There have been at least three murders in two days. The trade rider, stabbed in the East Harbor. A maid, horribly mutilated, found atop a warehouse in the West Harbor. Another maid, with her throat slit or torn open, found in Servants. Plus Chelson’s daughter, badly injured at least, taken from Lesser Silk.
She may be alive. Why would the killer take the body? Chelson, though, took the more pessimistic view, and, not wanting to involve Ject, said that his men would investigate. A second citywide search, which an owner’s daughter would merit, would indeed be very embarrassing, but Ject won’t miss an opportunity to indebt Chelson to him, so he’s ordered his men to make inquiries too.
Ject scrapes off some persistent splatter with the blade then washes off its residue. He shakes out a rolled rag, wraps it around two fingers, and digs out some yellow paste, a traditional dubbin of wax, soda ash, and tallow. This is one of his better batches, but the secret is in his black polish. He rubs it into the leather.
Ject considers the city guard from Quiet who is also missing. No one has seen him since he went on watch two nights ago—or no one’s said so out of fear of dismissal. He was in the same area as the two maids. If he were murdered, how would he fit with the rest?
And now he’s gotten a report of a man who assaulted a woman in Servants. He fled after she fought him off, leaving behind a substantial knife. He wore a long-sleeve black tunic and pants, and, from what little the witnesses saw of her, she resembled Chelson’s daughter. Why would she have been there? Did the same person catch her at home?
Could he have also been this barrowman? Black is the color mandated for night workers, though.
Ject owes that footman for calling the guards. He wouldn’t have heard about the barrowman otherwise. He’ll find a place for him if Chelson finishes or diminishes him.
Ject works the yellow paste methodically up the shaft of his boot as he matches victims to the most likely suspects. Tristaban—Barrowman. Tristaban’s girl—the unidentified assailant or Livion. The rider—Livion. Livion doesn’t strike him as violent, but he can’t deny Livion had the opportunity to kill the girl and he could imagine a motive, nor can he deny Livion had the chance and a possible motive for killing the rider.
They died so differently, though. The girl was probably killed from behind then her body was left in plain sight. The rider was stabbed or slashed many times in the abdomen, as if the killer were enraged or more than one were involved, then his body was hidden. Ject’s seen meek men like Livion go wild and kill, and he’s seen the meek kill methodically, but the same man wouldn’t kill both ways alternately. And the wild don’t hide a body, while the meek don’t leave them out in the open. If Livion killed one, he didn’t kill the other. He’ll put Livion down for the rider.
Perhaps the person who killed the maid was interrupted when killing the girl, the way he was interrupted tonight. That seems a reach. No one’s so bold twice.
Ject trades his cloth for the clean one and scoops up some black, a mixture of bone black and wool grease that will restore his boot’s color and give it an unusual shine. As he starts at the toe again, he realizes the guard, Bern, and the maid have something in common. She was left on a rooftop inaccessible without a ladder. He was stationed atop Quiet, also inaccessible except by the tower stairs. If he didn’t sneak away, what if he were taken while on Quiet? All a person would have to do is fly.
Could he have actually been right about the dragon story?
Too bad the story’s in ruins. Livion’s compromised. He’s compromised. Herse’s story, the only one still standing, however improbable, must command the truth, and Herse will again make the case for war at a special session of Council at seven hours tomorrow. Ject checks his clock. It’s almost midnight.
If the Council submits to his story, half the city could be burned the way it was in the last war. Hundreds, probably thousands, will die before starvation and disease set in. And worst of all Ject, as is traditional and necessary in time of war, will be put under Herse’s command along with Prieve, then likely relieved.
That can’t happen. All he needs to do is produce a dragon.
Or a dragon of sentiment—a roaring fear, a monstrous rage—one that could sway or at least delay the vote.
He twists some black into the tips of his mustache as he decides what to do, curls them while he shapes his plan, and, feeling as revitalized as his mustache, pulls a bell cord to summon Ravis. He unbars the door and gets to work on his other boot. This will be a long night, but by dusk tomorrow Herse may feel like Ject’s boots have been driven deep into his throat.
From atop the city’s exterior gate, Herse and Rego look down Gate Street, one of the few roads winding through Hanoshi Town that’s cobbled and lamplit.
Rego faces Thuban, the pole star, and tilts his head straight up. The star Tarf is nearly overhead. “It’s almost midnight,” he says.
A soldier on the gate tower to their left blows a curling brass horn: the gates will close in ten minutes. They won’t be opened until six hours. In a tavern just outside the gate, someone says, “Last call!”
Rego looks concerned.
“He’ll be here,” Herse says.
Three men, two carters and a stevedore just off shift, hurry out the gate and head for the tavern. They nearly run into a woman stumbling from an adjacent alley. She curses them and smoothes her clothes, which weren’t smooth to start. As the carters go inside, the stevedore asks her something. She shakes her head. He shakes his purse. She looks at the gate then shows him ten spread fingers. He asks something else. Ten fingers again. She’s stunned when he accepts and grudgingly follows her into the alley.
“Ten pennies for ten minutes?” Rego says. “Good work if you can get it.”
Herse says, “If Ject could get half a coin for the women he jails, he’d be on the Council himself. Ah, there we are.”
Three large wagons crawl up the street. The canvas covering their cargo mounds reveals fragments of the Shield’s logo on blond crates of various sizes. The soldiers at the gate normally stop wagons and ask about their cargo. These they wave through.
The horn sounds twice. People leave the tavern, many furious. A carpenter heads for the gate.
The lead driver appears on top of the tower.
Rego says, “Any trouble, Sergeant?”
“No,” he says. “We brought all the weapons. Had to leave behind some shields. We didn’t have another wagon.”
“We’ll manage,” Herse says.
Rego says, “From what I saw when spreading the word, most supporters are already armed in a makeshift way.”
Now the carpenter appears.
“Corporal,” Rego says.
“The two men who just entered the tavern, they said if there’s a war, wages will be docked eight pennies for every whole coin to pay for it. People are outraged.”
“That can’t be true,” Rego says. “It’d be two at most.”
“One to start,” Herse says.
The horn sounds three times. Patrons are pushed out of the tavern, which has to close. They continue arguing in the street.
Herse says, “Fortunately, we have a more encouraging message. Birming, you brought the blue chest?”
“First thing loaded, as you requested,” the sergeant says.
“Then we have the only weapon we really need.”
The gates creak closed. The bars slide into place. The woman bounds from the alley. The stevedore laughs as she pounds on the gate, trying to get inside the city. She looks up at Herse pleadingly.
He shakes his head and turns away. She curses him with an athlete’s creativity.
“Someday soon,” Herse says to Rego. “Very soon.”
Chelson pushes between two soft pink drapes into his daughter’s inner room. The walls are lined with wardrobes, mirrors, and scores of shelves on which sit hundreds of tiny dolls. Each has been
carefully ranked by Tristaban since she was a child, and she still moves them around occasionally as great or terrible things happen in their complex lives. Their heads swivel as one and look at him, it seems.
“My men will find the barrowman,” he tells them, “and whoever hired him.” Was it Eles or Blue Island? Thick as thieves, those two. No interest in war, only in rents and fees and regular routes. They did not claim. They collected. Would they really go so far to sway him and his allies on the Council to not call for war? If so, they miscalculated. War must have its sacrifices. And he must cut his losses.
The doll Chelson had made to resemble his daughter is not on top. It never is. He admires that. She’s a striver. She wouldn’t lose her will to climb like so many of the dolls on the middle shelves. The doll’s currently third after two others. He can’t remember their names.
He picks up the top doll. He ordered it for her from the Dawn Lands. Its face is red porcelain with a tiny black smile. Its dress is silk, the colors obeying no Hanoshi code. He smashes it on the tile floor between two rugs.
Whoever took Tristaban will pay, he thinks. No one steals from him.
The new number one is made of fine gray wool wrapped around cotton wadding and wood. The eyes are coming loose. She used to sleep with this one, he thinks. He rips off an eye, worms a finger into the torn wool beneath, and tears the fabric open. He strips off the wool like a glove from a finger, plucks away the cotton, and drops the remains. The bones clatter on the tiles.
The barrowman will be lucky to get off as easy as this doll after Holestar finds him.
Chelson picks up the Tristaban doll. She was seven when it was made. An engineer came, measured her features with calipers, and sketched her from every angle. She loves the doll, but hated standing naked and cold for so long. He shakes the doll’s head. Something rattles inside. He reaches under its dress to grab its skinny thighs and whacks the head against a wardrobe. The articulated body sways, its arms flail, until the head shatters. A penny falls out.
By the time he’s finished with all the dolls, the clocks are chiming four. Servants have come and gone from Tristaban’s outer room, they’ve come and gone again, and now they’re hiding in petty tasks, waiting to be told to retire.
Chelson leaves the room. He closes the drapes and presses their ends together. Sometimes ventures fail, he thinks. You just have to start again. So he’ll make a new one. He’s making a war. He’s making an army. But why do all that to make a fortune if no one will maintain it after he’s gone?
He remembers something. Back in her inner room, down on his knees, Chelson claws through broken bodies and scrapes away tattered clothes until he finds it. The penny. He pockets it.
An hour before dawn, Livion hears footsteps outside his hell. He flattens himself against the thick wooden door. A shadow blocks the knife-edge of light slipping between the wicket’s hinges. He bangs on the door. “Just tell me if she’s safe.”
The shadow passes.
Deep beneath the Upper City, he doesn’t hear a screeching come across the sky. It envelops the city and skitters the horses, but no one can pinpoint its origin.
3
* * *
By the third hour, Chelson’s personal guards have questioned the foremen of the three companies that handle most of Hanosh’s night soil, starting with the one owned by the Shield. None had serviced Brimurray yet. It’s too far down Lesser Silk to have received such early service.
They then returned to Brimurray to question Tristaban’s neighbors, who didn’t appreciate being woken up, especially after their earlier inconveniences. Although most didn’t like Tristaban or her partner, they helped because they feared Chelson more. Only one had something promising to report.
A junior assistant from Blue Island and his partner, both drunk, said that after Livion had come and gone, they had gone downhill a few blocks for a glass. As they left the lane, they saw a barrowman loitering in the boulevard. They didn’t like the looks of him and told him so. His beard was trimmed with a carving knife, the woman said, and he wore a black shift her girl wouldn’t have used to wipe a floor. His pants were the strangest leather, the man said. And he smelled, his partner said, like nothing she’d ever smelled before.
The barrowman said his looks were his own, as was his business, and the boulevard belonged to everyone. He spoke more directly than they would have imagined, and he spoke well too, almost like a junior, which only made his impudence more aggravating. They reported him to a guard outside the Quick Nip, who said he would look out for the man.
The guard told Chelson’s men that when he patrolled uphill, he didn’t see the barrowman, but he admitted he wasn’t looking very hard. He wished he could’ve spoken to the couple with such impudence.
Hanosh has no end of freelancers in every trade, however despicable, which leaves Chelson’s guards with the unenviable task of looking into them. To speak with the person who can probably tell them where to start, they repair to an after-hours in Workers called the Salty Dog.
The tunnel entrance extends so far into the Hill that the Dog is rumored to have a door directly into Gate’s dungeons so prisoners can come out for a glass. And the ceilings are so low that some patrons flee the place, too strongly reminded of their time on the benches. Smoke collects between the beams, letting the meanest men stand to get a snort they couldn’t otherwise afford.
Holestar, the man with the half-red eye, spins his pint between his hands. Skite of the Crooked Nose works on his second. The third man, Derc, who has no distinguishing features beyond his size, considers a man at the bar.
The man, a tanner by his reek, says to a corner full of cronies, “We found out where he stored his cart and waited for him. The Aydeni walks right up to us, like we’re customers. Hah! First we let him watch us smash his cart, then we smashed him with the pieces. I never knew a wheel could do so much wrong to a man’s face.”
The men laugh. The tanner says, “One more round, then we’ll get back to drafting folks for the morning.” Ayes are said. Beers are brought.
Derc says, “You volunteering, Strig?”
“When Ayden gets here, I’ll volunteer,” he says. “In the meantime, we’ll give a slap to anyone who doesn’t want anyone volunteering. General orders, as it were.”
Derc says, “So you’d rather fight Hanoshi than for Hanosh?”
“They aren’t Hanoshi,” Strig says. “And anyone fighting for Hanosh is just fighting for some company. Useless drones.”
Derc says, “I fought, and I’ll fight again. Hundreds will. Good men.” He stands up. “Am I a fool? Are they?”
Strig looks at his cronies, and reluctantly stands. His cronies don’t. Holestar hisses sharply. Derc sits down.
Strig says, “That all he has to do to pull your leash?”
All talk ceases. The smoke stands still.
“I’m going to make you a bet,” Holestar says. He takes a silver coin out of his pocket and holds it up. “This whole coin says you can’t beat me senseless.”
Strig says, “I don’t have a whole coin.”
“What do you have?”
The tanner fumbles in his pockets. He finds ten pennies. “Half.” He drops several pennies, which other patrons corral and return, a fair price for their amusement.
Holestar says, “That’ll do.” He puts the silver between his teeth and gnashes the coin in half. He drops one shard on the barrel he’s drinking around and pockets the other. “Now, you could concede our bet, pay me my ten pennies, and leave, or we can play this out.”
Strig hesitates. A broken old tar in the corner fondles a shark’s tooth and says, “I’ll bet a penny he pisses himself before he can answer.”
Strig rubs the pennies off his sweaty palm onto the plank and runs from the Dog. His cronies follow sheepishly. Holestar gives the pennies to the tapman, who raises one in appreciation.
A woma
n comes in. Her face has the skin of a much larger face. The veins ridging her arms and hands are almost as thick as her bones. She says to the tapman so everyone can hear, “What’s the story of that guy who left? I swear he pissed himself just looking at me.” The after-hours patrons laugh. “Fakkin Tawmy,” one says, shaking his head.
She grabs a pint, spots Holestar’s crew, and comes over. “Need some help,” Holestar says. He pushes the half coin to her with his cup.
“So generous,” Fakkin Tawmy says, pocketing the shard. “Must be company business. No receipt, of course.”
Holestar says, “I need a barrow: black, deep, two-wheeled, probably wood, possibly used for night soil, possibly not by someone formally associated with that trade. Who would I want to find?”
“You interested in the barrow or the man?”
“The barrow, to start.”
“I can think of a dozen barrows like that. One stands out. It was stolen this afternoon in Servants, and found not long ago.”
“Where?” Holestar says.
“Alley in the Upper City. Near the tower.”
“Where is it now?”
“Back with its owner.”
“Know who stole it?”
“No,” Fakkin Tawmy says. “And it was empty when it was found. Someone probably needed to move something uphill and didn’t want to pay a carter.”
“Something, yes,” Holestar says. He drains his beer. “So who’s the lucky owner?”
A quarter hour later the crew watches a woman scramble out of a cesspit. She spits filth off her lips and points to a barrow, which is half-full. Holestar points at Derc.
Derc says, “Why me?”
“For spouting off in the Dog,” Holestar says.
Derc takes a deep breath and squats beside the barrow with a candle. He runs his finger along the top strake. Nothing. He scratches at the residue there. He holds his palm to the light. Flakes of dried blood.
“Tell me,” Holestar says to the woman, “exactly where the barrow was found.”
The Dragon Round Page 26