And once in a foul mood in this blasted heat, he’d stay that way for the rest of the day.
He forced a grin on his face and displayed it to the empty bar. “You don’t have to be in a bad mood,” he said. “Cheer up. It could be worse. You could be outside.”
“Good point,” he replied to himself, taking on a serious air. “Besides, we’ve got beer on tap in here, and the owner won’t be around until noon.”
“You,” he said in his happy voice, draining the rest of his beer and heading behind the bar to refill his glass, “are going to get very drunk.”
“Yes. Yes I am.”
He often wondered what people thought when they overheard him speaking to himself. Probably that he was a mad fool. But circumstance had often found him alone as a young man, and speaking aloud helped him gather his thoughts and stave off boredom on the long, hot Fatrastan nights. Besides, in his line of work it was best to keep people at arm’s length.
He was on his third beer when the door finally opened and a young man appeared. He peeked inside hesitantly, his legs braced as if to run, and then glanced over his shoulder before calling out, “Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m over here,” Michel said, waving. “You’re late.”
“I couldn’t find the place.”
“Stupid excuse.”
“Pardon?”
Michel held up his beer, examining the young man through the glass. Young man? A boy, more like it. Couldn’t be older than sixteen, barely even a scruff of beard on his chin. He was short for his age, a little bit overweight, but with the kind of plain face that could disappear into the crowd. Not all that different from Michel, which wasn’t surprising. It was, after all, the first thing the Blackhats looked for in a spy.
“A stupid excuse,” Michel repeated. The young man wore high-legged trousers, a flat-cut jacket, and a scarf in the style of a poor man’s cravat. The outfit was three years out of date, and it irritated Michel. “Not being able to find an address makes you look either a fool or an asshole. Both of those can come in useful at one time or another, but not as often as you’d think. Nobody likes a fool or an asshole, and the first thing you need to be is likable, or else you won’t blend in anywhere.”
The young man cast a confused glance around the bar, his eyes slightly wide as if he’d stumbled onto the lair of a crazy person. “Are you Mickle?” he asked.
“Michel,” Michel corrected, putting an emphasis on the second half of the name. “Me-Kell. My name doesn’t rhyme with ‘pickle.’”
“Right,” the young man said slowly. “I’m Dristan. Are you the guy who’s supposed to teach me how to be a spy?”
“Likable people,” Michel continued, ignoring the question, “are informed. They say please and thank you. They ask for directions. They are punctual. You’re going to be all these things, or you’re not going to be able to do your job. At best, the people you’re sent to observe will reject you. At worst, they’ll find out you’re not who you claim to be and kill you very slowly.” Michel sighed, finishing his beer and telling himself he shouldn’t drink another one. “You’re not a spy,” he said. “You’re going to be what we call a ‘passive informant.’ You’ll become someone else, immersing yourself entirely into a life that is not your own, and leak information about unrest, crimes, and plots against the government to your handler.”
Dristan looked more than a little pensive. He remained standing, uncertain of himself, still seeming like he might run at any moment.
Michel continued: “Don’t dress like a lower-class dandy. It makes you memorable, and you rarely want to be memorable. Wear short trousers and a light-colored shirt. Maybe a flatcap. You can never go wrong dressing like a common laborer.” Michel whirled his finger in the direction of Dristan’s head. “That look you have on your face: that hesitant, nervous thing. You want to start practicing not making that face. It’s suspicious. Now, tell me your name.”
“I told you I’m Dristan.”
“No,” Michel said, slamming the palm of his hand on the table. Dristan jumped. “Tell me your name.”
“I’m Dri …” Dristan paused. “My name is, uh, Plinnith.”
He catches on quicker than most of the people I teach to do this. “Plinnith? What kind of a name is Plinnith? That’s a stupid name.”
“Hey, I’ve heard it around before!” Dristan protested.
Michel rolled his eyes. “Plinnith is a stupid name,” he repeated slowly. “What kind is it?”
Dristan stared at him as if wondering what, exactly, he was asking for, before his eyes suddenly lit up. “Oh, oh! Plinnith. It’s Brudanian.”
“That where you’re from?” Michel asked, continuing the mock interrogation.
“I’m not. My, um, my mother was Brudanian. Came from a fishing village there.”
“Oh yeah? My best friend is from a fishing village in Brudania. Maybe it’s the same place.”
“I don’t remember the name,” Dristan answered.
“Oh, that’s too bad. What are you doing in Landfall, Plinnith?”
“Dad was a farmer out near Redstone. He died last fall, so Mom’s sent me to the capital for work.”
Michel continued to fire questions at the boy, going on for almost five minutes, needling him for details that normal people wouldn’t possibly ask for before he finally gave it a rest. He dropped the pretense, poured himself another beer, and said, “Not half-bad.”
The boy beamed back at him.
“Not great, either,” Michel continued. “I didn’t believe a damned word of it.”
“But you already know I’m not a farmer’s son named Plinnith!” Dristan protested.
“Do I?” Michel shrugged. “You have no idea what I know. It’s your job to convince me you’re the person you say you are.” He swirled the beer around, wishing for the thousandth time that there was a better way to do this. Kids came off the street all the time, looking to join the Blackhats. Most of them became low-level enforcers, roughing up anyone who spoke out against the Lady Chancellor. The smart ones might become political liaisons or pencil-pushers. The rest became informants, spying on the very population the Lady Chancellor governed.
Informants had the most dangerous job and got the least amount of training. What good was an informant, after all, if anyone spotted them hanging around with a known Blackhat? The best they could expect was a few days in an out-of-the-way spot with someone like Michel—an experienced informant who’d lived long enough to become a bureaucrat. People knew Michel was a Blackhat, of course. They just didn’t know he’d climbed the ranks by selling out his neighbors.
“Look,” Michel said. “It’s all about relating to people.”
“What do you mean?” Dristan asked.
“You and me, we’re Kressians, right? I mean, we call ourselves Fatrastan, but even if we were born here our grandparents were born in the Nine. Follow?”
“I think?”
“Now, our grandparents might have hated each other back in the old country. Maybe yours were Kez, mine were Adran. Mortal enemies. But once they’d come over the ocean they now had something in common. So they put aside their old hatreds and now they just call themselves Fatrastans. Right?”
Dristan didn’t look impressed. “I suppose …”
Michel cut him off. “They related. They found out what they had in common and worked together. During the revolution all of us who considered ourselves Fatrastan worked with the Palo against the Kez. Another instance of relating against a common enemy.”
“But Fatrastans and Palo hate each other now.”
“Sure. Because loyalties change once they’re no longer convenient. Remember, informants have to blend in. The loyalties you wear on your sleeve have to match the people around you. It’s a kind of theatrics, and a good actor will tell you that the best way to get into a character’s head will be by relating to them, even if they’re the villain. To inform on enemies of the state, you have to think like one; to become one.” He made an expansive gestu
re. “That’s spycraft, summed up.”
“I thought we weren’t spies.”
“‘Informantcraft’ isn’t a word,” Michel said. He squinted around the bar, scrunching his face, and considered another drink. Maybe just half a glass.
“You seem older than you look,” Dristan observed.
Michel headed around the bar toward the tap. “It’s because I know what I’m about. Learn confidence—or at least how to feign it—and everyone will assume you’re ten years older than you really are. Helps to know your craft, too, and in this case my craft is keeping an eye on the Lady Chancellor’s people.” Michel put the glass up against the barrel, holding it there for several moments before opening the tap.
Dristan seemed like a good kid. He might just be smart enough to make it through a few years of spying. Michel would give him an extra day or two of training, but he’d already decided to give Silver Rose Salacia—the person who would be Dristan’s handler—the thumbs-up. Unfortunately, in this line of work toss them in the bay and hope they learn to swim was the most efficient method of training. “What do you get out of this?” he asked, filling a second beer and sliding it down the bar to Dristan.
“I get a Rose, don’t I?”
The Roses were the Blackhat badge of authority, medallions that gave them their names—an Iron or Bronze Rose indicated a low rank, Brass or Silver a mid-rank, and Gold—well, Gold Roses were the Blackhat elites, privy to all the secrets and machinations of the Fatrastan government. They ran the country on behalf of the Lady Chancellor and held the wealth of the continent in their palms. Everyone coveted the Gold Roses. Few got them.
But even getting an Iron Rose could be a huge step up for someone from the slums like Dristan. If Dristan survived a mission or two he might jump straight up to a Brass Rose.
“Other than the Rose,” Michel said.
Dristan took a drink, looking down at his hands for a long moment, then said, “The Blackhats will take care of my sisters. Keep them fed, housed, out of the whorehouses. They’ll take care of them even if I die, so long as I remain loyal.”
Michel nodded. It was a common enough story. A lot of horrible shit was said about the Blackhats—most of it true—but they always took care of their own. “A piece of advice for you,” he said. “You’ve got a life right now, a family, happy memories?” He held out his hand, pointing to invisible objects on his palm.
“Yeah.”
“When you go into cover, you have to become someone else entirely. Don’t think about your old life, not even for a second, or you may betray yourself in a weak moment. Eat, sleep, breathe, even think like Plinnith the farmer’s son, or whoever the pit you become.” He made a fist. “Take all those happy thoughts and put them into a little marble in the back corner of your brain and don’t even look at it until the job is finished. I’m not an informant anymore—just a midlevel Blackhat serving at her Lady Chancellor’s pleasure—but I was in your spot once. The marble trick is how I got through it.”
“You were a spy—er, an informant?”
“Why do you think I’m sitting here telling you all this? I’ve been undercover three times, which is twice too many for someone operating in a single city. It’s a miracle nobody recognized me those second and third stints. But it also means I’ve done this a lot, so I get a few hours to pass on my experience to somebody like you.”
“Why did you do it?”
Michel considered the question for a moment. “Like you, I did it for the Rose.” He looped a thumb through the cord around his neck and showed Dristan the silver medallion that dangled against his chest at all times. “I also did it for Fatrasta,” he said honestly. “Because I wanted to make a difference.”
“Did you make a difference?”
“When you finish your first assignment, come and find me. I’ll tell you about the Powder Mage Affair.” Michel looked at his half-full glass and set it on the bar, more than a little annoyed with himself. Four glasses of beer before seven in the morning was excessive, even by his standards. There was a sudden thump, bringing Michel’s head around, and the door to the pub suddenly opened.
A familiar face peered in. It was a man in a black, long-sleeved shirt with a row of black buttons up the left breast and matching black trousers—the typical uniform of the Lady Chancellor’s secret police. He was missing a button from his left cuff, which irritated Michel to no end. He wore a Brass Rose openly pinned to his shirt. “Agent Bravis, sir,” he said.
“Son of a … Damn it, Warsim, this is a safe house. I train people here. People see you coming in here, wearing that, at this hour and …” Michel swore to himself several more times. His foul mood was just finally starting to turn for the better and Warsim had to show up and ruin his favorite safe house. “What the pit is it?”
Warsim ducked his head, grimacing. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t have much of a choice. You’ve been summoned to the grand master’s office. Fidelis Jes wants to see you.”
“Why?” Michel was taken aback. He wasn’t a Gold Rose. He had no dealings with the grand master. A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck. “Me? He asked for me by name?”
“That’s what I was told.”
Michel pushed away his beer and desperately hoped he’d have time to sober up. Pit, he was sober now. Being called into the grand master’s office was like being dunked in the bay. “Right. What time?”
“You have an appointment for eight fifteen.”
Michel checked his watch and glanced over at Dristan. “Get out of here,” he said. “Lesson canceled.”
“Should I come back tomorrow?”
“No. If things work out, I’ll come find you soon and we’ll get you back in training.”
“And if not?”
Michel double-checked his watch. The grand master. Bloody pit. “Forget we ever spoke.”
CHAPTER 3
Progress.”
It was an unimposing word, and not even that particularly fun to say, but it was bandied about in the newspapers so much that you’d think it was the name of Fatrasta’s new god. As if Fatrasta, a land of bickering immigrants, a twice-stolen nation of industrialized robbery, would ever spawn its own god. Landfall, the capital city of Fatrasta, would chew up a god and spit it out and it would barely make the newspapers.
Styke sat squeezed on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a narrow hallway. There were half a dozen others on the same bench—broken, beaten men who looked twenty years older than their age. They stared at the floor or the ceiling, avoiding eye contact, either praying or buried in their own desperate thoughts. Light streamed in through a high, barred window, and someone with a rickety cough hacked out their lungs in a nearby room.
On Styke’s lap was a worn, four-month-old newspaper, with PROGRESS emblazoned across the front of the first page. He considered the word for several minutes and thought of ripping the paper up as a way to vent the disgust it caused in him, but it was hard enough to get a newspaper in the labor camps and he’d traded a week’s tobacco ration for this one.
Instead, he produced a semi-carved piece of wood, clutching it as tightly as he could manage with his mangled left hand. With his right he began working at the wood with a small knife he’d stolen from the mess hall, thumb on the back of the blade, shaving bits off mechanically as he read.
The newspaper reported Adran mercenaries hard at work “taming the frontier.” Landfall was to open three more labor camps around the city to accommodate convicts shipped over from the Nine. Riots had broken out in the Palo quarter over the public hanging of a young radical. Trade had still not normalized with Kez, despite their civil war ending six years ago.
Styke snorted. The world, as he determined from the contents of any newspaper he could get his hands on, had changed little in the ten years since his sentencing. It was still filled with the greedy, violent, poor, angry, and not much else. He shifted his attention from the paper to the carving in his hand, whittling details into the soft pine for the next several minutes.
/> He held his handiwork up to the morning light. It wasn’t a bad little canoe, if he did say so himself. It was as long as his palm, thin and sleek, the outside covered in Palo markings. Certainly well done despite a dull knife and a crippled hand. He blew shavings off the back of his arm, then folded his newspaper and forced himself to stand, scowling as it took his right leg just a few seconds too long to obey his command.
He walked to the door leading into the courtyard and opened it a crack. Just outside waiting on the stoop was a young girl, though one might have easily mistaken her for a boy behind the mask of grime and filth that came from living in a labor camp. She was barefoot, wearing an old shirt of Styke’s that had to be tied at the neck and waist to keep it from falling off. She looked like a starving sparrow with half its feathers plucked out.
“Celine,” he whispered.
The girl perked up, turning her head. “Ben! You get out?” she asked excitedly.
Styke shook his head. “Haven’t even gone inside yet,” he responded. “Here.” He slipped the canoe through the crack before a guard could notice the door was open. “It might be a couple hours.”
“I’ll wait.”
Styke closed the door quietly and limped back to his seat, suppressing a groan as he lowered himself onto the hard bench. One of the other inmates glanced toward the door, then over at him, but quickly lowered his gaze.
Only a few minutes passed before a door opened at the far end of the hallway and a guard appeared. Styke couldn’t remember his name, but he knew he’d served in the Kez army as military police back before the war. He was a big man, taller than most with forearms as big around as powder kegs. The guard looked out across the sorry lot on the bench and whirled his truncheon absently. He wore the same sunflower-yellow smocks as the other guards, a facsimile of the Fatrastan military jackets that Styke himself used to wear.
He glared at Styke. “You,” he said. “Convict 10642. You’re up.”