Wyte didn’t answer.
A bald man appeared at the edge of the empty docks, weapon holstered. Just appeared. Finch couldn’t tell where he’d come from. Wyte drew his gun for both of them.
Face like a boxer’s, the nose wide from repeated blows. Scar over the left eye, under the right eye. Same knife stroke? Barrel chest. Thick arms. Wearing a blood-red vest over a dark-green shirt. Black pants, blacker boots.
The man came forward with hands held in front of him. Like he wanted to be handcuffed. Something was in his hands, though. An offering?
He dropped what he’d been holding onto the ground. A wooden carving of a lizard caught in some kind of trap.
The man said, in some misbegotten blend of accents, “I’m Bosun. Davies couldn’t make it.”
Close enough now that his face was like a carved oval bone. Scrubbed clean of anything except directness. Some sort of spice on his breath. A smirk Finch didn’t like any more than the name.
Wyte gave Finch a glance. Knew Wyte was thinking the same thing. Bliss had named Bosun as Stark’s right-hand man. Someone who didn’t flinch from torture. Who seemed to enjoy it. Who’d helped wipe out Bliss’s whole team.
“What happened to Davies?” Wyte asked, stepping back to create a little space. Finch faded to the right, so he’d be out of Wyte’s line of fire. Kept his hand on his belt. Near his holster.
“Davies couldn’t make it,” Bosun repeated. “Stark’s waiting. Come. Now.”
Bosun started walking back toward the maze of gathered boats. Didn’t seem to care about Wyte’s gun. Finch wondered who might be watching from the row of dark glass windows that formed the first wall of boats.
“What guarantees do we have?” Finch called after Bosun. Wanted to ask, “What’s with the lizard, you fucking lunatic?”
Bosun, without looking back: “None, beyond this: We won’t hurt you unless you try to hurt us. And we won’t try to fuck you, either. Unless you try to fuck us.” A deep rasp similar to laughter. Him receding farther toward the maze while the two detectives stood there.
Finch stared at Wyte. Wyte stared at Finch.
“Are we really going to go in there?” Wyte asked.
Finch looked back across the bay, saw how far they’d come. Who on the Spit would risk angering the gray caps? Thought about the skery. About how easy it would’ve been for them both to go down in a hail of bullets if someone waited behind the windows of the first line of boats.
Shrugged. “Just think of him as Davies if it makes you feel better.” Hiding his own unease.
They stepped around the lizard carving like it might do harm. On impulse, Finch went back and stooped with a muttered curse. Picked it up. As Bosun had no doubt intended him to do from the beginning.
Followed Bosun into the darkness.
* * *
Once, Finch’s father had shown him an old tobacco pipe. “This pipe contains the world,” he said. Finch might’ve been fourteen, still running errands like a loyal son. His father was ten years removed from the campaigns against the Kalif, and rising fast within House Hoegbotton. They sat at his ornate desk in the study of the old house. Dad on his soft red silk chair. Finch on a stool to his left. Souvenirs his father had brought back from the desert served as grace notes. A rifle used by the Kalif’s men. The steering wheel from a tank. A scimitar that he had promised would one day be his son’s.
A sunny spring morning, mottled shadow coming into the room from the long bank of windows against the far wall. Faint honey smell from the tiny white flowers that came with the manicured bushes that lined the avenue in front of the house.
“A pipe?” Finch said. Incredulous. Expecting a trick. Maybe a magic trick.
His father pointed to a hole in the side of the pipe. “Look inside.”
Warily, Finch put the pipe to his eye. Gasped in delight. Because the glass magnified the image revealed through the hole. And the world did indeed exist there. A whole map of the known world. There was a dot for Ambergris. The line of the River Moth. The city of Morrow marked to the north, Stockton some fifty miles south, on the other side of the river. The Southern Isles down below the Moth Delta. The Kalif’s empire covering the whole west beyond the Moth. Exotic city after city marked in that vast desert, the plains and hills beyond. To the east, jungle and mountains that remained uncharted.
“There’s a hole on the other side, too,” his father said.
Finch turned the pipe around. Stared into another tiny piece of magnifying glass. Black-and-white photos of twelve men and women confronted him.
“Who are they?”
“Spies,” his father said. “The owner of this pipe ran a network of spies. The map on the other side is really a code. It tells the owner something about the spies whose pictures you’re looking at. Each one lives in a different city marked on the map. But you have to know the code to know which goes with which city. And what other information is being given to you.”
Finch took his eye away from the pipe to look at his dad. “How fun!” he said, because he didn’t know what to say.
“No,” his father said, frowning. “No, it’s not fun. Not really. It’s deadly serious.” A look like he was trying to tell Finch something Finch just couldn’t understand at the time.
Finch remembers that pipe when he’s working on his overlay. That tiny view of a huge world, which makes him realize the limitations of his map. That beyond it, beyond Ambergris, there’s something more. Though it’s easy to forget.
It’s the pipe he’s thinking about as he enters the Spit with Wyte. About those spies, who had led exciting, dangerous lives all across the world. But who were still, at the end of the day, captured inside a pipe.
Bound by rules.
Moved around a board against their will.
Or thought they were.
What’s the difference?
2
Through the doors of boats. Through many doors. Always with sudden water between them. Gray, blue, black, depending on the shifting clouds above. The distance wide enough to make them jump. Then narrow as a line of blue. As the boats rocked, lashed together by rope that groaned. A marsh smell. A fish smell. Mixed with the odd old-new smell of paint curled back in a snarl or crisply flat.
Into spaces seeping water from old wounds, the texture of warped planks beneath their feet weathered in a hundred ingenious ways. Across decks that announced them through the creak caused by their weight, wood singing a dull protest. Up or down steps always too deep or too shallow.
Following the wide back of their silent guide, Wyte the worse off for being taller, having to contort his frame into whatever shape awaited him. The doors got smaller then larger, then smaller again. Oval. Rectangular. Square. Inlaid with glass. Gone, leaving only a gaping doorway and a couple rusted hinges. Once, a flapping triangle of canvas with an eye painted on it in green and red that seemed to follow Finch’s stumbling progress.
And what in Truff’s name is this supposed to represent? The thought came to Finch more than once, looking down at the whittled wood from Bosun. The trap. The lizard caught in it. The carving brought his thoughts to Sidle, made him feel, absurdly, like Bosun had been inside his apartment. Who created such things? Who had the time?