Hale, Ginn

by Wicked Gentleman (lit)

"None," Harper replied. "To be honest, I don't even know that we're following the right trail to find Joan. But I can't just let these killings go on."

  "It all seems too interlaced for your sister not to be somewhere in it," I commented.

  "Perhaps."

  There was something in the way Harper said the word that caught my attention. I wasn't sure if it was his tone or the word itself, but it reminded me of the night when we had first met and I had thought that Harper knew more than he was saying. I tried to study him, but the brilliant morning light burned at the fine details of his expression as well as the subtle scents that might have drifted off his lips. Some nights, if I concentrated, I could taste lies in the cool air.

  This morning, all I had was a feeling of unease. I knew little about Harper, less about his abducted sister. The fact that she was abducted, while other members of Good Commons had been out-rightly murdered, should have meant something. Yet I couldn't figure it out. There was something, a simple word, a small fact, that kept the matter from making sense.

  I wondered if that word had been on Harper's lips when he held it back and offered me an oblique "perhaps."

  I doubted that Harper was the only person who knew. I re-called the Prodigal girl's cracked eyes, her bleeding tears, and the smell of her. It was a horrific scent in comparison to the perfumes that had lingered on Joan Talbott's letters. Her hair had looked like it had been hacked off in a blind fury. Her clothes had been filthy ruins. I knew she hadn't burned Edward's house for nothing. She had known something about the murders and about Joan Talbott.

  "So, will you go?" Harper asked, and I realized that I had not been listening to him.

  "Where?" I asked, though it annoyed me to be caught so obviously adrift in my own thoughts.

  "To Scott-Beck's office." Harper scowled at me. "You weren't listening at all, were you?"

  "I was," I lied. "I just wanted to be sure."

  "It wouldn't seem suspicious if a Prodigal like yourself were to ask some advice of his legal firm. It would be much simpler than convincing my abbot to give me a warrant for search. He doesn't believe that any of the Good Commons murders are worth our time." Harper frowned at his cup. "Some days I don't even know why I bother going in."

  "The pay?" I offered.

  Harper laughed at the suggestion.

  "If I had joined the priesthood for money," Harper said, "I would have chosen one of the Golden orders, not the Inquisition."

  I squinted at Harper through my dark spectacles, blurring his image. Most of the Bankers I had seen were soft pillows of men. They traveled in chubby little clusters like summer clouds drifting across the sky. I tried to imagine Harper dressed in the white robes of a Banker, his light hair forming a thin halo around shaved dome of his head. The image didn't hold beyond a moment's amusement.

  I couldn't alter him, not even in my own mind. His lean body cut a hard, dark form against the light. He was a jarring blackness set against the white walls and polished elm of his home. Harper looked out of place even here in his own house.

  It shouldn't have been important, but I knew Harper was keeping something from me. He seemed to be keeping something from the entire world. Even handling his own dishes, he wore gloves.

  What was it that Harper wanted to hide so badly that he wouldn't even reveal himself in his own home? There were no personal photographs or paintings on the walls. There were no telling details, no books or childhood keepsakes, anywhere that I could see.

  The only thing in the room that expressed Harper's presence was his own body. I stared into his brown eyes and wondered who he truly was. Harper stared back at me.

  "I've lost you again, haven't I?" he asked.

  "No," I replied. "I was just thinking that you haven't actually told me much about either yourself or your sister."

  "There really isn't anything to tell." Harper stood up. "We ought to be on our way. I'd like to get you in to see Scott-Beck as soon as possible."

  "That was a quick change of subject." I slowly pulled myself up from the chair.

  "I'm too tired to be clever about it," Harper replied.

  "Will you let me see your hands?" I asked.

  "What?"

  "Your hands." I pointed. "The things under the gloves. I'd like to see them."

  "Why?"

  "Because you want to hide them." I shrugged. "It's just the sort of person I am."

  "You've already seen my hands." Harper lowered his voice, as if someone else might overhear us. "And a lot more of me."

  "Then what's the harm in showing me again?" I asked.

  "Why is it suddenly so important?" Harper asked.

  "Your hands themselves aren't," I said. "Whether you show them to me or not, is."

  "It's some kind of test?" Harper asked.

  "Perhaps." I enjoyed using Harper's own word, though he didn't seem to note it.

  Harper shook his head but went ahead and pulled off his gloves. He held his bare hands out in front of me. I studied them.

  Very little about Harper seemed holy, but his hands were those of a saint. Pale and utterly flawless, they could have been cut from pearls. His long fingers stretched out in graceful curves. They were like virgin bodies, utterly untouched, even by the sun.

  The urge to drag one of my black nails across the back of Harper's hand brushed through my thoughts. When I reached out and carefully touched one of Harper's fingers, I almost expected to see a dirty yellow stain left behind, but the skin remained flawless. I placed my palm against Harper's. His skin was warm and soft. I couldn't feel a single callus.

  I glanced up to see his expression. He stared at me intently, waiting for my appraisal.

  "Perfect." The word slipped out from me.

  A smile flickered across Harper's lips. Gently, he slid his fingers down against my palm. He stroked the tender curve of my wrists and then curled his fingers up against mine. The lightness of his touch sent a shiver through my arms, and I caught another of his quick smiles.

  "Your hands are perfect. Why would you want to wear gloves?" I asked, trying to draw my concentration away from the sensation of Harper's hands stroking mine.

  "I don't know," Harper said. "My father always did."

  "Did your stepfather wear them also?"

  If I had wanted to catch Harper off guard, I couldn't have chosen a better way. For one brief moment he simply stood, frozen in place, looking as if I had sent an electric shock through him.

  "I actually meant my stepfather," Harper said. "But how did you find out about him?"

  "A friend mentioned him to me." I let Harper draw his hands back from mine without comment. When just our hands had touched, there had been an openness between us. We shared the honesty of simple physical pleasure. Sensation alone was easy to accept. It asked nothing. Once even a single question was raised between us, any illusion of trust fell away.

  "Did your friend mention anything in particular about him?" Harper picked his gloves up from the tabletop.

  "No. Should he have?"

  "No," Harper replied firmly.

  I had the distinct feeling that the conversation was at an end.

  "It's time to go see Mr. Scott-Beck." Harper pulled the gloves over his hands and flexed his fingers against the black leather. His open palm closed again into the black fist of an Inquisitor.

  Chapter Ten

  Five flours

  Of course, I couldn't just see Mr. Scott-Beck. Not without a reference. I had to wait until he had an opening between his regular appointments. I slumped on a green loveseat in his waiting room. Other Prodigals passed me on the way in and then back out from their appointments. The wall clock chimed out a popular tune every half hour, and steadily I grew to hate it. I had nothing to do but wait and brood over the disassembly of that happy little clock.

  I hoped that Harper was as bored as well, but I doubted it. He had decided to wait for me in the teahouse across from Scott-Beck's office building. When I looked out the window, I caught sight of him. He was talk
ing to some blonde waiter. I frowned down at them for several minutes, then returned to my seat.

  In the full face of boredom, I longed to drag up some scent of terror or bloodshed. For the first two hours my anticipation of danger kept me nervous and wary. I watched every movement of the secretary, every exchanged greeting and goodbye, as if it were a prelude to murder. But steadily, as I witnessed the flow of Prodigal after Prodigal through the firm's doors, my excitement waned into reason.

  The fact that all of the murdered members of Good Commons had gone to this particular firm seemed damning until I realized that almost every living Prodigal seemed to use this firm. I wasn't even sure that any other legal office offered services for Prodigals. People came for dozens of different reasons. Some had wills, others needed contracts notarized, while still others were clearly criminal. I imagined that most of the population of Hells Below had come and gone through the firm's doors.

  The clock on the wall rang out its sweet, happy melody, announcing yet another hour of my life wasted in this room. The waiting room exuded benign tedium. The chairs and loveseats were spread out in a loose circle along the walls, allowing clients just enough distance from each other to keep them quiet. A set of pallid watercolors hung on either side of the window, and on the wall behind me there was the incessant tick of the wall clock. The place exuded the palpable sensation of devouring hours that I would have rather spent doing almost anything else.

  I gazed out the window. The blonde waiter was at Harper's table again. I couldn't see the waiter's face, but Harper gave him a slow, deep smile that made me think he must have been attractive. Fleetingly, I wished I had a rock to hurl at him.

  I turned to the only other person in the waiting room with me at the moment. The office secretary looked back at me with all the charm of a halibut. I tried to study him with interest, imagining that somewhere behind his murky green eyes there might be the flicker of dark murderous longing. The secretary blinked and then returned to sorting the stacks of paper on his desk. His only deep desire seemed to be for proper filing.

  No matter who came through the door, the secretary seemed to have a form for him to fill out. I had completed mine in the first minute of entering the room by simply leaving the questions unanswered and printing my name at the top of the page in the kind of deformed, clumsy script that screamed of illiteracy.

  At the time, I had thought I was clever for so deftly eluding the paperwork, but now I regretted it. At least filling the form out would have used up a little of the empty time I now had.

  I might have been able to amuse myself by writing in deliberately obtuse answers and a few outright lies. Instead I jabbed quietly at the cushion of the loveseat with my hard, black fingernail, slowly gouging my initials into it.

  When the clock chimed out its bright little tune for the tenth time, I realized with annoyance that I had the song memorized. At his desk, still sorting papers, the secretary hummed the tune aloud without seeming aware of it. I clawed at the loveseat with a little more force.

  A man and wife came in together, both dressed in their church best. They eyed my attack on the loveseat and then seated themselves as far from me as possible. They peered at me but looked away before I might make eye contact. The secretary brought them a sheaf of papers to fill out. The couple complained about the trouble all this was and how it didn't seem right that they, who were the wronged party, ought to have to do so much. The secretary apologized without much feeling and then drifted back to his desk.

  Every few minutes the husband or the wife stole a glance in my direction. They obviously believed themselves innocent in whatever legal matter had brought them to this office. I, on the other hand, clearly had the look of a hardened criminal of some kind. I heard the soft whispers of their speculations.

  I leered at them and they pressed closer to each other, ignoring me with all their concentration.

  "Sykes?" A middle-aged man called out from the door just past the secretary's desk. "Belahhh...Is there a Mr. Sykes here?" he asked, unable to make out the brutish scribble that I had given as my first name.

  "Here." I stood and went to the man.

  He was shorter than me by a few inches, but heavier. His shoulders and chest bowed outward in a thick mix of muscle and fat that reminded me of a bulldog. His animal physique looked odd packed into such an elegant suit. The image he cut was almost amusing, except that I got the distinct idea that the man could snap me in half if I laughed at him. Powerful men could dress however they liked.

  A smell on him burned at my nostrils. It bothered me, but I couldn't pick it out from beneath the thick waves of cologne that hung around him like mosquito netting. As he shook my hand with a firm military grip, I noticed that two of his fingers were bandaged.

  "Cats," he explained, though I hadn't asked. "I'm Lewis Brown,

  Mr. Scott-Beck's partner. I've gotten through all of my appointments today, so Albert asked me if I could run you through the first interview." His voice was slightly too loud and, like his handshake, too assured to be natural.

  "Thank you," I said when I realized that he was waiting for as much. I smiled to make up for my belated response. The only thing that truly pleased me was the prospect of escaping the waiting room before that clock went off again.

  "Come along." Brown turned hard on his heel and strode back through the doorway. I followed him through, then up a steep flight of stairs. He moved quickly, as if reaching the top of the staircase was a venture to be relished with healthy enthusiasm. I lagged behind.

  "I had a late night," I said after Brown turned and noticed that I was still several feet below him. "I'm still a little tired."

  "You work nights, do you?" Brown placed both his thick hands on his hips and looked down at me from the top of the stairs.

  "No, I was up with a girl." It pleased me to mislead Brown while telling him the truth. I reached the top of the stairs and followed Brown into his office. The room was large but filled with shelves of record books. Brown's desk was near the one window in the room. Late afternoon sun poured in between the curtains. I sat down across from Brown and shifted the chair so that I wasn't staring straight into the light.

  "Well, let's begin with these questions first." Brown set the unanswered form with my scribbled name at the top down on his desk.

  "Very well." I smiled to cover my lack of enthusiasm. The burning scent that had clung on Brown's gray suit seemed now to be drifting out from some corner of the room.

  "Your full name," Brown said.

  "Belimai Sykes," I replied, still half-lost attempting to recognize the smell.

  "No middle name?" Brown asked.

  "What? Oh, yes. Rimmon." The scent was distinctly coming from above the bookshelves. At first it almost smelled like rosewater, but the longer I remained in the room, the more I began to pick up sharp, searing undercurrents.

  "Rimmon." Brown paused after he had written my name in on the form. "I assume that's your lineage name."

  "I suppose." I forced myself to turn my attention back to Brown.

  "Now let me see..." Brown thumped the back of his pen lightly against his chin. For a moment he looked as if he was reading from some text at the center of his empty desk. "Clothed in the darkness he came beside Sariel, his body white as the lightning, his voice a terrible thunder, and he was called Rimmon, and he too knelt before the cross..."

  I just looked at Brown.

  "Book of Prodigals," he said. "It's a hobby of mine, keeping genealogies of all those fallen princes. It's very telling, you know."

  "Is it?" I wasn't really sure of what else to say. If I had had a genuine legal problem, I might have been annoyed by this digression. As it was, I thought it might be better than filling out the form. I let Brown go on.

  "Yes, indeed. You may think that genealogy has little importance in this modern age, but many Prodigals still carry traits of their ancestors in one form or another." Brown looked me over for a moment. "You, for example, I would guess are one of tho
se rarities, a flyer. You have a strong affinity for the air, either moving through it or smelling and tasting it." Brown made several marks on the form. "I'd also guess that you're pretty solitary, even among your own."

  "All that from just a name?" I asked, neither acknowledging nor refuting the description.

  "From just the name," Brown assured me with a look of pride. "Of course, there are well over a hundred names and attributes to keep straight in your head. I know most of the higher demons, but it's Albert who has all of them memorized perfectly."

  "Mr. Scott-Beck?"

  "Yes. The man has the memory of a mastodon." Brown turned back to the form. "Family?" he asked just as I had again begun to draw in curious tastes of the air in the office.

  "No," I replied.

  "None?" Brown seemed unable to credit this. "Certainly you have parents?"

  "Both dead."

  "Oh. Was it the Inquisition?" Brown asked with an unnatural gentleness in his voice. I could imagine him practicing that tone at night while flipping through the evening paper.

  "No," I replied, though it was half a lie. "My father was killed after a mine collapse." The explanation had been my mother's way of lifting the criminal nature out of my father's execution for sabotaging the Wellton mining company. "My mother drowned during the sewer floods twelve years ago."

  "And you have no one else?" Brown pressed.

  "May I ask why you need to know?" I didn't mean to sound irritated, but the elusive smell in the room and the memory of my mother's bloated dead body had twisted into a single presence. Repulsion and sorrow for a moment made me wish to just get up and leave the room. I held my breath against the smell in the air and the feeling passed.

  "We need someone to contact in case you're summoned to court and we can't find you," Brown explained.

  "I see." I frowned. "I can't think of anyone. You'd just have to leave a word at my residence."

  "And where is that?" Brown skipped down several spaces on the form.

  "For now, the Good Commons Boarding House, in Hells Beow." I watched Brown carefully as I gave my answer.

  "Good Commons." He smiled just slightly at the corners of his mouth as he wrote the name. "Yes, I believe I know where that is." He didn't pause long enough to take a breath before asking, "So, do you already have a criminal record?"