Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

Except in the Commons he hadn’t had the protection of a merchant house. So when he’d finally gotten sniffed out by agents of Morsini House after one daring raid, they’d taken him and ruined him beyond repair.

Such were the rules of life in the Commons.

When she finally saw him that day in the fishery, Sancia had been taken aback by the look on Sark’s face — for she’d never seen him…delighted. A person like Sark had little to be delighted about. It was unsettling.

He’d started talking. He’d vaguely described the job. She’d listened. When he’d told her the price tag, she’d scoffed and told him that the whole thing had to be a scam — no one was going to pay them that much.

At that, he’d tossed her a leather envelope. She’d glanced in it, and gasped.

Inside had been nearly three thousand in paper duvots — an absurd rarity in the Commons.

An advance , said Sark.

What! We never get advances.

I know.

Especially not in…in paper money!

I know.

She’d looked at him, wary. Is this a design job, Sark? I don’t deal in scriving designs, you know that. That shit will get us both harpered.

And that’s not what this is, if you can believe it. The job is just a box. A small box. And since scriving designs are usually dozens of pages long, if not hundreds, then I think we can rule that out.

Then what is in the box?

We don’t know.

And who owns the box?

We don’t know.

And who wants the box?

Someone with twenty thousand duvots.

She’d considered it. This hadn’t been terribly unusual for their line of work — usually it was better for all parties involved to know as little as possible about one another.

So , she’d said. How are we supposed to get the box?

He’d grinned wider, flashing crooked teeth. I’m glad you asked…

And they’d sat and hashed it all out right then and there.

Afterward, though — after the glee of planning it out, preparing it, discussing it there in the dark of the fishery — a queer dread had seeped into Sancia’s stomach. There anything I should be worried about here, Sark?

Anything I know ? No.

Okay. Then anything you suspect?

I think it’s house work , he’d said. That’s the only people who could toss around three thousand in paper. But we’ve done work for the houses before, when they need deniability. So in some ways, it’s familiar — do as they ask, and they’ll pay well, and let you keep your guts where they are.

So why is this different?

He’d thought for a moment, and said, With this price tag…well, it’s got to be coming from the top, yeah? A founder, or a founderkin. People who live behind walls and walls and walls. And the higher you go in the houses, the richer and madder and stupider these people get. We could be stealing some princeling’s plaything. Or we could be stealing the wand of Crasedes the Great himself, for all I know.

Comforting.

Yeah. So we need to play this right, Sancia.

I always play it right.

I know. You’re a professional. But if this is coming from the echelons, we need to be extra cautious. He’d held out his arms. I mean, look at me. You can see what happens when you cross them. And you…

She’d looked at him, eyes hard. And me?

Well. They used to own you. So you know what they can be like.

Sancia slowly sat up in bed. She was achingly tired, but she still couldn’t sleep.

That comment— They used to own you— it had bothered her then, and it bothered her now.

The scar on the side of her head prickled. So did the scars on her back — and she had a lot more there.

They don’t own me still , she insisted to herself. My days are free now.

But this, she knew, was not entirely true.

She opened the closet, opened the false floor, and picked Clef up.

she said.

Clef said, excited.

Sancia ran a string through Clef’s head and hung him around her neck, hidden in her jerkin. Then she walked down her rookery stairs and slipped out the side door. She scanned the muddy fairway for any watchful eyes, and started off.

By now the streets of Foundryside were filling up with people, tottering or skulking over the wooden sidewalks. Most were laborers, staggering off to work with their heads still aching from too much cane wine the night before. The air was hazy and humid, and the mountains rose in the distance, steaming and dark. Sancia had never been in the uplands beyond Tevanne. Most Tevannis hadn’t. Living in Tevanne might be rough, but the mountainous jungles were a lot worse.

Sancia turned a corner and spotted a body lying in the fairway up ahead, its clothes dark with blood. She crossed the street to avoid it.

said Clef.

<���…that’s a good point, I guess.>

did see that, right? That guy was dead?>

She looked back and observed how much of the man’s throat was missing.

said Sancia.

And she explained.

Since it was the merchant houses that made Tevanne great, it was probably inevitable that most city property would wind up being owned by them. But the houses were also all competitors who jealously protected their scriving designs; for as everyone knew, intellectual property is the easiest kind to steal.

This meant that all the land the houses owned was fiercely guarded, hidden behind walls and gates and checkpoints, inaccessible to all except those who possessed the proper markers. The house lands were so restricted and controlled they were practically different countries — which the city of Tevanne more or less acknowledged.

Four walled-off little city-states, all crammed into Tevanne, all wildly different regions with their own schools, their own living quarters, their own marketplaces, their own cultures. These merchant house enclaves — the campos — took up about 80 percent of Tevanne.

But if you didn’t work for a house, or weren’t affiliated with them — in other words, if you were poor, lame, uneducated, or just the wrong sort of person — then you lived in the remaining 20 percent of Tevanne: a wandering, crooked ribbon of streets and city squares and in-between places — the Commons.

There were a lot of differences between the Commons and the campos. The campos, for instance, had waste systems, fresh water, well-maintained roads, and their buildings tended to stay standing, which wasn’t always the case in the Commons. The campos also had a plethora of scrived devices to make their lives easier, which the Commons certainly did not. Walk into the Commons showing off a fancy scrived trinket, and you’d have your throat slit and your treasure snatched in an instant.