The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 020: The River Barge

The west channel ended in a stone mouth the size of a barn door, and beyond it was the river.

Grey light was coming up behind the city. The outfall opened over a muddy bank, thick with reeds, and the water below was the color of tin. Ethan stumbled out into the cold air with his arm pressed to his ribs. His knees shook. Behind him the tunnel was full of lantern beams and the clang of chain mail.

"Down," Rhea said, and shoved Tomas into the reeds.

They crouched there, all three, in the mud and the stink. The Wardens' voices rolled out of the tunnel mouth, confused and angry, and then slowly faded as the men turned back toward the sluice. They'd lost the trail. For the moment.

"Psst."

Ethan jerked around.

A hand rose from the reeds ten feet away, dripping, with a bit of green weed hanging from one finger. It waved once. Under it came a head of wet grey hair and a broad, familiar scowl.

"Gods," Anselm said, spitting out water. "You took your time."

Rhea made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. She crossed the mud in two strides and hauled her cousin out of the reeds by his collar, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Then she hit him on the arm, hard.

"You were supposed to jump at the bend!"

"I jumped at the bend! The skiff hit the weir." Anselm rubbed his shoulder. "Three of those black things went in after the box. I watched them go down. I don't think they came up on the same side." He shook his head. "Your tin of poison is at the bottom of the river, old man. I'm sorry."

Tomas stared at the water. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then, to Ethan's astonishment, laughed. A high, helpless, wheezing laugh.

"Good," he said. "Good. Let it stay there. I've been afraid of that thing for three days."

They had perhaps an hour of darkness left, and Rhea spent it on something Ethan didn't understand until he saw the quay.

It was a narrow wharf at the foot of the lower ward, lined with coal sheds and net lofts. Even at that hour, dockworkers were already stirring, hauling crates. A great wooden notice board stood at the end of the pier, plastered with paper. Voss's wanted poster hung in the middle, Ethan's face looking out in black ink.

Rhea walked straight up to it.

She pulled the hammer out of Ethan's belt. Anselm had pressed it on him an hour ago: Take it. It's the only thing you hit straight. She held it for a second, felt its weight, and then she unpinned the silver captain's bars from her shoulder.

"Rhea," Ethan said. "What are you doing?"

"Something I should have done four years ago."

She set the bars against the wood, over the grey corner of Ethan's poster, and drove a nail through the center with three sharp blows. The sound carried down the quay. Workers lifted their heads. A cart stopped. A woman with a basket of fish set it down.

Rhea tore a page from her tunic, a sheet of cramped pencil, and pinned it beneath the bars. Then she turned to face the dock.

"My name is Rhea Kessel," she said. She did not shout. She didn't need to. The morning was very quiet. "I am Captain of the Tower Guard. I was. I resign my commission." Her voice shook once and steadied. "On the day of the Awakening, the monster that broke the seal did not break it. It was released. On purpose. By Warden-Inspector Lucan Voss, under orders of the Council. The boy on that poster didn't cause it. He survived it." She drew a breath. "Nine people didn't. One of them was my brother. Ask Inspector Voss where Tobin Kessel died."

Nobody spoke.

A big man in a leather apron slowly pulled a cap off his head. Then another. A woman crossed herself. Somewhere behind the net lofts, a child started to cry and was hushed.

Rhea lowered the hammer. She was white to the lips.

"Go home," she said. "Or don't. But you've heard it."

She walked back down the pier, straight-backed, past the staring dockers, and no one tried to stop her.

Ethan fell into step beside her. He didn't know what to say. After a while she handed him the hammer, handle first.

"They'll hunt me now," she said.

"They already were."

"Now they'll do it in public." She nearly smiled. "Good. It's harder to quietly kill a woman who just told two hundred people."

The barge was named Patience, and its captain was a hulking woman called Mags, who owed Anselm for a hull repair and did not ask for the story. She looked at the four of them, took in the blood, the mud, and the wanted poster still flapping on the board a hundred meters behind, and just said, "Greywatch. Eleven days. There's tea." Then she went back to coiling a rope.

Anselm stood on the pier as the lines came off. He had a sack of bread in one hand and a flask in the other, and he hadn't said a word since Rhea's speech.

"Come with us," she said.

"And do what? Caulk hulls in a hunter town?" He shook his head. "Somebody has to be here when the Wardens come. Somebody who can say he was robbed by a mad woman and her three idiots." He passed the sack across the widening gap. "Go on."

"Ans."

"Go."

The Patience slid out into the current. Anselm raised one hand, kept it raised until he was a speck on the dock, and then the fog took him.

The city shrank behind them. Ethan sat in the stern on a coil of rope with a mug of Mags's tea warming his bandaged hands. Tomas slept beside him, curled around the old book. Rhea stood at the rail with her back to them, watching the walls fall away, one hand tight on the wood.

"I'm going to ask him," Ethan said, to nobody. "Garrick. What he was paid."

Rhea didn't turn. "Not yet."

"I know."

"In Greywatch. Once you've slept and eaten and stopped bleeding. If you still want to, we'll find a way." She rubbed her thumb along the rail. "I left my dagger in that sluice. Third time I've thrown it. You'd think I'd learn to hold onto things."

"You held onto me."

She glanced over her shoulder at that, just once, and her face softened a fraction before she turned away again.

The window opened in front of his eyes.

[Hidden mission complete: Break a binding. Reward: Level +5.]

[Level 8 reached. Stat points: +15.]

He sat very still. Level 8. He thought of the boy in the Awakening Hall with his palm pressed to dark glass. He spent the points slowly, with the barge rocking under him. Strength, five. Agility, two. Perception, two. Endurance, six. The numbers settled one by one and the aches in his body began to fade.

On the far bank the towers of the Ironkeep rose from the mist, grey and enormous. He didn't look at them for long.

He lifted the mug and drank. Hot water ran over his tongue. No tea, no bitterness, no warmth of leaves.

He drank it anyway.