by D. K. Fields
The tiered booths that spread from the ring were full, every one of them, so full there was barely enough room for the chequers and the whores to ply their trades. The former squeezed through openings, looking hot in their black-and-white chequered coats. The latter were themselves squeezed as they wandered by in nothing but hats and old feathers.
A whore clumsily, deliberately, brushed against her. He wasn’t the worst-looking boy Cora had ever seen. Cora cupped his chin, feeling the softness of rarely-shaven skin.
‘When I’m done,’ she said. ‘You’re upstairs?’
He nodded.
‘Clean sheets, and make sure there’s no one in the room when I arrive. No one. That includes you.’
She watched him move off among the crowd. He barely came up to her shoulder but he had some muscle to him. She might even sleep with him.
Passing beneath the booths, she eased her way through the press of bodies that surrounded the ring. It was as busy as she’d ever seen the back room, but at least the whole Union was out in force. Some realms made it to Fenest for the election in greater numbers than others, but a ring was as good a place as any to see the whole lot. Rustans with their lockports – metal sunk right into their skin and bones – and Caskers inked up to their eyeballs. Doe-eyed Seeders, and a few Perlish with enough sense to know where the real action was. Torn, too, though rare. Wayward rarer still. The wheel and all six spokes, the Union of Realms, as unified in the stench of bindleleaf smoke and sweat as it was in its love of stories.
Cora allowed herself a glance at the ring itself – just a look, just because she was there. Ash beetles, brought in from the Tear. An election special.
The chequers at the huge numbers-board, which hung in silent judgement above the ring, were working furiously to keep up. The lure of the ash beetle was too much for many, but three-to-one favourite was madness.
‘Who’ll take the beetle, who’ll take it? You there— Oh, Detective.’ The chequer took a step back from Cora.
‘These short odds,’ Cora said. ‘Has the whole city gone mad?’
‘I don’t want any trouble,’ the chequer said. ‘Beulah, she—’
‘She knows her business,’ a man said, turning from the ring. A Rustan, by the looks of him; he wore a thick, lined coat despite the heat and his head was closely shaved. He was smoking a pipe, of all things. With one glance from the man, the chequer melted away into the crowd.
‘These your beetles, then?’ Cora asked the Rustan.
‘Ash beetles need ash to breed – we live above those clouds, in cleaner air.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘We help get the beetles here, so your city can go mad.’
He took the pipe from his mouth as he spoke. At the end of the stem were two shiny metal teeth. Cora stopped herself from wincing at the sight, but she couldn’t look away. He took his time replacing the ashes with fresh bindleleaf, as if the Bore was listening, and the bets continued all around them.
‘There’ll be some big losses tonight,’ she said, allowing herself a brief glance at the ring.
The Rustan’s metal teeth clicked loudly back into his mouth. ‘Beetle or no, Latecomer’s luck to you,’ he said.
‘Southerners,’ she muttered, as she took the steps up to Beulah’s box two at a time.
‘What’s your bet, Detective?’ Beulah said.
Cora closed the door behind her. Beulah was sitting at a narrow window, hunched on a stool. She had a plain pair of story glasses through which she surveyed the ring below.
‘Not tonight,’ Cora said.
Beulah smiled without lifting the story glasses from her face. ‘Tell it to the Drunkard.’
Every wall was plastered with betting slips, form tables, schedules and results from more manners of races and contests than Cora could name. The small room bulged with similarly papered shapes that must once have been usable furniture; nothing like a bed, though. Cora hoped the old chequer didn’t sleep down here, making a nest for herself in the broken hopes of losers. Better she found someone warm upstairs, in the whorehouse she owned.
‘So if you’ve not come to place a bet, what do you want, Detective?’ Beulah said.
‘I’ve got a body.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘I think he had debts,’ Cora said.
‘Dead people don’t pay their debts.’
‘Some debts are too big. Heard of any like that lately?’
Beulah gestured to the mess about her, the stubs that littered the floor, and those that spilled out of hanging baskets like dried flowers. ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’
‘A Wayward. Visiting the city, I’d say. Someone wanted to send a message and used chequer colours to do so.’
Beulah chewed this over, half-reaching for something and then stopping, only to shuffle on a few feet and reach again. ‘Wayward are rare at the ring. Even when they’re the favourites.’
‘The election?’
‘Best pre-Opening Ceremony odds on an election story I’ve ever seen.’ Shifting her stool, Beulah stood on it and plucked a sheet from the ceiling. ‘See?’
Cora waved her away. ‘I don’t play rigged games.’
‘So young, so cynical.’
‘Wayward debts, Beulah, not election odds.’
‘Fine.’ With the precision of a wading bird at the water’s edge, Beulah plucked slips from the murky detritus and came back with a grip full. ‘I hope none of these are dead.’
Cora flicked through. The Wayward listed on the slips liked the horses – no surprise there. And they were stingy at it. Again, no surprise. Nothing worth killing over.
‘You heard anything from the other ringmasters?’ she asked.
‘Those wet gossips? Nothing about a body, no. Nothing about a message.’
‘Shame.’
‘Is it?’ Beulah said. ‘I suppose it might be. Hard to give numbers either way.’
‘The wisdom of the chequers.’ Cora turned to leave the ringmaster. ‘I hope your beetle loses.’
‘One day you’ll stop chasing long odds, Detective, and learn to take a sure thing when you see one.’
Cora left the cramped box and carried on up beyond Beulah, beyond the galleries and out of the back room. If she wasn’t going to place a bet there was no reason to stay. She considered finding the boy she’d put on order, but there was too much to think on, and none of it felt good.
If the Wayward hadn’t been killed because of his debts, hadn’t been a warning to others coming to the city, then she had no idea why he had been killed. And that was a problem. Where to start to get the killer off the streets? Someone who took the time to sew a man’s mouth might not be too shy about striking again. The last thing the city needed during an election was that kind of murder. The cutpurses and drunkards didn’t go to the trouble of sewing up their victims. She doubted any of them knew how. Maybe that should be her first move; haul in the usual crowd and see if any of them could stitch.
She stepped into the street and lit a bindleleaf. By the door was a little niche dedicated to the Latecomer. At the feet of his crude wooden form were incense and pennies and all manner of scraps that spoke of stories told him here. Cora murmured a few words to the Latecomer before she left, mentioning the dead Wayward in the alley and the strange stitching of his mouth. In return, she asked the Latecomer for better luck, and as she walked away she saw that things were improving already: it had stopped raining.
Four
The next morning, Cora was stopped on the steps of Bernswick Station by a harassed-looking constable. But before she could add her own special form of harassment, might it please the Brawler, Sergeant Hearst emerged from the station.
‘That’s all right, Constable,’ Hearst said.
The young man was either too confused or too exhausted to offer any complaint as the sergeant waved Cora forward.
‘You’d best come in, Gorderheim,’ Hearst said. ‘Quickly now.’
‘What’s going on, sir?’ Cora said, glanc
ing back at the steps where more members of the Bernswick constabulary were gathering like a mob. ‘Tell me no more stitched bodies have turned up.’
‘Not yet. We’ve got a visitor.’
Hearst walked briskly past the unmanned front desk. In all Cora’s years she’d never seen it empty like that. She felt a hollowness take hold of her, which grew with every echo of their footsteps.
‘Had to close the station,’ Hearst said. ‘Not my idea, but nothing for it.’
‘Close the station? For how long?’
‘Keep up now, Gorderheim. We’ll be closed for as long as they’re here.’
‘Who? Those two?’
Two men were standing rigid but alert at the end of the corridor. Tall as sentry towers, there was little more than a few inches between them and the ceiling. They were so wide that Cora and Sergeant Hearst had to shift sideways to pass between them to reach the door beyond.
‘Gentlemen,’ Hearst said with a heavy deference. He waited until Cora and he were well away before saying, ‘Surely you recognise hired muscle when you see it?’
‘What I don’t recognise is why you’re doffing your cap and giving them the “how you please, sir”. So why don’t you tell me just whose muscle that is?’
‘The men are here with the Chambers,’ a woman said behind her. Chief Inspector Sillian came down the stairs from her office on the top floor of the station. ‘Outside the Audience, no one else causes this kind of havoc wherever they go.’
‘Ma’am,’ Hearst mumbled.
Cora found her mouth was too dry to do likewise, but managed to nod at the station’s highest-ranking officer. The chief inspector had ten years on Cora, and every one of those years had been spent indoors behind a desk. Her skin was smooth. Her dark hair oiled in place, slick across her scalp, clamped around her ears. Her parting revealed a scalp as pale as the Widow.
‘A Chambers?’ Cora said. ‘In the Audience’s name—’
‘Not a guest to keep waiting,’ Sillian said.
That was an understatement. The Chambers were the most powerful people in the Union. Each realm had one, and whichever realm won an election, it was their Chambers who assumed control of the Assembly and had the final say over taxes, law-making, potholes… And now one of the Chambers had come to the Bernswick station. That couldn’t be good news.
Hearst muttered something about refreshments and slipped away towards the briefing room. Cora made to follow him, but Sillian caught her arm.
‘Detective, you’ll come with me.’
The chief inspector was heading down to the cold room.
Cora had a glimmer of hope, fleeting, tantalising, that this might have something to do with the wheelwright scuffle that had got out of hand, and not her dead Wayward. Perhaps this Chambers owned a wheelwright, or the Derby Pump, or maybe they just wanted to stare at some mangled corpses.
That hope died as she descended the stone steps to where a man in the brown robe of the Chambers waited. A man with the weathered face and slate-grey eyes of a Wayward.
*
Chief Inspector Sillian bowed, slow and full, a perfect example of studied deference. ‘Your honour, this is Detective Gorderheim. She’s the investigating officer on this case.’
The Wayward Chambers’ gaze fixed on Cora. It was flat, intensely so, as if years on the Northern Steppes had left this man with nothing new, nothing impressive, to see. She could only look away as she was studied.
The body she’d found in the alleyway, only the morning before, was still laid out on the stone slab. Pruett and his assistant had done their best, but they couldn’t hold off the Widow’s attentions. The flesh had the usual pallor of the day-old dead, but the holes that punctured the skin around his lips were black now. With the dried blood cleaned, the effect was somehow worse than when the laces had still been there.
‘Do you know who this is?’ the Chambers said, his voice deep and accented, but clear.
‘No,’ Cora said.
‘No one should, not yet.’
He put a hand on the forehead of his dead kinsman. The gold bracelet of the Chambers was unmistakable, even in the pale light of the cold room. One bracelet on each wrist, each bearing the horseshoe of the Wayward realm. Bracelets that turned to manacles when the occasion called for it. What those occasions were, Cora couldn’t say. Ruth would have known. She’d have known it all – but then knowing it all was why Ruth had left. Abandoned her. Abandoned her to—
‘Look at what they did to him,’ the Chambers said. ‘They knew his name. Who he was.’
Cora cleared her throat. ‘And who was he, your honour?’
‘Ento. Nicholas Ento. A name that, in a few weeks, would have shaped the Union.’ The Chambers went to touch Ento’s punctured lips but stopped. ‘Find your place with the Audience, friend.’
‘Your honour, we regret your loss,’ Sillian said, her voice flat and measured, as if being near a Chambers was something she was used to. And maybe she was. Who knew the circles she moved in?
‘Our loss… This is only the beginning.’ He straightened and turned to them, his resolve as clear as anything could be on such a weathered face. ‘Nicholas Ento was the Wayward realm’s election storyteller.’
A storyteller. A storyteller had been murdered. She had never heard of such a crime before, and a quick glance at Sillian suggested that neither had the chief. As far as Cora knew, this was a first in the history of the Union. But had Sillian known the identity of the dead man all along? Was that why she wanted to keep a grip on this one?
‘You’re right to be shocked, Detective Gorderheim,’ the Wayward Chambers said. ‘Even in the aftermath of the War of the Feathers, when there was still so much distrust, even then a storyteller was held in high esteem. No one dared harm the first ’tellers as we sought peace after the war – votes instead of swords. But now, someone has committed the worst of all crimes.’
‘I see,’ Cora said, but in truth she was reeling.
‘I doubt that. I doubt that very much.’
‘Your honour—’ Sillian said, trying to regain some control of the moment, but the Chambers waved her words away.
‘You see, Detective, you’re not just looking for a killer of men. Whoever did this, their wish is to kill the Wayward story, to silence us.’
‘And you’re not going to let that happen, are you?’ Cora said, meeting the grey stare.
‘The story Ento carried, it will be told,’ the Chambers said.
‘Is that wise, your honour?’ Sillian said. ‘Might it not be better to change the story, to find a new tale for the election?’
The Wayward blinked, and in that small gesture was a world of scorn. ‘It is not a question of wisdom, Chief Inspector. It is a question of what is needed. The Wayward will tell the story Ento would have told, and you will find who killed Ento to ensure that no more lives are lost. We will not sacrifice our story, or another storyteller, to this election.’
*
The Chambers told them the body would be collected later that day by a Wayward delegation. It wasn’t a request. Cora raised no objections: she was done with it and Pruett would be only too pleased to have it out of his way. She had a name now, and she knew who he really was: Nicholas Ento, the Wayward’s election storyteller.
Cora waited respectfully for the chief inspector to accompany the Chambers from the cold room. Then she covered Ento and climbed back up the narrow, uneven stairs to the main floor. With each step, the picture became clearer, even as her bindle-ridden chest gave her less breath to consider what it meant. And maybe that was a good thing. She wasn’t liking where those thoughts were taking her.
She’d been wrong to read the laces as a sign of the chequers. Black and white meant something else in Fenest right now, with the election coming. Black and white meant stones for voting, one of each colour weighing the pockets of those picked to hear a tale. Black for a good tale, white for bad. Black for winning seats in the Assembly, for a new Chambers to lead their realm in power over
everyone else. Ento hadn’t been killed for debts. According to his own Chambers he’d been killed because of his story, the Wayward realm’s story, before a single vote had been cast.
And whoever had strangled him had wanted that known. Leaving the body in the alley, sewing the mouth and tipping off Butterman – if the murder was a message then it spoke a warning, but she needed more before she could understand it, let alone heed it.
The corridors of the station were still deserted, as was the briefing room and the front desk. She might have been the only living soul there. She waited.
It didn’t take long for the boots to sound on the station’s old and creaking floorboards. Sillian rounded the corner of the corridor. Without a glance at Cora, and without saying a word, she started up to her offices, which occupied the whole second floor. Cora followed her to the largest of the rooms and stood silently as the chief inspector positioned herself at the window to watch the street below.
‘Once, Detective Gorderheim.’
‘Excuse me, Chief Inspector?’ Cora said, closing the door behind her.
‘Once. That’s how many times, before today, a Chambers has visited Bernswick Station.’
‘Small mercies are rare under the Audience.’
‘The Wayward Chambers,’ Sillian said, ‘comes to see the dead Wayward storyteller, who was found in your alleyway. Do tell me when we’re granted the mercies, small or otherwise, Detective.’
Sillian allowed a silence to grow between them, still not turning from the window.
‘You have a question,’ Sillian said eventually. ‘The obvious question. But it still needs to be asked.’
‘Who would have known that Nicholas Ento was a storyteller?’
Sillian nodded to the street. ‘Only the Chambers.’
‘All six of them?’
‘All seven,’ Sillian said. ‘You forget your politics, Detective. The Perlish have double of everything.’
‘Of course, how could I forget the Perlish…’
‘Every election the Chambers choose their storyteller from among their people, and tell their opposite numbers from the other realms. And only them.’