Chapter Text
Chapter One: Inej:
Kasimir Lijizko needed a reason. A reason to save you. A reason to heal you. That’s what they said. But they were wrong. Inej knew the truth. If you saw the boy with the swan-head cane chances are he’d already made up his mind what he was going to do with you. The Bastard Saint of the Barrel never needed a reason, only an excuse.
Inej watched from the roof of a building facing the Exchange as Kaz crossed to the wounded boy writhing in agony on the ground. The boy’s name was Big Bolliger and he was a traitor. Inej had watched him be shot. Now she wondered if she was about to witness his salvation or damnation. As the rain fell gently around her, she gripped the edge of the roof tile and offered a soft prayer to the Saints, not for Bolliger –Kaz would decide his fate –but in apology. The work of this night had nothing to do with miracles.
Kaz poked Bolliger with the end of his cane. “Stop bellyaching Bolliger and pay attention. Do you know who I am?”
“You’re the Dime Lions' Healer.” Bolliger grabbed at Kaz’s bad leg. “Please. Help me.”
Kaz pinned Bolliger's hand under his cane and leaned down, hard enough to grind bone. "It’s customary to pray for salvation, Bolliger. Luckily for you, prayer isn’t a currency I have any interest in. I want information.”
“Anything,” Bolliger sobbed. He squirmed on the ground, smearing bodily fluids over the stone.
Slowly, Kaz crouched in front of the fallen boy, his movements smooth despite the pain Inej knew he was in. Shoving his cane into Bolliger’s shoulder he forced the other boy out of his protective curl and onto his back.
“You betrayed your crew, Big Bol,” Kaz sneered, voice venomous. “The Dregs gave you a home, a family, and you threw them over for the Blacktips.” Inej knew what was coming and tensed. “Give me a reason, Bolliger. One reason to let you walk out of here.” The words were so low and soft she could not hear them. She only knew he had spoken because he had said the same words, in the same horribly patient voice, more times than she cared to recall while standing over the dying.
Like the Barrel that had spawned him, its bastard saint was brutal. Inej had seen Kaz limp away from people begging him to heal them because they could not meet his price. The cruellest part of all was that it was a sham. Those who died did so never knowing Kaz had already weighed the price of their life and found them unworthy long before he extracted what he wanted and abandoned them to Death’s embrace.
“Y-You said you wanted information,” Bolliger panted. Inej couldn’t see the extent of his wound from her vantage point, but the dark, wet stain seeping through his orange and cream jacket was obvious even several storeys up.
“This isn’t a barter, Bolliger,” Kaz jabbed him in the gut, causing him to moan and buck off the floor. “You’re going to answer every question I ask. In fact, you’ll do more than that. You’ll lie if you have to; you’ll turn poet and compose verses in old Ravkan; you’ll even sing for me. All to save your worthless life. And it won’t be enough, Big Bol, unless you can give me something more.”
Bolliger sobbed. “Please, I don’t want to die.”
“Few people do,” Kaz replied, tapping his gloved fingers over the elegantly carved silver swan head of his cane. Dropping any preamble he asked briskly, “What does Geels have planned for the Dregs?”
Bolliger shook his head. “Not the Dregs. Rietveld. He wants the skiv dead.”
Inej watched Kaz closely, but even she couldn’t detect any reaction from him. Kaz was quiet for a beat. “I know about the plan to have the Stadwatch shoot Rietveld. What I want to know is who put up the Kruge for the job. The Blacktips’coffers are empty. Who is the moneyman pulling Geels’ strings?”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” Bolliger groaned. “Geels told me to be ready, in case the guard missed. That’s all, I swear.”
“Ready with a knife for Rietveld’s back.” Kaz stood up, brushing down his light grey trousers. He folded both hands over the top of his cane. “Your heart’s slowing Bolliger, soon you’ll be dead. Stewed in your own poisoned juices.”
“I’m cold,” Bolliger wept.
“You’ll be colder soon,” Kaz told him. “Lucky for you, you’ll be long past caring.” He thumped his cane on the ground, once, twice. Inej blinked in surprise. It was a signal for her to come out of hiding.
This was not part of the original plan. Kaz had sent Inej to observe the parley between the Dregs and the Blacktips and told her to watch the Stadwatch posted to the roofs. He’d expected foul play and wanted her to intervene. As a prominent Dime Lion, Kaz could not be seen at the Exchange, let alone actively interfering in Blacktips and Dregs affairs. The Wraith, however, was never seen. She had been his hidden hand, shifting the course of the night with a knife to a Stadwatch grunt's throat. Inej had asked Kaz why he was so interested in a parley between two of the Dime Lions rivals, and he’d given her a line about the importance of knowing what the other gangs were doing in case there was profit in it for him.
She hadn’t believed him. There was no profit to be had from either the Blacktips or the Dregs, the two weakest gangs in the Barrel. Yet, more times than she wished to count, Kaz had sent her to watch Jordie Rietveld, the Dregs lieutenant. Inej had her suspicions why, but she’d never asked Kaz. She had little interest in his lies when the truth was obvious to someone who knew almost every secret in this wretched city.
Most of the Barrel believed Kaz Lijizko had been born in Ketterdam to a Ravkan father and a Kerch mother and plucked from a plague pit by Pekka Rollins because he was Grisha. To the best of her knowledge only Inej knew that Lijizko was not his real name. She didn’t know what his real name was, but she had a feeling Jordie Rietveld did.
Scaling the wall she lost track of what was happening in the square below, so it was a surprise to find Bolliger sitting up, clutching his gut but looking slightly less like a corpse. She had been sure Kaz would leave Bolliger to die.
“The deal is the deal,” she heard Kaz tell Bolliger. “Midnight tomorrow. And Bolliger, if you even think about betraying me, I will cut you open and feed you your intestines. I promise I can keep you alive long enough to swallow them back down again.”
Bolliger nodded like his head was on a string being controlled by a shaky puppeteer. “The deal’s the deal. I’ll get your information.” He staggered to his feet. Weak and doubled over, still clutching his gut, the disgraced Dreg tottered away into the shadows beyond the Exchange.
Inej slipped up beside Kaz. “You sent him to spy on the Blacktips.”
“He’ll fail,” Kaz said. “Geels is a fool but not that sort of fool. He’ll kill Bolliger the moment he sees him.”
Inej shook her head. “Then why?”
“Because I want Geels to know I’m watching,” Kaz said taking off his hat to shake off some of the rain.
Inej sighed. “You already know who paid the Blacktips.”
He nodded sharply, lips thinning. “Pekka.”
Inej shot him a sharp look of her own. “I won’t play these games with you, Kaz. Tell me or keep your secrets. I don’t exist to gratify your arrogance.”
He smiled then, his rare real smile. The one that lit up his and made him look like the seventeen year old boy it was so easy to forget he was. “Of course not, Wraith.” He gestured with his cane. “Walk with me to the Shop?”
Inej did not frown, but she wanted to. “I will not go in,” she reminded him.
“And I won’t ever ask you to,” he assured her.
She and Kaz had an agreement; in exchange for her services as his wraith, she never had to set foot in another brothel again. It sometimes made working together difficult. Kaz was based out of the Sweet Shop and was required, as part of his contract with Rollins, to put in at least twenty hours of work there a week.
Kaz had come up with a solution, however, one that allowed her to have her way. He’d had a small balcony built under the window of his bedroom turned office. It was little more than a ledge, impossible to reach for anyone lacking Inej’s skills. She perched there to whisper her uncovered secrets and receive her orders and never had to breathe in the Sweet Shop’s sugary air. It was these concessions to her will that made working with Kaz bearable. He was a bastard, but in providing her an escape from Tante Heleen and exerting his influence on Rollins to make him honour her terms, he’d been something like a saint to her.
As they walked in companionable silence through the dark Ketterdam streets, the only sound the rain hissing around them and the rhythmic thump of Kaz’s cane on the cobbles, she wondered if she was any better than Bolliger, running to his death because Kaz had chosen to show him his cursed version of mercy.
What value had Kaz assigned her life, she wondered, and would she be able to pay off her contract before he decided she’d reached the limit of her usefulness?