Blood Under Water

by Toby Frost

  Nothing to get stolen or broken. Like the front room in a bad tavern.

  Strange to think that she’d been sitting here only this morning, holding back the urge to rage at Falsi as he patted his dog and threatened to have them all hanged. Time to get to work.

  First, she needed to see the body of the priest. The door led straight onto the staircase. It seemed deserted. She sneaked downstairs, legs bent, pausing every few seconds to listen.

  The guards must still be outside.

  The stairs ended in a little hall, lit by a single lantern. A statue of Lady Justice stood in a niche, draped with a rosary. Giulia took a stub of candle from her bag and lit it from the lantern. The door to the cell stood opposite the stairs: dark old oak, reinforced with iron bands.

  That’s where they locked us up. She looked through the little hole in the door: the cell was empty. The prostitute must have made good on her promise to get the guard to let her go.

  To the right was another door. It opened easily. A narrow flight of stairs led down.

  Sickly, perfumed air rose up from below. She smelled lavender and, under it, the artificial tang of alchemy. This had to be the place. She closed the door behind her, unpleasantly aware that she was trapping herself, and descended.

  There would be nothing alive down here, but she still felt as if she would be met at the bottom of the stairs. The urge to hurry grew in her, the need to get this done and get out.

  A table stood in the middle of the room under a dead lantern, massive and battered like a butcher’s block. Bundles of dried flowers lay on the table to keep the air clean. There were black marks on the wood, marks that became deep red as the candlelight fell across them.

  Someone had pinned a sheet of paper to the wall. She held the candle up to it, saw the hand-inked script, and realised it was a charm against disease, the sort you could buy from a good apothecary. Giulia lit the lantern.

  A body wrapped in white cloth lay against the back wall like a huge chrysalis. Giulia crouched down beside the parcel. She took hold of the cloth, pulled it back and looked into the empty face of Father Coraldo.

  “Hello again,” she said.

  It was strange to think that this lump had once been a living man. The priest looked like a doll now: a pallid mannequin. She made the Sign of the Sword across her chest. Blessed Lord, rest this man. Then she pulled back the sheet.

  His chest was a ploughed field. To the right, just below the navel, there was a small puncture wound, the sort of thing a blade would do. That would have hurt, would have crippled him, but the killing blows had not been made by a man. Perhaps he’d been hit by the knife to keep him still while the dog did its work. If it was a dog at all.

  A single blow had finished him: a massive downward swipe from shoulder to gut, done by something with four claws. She felt a little sick.

  Giulia held her hand over his chest and spread her fingers out. A man could have done it, if he wore a metal hook at the end of each digit. Was there a weapon Easterners used, like that? Hugh would know; he’d frequently bored her with stories of his exploits on the Silk Road. Whatever it was, it was not a dog. Dogs and wolves killed with their teeth. And no dog was big enough for this.

  She crouched in the dim light, trying to think. Some kind of huge cat? She’d once seen a mountain lion in a show at the Pagalian arena. That must have been ten years ago. Perhaps a beast that big could carve a man up like this. But what kind of madman kept a lion as a pet?

  Something jarred in her mind, something she’d seen that night – the griffon she’d glimpsed a long way off, silhouetted against the moon. Hadn’t someone said something about there being wild griffons on the edge of Averrio? For that matter, even if it was a big cat and not a griffon, who would have the money to keep an animal like that?

  City elders? Hell. If they were the people pulling Lieutenant Falsi’s strings, she’d be better off fleeing from Averrio while she still had a chance.

  She shuddered. A dead priest, some kind of huge animal, and money behind it all. It felt like a conspiracy, like the signs of black magic. Giulia made the Sign across her chest again. It was time to go, thank God.

  As she pulled the sheets back over the body, she thought, They shouldn’t do this. They shouldn’t be allowed to kill a priest.

  The thought surprised her. She was not especially religious, and had liked few of the clerics she’d ever met. She hadn’t even liked Sebastian Coraldo: he had seemed half-mad, a man made shifty and dangerous by fear. Yet she felt angry as she covered his face.

  There was a lot still left to do. The fat Watch captain had taken something from Father Coraldo’s body, and she needed to find out what it was.

  Giulia blew out the candle as she returned to the entrance hall. She was in the doorway when the floor above her creaked.

  Someone was upstairs. Well, there was no getting out of this. She walked to the stairs, flattened her back to the wall and began to climb.

  She reached the first floor and kept going. As the second floor came into view, she heard the steady thud of something soft being hit over and over again. A nasty sound.

  The stairs opened onto a corridor. There was a door on either side of the passage, and the one on the left was open. At the far end, a ladder led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. She walked down the hall, placing each boot down carefully, feeling the give in the planks underfoot. At the edge of the open door, she crouched down and peered around the corner.

  A short, broad man stood with his back to the door. His arm rose and swung a truncheon into a practice dummy made out of sacks. Behind him there were weapon racks and a couple of archery targets. There was a big ring of keys on his belt. His blue tunic looked as broad as the sail on a galleon.

  As she watched, the man put down his truncheon and took a deep swig from a bottle of wine. A second bottle lay on the floor behind him, uncorked and on its side.

  Drunk and violent. Only the finest need apply.

  She crept silently past the doorway. The sound of the guard battering the dummy was a muffled drumbeat behind her.

  The door across the hall was smarter than the others, with a polished handle and new iron bands across the wood. This looked promising. Less promising was the large brass lock set into the door.

  Damn it. She thought about creeping back and stealing the keys off the man’s belt. Too risky. She crouched down and took out her picks.

  After five minutes, her legs started to ache. Her left knee seemed to be rusting shut. She counted the tumblers as she worked: the first one was easy, then came the gradual, reluctant yielding of the second, and finally the third, rolling back with a sharp click. Giulia slid the picks out of the defeated lock. Her legs felt weak as she stood up again. She turned the handle and opened the door.

  Moonlight streamed in through a broad window, over clean walls and a patterned rug. There was a painting of Saint Josua Lexicatus on the far wall and a woodcut of the Archangel Alexis in his armour behind the wide, empty desk. On a shelf behind the desk was a copy of the Holy Codex and a thin accounts-book.

  Giulia closed the door behind her and took the books down. She checked the Codex first – she’d seen criminals cut a hole in the pages to hide keys. Nothing except holy writ. She opened the thin book and saw names and offences: it was a roster of crimes discovered and pursued.

  Giulia flicked through to the last page of writing. She stood near the window, holding the roster up as if to offer it to the moon.

  “Priest in Cannal. Dead, stabbed. Anglans in cell, look like Mersenries. Told Proc will hang them soon.”

  And that was it: her life and achievements summed up in “will hang them soon.” It amused her, in a bitter way. She put the roster back and rifled the desk. It had two drawers, both unlocked. The first one contained paper, ink, a couple of quills and a letter-stamp with the emblem of the Watch carved into it.

  Fr
om down the corridor, there came a sudden pounding of boots and a clumsy thud. A drunken voice called out, “Ah, shit!”

  She waited. No movement. Maybe he’d knocked himself out.

  There was a red candlestick beside the desk. She pulled out a piece of thieves’ tinder from her bag, spat on the end and watched it sizzle into life. She touched the candle to the flame.

  Giulia sat at the desk and waited until the candle-wax was soft and hot. She tore a piece of paper from the roster-book and dripped wax on it until there was a thick coating on the paper the size of a coin. Then she took the stamp and pushed it into the wax.

  The impression was good. Giulia removed the stamp and returned it to the desk.

  The man in the practice room had fallen silent. Perhaps he’d passed out. Somewhere outside, a dog began to howl. Giulia stashed the wax imprint in her satchel. Then she turned her attention to the second drawer in the desk.

  She pulled out a wad of old letters. None of them looked important. She reached in to the back of the drawer and her fingers touched something cold and hard, wrapped in a rag. She slid it out and laid it on the desk, then lifted the cloth away.

  Yes. It was a tile of some sort, a red clay square about four inches wide. There was an image sculpted onto the tile. Giulia tilted it at the window, so that the moonlight caught on the ridges in the clay.

  The picture looked as if it had been drawn either by a child or someone long ago. It showed a man in a loincloth lying on the ground. Strings were coming out of his head: hair, presumably, or maybe blood. Standing over him was a man in a cuirass and a plumed helmet. The standing man waved a sword in the air. His free hand pointed to the ground. Objects lay scattered beside the dead man: bowls, plates, what might have been a statue or a small animal.

  It made her feel uneasy, as if it was enchanted. She watched the shadows catch on the tile as she turned it in her hands, wondering whether, if she looked at it for long enough, the clay blood might run back into the victim’s head, or the little killer might dance with glee. She remembered the water-wyrm in Elayne’s glass, rising up from the depths.

  Suddenly Giulia knew that this business was more than a mistake, more than the casual corruption of Watchmen too lazy to do their job: somewhere out there was evil, real and alive, closing in on the four of them like poisonous smoke.

  Is this what he was murdered for?

  She would steal the tile. It might be vital for tracing the killer. When the captain noticed that it was gone, what would he do? He could hardly send his men out to find the thing, seeing how he’d stolen it off the body of a priest. Giulia wrapped it up in the cloth and slipped it into her satchel.

  She felt something in her back. She was being watched.

  Giulia turned around. There was nobody there. Strange: for a second she had been certain that someone was in the room with her, some cloaked stranger creeping up on her. She waited, staring at the door, but it did not open.

  She put the paper and pens back in the desk and closed it up. Giulia blew out the candle, shut the office door behind her and locked it with her picks. As she pulled her hood up, she heard a voice.

  “We’re doing what we can, Procurator.” It came from below. The stairs creaked under two pairs of boots.

  Shit!

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it for a moment. I’m sure you’re doing everything you’re capable of. But this has to be resolved quickly.”

  They were close – five, six seconds away. The office door would take too long to unlock. The practice room was silent, but wide open. Giulia looked back and saw the ladder leading up to the trapdoor at the end of the hall. She cursed, ran down the hall and scrambled up the rungs. In one quick movement she yanked the bolt back – it sounded deafening – pushed the trapdoor open, slipped through and climbed onto the roof.

  Cold air hit her. She wanted to slam the door down; she forced herself to lower it quietly. Light rain pattered against her bare hands. Giulia took a deep breath and imagined her heart slowing, becoming calm. She got on all fours on the cold stone roof and put her ear to the trapdoor.

  “…precisely why the whole business is such a worry,” the cultured voice was saying. “It’s completely unacceptable that a priest should be found dead. It makes us look absurd.”

  “I know.”

  “It needs cleaning up, and soon. I don’t like loose ends.”

  “I’ve got some suspects. They’re foreigners just arrived in the city. Three of them are New Churchers. Falsi has them under house arrest.”

  “House arrest? Why aren’t they in the cell?”

  The deep voice paused. “I think he wants them to confess. He can be like that, sir. A reliable man, but he likes to do things formally, you know—”

  “I see. Well, make sure it’s dealt with properly. I don’t want anybody to be able to say that we weren’t fair. Now then, this stone you found on him—”

  “Right up here, Procurator.”

  Giulia lifted the trapdoor an inch and squinted through the gap. Two men stood in the corridor, facing one another as they talked. One was a Watchman in a polished breastplate, tall and wide enough to almost completely eclipse his colleague. He was the fat captain she’d seen stealing from the dead priest. The other was slight and dapper, his hair thick and fluffy above a high forehead. He wore no armour, just expensive-looking clothes and a smart, short cloak.

  The Watch captain had a ring of keys on his belt. “I put it in here,” he said apologetically, “for safe keeping. No-one else knows.” The captain opened the door for his visitor.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” said the other man. They stepped into the office, and the door closed.

  As soon as they were out of view, Giulia opened the trapdoor and climbed back down the ladder. She crept past the office door, almost on all fours.

  She glanced into the practice room. The Watchman lay flat out on the floor. The training dummy stood over him, as though it had bested him in combat.

  As she reached the head of the staircase, the voices jumped up a notch. Giulia hurried down the steps. The office door clattered open. “It must be here!” the captain said, and she ran downstairs.

  In the hallway above her, they were arguing.

  “—no need for that. I’ll tell my men,” the Watch captain said.

  “Whatever it takes. Just get the bloody thing back!”

  Giulia slipped through the doorway and was back in the room where she’d met Falsi. She walked to the window and opened the shutters.

  She climbed onto the windowsill, turned and lowered herself down until she dangled from her hands. Giulia dropped the last few feet and landed neatly in the street below. She ran down the alleyway, and the shadows swallowed her up.

  ***

  The inn was busy when she returned. People crowded round the rat pit, calling out and laying bets. A trader swept a heap of coins into a bag. Giulia slipped past a thuggish man carrying a wounded dog as gently as a baby. “Damn thing turned cur on him,” someone said to her left, and a woman laughed, her voice full of drink. Giulia picked her way through the bar and went upstairs.

  Hugh sat in his room, dozing. As she stepped into the doorway his eyes flicked open, as if she had snagged a tripwire to jolt him awake. “Hello there. How did it go?”

  “Not bad, thanks. Let’s get the others,” she added. She felt flushed with success, almost gleeful, the way she often did when a job went well. “I’ve got something to show you all. It’s been a busy night.”

  Hugh knocked on Edwin’s door. “Come in,” Edwin said. He and Elayne sat at a table in their room, playing a hand of one-and-thirty. Elayne smiled and gathered the cards up as Giulia entered, making her look both dreamy and conspiratorial.

  Giulia said, “Evening, everyone. I need to talk to you all.”

  Edwin gave Giulia his seat, and Hugh leaned against the door, in the shadow
. With four people in it, the room seemed minute.

  She felt weary. I must have had about five hours’ sleep since I got to Averrio. If that.

  “So, how’d it go?” Edwin asked.

  Elayne nodded several times. “All well in the city tonight? Did you find anything interesting?”

  “Oh, yes,” Giulia said. “But listen, we need to be careful. If we have to talk openly, we only should do it up here.”

  “I second that,” Elayne replied.

  “Giulia’s right,” Hugh said. “Can’t trust these buggers.”

  “Then it’s agreed,” Edwin said. “What did you find out, then?”

  “I went back to the Watch-house,” Giulia said, setting her bag down on the table. “I broke in and had a look around.”

  Edwin stared at her. “You mean the place where we were locked up?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Edwin leaned across the table. “Is that a good idea? If they knew you’d done that—”

  “They don’t.”

  “But if they did—”

  “Giulia here knows her stuff,” Hugh said. “If she says she got away clean, I’m sure she did.”

  “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing we should be doing,” Edwin said. He took out his pipe and examined it, as if the discussion had ended now.

  “As opposed to doing magic on a Watch lieutenant,” Giulia said. Edwin shot her a hard look. “I hate to say it,” she added, “but someone’s got to get us out of this shit, and I’m the only person who can get much done right now. The Watch played dirty with us, so we’ve got a right to play dirty with them. When the rules no longer favour the weak, the weak have a right to make new rules.”

  “That’s very profound,” Elayne said.

  “It’s not mine. I heard it in a play.”

  The sorceress leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “So then, tell us about what happened when you broke in. What did you find?”

  “First, I went downstairs, to the room next to where they kept us, and I got a look at the dead man, Father Coraldo. Somebody stabbed him, but it wasn’t being stabbed that killed him. Something ripped him up a treat.” She shook her head, remembering the torn, waxy flesh. “It wasn’t a dog, I’m sure of that. I don’t think it was a wolf, either.”