Corroded tscc-3

by Karina Cooper

  I plucked one knife from the corset slatting beneath my coat. If Maddie Ruth ever forgot what I did for her this day, I’d deliver a bolloxing so hard, her skull wouldn’t stop ringing for a fortnight. Clenching my teeth, I cut the end of the rope I stood upon. My stomach left its usual haunts to launch into my throat as the support dropped out from beneath me.

  Allez hop, I thought wildly, because that, too, was a kind of habit, and one I relied upon to focus myself.

  I grasped the rope, swung across the alley and slammed hard into the wall. My palms burned with the effort; flesh tore under the rough, twisted hemp. That would scar, I was sure of it. Rope abrasions were never gentle.

  Nothing for it, now.

  Agile as an African monkey, I climbed up the rope, hissing as my hands twitched, and over the ledge. “Maddie Ruth!”

  “Where are they?” came a not so faint demand from my left. “Dicker! Abe?”

  “Get over here,” roared the one I assumed was called Abe.

  “Maddie Ruth,” I called in a loud whisper, “get on this rope!”

  This far up, the murk seemed thicker towards the street than it did while upon it. I couldn’t be sure Maddie Ruth obeyed, not until the rope I held in my throbbing hands went taut.

  Untested though she was, she had gumption. I did not know exactly what Hawke’s Menagerie had taught her, but as I pulled the rope hard, hauling her bodily over the ledge with enough effort to drench my forehead, neck and back in sweat, I was glad that she knew enough that she could hold on to a rope without wilting.

  She grasped the ledge as she came close enough, wriggled onto the slanted surface of the rooftop we now occupied, and collapsed, gasping for breath.

  I did not sit. I was not so ignorant as my unbidden companion.

  “Take a moment,” I said, my gaze not on her as she struggled to catch her breath, but on the roiling fog drifting across the landscape. Pointed rooftops and slanted shingles parted the miasma like ships at sea, bordered by wrought iron grating or strung together by more ropes or twisted bits of cloth. The occasional sheet—ragged sails, usually, pinched from wherever they could be found—flapped like beacons. There were no lanterns to see by up here, not by day, but there were many marked signs. I could read some of them, but none were in written word. The cant of the Crossing was a learned thing, and mine mostly by accident.

  Maddie Ruth pushed tendrils of brown hair from her sweat-damp cheeks, looking for all the world like the wayward child she protested not to be. “Is this safe?” she asked, only fortifying the naïve comparison.

  I shook my head. “Of course not,” I replied, giving her the courtesy of unbuttered honesty. She winced. “Welcome to Cat’s Crossing, girl. Pray your footing is as precise as your aim.”

  “It is.”

  “That will be seen.” Lights bobbed in the swirl, and I muttered an uncivility beneath my breath. “Come on, then. We’ve ground to cover.”

  “But—”

  She was rather fond of the word, wasn’t she? I cut her off with an impatient gesture. “Cat’s Crossing is the domain of the quick and the agile, and you may rest assured that every gang has a bantling or two to run it. Including the Ferrymen,” I added pointedly. “Now, off your backside, Maddie Ruth, and make good on your boasting.”

  That was enough. She clambered to her feet, less grace than I expected but I imagined the weight of the device upon her back made for awkward maneuvering.

  That would pose a problem. Brusque though I was, I had no intentions of losing the girl.

  Cat’s Crossing was the name given the run of rooftops above London’s low’s streets and far below the lifted platforms comprising London proper. It was usually the haunt of children—bantling gangs who either worked for themselves until they were too big to safely run the Crossing or kept company with the foremost gangs in whatever turf they occupied.

  It was, in essence, a suicidal course. Even the children who occupied it weren’t immune; many was the small body found twisted and broken on the cobbles below.

  I would have to be very careful with Maddie Ruth in tow.

  “I’m ready,” she said, huddling closer as masculine swearing drifted from below and the occasional bit of lantern lit a dull glow from rooftops just beyond.

  I really didn’t imagine that she was. But she’d learn.

  The alternative was not one I was willing to pursue.

  Chapter Five

  Were we on Baker ground, I would have expected to find the occasional carrier—usually a pair of young kinchin rogues whose purpose was to keep watch on the territory and run messages to members below when likely prospects came wandering past.

  More often than not, these kinchins saw great sport in fishing for hats by way of hook and twine. One recognized a successful angler by the state of his hat, usually somewhat too big and stuffed with rags for fit.

  As Ratcliffe was unclaimed territory—by careful politicking by the Karakash Veil, I’d wager, who’d not take kindly to the Black Fish Ferrymen’s usual muckery of prostitution and drink encroaching upon their own wares—I saw no carriers of any stripe. As I led Maddie Ruth on a quick-footed chase across the adjacent rooftops, over a knee-high divide of twisted iron fencing—to keep the birds away, naturally—and bade her jump across the narrow gap dividing one roof from the next, I saw nothing to indicate that the district’s Crossing was well-used at all.

  This way was not a path for standard men, as many of the most useful ways required leaping, twisting, climbing and the occasional fall. Being short of stature as we both were, we could easily fit in the narrow passes between overhangs, or where one ledge tucked against another in cramped residence.

  The men who searched for us below, however, did not give up so easily.

  “Why are they searching so steadily?” Maddie Ruth asked as we paused to let her adjust her burden. Red-cheeked and now soot-smeared, she looked as much a fright as I expected I did. At least she was no longer so out of place, what with her higher standards of cleanliness than the streets often demanded. I’d helped her tuck up her skirt, baring a sight more woolen stocking than I expect she cared for.

  Better that than tripping on the hem and regretting the lack of foresight during the tumble to a broken head.

  I shook my head. I had no answer for her. I could see no benefit to be so focused on two flighty birds with no apparent value to them. I leaned over the ledge we crouched beside, coughing harshly to dispel the gummy taste of the smokestacks we passed by from my throat.

  I couldn’t see the streets below, not as such, but I could still hear the echoed remains of hue and cries, lifted from one side of the district to the other.

  “It makes no apparent sense,” I muttered.

  “Maybe they’re after you?”

  “If they are,” I said, not one to let a lesson slide, “then ’tis because I am a collector and they see an advantage to it.”

  “Or they know you’re a girl.”

  “You’re the twist here,” I pointed out, glancing at her skirt with deliberately pointed interest. “My sex is not so apparent to them what don’t know how to look.”

  Maddie Ruth frowned, but said nothing.

  Good. I hoped she thought about that.

  I braced my fingertips against the ledge, wincing when the act sent sharp tingling across my injured hand. I muttered a few choice words. I should have asked to borrow Maddie Ruth’s gloves. She still carried them, tucked into the back of her belt.

  “I thought you would have fought them off,” she said, her voice quiet and a little small. “They’re not supposed to bother collectors.”

  “And who told you that?” Turning away from the long drop beside me, I hopped over a loose shingle and beckoned. “Come on, then, we’re not free yet.”

  She rose from her crouch, wincing. The weight of her launched netting device was likely becoming less insignificant by the minute. “It’s the rule, right? We all know collectors’re to be left alone.”

  “Is that s
o?” My voice was as dry as the Arabian sands, and slightly amused as I navigated us across the less steep rooftop of what I suspected was a pub, or some like communal gathering. The smell of roasting meat—plain, without spice, and likely flavored with rat or stray dog—merged with the thick pong of the typical London low barrage of odorous delights. Over it all, a fishy rot, wafting from the River Thames just south. “Pray tell who this everyone is so that I may commission them to make a sign.”

  “But they all say it.”

  Maddie Ruth was of an age where the truths of her knowledge had not quite come to terms with the realities of living. I had very little patience for it, though I admit that in her I saw some of my own arrogance. Difficult to avoid it. A young girl seeking to become a collector, a man’s profession at the very least and an unforgiving one at the worst.

  I’d learned quite a bit on my first official bounty, and subsequent collections had only refined me. That I was alive still was not entirely a matter of skill.

  “Use your eyes, girl,” I told her, grasping a ledge and leveraging myself over the top. My hands ached with the effort. “Does it appear as if the Black Fish Ferryman give a toss what your they suggests?”

  She was quiet for a long moment, following behind me with slightly more racket in every footstep. Creaking leather, shuffling boots and the occasional loud breath as she pushed herself harder than I expect she thought she might have to.

  Was I ever this naïve?

  I had to think so. No wonder Hawke’s first inclination had been to dismiss me, those five long years ago.

  We walked in silence for some few minutes, my gaze sharp on the shrouded rooftops around us just in case the Ferrymen had roped a bantling into playing the spy for them. Then, thoughtfully, I asked, “Why are you with the Menagerie, Maddie Ruth?”

  I could all but hear her shoulders move, emphasized by the squeak of still-stiff leather. “The work is steady.”

  “What work?”

  “I keep the clockwork running, make sure all the circus mechanisms are in good order, and when there’s the occasional tumble from the high places, I know enough common medicine to help.” She listed them off as if she were highlighting her own references, and I bit off a smile before I succumbed to it. “Beside all that,” she added, “Mr. Hawke took my pa in when no one else was willing. Seemed only right to stay when pa finally died of his ague.”

  A sobering thought. On the one hand, that the Veil allowed a stray girl and her sick father to stay painted a rather optimistic picture of the faceless voice threatening to turn me over to the flesh tables. On the other, Maddie Ruth had no apparent family to keep her off them.

  “What took your pa?” I asked her.

  “The bliss.”

  Not an uncommon issue, for them who did not handle the opium well. I said nothing to that, and heard no warning. As I said: arrogance.

  I meant to ask if she was treated well—and heaven help me if she’d said no, for I had no plans in place to remedy that—when a cacophony of shouting erupted somewhere below.

  I shushed her with a hiss, hurrying across the narrow tenement casing. Nimble, keeping my body ducked low, I leapt the small divide and left her to make her way over at a slower pace as I dropped to my stomach and crawled to the far edge.

  What I saw in the thinner fog almost forced me to laugh out loud; a shift of amusement that abruptly turned grim as Maddie Ruth fell to her knees beside me.

  “What is it?”

  “A puzzle,” I said, not truly an answer, but I hadn’t worked it out yet, myself.

  Men brawled in the street below, large and small, thin and wide. Black skin, pale skin, young and old. I saw perhaps half a dozen faces I wasn’t certain I recognized, and a little over a dozen more fighting them. I watched a large man pin down a lanky youth and drive a fist like a brick into his jaw, delivering a facer that would crunch bone. Two more chased a squat man whose bare-armed tattoos were already abraded and bleeding—likely a tumble to the rough cobbles.

  There was no charm, no grace to the event. This was no gentlemen’s game of fisticuffs. Them what would stagger away would do so bleeding.

  The hollering I’d heard came not just from this scrap in the middle of the street—empty, I suddenly realized, with carts left abandoned and doors closed along the way—but from the surrounding lanes and crossroads.

  We’d stumbled upon a patch brawl. But why on earth was I looking at Brick Street Bakers in Ratcliffe?

  More, if they were here, where was Ishmael Communion? I found it impossible to imagine the Bakers would move into another district so openly without Ishmael’s knowing. The man was not only a prominent member of the crew, but he was built like one of the Queen’s own warships—large, bulky and packing a fierce wallop.

  The fact that he was among the finest rum dubbers of the black art—that is, a master lockpick, whose skill could be considered an art—often made him a useful ally.

  I regarded the man as a friend. If he was here, he could help me smuggle my unwelcome companion out of this nonsense.

  “Let us go,” I whispered, and rolled from sight.

  The trouble with Cat’s Crossing—once one eased past the difficult footing, the often treacherous upkeep and the likelihood of carriers to report on one’s movements—was the getting down. To the unwary, reaching the street below was often a matter of misplaced footing.

  Reaching the street alive took some finer care.

  As I searched for a way down, Maddie Ruth found a bare bit of stone to squat upon and hugged her knees. The cacophony of fighting men surrounded us, drifting up like echoes of some ghostly battle.

  “Why are they fighting?” she asked me.

  “I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “But this isn’t Baker land.”

  “T’isn’t Ferrymen, either,” I pointed out, peering into a narrow alley in search of those subtle accents often put in place by Cat’s Crossing particulars. Things that seemed so normal were often anything but. Such as the wash line, which very likely hadn’t seen wash in ages.

  Nothing here, save the alley walls themselves. I could creep down them easy. Maddie Ruth would not.

  I passed it by, reaching the other side of the rooftop and looking down into a wider lane.

  I spied two kinchins huddled back to back behind a stacked bit of barrel, and not far, three men standing at loose ends. Of the three, only one had the broad shoulders of a man large enough to playact the role of a sky ship, and I grinned before I caught myself. I popped off three sharp whistles that bounced in the fog-damp lane.

  The two other blokes turned first, but when Ishmael Communion moved, it was akin to the rolling of a mountain. He looked up, the shrewd man, and picked me out right quick from the casement hanging.

  “Girl,” was his welcome rumble, “this is not the place.”

  Ishmael was not a man easily missed, with skin black as tar and eyes nearly as dark. The whites of them were tinged yellow, as if permanently colored by the peasouper he lived in. His face was comprised of wide, flat features, thick lips and a broad, pugnacious nose that easily marked him as a bruiser.

  A pick-lock and case cracker though he might be, there was little doubt that Communion would excel at arranging an opponent’s features in heretofore undiscovered ways. Those who failed to heed the warning learned it on the end of roughened, scarred knuckles.

  Though he may have a face only his late mother could love, his voice was exceedingly deep, and his rather excellent grasp of the Queen’s English gave him a certain complexity unexpected from a rum dubber.

  That he called me “girl” was not a slight. Like many in the streets below, he had no name for me, and had settled upon the moniker with simple acceptance. I’d never heard sting nor scorn within it, so I let it be.

  I grimaced. “Don’t I just know it?”

  “Who’s that, then?” demanded a tall, athletically shaped man beside Ishmael. Unlike the latter’s overalls and patched fustian coat, the man wore the com
mon togs of a dock laborer, and his hat was left crookedly atop golden hair slicked back by sweat or damp. He glowered at me as if I were the intruder and not them, which I returned with raised eyebrows.

  “Collector,” Ishmael rumbled, and left it—and his mates—there. He reached the bottom of the wall, so tall that were he to reach up with both hands, I wagered I could hang from the ledge and step on his palms.

  “What, a girl?”

  “The girl,” whispered the third bloke, who was a sight younger but whose nose bore the distinctive scarring of a knife’s edge. No prize already, the scar left him looking angry and mean. But his smile, when he flipped it at me, seemed easy enough. “The only cross patch in the lot. Cor. Didn’t know you was friends, Communion.”

  Ishmael ignored them to glower up at me, broad forehead beetling in. “You need down.”

  As I said, shrewd man.

  “I need help getting someone else down, rather.” I gestured behind me. “Maddie Ruth, come here.”

  She’d been waiting patiently enough, but at my summons, she darted to my side.

  I gestured down. “Communion, this is Maddie Ruth.”

  His full lip protruded in studied thought, a ream of pink flesh stark against the coal black of his skin. “Mark?”

  “I’d never,” she protested, as if she’d ever be the one doing the marking.

  “Wayward kinchin mort,” I corrected over her confusion. “And so far out of her depth as to be swimming in it. I’m attempting to get her home.”

  The two stared at each other awkwardly for a moment. Then, with a gusted sigh, he rumbled, “Right, then. Swing her over, I’ll bring her down.”

  “Wait, I’m to what?” Maddie Ruth squeaked this protest. “I can’t climb.”

  “It’s a poor collector who can’t,” I said. Not kindly but this really only served my point, didn’t it? I held out my hand. “Give me the net-thrower.”

  “Why?” She drew back some, as if I had offered to steal it.

  I resisted the urge to swat at her. “Because it will be dangerous enough climbing down without a heap of brass on your back, you daft patch, now hand it over.”