Kaz flashback

After their father died, crushed beneath a plough with his insides strewn across a field like a trail of damp red blossoms, Jordie had sold the farm. Not for much. The debts and liens had seen to that.

But it was enough to see them safe to Ketterdam and to keep them in modest comfort for a good while.

Kaz had been nine, still missing Da and frightened of travelling from the only home he’d ever known. He’d held tight to his big brother ’s hand as they journeyed through miles of sweet, rolling countryside, until they reached one of the major waterways and hopped a bogboat that carried produce to Ketterdam.

“What will happen when we get there?” he’d asked Jordie.

“I’ll get a job as a runner at the Exchange, then a clerk. I’ll become a stockholder and then a proper merchant, and then I’ll make my fortune.”

“What about me?”

“You will go to school.”

“Why won’t you go to school?”

Jordie had scoffed. “I’m too old for school. Too smart, too.”

The first few days in the city were all Jordie had promised. They’d walked along the great curve of the harbours known as the Lid, then down East Stave to see all the gambling palaces. They didn’t venture too far south, where they’d been warned the streets grew dangerous. They let rooms in a tidy little boarding house not far from the Exchange and tried every new food they saw, stuffing themselves sick on quince candy. Kaz liked the little omelette stands where you could choose what you liked to put in them.

Each morning, Jordie went to the Exchange to look for work and told Kaz to stay in his room.

Ketterdam wasn’t safe for children on their own. There were thieves and pickpockets and even men who would snap up little boys and sell them to the highest bidder. So Kaz stayed inside. He pushed a chair up to the basin and climbed on it so he could see himself in the mirror as he tried to make coins disappear, just as he’d seen a magician do, performing in front of one of the gambling halls. Kaz could have watched him for hours, but eventually Jordie had dragged him away. The card tricks had been good, but the disappearing coin kept him up at night. How had the magician done it? It had been there one moment, gone the next.

The disaster began with a wind-up dog.

Jordie had come home hungry and irritable, frustrated after another wasted day. “They say they have no jobs, but they mean they have no jobs for a boy like me. Everyone there is someone’s cousin or brother or best friend’s son.”

Kaz hadn’t been in a mood to try to cheer him up. He was grouchy after so many hours indoors

with nothing but coins and cards to keep him company. He wanted to go down to East Stave to find the magician.

In the years after, Kaz would always wonder what might have happened if Jordie hadn’t indulged him, if they’d gone to the harbour to look at boats instead, or if they’d simply been walking on the other side of the canal. He wanted to believe that might have made the difference, but the older he got, the more he doubted it would have mattered at all.

They’d passed the green riot of the Emerald Palace, and right next door, in front of the Gold Strike, there’d been a boy selling little mechanical dogs. The toys wound up with a bronze key and waddled on stiff legs, tin ears flapping. Kaz had crouched down, turning all the keys, trying to get all the dogs waddling at the same time, and the boy selling them had struck up a conversation with Jordie.

As it turned out, he was from Lij, not two towns over from where Kaz and Jordie had been raised, and he knew a man with jobs open for runners – not at the Exchange, but at an office just down the street.

Jordie should come by the next morning, he said, and they could go chat with him together. He’d been hoping to land a job as a runner, too.

On the way home, Jordie had bought them each a hot chocolate, not just one to share.

“Our luck is changing,” he’d said as they curled their hands around the steaming cups, feet dangling over a little bridge, the lights of the Stave playing over the water. Kaz had looked down at their reflections on the bright surface of the canal and thought, I feel lucky now.

The boy who sold the mechanical dogs was named Filip and the man he knew was Jakob Hertzoon,

a minor mercher who owned a small coffeehouse near the Exchange, where he arranged for low-level investors to split stakes in trade voyages passing through Kerch.

“You should see this place,” Jordie had crowed to Kaz upon arriving home late that night. “There are people there at every hour, talking and trading news, buying and selling shares and futures, ordinary people – butchers and bakers and dockworkers. Mister Hertzoon says any man can become rich. All he needs is luck and the right friends.”

The next week was like a happy dream. Jordie and Filip worked for Mister Hertzoon as runners,

carrying messages to and from the dock and occasionally placing orders for him at the Exchange or other trading offices. While they were working, Kaz was allowed to stay at the coffeehouse. The man who filled drink orders from behind the bar would let him sit up on the counter and practise his magic tricks, and gave Kaz all the hot chocolate he could drink.

They were invited to the Hertzoon home for dinner, a grand house on the Zelverstraat with a blue front door and white lace curtains in the windows. Mister Hertzoon was a big man with a ruddy, friendly face and tufty grey sideburns. His wife, Margit, pinched Kaz’s cheeks and fed him hutspot made with smoked sausage, and he’d played in the kitchen with their daughter, Saskia. She was ten years old, and Kaz thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He and Jordie stayed late into the night singing songs while Margit played the piano, their big silver dog thumping its tail in hapless rhythm. It was the best Kaz had felt since his father died. Mister Hertzoon even let Jordie put tiny sums down on company stocks. Jordie wanted to invest more, but Mister Hertzoon always advised caution. “Small steps, lad. Small steps.”

Things got even better when Mister Hertzoon’s friend returned from Novyi Zem. He was the captain of a Kerch trader, and it seemed he had crossed paths with a sugar farmer in a Zemeni port.

The farmer had been in his cups, moaning about how his and his neighbours’ cane fields had been flooded. Right now sugar prices were low, but when people found out how hard it would be to get sugar in the coming months, prices would soar. Mister Hertzoon’s friend intended to buy up all the sugar he could before the news reached Ketterdam.

“That seems like cheating,” Kaz had whispered to Jordie.

“It isn’t cheating,” Jordie had snorted. “It’s just good business. And how are ordinary people supposed to move up in the world without a little extra help?”

Mister Hertzoon had Jordie and Filip place the orders with three separate offices to make sure such a large purchase didn’t garner unwanted attention. News of the failed crop came in, and sitting in the coffeehouse, the boys had watched the prices on the chalkboard rise, trying to contain their glee.

When Mister Hertzoon thought the shares had gone as high as they could go, he sent Jordie and Filip to sell out and collect. They’d returned to the coffeehouse, and Mister Hertzoon had handed both of them their profits straight from his safe.

“What did I tell you?” Jordie said to Kaz as they headed out into the Ketterdam night. “Luck and good friends!”

Only a few days later, Mister Hertzoon told them of another tip he’d received from his friend the captain, who’d had similar word on the next crop of jurda. “The rains are hitting everyone hard this year,” Mister Hertzoon said. “But this time, not only the fields were destroyed, but the warehouses down by the docks in Eames. This is going to be big money, and I intend to go in heavy.”

“Then we should, too,” said Filip.

Mister Hertzoon had frowned. “I’m afraid this isn’t a deal for you, boys. The minimum investment is far too high for either of you. But there will be more trades to come!”

Filip had been furious. He’d yelled at Mister Hertzoon, told him it wasn’t fair. He said Mister Hertzoon was just like the merchants at the Exchange, hoarding all the riches for himself, and called Mister Hertzoon names that had made Kaz cringe. When he’d stormed out, everyone at the coffeehouse had stared at Mister Hertzoon’s red, embarrassed face.

He’d gone back to his office and slouched down in his chair. “I … I can’t help the way business is done. The men running the trade want only big investors, people who can support the risk.”

Jordie and Kaz had stood there, unsure of what to do.

“Are you angry with me, too?” asked Mister Hertzoon.

Of course not, they assured him. Filip was the one who was being unfair.

“I understand why he’s angry,” said Mister Hertzoon. “Opportunities like this one don’t come along often, but there’s nothing to be done.”

“I have money,” said Jordie.

Mister Hertzoon had smiled indulgently. “Jordie, you’re a good lad, and some day I have no doubt you’ll be a king of the Exchange, but you don’t have the kind of funds these investors require.”

Jordie’s chin had gone up. “I do. From the sale of my father ’s farm.”

“And I expect it’s all you and Kaz have to live on. That’s not something to be risked on a trade, no matter how certain the outcome. A child your age has no business—”

“I’m not a child. If it’s a good opportunity, I want to take it.”

Kaz would always remember that moment, when he’d seen greed take hold of his brother, an invisible hand guiding him onward, the lever at work.

Mister Hertzoon had taken a lot of convincing. They’d all gone back to the Zelverstraat house and discussed it well into the night. Kaz had fallen asleep with his head on the silver dog’s side and Saskia’s red ribbon clutched in his hand.

When Jordie finally roused him, the candles had burned low, and it was already morning. Mister Hertzoon had asked his business partner to come over and draw up a contract for a loan from Jordie.

Because of his age, Jordie would loan Mister Hertzoon the money, and Mister Hertzoon would place the trade. Margit gave them milk tea and warm pancakes with sour cream and jam. Then they’d all walked to the bank that held the funds from the sale of the farm and Jordie signed them over.

Mister Hertzoon insisted on escorting them back to their boarding house, and he’d hugged them at the door. He handed the loan agreement to Jordie and warned him to keep it safe. “Now, Jordie,” he said. “There is only a small chance that this trade will go bad, but there is always a chance. If it does, I’m relying on you not to use that document to call in your loan. We both must take the risk together. I am trusting you.”

Jordie had beamed. “The deal is the deal,” he said.

“The deal is the deal,” said Mister Hertzoon proudly, and they shook hands like proper merchants.

Mister Hertzoon handed Jordie a thick roll of kruge. “For a fine dinner to celebrate. Come back to the coffeehouse a week from today, and we’ll watch the prices rise together.”

That week they’d played ridderspel and spijker at the arcades on the Lid. They’d bought Jordie a fine new coat and Kaz a new pair of soft leather boots. They’d eaten waffles and fried potatoes, and Jordie had purchased every novel he craved at a bookshop on Wijnstraat. When the week was over, they’d walked hand in hand to the coffeehouse.

It was empty. The front door was locked and bolted. When they pressed their faces to the dark windows, they saw that everything was gone – the tables and chairs and big copper urns, the chalkboard where the figures for the day’s trades had been posted.

“Do we have the wrong corner?” asked Kaz.

But they knew they didn’t. In nervous silence, they walked to the house on Zelverstraat. No one answered their knock on the bright blue door.

“They’ve just gone out for a while,” said Jordie. They waited on the steps for hours, until the sun began to set. No one came or went. No candles were lit in the windows.

Finally, Jordie worked up the courage to knock on a neighbour ’s door. “Yes?” said the maid who answered in her little white cap.

“Do you know where the family next door has gone? The Hertzoons?”

The maid’s brow furrowed. “I think they were just visiting for a time from Zierfoort.”

“No,” Jordie said. “They’ve lived here for years. They—”

The maid shook her head. “That house stood empty for nearly a year after the last family moved away. It was only rented a few weeks ago.”

“But—”

She’d closed the door in his face.

Kaz and Jordie said nothing to each other, not on the walk home or as they climbed the stairs to their little room in the boarding house. They sat in the growing gloom for a long time. Voices floated back to them from the canal below as people went about their evening business.

“Something happened to them,” Jordie said at last. “There was an accident or an emergency. He’ll write soon. He’ll send for us.”

That night, Kaz took Saskia’s red ribbon from beneath his pillow. He rolled it into a neat spiral and clutched it in his palm. He lay in bed and tried to pray, but all he could think about was the magician’s coin: there and then gone.

...

The money Mister Hertzoon had left with Kaz and Jordie ran out the following week. Jordie tried to return his new coat, but the shop wouldn’t take it, and Kaz’s boots had clearly been worn.

When they brought the loan agreement Mister Hertzoon had signed to the bank, they found that –

for all its official-looking seals – it was worthless paper. No one knew of Mister Hertzoon or his business partner.

They were evicted from the boarding house two days later, and had to find a bridge to sleep under, but were soon rousted by the stadwatch. After that, they wandered aimlessly until morning. Jordie insisted that they go back to the coffeehouse. They sat for a long time in the park across the street.

When night came, and the watch began its rounds, Kaz and Jordie headed south, into the streets of the lower Barrel, where the police did not bother to patrol.

They slept beneath a set of stairs in an alley behind a tavern, tucked between a discarded stove and bags of kitchen refuse. No one bothered them that night, but the next they were discovered by a gang of boys who told them they were in Razorgull territory. They gave Jordie a thrashing and knocked Kaz into the canal, but not before they took his boots.

Jordie fished Kaz out of the water and gave him his dry coat.

“I’m hungry,” Kaz said.

“I’m not,” Jordie replied. And for some reason that had struck Kaz as funny, and they’d both started laughing. Jordie wrapped his arms around Kaz and said, “The city is winning so far. But you’ll see who wins in the end.”

The next morning, Jordie woke with a fever.

In years to come people would call the outbreak of firepox that struck Ketterdam the Queen’s Lady Plague, after the ship believed to have brought the contagion to the city. It hit the crowded slums of the Barrel hardest. Bodies piled up in the streets, and sickboats moved through the canals, using long shovels and hooks to tumble corpses onto their platforms and haul them out to the Reaper ’s Barge for burning.

Kaz’s fever came on two days after Jordie’s. They had no money for medicine or a medik, so they huddled together in a pile of broken-up wooden boxes that they dubbed the Nest.

No one came to roust them. The gangs had all been laid low by disease.

When the fever reached full fire, Kaz dreamed he had returned to the farm, and when he knocked on the door, he saw Dream Jordie and Dream Kaz already there, sitting at the kitchen table. They peered at him through the window, but they wouldn’t let him in, so he wandered through the meadow, afraid to lie down in the tall grass.

When he woke, he couldn’t smell hay or clover or apples, only coalsmoke, and the spongy rotting vegetable stink of garbage. Jordie was lying next to him, staring at the sky. “Don’t leave me,” Kaz wanted to say, but he was too tired. So he laid his head on Jordie’s chest. It felt wrong already, cold and hard.

He thought he was dreaming when the bodymen rolled him onto the sickboat. He felt himself falling, and then he was caught in a tangle of bodies. He tried to scream, but he was too weak. They were everywhere, legs and arms and stiff bellies, rotting limbs and blue-lipped faces covered in firepox sores. He floated in and out of consciousness, unsure of what was real or fever dream as the flatboat moved out to sea. When they tumbled him into the shallows of the Reaper ’s Barge, he somehow found the strength to cry out.

“I’m alive,” he shouted, as loud as he could. But he was so small, and the boat was already drifting back to harbour.

Kaz tried to pull Jordie from the water. His body was covered in the little blooming sores that gave the firepox its name, his skin white and bruised. Kaz thought of the little wind-up dog, of drinking hot chocolate on the bridge. He thought that heaven would look like the kitchen of the house on Zelverstraat and smell like hutspot cooking in the Hertzoons’ oven. He still had Saskia’s red ribbon.

He could give it back to her. They would make candies out of quince paste. Margit would play the piano, and he could fall asleep by the fire. He closed his eyes and waited to die.

Kaz expected to wake in the next world, warm and safe, his belly full, Jordie beside him. Instead, he woke surrounded by corpses. He was lying in the shallows of the Reaper ’s Barge, his clothes soaked through, skin wrinkled from the damp. Jordie’s body was beside him, barely recognisable, white and swollen with rot, floating on the surface like some kind of gruesome deep sea fish.

Kaz’s vision had cleared, and the rash had receded. His fever had broken. He’d forgotten his hunger, but he was thirsty enough that he thought he would go mad.

All that day and night, he waited in the pile of bodies, looking out at the harbour, hoping the flatboat would return. They had to come to set the fires that would burn the corpses, but when? Did the bodymen collect every day? Every other day? He was weak and dehydrated. He knew he wouldn’t last much longer. The coast seemed so far away, and he knew he was too weak to swim the distance. He had survived the fever, but he might well die out here on the Reaper ’s Barge. Did he care? There was nothing waiting for him in the city except more hunger and dark alleys and the damp of the canals.

Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. Vengeance was waiting, vengeance for Jordie and maybe for himself, too. But he would have to go to meet it.

When night came, and the tide changed direction, Kaz forced himself to lay hands on Jordie’s body. He was too frail to swim on his own, but with Jordie’s help, he could float. He held tight to his brother and kicked towards the lights of Ketterdam. Together, they drifted, Jordie’s distended body acting as a raft. Kaz kept kicking, trying not to think of his brother, of the taut, bloated feel of Jordie’s flesh beneath his hands; he tried not to think of anything but the rhythm of his legs moving through the sea. He’d heard there were sharks in these waters, but he knew they wouldn’t touch him. He was a monster now, too.

He kept kicking, and when dawn came, he looked up to find himself at the east end of the Lid. The harbour was nearly deserted; the plague had caused shipping in and out of Kerch to grind to a halt.

The last hundred yards were hard. The tide had turned once more, and it was working against him.

But Kaz had hope now, hope and fury, twin flames burning inside him. They guided him to the dock

and up the ladder. When he reached the top, he flopped down on his back on the wooden slats, then forced himself to roll over. Jordie’s body was caught in the current, bumping against the pylon below.

His eyes were still open, and for a moment, Kaz thought his brother was staring back at him. But Jordie didn’t speak, he didn’t blink, his gaze didn’t shift as the tide dragged him free of the pylon and began to carry him out to sea.

I should close his eyes, thought Kaz. But he knew if he climbed down the ladder and waded back into the sea, he would never find his way out again. He’d simply let himself drown, and that wasn’t possible any more. He had to live. Someone had to pay.

...

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.’”

He still went by Kaz, as he always had, but he stole the name Brekker off a piece of machinery he’d seen on the docks. Rietveld, his family name, was abandoned, cut away like a rotten limb. It was a country name, his last tie to Jordie and his father and the boy he’d been. But he didn’t want Jakob Hertzoon to see him coming.

He found out that the con Hertzoon had run on him and Jordie was a common one. The coffeehouse and the house on Zelverstraat had been nothing more than stage sets, used to fleece fools from the country. Filip with his mechanical dogs had been the roper, used to draw Jordie in, while Margit, Saskia, and the clerks at the trade office had all been shills in on the scam. Even one of the bank officers had to have been in on it, passing information to Hertzoon about their customers and tipping him off to newcomers from the country opening accounts. Hertzoon had probably been running the con on multiple marks at once. Jordie’s little fortune wasn’t enough to justify such a set-up.

But the cruelest discovery was Kaz’s gift for cards. It might have made him and Jordie rich. Once he learned a game, it took him mere hours to master it, and then he simply couldn’t be beaten. He could remember every hand that had been played, each bet that was made. He could keep track of the deal for up to five decks. And if there was something he couldn’t recall, he made up for it by cheating.



He’d never lost his love for sleight of hand, and he graduated from palming coins to cards, cups, wallets, and watches. A good magician wasn’t much different from a proper thief. Before long, he was banned from play in every gambling hall on East Stave.

In each place he went, in each bar and flophouse and brothel and squat, he asked after Jakob Hertzoon, but if anyone knew the name, they refused to admit it.

Then, one day, Kaz was crossing a bridge over East Stave when he saw a man with florid cheeks

and tufty sideburns entering a gin shop. He wasn’t wearing staid mercher black any longer, but garish striped trousers and a maroon paisley vest. His velvet coat was bottle green.

Kaz pushed through the crowd, mind buzzing, heart racing, unsure of what he meant to do, but at the door to the shop, a giant bruiser in a bowler hat stopped him with one meaty hand.

“Shop’s closed.”

“I can see it’s open.” Kaz’s voice sounded wrong to him – reedy, unfamiliar.

“You’ll have to wait.”

“I need to see Jakob Hertzoon.”

“Who?”

Kaz felt like he was about to climb out of his skin. He pointed through the window. “Jakob fucking Hertzoon. I want to talk to him.”

The bruiser had looked at Kaz as if he were deranged. “Get your head straight, lad,” he’d said.

“That ain’t no Hertzoon. That’s Pekka Rollins. Want to get anywhere in the Barrel, you’d best learn his name.”

Kaz knew Pekka Rollins’ name. Everyone did. He’d just never seen the man.

At that moment, Rollins turned towards the window. Kaz waited for acknowledgement – a smirk, a sneer, some spark of recognition. But Rollins’ eyes passed right over him. One more mark. One more cull. Why would he remember?

Kaz had been courted by any number of gangs who liked his way with his fists and the cards. He’d always said no. He’d come to the Barrel to find Hertzoon and punish him, not to join some makeshift family. But learning that his real target was Pekka Rollins changed everything. That night, he lay awake on the floor of the squat he’d holed up in and thought of what he wanted, of what would finally make things right for Jordie. Pekka Rollins had taken everything from Kaz. If Kaz intended to do the same to Rollins, he would need to become his equal and then his better, and he couldn’t do it alone. He needed a gang, and not just any gang, but one that needed him. The next day he’d walked into the Slat and asked Per Haskell if he could use another soldier. He’d known even then, though: he’d start as a grunt, but the Dregs would become his army.

Had all of those steps brought him here tonight? To these dark corridors? It was hardly the vengeance he’d dreamed of.

The rows of cells stretched on and on, infinite, impossible. There was no way he would find Rollins in time. But it was only impossible until it wasn’t, until he sighted that big frame, that florid face through the grate in an iron door. It was only impossible until he was standing in front of Pekka Rollins’ cell.

He was on his side, sleeping. Someone had given him a bad beating. Kaz watched the rise and fall of his chest.