Slowly she slid her eyes up to mine, not saying anything. Then she turned away and muttered, “They sent an agent around. He asked me about Avraham. He took my statement.”
“The ice will do what they can. But they don’t hear everything that I hear, and they aren’t always listening.” That was about as much as I could say for Black House. “I’m trying to find out if there was some common thread connecting Avraham and the other children, something about him that stood out, something unique …” I trailed off feebly.
“He’s quiet,” she answered. “He doesn’t talk much, not like the girls. Some days he wakes up early and helps me with the wash. He likes being up before the rest of the city, says it helps him hear things better.” She shook her head, the colored beads set in her hair trailing back and forth. “He’s my son—what do you want me to say?”
That was a fair enough answer, I supposed. Only a fool would ask a mother what made her child special. Every freckle on his face, as far as she was concerned, but that wouldn’t do me much good. “I’m sorry, that was tactless. But I need to understand why Avraham …” It was hard to gauge how imprecise a euphemism I should insert here. “Why Avraham might have gone missing.”
She choked an answer back down in her throat. I followed up with what finesse I could muster.
“You were going to say something. What was it?”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Sometimes we know more than we think. Why don’t you tell me what you were going to say.”
Her body seemed to expand and contract with every breath, like the only thing keeping her upright was the air in her lungs. “Sometimes he’d know things that he couldn’t have known about, things about his daddy, other things, things I had never told him, things nobody could have. I’d ask him how he found out, but he’d just smile that queer smile of his and … and …” Her composure, firm as stone up to this point, broke, utterly. She buried her face in her hands and wept with all the force of her matronly body. I tried to think of some way to calm her but failed—empathy was never my stock in trade.
“You’ll save him, won’t you? The guard can’t do anything, but you’ll bring him back to me, won’t you?” She took me by the wrist, and her grip was strong. “I’ll give you whatever you want, I’ll pay you anything, whatever I have, please—just find my boy!”
I pried her fingers off as delicately as I could. It was beyond me to tell a mother she wouldn’t see her child alive again—but I wouldn’t lie either, put my name in hock to a promise I’d never redeem. “I’ll do what I can.”
Meskie was not a fool—she knew what that meant. She set her hands in her lap, ending her despondency by sheer force of will. “Of course,” she said, “I understand.” Her face had that terrible calm that comes when hope lies buried. “He’s in Śakra’s hands now.”
“We all are,” I said, though I doubted it would help poor Avraham any more than it did the rest of us. I thought about leaving her some coin but didn’t want to insult her. Adeline would come around later with some food, though Meskie wouldn’t need it. The Islanders were a tight community—she’d be provided for.
Wren was waiting for me outside, clumped with Meskie’s daughters, but easy enough to pick out. Contra their mother’s description they were very quiet. “It’s time to go.”
Wren turned toward the girls. “I’m sorry,” he said. They were probably his first words since I’d left.
The youngest burst into tears and ran inside.
Wren blushed and started to apologize, but I put my hand on his shoulder and he shut his mouth. We walked back to the Earl in our customary silence, though somehow it seemed quieter.
I dropped the kid off and headed out to see Yancey. The more I mulled over last night’s conversation with Beaconfield, the less I liked it. He knew where I slept—there was nothing I could do there. But if the Blade decided to move on me, he’d go through the Rhymer first, and that was a possibility I might have a hand in affecting.
I knocked lightly on the door. After a moment it opened, revealing Yancey’s mother, an Islander in her mid-fifties, aging but handsome, her brown eyes smiling and vital. “Good morning, Mrs. Dukes. A pleasure to see you again after such a protracted absence.” There was something about Ma Dukes that brought out the courtier in me.
She waved off my compliment and moved to embrace me. Then she pushed me away lightly, holding my wrists with her long-fingered hands.
“Why haven’t you been round to see me lately? You found yourself a girl?”
“Busy with work—you know how it is.”
“I know all about your kind of work. And why are you so formal all of a sudden?”
“No more deference than is due so revered a matriarch.”
She laughed and ushered me inside.
Yancey’s home was warm and bright, regardless of the season. The Islanders were renowned as the greatest sailors of the Thirteen Lands, and they served more than their quota in the Imperial Navy. True to form, her eldest took the Queen’s copper and was at sea nine months of the year, but even an occupant short the house still seemed crowded, overflowing with bric-a-brac acquired from foreign ports and Yancey’s collection of drums and curious, hand-carved instruments. Ma Dukes led me into her kitchen and motioned toward a stool at the table.
“You eat already?” she asked, spooning me a plate from the steaming mass of bubbling pots and pans on the stove.
I hadn’t actually, not that it mattered. Lunch was fried fish and vegetables, and I tore into it with relish. Her duties as a host fulfilled, Ma Dukes eased herself into the chair across from mine. “Good, huh?”
I mumbled something affirmative through a mouthful of onions and peppers.
“It’s a new recipe. I got it from a friend of mine, Esti Ibrahim.”
I shoveled another piece of cod into my maw. It never failed—somewhere along the line Ma Dukes had become convinced that all my troubles stemmed from the absence of an Island woman to share my bed and cook my meals, and was determined to make good this lack. It made visits a bit exhausting.
“Widowed, lovely hair. You could do a lot worse.”
“I’m not sure if I’m the most stable bet right now. Remind me next time you see me.”
She shook her head with something approaching disappointment. “You in trouble again? Always gotta stir the pot, by the Firstborn. Smirk all you want, you aren’t a child. Closer my age than Yancey’s, am I wrong?”
I hoped that wasn’t true, though it might have been.
“He’s on the roof.” She slapped my arm with a damp dishrag. “Tell him lunch is ready when he wants it.” Her eyes turned steely. “He stays out of anything you’re into—don’t forget you’re a guest in my home.”
I kissed her lightly on the cheek and made my way upstairs.
Yancey’s house buttresses the Beggar’s Ramparts, a steep canyon that acts as de facto divide between the Islanders and the white citizens of the docks. At ground level the crevasse was filled with trash, and the sight of it would belie the suggestion that the divide was a positive addition to the landscape—but from on high the break from the skyline it offered was actually quite soothing. When I came up the Rhymer was lighting a banana leaf stuffed with dreamvine. We shared the blunt and the view for a few quiet moments.
“I need two favors,” I began.
Yancey had one of the best laughs I’d ever heard, rich and full. His whole body shook with mirth. “You’ve got a way of beginning a conversation.”
“I’m quite the charmer,” I acknowledged. “First, I need someone who can give me the word on Beaconfield.”
“Ain’t me, man, I only met him twice now.” He smiled conspiratorially and his voice dipped an octave. “Besides, it ain’t wise for the help to pay too much attention to the master of the house, you hear true?” He breathed out a trail of smoke rings, verdant greens and bright oranges. The wind carried them south toward the harbor, the bustle of the docks va
guely discernible even at this distance. “I might know somebody, though. You ever hear of Mairi the Dark-eyed, runs a place north of downtown called the Velvet Hutch?”
“A house of worship, no doubt.”
“You bet your life on that, brother. Praise the Firstborn!” He chuckled and slapped me on the back. “Nah, man, she’s an old friend. Word is she used to be the Crown Prince’s mistress, back in the day. Now she sells high-class tail to nobles and rich bankers, and”—he winked at me—“she’s on first names with every skeleton in every closet from here to Miradin.”
“Quite the necromancer.”
“She’s multitalented.” he confirmed. “I’ll send word that you’re coming by to see her.”
“That’s the first favor—you won’t like the second one. I need you to disappear for a little while.”
He slumped against the railing, the hog leg dangling from his lips. “Come on now, don’t tell me that.”
“Take a trip to the coast for a few days, or if you want to stay in the city go visit your Asher friends. Just keep away from your usual hangouts and don’t perform.”
“I ain’t in the mood for taking no trip, man.”
“If it’s about money …” I began.
“Ain’t about money, man. I got enough money—I don’t need to beg coin.” His eyes cut through the haze of smoke with dull ferocity. “It’s you—you fuck shit up, it’s all you ever do. You a poison—everyone you meet is worse for it, you know that? Every single person. I ain’t got no problems with nobody, then I do you a kindness and what happens?” His tone had switched from condemnation to regret. “I’m an exile in my own fucking city.” He sighed and took another hit, spewing multicolored fog into the air. “This about the Blade?”
“Yes.”
“I told you he was dangerous. Don’t you listen to anyone?”
“Probably not enough.”
“Why he after you?”
“I’m pretty sure—”
Yancey cut me off with a chop of his hand. “Never mind, man. I don’t want to know.”
That was probably for the best. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“I ain’t holding my breath.”
We leaned against the barrier for a long time afterward, passing the blunt back and forth until it was down to the roach. Finally Yancey broke the silence. “Mom try and hook you up again?”
“Esti Ibrahim, I believe her name was.”
He sucked his teeth in contemplation. “Makes the best fried fish in Rigus, but she’s got an ass like the stove you’d fry it on.”
“That was some damn good fish,” I acknowledged.
He snickered at that, and I should have joined in, as a courtesy if nothing else. But the talk with Meskie had me out of sorts, and I was finding it tough to be a cheery companion. “So you’ll talk to Mairi for me?”
The Rhymer’s glimmer of humor died quick, and he turned moodily back toward the rail. “I told you I would, didn’t I? I look out for my people. When I say I’m gonna do something, it ends up getting done. I’ll send someone by after lunch; you can go see her whenever the hell you want.” He took one last puff of vine and belched out a cloud of vermilion. “If there ain’t nothing else I can do for you, how about you get the fuck off my roof. I gotta figure out where I’m gonna be sleeping tonight.”
Yancey’s profession demanded a certain skill with his tongue, and I’d earned the rough edge of it. To punctuate his dismissal he flicked the end of the butt over the edge and into the expanse below. I wondered if we’d ever smoke another. With nothing left to do I cut downstairs and out the front, making sure not to catch Ma Dukes on the way out. After today she probably wouldn’t be so keen to find me a mate.
Another bridge burned, I supposed.
I headed back to the Earl and killed the rest of the afternoon catching up on lost sleep. Around six I slipped out, first sending Wren on a bullshit errand to make sure he couldn’t follow. My last interaction with Crispin was at that boundary of antagonistic and intimate that didn’t require a spectator, and it seemed likely this one would go in the same direction, particularly as Crispin would probably make me shine his shoes in exchange for the information he had discovered. The Oathkeeper knew I would have.
The walk to Herm’s Bridge was a rare moment of silence, a brief half hour in the dimming light of the evening. It was the time of year when it pays to be conscious of every last ray of sunshine and gust of warm air, the fading heat soon to be submerged beneath winter’s implacable thrall. For a few minutes the events of the last two days lay half forgotten in the recesses of my mind.
I suppose it’s the nature of reverie to end.
A body doesn’t look like anything else, and even with the spread of night blurring the landscape I was certain the one lying at the foot of the crossing was Crispin’s. I broke into a quick jog, knowing it was useless, that what had come for Crispin hadn’t left him injured.
He’d been terribly mutilated, his fine face bruised and battered, his aquiline nose caked with blood and pus. One eye had burst in the socket, white ooze leaking, the gleam of his iris offset inside. His face was frozen in a hideous grimace, and at some point during his torment he had bitten through most of the flesh of his cheek.
It was dark but not that dark, and Herm Bridge isn’t a back alley but a minor thoroughfare. Someone else would stumble on the body soon. I knelt beside his corpse and tried not to think about the time he had invited me to his family’s house for Midwinter, his eccentric mother and spinster sister playing the grand piano, all of us drinking rum punch till I passed out by the fire. I slipped my hand into his coat pocket. Nothing. A quick search of the rest of his clothing revealed the same. I told myself that the stench was hallucinatory, that he hadn’t been dead long enough to rot, and the cold would keep him whole for a while longer anyway, that I needed to concentrate on my task. It’s what he would have done. By the book.
Finally I hit on the bright idea of checking his hands, and after a moment of frustration in opening their vise-clench, found a half-torn sheet of paper Crispin had been holding—whether to keep it from his attacker or as some sort of a talisman I would never know.
It was a government form. At the top was a bureaucratic code, followed by a warning against unauthorized viewing. Below, under the title Practitioners, Operation Ingress was a list of names and a one-word description of their status—Active, Inactive, Deceased. I was unsurprised to see a great many marked with the third. I scanned to the bottom and felt my heart stutter a beat—the last legible name on the list, just above the tear, read Johnathan Brightfellow.
So Beaconfield was behind it after all. It was a hell of a way to have my suspicions confirmed. A hell of a way.
I did one more thing then, something that I barely thought about even while I was doing it, something cheap and ugly and only partly justified by necessity. I reached up to Crispin’s throat and ripped his Eye from off his neck, then stuffed the gem in my pocket. The ice would figure that whoever had killed him had taken it, and though I didn’t know how yet, I had a feeling it would come in handy.
I forced myself to my feet and looked down at Crispin’s shattered body. I felt like I ought to say something but wasn’t sure what. After a moment I put the paper into my satchel and slipped off. Nostalgia is for saps, and vengeance doesn’t send out heralds. Crispin would have his eulogy when I settled up with the Blade.
I cut back toward the main thoroughfare at a fast clip, stopping in front of a partially constructed town house bordering the river. After making sure no one was in sight, I wedged open a plank of nailed wood and sneaked inside, slumping against a wall in the darkness.
After a short wait a group of workmen stumbled upon Crispin’s body. They spent a few moments yelling things at each other I couldn’t hear, then one sprinted off, returning shortly after with a pair of guardsmen who further degraded the crime scene before leaving to make contact with Black House. I took the opportunity to backtrack a block and buy a bottle of
whiskey at a dive bar, then hustled back to my hiding spot.
I returned in time to sit aimlessly for twenty minutes while the freeze responded to the murder of one of their own with impressive alacrity. When they did show, they rolled deep, a whole pack of them, ten or twelve with more coming and going throughout the next few hours. They swarmed around Crispin’s body like ants, looking for evidence and canvassing witnesses, following procedures rendered irrelevant by the fact that Crispin’s murder had few parallels in the city’s history. At one point I thought I spotted Guiscard’s patrician mug standing over his partner’s body and talking animatedly with one of the other agents, but there was a lot of ice gray swirling around, and I might have been wrong.
I alternated pulls from my whiskey bottle with snorts from my rapidly diminishing supply of breath. It was almost eleven by the time they wrapped up their search and tossed Crispin’s body on the mortician’s cart. His mother and sister had died some years prior, and I wondered who would take care of the funeral or that comically monstrous structure he had been raised in. It went hard to think of it shuttered, its antiques sold off at auction, its ancient title passed to whatever tax farmer had the coin to afford it.
I crept out of the abandoned house, the street at this point empty of traffic, agent or otherwise, and I began the long walk back to the Earl, despair bleeding through my best attempt at narcotization.
I woke the next morning to find my pillow soaked through with a liquid that I very much hoped was not vomit. Blinking myself out of sleep I rubbed at my nose and found a crust of dried blood. Not bile at all, just the aftereffects of a hard night of breath. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.
A thick wad of phlegm landed in the chamber pot and I followed it with a selection of other waste, then opened the window and emptied them into the alley below, wincing at the freezing gust that came in as I did so. A dark cloud hovered over the cityscape, swallowing the light such that it was difficult even to determine the time. Down on the street I could see those few poor souls forced to travel holding tight to their outerwear and struggling through the gale.
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