by R A Fisher
“You know, girl,” he said, showing off his missing teeth with a hawkish smile. “You keep that attitude up, and your life will be a lot easier than mine was.” He handed her the bottle.
The copper-haired man that the girl had called Lint spent his days sleeping somewhere in the maze of the Lip. Ranat had wondered aloud about waiting until the night when he might come out for his shift, but the girl had advised against it. The Grace’s Walk was just one of the streets where the keepers sent their vagabonds to congregate, and she didn’t know when Lint would be back at the same spot.
Ranat had no reason not to believe her. She’d become friendly enough after he’d handed her the bottle, and he forced himself not to snatch it out of her hand when she’d lifted it for a second, long drink. She explained to him as best she could where Lint slept, and Ranat had left it at that.
The tunnels of the Lip were crowded and twisted, and they stank. Smoke and brine, sweat and sex, death and shit and piss and rotten fish; all of it came together in the passages to turn the air into an overbearing ichor; poison gas that failed to kill, but made Ranat sick every time he went below.
Which is why, even after over fifty years living around the Lip, he’d only been inside a handful of times. A mix of natural tunnels and caverns, and ancient quarries mined out when the city above had been constructed millennia ago; passages not filled with Tidal Works’ machinery had become a habitat for the desperate and depraved. Ranat thought if he were to give up now and went into hiding deep within the Lip, the Church would never find him. The authorities never ventured far into the tunnels.
Entrances pocked the muddy streets above, sometimes nothing more than a shoulder-wide hole with a rickety wooden ladder or a stairway that looked to go into a basement, but then kept going. The girl’s instructions led Ranat to one such stairway, not far from the high cliffs that marked Fom’s precarious northwestern border. He could hear the incoming tide crashing against the limestone as he descended the stairs but, as soon as he was within, the sound became a loud indistinct rush of noise, directionless and all-encompassing.
The press was absolute, and Ranat was at the mercy of its currents. The girl had made it sound easy enough, but travel against the flow of people seemed impossible in the narrow space. It carried him opposite the way he wanted to go until the swarm of humanity deposited him in a large rectangular room with a ceiling so low, he needed to stoop. Dozens of rickety kiosks, selling everything from clothes sewn from rags to pickled fish, formed crooked rows. The air was stagnant, pungent with smoke that sputtered from torches and tar-fuel lamps lining the walls.
Ranat had little choice but to wait near the passage that had ejected him. He would never find his way if he tried to take an alternate route. A nearby kiosk sold glogg, and he paid the woman behind it the last of his tin balls to fill his empty rum bottle. He scowled at the first swallow, almost spit it out, but he didn’t. Glogg could be made from pretty much anything, but this was the first time it had tasted like fish.
After a period of time that Ranat measured in swallows of fishy glogg, the tide of humanity sputtering from the passage ebbed, then halted, and began to flood the other way. He gripped his bottle and pressed in with the others.
After that, it was as easy as the girl said it would be. The nest of beggars was in a natural cavern only fifty paces from the stairway where he’d entered. It had taken him long enough that most of the people had woke by the time he got there, getting ready for their shifts, dressing or drinking jars of cloudy water, or eating unidentifiable meat off flat, thin slabs of shale that served well enough as plates.
The man named Lint was just sitting up on his bed mat, rubbing his eyes and looking around groggily at the others. He was the first to see Ranat, who stood in the chamber’s mouth, staring at him. He arched his eyebrows when he noticed the attention, but didn’t seem concerned by it.
Ranat wavered a moment and shambled into the room, stumbling and almost falling on top of a young girl who squealed in alarm. The fish-glogg was stronger than he’d given it credit for.
The others in the room looked on with passing interest as Ranat picked his way over to Lint, careful not to trip over anyone else.
Lint watched him approach, scratching his beard. “Yeah?”
Ranat sat next to him without invitation and handed him the bottle.
Lint took it, uncorked it, and took a whiff, then frowned at it and handed it back without drinking. Ranat shrugged, took a pull from it, and jammed the cork back into the neck. It wasn’t that bad once you got used to it.
“You were on the Grace’s Walk before sunrise a week or two ago?”
Lint shrugged. “Where you hear that?”
Ranat paused. “A girl working up there now. She never told me her name. Told me to find Lint, though. I’m guessing that’s you.”
Lint glowered under his beard. “Smart girl, not giving her name. Wish she didn’t tell you mine, neither. Yeah, okay. So? What about it?”
“Just looking for someone who saw something is all.”
Lint snorted. “Yeah? Well, you’ll have to be more specific.”
“A rich guy. Church. White coat, black hair. Meeting with someone in an alley just off where you guys go. Probably a little before dawn. A couple hours, anyway. Not before.”
Lint thought. “You got tin?”
Ranat hesitated. He had a lone Three-Side left, hidden in the silk pouch under his coat. “I got fish-glogg.”
Lint let out a laugh, despite himself. Then he sighed. “Alright, old man. You win. Give me that bottle.”
Ranat offered him the bottle again. Lint took a long swallow, squinched his face as if he were trying to keep from throwing up, and passed it back. Ranat took another swallow himself for good measure.
“No. Nothing like that rings a bell. You sure about when it happened? For the past week, I been further up near the north gate. Few weeks before, I was on the Walk, but the matron had me way down near the Customs Towers.”
Ranat frowned, rubbed his jaw, and absently took another drink. When had he found the Hierophant’s body? The time between then and now oozed in his mind—a hazy string of sleepless nights and empty bottles. Had it been more than a week or two? Had it been a month? Maybe those times he’d slept, he’d slept longer than he’d thought. A day here. Two days there. It added up, and it had happened before. More often than he could count. He’d never had much use for keeping track of time.
He felt Lint’s eyes on him, tired, curious, but not malicious. The beggar had never witnessed a meeting like the one Ranat was describing. Maybe Lint had been there, and just not noticed two or three men standing in the darkness of the alley.
Frustration, long building, erupted inside Ranat. The cavern swam in his vision, became a blurry constellation of torchlight and faces as tears came unchecked. No one had seen anything. The beggars would have been focused on their quarry in the street, not a secret meeting in the alley. He resented himself for believing there’d been a chance. Even if one of them had seen something, they would have looked away, pushed it from their mind. People living on the streets of Fom didn’t live long when they noticed meetings like that. That should have occurred to Ranat, of all people.
“I th-thought … I-I … Sorry …” Ranat stammered and stood, too fast. The room beyond his tears spun and threatened to throw him back on the ground, but he staggered back and forth a few times across Lint’s bed and regained his footing. He swayed where he stood, making little circles in the air with his body while his legs stayed put, but at least the danger of falling had passed.
“You okay there, old man?” Lint’s concern sounded genuine.
Ranat didn’t trust himself to speak, so he only gave a slight nod. The gesture sent the cavern spinning again, but not as bad as standing up had. He took a fumbling step toward the mouth of the chamber. Fresh air, he thought. I just need fresh air, and maybe a drink that doesn’t taste like fish.
“Well, hmm …” Lint said behind him.<
br />
Something in his tone made Ranat stop and half turn back.
“I mean, I didn’t see a meeting or anything, like the one you said, but …”
“Yeah?” Ranat’s voice came out a hoarse whisper, and he didn’t trust himself to look at Lint. He was shaking again, this time with shame. Until a few weeks ago, he hadn’t cried in sixty years. He felt the pity in the eyes of those watching him. Felt it make his face grow red.
“Well, just that, now that you made me think on it, there was this keg wagon. A real banged up one, painted green, came rolling along like it was off to put out a fire. Damn camel pulling the thing tried to bite me when I didn’t jump out of the way fast enough.
“Anyway, like I said, there was no meeting, but they pulled the wagon up to an alley there, right along the Walk, kind of pulled something out of it, and went off again, back the way they came. I remember thinking it was weird to see a keg wagon that time of night with no kegs on it.”
Ranat had stopped shaking, forgetting his shame. He looked at Lint with eyes clearer than they’d been in a long time. “You didn’t see what they pulled off?”
“Off the wagon? Nah. I didn’t try to, neither. Looked like something that was none of my business. That was all I needed to know.”
Ranat pressed his palms into his eyes, let out a deep, shuddering breath. “Looks like you and that girl are both smarter than me, then.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Did you get a look at the driver?”
“Well, like I say, I tried not to pay attention. Two of them, though. Driver and another one. Hoods up. Heads down. ‘Was raining, so nothing weird about that. Both of them big, stocky like. Then again, it was a keg wagon, so nothing weird about that, neither. Anyway, hope it helps.”
Ranat took a deep breath and released it. “Yeah. Thanks. It does. Thanks.” He turned, paused, and turned back again, digging under his coat for his last Three-Side. “Um, here. I … thanks.”
Lint took it, smiled. “Wow, thank you.” He stuffed the coin into his pocket. “And good luck. With … whatever it is.”
Ranat chuckled, his eyes sad. “Whatever it is, it’s probably the last goddamn thing I’ll ever do. But thanks.”
The deep grey of evening had been fading when he emerged from the passages, and it was gone before he passed from the Lip into the rest of Fom. Rain dribbled through the night.
Ranat left the Lip and walked. He didn’t stop for a drink; didn’t stop to think. He walked with only a fraction of his mind knowing where he was going. But he knew enough to stop when he got there.
The thirteen Customs Towers stood over a thousand hands high, topped with bronze domes that sometimes caught sunlight when Fom’s fog roiled just right, and the reflections of them shined below: suns burning through the mist. Grass covered the flat ground around them.
He’d heard of other parks in Fom, though he’d never been to any of them, and didn’t know where they were. As far as he knew, this was the only place where he could lie in the grass.
If the Eye was out that night, it was too shrouded in clouds to cast its polarized light onto the domes. Light came from the glow lamps that lined the wide boulevards leading from the arches of the Towers into the city. The indistinct grumble of Fom rose behind him over the patter of the rain, while in front of him the ships in the harbor huffed and groaned on the outgoing tide, hidden from view by the limestone cliffs upon which the towers stood.
The muddy grass was cold and slick under his back. Drizzle tickled his face, while an occasional raindrop slapped it. He smelled the rain and the grass, the seaweed of the bay and the ocean beyond, the smoke from the steamships. He was doomed, and he wanted to feel something green and growing one more time.
He was a foolish old man for not seeing it sooner. No, he thought. Not foolish. Just drunk. The Hierophant hadn’t gone to the Lip. Someone had dumped him there. They could’ve taken his tin, his goddamn belt. But they didn’t. They left it on his corpse so they could pin whoever looted it with his murder.
They didn’t kill him for his money, so why? Ranat could only think of one answer. He was a Hierophant, and someone was tired of his “help.”
Ranat was condemned. There was no fighting the Church. He had no proof, and he was a nobody. Lower than a nobody. He was a damn grave robber. He hadn’t even been in the Books of Heaven before he’d been stricken from them. There was nothing—
His train of thought skidded to a halt. There was something else. Trier N’navum had died with a note hidden in a pocket that his killers must not have known about. Ranat had forgotten about it with everything that had happened. And the endless flood of booze down his throat hadn’t helped, either.
He scrambled to his feet and turned his face up into the rain, and let it rinse the mud from his back and hands. Then he pulled himself straight and walked back into the city.
Chapter Seven
“Never heard of the Crow’s Marquis.” Gessa paused, eyeing him, curious. “You sure you’re okay?”
Ranat had snuck back to his basement and fished out the note he’d gotten off the Hierophant. Then he’d risked ducking his head into the nameless bar, where he’d literally run into Gessa. Her obvious joy at seeing him again, though, was fading into exhausted frustration.
“Yeah,” he answered the question for the third time. “I might even get this all sorted if I can ever find this place. How about you? You’re okay?”
She shrugged. “I guess. I was worried. You disappeared, and everyone was talking. Then those two guys came around …”
“Yeah, you said. They didn’t hurt you, though?”
“No. Just asked questions that they acted like they already knew the answers to. Not about you, mostly. Just whether I’d seen you. Most of it was about that hawker I introduced you to. I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much. They asked where you lived. I lied and said I didn’t know. Then they went away.”
“What did you say about me?”
“Nothing. Just that I didn’t know where you’d gone to. I didn’t know. Nobody did. After we heard that some official’d been murdered, we thought the Church had picked you up for it, until they started coming around asking about you.”
“Haven’t seen them around lately?”
“The guys asking the questions, you mean? No. Not in the past week or more. No one else from the Church, either. They caused a stir when they first started hanging around the neighborhood. I would have heard if someone had seen them again.”
“Okay. Well.” Ranat slid off his stool. “You got these?” He nodded toward the empty glasses on the table.
“I said I did.” She frowned and stood alongside him. “Wait a minute—that’s it? You show up, make me buy you a few drinks, then you’re off again?”
He stopped and looked at her. It never occurred to him she might really care. “Gessa, look.” he began and stopped.
She didn’t say anything but took a step closer.
“Gessa,” he started again. “I don’t know how things are going to end up, but … it was … good … I mean with you. It was really good. I wish … I mean, if things work out, then I’ll find you, or whatever. Until then, everyone is still looking for me … even here. It … is probably not good. For you, I mean. So, I’ve got to go. So … sorry.”
Before he could turn, she caught his hand, leaned up, and kissed him. “I’m sorry too,” she said. “But I hope you really can work it out.” She tried to give him a smile, but the quivering lip gave it away.
“Yeah,” Ranat breathed. “Yeah. Me too.”
“What do you mean I can’t go in?”
The man standing in the doorway of The Crow’s Marquis was broad enough to fill the frame. He stroked his long black mustache as he spoke. “As I have said, this establishment is a private club. Members only.”
“Fine,” Ranat grumbled. “You win. I want to be a member.”
The man eyed Ranat up and down and adjusted the deep blue kerchief tied around his neck. “Ye
s. Well. The Marquis is currently … full.”
Ranat rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
The Crow’s Marquis in a wide maze of streets that twisted between the arenas and Cathedral Hill. It was once a private estate, and it lay behind a high wall that concealed a flower garden, wooden benches, and a small reflecting pool. Ranat had resorted to asking anyone and everyone if they’d heard of it and, even then, he’d had no success until he’d gone back to the hawker he’d met through Gessa and asked him.
Very prestigious, the hawker had said. He wasn’t a member but often thought about becoming one.
If he ever decided to, Ranat would bet they wouldn’t be “full.”
He exited down the little garden path and onto the flagstones of the street. The bronze gate clanged shut behind him, although he hadn’t seen anyone standing nearby. Maybe the doorman had it attached to a string he could pull.
He gazed down the lane. It was a little past noon, and the road was busy but not crowded. Puddles pooled along the creases between the flagstones, but the clouds had lifted again, and a few blotches of pale blue formed and faded away behind the high, wind-blown clouds.
The block stretched long in either direction. The Crow’s Marquis hunkered in the middle of a cluster of similar buildings. From what little he could see over the high walls, they looked like houses, but then, so did The Marquis. He wondered how many of them were clubs or brothels, or wherever else the rich whiled away their time.
He circled around, turning left from The Marquis, then left again at the first cross street, then left a third time, hoping to find some sort of forgotten back entrance. Nothing. The alley held a long row of wagon gates, all locked with crossbars from the other side, and he couldn’t be certain which one belonged to the Marquis anyway. The walls between the houses ran anything but straight, so it might be more complicated than counting doors. That was presuming he could even open the gate from the outside. He couldn’t climb the wall.