Assuming you had the coin – though he asked for it, Eloway didn’t run a charity.
‘You got my cigarette?’ he asked.
‘Are you seriously trying to shake me down?’
Eloway tapped at his rags. ‘Pockets kill the effect.’
‘Śakra’s cock, you think maybe you take this charade a little far?’ But I rolled one up for him anyway.
He took it with a smile. ‘What did Joachim Pretories want?’
Everything worth knowing, like I said. ‘Trying to run me, Eloway?’
‘What do you cost?’
‘More than you could afford,’ I said, though it wasn’t true. ‘I’m looking for a woman.’
‘A clean one should run you a couple of argents, but this part of town you could get serviced for half that, if you ain’t particular.’
‘Name’s Rhaine Montgomery, though she won’t be using it. Early twenties, red hair, blue eyes. Top crust and trying to hide it. She overpaid for lodgings, and she’s probably been took by half the clip men on whatever street she’s holed up in.’
‘Montgomery? As in Edwin Montgomery’s daughter?’
Facility with names was a requirement of Eloway’s position. ‘Yeah.’
He ashed my cigarette on the ground next to him. ‘I’m a patriot, Warden,’ he said, impressively dignified given that his costume included a smattering of fresh dog shit. ‘And not interested in causing the general any harm.’
‘He’s the one asked me to find her,’ I said. ‘Does that mean I get a discount?’
‘I’m not that much of a patriot. When do you need it by?’
‘What time is it?’
‘Round two.’
‘I’d like it before one-thirty.’
He chuckled and quoted a price. I quoted a lesser one. We reached an agreement, and I counted it out and handed it to him. One of the boys slipped over and took it, then ran off. ‘Send word to the Earl?’ he asked.
I nodded and he pulled his rag back over his eyes. As I left the cover of the alleyway a passing merchant looked Eloway over sadly and slipped an argent into his cup. Eloway’s patter turned grateful, though I suspected beneath the blindfold he was winking.
12
It was no more temperate in the Earl than it was outside. But it was darker, and that was enough to pretend. I didn’t bother to spark a lantern, finding my way to a chair in the corner and lighting a twist of vine. Between that and my general laziness, sleep came quickly enough.
I was awakened by Adeline standing over me. More accurately, I awakened with Adeline standing over me. For all I knew she’d been waiting silently for three-quarters of an hour, counting the seconds until some unrelated incident brought me up from sleep.
‘Howdy darlin’,’ I began, blinking myself alert. ‘How’s the queen?’ Adeline was wide-hipped and plain, and looking at her you wouldn’t call her a pretty woman. But later on you’d remember her that way. Finding her was one of the few true pieces of luck Adolphus had ever received, and holding on to her evidence of greater wisdom than he sometimes displayed.
Her lips hinted at a smile, as if afraid to breach etiquette. ‘Staying cool?’ In keeping with the demeanor, her voice rarely rose above a murmur.
‘Trying to.’
‘I’ll bring you some lemonade.’
‘My angel.’
Despite the heat, Adeline didn’t sweat, seemed barely even to breathe. It was difficult to square this passivity with the fact that she oversaw virtually everything that was required for the continued functioning of the Earl, as well as the needs of her husband and adopted son. ‘I heard you had a talk with Wren.’
That was surprising – the boy was sullen in childhood, and even more loquacious youths tend to lose their taste for dialogue after entering adolescence. ‘I know, he shouldn’t be associating with such an unsavory element.’
‘He said you caught him practicing the Art.’
‘Is that what he was doing?’
‘He said you told him you’ll find him a teacher.’
‘He’s a chatty one, our Wren.’
‘He won’t sit on the shelf forever.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’
‘So you’re taking care of it.’ Not a question, though phrased as such.
‘I am.’
She nodded.
Talking to Adeline is like searching for meaning in the bottom of a tea cup, or the quivering in a line of fresh entrails. But near on fifteen years of practice had given me a feel for the hints which indicated movement beneath the waters. ‘What else you got?’
‘Adolphus.’
‘He’s a drag. What say the two of us ditch him and make for the coast, buy a little cottage and sleep the days away?’
She didn’t laugh. ‘I don’t like his new friends.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘Then you’ll speak to him?’
‘He ain’t Wren, Adeline.’
‘He listens to you.’
‘Not on this.’
She sighed unhappily, then disappeared, coming back after a few minutes with the promised glass of lemonade. Then she busied herself preparing for the evening trade, cleaning tables, sweeping the floor, activities that required illumination and thus made further repose impossible. I busied myself in the pages of a history tome I’d picked up a week earlier.
After a while a soot-faced boy came calling my name. I waved him over and he passed me a small slip of paper.
The Queen’s Palace.
I set in into my pocket, and dug out a tarnished bit of silver. ‘This is for you,’ I said, ‘for coming out here in the heat. Make sure Eloway keeps his greedy little hands off it.’ The runner smiled and disappeared.
‘Who was that?’ Wren asked from behind me. One thing he hadn’t lost since I’d fished him out the gutter was his preternatural capacity for quiet. He’d have been fierce at second-story work, though I supposed it was my job to keep him out of that sort of line.
‘Your replacement. I need someone working for me I can rely on not to disappear all day.’
‘Adolphus had me putting up fliers,’ he said, his face red from excitement and not just the heat.
‘Putting up fliers?’
‘For the Association. For the big rally they’re having next week. To remind the Throne of the sacrifices they made for the country, and to renew the bonds of fellowship too long allowed to remain fallow.’
He’d learned these last words that morning. I disliked hearing him parrot them. ‘And where’s the man himself?’
‘They’re having a meeting at the local chapter. They want to vote Adolphus chair.’ He puffed his chest out, proud of the giant’s accomplishments. Under different circumstances I would have found it rather touching. ‘They say he was a hero, that he held the line at Aunis all by himself.’
‘Did they now?’
‘They said I couldn’t stay. They said it was for veterans only.’ This slight appeared not to have bothered him. ‘They seem all right to me.’
There was no reason to be angry at Wren for following his father’s orders. I found that I was, all the same. ‘But then you don’t know anything, so your opinion isn’t worth as much as mine.’
It was a cheap shot, but it set him down a notch. ‘I was just doing what Adolphus told me.’
‘Adolphus is a grown man, and can make his own mistakes – you’re a child who eats off my sufferance. So long as that continues, what I say gets the last ring in your ears.’ I sipped through my lemonade, wishing it was liquor. ‘You see Yancey before you decided to enlist?’
He nodded, no longer smiling. ‘Said he’s got a gig in Brennock, at the Pig and Fiddle.’
‘He say when?’
‘After eight.’
‘If Adolphus is too busy playing soldier to take care of his responsibilities, then they fall on you. Go help Adeline with dinner. And don’t ever make me wait on a message again.’
He gave me a pretty good eye-fuck on the way to the back
, but he went. It seemed like today was my day to be the prick. A lot of days are like that, if we’re being honest.
I took up a spot in the yard and re-lit the joint I’d fallen asleep over. When that wasn’t enough I rolled another, and when that wasn’t enough I figured nothing would be, and settled back to watch evening cross the cityscape.
13
I ate an early dinner then started off for Brennock. It was half a trek, and I broke up the monotony with a hit of breath when it felt appropriate, as it often did.
This section of the city was mostly industrial, cavernous mills and foundries with little nightlife to speak of. Yancey’s having to play there was a sign of the blight that had overtaken his career, a sharp reversal from the decade of uninterrupted success his talent and drive had earned him.
While playing a private party a year back some noble had said something or done something that made Yancey decide to arrange his face into a different pattern – an understandable impulse, if self-defeating in the long run. He’d gotten out after five months, which was shorter than I had expected – putting a digit on a noble pays out the same as murdering a dockworker. Yancey wasn’t soft, but the time he’d spent inside had done him no favors. His eyes were older and there was an occasional tremor to his vibrato. More than that, having gained a reputation for brutalizing members of the audience, his old fans weren’t quite so enthused about having him round. He’d been forced into accepting gigs he’d have laughed off not long earlier, which was why I found myself in a shitty bar in an ugly part of the city, surrounded by a group of people who seemed distinctly unenthused to be consuming the poetic stylings of one Yancey the Rhymer.
Ironically his misfortune had been a boon for me – since being deprived of the opportunity to make money off his craft he’d had to put more work into his sideline: playing middleman for rich folks who wanted my services. I felt a little bad about it, but then we’re all making our bread off someone’s misery. Me more than most, I supposed.
Happily I’d come between sets, so I didn’t need to watch him demonstrate his abilities to an unappreciative audience. He was at the counter dripping honey into the ear of a waitress two stone past pretty. She laughed and slapped at him playfully with a dishrag. Whatever else the Rhymer had lost, he could still string together a sentence.
‘If it ain’t the Duke himself.’ He ticked his bare skull toward a side booth and turned back to the maid. ‘Pour two beers for us, sugar – my man and I need to hash out some truth, and that always goes better well lubricated.’
The waitress went to get us our drinks, and I followed Yancey to the corner.
Yancey was a small man, with a coiled intensity that kept him constantly in motion. In the past he’d run to thin and wiry, biceps like pulled rope, but his time inside had bloated him and hemmed a ring of flesh around his midsection. Despite that his face seemed thinner and somehow paler, though his lineage was uncrossed Islander and his skin black as ink. He’d always been something of a coxcomb, his sense of style near as sharp as his ear, but lately that too had gone to pot, a casualty of his loss of income or interest.
My ass had barely scraped the wooden bench before he leaned in and tapped a finger against his nose. ‘You got a toot for me?’
‘Fresh out.’
‘Pity.’ Breath was a habit Yancey had taken to with unfortunate enthusiasm. ‘So how you been?’
‘I wouldn’t mind getting rained on, like everyone else in the city. How ’bout you?’
‘Nah, the heat don’t bother me.’
‘What’s your secret?’
‘I get my dick sucked a lot.’
‘I didn’t know that helped.’
‘It helps with everything.’ The server came by holding a pair of tankards in front of a pair of plump breasts. ‘Something about these Vaalan girls,’ he said after she left, sucking his teeth and falling silent – words failing him, for once.
‘I’d prefer a woman I could share a carriage seat with.’
‘More for me.’
‘A lot more.’
Yancey laughed. ‘Your boy said you wanted to speak to me on something.’ His grin was wide. ‘I remember when he came up to my waist, and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Child’s growing.’
‘As it turns out, he’s the purpose of the conversation.’
He motioned for me to continue. ‘Your mouth ain’t sewn shut.’
No one was listening, but I took a look around anyway. ‘Wren has the gift.’
‘Indeed.’ He took a sip from his brew, white foam around his pink lips.
‘I need someone who can give him the ins and outs of it, and who isn’t affiliated with the Throne – someone as far off their map as you can get.’
‘I’m no practitioner.’
‘But somewhere, in your long list of acquaintances, I suspect you’ve a person who fits my description.’
The Islanders had fled their homeland a millennium back, taking to the seas as it disappeared beneath the waves, a catastrophe so inconceivable and distant it had long ago merged into myth. Centuries of living as half-wanted guests in foreign lands had given them an aversion to government that was virtually a racial trait. Their entire civilization flourished out of sight of the authorities. They had their own banking houses, their own religious practices – and their own magical traditions. After the war the Bureau of Magical Affairs had made it their business to bring the nation’s practitioners under thumb, combing the disparate threads of the Art into a single weave – but the Bureau of Magical Affairs, like every other government organ, held small sway amongst the seafarers.
I imagined there were other avenues of the Art that the Throne had yet to strangle. Tarasaighn augurers drying herbs deep in the swamps of their homeland, heretics drawing otherworldly diagrams and whispering strange prayers – but I didn’t know any of them. I knew the Rhymer, and I hoped he’d come through for me. He always had before.
Yancey drummed his fingers against the table, unconsciously and in perfect rhythm. After a moment he matched the beat with a nod. ‘Yeah, I might know somebody – how far out you want to look?’
‘Far as I can get.’
‘There’s a witch-woman, lives in the Isthmus. I’ve never had occasion to seek her services but word on high is she’s legit – even the mobs toe her line, leave her little offerings and make sure not to cross her.’
‘And the Throne remains blissfully ignorant of her activities?’
‘Brother, her corner of Rigus, there ain’t no Throne.’
‘She got a name?’
‘Mazzie. Mazzie of the Stained Bone. Ever hear it?’
‘Muttered under the occasional breath. You think you could put us in touch?’
‘I’ll send someone around tonight – Mazzie keeps late hours. She gives the go ahead, I’ll leave directions to her place for you tomorrow morning.’
‘Stand-up, as always.’
Yancey was confident enough in his character not to be particularly grateful for my validation. He went back to his drink. I realized suddenly we’d run out of things to talk about. I didn’t remember that happening so much between us, back in the day. ‘How’s your mom?’
‘She’s all right. She asks about you some.’
That was a lie, though a kind one. I’d been close to Ma Dukes once, before my blindness and stupidity had put her son into danger some years back. Yancey had eventually forgiven me for my foolishness, but his mother wasn’t so casual about the peril I’d brought down upon her seed.
I pulled a couple of ochres from out of my money pouch. ‘I almost forgot – I owe you some coin for dropping my name to the Count of Brekenridge.’
‘Yeah?’ His eyes narrowed quizzically. ‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said, setting them next to his drink.
He looked at the coins for a long moment, then raked them off the table. ‘Sweetness, bring me a bottle of something that bubbles,’ he yelled over his shoulder, before turning back to face me. ‘You sticking ’roun
d to enjoy it?’
‘I’ve got somewhere to be,’ I said, standing. ‘And I imagine our server will be a better companion – help keep you cool.’
His laughter was well bought at twice the price.
14
The Queen’s Palace was not the second, nor fit for the first. A flophouse a few blocks from the docks, ugly even by the standards of an ugly trade. Its clientele consisted mostly of streetwalkers renting love nests by the hour, and addicts one short rung above abject destitution.
I knew it all right. Better than I’d like to admit, well enough that I didn’t need to waste any time dancing with the clerk at the front desk. I plopped down an argent and tapped two fingers beside it, and my silver was replaced with the register. There wasn’t a real name to be found, but one from three days prior was so obviously made up that I felt certain I had my quarry. I took note of the room number and nodded to the receptionist. He placed the faded tome back beneath the counter and went back to not seeing anything. I slipped upstairs.
The lock on her door was nothing of the sort, a bit of tin I could have opened with my fingernail, though for appearance’s sake I slipped a thin spurt of metal out from my satchel and spent a few seconds teasing it open.
The door swung open on a small room, a largish closet really, barely big enough for a small bureau and a lumpy bed. She was sitting on this last, staring out at the alley below, but she turned when the hinges squeaked, pulling a small dagger from beneath the pillow. The hilt was burnished silver with a fire opal in the pommel, and she held it towards me, less a weapon than a talisman to ward away evil.
Tomorrow, the Killing lt-2 Page 8