by Peter McLean
It was quiet down by the water, and as we drew closer we could hear the great wooden wheels themselves turning on their axles, groaning rhythmically to themselves. Scummy white froth drifted downstream toward us where the river had been churned up by the movement, and in places I could see things floating in it. Turds, mostly, but there was the odd dead rat.
We were in the Wheels, all right.
“Keep your eyes open,” I said quietly, “and don’t draw attention.”
I could feel eyes on me like the flies on a hot Abingon night, making my skin crawl. There were high buildings on our left, their damp timber flanks rearing above the path and keeping us in shadow. Across the water to the east was nothing. It was just open marshland stretching into the distance. The river formed the fourth wall of Ellinburg, and they would be desperate raiders indeed who tried to cross the marshes, and then that wide expanse of flowing filth.
“Someone’s watching us,” Anne said.
“I know,” I murmured. “Someone always is, in the Wheels. It’s probably just children.”
It probably was, but even children are dangerous if there are enough of them and they’re armed. I didn’t know how many there were, but they would be armed all right. You could bet on that, in the Wheels. The path ended in a sheer drop down to rotting wooden pilings that had once supported a jetty, but on the left there was a cobbled alley leading up between two buildings. About twenty feet ahead of us the first of the great wheels was turning and groaning.
“There’s folk up there,” Anne said.
I turned and looked up the alley toward Dock Road, where three cloaked figures were hiding in the shadows at the top in a way that said murder as loud as if they had been shouting it.
“Stinkers and Wheelers don’t get on,” I explained. “We didn’t come along the riverbank for the fresh air. Going through the streets wouldn’t have been good for our health. I don’t think those fine fellows know who we are, but they’re giving us the hard eye just because of which direction we’ve come from. The river path is all right, though, usually—Old Kurt insists there’s free access to his door for everyone, wherever they’re from.”
“And these Wheelers listen to him, do they?”
“Yes, Anne, they do, and more to the point so do the Gutcutters. Old Kurt is . . . well, I told you that people call him a cunning man. He’s that all right, in both senses of the word. He knows how to win respect and get his own way, and I admire that. Whether he knows how to do magic, though, that’s another matter.”
“I don’t want him to do magic,” Anne said, somewhat sharply. “I just want him to tell us about it.”
“Aye, well, he can do that,” I said. “Some of what he says might even be true, I wouldn’t know.”
I led the way into the alley, keeping my eyes on the fellows at the far end. Halfway along the narrow cobbled space, set into the side of an otherwise blank brick wall, was Old Kurt’s door.
The building he lived in had been a workshop of some sort once, but many years ago Old Kurt had paid my da to brick the frontage up for him and seal it off from the street. He’d had Da bash a hole through the alley wall and make a new entrance there instead, so that Wheelers and Stinkers alike might have access to his door without having to fight their way there.
That was how I had first met him: as a ten-year-old ’prentice boy mixing lime mortar in this alley for Da and trying not to get my head kicked in while I was doing it. Kurt had made a point of picking a Stink man to do the work instead of a Wheeler, although that had caused some hard words at the time.
Kurt had been old even then, or had looked it to my young eyes anyway, and I had over thirty years to me now. Old Kurt was still there, though; I could tell that from the rat that was nailed to the outside of his front door.
He always nailed a fresh rat to his door every fifth day, and this one didn’t look to be more than two or three days old. As to why he did it, well, I supposed that was his business, but it told folk he was still alive if nothing else.
I rapped loudly on the door and called out the words.
“Wisdom sought is wisdom bought, and I have coin to pay,” I said loudly.
A moment later the door creaked open and Old Kurt’s face peered out at me from the shadows inside.
“You’d better have, Tomas Piety,” he said. “Oh, and this fine lady too! Welcome, welcome. Come you in, and mind your heads.”
I looked at Bloody Anne with her scar and her daggers and her stained, dirty men’s clothes, and wondered if Old Kurt had ever seen a fine lady in his life. Probably not, I thought. We followed Kurt into his house, which was dimly lit with lamps on account of most of the windows having been boarded up. The place was squalid and it stank, but there were treasures in there too. Odd things, things you wouldn’t necessarily notice if you didn’t know to look for them.
The sword hanging over the mantel, its scabbard thick with cobwebs, had once belonged to a king. The skull on the windowsill, the one with its temple bashed in, had supposedly belonged to the same king. That brass candlestick with dried crusty tallow all over it was really solid gold. Or so Old Kurt had told me when I was a boy, anyway.
I smiled at the memories. He was a horrible old man with a house full of shit, to my mind, but he had been the one who had chased those Wheeler boys off me while I had been mixing my mortar in the alley outside. Not my da, Old Kurt had done that. Da had thought fighting was good for a boy, that it made a man of him. Although considering what went on in our house at nights I’d have thought that was the last thing Da wanted. I didn’t want to think about that now, though. Not ever.
At that time I had only had ten years to me and there had been three boys, and all of them old enough to shave, but Da hadn’t stirred himself while Kurt chased them away. I had told Anne that Old Kurt and me weren’t friends and that was true enough, but I would always have time for him, for that.
He took his chair by the fireplace and waved us to a pair of rickety stools.
Kurt must have had almost eighty years to him, by my reckoning, but he still looked the same as I remembered him from when I had been a boy. He was a narrow, spare man, his pointed face and whiskered chin making him look much like the rat nailed to his door. His thin white hair was short but dirty, pushed up in all directions by his darting, ratty hands.
“Show me your silver and tell me your troubles, Tomas,” Kurt said.
I looked at Bloody Anne.
“This is your question, not mine,” I said to her. “It’ll be your silver that buys an answer to it.”
She took a mark out of her pouch and put it in Old Kurt’s grubby outstretched hand. He looked down at the coin, back at Anne, and grinned.
“Fine silver from a fine lady,” he said with a leer. “I’m a lucky boy, ain’t I?”
She cleared her throat. She looked uncomfortable, did Bloody Anne, and I noticed her eyes kept wandering to the skull on the windowsill, the bound herbs that hung in bunches from the ceiling, the thick dusty books that were scattered around the room. Some of the books had rat shit on them, I saw.
“There’s this boy,” she started. “He—”
“A boy, is it?” Kurt interrupted. “Might have known you’d be wasting my time, Piety. I don’t do love spells, nor potions neither.”
I said nothing and let Anne speak for herself. The lesson of the boardinghouse was still fresh in my mind, and I don’t believe in making the same mistake twice.
“I don’t want a fucking love spell,” Bloody Anne snarled at him. “I’ve paid you silver for wisdom, so you’ll have the good grace to shut up and listen to the fucking question without interrupting me again or I’ll nail you to your door with your fucking rat, you understand me?”
Old Kurt stared at her for a moment, then laughed his thin, reedy old man’s laugh.
“That’s me told, ain’t it,” he said. “I’ll listen, my fin
e lady. I’ll listen to you.”
He was quiet then, but something in his eyes and the way he was looking at Anne made me wary. You didn’t cross Bloody Anne, not if you knew what was good for you, but you didn’t cross Old Kurt either.
No, you didn’t do that.
“This boy,” Anne started again. “He’s an orphan, with twelve years to him. We found him near Messia, after the sack. In the war, this was, way down in the south. A strange boy, but he wanted to join up and the regiment took him and any others they could get. He’s touched by the goddess.”
“Which one?” Kurt asked. “And who says so?”
“Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows. Tomas is her priest, and he says so.”
Old Kurt turned a stare on me. I wasn’t wearing my robes that day, and this was obviously the first he’d heard of it.
“A priest, is it?”
“It is,” I said. “This boy, Billy. He’s a confessor and a seer. The goddess speaks to him, or through him. I don’t know which.”
“Well and good,” Kurt said, “if a priest says so.”
He smirked when he said it, though, and I remembered why Old Kurt and me weren’t friends.
“One of our crew was wounded,” Anne went on. “He nearly died from all the blood he lost. Should have died, to my mind, but he didn’t. He didn’t because Billy sat up all night floating in the air and staring at him, doing magic at him. Now he’s awake and alive and eating for six men, and I want to know if we have a witch in our crew.”
Her scar tightened and twisted when she said witch, I noticed.
“Witches now, is it?” Old Kurt said. “Messia, is it? Well, what could that mean?”
“You tell us,” I said. “You’re the cunning man.”
Old Kurt thought on it for a moment, then got up and went over to a big chest by the back wall. He rummaged inside for a moment, then straightened up and handed Anne a long iron nail.
“You put this under where the boy sleeps at night,” he said, “and we’ll see.”
“What is it?” Anne asked.
“A nail,” I said.
“It’s a witchspike, you ignorant thug,” Old Kurt snapped. “Priest my hairy arse, or you’d know what it was. That there’s a witchspike, and if he’s what you fear he’ll feel it. Put that under his blankets and wait. If he wakes screaming in the night then he’s a witch, and you can deal with that as you see fit. If he doesn’t, though, then you bring him here. You bring him to see Old Kurt and I’ll have a look at him. Is that a deal, my fine lady?”
Anne nodded and slipped the nail into her pouch.
“Deal,” she said.
FIFTEEN
We left Old Kurt’s after that, having no reason to linger. I stepped back out into the alley and there were the three cloaked figures waiting for us.
“You’re away from your streets, Piety,” one said to me.
I nodded slowly.
“That I am,” I said. “I’ve been visiting with the cunning man, as you can well see. All have free passage to Old Kurt’s door. You know that.”
The man stepped closer to me, and I could see the jut of an unshaven chin poking out of the hood of his cloak. He looked to have perhaps thirty years to him and he sounded like an Ellinburg man, and those things together made him a veteran.
“How long have you been back?” I asked, before he could say anything else.
He paused, looked at me. I heard his sigh and knew I had found common ground. Men who had shared the Hell of Abingon would always have that in common, if little enough else.
“Three days,” he said.
“And no Ma Aditi,” I said.
“Not yet. She’ll come.”
“Will she?”
I was conscious of the other two, who had the back of the one I was talking to, and of Bloody Anne who as always had my back. I didn’t know what they were carrying under those cloaks, but I wouldn’t have bet a clipped copper against it being steel. Common ground or no, that made us three to two, and we were on their streets where they might have friends just a shout away. We might have shared the same horrors, but that alone wasn’t going to make us friends. That was three to two against us at the very best, then. Not good odds, not when we’d be betting with our lives.
“She will,” he said.
I nodded at that and decided that honor would keep for another day.
“We’ll be on our way, then,” I said.
“Back to the Stink.”
“Aye, back to the Stink,” I agreed. “The Wheels belongs to the Gutcutters, everyone knows that.”
“That it does, Piety,” he shouted after us as we walked back down to the path at the riverside. “That it does, and see you remember it!”
* * *
• • •
When we got back to the Tanner’s Arms it was starting to get dark and we were both hungry. I found Hari limping around in the kitchen, leaning on a stout stick he had found somewhere. He was tidying cupboards and taking what looked like an inventory of what he found in there.
“How’re you feeling?” I asked him.
“Not so bad, boss, thank you,” he said, although I could see the pain and weariness etched in the lines of his pale face.
“You look at home, in here,” I said.
He shrugged. “Just trying to keep busy,” he said. “I want to be useful to you. I . . .”
I don’t want to be thrown out into the streets to starve because I can’t fight no more, his face said.
“You’re all right, Hari,” I assured him. “Don’t you worry. Have you seen young Billy?”
Hari shook his head, but some of the tension went out of his face at my words, and he allowed himself to sink into a chair with a wince of pain.
“I think he went in the back to sleep some more,” Hari said.
I nodded and helped myself to something to eat, then left him to it. I left my mail and leather upstairs in my room but buckled the Weeping Women back around my waist again over my shirttails. I didn’t think the Gutcutters would bother us, not on our own streets. Not without Ma Aditi here to say so, anyway, but one of them had seen me and by now they’d all know I was back in Ellinburg.
The war in the south might only just have ended, but all that meant was that the war in Ellinburg was about to start up again. It was a quiet sort of war, by and large, but it was a war all the same, and now we had this man they called Bloodhands and his Skanians added to the broth. If Hauer was to be believed we did, anyway, and I couldn’t think that he wasn’t. He had no reason to lie about it, that I could see.
I went back down to the common room and found Bloody Anne waiting for me behind the bar with two glasses of brandy already poured for us. She nodded to me cordially enough, but I couldn’t help noticing the way her fingers kept touching her pouch. Billy the Boy was going to come between us if I wasn’t careful.
“You’re going to use that, then?” I asked as I picked up my drink and leaned forward with my elbows on the bar opposite her.
“The witchspike? Yes, Tomas, I am.”
I nodded. “Well, that’s your affair,” I said. “Your silver bought you wisdom from Old Kurt, so it’s up to you whether to believe what he told you.”
“Don’t you?”
I shrugged and took a swallow of brandy.
“People call him a cunning man,” I said, “and that has two meanings, like I said before. Maybe he knows about magic and maybe he doesn’t, but he’s the other sort of cunning too. Old Kurt is very good at making people believe in him, Anne. Very good indeed. He’s that sort of cunning, believe you me.”
“I’ll put it under Billy’s bedroll,” she said, sounding firm about the notion, “and then we’ll see.”
I just nodded. If that made Anne happy, then who was I to judge, but to my mind all that would prove was that a boy who was exhausted and
would probably go to bed drunk anyway wouldn’t notice that there was a lump under his blankets.
The front door creaked behind me, and I turned to see who it was coming back from wherever he had been. My eyebrows rose as I saw that this wasn’t one of my crew coming in at all. I leaned back with my elbows on the bar behind me and my hands hanging loose within easy reach of Remorse and Mercy.
She walked into the tavern with her hood pushed back to bare thick dark hair and a face the dusky brown color of an Alarian’s. A patched and frayed green cloak hung from her shoulders, open over her white linen shirt and servant’s skirts. There was a leather traveling bag in her hand.
“How do?” I said.
She smiled shyly and bobbed a clumsy curtsey.
“Good evening, sir, Mr. Piety,” she said. “My name’s Ailsa. I heard the tavern was opening again, under new management as you might say, and I wondered if you had any work going? I need the coin but I ain’t afraid of hard work, with my hands nor my head. I can keep a bar and I can tally books, or I can scrub a floor and wash glasses, and I can be trusted with money and with words alike.”
She had perhaps twenty-five years to her and she looked like a trader off one of the tea ships, but I knew she wasn’t. Oh, she was young and very pretty, but I wasn’t fooled. Her dark eyes met mine, and I knew exactly who she was.
She’ll give her name as Ailsa, Rosie from Chandler’s Narrow had told me. She’ll be here tonight, and you’re to give her a job when she asks you for one.
That had sounded a lot like an order to me, the sort of order that I knew I had to obey. I didn’t fucking like it, but then I hadn’t liked it the last time either. Serve the crown or hang; that had been the choice before me, and to my mind that was no choice at all.
She’ll say she can be trusted with money and with words alike. You hear her say that, she’s the one.
I nodded.
“Aye,” I said. “The Tanner’s Arms is back under its rightful management, to set the matter straight, but aye. I reckon there might be work going, as you asked so nicely.”