For the first time, Lin passed through the arch, following Kel, and was inside the Maze. She could still see the glow of the Ruta Magna if she looked back over her shoulder, but not for long. The narrow, smoky streets swallowed it up.
The city’s lamplighters did not come here, any more than the Vigilants did. Instead, cheap torches—rags soaked in naphtha and wrapped tightly around wooden poles—blazed in metal holders clamped to pockmarked walls, much of whose paint had long been eaten away by salt air. The sense of being pressed down by darkness was profound, with the high warehouse walls and thick, rising smoke blotting out the moon and stars.
The place smelled of old fish, discarded rubbish, and spices. Houses where many families clearly lived had their doors thrown open; old women sat on the steps, stirring metal pots with long spoons over open cooking fires. Passing sailors carried metal bowls around their necks, and would hand them over, along with a few coins, for a ladle of fish stew.
The fires added their smoke to that of the torches, making Lin’s nose tickle. It was hard to see anything clearly between the smoke and the crowds. Faces loomed up out of the shadows and vanished again, as if they belonged to lively ghosts.
Out of self-preservation, Lin stayed close by Kel’s side. If she mislaid him, she doubted she could make her way back out to the Ruta Magna without becoming hopelessly lost. He walked with confidence, so her teasing had not been entirely misplaced. He did know his way around the Maze.
“Look out.” Kel indicated a puddle of something blackish red, which Lin dutifully stepped around. He gave her the sideways smile she was beginning to realize was habitual—the one that seemed to say I take nothing too seriously—and said, “What do you think? Is the Maze what you expected?”
Lin hesitated. How to say that it was strange to her, because they did not have poverty like this in the Sault? She had been to poor houses as a physician, but this felt different. It was a place that had been left to consume itself without the interference of either charity or Law. She could see, through grimy windows, whole families sleeping on the floors of crowded, narrow houses. Poppy-juice addicts, their heads lolling as they dreamed, sat propped against walls, passersby stepping over them as if they were sleeping dogs. Old women kneeling in doorways shook metal cups, begging for coins.
“It’s crowded, but it feels abandoned,” she said.
He nodded, as if calmly observing the truth of what she’d said. He was awfully calm in general, she thought. She supposed it was the nature of his job, pretending tranquility in situations where he had to lie and lie and smile while he did it.
She wondered if he was lying to her when he smiled.
“I assume whatever book Morettus wants, it is something no reputable bookshop would carry,” he said.
“It is a book about magic.” Lin skirted around a Shenzan sailor sitting in the street, his left sleeve rolled up. A thin man in a Hanseatic soldier’s jacket was carefully applying a tattoo to his arm, using a tray of dye and heated needles. It was a crocodile, its tail looped around the man’s arm, its scales done in brilliant green and gold. “I cannot say anything more.”
“A book about magic,” Kel echoed thoughtfully. “Dangerous stuff, indeed.”
Lin eyed him sideways. Waves of sea air were rolling in, making her shiver, mixing with the spice-and-smoke scent of the Maze. They passed a salesman hawking bottles of a dark liquid he promised would clear up pox scars and “improve the quality of passion.” Lin cast him a disapproving glare. She knew such men; there was no more than colored water in the bottle.
“Do you know what Morettus is planning to do with the book, if you find it?” Kel said.
“I don’t think he wants it for himself, exactly,” Lin said. “I think he wants me to have it. To learn from it how to better mix magic and medicine.”
“Interesting,” Kel said. “Perhaps he’s ill. Or knows someone who is.”
Lin had been too busy thinking about Mariam to consider such a theory. The Ragpicker King seemed well enough to her eye—too thin, and perhaps too pale, but in a manner that suggested intensity and overwork, not sickness.
Kel smiled—the smile of someone recalling a memory. “There was a game I used to play as a child, at the Orfelinat. If you had magic, what would you do with it? My best friend, Cas, and I used to say we’d use magic to become the most powerful pirate kings of all time. That gold would fly off the decks of other ships and into our coffers.”
Lin could not help but laugh. “You dreamed of becoming a lazy pirate?”
She could not help but picture him as a little boy, before he’d learned that preternatural calm, that sideways smile. A little boy like Josit had been, all skinned knees and messy hair. She liked him, she thought. He was hard not to like—self-deprecating, funny, clever. She could see why Prince Conor had been so desperate for him to live.
They had reached the central part of Arsenal Road, the Maze’s main thoroughfare. Drink and drugs for sale had given way to sex. Scantily dressed young men and women, lips and cheeks rouged with paint, sat in the open doors of brothels, or crowded in front of glassless windows, calling out to passersby. A man in a blue soldier’s uniform stopped in front of one window. After a lively exchange with a crowd of girls, he crooked his finger at one—a slim young thing with dark hair and freckles. She came out of the bawdy house and smiled at him, holding out her hand. He counted coins into her palm under the light of a naphtha torch before leading her down a nearby alley.
Lin had thought they would disappear into the shadows, but they were still visible when he stopped and lifted the girl up against a wall. He slid his hands up under her skirt, burying his face against her neck. Her bare legs dangled around his hips as he unbuckled his trousers and thrust into her with a feverish desperation. Lin could not hear them, but the girl seemed to be patting his shoulder as he moved—an almost motherly gesture, as if to say, There, there.
Lin felt her cheeks flame. Which was what she got, she supposed, for standing and staring; Kel had stepped away for a moment to drop a coin in the cup of a young boy in a torn jacket several sizes too big. He’d only been gone for a moment, but when he returned, he took a look at Lin’s face, glanced down the alley, and smiled wryly. “That’s what they call ‘a half-crown standup,’” he said. “Cheaper if you don’t pay for a room. And no,” he added, “I don’t know that from personal experience.”
“It’s just . . . Well, it’s not like the Temple District, is it? The courtesans there have their health checked by physicians regularly. For their own protection,” she added, knowing she probably sounded extremely prudish, “as it should be.”
“To work in the Temple District is to be a courtesan,” said Kel, sounding uncharacteristically somber. “To work here in the Maze is to be desperate.” He seemed to shake off the seriousness, like a heron shaking water from its feathers. “Come. We’re not far from the market.”
They fell back into step together. Lin said, “You told me the Ragpicker King keeps offering you a job. A job doing what?”
“Spying for him, as far as I can tell. He wants to know what’s going on with the Charter Families. He has some eyes on the Hill, but not in every room.”