Chapter Text
Wylan Van Eck was dead. It was a shame, really.
Not even ten years old, he was but another corpse lost to the Queen Lady’s plague. Another loss for the blight that had purged Ketterdam of the young and old, its rich and its poor. Another loss that had left another house with its shutters drawn tight, heads bowed in mourning.
What had the esteemed Councilman done? The congregation whispered amongst themselves as they shuffled into the pews of the Church of Barter. What great slight was Ghezen punishing him for, that lung fever had taken his beloved wife, and now the plague claiming his only heir?
Questions buzzed behind the gloves of gossiping wives, eyes wandering over the widower as he clasped his hands in prayer, pressing them first to his lips and then to the heavens. He was a good man. He was a pious man. As if painted by DeKappel himself, he was the picture of Ghezen’s favour, dutifullying following the course his father and his father before him had walked out. Yet Ghezen had struck him and struck him hard.
Nobody shared their questions with the man. But he heard them all the same, shaking hands with his fellow council members as their jowls quivered in sympathy, raising his glass in toast to all those who’d been lost. Another man might’ve gone mad or gone cold inside. Nobody would fault him if he succumbed to the grief. He was only human after all. But as Ghezen willed, he persevered. He stood tall, straight-backed, his dark clothes the mark of a business-man not a man cowed by grief.
He was Jan Van Eck and he would not stop moving forward.
-
Wylan Van Eck must’ve been dead.
His sins had finally caught up with him. He’d spent too long scurrying through the reeds, barely a step ahead of his devils and he’d finally stumbled. Like a cat catching a mouse, they’d wrenched him sharply by the collar and dragged him down through the wash. And here he was, finally in hell where he belonged.
His final resting place.
The sharp sting of ammonia pulled at his senses, forcing air into his lungs, wrenching his eyes open like a fish on a line breaking through the surface. Light burned his eyes after too long spent submerged in darkness.
The remnants of adrenaline and whatever he’d been injected with pulsed through his veins. His heart hammered just below his breastbone. He blinked rapidly into the eyes of a stuffy-looking old man dressed in the robes of a university medik. A cloth pouch hung in his hand, the stench likely what brought Wylan into consciousness.
Seeing he was awake, the man backed off, pinching the sagging folds of his throat as if to steady himself.
WhatamIdoinghere? WhatamIdoinghere? WhatamIdoinghere?
Like a staccato scale, the familiar panic rose and fell as he took in the scene before him.
Hands shackled behind his back, he was bound to a chair. It was a comfortable expensive chair that had no place in the Barrel.
While the canal rats and rodents that lurked through the Barrel liked to flash wealth, they did so in the style of paupers. Their offices, which Wylan certainly wasn’t shy to, were loud and gauche. Golden Zemeni panels glinted in the corners and Ravkan patterns draped to hide pock-marked plaster. Like children playing dress-up, they clung to their money dug from other men’s graves.
The truly rich men of Ketterdam didn’t bother with embellishments. The truly rich man understood the importance of restraint. You couldn’t catch a rich man by the amount of gold he hung around his throat or the number of silver buckles that jangled with every step of his cobbled shoe. Understatement was statement enough.
Wylan’s eyes roved over wooden panels, scenes of frothing oceans and glistening fish leaping through carvings. Armed stadwatch members stood between the mahogany bookshelves that loomed over him, like a jury, sneering over everything he did not know. The moon’s weakened yellow glimmer seeped through the stained-glass windows that shadowed the mercher before him. His heart skipped a pulse.
Apart from a few more lines, parentheses dug into the soft flesh beside his mouth, he might’ve been pulled straight from the watercolour landscapes of Wylan’s nightmares. He had the same strict, black edges to his frock-coat, the same laurel pocketwatch. In their years of separation, his blonde hairline had made a determined retreat from his eyebrows. It felt like a concession. A childish one certainly, but Wylan was sure that Nina would crack a joke about it if she were here.
Saints, he wished she were here, all painted-red grins and fire-cracker wit. Or Matthias, with his lumbering, heavy-handed comfort. They would know what to do. They wouldn’t be sat here, gaping like a carp from the 1st Harbours newest catch.
“What business,” he croaked out, the age old terror of a lost child hiding behind curtains or his mother’s skirts, eyes screwed tight in expectation of a slap, clouding his voice.
“Mr Hendricks,” his father greeted, not an ounce of recognition carried on his easy tone. “Hope you’re well.”
Most of his interactions with his father had been muddled by confusion. Gasping tears as crawling black squiggles refused to untangle themselves into letters for him. Feeling the floors drop underneath his feet as his father refused to explain that his mother was not actually dead and would be home from her spell in the country any day now. Tracing the shell of his face in the mirror as it blurred between the girl he was and the boy he needed to be. Turning his picturebooks over in his hands over and over again as he tried to connect the sunny men in the stories with his own stone-cold father. A granite father and his little glass boy. They were both creatures of habit.
“What business, Van Eck,” he repeated, a fraction more sure.
Of course his father did not remember him. The child his father remembered was a scrap of a girl – pudgy cheeks, long auburn curls like her mother, hauntingly pale eyes like her father. While malnutrition and the unfortunate side effect of being born female leaving him much smaller than his peers, Wylan was no longer that girl. Dumpling hands became half slender piano fingers and half metal digits, forged of Wylan’s own reckless determination. Cheeks hollowed out into sharpened cheekbones and the red of his youth, his last heirloom of his mother besides her name, was buried under years worth of cheap Barrel hair dye. Even if he let his natural curls grow out, he doubted they’d echo their childhood hue.
“You know of me?” his father said mildly.
Know him?
Wylan nearly started laughing at the question. If he did, he was sure the sound would putter out into a deranged hack. As a child, sermons in the Church of Barter had been as dull and humourless as Wylan assumed Ghezen was. But perhaps the god had a sense of humour after all. How else could Wylan explain the conversation happening at that moment?
“You’re –” he coughed. “You’re a mercher who works to improve the Barrel.”
“I try to find men honest work,” his father shrugged.
Sankt Van Eck, Wylan could hear Nina snicker in his ears.
“How good of you,” he replied aloud.
“What business? I can’t imagine you’d drag me all the way to the Gelden district just to inquire about my wellbeing.”
As he spoke, he ran his fingers along the chains that bound his hands. He cursed the lack of mobility. If only he could reach his coat pockets! He had at least a dozen solutions and concentrates that would’ve melted the metal in less time than Wylan could take to name them. Only a quarter of them would melt through the floor too. As he was, he would have to settle for an old-fashion escape trick.
“I have a proposition for you,” Van Eck hummed. “Or rather, the Council does.”
A jolt of surprise ran through him. “What could the Council want with me? Especially with such a crude house call.”
It had been Wylan’s fault he’d gotten jumped. The parley that night with the Black Tips had been keenly close to ending up with his blood dashed on the Exchange’s stones. If he’d been a better man, he’d have let it. In the heat of moments, Wylan could bury the soft little boy who still woke up from dreams crying for his mother. Like a stone, he could let himself sink into a well deep inside him. Left behind was a puppet boy, jerking his strings to the tune of the Barrel.
His new world only spoke violence: he either learned the language, or succumbed to it. That didn't mean he needed to enjoy it.
Letting the Dregs clamour and caw, clapping their hands on his shoulders as they demanded the details of victory, he’d grinned along with them before feinting into a nearby alleyway. They thought him too proud to associate with foot soldiers, and wasn’t that a better truth than the boring reality that their leader was a selfish, lily-livered coward? While the Dregs ran on back to the Slat to celebrate their renewed claim on fifth harbour, Wylan had bent double in an alleyway, metal palm pressed cool against his mouth. He couldn’t tell if he was forcing back tears or vomit.
This wasn’t forever, he told himself. One day, he’d leave this saints-forsaken city behind and he would never look back. The blood that soaked his fingers would become oil paints. He’d find his mother’s, apologise to her grave for every time he’d taken a hammer to her good memory, apologise for how the Van Eck men couldn’t help but break her down into little amber shards. Then he’d vanish as his father always meant for him.
But like a too quick breath dragged out a wrong note, his father had disrupted his careful composition.
“Consider it a warning,” his father said. “As well as a demonstration.”
The shape from the alleyway flashed across Wylan’s memory. Appearing and disappearing like a ghost, Wylan’s powders had passed straight through it. Before he knew what was happening, a syringe had pressed into his sleeve and he’d woken up in this mercher’s office. Unless his father had redecorated in the years past, it wasn’t his own. More questions.
“You were first arrested when you were eleven years old,” he continued. “Then thrice when you were twelve and you were picked up when the Stadwatch rousted a gambling hall when you were fourteen but you haven’t served any time since.”
Wylan didn’t reply. His father had always liked to talk, spinning his anger and bitterness into long-winded monologues that made little sense to Wylan’s young ears. What could he say to defend himself either? He just stared up at the man, waiting for him to reach his point. Every moment his father spoke was another for Wylan to ease out of those blasted chains.
“You run book on prize fights, horses and your club’s own game of chance. You’ve doubled Fifth harbours profits ever since you took ahold of it. The chemical compositions you’ve created confuse the minds of men at the university twice your age yet you use it for murder and blackmail. I’ve heard you’re a rather gifted lockpick. Would you agree?”
“You flatter me, sir,” Wylan said, feeling along the cool metal for the last click of the chains falling away. He refused to take in the words his father said. Hearing him recall his actions in an almost appraising tone, if not for the familiar disgust rimming his pupils, was worse than being waterboarded by an especially confident Liddie.
Taking to his feet, he let the chains fall to the floor and brushed down his coat. As he did, he felt for the little black explosive he’d been looking for and held it out to his father.
“All it takes is one click and this whole room comes crashing down,” he said, trying to imitate his father’s easy menace.
The guards had raised their guns but Wylan felt no fear. Not a bullet would strike him without his father's word.
“You. Me. Those nice young men you’ve hired to make you believe you’re safe.”
“Now, let’s not be hasty, boy. I haven’t gotten to the good part yet.”
His father held his hands out placatingly, eyes laser-focused on the bomb in Wylan's hand. A thin bead of sweat beaded above his upper lip.
“Then start talking, sir.”
“Mikka,” his father called.
There it was again. The dead boy. Paler than a corpse and equally thin, he strode easily through the wall.
Wylan blinked once. Then again.
Even as a child, he’d considered himself a creature of science. The dogged need to know why fueled his every step. Why did the sun rise every morning by the workings of its own clock? Why did bones click one way and break the other? Where did the seams of reality fit together to present the picture it did? If Wylan knew how the world worked, he could make his way through it.
Wylan did not understand how he’d just seen a boy walk through solid wall. He was dressed in the livery of a Grisha Tidemaker but they could only control currents, not the state of objects themselves. Further, Wylan knew that not using their powers could make a Grisha sickly or unwell but this boy seemed to be on the wrong side of a reanimated cadaver. He looked sharply to his father for understanding.
“Put down the bomb and I’ll explain.”
“I’d prefer if you start talking now.”
They held eye contact for a beat, identical irises narrow in determination. Then his father sighed.
“Have you heard of jurda parem, Mr Hendricks?” his father asked instead, always a man of riddles, demanding answers that Wylan did not know.
“Jurda is a stimulant, grown in Noyvi Zem,” he parroted immediately, flipping through his mental knowledge of the plant. “Your company and many like you import it. It’s harmless. Maybe some staining and a mild headache at best. What does that have to do with this?”
“Jurda is just a stimulant, yes,” his father said. “But jurda parem is far more. Certainly not harmless.”
Wylan kept his eyes on Mikka as his father spoke. He must’ve been young once, but whatever had happened to him had stretched his skin tight over the bones. He had the yellowed pallor of opioid addicts Wylan would see rot in the corner of alleyways.
“You drugged him.” It was not a question and his father did not pretend it was.
“An experiment of which Mikka was a willing participant,” his father shrugged. “A shortening of his indenture although I doubt he will last to see its completion. You see, jurda parem is a cousin of jurda. Same plant but entirely different manufacturing process. We’re not sure of the process by which the drug is made, but a sample of it was sent to the Kerch Merchant Council by a scientist named Bo Yul-Bayur.”
“He sounds Shu.”
“Because he is. He wished to defect and sent us a sample to convince us of his extraordinary claims.”
“Then where is he?”
“Patience, Mr Hendricks.” Danger flashed in his father’s mild tone. It was a snake rearing up to strike, the quiet stench of ozone before the lightning, the spark before the bang. “All your questions will be answered in due time. When Bo Yul-Bayur sent us the sample of jurda parem, we fed it to three Grisha, one from each Order. One from each household.”
He paused to touch his hands to his ruby tie-pin, as if reminding Wylan of his status. Not that Wylan could ever forget.
“One was a Healer indentured to Councilman Hoede. Another was a Fabrikator from Mr Hertzoon. Finally, Mikka is my own Tidemaker. You’ve seen what he’s done with this drug.”
Hoede and Hertzoon. Both names strung chords in Wylan’s minds, forming the shapes of mysterious disappearances and runaway heirs.
“So this drug can help Tidemaker’s alter object’s natural states? Or their own bodies? That makes no sense. Grisha power doesn’t stretch that far, steroid or not,” Wylan replied.
“It shouldn’t be possible,” his father agreed. “In theory, jurda parem is a stimulant just like its ordinary cousin. But it alters a Grisha’s very perception. They can interact with the very fibres of our world, making connections at frightening speeds. The impossible becomes simple to them.
“Amazing,” Wylan breathed out, seized by the scientific wonder of such a discovery. A moment later, the horror hit. “You never get something for nothing. What else does this drug do? You said you tried it on Fabrikators and Healers too. What happened?”
His father reached into the desk and Wylan’s body tensed in anticipation for what would greet him. He watched as the man pulled out a solid lump of gold. “This began as lead.”
“I didn’t think you were one for fairy stories, Councilman,” Wylan snorted, disbelief edging his words. “They’re different atoms. You can’t just alter their molecular structure.”
“Atoms are just atoms. Matter to manipulate. It has the same melting point as gold, the same weight and malleability. If it’s not identical to gold in every way, difference has eluded us. One moment, the Fabrikator was holding lead, the next moment we had gold. Test it if you want.”
Wylan certainly would. He took the metal and quickly pocketed it.
“So that’s two orders,” Wylan said. “What about the third? Hoede’s Healer? What did she do?”
“Would you care to follow me, Mr Hendricks?”
As they walked through the precisely panelled house, Wylan couldn’t help but wonder if his father felt any hesitation speaking his mother’s surname. It was the only thing Wylan had kept, the one part of himself he couldn’t bring himself to leave submerged in Ketterdam’s harbours.
The walls dripped wealth, but it wasn’t his father’s home. Wylan quickly realised that. Everything was accented in fine, seafoam green and in the few rooms Wylan could peer into, the furniture was draped. A ghost house. Hoede. The runners and spiders of the Barrel had been cawing over the mess of last week. A Councilman whisked off to the country while Stadwatch swarmed his home. Rumours of firepox hummed behind everybody lips. But Wylan knew his father. He would never put himself in danger, when he could pay somebody else to instead. Whatever had happened here was not the works of plague.
“There was no firepox here, was there?” he asked aloud, sweeping a finger over a dusty glass window.
“Nothing can harm us here,” his father replied. “If you do the job I need you for, there will be no harm to anybody. Come, now.”
His father led him through a door into a manicured garden. The heady perfume of early crocuses imbued Wylan’s senses, bringing him memories of tinkling, childish laughter and paint-splattered skirts. However, as they turned into the boathouse, any memory of childhood quickly curdled.
He brought his sleeve up to shield his mouth but it did not fully banish the stench of urine and excrement. The room was lit by two glass lanterns on the wall, casting a group of guards, some in Stadwatch-purple and others in Hoede’s customary green, in shallow light. Shattered glass lay at their feet but nobody moved to clean it. Another city guard stood within the iron box in the middle of the room, and Wylan rapidly understood the glass was the remnants of an observation window. All the men’s faces were slack. Their eyes held nothing.
“What’s wrong with them,” Wylan asked automatically. He stepped forward and recoiled as his shoe brushed a body on the floor.
His father noticed it and sighed. “We’ve lost another one.”
As he commanded his guards to carry the corpse away, Wylan couldn’t tear his eyes away from the horrible sight. The men in the room had not reacted once to anything that had happened.
“What is this? What have you done?” Wylan repeated, horror filling his tone. He whirled on his father.
“The Grisha was a Corporalnik serving her indenture with Councilman Hoede’s household. He thought because she was a Healer and not a Heartrender, he was making the safe choice to test the parem."
“What did she do?” Wylan tried to imagine what had occurred in this little boat house but his brain was pulling straws.
As his father explained, the scene bloomed before Wylan’s imagination. A Healer controlling the guard with her powers, eyes blown wide from the drug. He imagined this woman, dark hair and dressed in red, step easily out of the room and pull an entire room of armed men into submission with a blink. Then finally, Hoede was delivered his cruel, karmic justice.
Wylan couldn’t feel any pity for the man, using Grisha as guineapigs, with no care for their wellbeings. However, these guards were a different matter. The corpse his father had ordered out was barely more than a boy. What more were they than pawns, being pushed forward step-by-step by higher powers?
“Did Hoede die?”
“He’s recovering in his country manor. Moderate blood loss but he is in the same state as these men.”
“What happened to the Healer?” Wylan inquired as his father led him out of the boathouse and locked the door behind them. He watched the wood creak in the night wind for a moment before joining step with the man.
“Drowned,” his father said simply. “She secured a small craft and I believe she was headed out for Ravka. However, three days ago, we found her washed up near Third Harbour. We believe she was coming here for a second dose.”
“It’s debilitating, isn’t it?” Wylan said. A girl drowning trying to get back into the city that had tried to kill her, just for a second taste. A walking corpse who could perform miracles. Never something for nothing.
“Quite.”
There was a man waiting for them by the main gate. The moon’s weak glow reflected on his darkened silhouette, the same clean cut as his father. This man was another mercher. Mr Hertzoon, Wylan’s brain supplied. His father’s final conspirator.
As they approached, the man’s features came into clear details. He surveyed tufty sideburns and a warm face; a black suit stretched tight over a comfortable stomach. This was a man who was not well-acquainted with suffering. He grinned broadly as they reached him.
“Mr Hendricks I hope you’re well. I am Jakob Hertzoon,” he said as if they were passing each other on the street. “I trust the councilman has filled you in on what’s going on."
“Why did you bring me here?” Wylan asked, tired of the stalling and false niceties. He wanted to go back to the Slat and bury himself in his bed for at least a week. “Do you want me to try to reverse engineer the formula?”
“This drug is the work of much more than a Barrel rat who fancies himself a pharmacist,” his father snapped. “I need you to steal Bo Yul-Bayur. He was kidnapped by the Fjerdans around a month ago, when we were supposed to meet with him. He was begging for asylum, you see.”
“And you need, in your words, a Barrel rat to steal him back?”
“The diplomatic situation is very delicate right now. This mission is one of discretion,” said Mr Hertzoon.
“Where is he?”
His father cleared his throat, glancing at the other man.
“The Ice Court. We’re prepared to offer you five million kruge.”
Wylan inhaled so fast that he started choking on his astonished laughter. Perhaps his father had gone insane during his years of isolation.
“I don’t make a habit in suicide missions, Councilman,” he said. “Especially not ones that risk other’s lives too.”
“Ten million,” Mr Hertzoon interjected.
“I’m not your indentures, sir. I won’t take deals I’ll have to cash from the grave.”
“Twenty million kruge.”
Wylan was about to refuse again when he caught his father’s gaze. Like the swell of an orchestra, he suddenly realised the absurdity of this situation. His father’s gaze was wide and desperate. For once, Wylan held something his father needed. He held something his father wanted. His father might’ve given up on Wylan years ago, cast him out into the cruel world. But he was no better and no worse than the shadows Wylan had acquainted himself with. He was just doing what he could to push himself forward in a world that threatened to drown them.
With the threat of jurda parem, that threat grew by the moment. If the drug was unleashed onto the market, Grisha would be persecuted far more than they already were. Every country would have motivation to turn Grisha into their country’s personal drugged up pets. Even if Yul-Bayur ended up at the end of a Fjerdan rope, once the formula was created once it was only a matter of time before every country had managed a version.
He didn’t want to see Nina with her cheeks shrunken and eyes lost to the drug, all her fire deadened and dulled. There was a durast who worked out of a glassblowing factory on Rozenstraat, who worked for the Dregs. Wylan didn’t want to imagine him, always shooting jokes and flirts in the same breath, at his knees begging for a second dose.
Wylan could pretend he was doing it for Grisha. He could pretend that he was doing something heroic. Accomplishing the impossible, breaking into an unbreakable prison to save the world. But Wylan was not a hero or a good man. The only good men in Ketterdam were the ones found in people’s prayer, martyred before they could fall too far.
Even with Per Haskell taking his twenty percent, and every fraction Wylan would give to the team forming in his mind, there would still be a lot of money. More money Wylan knew what to do with. That was untrue. This money meant he could get out of the city. He could leave enough to keep the Dregs from collapsing and disappear as his father intended. He could finally make his father proud. He could finally make peace with his mother. At last, he could do something that wasn’t a tarnish of his family name.
Maybe even he didn’t get his father’s pride, he could get his respect. Whether his father knew who he was talking to, he still believed that Wylan could do this. For the first time in his life, he had faith in him.
Even after all these years, it meant too much.
“Why do you even want me?” Wylan asked, finally. “You have the money for any team in Kerch. Especially with your budgets combined. Why me?”
“You’re a remarkable young man, Mr Hendricks,” Mr Hertzoon said. “I do wonder what a boy of your calibre might have accomplished, if you hadn’t gone down such a route?”
Wylan’s eyes flickered towards his father. It was a question only the man could answer.
“A DeKappel went missing from my house three months ago,” his father said instead. “Worth nearly one hundred thousand kruge.”
“I’m so sorry, sir,” Wylan replied.
“It was rather sad indeed. Especially as I was quite eager to show it off and the cost I had taken to protect it. Yes despite my safeguards, my guards, my dogs and my staff, it was taken from me.”
“My condolences, sir, but what does this have to do with me?”
“My painting did not surface on any world market,” his father steamed ahead, as if Wylan had not spoken. “It was as if the thief did not take it to sell but merely to prove that he could do it.”
“That’s a rather stupid risk, don’t you think?” Wylan frowned.
“I don’t pretend to indulge the motivation of thieves,” his father spoke, picking at a nail. “However, I do believe that whoever stole my DeKappel is exactly who we need for the Ice Court.”
“Then you should try and find them, sir,” Wylan said.
“And yet all we have is you,” Mr Hertzoon rumbled beneath his moustache. “Do we have a deal, boy?”
Despite the other man’s words, Wylan did not drop his father’s challenging gaze.
“The deal is the deal,” he said, echoing the words of the businessmen he should’ve grown to be.
“The deal is the deal,” the men said.
Wylan shook Mr Hertzoon’s hand first and then his father’s. Pale skin against Fabrikated bronze. He watched his father’s eyes narrow at his mechanical appendage.
“A metal hand,” his father said. “How curious. What happened?”
Prosthetics weren’t exactly uncommon in the Barrel, where shoot-outs and jobs gone wrong meant many had lost a limb or two, but Wylan knew his left hand drew a few double takes. Smooth bronze joined neatly to his elbow with the work of a Fabrikator who’d worked in the Barrel a few years ago and nearly a years worth of his own designs.
“What always happens,” Wylan shrugged as he unlatched the gate and quietly let himself out. “I didn’t give up.”