Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

  ‘But thicker than these?’ Cora picked up the bowl that held the laces. One black, one white.

  ‘I’d put a mark on it, whatever the odds,’ Pruett said, and looked at her slyly.

  Cora shoved the bowl at him. ‘What about the dirt I picked up?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The mark on the wall, next to the body.’

  Pruett waved in the direction of the shelves that lined the back of the cold room. ‘Bowen put it in a jar, and if you’re really lucky he might have added a label too.’

  Cora saw the briefest curl of Bowen’s lips before the assistant went over to the shelves and reached for a tiny jar amidst the chaos of glass and stoppers and wooden boxes.

  He handed it to Cora and muttered, ‘Someone has to keep track of things in this place.’

  She nodded her thanks and held the jar to a lamp to examine the red-white dirt it held. No more than half a teaspoon’s worth.

  ‘What do you think this is then, Pruett?’

  ‘Plague.’

  Cora fumbled the jar onto a nearby table and stepped smartly away from it. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s my theory, anyway. What else do you expect from the muck of this city?’

  ‘You’re telling me you don’t know what this is, and, more importantly, you don’t care.’

  ‘Exactly right, Detective.’

  ‘You won’t mind if I take it then?’

  ‘I think we can live without it, though I doubt you’ve got room in that cupboard of yours for too many—’

  The door at the top of the stairs was flung open and a red-faced constable appeared above them. ‘Five dead at the Derby Pump, Mr Pruett!’

  Pruett groaned. ‘Move this one to the back door, Bowen. I’ll send someone for the burning as we go.’

  ‘And Sergeant Hearst says to tell you,’ the constable called down, ‘it’s a mess. Some of them was wheelwrights. They went at each other with piping and such.’

  ‘I need you to keep the Wayward,’ Cora told the stitcher.

  Pruett shrugged on his coat. ‘When there’s five more on their way? What’s so special about this one?’

  ‘Everything,’ Cora said.

  ‘Two days,’ Pruett said. ‘The rate this city murders people, I won’t have room for him for any longer.’ He and Bowen readied themselves to leave.

  Cora looked at the laces in the bowl again. One black, one white.

  The door closed behind the men. She took out her bindleleaf tin and rolled a new smoke.

  One black lace, one white.

  She lit up, then put the small jar of dirt into her coat, her fingers brushing against the many slips of paper that lined her pocket. She didn’t need to take them out to see what they were, or that the name of the Oak was written on each of them. She didn’t have a choice now, did she? She’d have to go. The laces had decided her. Whoever sewed the Wayward’s mouth had done so to send a message, and the colours of the laces were deliberately chosen. Of that she was certain, and she was beginning to see why.

  One black, one white. The twin colours of the coats worn by the chequers: those takers of bets big and small, rich and poor. If you gave them your Senseless, Penniless, Heckling, your Curious, they’d make stories worthy of the Audience, win or lose. Had the Wayward over-played his hand and been unable to pay?

  She left the cold room. Tonight she would see what the betting world knew of the dead Wayward, and learn the night’s numbers while she was at it.

  Three

  It was raining, Painter be damned. Cora became aware of it as she left her desk, despite the lack of a window in her office. The water knuckled hard on the station roof two floors up, and was quietly finding its way inside too, no doubt. Anyone spending the night in the cells would be witness to the wet creep across the floor. In the cold room, Bowen would be putting down the sandbags again.

  She was late leaving the station, but the briefing room was still noisy – the election meant long days for the constables. As she stepped into the street, there was the reason: despite the rain, there were people everywhere. And somewhere among them, the Wayward’s killer. The kind of person who sewed a man’s mouth shut. She quickened her step.

  It wasn’t just Fenest’s own in the crowds. People came from far and wide for the election, though most wouldn’t hear the stories. It was the occasion that drew all six realms to Fenest, to the heart of the Union. They came just for the atmosphere, and here it was, pissing all over them. She pulled up her collar and stepped into the throng.

  Once every five years an election took place on her doorstep, and somehow every five years she managed to forget how awful it all was. The whole business of it: each realm sent a storyteller to Fenest and, over the course of a few weeks, those storytellers told their tales to win votes for their realms – votes cast by stones. And the prize was power. It was just as Ruth had said, all those years ago: there was power in stories and a story of power. Cora spat. Ruth hadn’t hung around long enough to see what that really meant. Things were different once the easy lessons of the Seminary were left behind.

  But in the election, stories were the means to power, because every ‘yes’ vote, every black stone cast for a story, got that realm a seat in the Assembly. And the realm with the most Assembly seats at the close of the election gained the power to shape what happened across the Union for the next five years, including in Fenest. Just being an administrative capital, Fenest didn’t get its own storyteller or election story. Though the capital was in charge of proceedings, Cora, like every other Fenestiran, was stuck with whoever won for five long years. Until the wheel turned again and brought the next election. Until this moment.

  In some ways, these weeks leading up to the first story were the worst. Newcomers to the city had to find their way among the locals. There was always a spike in cut-purses and the Brawler heard more stories in his Seat than usual. Perhaps the Wayward found behind Mrs Hawksley’s was just one of the expected victims of the election. Caught in the fever pitch and consumed by the chequers’ halls – betting being one of Fenest’s most popular attractions. Not that things would settle down even when the election started and the stories began. Then the constables would be needed for crowd control at the story sites. Demand for seats in the public gallery always outstripped supply and it was often ugly.

  The constables could get to work out here, Cora thought, dodging a group of young Perlish men oiled and tucked into their fancy clothes. Thin smoke drifted from bindleleaf held at arm’s length in lacquered holders. Enjoying the last days of Perlish control of the Assembly, she guessed; the Perlish realm, both damn Duchies of them, had won the previous election. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember anything about the story that had won the Perlish power last time. Their tenure as ruling realm would likely stay much more memorable: tax exemptions for luxuries while basic provisions in Fenest went unfunded. This was the state of things for the other realms too, so the pennysheets said. And here was one such dereliction now: a pothole yawned before her, full of greasy-looking water.

  Cora wasn’t going anywhere fast, but the rain was getting heavier. She ducked into an alley she knew she shouldn’t, but she needed to make a stop before the Oak and do it before she drowned. Picking her way through piles of muck and streams of slops and who-knew-what-else took some doing. Which was why she didn’t see tonight’s trouble until the knife flashed towards her chest.

  Two of them, a man and a woman, both as dirty as the alley they were thieving in.

  ‘Pockets, now!’ the man said.

  ‘All right, easy does it. But you’re not going to like what I’ve got.’ Cora reached into her coat and pulled out her badge. The woman saw silver and, Poet hear her, she looked pleased – as if it might be something valuable. But the man understood. He hesitated, his knife dropping just a touch. ‘That’s right,’ Cora said. ‘Picked the wrong one tonight.’

  A look passed between them. It screamed desperation as loudly as their tattered tunics.

  Th
e man lunged. Cora caught his wrist and pulled, hard, overbalancing him. One shove and he was sprawling among the alley’s detritus.

  They weren’t tough, but they could run. The woman was gone so quick Cora started to doubt she’d been there at all. The man was up and off before Cora had even taken a step. She sifted the sodden pennysheets and rotten crates with her foot, just in case he’d dropped the knife. It was no great surprise to find he hadn’t – that blade was his livelihood. Shined special for the Partner and the out-of-towners.

  Cora let her breath settle back to its usual bindleleaf-induced pace and counted herself as fortunate as the Latecomer that the pair hadn’t been real trouble. The Wayward hadn’t been so lucky. When she got moving again she kept her wits about her, ignoring what she stepped in, until she emerged from the alleys and into an even more perilous part of the city: the administrative quarter. Least in the alleyways people were honest about stealing from you.

  She made her way along wide, well-lit streets where important people walked from one important building to another. It was almost possible to pretend she was one of them. But then, when she looked up at the enormous pale stone walls and thin windows of the Wheelhouse, she felt about as small as a cutpurse impressed by a flash of silver. There was nothing about collecting her pittance of pay that made her feel important.

  The Wheelhouse was squat and square, despite its name. It was home to the Commission – the civil service of Fenest. Even at this hour of the evening, lamps still burned in all the windows. The main doors were open and the front desk was manned. Clerks in washed-out purple rushed to and fro, arms overflowing with scrolls and ledgers. The Commission recorded every aspect of life in Fenest – the city, the people, the stories, all the hours of all the days. Cora was just another employee, paid, logged, weighed and measured by the Commission.

  Her badge was checked at the front desk, as it always was, despite the regularity of her visits to the Wheelhouse. When she’d first joined the police, Cora had wondered if badge-checking was a policy designed to make employees feel as if they could at any moment be rejected – a way to ensure complicity with Commission systems. Now she didn’t bother wasting thought on such questions. The Commission was the Commission. It was above her pay grade to fathom it.

  After all these years she knew her way through the ugly marble-floored corridors to the small office deep in the bowels of the building. She nodded to the men and women she passed, most of them blind as the Devotee behind their thick spectacles. If any of them had seen the sun this year, it was only because they were under orders to log that it still hung in the sky. No one looked healthy, least of all Henry.

  He grunted a greeting as Cora entered the office. He’d put on weight again. He barely fit behind his desk, his gut resting on the top so he had to lift it to turn a page – something he did without thought. The smell of his sweat filled the room, and Cora felt guilty for letting some of it escape into the corridor.

  ‘Gorderheim.’ He strained to reach a stack of ledgers. ‘Gorderheim. Gorder— yes. Every month I wonder if it’ll be our last together.’ He smiled, his lips thin in his face. He used to be all hands and smiles back when Cora was younger, and he was quicker.

  ‘Don’t say that, Henry. You’ve got another year in you, I’m sure.’

  He hacked a laugh that quickly turned into a cough. ‘Not ’nother election though, eh?’

  ‘They making you do overtime?’

  ‘And then again,’ he said.

  ‘All part of the Commission’s greatest work.’

  He looked hard at her for a moment, unsure if she was serious. For her part, she wasn’t sure herself. What she’d said sounded like something from a pennysheet, and one that was particularly well-disposed to the Commission. There wouldn’t be much relief from talking about the election now: there was a week to go until the first story was told.

  And until then, the Commission’s army of civil servants and bureaucrats would be drawing up lists, making lists of lists, copying everything in triplicate and filing it all somewhere in the Wheelhouse, never to be seen again.

  ‘Between you, me, and the Stowaway, they’ve put me on voters,’ Henry said, pride dripping down his chin alongside the sweat.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Three hundred of Fenest’s finest scum and lowlifes, every district of the city represented an’ accounted for.’

  A pool of three hundred men and women from Fenest. For each story, fifty new names were drawn from the pool; fifty people who not only got to hear a storyteller’s tale, but also had to pass judgement on it. And on that realm. Had to choose: a white stone or a black, with the prize a term in power, ruling over all the other realms and Fenest too. Were the voters the lucky ones? To listen to an election story was a privilege Cora had enjoyed before Ruth left, but to say whether that story deserved a vote, deserved seats in the Assembly? It was a burden Cora didn’t want. Which was just as well: Commission staff, including the police, weren’t eligible to vote. One of the few perks of the job.

  ‘Voter lists. You’re a big wheel, Henry, right enough.’

  ‘Flatter all you like, Gorderheim.’

  Cora waited, expecting a ‘but’ to follow. It didn’t. She cleared her throat. ‘As good as it is to catch up, I’m afraid I have to get to business.’

  ‘Oak tonight, is it?’

  ‘Where else?’

  He chuckled unpleasantly. ‘Lot of out-of-towners with wool between their ears and heavy purses.’

  ‘Heavier than mine.’

  ‘Now, now, Detective. The Commission compensates us all as per our station.’ He turned his chair like a barge turned in a river. From a locked chest he produced a small stack of coins, which he placed carefully on the desktop; Commission regulations said he couldn’t pass her the money directly. How they loved their pointless rules.

  Cora stashed her pay inside her coat, in three separate pockets. It wasn’t much, but she couldn’t afford to lose it all at once – not even ringside. Most months she managed to double it or better on the same day she saw Henry. Tonight, that would be a struggle. She had actual work to do.

  ‘Audience save us from an election, right, Henry?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer, instead closing the door on the purple-clad clerk. As she strode away from the reek of stale sweat, she decided she had a second thing from that night to tell the Grateful Latecomer: this wasn’t her world. The Commission, with all its petty concerns and wheels-within-Wheelhouses, was something she only had to worry about one day a month – pay day. Silence take it the rest of the time.

  The rain-drenched streets of Fenest never felt so sweet as when she left the Wheelhouse behind.

  *

  Cora ducked inside the Dancing Oak. Steep stairs led down into the gloom, but she knew the way well enough. She also knew to grip the handrail when it was raining out. Making her way down, she dripped her own deluge on the steps which, worn smooth by decades of eager soles, were one of the finest waterfalls in all Fenest. If she listened long enough at the Oak’s bar on such a night she’d hear a story of irrigation, pipes, and that same rain water ending up in the Oak’s beer.

  And tonight was a night for listening. If anyone knew about a Wayward with debts enough to make a message of his dead body, it’d be Beulah. Dancing Beulah ran half the chequers’ halls in Fenest, one way or another, including the back room at the Oak. Cora hoped neither had anything directly to do with the Wayward in the alley. Or, at least, nothing that couldn’t be worked out.

  At the bottom of the stairs she avoided a man pissing his own waterfall and then pushed her way into the bar. For a moment she wondered if she had the right place, dazzled as she was by the sheen of oiled hair and beards in the lamplight. Men dressed in fashions that defied any kind of sense stood, posing, in pairs, acutely aware of when they were and weren’t being watched. They laughed fake laughs and coughed politely. The women were no better.

  ‘Amateur save me from the Perlish,’ she said, not caring who
heard. If they wanted to slum it when they visited for the election, fine, but she didn’t have to like it. Though the more she looked, the more she noticed people from other realms among the Prized’s fops and dandies.

  At the bar, two Caskers were arm wrestling, as if they were the only people in the whole place. A Wayward passed her, the many pockets of his cloak full to bursting. Cora thought about stopping him, but what could she say? ‘I’ve got a dead Wayward – you missing any friends?’ She’d have just as much luck talking to the group of Seeders who were drinking strong ale with the kind of determination even the Drunkard would find unsettling.

  Applause broke out like a fever. In the corner, on a stage lit by a single candle, a battered-looking man took to a piano. A few halting notes put an end to the applause. From his bruised mouth came the voice of a sweet summer girl.

  She turned away and headed down the passage that led to the back room. At the barricaded door she banged twice, loud. Someone from the crowd shushed her.

  When Butterman, the pennysheet hack, had said most of her sources were beyond this door, he’d been closer to the truth than he’d been his whole career. Lucky for her – lucky for a lot of people – the truth wasn’t worth printing. Not that she’d tell that to the Whisperer.

  She knocked again.

  ‘What’s the weather?’ someone grunted from behind the door.

  Cora cursed the Critic under her breath; how many times had she told Beulah such things were better left to Seminary children?

  ‘Just let me in. I need to talk to her.’

  ‘What’s the weather?’

  ‘Raining cocks, all right? It’s raining cocks out there. Not enough to help him on the piano, mind.’

  A deep belly-rumble came from the woman behind the door. ‘Sure thing, Detective.’ The door opened to reveal a heavily-lined face and gaps of missing teeth. ‘I heard the Perlish did that to them singers,’ she said, making a snipping gesture. ‘Beulah’s in her box.’

  ‘Where else would she be?’ Cora said.

  As the door closed behind her, the Perlish eunuch was singing of betrayal, the kind that came from those who were loved.