Early in her second year as a lay student with the alchemists, and six months before she drops out for the first time.

“How can you not believe in something, and you a mathematician?” They’re smoking shitty cigarettes over shitty beers in a windowless students’ bar and arguing about faith. Markfeet is five years older than the journeymen and has nearly a decade on her fellow apprentices, so none of it is especially revelatory.

“How d’you mean?”

“Y’put your hand on the wellspring of the world, man! You’ve been hip deep in the machinery of life, how can you see all that spinning work and not believe?”

She’d learned the basics from watching the hoodoo work in her days fighting back and forth across Maplewood, and of course from working with Forensics, so that puts her up on a lot of the tiny chicks she hangs with, but all of that’s practical knowledge, not theory.

“Hell, I believe in plenty. I believe there’s a rule and an order to life, and that it’s only time and hard work that keeps us from knowin’ it. Don’t know as I need to follow a creed to believe in that. Don’t know as what I’d do with that sort of believin’.”

She’s more interested in the how than the why, and that’s maybe the difference between the real scholastics and her, but it’s all smoke and endless conversation to her. Her throat burns with tobacco and her stomach aches with weak beer. She dreams of blood in the streets and the clean logic of murder.

It’s been a long, dark, sodden winter, and it’s February that puts the cap on it all with going on 30 straight days of rain. Markfeet can’t remember the last time she saw the sun; all of Albion quivers pallid and shadowless from the clifftops to the harbor. The bay is an endless pimply sprawl of lead that bleeds out into an equally leaden sky.

Her city speaks in whispers, in the same running, liquid consonants as the water that drips, drips, drips off the eaves and runs down the street. The aides down at the University have gone on strike, barricaded themselves in their shared offices and shuttered the labs. There’s blood waiting to spill there, she can almost smell it, a dull rusted thread under the omnipresent tang of mildew. The aides seemed resigned to whatever comes, flat hopeless faces dumb and stolid in solidarity.

The harbor guard has fished three bodies out of the docks in the last week and a fourth one this morning, puffy and bloodless and bruised. All older, fifties or sixties, and with the scarred hands and stained lips of silversmith’s assistants. Markfeet stares down at the latest, back shredded by barnacles, and curses the rain that keeps windows shuttered and eyes down.

“Didn’t think there were any of you left,” Markfeet says. “Not since Rozgavarivat burned, anyway.”

The patter wheezes somewhere deep in its hood. “Ffewer than we were, certainly,” it says, melancholy. “People mostly stay with their ffamilies these days. Can’t say as I blame them, either. But we still see one or two applicants a year, and more if it’s a bad winter.”

Markfeet grunts and watches Forensics beaver away, his ass rising and falling beside the body with the complacent diligence of a gardener weeding. The patter on the floor lies in the pool of her robes, lips and tongue gnawed nearly away.

The patter keeps its head turned away; in embarrassment, Markfeet thinks. “Was she a friend of yours?”

Another ambiguous noise from under the hood. “No. We… do not have ffriends. Or enemies.”

“Well, somebody must have hated her,” snaps Markfeet. “Hated her enough to kill her and wreck up her face like that.”

“Oh, someone did, certainly,” it says, and pulls the hood away from the moist ruin of its mouth, teeth red-stained and busy at lips and cheek. “But she’s beyond your justice now, I think.”

Albion by the sea, by the winedark sea. Dug into the white chalk of the cliffs, choked with fog, rimed with salt. The Sailor’s Quarter is a vile place, full of fleecers and ginsmiths and the thousand greedy ticks that batten on the guileless limbs of the tars; Markfeet hates it with the loathly dispassion she squanders on dogshit cluttering up the sidewalk.

The dance hall is dark, even with the blackout curtains hauled open to let in the morning sun. The room crouches under the unexpected light, stripped of the pennywhiskey glamor it normally begs. The whores lying tangled together in the middle of the room look much worse, their faces eaten away by acid. “Tell me about it,” Markfeet says to the bartender.

“Hell,” he says. “They were reg’lars, yeah? Been dancing here, six, seven months, maybe. Dunno what came over ’em last night, but they each do a threepenny stand off the whiskey and give some kind of a speech in the middle of the floor and then, bam, throw whatever it was in each other’s faces.”

“Anyone hear what they said?”

“What, over the band and the faro? Nah. Looked soulful, whatever it was.”

Forensics is bustling in, all clean smell of rosemary and steel, but she doubts they’ll find anything. Nobody’s likely to have hexed these worn-out jades, not when the slow curse of time and poverty’ll do. Markfeet gets out of the way, though, and lets them go to work, hoping, bleakly, that there’s a purely human motive back of it all, something she can run to ground, something she can revenge. Surely they deserve that much, at least.