The coach steadied as we reached the bottom of the hill, and the light inside dimmed as we entered the overhung streets of the level parts of the city. A glance out through the bars showed throngs of people going about their business in the tunnel-like dimness. Somewhere above, about a five-foot stretch of sky ran high overhead, where the roofs almost met. I always wondered how many people in this city had never really seen the night sky.
The sound of splashing and chanting told me we were on Waterdancer Lane, likely named after the girls making their pennies by stomping in tubs full of other people’s laundry. Not a bad place to pass through since I had become respectable. The stomping maidens were prone to lifting their skirts a little higher when men of gainful employment were about, hoping to catch their eye. I took some small pleasure in knowing I now ranked among those men, and had been known to drop off my linens for a good wash from time to time.
Lately, those linens were being dropped off at the tub of a young redhead with a spirited high step who I had been considering courting. I hadn’t quite reached two score years yet, and men older than me had taken some of those young ladies for wives.
But that was not to be. I needed to finish my business with Captain Drayton, and then get out of town once he thought he had me securely on his team. But until then…
“You mentioned a second victim, Captain?”
“I don’t know much about it yet,” Drayton responded. “We were on our way to your house from the docks when we were intercepted by a runner sent by the Watch Captain of the Weaver’s District. Not a lot of information, other than a Madame Vedure appears to have been murdered in the same manner as Mr. Carew, in her upper story apartment on Loomteller Street.”
I pride myself on always being in control of my outer demeanor, but I must have started slightly because Drayton immediately turned to face me.
“Does that name or address mean something to you, Mr. Cargill?” he demanded.
Another motto of mine is, “Go ahead and tell the truth if it can’t hurt you.”
“No, it’s just that I saw someone running on the Upperways in the Weaver District early this morning and fall. I was just reminded of that.”
“The ‘Upperways?’” Drayton repeated. “What is that?”
Crap.
“It’s what thieves call the rooftops,” Poole answered.
Oh well, it’s not like the charade was convincing Drayton anyway.
“No, Watchman Poole,” I countered, “it isn’t what thieves call the rooftops. The rooftops are merely the rooftops. The Upperways are the unmarked paths over those rooftops. The paths that avoid weak roofs, loose tiles and dead ends. Most people who use the Upperways learn them as urchins on the street. It’s an education that never ends in this big city. Some master it and some end up crippled or don’t survive. If you think you can just hop up there and start running willy-nilly from roof to roof, I assure you that you will end up in that latter category in almost no time at all.”
I paused to catch my breath, then continued.
“There is an old saying that ‘The Upperways are unforgiving of fools.’ Well, I’ve seen them kill people guilty of being fools, and others guilty of just being kids who hadn’t learned all the tricks yet.
The Gods only know how many there are to learn. I’ve also seen them kill people who knew them and just got too confident and careless, like the man running too fast this morning. And I assure you, Watchman Poole, all of those it killed had the advantage of knowing they weren’t just ‘running around on the rooftops.’”
I stopped, surprised by my own emotional lecture, while realizing I had been giving it to a man who could easily break me in half. For a brief second I wondered if I had pushed things too far.
“Outstanding!” Drayton leaned forward, grinning from ear to ear. “You are already proving your merit, Mr. Cargill!” he enthused. “If you give us nothing else of value this day, you will have already earned your pay just for that little education alone.”
Heinryk cleared his throat.
“Just curious,” he rasped, “but where exactly did that runner fall this morning?”
“In front of the alley between the warehouse and Dyer’s Hall,” I replied, “on Indigo Street.”
Drayton and the old veteran exchanged a look.
“That’s only a couple of blocks from where the murder took place,” Heinryk observed.
Drayton nodded and banged on the roof. The carriage stopped and he slid open a little window to the coachman’s area and instructed the driver to stop in front of Dyer’s Hall.
“Poole,” he said, “I want you to get out there, find the Block Sergeant, and see if a body has been found in or near the area Mr. Cargill described. If so, get a full report and return.”
“Yes, sir,” Poole responded, and then glowered at me from underneath his heavy brow.
Yeah, I was making friends fast.
Suddenly, leaving town seemed a lot less scary. I wondered what the city of Saalbach was like this time of year. Probably too cold for my tastes. Besides, every traveler I ever met from that city carried a hand axe where any civilized man carried his dagger. Bardokians are just not my type of people. Maybe somewhere more to the south...
I was busy musing on where I could uproot my life to when the coach rattled to a stop and Poole climbed out.
Looking through the bars of the window, I could see a dark stain on the cobblestones in about the area where the runner would have landed last night. Flies buzzed around it, but in this city, that didn’t necessarily mean anything suspicious. Twisting around, I looked up. There was more sky visible here, as Indigo Street was a little wider to accommodate the wool wagons. The smell of lanolin and mordent, from the dyes boiling inside the Hall, filled the street. The Dyer’s Hall loomed large beside us, a cavernous old brick building that spewed fumes from a full score of chimneys on its steep roof.
The drop from that roof last night would have been a little over forty feet.
Poole stepped into Dyer’s Hall for a minute, and then reemerged. He opened the coach door and leaned in, reeking of dye.
“The workers inside saw a body this morning,” Poole reported. He pointed to where the flies buzzed. “Over there, in front of the alley. It turned out to be a girl, though, probably a whore who got brained for picking up the wrong man. The block sergeant is up at the Watch House about a block up the street. I’ll run up there and get the report if you think it’s worth our time, Captain.”
“Ask him what she had been wearing,” I broke in.
Drayton looked at me in surprise and then regarded Poole, who had gone back to glowering again.
“Go ahead and get his report, Poole. And be sure and get an answer to Mr. Cargill’s question.”
Poole left and Drayton turned back to me with a quizzical look.
“Just because it’s a woman, it doesn’t mean she couldn’t be our roof runner from last night,” I stated.
Drayton looked skeptical, but Heinryk nodded. Heinryk may not have been an officer, but I could tell he had been around long enough to know I was right on this score. I noticed he had been quiet when I lectured Poole on the Upperways. While Poole made me nervous regarding future mayhem, Heinryk worried me because I wondered how much he guessed about my thoughts. I had a feeling he would be the most difficult to surprise.
The door opened and Poole got back into the coach. With a rap on the ceiling from Drayton, the coach clattered off again.
“The block sergeant reports they found a girl, a few years short of a full score,” Poole reported. “She had her brains beaten out all over the cobbles. They think her murderer must have been scared off by workers arriving early at the Dyers Hall. She wore a light skirt, but it had been tied up around her waist. She still had full stockings on under them, though, so the sick bastard didn’t have time to drag her off in the alley and have his way with her.”
At least now I knew how the runner from last night had landed.
“She wasn’t
murdered, Captain Drayton,” I interrupted.
“No?”
“She was the runner from last night. Wearing leggings under the skirt, and then tying the skirt up when on the rooftops, is a standard trick with the few girls who go on the Upperways. When on the streets, they simply let the skirts back down and nobody is the wiser.”
For a moment, he stared at me with raised eyebrows.
“Outstanding, Mr. Cargill,” he marveled, “simply outstanding. We haven’t even gotten to the murder scene in question, and you have already solved another death on the way. Whatever misgivings I may have had about recruiting you are gone.”
Well, at least one of us was all out of misgivings.
“However,” he continued, “I must confess to being surprised to learn of members of the gentler sex hopping over rooftops in the dead of night.”
I glanced over at Heinryk, but his face remained unreadable, so I answered as best I could.
“A girl who finds herself growing up on the streets has a very limited set of choices, Captain. Some of them become prostitutes, some hook up with a criminal strong enough to protect her, until he either dies or tires of her—and then she becomes a prostitute. A rare few others become thieves, burglars usually. Some try to gather enough money to make a dowry to entice some poor baker or shopkeeper into overlooking their lack of usual feminine skills and take them as a wife. Others make enough so they can afford to hire a few thugs and start their own enterprise. It’s survival,” I finished, trying not to think of the girls I knew who hadn’t made it.
The Captain wore a thoughtful frown as he followed this latest lecture of mine.
“Mr. Cargill,” he replied, “I can tell we are going to have many long and interesting conversations in the future. At the moment, though, I see we are approaching our destination and I need you to focus on the task at hand.”
The coach stopped in front of a crowded door in the dim street.
Loomteller Lane was a residential area of towering apartments, each floor overhanging the one below it, much like of the rest of the city. Only here, the roofs came so close together over the street that a grown man could step across the gap. The lower floors were occupied by small shops and the poorer inhabitants of the street. The top floors were accessed by their own set of stairs and owned by what qualified as the wealthier people in this dreary place. At the door in question, a watchman held a small crowd of gawkers at bay.
A hush descended over them as Captain Drayton descended from the coach.
They were neighborhood locals, a mix of poor workers at the nearby cloth factories, street urchins and people who stopped out of curiosity on the way from their morning shopping. Two members of the Silent March stood next to their body cart parked off to one side. The Captain ignored them all and ushered us inside the door, where a flight of stairs ascended to the fourth floor.
Stopping on the stairs, Drayton issued our orders.
“Poole, I want you to remain here for a couple of minutes and help our man outside with the crowd. Once you are confident things are under control, you may join us at your discretion.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Cargill, I want you to examine the door to her apartment and the door to the balcony. Also, keep an eye open for any signs of theft you think we may overlook. Heinryk and I will go in first, just to be sure nobody remains in there who shouldn’t.”
“Very well, Captain.”
If the large men with weapons wanted to enter first, that suited me just fine.
With a nod at Heinryk, Drayton took the lead and we proceeded up the stairs.
***
Captain Drayton and Heinryk entered the room while I remained behind to examine the door.
There wasn’t much to it.
A simple dead bolt lock, backed up by a sliding bolt the woman closed when she went inside. The lock wasn’t a complicated affair. A good burglar would be through it within a minute with a lock pick, less time if he bothered to carry a ring of skeleton keys. But it would have been a noisy process to attempt while the woman sat inside, and there was the matter of the second sliding bolt. The frame of the door had been broken, smashed by whoever kicked it in when the woman failed to answer.
“There’s nothing to be learned here, Captain,” I reported dutifully.
“I didn’t think there would be. Go ahead and check the balcony doors. That’s where the intruder entered. You might want to avoid looking at the body on the bed. I imagine you have seen death before, but this is rather disturbing.”
That aforementioned gremlin of curiosity stirred, but I ignored it for the moment. Better to be the good little pseudo-watchman and follow orders.
The apartment was a simple, large, one room flat, with the entrance opening at the foot of the bed. It was a surprisingly big, four-poster bed. There was a dresser, a rug and an overturned stool in the corner. Dresses, tunics and different articles of clothing lay in a heap below a row of pegs on the near wall. Something had knocked things around a little, but everything appeared to lie near its original position…as if they had merely been brushed against as opposed to slammed into. The disarray didn’t seem near bad enough to indicate a violent struggle, or the room being tossed in search of loot.
Odd.
Drayton and Heinryk were leaning over the bed, so I walked past them and across the room to the balcony doors.
They were heavy wooden slatted affairs, designed to let in air, but not be flimsy. They currently stood open, so I stepped out on the balcony and looked around.
Loomteller Street curved out of sight in both directions, a dim corridor of human activity and traffic. Things were brighter this close to the roof, and I bent and picked up a piece of shingle from the balcony. The scrap confirmed what we already suspected. I checked the hinges for signs of damage. While doing so, something unusual became readily apparent. Short, bristly black hairs were caught in the slats of the door and in the space between the door frame and the door.
Pulling out a few, I tried to imagine their origin and failed.
“I wonder if our murderers were wearing some kind of fur robes or coats,” I mused out loud, and held up the hairs for the other two to see.
“I see some of those in the handles to this dresser, too,” Heinryk replied.
“I think she has a few in her hand, as well,” Drayton added.
“Maybe some kind of animal?” Heinryk queried. “Whoever it was left her coin purse untouched on top of the dresser.”
“I’ve seen victims of spine hounds, sand sprites, horned apes and sarolisks,” Drayton muttered, “but none of them did anything like this.”
Apparently our good Captain was well traveled.
With a shrug, I went back to examining the doors. Pulling them closed, I saw they were secured by a large sliding bolt lock. No damage showed on the bolt, though the doors seemed a little cracked and warped.
“She had her balcony doors closed, but not locked,” I reported. “Not very wise, but I guess she found that out the hard way. Whoever broke in simply came down on the balcony and pushed open the doors. She may not have even woken up.”
“Oh she woke up, all right,” Drayton replied, “and she didn’t like what she woke up to at all.”
Nothing remained to be learned at the balcony, so I joined them at the bed. While I have never harbored the morbid curiosity some people have about death, I’m not overly bothered by the sight of it, either. I’ve come across more than a few bodies in my former line of work.
I stepped up between the watchmen and looked down at the bed.
Madame Vedure had once been a stout, older woman—I could tell by the thick neck and the nest of chins her open mouth sank into. Her eyes were wide open and staring, and the look of horror on her face could be mistaken for nothing else. I had no doubt she had seen her attacker.
Her legs were also thick, and bent at the hip and knee as if she had started to draw them up in a defensive posture. One short, chubby arm lay across her chest, the ot
her splayed out across the bed.
But her torso appeared to be just skin and bones. Loose skin hung like curtains across her rib cage and what must have once been a thick belly, was now wide swaths of skin spread out on the bed with only her spine making a ridge in the middle of it. Something had deflated her, like an empty bladder. There appeared to be almost no blood, either on her person or the sheets.
For a moment, I stared at the corpse in slack-jawed incomprehension.
Then memory overwhelmed me.
Visions of a dim, green-lit tunnel and a hideous shape with dripping fangs flying at me out of the darkness filled my mind. For one brief instant, I felt myself back in that horrific grip and fighting for my life in that rotting hole.
In a flash, my sleeve dagger was in my hand and my back against the wall away from the bed.
“Heinryk, no!” I heard Drayton yell. The old watchman had out his truncheon, but stopped his advance on me when the Captain yelled.
I ignored them both and ducked down to try and see under the bed. My heart hammered in my chest and my knuckles were white from the grip on the dagger.
“Get away from the bed! It might still be under the bed!”
“Mr. Cargill,” Drayton barked, “there is nobody under the bed. We checked when we first entered the room.”
My eyes scanned the room for any other hiding place large enough to conceal the beast.
“Mr. Cargill, listen to me. There is nobody in here but us. Now give me that dagger!” He thrust out his hand, waiting, gesturing at Heinryk to stand down.
For a moment, panic still gripped me, and I was lost in that tunnel of eight years ago. Then a shuddering breath and an effort of will forced me back to the present. I reminded myself that I stood in an old lady’s room, and nobody shared it with me but two armed men who were nominally on my side.
Gasping for breath, I trembled as I approached the body for a second time. I carefully turned the dagger over in my hand and handed it to Captain Drayton as I passed him. I didn’t want to see the gruesome scene again, but I needed to be sure.
The Ways of Khrem Page 3
