Six of Crows (54 page)

“
Nej!
” cried one of the
drüskelle
. They stood open-mouthed, gaping at the stricken tree. “
Nej!
”

another voice wailed.

The ash began to tilt. It was too large to be felled by salt concentrate alone, but as it tipped, a dull roar emerged from the gaping black hole beneath it.

This was where the
drüskelle
came to hear the voice of their god. And now he was speaking.

“This is going to sting a bit,” said the
drüskelle
holding the whip. His voice was rasping, familiar.

His hands were gloved. “But if we live, you’ll thank me later.” His hood slid off, and Kaz Brekker looked back at them. The stunned
drüskelle
lifted their rifles.

“Don’t pop the
baleen
before you hit bottom,” Kaz called. Then he grabbed Kuwei and launched them both into the black mouth beneath the roots of the tree.

Nina screamed as her body was yanked forwards by the cables. She scrabbled over the stones trying to find purchase. The last thing she glimpsed was Matthias toppling into the hole beside her.

She heard gunfire – and then she was falling into the black, into the cold, into the throat of Djel, into nothing at all.

ELEVEN BELLS AND THREE-QUARTERS CHIME

Kaz had considered trying to eavesdrop on Matthias and Brum in the ballroom, but he didn’t want to lose sight of Nina when there were so many
drüskelle
around. He’d gambled on Matthias’ feelings for Nina, but he’d always liked those odds. The real risk had been in whether or not someone as honest as Matthias could convincingly lie to his mentor ’s face. Apparently the Fjerdan had hidden skills.

Kaz had tracked Nina and Brum across the grounds to the treasury. Then he’d taken cover behind an ice sculpture and focused on the miserable task of regurgitating the packets of Wylan’s root bombs he’d swallowed before they’d ambushed the prison wagon. He’d had to bring them up – along with a pouch of chloropellets and an extra set of lockpicks he’d forced down his gullet in case of emergency

– every other hour to keep from digesting them. It hadn’t been pleasant. He’d learned the trick from an East Stave magician with a firebreathing act that had run for years before the man had accidentally poisoned himself by ingesting kerosene.

Once Kaz was done, he’d let himself check the treasury perimeter, the roof, the entry, but eventually there was nothing for him to do but keep hidden, stay alert, and worry about all the things that might be going wrong. He remembered Inej standing on the embassy roof, aglow with some new fervour he didn’t understand but could still recognise –
purpose
. It had suffused her with light.
I’m
taking my share, and I’m leaving the Dregs.
When she’d talked about leaving Ketterdam before, he’d never quite believed her. This time was different.

He’d been hidden in the shadows of the western colonnade when the bells of Black Protocol had

begun to ring, the chimes of the Elderclock booming over the island, shaking the air. Lights from the guard towers came on in a bright flood. The
drüskelle
around the ash left off their rituals and began shouting orders, and a wave of guards descended from the towers to spread out over the island. He’d waited, counting the minutes, but there was still no sign of Nina or Matthias.
They’re in trouble
, Kaz had thought.
Or you were dead wrong about Matthias, and you’re about to pay for all of those talking
tree jokes.

He had to get inside the treasury, but he’d need some kind of cover while he picked that inscrutable lock, and there were
drüskelle
everywhere. Then he saw Nina and Matthias and a person he assumed must be Bo Yul-Bayur running from the treasury. He’d been about to call out to them when the explosion hit, and everything went to hell.

They blew up the lab
, he’d thought as debris rained down around him.
I definitely did not tell them
to blow up the lab.

The rest was pure improvisation, and it left little time for explanation. All Kaz had told Matthias was to meet him by the ash when Black Protocol began to ring. He’d thought he’d have time to tell them to deploy the
baleen
before they were all falling through the dark. Now he just had to hope that they wouldn’t panic and that his luck was waiting somewhere below.

The fall seemed impossibly long. Kaz hoped the Shu boy he was holding on to was a surprisingly young Bo Yul-Bayur and not some hapless prisoner Nina and Matthias had decided to liberate. He’d shoved the disk into the boy’s mouth as they went over, snapping it with his own fingers. He gave the whip a flick, releasing all of the cables, and heard the others scream as the strands retracted. At least they wouldn’t go into the water bound. Kaz waited as long as he dared to bite into his own
baleen
.

When he struck the icy water, he feared his heart might stop.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but the force of the river was terrifying, flowing fast and hard as an avalanche. The noise was deafening even beneath the water, but with fear also came a kind of giddy vindication. He’d been right.

The voice of god.
There was always truth in legend. Kaz had spent enough time building his own myth to know. He’d wondered where the water that fed the Ice Court’s moat and fountains came from, why the river gorge was so very deep and wide. As soon as Nina had described the
drüskelle
initiation ritual, he’d known: The Fjerdan stronghold hadn’t been built around a great tree but around a spring.

Djel, the wellspring, who fed the seas and rains, and the roots of the sacred ash.

Water had a voice. It was something every canal rat knew, anyone who had slept beneath a bridge or weathered a winter storm in an overturned boat – water could speak with the voice of a lover, a long-lost brother, even a god. That was the key, and once Kaz recognised it, it was as if someone had laid a perfect blueprint over the Ice Court and its workings. If Kaz was right, Djel would spit them out into the gorge. Assuming they didn’t drown first.

And that was a very real possibility. The
baleen
only provided enough air for ten minutes, maybe twelve if they could keep calm, which he doubted they would. His own heart was hammering, and his lungs already felt tight. His body was numb and aching from the temperature of the water, and the darkness was impenetrable. There was nothing but the dull thunder of the water and a sickening sense of tumbling.

He hadn’t been sure of the speed of the water, but he knew damn well the numbers were close.

Numbers had always been his allies – odds, margins, the art of the wager. But now he had to rely on something more.
What god do you serve?
Inej had asked him.
Whichever will grant me good fortune.

Fortunate people didn’t end up racing ass over teakettle beneath an ice moat in hostile territory.

What would be waiting when they fished up in the gorge?
Who
would be waiting? Jesper and Wylan had managed to engage Black Protocol. But had they managed to do the rest? Would he see Inej on the other side?

Survive. Survive. Survive.
It was the way he’d lived his life, moment to moment, breath to breath, since that terrible morning when he’d woken to find that Jordie was still dead and he was still very much alive.

Kaz tumbled through the dark. He was colder than he’d ever been. He thought of Inej’s hand on his cheek. His mind had gone jagged at the sensation, a riot of confusion. It had been terror and disgust and – in all of that clamour – desire, a wish that lingered still, the hope that she would touch him again.

When he was fourteen, Kaz had put together a crew to rob the bank that had helped Hertzoon prey on him and Jordie. His crew got away with fifty thousand
kruge
, but he’d broken his leg dropping down from the rooftop. The bone didn’t set right, and he’d limped ever after. So he’d found himself a Fabrikator and had his cane made. It became a declaration. There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken. The cane became a part of the myth he built. No one knew who he was. No one knew where he came from. He’d become Kaz Brekker, cripple and confidence man, bastard of the Barrel.

The gloves were his one concession to weakness. Since that night among the bodies and the swim from the Reaper ’s Barge, he had not been able to bear the feeling of skin against skin. It was excruciating to him, revolting. It was the only piece of his past that he could not forge into something dangerous.

The
baleen
began to bead around his lips. Water was seeping in. How far had the river taken them?

How far did they have left to go? He still had one hand gripped around Bo Yul-Bayur ’s collar. The Shu boy was smaller than Kaz; hopefully he had enough air.

Bright flashes of memory sparked through Kaz’s mind. A cup of hot chocolate in his mittened hands, Jordie warning him to let it cool before he took a sip. Ink drying on the page as he’d signed the deed to the Crow Club. The first time he’d seen Inej at the Menagerie, in purple silk, her eyes lined with kohl. The bone-handled knife he’d given her. The sobs that had come from behind the door of her room at the Slat the night she’d made her first kill. The sobs he’d ignored. Kaz remembered her perched on the sill of his attic window, sometime during that first year after he’d brought her into the Dregs. She’d been feeding the crows that congregated on the roof.

“You shouldn’t make friends with crows,” he’d told her.

“Why not?” she asked.

He’d looked up from his desk to answer, but whatever he’d been about to say had vanished on his tongue.

The sun was out for once, and Inej had turned her face to it. Her eyes were shut, her oil-black lashes fanned over her cheeks. The harbour wind had lifted her dark hair, and for a moment Kaz was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world.

“Why not?” she’d repeated, eyes still closed.

He said the first thing that popped into his head. “They don’t have any manners.”

“Neither do you, Kaz.” She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and got drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.

Kaz took a last breath as the
baleen
dissolved and water flooded in. He squinted against the rush of the water, hoping to see some hint of daylight. The river knocked him against the wall of the tunnel.

The pressure in his chest grew.
I’m stronger than this
, he told himself.
My will is greater
. But he could hear Jordie laughing.
No, little brother. No one is stronger. You’ve cheated death too many times.

Greed may do your bidding, but death serves no man.

Kaz had almost drowned that night in the harbour, kicking hard in the dark, borne aloft by Jordie’s corpse. There was no one and nothing to carry him now. He tried to think of his brother, of revenge, of Pekka Rollins tied to a chair in the house on Zelverstraat, trade orders stuffed down his throat as Kaz forced him to remember Jordie’s name. But all he could think of was Inej. She had to live. She had to have made it out of the Ice Court. And if she hadn’t, then he had to live to rescue her.

The ache in his lungs was unbearable. He needed to tell her … what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn’t pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he’d begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.

The water pressed at his chest, demanding that he part his lips.
I won’t
, he swore. But in the end, Kaz opened his mouth, and the water rushed in.

PART 6

PROPER THIEVES