My phone rang. I answered it. Corinne spent five minutes infodumping as much as she could about the Waratah, which was academically interesting, but not overly helpful. Brand tugged on my sleeve and told me to ask her if she’d gone into the chat rooms and looked at visitor comments. There was a lot of meat in unfiltered user comments, which rarely turned up in search engines. Corinne heard Brand asking, and said, “No, I just sat on my fat ass and read the Wikipedia entry. Do you want to teach me to suck eggs while you’re at it?” She hung up.
Mid-dock was an immense wooden platform surrounded by weathered railings. It looked like a triage area, or a soup kitchen, or a drug den—or all three.
To my left was a naked derelict pulling ants out of his pubic hair. When he saw me flinch, he grinned and yelled, “It’s easier to drink from the side of a skull than the eye sockets.”
To my right, a woman with arachnid in her bloodline was pacing back and forth. Thin strands of web stretched from her footsteps. She had a sunburn and bad dye job.
None of these people looked like they had information, or at least not enough to justify the challenge of a conversation.
“There,” Addam murmured, and pointed.
I looked in that direction and saw some sort of priest or healer in gray-green robes. He was holding a woman’s wrists in both hands, trying to keep her from scratching at bleeding wounds on her face. She was staring into the priest’s eyes with a look of unreliable sanity, saying, loudly, “She comes. You know that she comes. It’s time.”
“You’re hurting yourself, Irehne,” he said quietly, as we came up behind them. “You must rest. Will you let me help you rest?”
“Will you wake me when my time comes?” she asked.
“Of course,” he promised.
As she nodded, he let go of one of her hands and touched the center of her forehead. But her agreement was a lie. Her hand sprang up as soon as it was free. She managed to dig her nails into the injury before his magic overcame her, and she collapsed in a magical sleep.
The priest arranged her on a reed pallet, and kindly pulled greasy hair from her bloody forehead. He pulled a clean tissue out of his pocket and dabbed at the wound on her face.
“Who hurt her?” I asked.
The priest looked at me and blinked. After a half-second he shook his head, and really saw me. “My lord,” he said. Not specific recognition; just a general sense that I was from the landed class.
“The woman,” I said. “Did someone hurt her?”
“Oh. No. That would be easier to handle. She’s addicted to the Agonies.”
Kellum said his cousin used them. A new type of drug, Brand had mentioned. “I’ve heard that’s a problem on the docks,” I said.
The priest wiped his hands on his robe and stood up. “Irehne is fond of Itch. The worst of the Agonies, if you ask me. It localizes the high in one part of your body, and you release it in bursts by scratching. It overrides any sense of restraint. Most people break skin in minutes, and in a place like this, infection is almost guaranteed.”
“It’s kindly of you to help her,” I said.
“Ach, no. I’m only doing my part. Might I ask for a donation, my lord? I mean no offense.”
“Of course not. I mean yes—I have some money on me. I wish it were more.” I started to pull out my wallet, but Addam was already there two more creaseless fifties. He ignored my look, which was just as well, because I didn’t have time to feed my growing guilt at relying on his superior funding.
“Could you help us with some directions?” I asked as the priest bowed over the donation and murmured a blessing. “We’re looking for a . . . contact. He works in a bar called the Chained Rock on the Waratah.”
A flash of disapproval was quickly swallowed, as the man busied himself with hiding the donation in his robes.
“Not a very nice bar?” I guessed.
“Not very, my lord. Safer than most, for what it’s worth. For the customers at least. It’s five-square that way.” I wasn’t sure what a square was— maybe a block? But the direction was unmistakable.
“We’re unfamiliar with these parts of the docks,” I said, and looked him right in the eyes as I said it. “And we’re not likely to approve what we’re about to see. Could you tell us what to expect?”
He held my gaze, and finally nodded. “The Chained Rock is frequented by men and women who like to . . . leave marks on their purchases. I’ve frequently tended to a lot of their employees. If your contact works there, then he hasn’t worked there for long. No one works there for long, I’m afraid.”
“Fucking awesome,” Brand whispered behind me.
We took our leave, heading in the direction the priest had indicated. The areas past mid-dock—lit by tar-headed torches, and hurricane lamps, and shabby light cantrips—grew increasingly derelict. I peered over the railing and saw sea foam over dark water. Something moved just below the surface, too dexterous to be a fish.
We tightened our formation, and walked in silence.
The SS Waratah was a five-hundred-foot cargo steamship from the turn of the last century.
It had sailed a route between Europe, Australia, and Africa until July of 1909, when it vanished without a trace on its way to Cape Town. There had been no weather anomalies in the area, no reports of piracy. Two hundred and ten souls were simply lost without a shred of evidence.
The most advanced theory about its disappearance was that it was struck by a rogue wave—a killer wall of water that could reach seventy feet in height. The broken remains would have been washed toward Antarctica or lost at sea. Indeed, in my otherly vision, I saw three meters of gray ice locking the prow of the ship to a desolate, craggy landscape.
I blinked away the ghosts and saw what the Waratah had become today.
The Chained Rock, the name of the Waratah’s brothel, was a play on words.
The owners had built a nest—a prison—for an ocean roc. The once-beautiful beast was tied down with cold iron chains, its links inlaid with coral and obsidian runes. In open water, an ocean roc was a master of elemental magic: it could fly as fast as hurricane winds, and create tsunamis with its wing beats. I’d heard there were only a few left in the wild, which was what made this captivity so appalling.
The creature’s wings—in their glory as wide as redwood branches— were now rotting and bald. Christmas lights had been threaded through the rips in the membrane.
There were a hundred metaphors in the abasement, and few that spoke well about the type of men or women who would permit them.
The light inside the nearly empty brothel was too dim for a safe entrance. I used it as an opportunity to assert my power.
With a whisper and an exaggeratedly casual gesture, I manifested three separate light cantrips and sent them circling above my head. The average scion had enough concentration to do just one parlor trick like that; juggling several like a circus act required a sigil spell from most.
I let Brand watch my back, and waited to be approached by the person in charge.
My bored eyes flicked among the small, uneasy crowd. At a table nearby, a woman with a vacant smile burned holes in a plastic water bottle with a cigarette. She batted lashes over bloodshot eyes, inviting me over. A device covered her palm and fingers, like a filigreed glove. It was made to look like ornamentation, but it wasn’t. The filigree would slide sharp metal blades under her own fingernails when commanded by the master device it was slaved to. It was a tool of torture, to keep her controlled and biddable. I hadn’t thought my impression of this place could go lower, but it’d just dug another six feet down.
I thought of Max, and what we needed to do to keep him safe, and let my distaste simmer.
A man burst from the back room and rushed up to me, smiling broadly. He hadn’t brushed his teeth in so long that the calcified plaque looked like a coral reef. The thick bracelet on his wrist, I saw, was made of silver filigree.
“Is this your place,” I asked, though when I was acting like an assho
le scion I made it a point to speak in periods and not question marks.
“I manage it, my—”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said.
“You honor us, truly—that is most excellent. I would be happy to prepare the very best of accommodations for you. Will you be walking through the red door or the blue door?”
I gave him a hint of eyebrow, and let him read into it.
“As you may know, we pride ourselves on providing the safest atmosphere for our customers. The red door will provide you with an employee most skilled at permitting your . . . personal expressions. The blue door will provide you with an employee skilled at providing those expressions, with all sensible precautions and controls, of course.”
I stared toward the doors. A young man lingered by the blue one, staring in my general direction with intent focus. He was not a man, just shaped as such. He licked his lips with a tongue made of salt.
“Where,” I asked, “is Sherman.”
“Sherman?” the manager asked, stuttering on the S. He flicked his eyes behind me, where the bouncers stood—and then, just as quickly, in another direction, which was where Brand stood. Brand’s expression would have made it clear that the bouncers would not be allowed to interfere with whatever happened next.
And all of the sudden, I was bored with acting bored.
“Fuck it,” I said, tiredly. “I’ve seen enough of the Green Docks. I will not stretch this night a single minute past what I still need from it. So I am going to ask you questions. And you are going to answer them. Challenge me, and I send this ship to the ocean floor. Do you understand?”
“My lord . . . we . . . this is . . .”
“This is what? You what? You have patrons who would scare me? You have armed men who would stop me? Is that a challenge?”
“No, my lord,” he whispered.
“What do you even have to gain from it?” I asked. I half-turned and pointed behind me. “Do you have any idea how much it must have cost to trap an ocean roc? This place pulls in far more money than they put into the décor.” I dragged my eyes from his scuffed shoes to his bad dental work. “Or its staff. Protecting it from me isn’t worth your life. Give me that.” I pointed at his wrist.
“My lord?” The man touched the slave bracelet. “T-this, my lord?”
“Yes. Give me that.”
The brothel manager did the math in his head, his gaze snapping between Brand’s knives, and Addam’s and my sigils. He unhooked the device and handed it to me.
“Now put on the bracelet that woman is wearing,” I said.
His mouth opened and closed and opened.
“Put it on. You will wear it, while I’m here, as a hostage of your good will. Put it on, keep it on, and tell me where Sherman is.”
Two minutes later we were on our way through the red door.
If I’d interpreted things right, the tastes of the establishment ran from beatings to being beaten. Sherman, behind the red door, was the latter. Which meant I wasn’t sure what sort of condition we’d find him in this late in the evening.
As we walked down a dirty, planked hallway, Brand nodded at the bracelet I cradled in my hand. “You can work that?”
“Probably not. I was just being an asshole.”
He grunted. He could appreciate that.
I said, “I want to try something different with Sherman. It’s getting late—I didn’t realize we’d waste so much time just walking. Let me be the bad cop—I have an idea to make this go quick.”
“And does this mean Brand will be playing good cop?” Addam asked, and did a very good job at hiding his smile. Brand gave him a hard stare.
“That’s the door,” I said. “Just follow my lead.”
It was unlocked. I opened it without fanfare. The room on the other side was barely functional, with a bed, a single chest, and a basin of water on a scuffed nightstand. Two dead flies skimmed the surface. The only thing of any personality in the berth was stale, cheap incense, and a crystal geode on the chest.
A young man kneeled by the chest. He wore a leather suit riddled with dozens of complicated zippers. The material was expensive, and the design so useless that it must have been highly fashionable, but it had been inexpertly patched in several areas.
The young man was occupied with cigarettes—or rather the threadbare assembly of them. About eight or nine already-smoked butts were lined on a napkin, and he was cutting them open with a razor blade. He’d painstakingly salvaged the unburned tobacco into a small pile, which he was now shaking into rolling paper.
There were other things I took in, in the split second before anyone spoke. On a table in the corner was a bottle of calamine lotion, rubbing alcohol, and cheap, off-brand Band-Aids. The sort of thing I’d imagine would keep this Itch from killing you quickly. Sherman might have been a drug addict who was four shaky walls away from street trade, but he was smart about it. I could use that.
The young man blinked at us, a deer in headlights. Brand, good cop, took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and laid it before Sherman. It looked suspiciously like the last half-smoked pack I’d hidden in the rafters of my bedroom.
“Sweet of you,” the young man said. “But I wasn’t expecting clients.” He pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it. His lips were so dry and chapped they left pieces of skin on the filter.
“We’re not clients,” I said. “We need information. You will provide it.”
“Information?” he said. He was high. His mouth worked around the word for a second before he spoke it, like a badly dubbed foreign film.
I could work with that, too.
He tried speaking again. “This is about Corinne Dawncreek, isn’t it?”
“This is about the money you took from her, and the information you failed to provide. This is about Layne. This is about my time, and my effort, which I hold in very high regard, and which has been exceedingly squandered in this miserable place. You may think you have nothing else to lose, Sherman, but if you give me a reason, I will prove you wrong.”
“No worries,” he said, and jerked a ribbon of smoke at me. “No problems.”
“You’re right, I have no problems. I never do. I have great big holes where problems used to stand.”
“Okay okay okay yes yes yes,” he said. “Point made. Properly scary. Do I know you? You look familiar. What do I call you?”
I fed the smallest bit of Aspect into my eyes. Orange light fell crooked on his face, creating shadows from his broken-vein nose.
He swallowed, and lowered his eyes into another drag off the cigarette. “Ask your questions.”
“What do you know about Layne Dawncreek’s disappearance?”
“I didn’t. Know, I mean. I do now, because Corinne told me. I haven’t seen Layne in weeks.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not. Or I don’t think I am. It seems like weeks. We had a falling out. He was messing up. I have my own mess-ups—I don’t have room in my life for his, too.”
“That’s another lie,” I said, and let the impatience brighten my eyes. “I think you were very much involved in his mess-ups.”
“Sherman,” Brand said, and while he couldn’t quite manage gentle, he compensated by speaking quietly. “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you meet Layne?”
His lips worked around the words, then he shrugged, like he’d run out of any reason to stall. “Have you heard about the parties?”
“What parties?” Brand asked.
“The parties. In the . . . in his court. Do you know who he is?”
“I think we do,” Brand said. “Don’t worry—we don’t like saying his name either.”
“How do the parties and . . . he connect?” I asked impatiently.
“He has people, and his people like parties with bright, young things. That’s how Layne and I met—at a fancy party with a very small RSVP list.”
“Do you know where Layne is right now?” I asked.
Sherman paid attention to his
cigarette for a moment. People use hesitations as cover when they’re about to lie, which doesn’t work so well when you’re high and clumsy. Sherman may have realized that, because he sighed, tiredly. “I told you. I didn’t even know he was missing.”
“There’s more you’re not saying,” I said, and orange light licked out with the words. Sherman’s eyes dilated and he pressed back away from me. “Tell me what the Hanged Man did with Layne.”
“You shouldn’t say his name,” Sherman stammered.
“He should never have said mine. When did the Hanged Man learn about Layne’s magic?”
Bull’s-eye. A damned bull’s-eye. I saw it on his face.
“So you know about Layne’s necromancy, too,” I said. “You know that’s why Layne caught the Hanged Man’s attention.”
Sherman closed his eyes and nodded. “Layne was invited to the parties. That’s where we met. The . . . Huh-Hang . . . He attended one—he doesn’t often. He’d always been interested in Kevan’s magic—Layne’s da had this weird type of death magic. And he, the lord, was interested if it ran in family lines. And it did. And . . . And there’s nothing more. What more do you need to know? When that . . . when he becomes fascinated with you, you end up mounted on Styrofoam with pins in your wings. Layne screwed up. He got noticed. Where people go once they vanish inside the Gallows, I don’t know, because I’m not stupid enough to want to know. I’m certainly not stupid enough to follow.”
My phone buzzed. I ignored it. It buzzed again, and again, and again.
I pulled it out and looked at it. It said: “Read this.” Then: “Read this.” Then: “Read this.” And finally, “Show him the stone right now.”
They were all from Quinn.
I took the wardstone out of my pocket—the ward key we’d found hidden at the Dawncreeks. I went over and held it between Sherman’s eyes—literally, uncomfortably, inches in front of his eyes. The loss of personal space was almost as startling as the object, because he scrambled to the other side of the room.
The Hanged Man Page 12
