Watchman's Quest

by Craig Askham

  She chuckled, enjoying his annoyance. Arrogant bitch.

  “How long have you been with the company, Mr. Ironshoulder?” she wondered.

  “Five years.”

  She burst out laughing at that, and he turned to face Stephen, effectively dismissing her. The line was one of his favourite ice breakers, but her mocking laugh only served to add another layer of frost to their exchange. And then the laugh disappeared so fast he wasn’t sure it had even been there at all, and her good-humoured expression turned serious.

  “You’ve been manhandling our clients, Mr. Ironshoulder,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Bad form, sir. Bad form indeed.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her to piss off, but changed his mind when common sense kicked in. He forced himself to look back at her.

  “We have a situation, and I need your help,” he said, instead.

  “I’m off duty,” she drawled, already bored. “And already regretting putting down my drink and getting involved.”

  “Catchers are never off duty.”

  “Not true.”

  “Fine. Piss off back to your drink, then.” He dismissed her for a second time, by turning to look at the name above Stephen’s head. “Knerak,” he said, taking a chance on the K being silent. “I think that Watchman with the ponytail has gone after your friend. If he arrests him, I think you know he won’t last two minutes under interrogation. He’s going to bring this whole operation down around us, and all because he can’t hold his drink.”

  Stephen relaxed a little, and Vaida removed her hand from his arm. She was interested, now.

  “He’s also a massive dickhead,” the gamer muttered. Ironshoulder rolled his eyes, but let the inappropriate insult go. Nobody local was paying them a blind bit of notice.

  “Agreed. I need to go after him, but I also need to make sure you guys don’t get arrested. No offence, but none of you would last any longer under questioning than Lekan.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and nodded.

  “Fair point.”

  “What are you still doing here, Givrok?” Vaida interjected with a sigh. “I hope this decision isn’t going to take as long as choosing your name.”

  Ironshoulder smiled, accepting the jibe as one he’d walked into of his own accord.

  “Can I leave these gentlemen in your care?” he asked, and she made a shooing motion with her hand.

  “I’ll certainly let them buy me some drinks while we wait for you to come back,” she said. Stephen looked over his shoulder at the kolkka room.

  “What if those Watchmen come for us?”

  “I’m a Catcher, Knerak,” she said. “I know those Watchmen well enough that they’ll listen to me when I tell them to mind their own business.”

  Ironshoulder turned to leave, but paused when he had a sudden thought about one of the men in the kolkka room.

  “Any chance you can stop those Watchmen friends of yours from sending a fellow Fixer to the cells for the night?” he asked.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Rurhol Heavyfinger.”

  All traces of friendliness slipped from her face, again so quickly that they might not have been there to begin with. Ironshoulder suspected it had something to do with all the cosmetic surgery she’d had.

  “Not a chance,” she sneered. “That prick owes me thirty duskets, so he can rot in the corner of a dungeon for all I care. Now get lost, Ironprick, before I change my mind and have you slung in there with him.”

  With that, she stalked off. Stephen looked at him, unsure what to do. He mimicked her shooing motion of moments earlier, and the gamers took off after her. Watching them until he was sure they were safe, he spared one last look over at the door to the kolkka room before turning to leave.

  “Sorry, Rurhol,” he muttered, darkly. “I tried.”

  Five

  The air was deliciously cool after the stuffiness of The Chirping Cricket, wafting faint scents of cooked meat from somewhere close by. Ironshoulder hurried down the street without drawing too much attention to himself, regretting the decision at the start of his shift to arm himself with only a knife. It was a good knife, admittedly; perfect for putting holes in kolkka tables, but woefully inadequate against a fully-trained Watchman carrying a pair of well-maintained short swords. It was as good a reason as any not to kill the man, only slightly behind the stronger motivation not to end up being the one wearing Lekan’s silly wig.

  The smell of the meat was making his stomach rumble, even though there was a very good chance it was rat on the menu. To be fair, he’d tried it once or twice and it wasn’t too bad. Liberally spiced to disguise the taste, and barbecued almost black, it wasn’t quite worth the extra time spent on the toilet afterwards, but it was cheap. The trick was to time its ingestion correctly, so that the time spent passing it was carried out on a flushing toilet back on Earth, rather than crouching over a bucket in the corner of a Vanguran dungeon. Toilet paper. Two words that made a hell of a lot of difference when travelling between worlds. Toothpaste. There was another.

  Ironshoulder pushed thoughts of rat kebabs to the back of his head, skirting two drunken revellers as they stumbled into his path from a narrow alleyway between two brothels. He gave them as wide a berth as his reflexes allowed, adding I wonder what they were up to in that alleyway to his banished musings on rat meat. Best not to know.

  “Have away, stranger,” one of them grumbled at his back, slurring his words just enough to imply violence was an option if he didn’t do as he was told. Ironshoulder ignored him, which prompted the second man to chirp up.

  “Told him, mate.” His words were barely coherent. “Ain’t gonna mess with you now, is he?” The Stillwater man could almost feel the finger being jabbed in his direction.

  “Course not,” said the first man, and then hiccuped. “Sneaking up on people like that, gonna get his sorry self killed right dead. What say you, Veek?”

  “Right dead,” his companion agreed.

  Ironshoulder quickened his pace, fighting the urge to pop back and bang their heads together. Turning the corner, he headed in the direction Pej Vahdat should have taken in order to make it back to the portal in the quickest time possible. Remembering how the wiry man had struggled under Lekan’s weight, he figured they couldn’t have made it much farther. Slowing dramatically as he reached a crossroads, he drew his knife and reversed it, hiding the blade against his leather-covered forearm. If Pej and Lekan were close, he needed to be on the lookout for the curious Watchman.

  He went straight over the crossroads, but there was nobody of interest in the street. Three young lads clearly under the influence, a prostitute old enough to be their grandmother trying to sell them her wares, and a body of indeterminable gender slumped in a shop doorway, possibly dead. He carried on, scanning the rest of the long street as far as the lamplight would allow. Something wasn’t right; there was no way Pej could have made it all the way to the next junction already. Not under the weight of the politician and his wig. They must have gone a different way.

  “Damnit, Pej Vahdat,” he muttered, sounding it the way he had originally sounded it. The idiot didn’t deserve the extra effort it took to pronounce it the flamboyant way. He ducked into the nearest shop doorway, out of the reach of the lamps, and shook his head. “Why would you bother making it easy for me?” He peered back the way he’d come. Nobody significant was following him, only the idiots from the alleyway, and he wasn’t sure that was intentional. Back down the street a way, the old prostitute continued to hassle her intended victims, and they laughed at her efforts in return. One of them joked that her breasts looked like a couple of old cabbages flapping in the breeze, and another told her she was going to get a good slap if she didn’t get lost. Like the comedy genius he undoubtedly was, the third laughingly christened her Sally Slapcabbage and asked how much she would charge him for a foursome with her daughter and granddaughter.

  Ironshoulder didn’t hear the reply, instead ste
pping right back against the shop door until the alleyway drunkards staggered past. He took a deep lungful of the pungent herb odour that told him the shop on the other side of his posterior belonged to an apothecary. As soon as the men were a few dozen feet past the doorway, he stepped silently back into the light and retraced his steps to the previous junction. “Which way would you go then, Pej, if not the way that makes the most sense?”

  Ironshoulder didn’t fancy his chances. There were dozens of routes the guide could have taken from the tavern back to the old mirror warehouse where the portal was located, over in the merchant quarter. As well as he thought he knew this city like the back of his hand, Pej probably knew it better. It was his job, after all. Ironshoulder went wherever the instructions on his heads-up display took him, be it here in Sheniwar or across the short stretch of sea in Arunkumar. Not to mention the lands of the Shadzir to the northeast, and sometimes even the mountain fortresses of the Seghir far to the north. It was a lot of geography, not to mention street names, to fit into his head. Pej, on the other hand, would no doubt have a heart attack if he got too close to any the city gates.

  He needed to make a decision. Put yourself in Pej’s boots. Why would you deviate from the obvious route? Frowning, he headed right and plotted a new course in his head. He wasn’t employed by Stillwater to second-guess people; they had Catchers like Vaida Nassera for that. He usually just spent his time making sure people did as they were told. And shitting in buckets.

  “Hello, sailor.” The old prostitute appeared to have had no luck with the three youngsters, and had decided to turn her attention to him. He didn’t bother slowing down, and she had to hurry to keep up with him, heels clip-clopping against the cobbles. “I take that back,” she said. “Sailors can’t walk this quick on dry land. Slow down, you big oaf. Take a moment to talk to me.”

  “Piss off.”

  “That’s not very nice,” she said, dropping back. She sounded out of breath. Not enough exercise, he thought.

  “I’m looking for someone,” he told her, squinting his eyes to try and see as far down the street as possible. The pair of them were travelling down one of the city’s larger thoroughfares now; the buildings were farther apart, and ever so slightly grander than the ones they’d just left behind. The prostitute already looked out of place in her knee-high boots and the tatty red velvet dress originally purchased by her grandmother. All he had to do was keep walking, as she was probably already encroaching on another whore’s patch.

  “Thought as much,” she said softly, and something about her knowing tone caused him to slow down and face her. She’d probably been attractive five years ago, when her long hair had still been mostly black and the lines around her eyes hadn’t been so pronounced. She actually wasn’t that old, early forties perhaps, but the life she’d led made her look a decade older. A decent cosmetic surgeon could sort her out in his sleep, make her look twenty again, probably even turn her into enough of a beauty to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams. She’d need a damn good dentist, though. Although, he conceded, there were plenty of deviants on both planets that would pay good money to experience her lack of teeth.

  “Why did you think as much?” he wondered, resting a protective hand over his purse.

  “Got that look about you, sir. A man on duty, like the merchant and the Watchman who was following him.”

  “Damn, you’re good,” he laughed, letting the fingers of the previously protective hand start loosening the strings of the purse. She lifted the torn edges of her dress, and curtsied.

  “Old Sally Slapcabbage, at your service.”

  “Which way did they go?”

  “You know how it works,” she told him. “Let me feel cold, hard bronze in the palm of my hand, first.” She gave him the most salacious grin he’d ever seen, and nodded in the general direction of his crotch. “Or your cock, if you’d prefer.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Ironshoulder replied, frowning. “I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be selling your body, not trading information for mine.”

  She shrugged.

  “At my age, I’ll take whatever payment I can get. A big, handsome man like you would probably break me in half. But what a way to go, eh?”

  Ignoring her filthy giggle, and his burning cheeks, he took a small step backwards.

  “Coin it is, then,” he said, taking out a couple of bronze coins from his purse. “Where did you see these men, and in which direction were they travelling?”

  Sally Slapcabbage held out her palm, and he dropped the coins into it. She bit each of them, then dropped them into her cleavage and pointed back the way they’d come.

  “The Rakeshi and the nobleman came from the same direction you originally came from,” she said. “They turned right at the crossroads, whereas you went straight over. The Watchman followed. Rukara Street, if you’re the type to take notice of such things.”

  “Bugger.”

  “That’ll cost extra, but we can come to an arrangement.”

  Ignoring her, he started back the way he’d come. She followed.

  “Was the Watchman following at a distance, or did he look like he was going to intercept them?”

  “I don’t know what intercept means, my wordy friend, but it certainly seemed like he intended to waylay them, if that’s what you mean?”

  “It is.”

  For the life of him, Ironshoulder couldn’t work out which route Pej Vahdat was trying to take Lekan. He accepted the guide had a plan, and probably a decent one at that, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Reaching into his purse, he withdrew another three duskets and held them in front of her.

  “Excellent,” she breathed, and grabbed hold of his bicep. “You can have it twice for that. I know a place we can go.”

  “What the…?” He jerked his arm free of her grasp without breaking his stride, and then realised what she meant. “No,” he said, firmly. “I want your knowledge, not your body.”

  “Whores have feelings too, you know,” she sniffed.

  “You also have enough space between your tits to store another three coins,” he muttered, and she slapped the bicep she’d just been squeezing.

  “They’re not what they once were,” she admitted. “But there’s no need to insult me.”

  Ironshoulder grinned as he quickened his pace. Despite apparently being affronted, she managed to keep up. Clip-clop, clip-clop went her boots.

  “If you were walking from here to the old mirror warehouse over in the merchant quarter, which way would you go?” he asked. “Quickest route, not necessarily sticking to the streets.”

  “Don’t know the mirror warehouse,” she laughed. “Me and mirrors don’t get on so much anymore.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said, seriously. “How would you get to the merchant quarter from here. It’s important.”

  “How important?”

  Sighing, he reached into his purse again. Shortly afterwards, three more coins found their way down her top.

  “You saw me coming from quite the distance, didn’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway.

  “It’s shaping up to be a good night. I know a way you could make it even better, though.”

  “Not going to happen. What’s the quickest route? Answer me now, or I’ll take back my money.”

  He didn’t need to look at her to know she was pouting.

  “Fine,” she huffed. “Carry on up Rukara Street until you come to the alley between Malecki’s and The Sword Hole. People think…”

  “Wait,” Ironshoulder interrupted. “Malecki’s is the bakery, right?”

  “Best in the city,” the prostitute confirmed. “Are you even from here?”

  “The tavern next door, though…” He ignored her, but then let the thought tail off while he tried to picture the street in his mind. “It’s not called The Sword Hole. It’s The Poke It Inn. Not a name anyone’s likely to forget, Sally. Are you making this up?”

  Sally rolled
her eyes, holding up her left hand as she struggled to stay in step with him.

  “No, you simpleton. Poke It Inn is the tavern, here.” She punctuated here with a chopping motion. “Malecki’s is here.” She moved her hand a few inches over, and chopped again. “Sword Hole is here.” Another few inches, then chop. She moved her hand back over to the left. “Poke It Inn.” Chop, move. “Malecki’s.” Chop, move. “Sword Hole.” Chop. When done, she formed a circle using the thumb and index finger of her left hand, then moved her right index finger in and out of it a few times. “Poke it in Malecki’s sword hole,” she repeated, without the chops. “The Sword Hole is a brothel. Soldiers only. How did you not know that?”

  Ironshoulder shrugged, feeling suddenly uncomfortable in Sally’s company. She had a sense of humour, this one. He liked it. Pej Vahdat, though, was possibly lying dead in a gutter somewhere, and the idiot Lekan was probably mere moments away from blabbing all about Stillwater to the City Watch; the warehouse, the portal, and the hundreds of holidaymakers currently questing, drinking and whoring their way around the planet. Now wasn’t the time to be chatting to Sally Slapcabbage. On the other hand, however, a few minutes spent here, gleaning the correct information from her, could save him precious moments in the long run.

  “I mostly drink dockside,” he said, by way of explanation. “I wasn’t born here.”

  “Fine,” said Sally. “You’ve never heard of the most well-known soldiers’ whorehouse in the city. Your innocence makes me want you all the more.”

  “Tell me about this alleyway,” Ironshoulder prompted, and she sighed.

  “It’s warm and moist,” she said, longingly. Then she screwed up her face. “Quite well travelled, though, if I’m honest.”

  “Not the one between your legs. Tell me about the alleyway between the bakery and the whorehouse. Last chance, Sally.”

  “Wirio’s Balls, man, where’s your sense of humour? Fine. Go through the alleyway. Most people think it’s a dead end, but it’s not. It’ll bring you out around the back of the Sevalon Street market. Place is teeming with vagabonds, but something tells me that won’t bother you. Cut through the market and head along the Old King’s Road, all the way to the barracks. Tell me you’re at least familiar with the barracks, soldier boy?”