“No,” Tunstall said. “We should have gotten you to tell us more about the pigeons afore now.”
Goodwin halted to stare at a sutler who lingered over a table of spices. The mot glanced at us and moved on. Goodwin spoke as we kept walking. “And the dust spinner thing. Though truthfully, Cooper, that one makes my skin prickle. At least pigeons are birds. They’re part of creation. Stands to reason they’d be the servants of the gods. But spinners are just sticks and dust and air.”
Tunstall reached out to grab a gixie’s wrist. She was moving into the row, having spotted a fine lady on a man’s arm coming her way. Behind them was a foist about my age. The little gixie was the decoy, the doll she held her lure. The game was played when she dropped the doll right before the lady and her cove. The child would scramble to get the toy. Whilst they were distracted, the girl’s partner would foist at least the lady’s coin, if not the man’s, too.
My own eye was caught by a man asking a vendor to change three silver nobles for coppers. Something about it struck me odd. It was too early in the night for the gambling to have started. That was when coves dressed like this one was might need coppers or have silver to change. He’d bought sticks of cinnamon from the vendor for his trouble, but from the vendor’s scowl, he’d not purchased enough. Or mayhap it was the sweat on the cove’s brow when he put his silver coins on the counter.
I took out my baton and went to stand next to him. “Greetings to you, Master Spicer,” I told the spice seller as he placed copper after copper on the counter. I picked up the silver noble. “Good evening, Master – “
He didn’t answer but turned to run just as I saw the King’s profile pointed to the left, not to the right. The cove might have escaped had I not already set my baton right behind his knee. He stumbled, enough for Goodwin to cut in and twist his arm behind him. I took out my dagger and drew it across the face of the coin. The thin silver curled up to show lead beneath. I held it up for Goodwin’s inspection.
She thrust the captive against the plank counter. “Cooper, empty his purse. You coves are lower than maggots, you know that?” she asked him. “Enough of these false coins get out there and instead of regular folk paying a few coppers for a meal, we must pay a handful of silvers, and whole families get sold as slaves so one or two might eat.”
The spice vendor spat on the ground. “I hope they sell yours to south Carthak,” he said to the cove with real hate. “Leave ‘em with the snakes an’ the fevers an’ the great farms where they work to death.” He swept his coppers away.
Tunstall searched the Rat whilst Goodwin tied his hands. “Let’s hope you have the names of whoever gave you these, my friend,” he advised in his pleasant way. “Elsewise you have a nasty death on Execution Hill to look forward to.”
The Nightmarket kept us busy until suppertime. At the Mantel and Pullet, Tunstall ordered a bountiful meal to repay us for all that work. I thought I might drool when the smells met my nose: spiced pork pie with anise, herbs in beef broth, a raston, and a Tyran custard. To make my happiness complete, the barmaid came over with our jacks, ale for the Dogs and barley water for me.
We ate in silence while the house roared with talk around us. Then, as I was beginning to think I would not die of starvation, Goodwin put her hand on my wrist and bore it down to the table. I met her eyes and swallowed my mouthful.
“Explain the comedy with the pigeon and Mistress Tansy now. I think I’ve been patient. Mistress Noll said it, that first night, it was magic in your father’s line. Well and good. You have it. You speak to dust spinners, too. I don’t understand that, but I’m prepared to exist with it. We live in a world of magics, after all. But that at Mistress Deirdry’s stall – those things don’t happen, Cooper.” She speared a bit of pork with her knife and put it in her mouth.
I took my chunk of fire opal from my pocket and turned it in my fingers. I didn’t look at it, but just feeling its roughness against my skin helped me to order my thoughts. “Truth to tell, I was as scared as Tansy.”
Tunstall grunted. “You hid it well. Good for you.”
I heard a thud under the table. He yelped. She had kicked him. “You spoil her,” she said.
I waited until they were watching me. Then I went on, “It never happened before. Not to me. But…see, I don’t think most folk should know pigeons are the Black God’s messengers, or that they carry the ghosts of them that’s uneasy and dead. They wouldn’t leave the poor birds alone. But I’ve known that Rolond Lofts was still about, riding a Lower City bird, since the day after I started my training with you. I just couldn’t find out which bird at first. He was still with a big flock.”
“Why not ask your friend Slapper?” Tunstall asked. He grinned at Goodwin. “I like Slapper. Now there’s a pigeon a Dog can relate to.”
She kicked him again.
He glared at her. “Are you and your man fighting? Is that your problem?”
“No, you great lummox. I want to hear Cooper,” she said, her voice flat. “Go on, girl.”
“Slapper and I don’t talk,” I explained. I was trying not to smile. “At least, we never did before tonight. He’s popular with the ghosts, but see, the ghosts don’t control the birds, and the birds don’t control the ghosts. They just…fly around.”
Goodwin scowled. “That’s not very efficient, you ask me.”
“They’re dead. I don’t think time means the same. Only tonight, tonight I think Rolond wanted his mama so bad, he – broke through, somehow, and made his pigeon go to her. The bird was young. And…I’d like to see the Shadow Snake drawn and quartered.” There were drops falling on my plate. I was crying, curse it. “He was only three.” They knew I didn’t mean the Shadow Snake. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “I talked to the birds whilst I was home yesterday.” I wasn’t going to speak of what had happened tonight if it made me act like a looby. “They understood me then, too. I talked with the ghosts who were killed, the ones murdered all together that the spinners told me about.” I glanced at them through my bangs. Tunstall was steadily eating. I don’t think an earthquake would stop Tunstall working his way through a plate of food. He was on his third helping of the pie. Goodwin was drinking her ale and watching me. “There are nine of them. They were hired to dig a well and taken there blindfolded. Whoever had them there kept them captive in some building. They just dug in the pink city rock and found the gems. They didn’t know the rightful name for fire opals. That’s what they told me yesterday.”
For a long while, seemingly forever when there was sweat crawling down my sides, my Dogs said nothing. I thought they would decide to lock me up with the truly mad, them as scream and talk nonsense with themselves. Then Goodwin looked at Tunstall.
“They were digging for Crookshank. He’s the one with the fire opals.”
Tunstall ran his fingers through his hair. “If Crookshank meant to kill them all along, he wouldn’t let anyone that could be connected to him do the hiring. He’s too canny a bird. Whoever hired them, could be it’s someone we haven’t connected with Crookshank’s businesses.”
Goodwin looked at me. “They never left that building?”
She asked it like my ghosts were real human Birdies, singing the songs Dogs liked to hear. “They said they never did. I think they’re buried there.”
Goodwin wrinkled her nose. “Nasty smell for whoever might want to dig on that spot again. So he’s done at that location – “
“Crookshank won’t stop at one building. Not when the pink rock passes all under the Lower City.” Tunstall signaled the barmaid to refill our jacks.
Goodwin grinned. My skin began to prickle with excitement. She said, “He’ll be hiring more workers. Maybe his folk will tell the new diggers not to say they’ve got work, but these days? With jobs trickling out of Corus like water from a busted bucket?”
“They’ll talk.” Tunstall nodded. “Someone will tell a sweetheart, a rival, the one they owe money to.”
“He won’t hire a lot of diggers,” I said.
“He won’t want folk noticing. And they dig in cellars. Not so much room in those.”
“But he’ll be hiring,” Goodwin explained. “Too many other businesses hereabouts have been letting folk go. It’s a ripple, Cooper. You learn to feel for ripples.” She climbed onto her bench. Taking her whistle, she blew a sharp blast on it. Heads turned everywhere inside the room. “Harken, you Dogs!” she cried, her voice cutting through the last noise as the room went quiet. “Me’n Tunstall and Cooper have a scent. We’d like you to get it in your noses. Someone hired nine diggers, telling each one they were being hired to dig a well. Each one alone, not all nine, understand? Hired for a one-digger job, but it was nine all told. They’re all missing, probably dead. Now the Rats that did it either hired more in the last week or they’re hiring right now. A sniff, the tiniest sniff, and you bring it to one of us. Whatever’s in it at the end, you’ll share. If there’s naught in it, we’ll remember what we owe.”
Tunstall didn’t stand on the bench, but he did rise. “Some Rat went and doused nine folk. Now he means to do it twice, under our very sniffers. We can’t allow such goings-on, not on our watch.”
Them that were Dogs answered him with growls. I could see Ersken and Verene. I think their eyes were as wide as mine. I’d heard of a Growl, when Dogs took up a challenge. It meant ill for the Rats that made them voice it. But it was one thing to hear of it, another to sit in the Mantel and Pullet and hear that rumbling snarl come from dozens of throats. The army folk and off-duty Palace Guards shifted where they sat. The maids and the barkeep had retreated to the kitchen when Goodwin stood on the bench. Seemingly they knew what was coming.
I had what I wanted for the nine dead whose cries the spinners had first picked up. The Dogs would seek them. I’d never even thought that it might be easier to find whoever it was that hired them. But Goodwin was right. These days plenty of folk were out of work. No matter how they were sworn to say nothing of someone looking to hire, word would leak out. Soon enough, a Dog would hear.
Goodwin stood down, but she did not sit. Instead she checked her belt, making sure her weapons and purse were placed as she needed them. It was time to go back to the street. Tunstall emptied his tankard and counted out the coins for our barmaid. When he finished, he looked at Goodwin. I was already up, still trembling from the Growl. I wanted to find a Rat and shake him till he was senseless.
“Well?” Tunstall asked. “Have you a plan? Because I do.”
She actually raised her hand and beckoned to him with those two fingers.
“Let’s visit Dawull,” Tunstall said, and put a toothpick in his mouth. “Let’s ask him if he’s been dancing for Crookshank. Maybe Dawull’s folk don’t know Crookshank is killing folk just for digging for him.”
“You’re a bad lad,” Goodwin said, her eyes alight. “Let’s go see Dawull.”
Dawull held court at the Fog Lantern, near Kingsbridge. It was actually in Flash kennel’s territory, since Jane Street’s ended at Justice Way. The rules were, Jane Street Dogs could visit district chiefs without asking leave of other kennels, since we had the Court of the Rogue in our territory. How well that worked usually depended on the Dogs involved. In this case, Flash kennel didn’t care what we did.
Tunstall and Goodwin saluted Dawull’s sentries on the approach to the Fog Lantern. The rushers looked like they’d swallowed sommat nasty, but none would say anything to my Dogs’ faces. In the shadows I saw runners head off down the alleys to warn Dawull. Maybe they went to tell Kayfer and other folk as well. I wished my Dogs had brought some of the packmates who’d been at the Mantel and Pullet. What if Goodwin and Tunstall had given in to the kind of carelessness that got us in trouble at the Barrel’s Bottom? I’d hoped to lose the last bruise on my face before I got new ones.
We were almost there when someone gave a two-fingered whistle that almost blew apart the fog that was coming up off the Olorun. One of Dawull’s lookouts grabbed his club. Another one, standing in a second-floor window across the rutted street, waved him off.
Three people came toward us from the Kingsbridge end of Rovers Street, two men and a woman. Lady Sabine wore a long tunic in the men’s fashion, her sword and dagger sheaths and belt well polished, and slippers on her feet. Her cloak was fastened over one shoulder, leaving her sword arm bare. She’d bound her hair up in a net with small pearls stitched on it. She looked…nice. Ladylike. She even wore rings on two fingers of each hand, though none of them were big.
The men who walked with her were knights. They plainly expected everyone to know that, though they wore no armor. They wore long tunics and cloaks like Lady Sabine. There was more gold and gems on their sheaths and belts, but they had weathered faces, and the weapons’ hilts were plain. They moved like fighters. They also had that air most nobles have, the one Lady Sabine doesn’t. It’s the air that says normal folk must drop what they do and wait to see if they have to attend to the nobles.
Lady Sabine walked forward a few steps. “You three – four, excuse me, Master Pounce – blend in so well,” she said as my cat patted her shoe.
I squinted through the fog. I hadn’t even known Pounce had arrived until that moment.
“I find you in the most dreadful places. Didn’t you have enough of Rovers Street last week?” the lady asked.
“It’s not given to us to choose where we must walk, milady,” Goodwin told her.
“Oh, aye, it is,” grumbled the lookout closest to us.
“Silence, lout,” commanded one of the knights, who’d come nearer. “You were not addressed.”
Sabine rolled her eyes.
“We’re on Dog business, Lady” Tunstall explained. He reached out, casual-like, and cuffed the lookout on the ear. “We’re paying a visit to Dawull.”
“Chief of Waterfront,” Goodwin explained. “It’s one of the Rogue’s districts. We mean to rattle his trap.”
“That sounds amusing,” Lady Sabine remarked. “Lads, I have an idea. Let’s go watch my Dog friends annoy this criminal. We don’t really want to go to my Lord of Naxen’s party. You know it will be boring to madness. All kinds of noble maidens will simper at you, and their mothers will scowl at me.”
Goodwin looked at Tunstall, who shrugged. The two men talked it out in whispers. Finally we walked on, with the two noblemen beside Tunstall and Lady Sabine with Goodwin, Pounce, and me.
“We had an invitation to supper at my Lady of Hollyrose’s in Highfields,” she explained to my Dogs. “She’s elderly, so it ended not too long ago. We decided to walk to my Lord of Naxen’s party. The three of us served out in the hill country this last year, so we’re used to more exercise than we’ve been getting of late.”
“But at least we had a choice about being in the hills, Sabine,” joked the redheaded knight. “We could have gone home as we liked. You had to wait until His Majesty pardoned you.”
That made Goodwin look at her as we halted in front of the Fog Lantern. “You needed a pardon to come home?” she asked.
“We had a misunderstanding,” the lady said, her deep voice quiet. “It’s over and done with.” She walked through the open door of the tavern. “I wonder if the ale’s any good.”
Her knight friends followed.
Tunstall waited until they were well inside before he whispered, “Those two had better not be interested in her.” He walked in, leaving Goodwin, Pounce, and me to follow.
“The big looby,” I heard Goodwin mutter. “Never get involved with the nobility. Everyone knows that. Everyone.”
I remembered the rumble in his voice when he’d said that about the knights being interested in her. “I think he forgot.”
Into the common room we went, following the nobles. Dawull and his favorites held the far corner. Dawull’s rushers and their mots, and his thieves, robbers, and lickboots sat everywhere else, along with Players and gamesters hoping to win some coin from the regular customers. Dogs and children played on the floor whilst maids tried to serve everyone.
At just this mom
ent, though, all was silent. Lady Sabine and her two friends surveyed the room. They looked as out of place as I would have looked at their supper in Highfields. I had a mad wish to giggle and bit my lip.
The blond knight looked at three river dodgers who held the nearest table. He didn’t even bother to speak. He simply snapped his fingers at them and jerked his thumb. Surely, I thought, they’ll throw the table at him.
But meek as priests’ finches, they went to another table. That same knight beckoned to a serving maid as the two noblemen seated themselves. She thrust the neck of her dress lower, when it already did little enough to cover her peaches, and came to see what they would have. When Lady Sabine took her seat with them, the wench actually glared at my lady.
Dawull saw us on the stair and got to his feet with a grin. “Heads high, my pets!” he bellowed. “I smell” – he swung that great red head around, sniffing loudly – “dank fur. Piddle. Scummer. Dogs.”
Some laughed. I saw movement in a hall to one side that I’d wager led to the privy, since Aniki came out adjusting her belt. She noticed us and waved. I only nodded, since waving back was not something dignified and Dog-like. Pounce didn’t worry himself with such things. He bounded across the floor, jumping onto a four-legged cur’s back and up into Aniki’s arms. She smiled and gave him a good scratch, but her wary eyes were on the three of us as we walked toward Dawull.
His rushers had their swords half drawn when we stopped ten feet from him. Goodwin put her hands on her hips. Tunstall scratched the back of his neck, as if he did nothing in particular. I clasped my hands before me and set my feet in the rest position. I wished I had my baton out, but drawing it now would put Dawull’s back up. I stayed alert for movement on my sides. I was very glad Lady Sabine had decided to come with us rather than go to a stupid party. I couldn’t be sure if her friends would help us, but I knew she would. And she was behind me. I need not fear with Lady Sabine present.
“We’re looking for Crookshank,” Goodwin said. “Tell him to stand forth.”
For a moment all was still. Then the laughter began. My Dogs’ shoulders didn’t even twitch, so I held steady and kept my face still.
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