Her reply bounces down the staircase like a dropped melon. “Teacup-p-p-p!”
I sprint up three turns of steep, winding staircase. She’s stopped at a small, stone landing that branches in two directions, though one is collapsed and full of rubble, faintly stinking of burnt fabric. The landing and the steps are littered with cast-off goods and broken tools. A corkscrew. A broken tankard. The other passage curls upward again.
Lucinda is bent over a large, wooden object resting casually on its side, splintered and scorched. One side of it is flecked with white plaster and dark water-stains.
It’s a table.
A very specific table.
The kind of table that would seat several men, but rarely saw more than one young drunk. Except the night Magnus lifted it from the floor and hurled it through the side of the tavern. I see it as it once was, exploding through the lathe and plaster siding of The Black Cat.
“Magnus’s table.” Lucinda caresses it.
“Markel’s table,” I say, correcting her. “I know where we are.”
“Beneath The Black Cat,” she finishes.
“This was his home,” I say quietly, understanding finally how he’d so easily turned aside his fellow Nightshades in The Black Cat Tavern and Inn.
House magic.
Tom owned The Black Cat, slept beneath it, and ate from its kitchen every night. The same trick Red and her Dreadlord friend had tried to use on me, only this with elegance.
Sifting down the last few steps, I smell potatoes and cellar cheeses. My stomach rumbles. My mouth waters.
Lucinda knows it. “You can’t go into Selwin’s by yourself, Teacup,” she says softly. “Not without trying to get help.”
She could never catch me if I chose to run, but her eyes are full of kindness. “Listen, Teacup. Please. For Carmen’s sake. You aren’t alone. Let’s go up. Get some help. Eat a meal.”
“Lucinda, who is going to help us? The town is practically burning down around us and it’s my fault.”
Lucinda licks her lips. “I’m going to try. I’m going to go upstairs and tell my friends what’s going on. Wait for me here, Teacup. We’ll all go on to glory and death together, but somebody should know. Somebody should see our hope.”
“Our foolishness.”
She grins. “Maybe.”
I watch her stalk up the twisting tunnel. I drift after her, to make sure she isn’t coming right back, of course.
Part of me aches. I miss my friends. I miss the darts games, the smoky nights, the arguments I had with Petri, and the thrill of getting a new job from him. Here I can do more than just save Carmen. I can show them that the stories are true. I can make heroes for them to talk about. Hope has always been in short supply in Lower Ector, but this is one delivery I can make.
My stomach aches, too. Santé’s gift-bread was barely enough to take the edge off two-days’privation, and I puked most of that up anyway. I can almost smell the disappearing angel rolls, the roast, and the green-and-orange of stewed vegetables. It’s the same food Magnus bought for me on the night I saved his life and poisoned him in one go. I can smell alcohol splashed across the gap-toothed farmer by Markel. I see the haze of flying utensils, and the blood-and-knuckles brawl. The silence of midnight flowing into the inn on Nightshade shadowcloaks.
Except there are only two Nightshades up there tonight. For a moment I can hear them breathing. I can smell them, not inside the inn but close by. The wood and stone between us fades for a moment and I can see them, one at the front door and one behind the kitchens. There are more nearby, but these are two have been set to watch the inn. I try to force the vision outward, but it collapses and I almost pass out. What has Tom done to me?
He has trained me and he has forced my hand. He has protected us with blood and bone. He has passed the torch to me.
These memories.
These people.
They fed me. They helped Carmen thatch her roof. They may have broken teeth and bad breath but we are not alone.
I catch up to Lucinda. “Somebody needs to make sure you spread the right rumors.”
Lucinda grins at me and we inch up the stairs together.
“Just a quick stop,” she whispers.
The passage turns to timber before we reach the top, round pillars holding up squared crossbeams. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, or rather the back end of one of Barkus’s large ale barrels. Plastered on the back of the barrel with a clear, boiled-flour paste is a sketch from my execution. It’s peeling at the edges, but the charcoal likeness is in as good condition as ever.
Scribbled below my face are words. “Welcome home, Mr. Steaps.”
“They misspelled your name again,” Lucinda says, pushing, trying to dislodge the barrel.
“Yep,” I grunt. “Push on that instead.”
Lucinda pushes down on a barrel stave that’s a different pigment than the others. To her surprise, the stave lifts and the entire back of the barrel springs open.
“In you go,” I say.
She steps back instead and puts a hand on my shoulder. “We don’t have to, Teacup. The tavern is probably crawling with Nightshades. This could ruin everything.”
Oddly, her concession brings me comfort.
“No. They’re outside, I think, and I have some questions for Barkus. I think he was working for Pale Tom.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” We may not walk out of Selwin’s alive, but The Black Cat is home. I own it.
She gives me an odd look, as if trying to understand my change of opinion.
I shrug. How can she understand? I try to explain. “What happened to that ‘We aren’t the only people who care about Carmen’ bit? You were right. You’ve been right the whole time. Our friends deserve to know what’s become of us. We can at least tell them we won’t be coming back to Ector afterward.”
In the torchlight I see my tired smile mirrored in hers, but still she doesn’t move.
“What?” I ask.
“I wasn’t kidding about you going first,” Lucinda whispers. “I’m not crawling into that barrel until I know for sure the other side opens up.”
FOURTEEN
Lucinda and I crouch at the cellar door. Or rather Lucinda crouches, ear pressed against the door. I’m belly down on the stairs watching through the crack at the bottom. It gives me a clear line on the bar, but only of people’s feet.
“I think they heard us,” Lucinda says.
“Yeah,” I mutter, trying uselessly to squeeze wine spirits from my clothes. “They’ll send someone down to clean it up. We’ll have that person pass Barkus a message without going out into the open.”
Below us, the cellar lies in a ruin of collapsed shelving and broken barrels. One last trick Tom left us. The entire cask shelf collapsed as soon as I shimmied into the barrel-door, burying me in wine and splinters. Lucinda laughed, and so did I, though mine was a small, short-lived, snickering thing, because lying in a lake of alcohol and broken barrels isn’t comfortable. I can feel the instant bruises where the tumbling edges clipped me.
It’s unlike Barkus to have weak shelves and weak barrels. In particular, the smaller barrels of triple-distilled grain spirits shouldn’t have sprung their hoops so easily. He knows his business, and he knows a shoddy barrel when he sees it.
Lucinda relaxes at the door, loosening her sword. “You smell like Markel.”
“Lushinda,” I say, weaving up the stairs to imitate Markel. “I shwear I’m shober.”
Lucinda smiles, just as Barkus’s voice breaks over the dinner noise.
“Holy hells, Tamara! If I have a lake of ale in my basement, it’s coming out of your wages.” There’s something off about his voice, like he’s hiding something.
Tamara’s voice is thinner than it should be, but just as insistent now as it was the day Lucinda first took the barmaid job. “Barkus, if there’s a lake of ale down there, it’s because you’re too cheap to let a decent carpenter go near those rickety, old shelves.
”
Barkus jerks open the door. I barely see his silhouette before he lobs a burning torch straight at my face. So much for sending him a message.
Lucinda bats the torch aside with a long arm as it passes her. She’s worked the bar long enough to know how much grain spirits like a flame. The torch clatters harmlessly to a halt a few steps in front of me.
Barkus stumbles back, jerking a hand up as if to ward off an attack. There’s a moment of stunned silence. Then he opens his eyes slowly and lowers his defensive arm. I notice that his other arm ends in a scarred and scabby stump.
“Lucinda?” he asks quietly. He peers around her. “Teacup? I thought you were dead. We heard they’d run you down in the sewers.”
Lucinda pushes past Barkus. “You, of all people, should understand the power of a well-placed lie,” she says as she scans the room quickly. Barkus has blown whatever anonymity we might have had, and if there’s to be trouble we don’t want to lose whatever advantage we might still have.
“All clear,” Lucinda says after the barest of hesitation.
I push past Barkus as well, doing my own scan of the room. Just the usuals, Gap-tooth with a soup-spoon halfway to his gaping mouth. There’s also a woman in the corner I don’t recognize. She’s wearing the standard-issue, grey cloak of a noble trying unsuccessfully to fit in with common folk. The cloak covers her eyes and clean face well enough, but she doesn’t slouch at all, and she’s holding both knife and fork as if she’s been cutting up her greens instead of just stuffing them in like everyone else. She’s nothing to worry about. Not immediately.
Barkus puts a hand on my shoulder to stop me. “They’ve double-watched the place. If we so much as twitch, they’re going to torch us.”
“So what?” I say, scowling at the hand on my shoulder. I point to the smoldering torch and then the cellar floor bathed in grain liquor. “You seem determined to save them the trouble. Barkus, what happened to your hand?”
Tamara bursts from the kitchen with another lit torch, but when she sees Lucinda she drops it on the wooden planking and squeals, hands flying to her mouth. Lucinda covers the distance between them and hoists the shorter woman in a giant bearhug. There’s a tangle of skirts and piecemeal armor, and the two of them manage to hug each other and put the torch out without making things worse. This mostly consists of Lucinda stomping on the torch, and Tamara telling her how to stomp on it.
“Very determined to save them the trouble,” I mutter under my breath. I carefully remove Barkus’s hand from my shoulder. “Why are you trying so hard to burn my inn down?” I put a little extra emphasis on the possessive so he’ll know I’m in the know now.
Barkus looks me in the eye, sees something, and drops his gaze to the smoldering torch. He stumps down the stone stairs and stoops to retrieve it. Then he blows the torch out with one giant, wheezy breath, ignoring the flakes of soot it’s left on the stone steps.
“Had a little chat with the Tax Watch?” he grumbles.
“Yes,” I say. I don’t tell him the Tax Watch headquarters collapsed before I got any satisfactory explanations.
Barkus sighs, and despite his mild subservience I can’t help feeling disrespected. He should be a little more nervous after the years of irritation and trouble he’s caused me. But he’s not.
“You can’t blame me for hoping to have The Black Cat free and clear,” he says. “The old master didn’t say I had to tell you.”
“You know I’m going to blame you for something,” I say.
“Of course. That’s business as usual.”
Barkus finally grins a big, greasy smile, and I almost grin back, because his good cheer is catching. “Welcome back, Mr. Steeps,” he says. “You’re a damn sight better than my last boss.”
I shrug. “I don’t know that I’m any better than Tom.”
“Maybe not.” He claps me on the back anyways. “But unlike Tom, you’ve always been good for business.”
I can feel the corners of my mouth turn up as I remember one of those days, long past. “That horse-thief from Doward had it coming to him.”
“Aye, he did.”
I know Barkus. He’s trying to butter me up but I can’t help smiling. Barkus knows his trade, even the honest parts. If he didn’t have a stump where his left hand should be, I could almost forget how fast times were changing.
Barkus doesn’t notice the deep sadness, though. He just sees the smile. “That’s the spirit,” he says. “You’ll be an even better man once I put some food in your belly.” He glances hopefully into the cellar. “Any more guests coming through the false barrel?”
So he knew about it.
“Just Lucinda and me,” I say.
“Pity. We could use that big, self-righteous fellow you left with.”
I shake my head. “Not a chance. Magnus draws ‘Shades like a lodestone.”
“Seems he’d be in good company with you,” Barkus says.
Touché.
Barkus doesn’t press the point, but points to the stairs instead. “Upstairs. Both of you,” he says, pointing emphatically to the private staircase. “We’ve got ‘Shades here like flies on old gravy, an’ I don’t need more trouble than I’ve already bought.”
He turns to the kitchen. “Double plate, I tell ya,” he roars, “an’ don’t chintz on the sauce. We got some old friends to feed.” Not that that means anything special. He calls everyone ‘old friend,’ and more particularly, those he’s trying to hoodwink. Still, his voice feels like home, and for once he actually heads for the kitchen when he gets a less-than-convincing response.
He doesn’t see me grinning. I turn for the stairs, but a small crowd has already gathered around Tamara and Lucinda. Fat Madame Boucher has her arms around both. “It’s so good to see you two dearies together again,” she says. “This place finally feels like home again.”
Jenna is there too, suddenly, so waiflike that a strong cough would knock her over. She grabs Lucinda’s ragged hair and sighs as Lucinda hugs her.
Markel stumbles over and breathes heavily on the pile of them. “Lushinda!” he beams. He’s got a fading black eye and his face is a mass of bruises.
Sylvie waves at me from behind the bar, from Petri’s old place.
“You’ve been promoted?” I mouth.
She curtsies, complicated by the fact that she’s as pregnant as a melon.
I bow back.
Gerard and some pensioners whose names I can’t remember gather around us, slapping us on the back. A handful of thugs and dockworkers crowd in, too. Friends and fake friends that I haven’t seen in months. In fact, half the room has rushed over to congratulate us on not being dead in the sewer somewhere, and the other half seems intent on doing so as soon as they’ve finished eating. The lady hiding under her hood tips her chin further down and fiddles with the food on her plate, pretending to ignore the hubbub. She isn’t a regular, but she isn’t a Nightshade, either.
Words fly around the commons like shuttlecocks on a loom. I don’t bother to track all the conversations but respond intuitively as I try to get Lucinda’s attention. “Hello again,” I say. “Hi. Oh. The kids? Doing well. No, they won’t be stopping in tonight. Up to no good, as usual.” I smile as best I can to all the well-wishers. “Nice to see you, too,” I say again for the umpteenth time.
Gradually the crowd pushes Lucinda and me apart and I give in to it. They’re congratulating us, asking where we’ve been, and wanting to know if all the rumors are true. They can see the white spiderweb scar peeking out from underneath her bracer and want to know how she got it. Inevitably, Lucinda’s crowd grows and mine shrinks.
“Greetings, o’ man,” says a voice behind me.
I turn and find myself face-to-face with Griphurk Razelnok and a pair of dockworkers. Gerard drifts closer to me, as do several of the other pensioners who weren’t on the best of terms with Lucinda, but I focus on Grippy. He has a way of demanding attention, and not the good sort. His hardened, leather vest looks suspiciously like ar
mor.
“You’re all dressed up,” I say generously.
“Oi,” he agrees. “It’s gettin’ bad out there. They’re chanting yer name o‘bout half o’th time.” He steps in close. For some strange reason I think he’s going to hug me, like Davaria did when we left Three-Caves Hold, but then his claw closes on my throat and he traps my hand. I try to drop backward, but the presence of a wall props my shoulders up. One of the dockworkers leans forward, trapping my other hand to the wall of The Black Cat.
They think they’ve got me pinned to the wall.
I try to twist free.
Okay.
I am pinned to the wall. Nothing in Tom’s stupid ring helps for this sort of thing. A real Nightshade wouldn’t trust anyone enough to let them get this close. I can’t yell for Lucinda, or reach their shins with my short legs.
Diplomacy it is, then. I try to smile.
“Yer kicked a hornet’s nest, o’ man,” Grippy growls, and there’s a pinch of spite in his anger. I can definitely see his M’ma Ownie side. “Yer ran like a trout. Yer left us a steaming pile and no teeth.”
“Yeah,” says one of the dockworkers. “S’yor fault Gimpy’s dead.” You can call anyone “Gimpy” when you’re two meters tall and made mostly of fists, but I know he’s talking about Petri. It is my fault, after a fashion, because Petri did get mixed up in Tom’s plot when I tried to abandon my ring on the tavern floor. And I did ‘run like a trout,’ as they say. It doesn’t make me feel any better to know I’m planning to do it again, as soon as I rescue Carmen.
I don’t tell them this, though. Instead, I jerk my head toward my left vest pocket and open my mouth like I’m trying to say something.
Grippy eases up on my throat just a hair.
“Left pocket, Grip” I croak.
Grippy isn’t stupid. He isn’t about to reach into any of my pockets. “Check it,” he tells old Gerard.
Old Gerard isn’t as bright as he used to be. He just reaches into my vest pocket while giving me an apologetic look. I’m just here by accident, the look says. Fortunately for Gerard, there aren’t poisons or tricks in that pocket. Just the small bracelet gift from Davaria.
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