08 A Little Hatred: Book One (The Age of Madness)

He could still hardly believe this beautiful, masterful woman was the same ragged, helpless girl who’d hidden in his daughter’s room. She seemed to come from a different species than the sorry rest of humanity now. Her clothes were a masterpiece of engineering as much as tailoring, twisting her into a shape no person ever was. She was graceful as a tightrope-walker, unstoppable as a warship’s figurehead. Folk stood gaping at her, like one of the Fates had dropped from the sky and was taking a stroll through their building site.

‘Should I stay here?’ muttered Broad as he helped Zuri down, not that she needed it, she was deft as a dancer. Probably she should’ve been helping him.

‘No, no.’ She had a smile that was hard to pin down. ‘It would be lovely if you came along.’

They’d made a huge breach in the old city walls, rubble showing through a teetering mass of scaffolding and two cranes towering overhead. They’d knocked down a few rows of houses, too, and were digging a mighty trench through the midst of it all. Parties of men, some of them bare-chested even in the cold, thumped away with picks and shovels in time to a work song growled between gritted teeth. Women in filthy dresses, wet hair plastered to their faces, slipped and slid up the bank with yokes across their shoulders holding buckets full of mud. Further back, children swarmed in the bottom of the great diggings, smeared grey from head to toe, stamping clay down around the sides of the trench with their bare feet.

‘What is this?’ muttered Broad.

‘It will be a canal,’ said Zuri, ‘floating cargo into the heart of the city. And out again, of course.’

‘What’s Lady Savine’s interest?’

‘One-fifth of it. Or it should be. We are here to make sure.’

They clattered up a stair and between two long rows of clerks. A narrow office at the end was crowded by a big, pudgy man with grey hair scraped over his bald pate and an oversized desk covered in green leather. He had to lean dangerously far across it to shake Savine’s hand, giving the buttons on his waistcoat quite the test.

‘Master Kort,’ she said as Broad shut the door.

‘Lady Savine, I am delighted to see you well.’ Kort gave Broad a slightly troubled smile. Broad didn’t return it. He was getting the sense he hadn’t been brought there to smile. ‘Everyone has been … extremely worried.’

‘So moving,’ said Savine, pulling off her gloves one finger at a time while Zuri whipped free a dagger of a hatpin. ‘But in business, we must set sentiment aside.’ With the slightest twist, Zuri lifted Savine’s hat away from a wig that must’ve cost more than Broad used to earn in a year. ‘I am delighted to see work on our canal progressing so well.’

Kort winced, hesitated, winced again and finally leaned forward, clasping his hands. ‘There is no easy way to say this—’

‘Take the hard way, then, I am not made of glass.’

‘Regrettably, Lady Savine, I was obliged … to come to a new accommodation.’

‘And who has been so accommodating?’

‘Lady Selest dan Heugen.’ Savine’s expression didn’t seem to change, but Broad had the feeling it took a struggle. ‘Her cousin was kind enough to arrange for some permits—’

‘We had an agreement, Master Kort.’

‘We did, but … you were not here to fulfil it. Thankfully, Lady Selest was able to step into the breach.’

Savine smiled. ‘And you think you can just slip her into my breach without so much as a by-your-leave?’

Kort shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘The banking house of Valint and Balk was kind enough to act as her backer, and she was kind enough to act as mine. Lady Savine, I was really given no choice—’

‘I recently spent several weeks living like a dog.’ Savine still smiled, but there was something brittle in it now. Something jagged. ‘And I do not mean that figuratively. Starving. Filthy. Hiding in a corner, constantly afraid for my life. It has changed my perspective. It has made me see how very fragile we all are. Then I have been involved in a … let us call it an affair of the heart, which did not end to my satisfaction. It did not end to my satisfaction at all.’

‘I have nothing but sympathy, Lady Savine—’

‘Your sympathy is not worth a speck of shit.’ Savine fished an infinitesimal mote of dust from her sleeve and rubbed it away between finger and thumb. ‘It’s your canal I want. Just what was agreed. No more and no less.’

‘What can I say?’ Kort spread his big hands. ‘My canal is no longer available.’

Savine’s smile had hardened to a skull’s grin. The fibres in her neck stood out as she bit off the words. ‘The thing is, so much of business is a show. It is about the confidence people have in you. And confidence is so fragile. I am sure we have both seen it a hundred times. Cast from iron one moment, crumbling like sand the next. Following my misadventures in Valbeck, confidence in me has been profoundly shaken. People are watching me. Judging me.’

‘Lady Savine, I assure you—’