But even as she gave thanks, she knew that the rain was not enough. She wanted a storm – thunder, wind, a deluge. She wanted it to crash through Ketterdam’s pleasure houses, lifting roofs and tearing doors off their hinges. She wanted it to raise the seas, take hold of every slaving ship, shatter their masts, and smash their hulls against unforgiving shores. I want to call that storm, she thought. And four million kruge might be enough to do it. Enough for her own ship – something small and fierce and laden with firepower. Something like her. She would hunt the slavers and their buyers. They would learn to fear her, and they would know her by her name. The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true. She clung to the wall, but it was purpose she grasped at long last, and that carried her upwards.
She was not a lynx or a spider or even the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.
Kaz sped through the upper cells, sparing brief seconds for a glance through each grate. Bo Yul-Bayur would not be here. And he didn’t have much time.
Part of him felt unhinged. He had no cane. His feet were bare. He was in strange clothes, his hands pale and ungloved. He didn’t feel like himself at all. No, that wasn’t quite true. He felt like the Kaz he’d been in the weeks after Jordie had died, like a wild animal, fighting to survive.
Kaz spotted a Shu prisoner lurking at the back of one of the cells.
“Sesh- uyeh,” Kaz whispered. The man stared at him blankly. “Yul-Bayur?” Nothing. The man started shouting at him in Shu, and Kaz hurried away, past the rest of the cells, then slipped out to the landing and charged down to the next level as fast as he could manage. He knew he was being reckless, selfish, but wasn’t that why they called him Dirtyhands? No job too risky. No deed too low.
Dirtyhands would see the rough work done.
He wasn’t sure what was driving him. It was possible Pekka Rollins wasn’t here. It was possible he was dead. But Kaz didn’t believe it. I’d know. Somehow I’d know. “Your death belongs to me,” he whispered.
The swim back from the Reaper ’s Barge had been Kaz’s rebirth. The child he’d been had died of firepox. The fever had burned away every gentle thing inside him.
Survival wasn’t nearly as hard as he’d thought once he left decency behind. The first rule was to find someone smaller and weaker and take what he had. Though – small and weak as Kaz was – that was no easy task. He shuffled up from the harbour, keeping to the alleys, heading towards the neighbourhood where the Hertzoons had lived. When he spotted a sweetshop, he waited outside, then waylaid a chubby little schoolboy lagging behind his friends. Kaz knocked him down, emptied his pockets, and took his bag of liquorice.
“Give me your trousers,” he’d said.
“They’re too big for you,” the boy had cried.
Kaz bit him. The boy gave up his trousers. Kaz rolled them in a ball and threw them in the canal, then ran as fast as his weak legs would take him. He didn’t want the trousers; he just wanted the boy to wait before he went wailing for help. He knew the schoolboy would huddle in that alley for a long while, weighing the shame of appearing half-dressed in the street with the need to get home and tell what had happened.
Kaz stopped running when he reached the darkest alley he could find in the Barrel. He crammed all the liquorice into his mouth at once, swallowing it in painful gulps, and promptly vomited it up. He took the money and bought a hot roll of white bread. He was barefoot and filthy. The baker gave him a second roll just to stay away.
When he felt a bit stronger, a bit less shaky, he walked to East Stave. He found the dingiest gambling den, one with no sign and just a single lonely barker out front.
“I want a job,” he said at the door.
“Don’t have any, nub.”
“I’m good with numbers.”
The man laughed. “Can you clean a pisspot?”
“Yes.”
“Well, too bad. We already have a boy who cleans the pisspots.”
Kaz waited all night until he saw a boy about his age leave the premises. He followed him for two blocks, then hit him in the head with a rock. He sat down on the boy’s legs and pulled off his shoes, then slashed the soles of his feet with a piece of broken bottle. The boy would recover, but he wouldn’t be working anytime soon. Touching the bare flesh of his ankles had filled Kaz with revulsion. He kept seeing the white bodies of the Reaper ’s Barge, feeling the ripe bloat of Jordie’s skin beneath his hands.
The next evening, he returned to the den.
“I want a job,” he said. And he had one.
From there he’d worked and scraped and saved. He’d trailed the professional thieves of the Barrel and learned how to pick pockets and how to cut the laces on a lady’s purse. He did his first stint in jail, and then a second. He quickly earned a reputation for being willing to take any job a man needed done, and the name Dirtyhands soon followed. He was an unskilled fighter, but a tenacious one.
“You have no finesse,” a gambler at the Silver Garter once said to him. “No technique.”
“Sure I do,” Kaz had responded. “I practise the art of ‘pull his shirt over his head and punch till you see blood.’”