knew that no one would dare shop in Nightmarket for the rest of Fleet Week.
Although I considered feigning a nervous breakdown and quitting immediately, I decided that it would be less suspicious to work for a few more days. By then, Fleet Week was almost over, with no signs of holiday business returning to normal, and the clockmaker was hunting for excuses to let me go anyway.
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The next evening, our crew was relaxing in the railcar common room when Cricket shot through a window and spun around Faith in excitement. “It’s in her parlor!” she squealed. “The captain lady put the clock in her parlor! Can I eat now? Can I eat now?”
“Not yet, dear,” chided Faith, petting the ghost’s head. “Go back, haunt the place, and make sure that no one else tries to wind it. Report back when Clave does. Then I’ll feed you.”
“Okay!” Cricket streaked off again.
We settled back down to wait, Ash using the time to design a new game for the orphans. “I’m calling it ‘The Slide and the Constabulary,’” he explained to us. “I’ll split them up into groups of three. One of them will play the Slide, and the other two will play the Bluecoats. The rest of the class will judge the Slide on how well they lie.”
A useful exercise indeed, and one which he’d already modeled for the Insect Kids.
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When Cricket returned a few hours later, she literally glowed with anticipation. “The clock exploded!” she sang out, dancing around Faith in a blur of blue light. “The captain lady is de-ead!”
“Excellent!” pronounced Ash. “I’m only sorry we weren’t there to see it.”
Cricket slowed slightly. “It was pretty gruesome,” she informed him, sounding faintly impressed. “There were little bits everywhere.”
At that, Faith bounded to her feet. “I think this is cause to celebrate, dear Cricket,” she announced. “I’ll take you out to dinner. What do you think of Six Towers?”
In answer, the little ghost darted for the door. “Did you know she was Hive?”
Faith stopped short in the middle of the room. Ash sat bolt upright. I stiffened.
“I take it that’s a no,” chirped Cricket. “She had, like, a bee on her back, so I assumed….”
“That’s a good assumption,” Faith told her. Putting on a fake disapproving scowl, she scolded, “Now, Cricket, when did you get involved with the Hive?”
The ghost pouted back at her. “I was never involved with the Hive.”
“How did you know about the bee, then?”
“Everyone knows about the bees!” the former child thief retorted. “You keep way, way away from the bees. That’s how you know who not to rob.”
With a careless shrug, Faith said cheerily, “Well, in this case, you pay attention to the bees because that’s how you know whom to explode. We do things a little bit differently, once you’re dead.” Ruffled sleeve flapping, she made a shooing gesture. “Off we go! Unless you want to feed off one of the orphans? We have a lot of them around….”
Cricket hesitated, undecided.
“Faith,” Ash warned.
Casting an impish grin in his direction, Faith ushered the ghost out the door.
Trying to sound neutral, I observed, “We’re getting in deeper and deeper with the Hive.”
“We’ve only killed two of them. I mean three. Vhetin Kellis, Skannon Vale, and now Lady Clave.” For once, Ash sounded genuinely unconcerned by the exact number. “I assume Faith has checked that Irimina isn’t a member herself. Although, honestly, we’d be better off if it were someone within the Hive assassinating her way up, than a lowly smuggler tangling with the Hive by accident. We’ll all be in huge trouble if this ever gets traced back to us.”
That was true, since the Hive wouldn’t be inclined to forgive a crew that picked off its members, even if it were by accident rather than design. Still, I didn’t mind whittling down their numbers, which increased the Lampblacks and Red Sashes’ chance of pushing it out of Crow’s Foot and the Docks.
Unfortunately, Hive leadership analyzed the situation and drew the same conclusion.
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Early next morning, someone frantically pounded on each of the railcar doors in turn until I tumbled out of bed, grabbed Grandfather, and flung my window open.
Wide-eyed and terrified, Bug thrust a scrap of handbill into my hand, whirled, and dashed off without even waiting for a tip. He practically bowled over a Red Sash runner, who looked just as panicked. She also shoved a letter at me and sprinted away.
Frowning after them, I shut the window and examined the scrap of paper. It had been torn from one of the advertisements that people stuck on the wall of the Leaky Bucket. Flipping it over, I almost failed to recognize Bazso’s handwriting. “Hive killed Pickett last night. Be careful.”
My entire body went cold. In front of my eyes rose the scene – Bazso in his usual booth, sipping his morning whiskey and frowning at Pickett’s empty seat; a Lampblack racing into the pub to shriek out the news; Bazso cursing, snatching up his hat, and rushing for the door with the other Lampblacks, pausing just long enough to rip off a piece of handbill and scrawl a warning to me.
Numbly, I looked down at the other message. It was a sealed letter, using the thick cream stationery that Mylera favored. As if I were far, far away, I broke the seal and unfolded it to see her elegant handwriting, just the slightest bit shaky.
Isha,
she began, and that slip alone told me how rattled she was. In anything that could be intercepted or stolen, she normally addressed me as Glass.
Last night Xayah was killed by Hive assassins. We have not yet decided how to respond. Watch your back.
– M
I slammed the letter down the table.
Oh, I already knew exactly how I was going to respond.
And it had nothing to do with watching my back.