‘And the team you sent after the boy? You’re going to tell me Crowley had nothing to do with that?’
Guiscard wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘It was an insurance policy – once we realized what Crowley had done, the Old Man wanted something to bring you to heel.’
My bedroom window burst from the heat, and the fire pulsed out, reacting to the sudden rush of air. ‘How does that seem to be working?’
‘The Old Man doesn’t want this to affect the situation with the Steps.’
‘Even the Old Man don’t always get what he wants.’
‘He’s willing to forgive the dead agents.’
‘How kind of him.’
‘And he’s willing to do whatever else he needs to square accounts.’
‘You’ve got nothing can balance the ledger.’
‘Crowley’s holed up at one-forty-three Stamford Avenue. Whatever happens to him is no longer our concern. He’ll have some people with him, how many we’re not exactly sure. You want me to detail a hit squad as back-up, that can be done.’
‘I’ll take care of it myself.’
‘That’s what I figured.’
I could feel the breath spreading out through my sinuses and into my brain and into my lungs and into my soul. I forced myself to cap the vial, then put it into my pocket. Three years off the stuff, my tolerance wasn’t what it had been. Today wasn’t the time for an overdose. Tomorrow, maybe. ‘How you feel about all this Guiscard?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Does this have the flavor of a man with a strong hand on the tiller?’
‘There’s still time to salvage things – if you’re willing to think logically, and not act on impulse.’
‘How long have you known me?’
‘A while now.’
‘Have I given you the impression of a man willing to forget an injury?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘How smart are you, Guiscard?’
‘Not as smart as I thought I was.’
‘That you can recognize that is a point in your favor.’
Karl came out from the house next door. I hadn’t seen him since that first day, hadn’t been looking for him particularly. He took in the growing conflagration, then sprinted over to where I was standing. As close to a sprint as an old drunk can manage, at least. ‘Your bar is on fire!’ he yelled. We were about two feet from each other, but he yelled anyway.
‘That would seem to be the case.’
‘Aren’t you going to do something about it?’
‘I am doing something about it,’ I said. ‘I’m smoking a cigarette.’
His mouth quivered indiscreetly, fat lips surrounding a partial collection of yellowed teeth. A few seconds of that and he turned to Guiscard. Guiscard didn’t look at him. Guiscard wasn’t in a position to do anything for anyone, though it took Karl a while to realize it. Finally he turned and ran off, presumably to alert the city guard. I didn’t think they’d do much for him either.
‘Are you smart enough to know which way the wind’s blowing?’ I asked.
‘What does that mean?’
‘The Old Man is gone, he’s done. He’s had a good run, or maybe a bad one, but either way it’s one that’s coming to an end. The Steps are going to put him down, and I’m going to help them.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because you’re going to help me.’
I’d been working at Guiscard since before I figured what I’d need him for, since I noticed that little worm of self-doubt had taken root inside him. That’s what I do really, chisel at weak links. Of course, he wasn’t going to bend just like that. He’d need to be shivved into it. ‘I’ve spent ten years in service to the Throne. You think I’ll betray Black House like that?’
‘The place ain’t going nowhere – you’ll just be in charge of it. And when you are, what looks like treason will be revealed as preemptive loyalty. Who exactly do you imagine you’re betraying? The King? He’ll be fine, the Steps will need a figurehead, same as ever. The country? It hasn’t exactly flourished in the hands of our current tyrants. The only person who loses out in this is the Old Man, and I can’t imagine even you’re so foolish as to think you owe him anything.’
We watched the fire burn. Fire does that.
‘And what?’ Guiscard asked. ‘Trust my future to the good graces of the Sons?’
‘Why not? Today, a man like you swapping sides, that could tip the balance. You kick them the Old Man, you tell the rest of the force to stand down – some of them won’t listen, but some of them will. You’re a noble, and high ranking – the Steps are going to need someone to tell the old guard the new one’s arrived. You’d be as good as gold to them.’
‘And what about tomorrow? What happens when I’m not so useful, when they’ve got the whole thing sewed up?’
‘If I was to be worried about tomorrow, I’d be worried about one wherein I threw my weight behind an aging monster without the strength to keep his grip. The Old Man will not hold the city another month. You stand with him, you’ll fall with him, and I can promise you the drop will be steep.’
‘The Steps are fanatics. They’re trying to destroy the Empire.’
‘No, they’re just trying to steal it. Line up early, and you can get a place at the table. You think the Sons of Śakra won’t need a secret police? Hell, they probably won’t even make you wear the hat.’
Guiscard had gone silent, staring into the flames.
‘Take this as your fair warning, and one you don’t deserve. I’m bringing it down, all of it, the whole damn thing. You’d best not be standing beneath it when it goes.’
At the end of the day, Guiscard wasn’t any worse than anyone else, and better than most. But we’re all pretty attached to our own skin. I might have exaggerated the degree of certainty with which I predicted the demise of the present order, but it was a plausible enough scenario. And when it came down to it, who had any real loyalty to the Old Man, or the world he had built?
The bonfire threw his face into sharp relief against the coming night. ‘Even if I were to … consider something like that – how would I go about doing it?’
‘You’re running security for the Old Man, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Stop running it.’
‘It’s not that simple. The Old Man doesn’t trust anyone, and he isn’t the sort to stick his neck out on my say so. He’s holed up deep – you want to lure him out, you’ll need bait.’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘You’ll get it,’ he repeated. ‘Care to tell me what it will be?’
‘You’ll know when you need to.’
A scrap of fire jumped from the roof of the Earl onto Karl’s house. The city guard was also responsible for putting out fires, though they took as much interest in that as they did locking up criminals. If Karl had been wiser he’d have spent his time pulling what few possessions he owned outside into the street, rather than running off to alert the hoax. They’d come eventually, too late to save the bar of course, though probably in time to stop the rest of the block from going up with it.
‘Did it occur to you that the fire might spread?’ Guiscard asked.
I flicked the end of my cigarette into the inferno that had been my home. ‘It had very much occurred to me,’ I said.
43
Enjolras could see there was something off with me, and was doing his best to take advantage of it. It had been a while since I’d had any breath in my system, and it was having more of an effect than I’d anticipated. My teeth edged against each other, my mouth was dry and pinched. Beneath the table I clenched and unclenched my fists compulsively. Aside from my fidgeting, the simple nature of the request was enough to tip him to a desperate situation. No one asking to be smuggled out of Rigus on the next morning’s tides is operating from a position of strength.
I was starting to get very antsy. This was the least of what I needed to get done, and I had little enough time to do any of it.
‘Five ochres,’ he said, ‘and that’s the last number I’ll quote.’
‘Three.’
‘Four,’ he said, making a liar of himself very quickly.
For four ochres you could sleep in the Captain’s bed on a caravel, and eat like a noble besides. It was closer to rape than robbery, but I was over a barrel. I’d have paid twenty ochres to get Wren and Adeline away from what was coming. I’d have paid forty. I’d have given every copper I’d ever owned.
We were in a little shithole tavern by the wharf, wedged tightly into a booth in the back. Though as the entirety of the establishment could have fit comfortably into some of the nicer outhouses I’d been in, the back was near the same as the front. At the counter the bartender stared out his open door, wiping the counter numbly. He’d been wiping at the same spot since we’d come in. It was the only clean spot on the bar, but that hadn’t yet occurred to him. I was pretty sure he’d taken a dose of Ouroboros Root, though the effects of that hallucinogen are often indistinguishable from simple idiocy. The only other occupant was the resident whore, fat-faced and fat-thighed, the first painted up like a doll, the second on display below the skin-tight skirt she wore. After a futile few moments of trying to attract our attention she’d given up and gone back to her spot at the window.
Enjolras was one of the many petty smugglers that worked the Kinterre-to-Rigus route, had a junk called Kor’s Bitch that he held together with turpentine and string. He brought in wyrm and dreamvine and sometimes the occasional unfortunate girl, destined to live out a short life in one of the brothels his countrymen ran. Rigun was his second language, the first being a sort of gutter Tarasaighn all but indistinguishable from gibberish. He’d worked for me a few times, hustling in product. He’d always played square, but then in the past the stakes had been considerably lower.
I counted two ochres out from my pouch and handed it to him. ‘You’ll get two more when you’re in Kinterre.’
‘All right.’
‘You leave tomorrow before dawn.’
‘Before dawn.’
‘And they’re your only human cargo – no other passengers. Four ochres buys out the rest of the vessel.’
‘We don’t generally carry travelers. But there’s a cabin in the back they can have. It’s small, but cozy.’
His ‘cabin’ was a few square yards by the bilge, covered over with old foodstuffs in case the authorities decided to search it, and usually filled with contraband. But it would do for ten days’ sail to Kinterre. Anyway, I wouldn’t be using it.
I hadn’t touched the beer I’d bought when I’d come in, and it wasn’t because I didn’t want a drink. I desperately wanted a drink. I more than wanted a drink, I was pretty sure I needed one, like a weed in the desert. I just didn’t want this one, because it smelled distinctly of piss. ‘They tell stories about people in your position, who decide once they’re out to sea that there’s no point in keeping the promises they made on land. They figure they’ll steal what they can off the corpses they make, and they won’t need to worry about retribution, since anyone who might offer it is stuck a thousand miles away.’
Enjolras spat onto the floor but didn’t look away. ‘People tell all kinds of stories. Most ain’t nothing more than that.’
‘People tell stories about me, too.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Every one of them is absolutely true. The boy and his mother don’t show up at Kinterre in ten days, won’t nothing happen to you right away. But one night, long after you’ve forgotten this conversation and what you’ve done, you’ll answer a knock at your door and men you’ve never seen will be standing there. And then they’ll do things to you, Enjolras – terrible thing, vile things, things that no man should ever have done to him. And as you suffer, and shortly before you die, you’ll wonder desperately what could possibly have possessed you to set yourself up for such a … horrific end, just to have carried around a few extra ochres in your pocket.’ I let the pause build. ‘But you won’t get no answer.’
By the time Wren and Adeline did or did not make it to their destination I would almost certainly be dead. There was, of course, no need for Enjolras to know that. And if I were to live out the next few days, and if Enjolras was to have betrayed me – well, then my threats would have been far from empty.
He went white and drank the rest of his shitty beer before speaking. ‘By Śakra the Firstborn and his consort Prachetas, by Lizben the Kind, by Kor who watches over sailors – your people will be in Kinterre in ten days’ time, or my junk will be in the bottom of the ocean.’
I let him sweat for a while before speaking. ‘You didn’t swear by me.’
‘I swear by you, Warden. I swear on your name.’
That wasn’t near good enough, but it was all I’d get. I nodded and stood. ‘Till tomorrow, then.’
‘Till tomorrow,’ he agreed.
Adeline had been keeping her head down at an inn called the Half-way Home for the last two days, and I’d sent Wren to join her after I’d picked him up at Mazzie’s. It was a short walk, a half dozen blocks, but during it I took the opportunity to finish off another vial of breath.
The Half-way Home was also a shithole. There are very few establishments near the docks that cannot claim that dubious distinction. Adeline’s room had a back entrance, and I climbed up the narrow wooden staircase that led to it after making sure no one was following.
She was nervous, understandable even from what little she knew of the situation, but she was holding it together. I locked the door behind me. Would have bolted it and shoved a chair against the handle, if there had been a bolt to shove, or any furniture apart from the crumbling bed Adeline was sitting on. Wren stood at the other end of the room, staring through a little window at the slums and the bay beyond.
‘There’s been a change of plans,’ I said.
Adeline nodded.
‘We aren’t going to the Free Cities next week on an Islander caravel. You’re going to Kinterre, tomorrow at first light, in the bilge of a Tarasaighn junk.’
‘You said “you”,’ Adeline noted.
‘Because I’m not coming, not right now, and neither is Adolphus. We’ve got to stick around for a little while, make sure some things here work out a certain way. We’ll follow in a couple of days, should be right behind you. But don’t wait for us – you get a berth on the first ship heading to the Free Cities. If we don’t see each other in Kinterre, we’ll meet up across the sea.’
‘Where is he?’
I’d been mentally preparing myself to lie for the last forty minutes or so, but I froze at the moment of truth, had to play for time by fiddling with my cigarette. In short, it was not my best performance. ‘He’s at the Earl, I’m going to pick him up after I’m done here.’
Adeline was all but impossible to lie to. What took a Questioner an hour and a selection of sharpened metal to learn she could pick up in a second-long glance. Generally she tempered her insight with an astute capacity for not asking certain questions. I wished she hadn’t asked this one. ‘What are you two going to do?’
‘We’re going to handle some things that need to be handled. I need someone to watch my back, just for the next couple of days. Don’t worry about us – the things we’ve been through, this barely qualifies as a scrape. You’ll be listening to his stupid jokes before you know it.’
I think she must have known this was a lie; my story was full of holes big enough to drive a wagon through. But she didn’t call me on any of them. Perhaps some part of her mind – that bit below full consciousness which is concerned only with self-preservation – perhaps it knew that to inspect my claim too deeply would make it impossible for her to keep going. ‘All right,’ she said finally, though of course it wasn’t that at all.
I counted ten ochres from my purse and handed them to Wren. They represented most of my current stash, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be needing money much longer. ‘This is hers,’ I said, ‘but I trust you to hide it better. Two go to th
e Captain, once he drops you in Kinterre – two and not a damn copper more. There’s an account drawn up at the Ormando banking house, in New Brymen.’
‘How much?’
‘A little north of a thousand ochres.’
Wren released a thin intake of breath, though by my way of thinking it was an awfully paltry sum for a lifetime ill spent.
‘I don’t trust the men taking you there any more than I trust anyone else outside of this room, and you shouldn’t either. Lock the door, sleep in shifts. The first hint you smell of anything you ace the captain, and you do it public like, with the Art – you can do that, right?’
‘I can do that,’ he said, nodding fiercely.
‘They’ll be pissing themselves to think they’ve a practitioner aboard, and that should keep them honest for the rest of the voyage. But don’t kill more than two of them, or there won’t be enough people left to run the ship.’
‘I got it.’
‘I mean don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to. That would really be best.’
‘I got it,’ he repeated, aggravated.
That was all I had to say to him. Actually I had much more to say to him, hours and hours of monologue, but that was all I did say to him.
‘Adolphus will join us soon,’ Wren said or asked, I wasn’t sure.
‘I don’t have the time to repeat myself. You’ll see him in Kinterre in two weeks, or in the Free Cities in a month and a half. Find yourself at the Kor’s Bitch tomorrow morning before dawn. Don’t leave the room till then.’
That was the end of it, there was no point in a dramatic farewell, both because I was still pretending this wouldn’t be the last time we’d see each other and because I’m just generally not one for melodrama. Adeline isn’t either, but I suppose she’s further in that direction then I am, because before I could bolt out the back she stepped forward and took me into an awkward embrace.
I didn’t want a hug from Adeline. I was about to start doing some things for which being human was a distinct liability, and the smell of her hair and the feel of her fat arms holding me were sharp reminders of the few steps I still was away from monster. I squeezed her back and tried to keep my mind off the twenty years I’d known her, the meals she’d made me, the confidences we’d shared. Of what she’d meant to the best friend I’d ever had, that she’d been mother to the boy who was nearly my son.
She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Page 33