living man. “Everyone gives up eventually. Took me three hundred days before I stopped counting. See how long it takes you.”
Rags ground his teeth and refused to answer. He had his own cell, a point in the place’s favor. Coward’s Silence knew how to treat its degenerates, letting them ignore each other in peace.
Sixteen days.
The Queensguard would come to transport him eventually. They were famous for their successful interrogations.
That thought coaxed a snort from his nose.
The job was supposed to have been simple. Blind Kit had finally pinpointed the location of the Gutter King’s underground vault. The haul of Rags’s dreams—the infamous collection of pirate gold and stolen Ever-Nobles’ fortunes, snatched in the chaos when their families fell out of favor and were run out of town. After the Queensguard burned House Ever-Loyal last year, countless early Radiance forgeries flooded the Cheapside Gray-Market. Rags didn’t buy into the frenzy, knew the real loot had already been smuggled deep underground. That cache kept the undercity running, kept the Gutter King stroking the strings.
Rags, with help from Blind Kit, was going to relieve the Gutter King of some of it.
Not all. Not enough that they’d become a target, but enough to make life easier for years. Rags had even considered the possibility of going soft, of buying a nice house in a cheap part of town. He could take up juggling, or some other thing that took quick hand-eye work but carried fewer risks than thieving.
Rags had made it into the sewers, past the shadowy henchmen and their spring-traps, all the way to the fucking door of the vault.
The man who’d been tapped to rig the explosion hadn’t lit the fuse.
Instead, the grating had opened. Out had poured dozens of Queensguard in silver and black.
Only one wall had separated Rags from the biggest score of his life. In the blink of an eye, it was gone.
Someone must have sold him out. Not Kit, who’d had a bounty on her head for close to two years, as long as she’d been blind. She wouldn’t go near the Queensguard after they’d run the last healers and hedgewitches out of the city.
To Rags, her fear and mistrust made her reliable. Sure, a handful of other thieves in the Clave might risk a run-in with the Queensguard over a fat score, but Rags was careful not to make enemies with those crazy gamblers.
Think about that later. The interrogation was coming, and from the way they’d thrown him in, left him to stew for sixteen days, they were planning something extra nasty. Rags ran his tongue over the split in his upper lip—it stung, infected and bound to scar—and set to cleaning the dirt from under his nails. He’d waited too long to be set free, returned to his tools: delicate metal lockpicks that worked in a pinch for cleaning under an infected nail.
He’d have to do it by hand.
Rags set to the task, careful and slow. He couldn’t afford to damage the other, irreplaceable tools of his trade: his wicked quick fingers that danced with a hummingbird’s speed and could sting like a wasp when called to.
Sixteen days. He wasn’t going to lose count. He marked the passage of time by the delivery of his meals, if they could be called that, and chewed the moldy bread, not bothering to spit out the maggots. Protein. Keep his strength up, his mind sharp. The cell stank of his filth, but that honed his senses, kept his teeth bared. He wouldn’t rot in this place. As soon as the Queensguard came for him, Rags would get out.
The Queensguard finally showed when he was drifting through the vulnerable shadow space between sleep and waking life. The man in the next cell laughed darkly, choked, spat. Rags’s eyes adjusted to the sudden fall of light, scanned the row—two rows—of Queensguard for a weak point, and found none.
Hands on him, hoisting him to his feet. No jeers about his condition, no introductory punches. The royal seal on their breastplates.
Rags swore like a dying pig.
The Queensguard ignored his vulgarity and hauled him out.
2
Rags
They went up, not down. Troubling, because all interrogation rooms were down, the better to hide the screaming from civilians. If they weren’t hauling him in for torture and questioning, where were they headed?
Rags lifted his head high—he couldn’t see over the spiked epaulets in front of him—and readied himself to meet—
Whatever it was.
A long trek through the dismal dark, following the relentless, clanking pace set by the Queensguard. It