“Only the best seat in the house for you, Mr. Clementine,” Scarlette said with a wink and a smile as she deposited them at the only empty table in the center of the audience.
It faced the stage head-on, allowing them to see the dancers without needing to crane their heads around. The stage was currently empty and low-lit, the velvet curtains pulled around the curved shape of it while the band sat idle off to the side.
Nathaniel and Blaine took their seats beneath Scarlette’s watchful eye before she said her goodbyes with a flirty smile. She wandered off between the tables, stopping here and there to chat with the customers there to be entertained.
“On the house,” a server said as she twirled up to their table, setting a pair of small glasses down before them with a flourish.
“I can’t possibly drink any more,” Blaine groaned, but he reached for the glass anyway.
The glass was red in color, and the drink it carried was tinted blue. It smelled like alcohol even if it didn’t taste like anything. Magic helped with that, and Nathaniel drank the potion in one quick swallow.
Its effects were immediate. His head pounded like a drum, his stomach roiled like he was standing on an airship flying through a storm, and the nausea that assailed him was almost overwhelming for the few seconds it lasted. Then the sensations faded to a clarity not hazed by drunkenness, forced sobriety an aether-provided gift.
“Wow,” Blaine said, staring at the glass. “Someone needs to patent this stuff.”
“Scarlette already has,” Nathaniel said.
Nathaniel pushed the glass aside and leaned back in the wooden chair, making sure to keep his expression easygoing and attentive. No one came to Paradis and stayed in a bad mood. The women and men who worked for Scarlette were very good at their jobs, and the entertainment they provided always put a smile on everyone’s face.
They stayed through two new performances, erotic dances that left Nathaniel feeling a little hot under the collar. The cold water doctored to look like alcohol gave him something to do with his hands even if he could do nothing about the ache in his trousers. The gossip had been right. Scarlette’s new showwasexquisite.
When one of Scarlette’s girls settled onto his lap, dressed in a satin corset not meant for dancing, to undo his cravat and whisper a request into his ear, Nathaniel wasn’t one to say no. Quirking an eyebrow at Blaine, he nodded in the direction of an entrance whose velvet curtains were tied aside.
“Care to join us? She has a friend upstairs for you, if you like,” Nathaniel said with a casualness he had perfected after his first few visits.
He’d had long practice cultivating enjoyment of carnal pleasure in Paradis to hide the real reason he visited. Blaine had no trouble agreeing to Nathaniel’s request, and the brothel worker led them out of the theater through the velvet curtains for the stairs that led above.
Two very burly-looking men armed with pistols stood guard at the foot of the stairs. Scarlette wasn’t one who allowed abuse of her workers, and she employed several strong men and women to help keep the peace without involving peacekeepers.
They went upstairs and were taken to a bedroom decorated in deep green and brilliant gold, the bed elegantly made. It always was between customers. The heavy velvet curtains had been drawn over the only window, hiding what happened within. Instruments and draughts for pleasure were neatly laid out on the credenza, though Nathaniel didn’t go over to peruse them.
“Let me go find my friend. Feel free to get comfortable,” the woman said with a laugh before closing the door behind her.
Blaine craned his head about, taking in the room, before pinning Nathaniel with an irritated look. “I’ve never been one for brothels.”
Nathaniel didn’t know Blaine’s history beyond what Lore had told him—an Ashionen who’d spent years in E’ridia before making his way home at the behest of the Clockwork Brigade under an assumed identity. He knew nothing about the life Blaine had lived in another country, only borne witness to his deft hand at making engines sing for the sake of his students.
But Meleri, in her capacity as Fulcrum, had elevated Blaine to a level of trust within the Clockwork Brigade that Nathaniel had no choice but to accept. Nathaniel’s position was such that he was allowed to learn Blaine’s real first name but was not given his last. There was no way for anyone to track Blaine through genealogies without it, and perhaps that was the point.
“Don’t worry. We won’t be staying long,” Nathaniel promised.
Less than a minute later, the door opened again and Scarlette slipped inside. The smile on her face dropped away the second the door shut behind her.
“Do you have it?” she asked in a low voice.
Nathaniel slipped his hand beneath his tailored jacket and pulled the folded-up copy of a manifest from the inside pocket. “Of course.”
He passed the manifest to her, the information there proprietary and belonging to the Clementine Trading Company. Within its neatly typed columns was the monthly schedule for the dozens of company steam trains that rode the rails across every country on Maricol save the Tovan Isles and E’ridia. His family’s company couldn’t cross an ocean, and the threat of poison and revenants in the Eastern Spine had always curtailed railway expansion in the east.
Cities and way stations were listed out beside train numbers and timetables on the manifest, but the only ones that mattered were those Nathaniel’s father had marked with a red star. Those columns and rows were the ones Scarlette memorized, because those trains would be the ones ferrying escaped debt slaves out of Daijal with the aid of cogs overseen in that country by the Marshal.
Paradis was first and foremost a place of entertainment, but beneath the veneer of pleasure it provided was a place for those escaping debt bondage to rest. Scarlette would have built her business to be a haven whether or not she’d joined the Clockwork Brigade. She’d been a debt slave once, after all, and become the muse of a man in Daijal who loved her so much he’d paid her debts and freed her.
Scarlette had returned his misplaced idea of kindness by clawing a notarized copy of her loan discharge paperwork from the bank and fleeing east. The first thing she’d ever done with her second chance at life was to bury her past in colored ink to hide black numbers. It was tradition these days for freed debt slaves to carry intricate cover-up tattoos on their necks and have copies of their loan discharge paperwork deposited in multiple places.
The Collector’s Guild was notorious for not caring about a person’s status when they’d once been a debt slave. Their reach had grown deeper into Ashion as a whole and was entrenched in Amari this long after the Inferno. The laws coming out of Daijal that were eventually mirrored and passed in Ashion meant getting rid of the Collector’s Guild was nearly impossible.
Scarlette was too well-known, with far too many cultivated business relationships, for any debt collector to openly harass. Her notoriety meant she couldn’t evade scrutiny, but the Clockwork Brigade had long ago decided what shelter and aid she could provide was worth the risk.
