T he wheel spun, gold and green panels whirring so fast they became a single color. It slowed and stopped and whatever number came up must have been a good one, because the people cheered. The floor of the gambling palace was uncomfortably warm, and Nina’s scalp itched beneath her wig. It was an unflattering bell shape, and she’d paired it with a dowdy gown. For once, she didn’t want to draw attention.
She had passed unnoticed through her first stop on West Stave, and through her second, then she’d crossed over to East Stave, doing her best to move unseen through the crowds. They were thinner due to the blockades, but people would not be kept from their pleasures. She’d made a visit to a gambling palace just a few blocks south of this one, and now her work was almost done. Kaz had chosen the establishments with care. This would be her fourth and final destination.
As she smiled and whooped with the other players, she opened the glass case in her pocket and focused on the black cells within it. She could feel that deep cold radiating from it, that sense of something more, something other that spoke to the power inside her. She hesitated only briefly, recalling too clearly the chill of the morgue, the stink of death. She remembered standing over the dead man’s body and focusing on the discolored skin around his mouth.
As she’d once used her power to heal or rend skin, or even place a flush in someone’s cheeks, she had concentrated on those decaying cells and funneled a slender sheath of necrotic flesh into the compressed glass case. She’d tucked the case into a black velvet pouch and now, standing
in this raucous crowd, watching the happy colors of the wheel spin, she felt its weight—dangling from her wrist by a silver cord.
She leaned in to place a bet. With one hand, she set her chips on the table. With the other, she opened the glass case.
“Wish me luck!” she said to the wheel broker, allowing the open bag to brush against his hand, sending those dying cells up his fingers, letting them multiply over his healthy skin.
When he reached for the wheel, his fingers were black.
“Your hand!” exclaimed a woman. “There’s something on it.”
He scrubbed his fingers over his embroidered green coat as if it were simply ink or coal dust. Nina flexed her fingers, and the cells crawled up the broker’s sleeve to the collar of his shirt, bursting in a black stain over one side of his neck, curling under his jaw to his bottom lip.
Someone screamed, and the players backed away from him as the broker looked around in confusion. Players at the other tables turned from their cards and dice in irritation. The pit boss and his minions were moving toward them, ready to shut down whatever fight or problem was disrupting game play.
Hidden by the crowd, Nina swept her arm through the air and a cluster of the cells jumped to a woman beside the wheel broker wearing expensive-looking pearls. A black starburst appeared on her cheek, an ugly little spider that rippled down her chin and over the column of her throat.
“Olena!” her heavyset companion shouted. “Your face!”
Now the screams were spreading as Olena clawed at her neck, stumbling forward, searching out a mirror as the other customers scattered before her.
“She touched the broker! It got her too!” “What got her?”
“Get out of my way!”
“What’s happening here?” the pit boss demanded, clapping a hand on the baffled broker’s shoulder.
“Help me!” the broker begged, holding up his hands. “There’s something wrong.”
The pit boss took in the black stains on the broker’s face and hands, backing away quickly, but it was too late. The hand that had touched the broker’s shoulder turned an ugly purplish black, and now the pit boss was screaming too.
Nina watched the terror take on its own momentum, careening through the floor of the gambling hall like an angry drunk. Players knocked over their chairs, stumbling toward the doors, grabbing for chips even as they ran for their lives. Tables overturned, spilling cards, and dice clattered to the floor. People raced for the doors, shoving one another out of the way. Nina went with them, letting herself be carried by the crowd as they fled the gambling hall and lurched into the street. It had been the same at every one of her stops, the slow bleed of fear that crested so suddenly to full-blown panic. And now, at last, she heard it: the siren. Its undulating wail descended over the Stave, rising and falling, echoing over the rooftops and cobblestones of Ketterdam.
Tourists turned to one another with questions in their eyes, but the locals—the performers and dealers and shopkeepers and gamblers of the city—were instantly transformed. Kaz had told her they would know the sound, that they would heed it like children called home by a stern parent.
Kerch was an island, isolated from its enemies, protected by the seas and its immense navy. But the two things its capital was most vulnerable to were fire and disease. And just as fire leapt easily between the tightly packed rooftops of the city, so plague passed effortlessly from body to body, through the thick crowds and cramped living spaces. Like gossip, no one knew exactly where it began or how it moved so quickly, only that it did, through breath or touch, carried on the air or through the canals. The rich suffered less, able to stay sequestered in their grand houses or gardens, or flee the city entirely. The infected poor were quarantined in makeshift hospitals on barges outside the harbor. The plague could not be stopped with guns or money. It could not be reasoned with or prayed away.
Only the very young in Ketterdam didn’t have a clear memory of the Queen’s Lady Plague, of the sickboats moving through the canals piloted by bodymen with their long oars. Those who had survived it had lost a child or a parent or a brother or a sister, a friend or a neighbor. They remembered the quarantines, the terror that came with even the most basic human contact.
The laws addressing plague were simple and ironclad: When the siren sounded, all private citizens were to return to their homes. The officers of the stadwatch were to assemble at separate stations around the city— in case of infection, this was a means of attempting to keep it from
spreading to the entirety of the force. They were dispatched only to stop looters, and those men were given triple pay for the risk of policing the streets. Commerce halted and only the sickboats, bodymen, and mediks had free rein of the city.
I know the one thing this city is more frightened of than the Shu, the Fjerdans, and all the gangs of the Barrel put together. Kaz had gotten it right. The barricades, the blockades, the checks on people’s papers, all of it would be abandoned in the face of the plague. Of course, none of these people were properly sick, thought Nina as she sped back through the harbor. The necrotic flesh would not spread beyond what Nina had grafted onto their bodies. They would have to have it removed, but no one would grow ill or die. At worst, they’d endure a few weeks of quarantine.
Nina kept her head down, her hood drawn tight. Despite being the instigator of the chaos and knowing the plague was a fabrication, her heart still raced, driven by the panic swelling around her. People were crying, pushing, and shouting, fighting for space on the browboats. It was pandemonium, all of her own making.
I caused this, she marveled. I controlled those corpses, those fragments of bone, those dying cells. What did that make her? If any Grisha had wielded such power, she had never heard of it. What would the other Grisha think? Her fellow Corporalki, the Heartrenders and Healers? We are linked to the essence of creation itself, the force at the core of the world. Maybe she should feel ashamed, perhaps even afraid. But shame was not in her nature.
Perhaps Djel had extinguished one light and ignited another. Nina didn’t care if it was Djel or the Saints or a troop of fire-breathing kittens; as she moved eastward, she realized that, for the first time in a long while, she felt strong. Her breathing was easy, the ache in her muscles had faded. She was ravenous. The craving for parem felt distant, like a memory of true hunger.
Nina had mourned the loss of her power, the connection to the living world. She had resented this shadow gift. It had seemed a mockery, a punishment. But just as life connected all things, so did death. It was that endless, swift river. She had dipped her fingers into its flow, held its swirling power in her hand. She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown.
