by Toby Frost
She reached the Old Arms in the mid-afternoon. Hugh sat in an alcove in the main bar, his head nodding. She thought that he was asleep, but he glanced up as she approached. He looked tired and sad, like an old hound.
“We’ve got a problem,” Giulia said. “A big one.”
“What happened?”
“I followed that note up. It was a trap. The man whose name was on that bit of paper tried to murder me.”
Hugh was fully alert now. His eyes were hard. “What did you do?”
“I’m not sure. I thought I’d killed him, but he just – I don’t know – healed back up again. I think he was some sort of wizard.”
“A wizard?”
“Enchanted, maybe. Shit, Hugh, I don’t know the fucking word for it. We got talking, and he was asking me about all of this. He must have been listening for me to say something, because all of a sudden he came at me. He was tough, very tough, but I put a knife in his neck. Then he got back up again.”
“What did you do?”
“I hit him with an oar. Right here,” she added, tapping the back of her head. “I think I killed him. Then I got the hell out of there.” Even describing the fight had made her a little short of breath. “Shit. I was lucky to get away.”
“You’d have been luckier if I’d have been there.” Hugh smoothed down his moustache. “Do his men know he’s dead?”
The innkeeper wandered into view, holding a broom in hand. He started to sweep up, the bristles scraping the floor. Hugh looked at him. “Fetch us more wine, would you, please?”
The innkeeper grunted and moved away.
Giulia said, “They must do. I didn’t hide him – I wish I had, now. I didn’t tell him who we are, or where. But I reckon he must have known.”
“It sounds like it,” the knight replied. There was a bottle beside him; he reached out and took a deep swig from the neck. The bottle caught the light as he put it down, and Giulia saw that it was almost empty. She thought: This place is rotting you. Hugh said, “Do you think this Varro killed the priest?”
Giulia was surprised to realise she hadn’t considered it. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. Look, Hugh, this changes things. I thought the Watch just pinned this shit on us because it was convenient, because they were too stupid and lazy to find the real killer. But one of them – maybe all of them – sent me to Varro to get me killed. This is a conspiracy, Hugh.”
“I think you’re right. Seems strange, though. Why not wait to the end of the week and just have you arrested?”
“Maybe I’ve been getting close to something. Is there anyone who has a grudge against you? Anyone ever cross you, try to rob you, ask you for bribes that you wouldn’t pay, anything like that?”
He shook his head slowly. “No-one I can think of. Maybe a few people back in Pagalia, perhaps. But I’ve not got a feud – what do you call it? – a vendetta against anyone.”
“Me neither. Can you ask Edwin and Elayne if they do? I think it would be better coming from you.”
“I doubt they would have, Giulia.”
“Just check for me. You never know.”
“All right.” He took another swig from the bottle. “By God, I’ll be glad to see the back of this place. Sitting here like a bloody target, waiting for the Watch to try to get us…”
“I agree,” Giulia said. “I’m not for staying here either. Did anyone come looking around while I was gone?”
He shook his head. “Only the innkeeper.”
“Good. Listen: I need you to get Edwin and Elayne ready to ride out of here the very moment I say, all right? Get them packed up and ready to go.”
“Right. What about you?”
“I’m going to get ready. I’m going back out.”
***
Antonio Falsi was wasting his day. Up at some stupid hour to look for God-knew-what in that inn where the Anglians were being kept, and now a pointless patrol of Printers’ Row with two of the most slack-jawed halfwits that the Watch had ever managed to recruit.
They were a pair of idle youths with the scrawny quickness of pickpockets, eager to flaunt their status and unwilling to do any genuine work. All the time he had to chivvy them – wait here, go there, stand up straight – like a couple of beggar apprentices. Rubbish, real rubbish.
Falsi strolled through the street ahead of his men, hoping to lead by example and wondering whether they might just slip away while he wasn’t looking. He didn’t much care if they did. People liked to see the Watch out in force, as it made them feel safe, but to get anything done, to catch any real criminals, you needed trained men, not these sewer-rats.
To the right was Jansson’s Folios, the largest print shop in Averrio. The steady thump of a printing press pulsed out of the doorway like the beating of a metal heart. On the left was Frannie’s, and he nodded to her as she shook out a blanket outside the door. It was the only brothel in this district, discreet enough not to offend the printers, and the Watch protected it in return for payment. Falsi had heard stories about the state of the beds and some of the girls, and he always took his cut in money, not sex. Besides, his wife would murder him if he got up to tricks like that.
“All well, Frannie?”
She was a wide-hipped woman with big fists and straw-coloured hair. She grinned at him, showing off a large gap between her front teeth. “Fine, thank you, sir. All well with you?”
“Oh, fine.” Her eyes moved from him, and he looked around and saw one of his men in conversation with a page-seller, ten yards behind. “Hey! Come on!”
“Orange, Boss?” the other of the new men said, appearing at his side.
“No. Hey, where’d you get that?”
“Fruit cart,” the youth replied. “Owes me a favour, he does.”
“You’re here to work, not call in favours,” Falsi said. Cocky little bastard, he thought. The youth shrugged.
A stocky man ran into the road from an alleyway, apron flapping in front of him like a crusader’s tabard. “Thief! Thief!”
The man spun to a halt in front of them and jabbed his finger down the street. “Thief! That way!”
“What’s he like?” Falsi said.
“He stole a leg of mutton from my stall!”
“What does he look like?”
“Young, white shirt, dirty face! He went that way!”
Falsi turned to his men. “Right, you two, time to earn your pay. Go down there and get the hue-and-cry up. See if anyone’s seen him. I’ll head round the back.” They blinked. “Go on, get to it! Run!”
Let them do it. Lazy buggers.
“We’ll get him,” he told the stallkeeper, managing to sound confident. “Don’t worry. You follow my men and see if you can pick him out.” While I have a quick drink, he added to himself, trying not to smile at the thought of it. After a morning like this, he felt that he deserved it.
He watched the two Watchmen run around the corner, the stallkeeper keeping pace with them. Young men were better runners than he was, after all. One of the youths glanced back as he turned the corner, as if to check that Falsi wasn’t going to leave him on his own.
Actually, son, I am.
Falsi knew Printers’ Row well, and he walked three houses down and slipped into a door on the left. It was someone’s front room and it smelt of animals, or children. Two men with inky hands sat at a little table. A short woman in a leather apron appeared at Falsi’s side. “Cup of whatever you’ve got,” Falsi told the proprietor, and she leaned into a hatch and came up with a pitcher. Falsi sniffed the black, hoppy-smelling beer and passed the woman a coin.
The beer was strong and sour. Just the taste of it made him feel more manly, somehow, more professional. He lowered the cup and sighed louder than was necessary. “Ah, that’s good.”
Let the others do the hard work. They’d sent him on this shitty errand, like
a part-timer – why shouldn’t he enjoy himself a bit? By all rights he ought to be rowing back from the Isle of Graves by now with Sep and Rupe after putting that priest in the ground. Typical Cafaro, stealing the easy jobs. He wondered why he’d not been involved, and took another sip.
“Falsi.” He felt breath on his ear. “Don’t look round. Come into the alley outside. I’ve got news for you.” Something was wrong with the voice: he took a second to realise that it was a woman’s.
He turned and saw a figure slip out the door. Falsi took a deep swig of his beer and pulled his cloak away from the pistol on his belt. He could draw it faster than his sword, and it was easier to wield: a wide-bore wheellock with a low-strength enchantment on the mechanism to stop it misfiring. It had cost a lot, but it had kept him alive more than once.
He walked outside with the cup in his left hand. The cold air robbed him of the confidence that he’d felt indoors. His beer looked as tasty as pondwater. Falsi peered around the corner and looked into the gap between the houses. It was hardly a yard across. Quietly, he set his cup down and drew his gun. If this was some bastard trying to rob him, or a felon looking to settle an old score, they were in for a surprise. The sweat in his hair made his scalp prickle.
He had taken eight steps before something scuffed behind him. He started to turn, but she said, “Don’t move. I’ve got a crossbow. Put your gun down, good and slow.”
Suddenly everything was very difficult. Swallowing, keeping control of his bladder, even breathing took great concentration. Falsi held his fingers away from the trigger. He crouched down slowly and put the pistol on the ground. It occurred to him that if he’d dropped it right, it would have gone off, startling her. Perhaps that would have given him the chance to fight back. No time now, no time.
“Turn around.”
She was in black stuff: he didn’t make out the details. His eyes only saw her white, scarred face and the glint of metal on the crossbow she was pointing at his chest. It occurred to him then that she looked very professional. He took half a second to recall her full name: Giulia Degarno.
“Let’s talk,” she said.
His mouth was dry. There was a pebble in his throat. He nodded, then said, “If you want.”
“Someone tried to have me killed today. They sent me to talk to a man who tried to murder me. I want to know whose idea it was to send me there.”
He found words. “I don’t understand.”
“All right, let’s try again – and if you’re stalling me, you’re good as dead, so listen well. After your people searched the inn this morning, the innkeeper gave me a note. He said a Watchman had left it for me. It had a man’s name on it. I went to see the man whose name it was, and he tried to stick my face in a bucket of boiling tar. I didn’t let him. The way I see it, my face is messed up enough as it is.”
“Oh, fucking hell,” he said.
“So tell me who put that note there.”
“It wasn’t me. I don’t know anything about a note.” Falsi shook his head. “It must have been someone else.”
“Not you, eh?” She lifted the crossbow to head height, closed one eye and lined it up. His stomach churned; he clenched his bowels. If he was to die now, he’d face the end without actually shitting himself. Not much of a victory, but something. “I don’t want to know who it wasn’t. Who put it there? What about that fat man?”
“Orvo? He’s the boss. He might have put it there. God, he’s the only one other than me who knows how to write.” Falsi laughed once, then stopped.
“The man I saw this morning, ordering you around?”
Falsi grimaced. “Yes, that’s him. He’s captain round here. Look, my men will be here soon—” He half expected her to tell him they were already dead.
“Then you’ll send them away. This morning, when you searched us, what were you looking for?”
“Stolen goods.”
She said nothing.
“Look, they don’t tell me much, all right?”
“Don’t give me that. You’re the fucking lieutenant, for God’s sake. Didn’t any of your men know what you were looking for?”
“I don’t—” His voice caught in his dry throat and he could not speak, and for a terrifying second he thought she’d shoot him for holding out. He swallowed and said, “I don’t think so. All I knew was to turn the place over and look for anything unusual. Orvo had lost some thing of his – a picture or something.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes – yes, I promise it’s all I know.”
“So your boss, this Orvo – he left the note.”
“I suppose… You’ve got to understand: I didn’t see anyone, but I don’t see who else it could be – unless one of the men did it.”
“But your men are illiterate. You just said so.”
“My men are shit,” he said bitterly.
“This goes higher than you, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How much higher?”
“I don’t know.” Anger pushed through his fear. “Look, woman, I took you people in because I was doing my job, understand? They told me you killed him. Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Because we said we were innocent?”
“Oh, come on! That’s for the magistrate. They told me to arrest you and get you through quickly—” He stopped. Something dropped into place.
She’d seen it in his face. “Quicker than normal, right?”
He said nothing. He felt terribly naked all of a sudden, as if the clouds had split and a great eye was looking down at him from above.
“So whoever really did it would get away. Is that what Orvo said?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I thought so.” Something changed in her voice. It was still tight with anger, but the rage was no longer directed at him. Hope sprang into his mind: he might get away unscathed. She licked her lips. “You don’t have to do this, Falsi. You know it’s horseshit. And if you do go through with it, I promise that you’ll be answering to me and then to God really fucking soon.”
Fearing the answer, he said, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want to talk to whoever’s higher than your boss. Can you get me to the procurator?”
Falsi put up his hands. “Now just wait a moment. I can’t do that. I can’t just valse in and ask him to—”
“The procurator knows about this, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t just fetch him for you. He’s an advisor to the Council, and the Council is way, way above where I am.”
“The Council of a Hundred? Is this about them, then? Is that why the priest was killed?”
Falsi glanced around. He wanted to turn his head to check the alley behind him, but he did not dare. “Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t know for sure.”
She paused, frowning, and something seemed to relax a little inside her. “Right, then. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. You’ve seen me get the jump on you. You know that if I want to, I can get the jump on you again.”
“Yes.”
“Good. You are going to tell nobody about this conversation. You’re going to tell Orvo you think we’re innocent. You will do everything in your power to slow this horseshit down. And if anyone asks you, you think the case against us is weak – because you know it is.”
He nodded. “Right.”
“I’ll find you if I need anything, but until then, we stay well apart. Understand?”
“But what if they make me go after you? If they put pressure on me to bring you in early?”
“Then you might want to think about what pressure I could put on you.” She took a step backwards, towards the street. She glanced at the ground beside her boot. “I left you a present. Something to take home for dinner.”
She stepped out of view. Falsi flop
ped against the wall. The smoky air suddenly tasted sweet. He looked at the place she’d been, as if she had left a trace of herself there.
After a minute Falsi stood up and walked over to his beer. He picked it up and drank the whole lot quickly, his parched throat pumping as he drained the cup. There was a parcel on the ground, a bit of white cloth. He bent down and looked inside, then tucked it under his arm.
He felt elated as he walked out of the alley, but it was a silly elation, the giddiness that came with relief. Under it, he was weary and depressed.
The two young Watchmen stood outside Frannie’s, beside the stallkeeper who had raised the hue-and-cry. Between them was a scrawny beggar in torn hose and a white shirt. “We found the thief, sir!” one of the Watchmen said as Falsi drew near. “We caught this fellow creeping round the backstreets. Of course, he’s hidden the meat he took, but he’ll talk soon enough.”
Falsi opened the bundle he held under his arm. “Here,” he said, and he passed the leg of mutton to the stallkeeper.
The beggar shook himself free of his guards. “God-damned Watch,” he said, and he dipped his head and spat on the ground. He stomped off, head still down, muttering as he walked away. “Always looking for a poor man to beat… God-damned…”
Falsi looked down at the white shirt he still held. It was speckled pink where it had been wrapped around the meat. “Back to work,” he said.
***
“He just healed up, as if the cut I gave him hadn’t happened.” Giulia poured herself another cup of wine and put the bottle back in the centre of the table. “He didn’t wave his hands around, say magic words, or any of that stuff. Have any of you ever seen anything like that before?”
They sat around the table in the room that Edwin and Elayne shared. Giulia had been back less than an hour, and she had already drunk half a bottle of cheap red wine. It tasted like sucking on a copper penny, but she knew it would seem better in another cup’s time. She looked across the table at Elayne. “Is that a thing you can do, just heal up like that?”
“Not that quickly,” the wizard replied. “And not that easily either. If you stuck a knife in my neck, I wouldn’t be getting up at all. Of course, there might be other mages who’d know how to do that, but they’d have to be very powerful, and they probably wouldn’t spend their time making boats.”
