Six of Crows: Part Five

Nina and Inej were tucked up against the base of the biggest dome, a filigreed skylight that overlooked the embassy’s entry rotunda.

The rotunda below was a mass of people, drinking, laughing, greeting each other, a kind of raucous party before the celebrations on the White Island.

The embassy gate is a bottleneck crammed with guests—the Fjerdans aren’t going to get troops through there. Jesper, that just leaves the gate in the druskelle sector for you and Wylan to handle. You use it to engage Black Protocol, then wreck it. Break it badly enough that any guards who manage to mobilize can’t get out to follow us.

Once we trigger Black Protocol, you guys will be trapped on that island, and we’ll be trapped in the outer circle. We have no weapons and no demo materials.

If the old plan had been daring, it had at least been built on stealth.

The new plan was audacious, maybe even mad.

Using one of Kaz’s lockpicks and copper pyrite Jesper had extracted from the roof, Wylan traced his best imitation of the Menagerie feather on Nina’s arm, following Inej’s description and making corrections as needed.

The knowledge that they might never see each other again, that some of them—maybe all of them—might not survive this night hung heavy in the air. A gambler, a convict, a wayward son, a lost Grisha, a Suli girl who had become a killer, a boy from the Barrel who had become something worse.

“If any of you survive, make sure I have an open casket,” Jesper said as he hefted two slender coils of rope over his shoulder and signaled for Wylan to follow him across the roof.

In nearly two years of battling side by side with Kaz, of late-night scheming, impossible heists, clandestine errands, and harried meals of fried potatoes and hutspot gobbled down as they rushed from one place to another, this was the first time she had touched him skin to skin, without the barrier of gloves or coat or shirtsleeve.

She’d shoved, and now the boulder was rolling down the hill. Who knew what damage it might do and what might be built on the rubble?

They were already jogging down the gentle slope of the embassy roof toward the druskelle sector, Wylan panting from exertion, Jesper loping along with ease, and Brekker keeping pace despite his crooked gait and lack of cane.

He had the disconcerting sense that if he looked through the glass he would see himself running drills in the training rooms, seated at the long table in the dining hall.

They were the words of a druskelle commanding officer, and he delivered them with all the authority he’d ever learned to muster.

Now it was risk filling up his nose and mouth, making him feel giddy and invincible.

The opposite wall was adorned by an enormous banner with no discernible pattern, a patchwork of slender strips of cloth—mostly red and blue, but some purple, too.

He’d been willing, even eager to risk capture and execution as a thief and hired gun.

He needed a dose of imminent peril to get his head straight.

But from this vantage point she saw the wall had been crafted in the shape of a leviathan, a giant ice dragon circling the island and swallowing its own tail.

She needed someone of high-enough rank to have access to privileged information—someone drunk enough to make ill-considered decisions, but not so drunk that he couldn’t take her where she needed to go.

But if Jarl Brum was dead, he made a very lively corpse.

Heleen Van Houden, owner and proprietor of the Menagerie, the House of Exotics, where the world was yours for a price, was pushing her way through the crowd.

“That is the Wraith, right hand of Kaz Brekker and one of the most notorious criminals in Ketterdam.”

“How dare you come here under the auspices of my House?”

There was a stunned second of inertia.

It had been more than a year since she’d seen him, but she would never forget that face or the resolute blue of his eyes.

Had he seen Brum, his old mentor, alive and talking to Nina?

He matched her conspiratorial tone. “I’d love to know all your secrets.”

“There is little honor in a fight with such a creature. I’d rather face a thousand honest men with swords than one of those deceitful witches with unnatural powers.”

Suddenly, the full weight of what she was doing hit her. She was alone with one of the deadliest men in Fjerda, a man who would gladly torture and murder her if he knew what she truly was.

The words were innocuous, but that knot of fear tightened, a cold fist now, pressing against her chest.

“Did you really believe I'd turn against my nation?” Matthias’ voice was thick with disgust. “That I'd give up the cause I devoted my life to?

“We’ve combined the jurda parem with a sedative that makes them more biddable. We’re still working out the correct ratios, but we’ll get there. Besides, by the second dose, the addiction does the work of controlling them.”

Some of the captive Grisha were agitated, pacing.

“It is still a death sentence, just one a little longer in the making. We discovered long ago that the Grisha could prove a useful resource.”

They aren’t capable of right thinking, of human morality. They are meant to be controlled.

When Matthias pulled away, Brum had slipped into unconsciousness, but Matthias did not think he imagined the rage that lingered on his mentor's features.

The blood formed floating pools in the vague shapes of men, slick shadows that hovered in the air, the wet red of garnets, then splashed to the ground at the same time as the guards collapsed, flaccid skin hanging from their desiccated bodies in grotesque folds.

But he felt like he’d left some part of himself in the courtyard below, something he hadn’t even known mattered, intangible as mist.

The noise was deafening even beneath the water, but with fear also came a kind of giddy vindication. He’d been right.