His old master shrugged. “Hurry up.” He tossed a razor Rone’s way. “If you have time, clean up.”
Rone frowned but pocketed the razor regardless. He glanced at Sandis, but she was timidly asking Kurtz about his guns.
He had a feeling today was going to be a bad day.
Rone nicked his chin when the clock tower chimed, dropped the razor into Kurtz’s old sink, and grabbed his washed clothes and canvas bag before pushing his way outside. He’d forgotten how dim Kurtz kept his flat—the sunlight blinded him. The smell was pretty terrible, too. Whoever had taken Rone’s old job had not been tempted to excellency by Kurtz’s stories.
Sandis was silent as a rock as they took the path through the Riggers’ territory and pushed their way into the crowded streets of the smoke ring. Nobody looked at their pilgrimage ties twice, if they noticed them at all. Most shuffled forward with their eyes on the cobblestones or the back of the person in front of them. A glum bunch, but Rone couldn’t blame them. There was little to be happy about in this part of Dresberg.
The crowds were thicker than usual, which Rone normally would have hated, but each melancholy factory worker acted as a shield against watching eyes. Rone pushed his way toward the center of the road, letting the people herd around him. He and Sandis blended right— Sandis.
Rone cursed and stopped, earning a similar curse from the person behind him. He weaved against the crowd, which meant he was barely moving at all. To his relief, Sandis appeared only seconds after he realized he’d lost her.
“Keep up!” he called.
“What?” she asked.
Rone opened his mouth, then thought better of it. Shaking his head, he grabbed her hand and held on tight as they slowly navigated the narrow road. It might have occurred to him that, despite having known several women intimately, he had never actually walked about holding one’s hand. But the day’s mission pressed too hard on his thoughts for him to notice. Much.
Many roads near the center of the city had been widened over the years to accommodate the growing population, but engineers and laborers couldn’t move buildings, so the girth of streets could only expand so much. People had to leave before the sun rose if they wanted to get anywhere without pressing bodies with strangers, and in the smoke ring, wagons were hopeless. There wasn’t space, at least not during shift changes.
Smoke towers spewed rolling gray clouds into the sky, which occasionally mixed with the steady spit of steam vents. Despite an earlier bath, Rone felt dirty by the time he reached the edge of the smoke ring. The crowds began to thin, but he still took the busiest roads toward the cathedral, constantly searching intersections for grafters—those he had met, and those he hadn’t.
Sandis squeezed his hand, even when there was little chance of them separating.
Once upon a time, Rone had thought the cathedral beautiful. It was likely still the most aesthetic building in Dresberg, if one didn’t count the Lily Tower itself. While so many buildings adhered to utility—making roof hopping all the easier—the cathedral broke the mold, standing out amid its surroundings. The Central Cathedral of the Celestial was mostly a giant tapering tower that came to a point, from which jutted a solid gold pole reaching toward heaven . . . wherever it lay beyond the polluted sky. The base of the tower folded out into a long, flattish structure, like a lying dog with its tail in the air. Two small wings flared out from either side of that. The cathedral wasn’t whitewashed—someone had used their brain when building it—but its exterior was patterned with dark river stone. In the late-morning light, its windows looked like sapphire.
Apparently the cathedral also used to have well-kept grounds, but the city had eaten those up as it demanded more and more space for industry and the Angelic lost more and more rapport with the government. But the building itself still stood, and its halls were still filled with worshippers, priests, and pilgrims, so that had to mean something.
It means these people are gullible suckers, Rone thought as he trudged toward the building’s front doors.
A white-garbed priest stood outside the doors greeting people. When he saw Rone’s and Sandis’s pilgrimage ties, he nodded and directed them inside. “Just down this hall, my friends. You’ll see a small atrium filled with other pilgrims. Have you come far?”
Sandis glanced at him.
Rone bowed. “Aye.”
The priest seemed pleased. Rone pushed past him with Sandis in tow. He released her hand halfway down the corridor, trying not to be annoyed with her slow pace as she took in their surroundings. Several paintings of past Angelics hung on the walls, along with embroidered scripture spewed out by the man who’d started it all. Panels of four-petaled lilies, designed to look geometric, were interspersed with the other decorations. That was how the Celestial was portrayed—either as a lily or an androgynous, overweight person with white skin and white clothes. The Celestial had no gender.
The atrium Rone and Sandis entered—one that brought up a cluster of half memories Rone immediately shoved back down—was centered around a statue of the latter portrayal of the Celestial. Every aspect of it was round and glistening. A window in the ceiling shone light down onto its marble head. About a dozen pilgrims stood around it, half of whom actually did look like they’d traveled far. Despite the throngs and industry within Dresberg, the land surrounding the capital was pretty barren. Dry in the summer, buried in snow in the winter. A few towns and trading posts dotted it here and there. The next-biggest cities were populated by fishermen on the northern coast, and from what Rone understood, they were small compared to Dresberg. The farmland and ranches lay farther south, where the rain was decent and the cold not so severe. Judging by the pilgrims’ clothes, he guessed two-thirds of them were farmers, the rest tradesmen.
One of the former leaned toward his pregnant wife and said, “Soon, darling. Soon.” A rather pretty woman, Rone noted.
He turned his back to them and shoved his hands into his pockets.
Sandis approached him, with eyes wide, taking in their surroundings until finally settling on him. She blinked. “What’s wrong?”
He straightened and pulled his hands out of his pockets. “Nothing. Just have to wait until noon.” He glanced at her worn shoes. “Maybe they’ll have something that fits you in the donation box.”
Sandis looked at her feet. Wiggled her toes. “These are all right.”
Rone rolled his eyes, broke away from her, and headed back the way they’d come. Was it this way, or . . . Ah, there. He turned right and found a short hallway lined with crates of donations for the poor. People who could actually afford to do so brought in their used goods, food, and sometimes money to be distributed among the believers, for what good it did. Rone used to think of them as “guilt boxes,” since priests had to guilt the sinful rich into donating anything of real use.
He found a crate half-full of shoes and sorted through them. There was a pair of beaded heels in there. Who would have use for those? They’d been wedged between several worn pairs of kids’ shoes and some work boots ready to fall apart.
He pulled out some sturdy-enough boy’s shoes that looked like they might fit her. On his return trip to the atrium, he noticed a boy talking to Sandis—he was probably three or four years her junior and two inches shorter. Sandis didn’t protest the company, but Rone walked faster, anyway.
“Here,” he said, tossing the shoes at Sandis’s feet. “Try these.”
The boy looked at Rone and instantly turned around, scurrying back toward the cathedral’s entrance.
“Who was he?” he asked.
Sandis shrugged. “I don’t know. Came over as soon as you left, asking me where I was from.”
Rone frowned, peering down the way the boy had left. He hadn’t worn a pilgrim’s sash, had he? “Did you tell him your name?”