“Just wait in the cab. I doubt I’ll be long.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“Find out why he talked—and make sure he won’t talk again.”
The cab rounded the corner and slowed. Yasmeen frowned, leaning forward for a better look. Wagons and carts blocked the street ahead, each one half loaded with furniture and clothes. Men and women worked in pairs and small teams, hauling items from Kessler’s house.
Barker whistled between his teeth. “I don’t think he’s talking now.”
Barker was right, damn it. The households in Port Fallow operated in the same way as a pirate ship. When the head of the household or business died, they voted in a new leader who took over the business. But Kessler’s business was in knowing people, and keeping those names to himself. No one could carry on in his profession, and he had no family—and so everyone who worked for him, from his housekeeper to his scullery maid, would split his possessions and sell them for what they could.
Seething, Yasmeen leaned out of the coach and snagged the first person who passed by. “What happened to Kessler?”
The woman, staggering under the weight of a ceramic vase, kept it short. “Maid found him in bed. Throat slit. No one knows who.”
He’d probably flapped his lips about someone else’s business, too—someone who wasn’t interested in just warning him not to do it again. Yasmeen let the woman go.
“So we turn around, then?” the driver called back.
If he could. She and Barker might have better luck getting out and walking. Carts, wagons, and people were in motion all around them, crowding the narrow street—several more had already parked at their rear. A steamcart in front of them honked, and earned a shouted curse in response. Beside them, a wagon piled high with mattresses lurched ahead, giving them more visibility but nowhere to move.
The short cart that took its place didn’t block Yasmeen’s view across the street. Her stomach tightened. A woman dressed in a simple black robe stood on the walkway opposite Kessler’s house, watching the pandemonium. Unlike everyone else, she wasn’t in hurried motion. She waited, her hands demurely folded at her stomach, her head slightly bowed. Gray threaded her long brown hair. She’d plaited two sections in the front, drawing them back . . . hiding the tips of her ears.
As if sensing Yasmeen’s gaze, she looked away from Kessler’s home. Her stillness didn’t change; only her eyes moved.
Yasmeen had been taught to stand like that—to hold herself silent and watchful, her weight perfectly balanced, her hands clasped. She’d been taught duty and honor. She’d been taught to fight . . . but not like this woman did. Yasmeen knew that under the woman’s robes was a body more metal than flesh. Designed to protect. Designed to kill.
It was difficult not to appreciate the deadly beauty of it—and hard not to pity her. Yasmeen couldn’t see the chains of honor, loyalty, and duty that bound the woman, but she knew they were there.
And she knew with a single look that the woman pitied her in return. That she saw Yasmeen as a woman adrift and without purpose—a victim of those who’d failed to properly train and care for her.
Yasmeen lowered her gaze first; not out of cowardice, but a message that she wouldn’t interfere with the woman’s business here—and she certainly wasn’t stupid enough to challenge the woman.
Releasing her held breath, Yasmeen caught Barker eyeing the woman with a different sort of appreciation. Of course he did. She’d been designed to provoke that response.
“Don’t try,” Yasmeen warned him.
“She’s a little older, but I like the mature—”
“She’s Horde. One of the elite guard who serves the royalty and the favored governors.”
Barker didn’t hide his surprise—or his doubt. He studied the woman again, as if trying to see beneath the demure posture and discover what had earned the elite guard their terrifying reputation.
He wouldn’t see it. The elite guard earned that reputation when they dropped that modest posture, not when they wore it.
He shook his head. “She’s not Horde.”
“She’s just not a Mongol,” Yasmeen said. The Horde weren’t a single race—only royalty and the Great Khan had pure blood, and they never ventured far from the Horde capital. In five hundred years, their seed and the empire had spread too far for every member of the Horde to be Mongols. “Just as not every man and woman of African descent born on the northern American continent is a Liberé spy . . . or a cart-puller.”
His face tightened. “Cart-puller?”
“I am saying that you are not. You cannot even hear it without being ready to go to war again?”
“Because you haven’t been called one,” he said, before adding, “I wasn’t a spy.”
Yasmeen snorted her response.
He grinned and glanced over at the woman again. “Why is she here? No one in Port Fallow is Horde royalty.”
“Then she’s here to kill someone, or to take them back to her Khanate.” Obviously not Yasmeen, or she’d already be dead—but instead, she was forgotten. She’d been pitied for a moment, but now the woman was watching the house again . . . waiting. “Whatever her purpose, don’t get in her way.”
“All right.” Barker leaned forward and tapped on the cab driver’s shoulder before dropping a few deniers into his palm. “Shall we walk? By the time we get back to the docks, I’ll be ready for that drink.”
Yasmeen would be ready for three.
Yasmeen drank three, but not quickly. Barker took his leave after finishing the one she owed him, but Yasmeen stayed on, nursing hers until they were warm. Some nights in a tavern were meant for drinking, and others were meant for listening. Fortunately, nothing she heard suggested that word of the sketch had gone beyond Mills and Kessler. She turned down one job—a run to the Ivory Market in central Africa. Lucrative, but he hadn’t been willing to wait until she returned from England, and she wasn’t inviting anyone onto her airship before the sketch was off of it.
She hadn’t always been able to turn down jobs. Now, she had enough money that she could be choosy when she took on a new one. Even without the fortune that would come after selling the sketch, she could retire in luxury at any time—as could her entire crew.
She never would.
Midnight had gone when Yasmeen decided she’d heard enough. She emerged from the dim tavern into the dark and paused to light a cigarillo, studying the boardwalk along the docks. It was just as busy at night as during the day, but the crowd was comprised of more drunks. Some slumped against the buildings or slept beside crates. Groups of sailors laughed and preened and pounded their chests at the aviators—some of them women, Yasmeen noted, and not one of them alone. The shopgirls and lamplighters walked in pairs, and most of the whores did, too.
Yasmeen sighed. Undoubtedly, she’d soon be teaching some drunken buck a lesson about making assumptions when women walked alone.
She started toward the south dock, picking out Lady Corsair’s sleek silhouette over the harbor. Familiar pride filled her chest. God, her lady was such a beauty—one of the finest skyrunners ever made, and she’d been Yasmeen’s for almost thirteen years now. She knew captains who didn’t last a month—some who weren’t generous toward their crew, or were not strict enough to control them. Some who were too careful to make any money, or too careless to live through a job.
She’d made money, and she’d lived through hundreds of jobs: scouting, privateering, moving weapons or personnel through enemy territory, destroying a specified target. Both the French and the Liberé officers sneered when she’d claimed that her only loyalties were to her crew and the gold, but they used her when they didn’t have anyone good enough or fast enough to do what she could.
Then the war had ended—fizzled out. All of the same animosities still simmered, but there wasn’t enough money left in the treasuries to pay for it. So Yasmeen had left the New World, returned back across the Atlantic, and carved out her niche by taking almost any job for the right money.
Lately, that meant carrying a lot of passengers over Horde territory in Europe and Africa—a route that most airships-forhire would never take. Sometimes she acted as a courier, or she partnered with Vesuvius when that ship carried cargo that needed airship support, and then fought off any ships that tried to steal it from them.
A routine life, but still an exciting one—and the only kind of settling down that she would ever do.
Yasmeen flicked away her cigarillo, smiling at her own fancy. Routines, excitement, and a particular version of settling down. She’d have to record that thought and send it to Zenobia—along with an account of the little excitement that was about to take place.
Someone was following her.
A man had been trailing her since she’d left the tavern. Not some drunken idiot stumbling into a woman walking alone, but someone who’d deliberately picked her out—and if he’d seen her in the tavern, he must have known who she was.
But he must not have been interested in killing her. Anyone could have shot her from this distance. Instead he tried to move in closer, using the shadows for cover . . . but he was very bad at stalking. He paused when she did, and though he tried for stealth by tiptoeing, his attempts only made him more obvious. Of course, he couldn’t know that Yasmeen was at her best during the night—and that she had more in common with the cats slinking through the alleys than the lumbering ape that had obviously birthed him.
She’d only taken a few more steps when he finally found his balls and called her name.
“Captain Corsair!”