Yuland watched the coins change hands.
A parchment went across after them, to a man he didn’t know, and the Matron smiled the way she always smiled and waved a cheerful little wave.
“Bye, my not-so-little sparrow. Enjoy.”
She said it to all of them.
Then she was gone, and Yuland was alone with a strange man in a strange place.
His graduation, they’d called it. His new position. He had been offered it.
Nobody had asked him.
Apprentice tollman. Working the sewers. Picking apart the waste for anything worth a coin or two, and — more importantly, they’d stressed this part — keeping the filth moving downstream and stopping any of it clogging.
He wrinkled his nose at the smell and said nothing.
A stone bounced off his head.
The man who’d thrown it chuckled. “Ere. Son.”
It came out half gruff and half kindly. Yuland had heard both those tones before, plenty of times, but never at once and never from the same mouth.
Which will you prove to be, he thought. Kindly, or—
Another stone. Lower this time.
“I said ere, lad.” And there it was again, the chuckle underneath it, and Yuland thought that he might — for once, and against every reasonable expectation — have got lucky.
His training was, in the round, awful.
The one saving grace of it was the man doing the training. Valan was funny, and kindly, and a devoted enthusiast of the practical joke, and within a week he was the only friend Yuland had.
He was currently explaining the finer arts of sifting.
“That lot there.” He pointed with the pole. “We pull that apart, we kill two birds with one stone. Keeps her moving, and if we’re really, really lucky—” he raised his eyebrows “—we might find a shiny.”
Yuland covered his nose. “Really.”
“Yes, yes. Off you go.”
“Seriously, Valan. If this is another one of your jests—”
Valan waved a hand at him, half smiling, doing a very poor impression of a man being serious.
Yuland got into the water.
He gagged. The smell was still new enough to catch him in the throat every single time, and he had begun to suspect it always would.
“I hate this bit,” he said, to nobody.
He waded out toward the burg.
And his mind, the way it did when his body was busy, wandered off somewhere better. A week ago he’d been sitting on a step in the sun, talking rubbish with Bricce. Look at him now. If only Bricce could see how I’ve risen.
Poor Bricce. He’d be for the army, that one. Certain of it.
Then he tripped.
His hand shot out for the nearest solid thing to save himself, and the nearest solid thing was the burg. It bobbed lazily. He didn’t go under.
Then he realised where his hand was, and let go.
Valan’s laughter reached him before the understanding did.
“Go on, then,” Valan managed, snorting. “Sift.”
Yuland washed his hand in the water, which was grim, but which he judged to be an improvement on the alternative.
Then it dawned on him.
“Ohhh,” he said.
And he put both hands into the burg and pulled it apart.
“That’s it!” howled Valan, delighted, hanging off the pole. “It’s a shit job, lad, but someone’s got to do it!”
And Yuland — up to his elbows, gagging, eyes streaming — started laughing too.
“Shit job,” he repeated, and laughed harder, because he’d got it.
“Now then.” Valan wiped his eyes and made an effort to sound like a man conducting a lesson. “Pull it apart properly and look for anything shiny. Get right in it, boy.”
Yuland did as he was bid, coughing and retching, the other man’s laughter filling his ears.
“Nothing,” he said at last, straightening up.
“Well,” said Valan. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go.”
“Nine hundred and—” Yuland stopped. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine?”
“That’s the rough count.” Valan shrugged, cheerful as anything. “Shiny to shit.”
The next six months did not drag.
Yuland settled into it. He learned the water and the hours and the way the burgs moved when the rain came, and he learned that there was a life in this, of a sort, and that it was his. He was still not used to the smell. But his eyes watered a little less, day by day.
It was around the middle of the sixth month that it happened.
He was arm-deep in a burg, working it apart, the water swirling and the stench coming off it in waves. Soft, gooey, squidgy, pliable — and then, in one small place, not. Hard. A little sharp.
He broke off a clump the size of his fist and washed it down through the water, absently at first, the water going browner as he worked, and then not absently at all, because the smell had stopped mattering and something had arrived in his stomach instead, and it was the feeling of a man who thinks he might just have found a—
“Yes.”
His hand came up out of the water and there it was.
Small. Round. Gold. A woman’s earring.
To him it seemed larger than life. He held it up to the light with a grin so wide it hurt his face, and it took him a full minute to realise that anybody watching would have seen a madman standing in a sewer, staring at the air.
He didn’t put it in his pocket. He was too frightened of losing it. He closed his fist around it and left the burg where it was, forgotten, half-sifted, bobbing gently away from him.
He went straight to Valan.
“Valan. Valan.”
Valan stopped what he was doing and looked up from cleaning his coat.
“Lad?”
“Look. Look.” Yuland opened his hand. “My first shiny.”
The grin was still there.
Valan looked at it. Then he looked past Yuland, and around, and back over his own shoulder, and he grimaced.
“Come here, lad.”
The grin went. And for the first time in six months, Yuland thought that Valan might be about to prove a wrong ’en after all.
“Why?”
“Put it away.”
Yuland’s brow furrowed. But he did as he was told, and they went inside.
Valan produced a pipe and took his time lighting it.
“Look, lad. We can find that stuff. Course we can.” He glanced round the little room, as though the walls had opinions. “But then we report it. Right?”
“Right,” said Yuland, not seeing it yet.
“Or—” Valan leaned in, and the smile came back, slow and enormous, “—we don’t find it.”
He winked.
“And there’s no report.”
Yuland stood there.
“Now then.” Valan settled back, wreathed in smoke, cheerful as a man at his own birthday. “What did you find?”
Yuland was a quick learner.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just burg. Burg, and more bloody burg.”
“That’s ma boy.”
They were sitting together one evening when the older man sighed.
“Another one killed.”
Yuland looked up. “Killed?”
“Tollman killed. Old Frey. Over on the poor side.”
Valan’s face did something. It wasn’t much and it didn’t last, and Yuland — who prided himself on reading a man’s face, and who had got it right about Valan on the first morning with a stone bouncing off his head — couldn’t read it at all.
Then it was gone, and Valan was Valan again.
Yuland had never met Frey. He found he felt sad about it anyway.
“How?”
“It’ll be the thieves’ guild, more like.” Valan jerked his chin at the wall, and past it, at the dark. “They don’t like us moving about down there. Their rat lines.”
They didn’t talk much after that.
Yuland lay awake a long while, turning it over. Rat lines. Thieves.
The knock came in the morning.
A man in the crown’s colours stepped in, handed Valan a parchment, and walked back out without a word.
Valan read it. Then he looked up at Yuland, and grinned.
“Looks like I’m working again.” He shook his head, mournful. “Shame. I liked it better when you were covered in the muck meant for me.”
He winked.
“You’re off to the poor quarter, my lad.”
Yuland asked which end of it, and Valan told him, and he went to pack.
He took the earring with him.