THE WIDOW OF REDWATER

Mabel Quinn kept her office above a funeral parlor, which she said was good for business.

"Everyone who comes through that door," she explained, "has just had a shock. They're feeling mortal. They want to put their affairs in order. It's the best moment to sell them anything."

She sat behind a desk the size of a small boat, in a room lined with ledgers and the stuffed heads of animals that I suspected she had never shot. She was a small, upright woman of sixty or so, with iron-gray hair coiled in a knot and a face like a clenched fist. A pair of half-moon spectacles hung on a chain over a black bombazine dress. She wore four rings on each hand, and I had counted nine different kinds of stone. The gaslight caught them as she spoke.

This was the woman who ran the black market of Ravenport. It had taken me three days to find her. It had taken Josie four favors, a bribe, and the loan of her best brazier.

"You'll be the one," said Mabel Quinn, looking me over, "who stood on the Heir."

"I've been told."

"I watched it eleven times. My clerks wanted it in their parlors." She tapped a ring against the blotter. "You've got a very good face for it. Plain. Honest. People trust a plain face. Pity about the eyes."

"What's wrong with them?"

"Nothing. That's the pity." She leaned back. "You've the look of a girl who'll let a man bleed out to see how long it takes. I like that in a client."

"I'm not a client yet."

"You will be." Her small black eyes were sharp. "Josie Penhallow's been telling me for a week that you'd come. She says you've made something. Five things. She says they're remarkable."

"She's right."

"She's also a girl who describes a dented kettle as a work of genius." Mabel folded her hands. "Show me."

…

We had spent the winter on them, Josie and I. Not the whole of it; most of those months I'd been in a cave, feeding the Relic. But the weeks before and after I had worked in Josie's cellar, at the bench, with the furnace roaring and the Shade hanging over my shoulder, and we had made five things.

I laid them on Mabel's desk one by one.

The first was a ring. A narrow circlet of dull gray metal, plain as a wedding band, with a single rune cut inside. "A Hollow-ward," I said. "It sits on the finger. If a Hollow Choir cantor sets a curse on the wearer, the ring burns it out." She turned it in her fingers. She frowned. She put it on.

The second was a set of gloves. Fingerless, black, of oiled sealskin, with silver thread worked into the knuckles. "Spell-breakers," I said. "They absorb a single hostile cast per day. Of any rank, up to Silver. They store it, and when the wearer chooses, they release it back."

The third was a coat.

It was a long, narrow thing, dark gray, cut like a duster, with a high collar and a lining of crimson. It looked like nothing much. But the cloth was woven of ley-wire as fine as spider-silk, and the seams were inlaid with Cinder-runes in a spiral that ran from collar to hem. It had taken Josie three weeks to loom the fabric. It had taken me a night to etch it. "Cinder-mail," I said. "It will turn a pistol-ball and a Silver-rank blade. It burns any spell that touches it to ash."

Mabel put her hand on the collar and did not take it away.

The fourth was a lantern. A small brass hand-lamp, rather ugly, with a flawed glass. When lit, it burned with a clear white flame that cast no shadow, and it revealed every concealed Ward within thirty feet. "A detector," I said. "For vaults. It is better than anything the Wardmasters carry."

The fifth, which I laid down last, was a gun.

It was a spell-pistol. Not one of Hawk's broad blunt ranch-guns, but a slim, long-barreled thing of blued steel and walnut, with a chamber of six, and a grip that fit my hand like a glove. It had no Piercing rune, no Flame rune, no ornament. It had a single feature: a hairline coil of copper in the barrel, worked into a figure I'd taken, in part, from the pattern of the Clockwork. It corrected itself. It adjusted its own sights. If the user flinched, it flinched with her. If she missed, it moved the bullet.

I called it the Penhallow Self-Aligner, because Josie had demanded.

Mabel Quinn looked at the pistol for a long time.

"S-grade," she said at last, very softly.

"I believe so."

"Each of them." Her voice was dry. "Each of the five. S-grade. You understand what that means?"

"Roughly."

"It means that in forty years of dealing in curiosities, I have handled perhaps eleven." She put the pistol down with great gentleness, as though it might break. "And you have made five. In a cellar. With a girl."

"She's a very good girl."

"She is a goddamned genius, if she did the looms." Mabel took off her spectacles. Her small black eyes had gone wide. "Do you realize that the Exchange will open at three hundred thousand? For the lot? And will not close at less than a million?"

"I had hoped."

"Hoped." She stared at me. "My dear, you are either the most dangerous woman in the Republic, or the most naïve."

"It is not impossible to be both."

She laughed. It was a surprised crow of a laugh, short and harsh. "I begin to like you. Very well. I will take twelve percent. You will go by an alias. I will arrange the room, the seat, the entrance. You will be seen by no one. And you will sit behind a curtain, and be a mystery."

"A mystery."

"Everyone in the Republic has been looking for you since the marsh. If you walk in as Tamsin Reeve, you will be mobbed. The Whitlocks will have you in a cell by dinner." She reached for a pen. "But if you walk in as a stranger, a nameless benefactor, a rumor... they will fall over themselves to find out who you are. A mystery is worth ten times a fact."

"What would you call me?"

Mabel thought. She tapped the pen against her teeth. Her eyes slid to the window, to the gray street below, and the wind-blown black crape in the funeral parlor's door.

"You come from the Redwater," she said. "You are alone. You are, I think, grieving." A slow smile. "The Widow of Redwater."

I considered it. I thought of a pair of black gloves. I thought of a funeral at which Hawk Boone had stood alone.

"It will do," I said.

…

I had one condition.

I stated it on the doorstep, as I was leaving, with the Shade waiting on the pavement and the funeral parlor's bell ringing below. Mabel had followed me out. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms folded, looking at me over the rim of her spectacles.

"There is a girl," I said. "Josie Penhallow. She is three hundred and forty dollars in debt to the Academy for tuition. She is two years behind on her rent. She has built five of the finest artifacts in the world and she has not been paid a cent." I turned my head. "Of my share, she gets a third."

"A third."

"Of everything."

"That's generous."

"It is nothing of the kind. It's the proper arithmetic. I could not have made them without her. Half the designs are hers." I pulled my collar up. "And I'd like it paid directly. Not through me. In her name, to an account she controls."

Mabel looked at me for some time. The light was behind her, and I could not see her face.

"You are not what I expected," she said.

"What did you expect?"

"A girl with a knife. That is what the Relay shows. A cold blade in a gray coat." She sounded faintly amused. "I did not expect a girl with a ledger."

"I am both."

"Evidently." She straightened. "It will be done. I'll send a boy to the cellar by the end of the week." She extended a ringed hand, and after a moment I shook it. "Miss Reeve."

"Madam Quinn."

"Welcome to the market."

…

I told Josie that night.

She was in the cellar, lying on her back on the floor with her head under the furnace, doing something to a pipe. I stood in the door and told her about the account, and the percentage, and the sum. She lay quite still. Then she wriggled out from under the furnace, and sat up, and looked at me with a smear of soot across her nose.

"Say that again," said Josie.

"Your share will be about two hundred thousand."

"Dollars."

"Yes."

She opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again, and a high thin noise came out of her, a squeak, rising and rising, like a kettle on the boil. She flung her spanner across the room. It hit the wall and bounced into the coal-scuttle. She jumped to her feet.

"Two hundred thousand!"

"Yes."

"I can pay the tuition! I can pay the rent! I can buy a proper furnace!" She was dancing. She was dancing around the room, with her arms in the air, her bun coming down in a flaming red tangle. "I can buy a forge! A real one! With a chimney! I can hire a boy! I can—I can—" She stopped. She turned. Her face crumpled, all at once, like a punctured balloon, and she burst into tears.

I stepped forward. I took her by the shoulders.

"It's yours," I said. "It's your work. It was never mine to keep."

"You didn't have to." She sobbed. "You could've paid me nothing! Nobody would've known! I was only the apprentice, I only did the looms—"

"You did the looms," I said, "and the temper, and the coil, and the thing with the pistol grip I'd never have thought of. You are the finest smith I have ever met." I gave her a little shake. "And you were the only person at that Academy who didn't turn her back."

She hiccupped.

"Besides," I said, "I owe you for the sword."

"The sword was a gift."

"Then I owe you for the gift." I let go of her. "Stop crying. It's unbecoming. You are about to be an heiress."

Josie wiped her face with both hands, which left soot on her cheeks in long black tracks. She looked, in the furnace-light, about ten years old. Then, quite suddenly, she threw her arms around my waist, and held on. I let her.

"Your face," said the Shade, from the stairs.

"What about it?"

"You are smiling."

I made it stop. But it was too late, and he knew it, and I felt the quiet warmth of him at my shoulder for a good while after.

…

Mabel's boy came for us on the evening of the eighth.

He was a thin, silent lad of about fifteen with a lantern, and he led us through a sequence of back streets and alleys to a service door in the wall of a tall, plain, windowless building near the harbor. It stood, I observed, on the corner of the Street of the Clockmakers. Its roof bore no sign. Its door bore no knocker. It looked, to the casual eye, like a warehouse.

It was the Gilded Exchange.

The boy knocked three times, paused, knocked twice. A panel slid back. A pair of eyes inspected us. The door opened a crack, and then wider.

Inside was a corridor lined with red velvet. Beyond it, an archway. Through the archway I saw the edge of a great glittering room, and I heard, rising and falling, the murmur of a thousand voices, the clink of glasses, the scrape of chairs.

I wore the gray coat. It buttoned to the throat. Over my face I wore a veil of black silk, light as smoke. My hair was pinned. My hands were gloved. On my left wrist, under the cuff, the Gold Sigil burned quietly in the dark.

"You ready?" said Josie, from behind me. She was in a plain brown dress and a new hat, with a catalog under her arm. Her face was pink with excitement.

"No."

"Good," said Josie. "Neither am I."

Mabel Quinn appeared in the archway, in her black bombazine, with her spectacles perched on her nose. She raised her eyebrows at the veil, and nodded approvingly.

"One thing," she said, in a low voice. She drew close. Her breath smelled of peppermint. "I have been in this business for forty years, my girl. I know the faces. I've been looking over the guest list since noon." Her eyes were bright and hard. "Do you know who has booked the second-tier box?"

I waited.

"Whitlock," said Mabel Quinn. "The whole House. The father, the uncle, and the boy." She paused. "And Fairchild's girl in a wheeled chair, with her arms in a sling."

I felt the Shade go very still at my shoulder.

"Good," I said.

Mabel stared. "Good?"

"I would have been disappointed otherwise." I drew down the veil, and settled the coat on my shoulders, and stepped through the arch. "Take me to my box."