by Ed McDonald
If I turned left down the street I’d take a couple of turns and be at my own house. A full house, these days. A big one. I hadn’t been there in two weeks. I employed a housekeeper, and she basically lived as though she were a wealthy, unloved mistress. Turning right took me back to the office. It was past eleven, which was early to finish drinking, but late enough given the time I’d started. My earlier fug had started to clear and I felt tired. The big bed in the house would be cold, empty, and I doubted the housekeeper kept a bedpan warming it. The office would be warm. The decision wasn’t difficult.
I made my way up the stairs with all the stealth that a drunk, three-hundred-pound man can manage. I didn’t fancy the smell of the whale-oil lamps so I lit candles instead, a warmer kind of glow. Maldon had already left a list on my desk. He hadn’t wasted any time making his demands: copper wiring, canisters, wood, brass pipes. Sets of workman’s tools, a pair of the crystal-lensed goggles that Talents wore, the components of a small forge, and a dozen rifled barrels. None of it was especially hard to come by, but rifled barrels were damn expensive, and I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of Maldon’s building a forge underneath my office, not with the amount of wine he was getting through. I sighed and rubbed my aching, dry eyes. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was trying to put together a new light loom or something similar, but when Shavada had been forced into his mind, his light-spinning abilities had been taken. We didn’t know why. The drudge couldn’t spin light any more than our sorcerers could use mind-worms. Perhaps an affinity to light cannot coexist with that much darkness. Who knew? Maldon was the only Spinner ever to have been forced into that situation.
My crazed not-a-child’s shopping list was not exactly ideal. I’d get him what he wanted, if it kept him out of trouble, but decided he’d have to set it up at my house. That showed where my priorities lay, because I wasn’t going to risk the office. I wrote a note to my accountant instructing him to release funds to reputable craftsmen for the required amounts. At least if Maldon had something to work on, it might keep him from trying to kill himself.
I yawned. Not as young as I once was, and a day of pounding up stairs and hard drinking will sap anyone’s grit. I clattered myself out of my armour, making an awful racket.
I knew about two of Maldon’s failed attempts. I didn’t know how many he’d made. Once, he’d hanged himself from the cellar’s rafters, but the fall hadn’t been long enough to snap his neck and he’d discovered that he didn’t really need to breathe. He’d been livid with frustration and boredom by the time I cut him down. The second time he’d slashed his wrists and bled all over my bathroom, but I was confident that he knew he would survive that one, no matter how much blood had stained my towels. It wasn’t much of a life, a never-ending childhood, eyeless and deformed, stripped of the vast powers he had once commanded. Letting him have a project was the least I could do.
‘I didn’t expect you back tonight,’ Valiya said from the doorway. ‘Care to make any more noise?’
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said. I was still half-abuzz with the drink, and now keenly aware of the dried sweat that coated me, the less-than-delicate bouquet that probably now filled the room. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Working,’ she said, then relented. ‘Amaira wanted to sleep in the kitchen again. She’s lonely here. I read to her.’
‘She has a room at my house,’ I said. ‘She just doesn’t use it, for some reason.’
‘And you don’t see why she chooses to be here, instead of a cold and empty house?’
I ignored the question.
‘She’s too young to be running around here all night. I should send her somewhere that provides a future.’
Valiya gave me an admonishing look. No matter how high you are in life, a woman can always give you that same disapproving look and make you want to improve. It is in such looks that life is given meaning.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, Ryhalt Galharrow. I am very fond of that girl, and I will be furious with you if you dismiss her. Especially if you do it when you’re all the way drunk. When did you last sleep?’ she asked. ‘Your eyes are redder than Rioque.’
‘My eyes can rest when I’m dead,’ I said. The drink was making me surly.
‘That all sounds very tough, but you’re no use to anyone if you collapse from exhaustion.’
It was even more annoying when people came along with facts, especially when you didn’t want them to be true.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t be curt. Strange day.’
‘Have you eaten anything?’ Valiya asked.
I felt momentarily embarrassed, but drunkenness is stronger than shame.
‘It’s pretty late for us to go out for dinner,’ I said.
I realised Valiya looked tired too, hollow shadows beneath her eyes. But there was a light blush to her cheeks that I hadn’t expected. She hid it behind a fall of auburn hair that fell across her face.
‘I’m not inviting you for dinner, you arsehole,’ she said primly. ‘You need food. And sleep. You’re no use when you’re dead on your feet. Come on.’
I didn’t get up. She was right. I was so damn tired. Everything felt distant, as though I were viewing it through a spy tube that made everything small and dim. She reached out a hand and helped pull me up out of my chair.
‘Go and wait in the mess hall,’ she said. I did as she bid.
Time passes strangely when you don’t sleep. Minutes slip away without being noticed, suddenly an hour might be gone and you’re standing in the same place, staring into nothingness. At those times I wonder if I was sleeping or if I’d simply lost my capacity for thought. Where do you go when that happens? We accept that when we sleep we retreat from the world, but what happens when we’re neither? I could have been sitting in the dining-room chair for a few minutes or it could have been an hour. I had no way to judge.
Valiya appeared. She brought a tray loaded with the kind of comfort food you make for a dying relative. And tea, awful green tea. I didn’t complain about any of it. It wasn’t Valiya’s job to feed me. Shouldn’t have been, anyway.
I ate and I talked. I told her about Devlen Maille and Marollo Nacomo, and about Saravor. I told her things that I’d never told anybody before, about confronting a Darling before the doorway to the heart of Nall’s Engine, about the hold that Saravor had had on me, and how I’d bought him off.
‘Saravor is the one that fixed Major Nenn, when she was wounded at Station Twelve, isn’t he?’ Valiya asked gently. I nodded. ‘She’s not in any danger from him. If he’s fixing men in exchange for their service – or making deals with him – then he has no hold over her.’
I hoped that was true. I buried the fear for now. I’d been afraid enough for one day.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But there’s more. Maldon said Shavada’s Eye had passed through Nacomo’s house. That means that Saravor is the one who took it. It makes sense. He’s more powerful than any regular sorcerer, because I gave him that power. And he’s used it to take possession of another part of Shavada.’
Valiya ran her fingers over the flowers tattooed along her forearms. Thoughtful.
‘What can he do with it? Barter it back to the Darlings in the Misery?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Saravor was always mad for power. It’s the only thing he truly wanted. If he has it, then the question is, what does he plan to do with it?’
11
After the Siege of Valengrad, there had been a rumour that Saravor was dead. It had seemed reasonable. He’d undergone a terrible battle with Maldon, the Darling as he then was, before vanishing with a sliver of Shavada’s power. Mortal creatures aren’t supposed to hold that kind of magic. When Shavada was destroyed, I’d hoped his magic would die with him. I’d tried to take steps to ensure Saravor could never use it, but he’d slipped away before I could get to him.
; I’d hoped that he had died during the Siege. Failing that, that he’d fled, never to return. Both hopes now seemed to be worth about as much as a paper helmet.
I felt a powerful urge to check on Nenn. Her boys were all on post-Misery rest, which they always got after a long spell on the sand, so I rode across to her place, tied Falcon up in the rose garden and rang the bell. Nenn answered it herself wearing a towel, her nose, and nothing else. An early-rising neighbour appeared to be scoffing at the outrageous lack of decorum, but in truth he was probably taking in her largely unconcealed and well-muscled legs.
‘Get a good look, you perverted old fart!’ she called. She held the door open for me, then flashed him her arse. She was laughing as we adjourned to the parlour.
‘You’re in a good mood,’ I said.
‘It’s a good day,’ she said. She stretched, raising the rim of the towel well past decency. Nenn had given very few fucks for propriety before her elevation in status. Now she had abandoned any pretence at giving any, but this was a particularly blatant display, even for her. ‘You want some breakfast? I’ve a bottle of twelve-year-old whisky around here somewhere.’
It was tempting, but not what was on my mind. I was about to say something when I heard a noise from an adjacent room.
‘Servants?’ I asked. Tense.
‘Probably some around here somewhere. But that’s just Betch getting cleaned up. Poor guy’s scratched to shit.’ She looked at her nails and grinned. She was not a gentle lover, and she revelled in the power that Betch’s desire for her gave her. Nenn hadn’t always had it easy. Now she’d found a man who made her feel beautiful. An important thing, that. In typical Nenn style, she wanted to show it off to the world. Or show the rest of the world what it was missing out on, anyway.
‘There’s food too,’ she said.
‘No. I need your help with something. But first, how’s your stomach these days?’
Nenn frowned at me.
‘I haven’t eaten anything bad, if that’s what you mean.’
‘No. Your gut. The one I paid Saravor top marks for. How is it?’
She shrugged.
‘It never felt totally right. Not like what I had there before. And I never stop wanting to eat chillies, though I have to when Betch is around or I get the juice on my fingers, and then it gets, well, you know.’
I really didn’t want to know.
‘It’s not still hurting? Hasn’t made you feel like, I don’t know, going shooting people? Nothing like that?’
‘I always want to shoot people,’ Nenn said. She uncorked the bottle of what I guessed was the twelve-year-old whisky, poured herself a dash of amber.
‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘Just one. But then we have work to do. I have this feeling that Saravor might be back in town, and if he is, it’s time that he left again. In a casket. Preferably in pieces.’
Nenn gave me one of her old, slice-’em-open grins. She knew I only asked her to help out with the kind of work she enjoyed.
‘Fine. But I need ten minutes.’
‘I’ll wait here.’
She shrugged.
‘Suit yourself. But I bet you end up waiting outside.’
She slipped back into the bedroom, and after the first few energetic noises I did indeed prefer to wait outside.
We rode into the Spills at the head of two dozen men. I can’t deny it felt good.
The Grandspire cast a long shadow across the Spills. High above, through open windows and unfinished walls I could make out tiny figures at work, laying bricks, planks, or bearing loads of steel cabling or delicate glass tubes for lighting. Nacomo had been a temporary bump in the production and nothing more.
By day the Spills looked worse than it did at night. Darkness is an amicable companion to ugliness, and the Spills was as ugly as the city got. Public services still weren’t what they’d been, and they’d not been up to much in the Spills to begin with. Garbage and sewage coexisted peacefully in potholes and gutters, the rats were trying to outgrow the dogs, and there were people everywhere. New arrivals, looking for work and finding it, and a lot of yellow-hoods about. Everyone scattered away from the snarls of black-uniformed soldiers.
We turned a corner, and there it was. It was four years since I’d been back here. Hadn’t had a reason to, and I didn’t know what I expected to find here now. Nothing, probably.
I had tried to kill Saravor, following the Siege. The only time in my life that I’ve tried to murder a man. Saravor deserved it, nobody would argue against it, but I wasn’t a murderer. I’d sent men – twenty grenadiers, big men with nasty grins – with orders to shoot first and keep shooting until there was nothing left of him. The sliver of Shavada’s power he’d taken was a bite too much for any man to possess. But my killers had found nothing but an empty house. Saravor had not stuck it out in Valengrad when the Siege came.
Now, we were back with twenty of Nenn’s Ducks, and I’d even managed to borrow two Battle Spinners from Marshal Davandein. The Ducks – a name that Nenn had given her men in mockery of Davandein’s Drakes, who thought themselves a cut above – were about as hard-nosed as they came while the Spinners seemed young and arrogant. I didn’t like them.
The big old town house was much the same as ever. The shutters hung loose on their hinges and the whole place sagged inwards like some kind of dark, withered old grandmother, slumped and defeated in a chair. We reined in outside.
‘You notice anything strange about this street?’ I asked.
‘There’s less shit in the road than I’d expect in the Spills,’ Nenn said. She was eyeing the big old house with some trepidation. Maybe I’d been wrong to bring her. This place couldn’t harbour many pleasant memories.
‘Yes. It’s too quiet.’
I tried the door. Gave it a few solid thumps. Waited. I half expected one of those grey-skinned children to open it, but my knocking went unanswered.
‘You really think he came back?’ Nenn asked.
‘It all fits,’ I said, and gave the door another good thump. Nothing. ‘Break it down,’ I said.
One of the grenadiers took an axe to the door and it fell into planks without much effort. The soldiers flowed in quickly, pistols cocked and smoking. Nenn and I came last.
The house had a grim, deserted feel to it. Mould had blackened the walls, puddles had gathered in the corners and a quick tour of the place showed that the old shelves, once filled with jars of fingers, noses, feet and eyeballs in preserving fluids, were gone. It even smelled empty. The Eye had not been brought here.
‘I nearly died in this room,’ Nenn said. It was a small, cramped little box room, much like many of the others. The bed she’d lain in was gone, and the air was chill.
‘There were a bunch of rooms you nearly died in,’ I said.
‘Do you ever regret dealing with him?’
‘Stupid question,’ I said. ‘Not for a moment.’
‘Do you think they can ever be good people? Fixers, I mean.’
‘I don’t know. Are there even any others like Saravor?’
Nenn shivered, and I don’t think it was the cool air that caused it.
‘I wonder, sometimes. Wonder whose guts I have inside me. He pulled the damaged ones out, the ones the drudge blade cut. Put in new ones, then sealed me up like he was patching a coat. You know what the worst thing was?’
‘It all sounds pretty bad.’
‘I was awake the whole time,’ she said. ‘I could feel it all. He immobilised me, but I felt the cuts. Felt him slicing pieces of me out.’
‘You’re alive. That’s what matters.’
‘I guess.’
The grenadiers finished their sweep.
‘Nothing, Major Nenn,’ the sergeant reported. ‘Nobody’s been here for a while. Maybe years.’ She dismissed her Ducks, let them fall out.
The place gave me t
he shivers. We left through the remains of the front door, mounted up and rode to the nearest place that would serve us a stiff drink. It was an open-fronted shop calling itself a wine seller, which took some nerve given the watered-down crap they were serving. Still. A drink’s a drink.
‘Waste of a morning,’ Nenn said. She stretched her bare arms and clicked her neck. ‘Plenty I could have been getting done instead. The citadel want me to take on some lads from the south country, green as grass and not even as tall.’
‘Good Fixers,’ I said, harking back to our earlier conversation. ‘Why did you ask that?’ Nenn hesitated, her eyes turning to a smoulder all of a sudden. She turned them on a couple of Spills locals who’d stopped to gawk at the two well-dressed folks sitting in this shit heap. We were probably scaring away other customers, but besides a table of Bright Order, the place hadn’t exactly been heaving when we arrived.
‘I think about it sometimes, all right?’
‘About what?’
‘What do you fucking think?’ she snapped. ‘People call me “Noseless,” Ryhalt. You think I like that? You think that’s what I want?’
‘You don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks,’ I said. ‘And your man Betch likes you well enough.’
‘Well. Maybe. Sometimes I wonder if it’s me he likes, or if I’m a way for him to climb the ladder. I appreciate the fucking, don’t get me wrong, but it seems strange that he’d choose me, missing half a face. Lots of prettier girls out there. Not hard to be prettier if you’ve got a nose.’
‘He doesn’t care. Likes you fine as you are.’
‘Nobody likes me as I am,’ Nenn snapped, voice cracking like a whip. ‘Not even me. I look at scarred men and it doesn’t get me tingly. It makes me turn away. I hide it under this wooden thing, but whenever I’m with Betch, the fear is there. The fear that really, he’s repulsed. That he doesn’t want to have to look at me.’