by Jordan Reece
. . . she had been a very bad girl . . .
He woke up aroused. Whether it was his or hers, he couldn’t say. There was nothing to be done about it in any case. He distracted himself by thinking about Tallo Quay, who had had something in his possession that he was going to use against Kyrad Naphates. It couldn’t have had anything to do with her admirable drive for bedsports. She had made very good points that she was not so important that the whole country would take an interest in her sexual activities, nor was there anything scandalous when her partners were all consenting adults from escort agencies. Also, it made little sense that Quay would wait several years to reveal his stories. He had been up to something else, and Hasten Jibb must have inadvertently gotten involved.
There were footsteps upon the stairs, a steady thumping from Scoth coming down to the ground floor. Jesco scooted up in bed and pulled up his knees so that his erection was not as evident. The door opened.
Scoth at home was wholly different from Scoth at work, and just as appealing in a different way. Dressed in battered work trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt, his hair was as rumpled as a wind-scathed sea. Stubble covered his cheeks and a screwdriver was protruding from his pocket. “Came to see if you were interested in eating yet. Or if you needed anything else.”
The presence under the blanket twitched. “I could do with some food. There are-”
“Plates and utensils in your bag and not to touch them,” Scoth finished. Wrapping his hands in rags, he came forward and removed those items from the suitcase. “Might be a queer breakfast, or it’s late enough to be almost lunch, I suppose. I just keep odds and ends around.”
Jesco wouldn’t expect anything different from this man. “Whatever you have will be fine.” As Scoth straightened, the screwdriver almost fell from his pocket. “What is it that you’re doing?”
“Working on some things upstairs. You want a book to read to pass the time? I can’t drive you back to the asylum yet. The roads are flooded.”
“I can’t read.”
Scoth looked at him incredulously. “I’ve seen you read street signs just fine. You mean you can’t touch the books? Just wear those gloves you have and fumble a bit to turn the pages.”
“Yes, I know my letters, but no, I can’t read a book,” Jesco explained. “It happens with those who have strong seersight. Reading the author’s words will conjure a thrall in me if they wrote with strong emotions.”
Scoth stared in amazement from him to the books. Then he shook his head and retreated to the door. “Everything in the world is a bloody menace to you.”
The money set aside for a new whirly-gig was going to have to be rerouted to The Seven Temptations. Jesco argued with the lump under the blanket and lost. It did not flag until it had reassurance that its needs came first, and it had been so long since the last visit . . . No, it really hadn’t been that long. Perhaps it was a little of Kyrad’s insatiableness still within his mind.
Breakfast arrived and it was as promised, a hodgepodge collection of odds and ends rustled up from the kitchen. Scoth thumped back upstairs as Jesco ate. Then he slid down in the bed to rest. From many recoveries from thralls, he had learned to estimate how long each would take. By tomorrow, he would be upright. Neither running nor walking fast, but he would be able to get around with no more assistance than a cane.
He was dozing when he became aware of thumping on the stairs, and his eyes stayed closed as the sound incorporated itself into a hazy dream. Then his mind roused and he woke to Scoth in the room. The detective was setting a gigantic whirly-gig upon a side table. It looked similar to a phonograph, its most notable features being a large golden horn attached at its base to a black spinner. Jesco rubbed at his eyes as Scoth fiddled around with it.
Unfolding a collapsible music rack beside the horn, he went to the bookshelves, perused the many options there, and pulled out a thick green book. That was placed upon the rack. From behind the horn came an extension of slender black tubes that stretched down to the book and joined up above it at a flat black disk. Flicking switches and repositioning the book, bringing down two metallic eyes that opened and shut, Scoth stepped back.
The pleasant voice of a man filled the room. “Autohorse Races.” The black tubes moved with mechanical clicks and opened the cover of the book. The first page was blank. Working just like real fingers, they turned it to the next where the title was repeated, followed by the author and publishing house.
“I’ve never seen one like this!” Jesco said. “Did you make it?”
“More like I just stuck a bunch of whirly-gigs together,” Scoth said, looking at it with something akin to pride. “It reads me books when I’m busy. The only thing it can’t do is fetch itself another book when it finishes the one it’s reading.”
Up the stairs Scoth went once more, and Jesco listened to the voice and the clicks of the mechanical fingers turning pages, and many thumps and crashes and taps from upstairs. The rain tapered outside the window but did not cease, and strengthened by afternoon. Every angel in the heavens was weeping upon the world, as a nurse had said when Jesco was young, and it seemed like there was a divine sadness in how the sky poured inconsolably.
It was almost evening when the phonograph came to the last page of the book. Closing it, the fingers retracted and the machine turned off. Jesco could take no more curiosity about the noise from upstairs, and some strength had come back to him. He dressed himself and stood up, wobbled yet held, and started for the door. It helped to hold on to the furniture. Halfway up the stairs he felt like he might fall, so he sat down heavily and rested his gloved hand upon a bar of the railing. The clattering stopped and Scoth appeared at the landing. Embarrassed, Jesco said, “I’ll make it.”
“Could have just called for help.” Scoth came down, wrapped his hands under Jesco’s armpits, and pulled him up step by step. Dragged into a room, Jesco was lifted to a chair.
It was a workshop filled with tables, whirly-gigs both whole and disemboweled all over them. There were tools for wood and metal along the walls, strips of horsehair in multiple colors hanging from a bar, and clusters of jars filled with nails and screws and washers on a bench. What slim light the sky was offering came down through giant skylights in the ceiling, where they caught upon strings of crystal and reflected over everything. Scoth went to a corner of the shop that was further lit by lanterns and bent down to pick up screws that had been dumped all over the floor.
“What do you do in here?” Jesco asked.
“Make a huge mess most of the time,” Scoth said as he dropped a screw in a jar. “It was my mother’s, a lot of it. She had a gift.”
“What did she do?”
“Made things. She couldn’t see a machine without wanting to improve it.” Looking to a pale blue, mechanical bird hanging from the ceiling, its beak open in a silent cry, he said, “That was hers. I hated that thing. She would put destination cards in its chest and send it flying around to find me with reminders about my chores. When I kept coming home late from school, she sent it downriver where I was larking about and had it yell at me. She’d coded her scolding to the map. I ran home real quick, my friends laughing their fool heads off.”
“She must have been young when she passed.”
“She was, and so was my father. They did almost everything together, so it was fitting that they just about died together, too. She had a weak heart, and he couldn’t keep going without her.”
“Did you never want to return to Korval to work there?”
“No. Money buys justice in little towns. It does that everywhere, but in some places, it’s much more blatant. And when money isn’t involved, well, then it just depends on the victim how much interest is going to be shown.”
“Was that what happened to your brother? Or was it a cousin?”
Scoth stopped picking up screws to give him a puzzled look. “No brothers or cousins to speak of. Why would you think that?”
“I’m sorry. It was station gossip that you
lost a brother or cousin.”
Annoyed, Scoth returned to his clean-up job. “It was Ravenhill running at the mouth over his cups, and as usual, he got it wrong.”
Thinking of Ravenhill’s insistence that a pickpocket had dragged Hasten Jibb’s body to Poisoners’ Lane, and wishing fervently that he had never brought up the gossip, Jesco said, “He’s not doing well lately, is he? He’s worked too many bad cases.”
“Nothing to do with his cases, or not much,” Scoth replied. “They don’t walk with him. Ravenhill’s lazy, they warned me when I got assigned to him. He’ll sew up a case with any thread at hand. Black thread, white thread, good thread, bad thread, he’ll use anything and figure it’s done. He was better than that once. But now . . . now he’s just wanting to get back to the card tables and a glass of gin, some fun with a prostie girl.”
“Is that why his wife left him?”
“His wife is a good woman. She knows about the prosties; she has a prostie man at a place that she visits herself. You play with your body but you leave your heart at home, that’s always been their understanding about it. And you patronize a quality establishment where you won’t be trotting home an infection on your personals. She kept up her end of it and he didn’t. Twice he gave her infections of different kinds, and there isn’t going to be a third time. She won’t be back. And all he thinks is that she’s the one being unreasonable.” Scoth put the last of the screws in the jar and set it on the workbench. He eyed Jesco warily. “Did you already know all that from your thrall on me?”
“All I saw was you going into The Seven Temptations.”
“Honest?”
“Honest. And it was nothing new to me. I’ve seen you there twice before.”
Astounded, Scoth said, “I never saw you there. Why didn’t you come over and say something?”
“We’ve admitted to being pricks. That should answer your question.”
Scoth ran his hand through his hair and made it even messier. “You could touch the things in that room and peep on myself and my whole family if it pleased you.”
“I could, but I’d rather not be in a wheelchair for weeks.”
“You could see my deepest, darkest secrets laid out in front of your eyes, experiencing them just like you were me. I thought at first that Kyrad didn’t know how much privacy she was giving up when she offered her ring, but she knew damn well. She knew and did it anyway to clear herself.”
“I sincerely doubt that your deepest, darkest secrets could be anywhere near as shocking as the things I have seen in my life.”
Turning off the lanterns one by one, Scoth said, “What do you do with all of that private information? Those are people’s souls laid bare before you.”
“All of it comes at a great cost to me. I don’t watch for entertainment, and I try to steer away from memories that aren’t relevant. And for what I do see anyway . . . I keep it to myself, the most private things. Because they are usually memories of pain, and I don’t want to tell anyone. I’m quite regularly sorry that I know them myself.”
They went downstairs, Jesco’s arm over Scoth’s shoulders, and made it to the spare bedroom without disaster. “Should we head for Ipsin?” he asked as Scoth settled him back in bed.
“Should but can’t for another two or three days. The only place I’ll be going tomorrow is to the market and on foot, and maybe the station the day after that to write a report of what we’ve learned. I’ve been to Ipsin once before and it’ll be a damn mudslide at the moment. You’re stuck here, sorry to say.” He removed the book from the phonograph and returned it to its shelf. Then he scanned the shelves for another one.
“Would it be all right if I came upstairs to watch tomorrow?” Jesco blurted.
“Sure. Wear your gloves and you can take apart the pile of clickers if you like. I want those gears inside.” He took another book from the shelf and brought it to the phonograph, though he didn’t turn it on to read.
“What are you making with them?” Jesco asked.
“A shooter, or I’m trying. Attaches to the arm, make a fist for the ignition, blasts out a projectile. Like a tiny cannon. So far I’ve just succeeded in shooting myself in the shoulder, so I can’t say that I’ll be wearing it out in the field any time soon.”
Jesco laughed and Scoth actually smiled. It was a small smile, a flash of white teeth and a sarcastic cant to his eyebrows at the shoddy workings of his invention, but it was the most that Jesco had ever seen from him. Then he went to get dinner, and brought it in upon two plates for both of them to eat together.
The next morning, Jesco got upstairs without trouble, and stripped a collection of old clicker cameras for the gears. It was not easy to do in gloves but still happy work. Afterwards, Scoth dressed his arm in a black holder with a cylinder that stretched down his forearm, and a strap that extended around his palm. He made a fist and rounds of pellets flew out to score dents into the wall. Jesco’s cheer was cut off by a yelp, Scoth ripping the shooter from his arm. The cylinder had grown very hot with each successive round and was scorching him.
There was little evidence of the thrall by the next day, Jesco tired but getting about without assistance. Scoth went to the station and returned in the evening with a furious expression. “Look at this!” he snapped, throwing down a newspaper in front of Jesco, who was sitting at the kitchen table to eat.
“I can’t,” Jesco said, and Scoth snatched it away.
“Owner of Naphates Mines is under investigation of murder,” he growled. “It was published in the Rosendrie South Press just this morning.”
Shocked, Jesco said, “But she isn’t under investigation! I cleared her. Who was the source for the article?”
“Doesn’t name the person and it’s a right piece of yellow journalism. It says that investigators went to the home of Kyrad Naphates to question her about the brutal murder of Hasten Jibb. It insinuates that he was one of her prostie boys.”
“He damn well wasn’t! That poor fellow couldn’t have faked it if he had tried. What else does it say?”
“It goes on at length about how she’s aiming for that position in Parliament and how this is going to hurt her chances. They won’t want someone accused of criminal activity, someone involved in an open investigation. It even says a seer was brought to her home! But not that you found her innocent. And here . . . here it says that the detectives on the case refused to comment. How was I supposed to comment when no journalist ever approached to ask me a thing?”
Jesco had lost his appetite. Pushing his plate aside, he said, “The source had to have been one of the escorts, but why?”
“Or a servant. She has plenty of both. Someone at that house spoke to this journalist who wrote it, Noran Gordano. He made sure to note that Parliament will be taking their vote on the liaison position next week. Do they want a criminal in their midst?” In disgust, Scoth tossed the paper into the rubbish bin.
“I wonder if the servant or escort approached the journalist and sold the story,” Jesco said. “Netted himself or herself a pretty penny and likely trounced Kyrad’s chances in the process.”
“Do you need to return to the asylum for anything, or can you go to Ipsin with me tomorrow?” Scoth asked. “I need to track down this Tallo Quay!”
Jesco paused to think of anything he could need from the asylum. “No, I’ve got my belongings with me, and I’ve already sent a portion of my pay to Isena for the month. I can go to Ipsin tomorrow.”
“Who is that? Isena?”
“My older sister. She was widowed a few years ago. I send her money.”
“Decent of you.”
“She’s all the family I have, she and her children. The rest of them believe I’m a demon’s child.”
Grumpily, Scoth sat down with his own plate of food. “I’ll take you back after Ipsin. Good to get rid of you. I eat far too regularly when you’re around.”
“How you suffer.”
“And Tammie’s back from Hooler. She said to give you a kiss, b
ut I won’t.”
“How I suffer. Saving them all for Collier? Why don’t you have a man of your own?”
“I did. He said I was married to the job and quit me. Can’t hold that against him. Why don’t you have a man?”
Jesco held up his hands. “Who would have me but a prostie? Who wants to make a partner of a man who has to live in an asylum, who can’t touch anything but flesh without gloves, who can’t even go out to eat or drink without complications?”
Scoth neither agreed nor disagreed, and changed the subject. “They’re pulling back on the Shy Sprinkler case. Nothing’s been found. The captain is taking heat about the unsolved necktie killings and wants me to focus more on those. I’m only going to finagle a few more days on Jibb before he starts coming down harder. I put him off with Ravenhill, who will be continuing that investigation for now.”
“I didn’t get called in for that case. Was a seer not needed?”
“No, those killings don’t call for a seer. I know damn well who did it but we just can’t locate him. We didn’t call you in for the Tesoola Park case either.”
“What’s that one?”
“Mother and little daughter taking a walk some time back, middle of the day, and someone or more than one someone shot them both in the back with arrows. And then pulled the arrows out and strolled away. They were killed almost instantly. No motive, no witnesses, no leads, no evidence, nothing. Just two dead bodies on the ground side by side, the mom holding the girl’s arm. That one keeps me up a lot of nights. It was like game sport for someone, but instead of hunting deer in the forest, he went to the park and hunted people.”