by Kage Baker
“Business first,” said Crossbrace regretfully. “Little surprise inspection. But I expect you’re all up to code, eh, in a first-class establishment like this?”
“Come and see,” said Smith, bowing him forward. “What are you drinking? Silverbush? Let me just grab us a bottle as we go through the bar.”
The inspection was cursory, and went well. No molds were discovered anywhere they didn’t belong. No structural deficiencies were found, nor any violations of Salesh’s codes regarding fire or flood safety. Crossbrace contented himself with limiting the upstairs inspection to a walk down the length of the corridor. Then they went back down to the kitchen, by which time they’d half emptied the bottle of Silverbush and some of the guests on the restaurant terrace were beginning to writhe together in Festival-inflamed passion.
“And you’ve got to see the drains, of course,” Smith insisted, opening the door into the back area. Crossbrace followed him out readily, and looked on as Smith, with a flourish, flung the trap wide.
“Look at that!”
“Damn, you could eat out of there,” said Crossbrace in admiration. He took down the area lamp and shined it into the drain, as the distant sound of erotic enchantment drifted across the water. “Beautiful! And that’s an old pipe, too. City records says this place was built back in Regent Kashlar’s time.”
“S’right,” affirmed Smith, refilling Crossbrace’s glass and having a good gulp himself from the bottle. “But they built solid back then.”
Somewhere close at hand, hoarse panting rose to a scream of ecstasy.
“Didn’t they, though?” Crossbrace had another drink. “What’s your secret?”
“Ah.” Smith laid a finger beside his nose. “Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder! See?” He waved a hand at the ten canisters neatly stacked against the wall.
“That’s great stuff,” said Crossbrace, and stepped close to read the warning.
Smith heard, ominous under all the giggling and groaning, the sound of someone running through the kitchen. The area door flew open, and Pinion stared out at him, looking panic-stricken.
“Boss! Somebody’s gone and died in—”
Crossbrace straightened up abruptly and turned around. Pinion saw him and winced. “In Room 2,” he finished miserably.
“Oh, dear,” Crossbrace said, sobering with alchemical swiftness. “I suppose in my capacity as City Warden I’d better have a look, hadn’t I?”
Smith ground his teeth. They went back upstairs.
“He’d ordered room service,” Pinion explained. “Never called to have the dishes taken away. I went up to see was he done yet, and nobody answered the knock. Opened the door finally and it was dark in here, except for the light coming in from the terrace and a little fire on the hearth. And there he sits.”
Smith opened the door cautiously and stepped inside, followed by Crossbrace and Pinion. “Mr. Coppercut?” he called hopefully.
But the figure silhouetted against the window was dreadfully motionless. Crossbrace swore quietly and, finding a lamp, lit it.
Sharplin Coppercut sat at the writing table, sagging backward in his chair. His collar had been wrenched open, and he stared at the ceiling with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth, rather as though he was about to announce that he’d just spotted a particularly fearsome spider up there.
On the table across the room were the dishes containing his half-eaten meal. The chair had been pushed back and fallen, the napkin dropped to the floor, and a small table midway between the dinner table and the desk lay on its side, with the smoking apparatus it had held scattered across the carpet.
“That’s the Sharplin Coppercut, isn’t it?” said Crossbrace.
“He’s the only one I know of,” groaned Smith, going to the body to feel for a pulse. He couldn’t find one.
“Saw his name in the register. Dear, dear, Smith, you’ve got a problem on your hands,” stated Crossbrace.
“Oh, gods, he’s stone dead. Crossbrace, you know it wasn’t our food!”
“Sat down to eat his dinner,” theorized Crossbrace, studying the dining table. “Had his appetizer; ate it all but a bit of parsley. Drank half a glass of wine. Working his way through a plate of fried eel—that’s your house specialty, isn’t it?—when he comes over queer and needs air, so he loosens his collar and gets up to go to the window. Bit clumsy by this time, so he bumps over the smoking table on his way. Makes it to the chair and collapses, but dies before he can get the window open. That’s the way it looks, wouldn’t you say?”
“But there was nothing wrong with the eels,” Smith protested. “I had some myself this aftern—” He spotted something on the table and stared at it a moment. Then his face lit up.
“Yes! Crossbrace, come look at this! It wasn’t food poisoning at all!”
Crossbrace came around to look over the corpse’s shoulder. There, scrawled on a tablet bearing the Hotel Grand-view imprimis, were the words AVENGE MY MURD.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, this puts a different light on it.”
“Somebody killed him,” said Smith. “And he took the trouble to let us know!” He felt like embracing Coppercut. An accidental death by food poisoning could wreck a restaurant’s reputation, but a high-profile revenge slaying in one could only be considered good publicity.
“So somebody killed him,” said Crossbrace thoughtfully. “Gods know he had a lot of enemies. Poison in his wine? Poisoned dart through the window? Could have been a mage hired to do the job with a sending, for that matter. Look at the coals in the fireplace, what’d he want with a fire on such a warm night? Suspicious. Maybe a smoke efrit suffocated him? Lucky break for you, Smith.”
“Isn’t it?” Smith beamed at the corpse.
“But it makes a lot more work for me.” Crossbrace sighed. “I’ll have to get the morgue crew up here, then I’ll have to investigate and question everybody, which will take all bloody night. Then I’ll have to file a report in triplicate, and there’s his avengers to notify, because he must have kept some on retainer … and here it is Festival time, and I had an alcove booked at the Black Veil Club for tonight.”
“That’s a shame,” said Smith warily, sensing what was coming.
“It cost me a fortune to get that alcove, too. My lady friend will be furious. I think I’m going to do you a favor, Smith,” Crossbrace decided.
“Such as?”
“It’s Festival. I’m going to pretend this unfortunate incident hasn’t yet happened to stain your restaurant’s good name, all right? We both know it wasn’t food poisoning, but rumors get out, don’t they? And the funniest things will influence those clerks in the Permit Office.” Crossbrace swirled his drink and looked Smith in the eye.
“But we do have a famous dead man here something’s got to be done about. So I’ll come back in two days’ time, when Festival’s done and everything’s business as usual. You’ll have a body for me and not only that, you’ll have found out who, where, when, how, and why, so all I have to do is arrest the murderer, if possible, and file the paperwork. I’ll have a Safety Certificate for you. Everybody wins. Right?”
“Right,” said Smith, knowing a cleft stick when he saw one.
“See you after Festival, then,” said Crossbrace, and finished his drink. He handed the glass to Smith. “Thanks.”
Having sworn Pinion to secrecy and sent him down to serve food, Smith finished the bottle of Silverbush and indulged in some blistering profanity. As this accomplished nothing, he then proceeded to examine the room more closely, while the sounds of a full-scale orgy floated up from the terrace below.
There was no trace of anything suspicious on the uneaten food, nor anything that his nose could detect in the wine. The empty appetizer plate had held some sort of seafood, to judge from the smell, but that was all. No hint of Scour-brass’s Foaming Wonder, which relieved Smith very much.
He dragged Coppercut’s body to the bed, laid it out, and examined him with a professional’s eye for signs of subtle assassination. No
tiny darts, no insect bites, no wounds in easily overlooked places; not even a rash. Coppercut was turning a nasty color and going stiff, but other than that he seemed fine.
Straightening up, Smith looked around the room and noticed that the low coals were smoking out in the fireplace. He approached it cautiously, in case there really was an efrit or something less pleasant in there, and bent down to peer in. The next moment he had grabbed a poker and was raking ashes out onto the hearth, but it was just about too late: for of the gray ruffled mass of paper ash there, only a few blackened scraps were left intact. Muttering to himself, he picked them up and carried them out to the circle of lamplight on the table. Writing. Bits of scrolls?
Spreading them out, turning them over, he found that some were in what was obviously a library scribe’s neat hand; others in a rushed-looking backhand that consistently left off letter elements, like the masts on the little ship that signified the th sound, or the pupil of the eye that stood for the suffix ln. Two hands, but no sense: He had the words journeyed swiftly to implore and so great was his and unnatural, also ghastly tragedy and swift anger and they could not escape.
Only one offered any clue at all. It said to the lasting sorrow of House Spellmetal, he—
The name Spellmetal was vaguely familiar to Smith. He knit his brows, staring at the fragment. House Spellmetal. Somebody wealthy, some dynasty that had suffered notoriety. When had that been? Ten years ago? Fifteen? More? Smith attempted to place where he’d been living when the name was in the news. And there had been a scandal, and the son and heir of House Spellmetal had died. A massacre of some kind, not a decent vendetta.
Smith turned and stared at the fireplace again. Now he noticed the scribe’s case sitting open in a chair. He went over and peered into it. Three-quarters empty, though it had clearly held more. Someone had pulled out most of the case’s contents and burned them.
“Blackmail,” he said aloud.
He looked speculatively at Sharplin Coppercut. Closing the scribe’s case and tucking it under his arm, Smith went out and locked the door behind him.
The dead man lay on his bed, staring up in horror. Below his window bosoms jiggled, thighs danced, bottoms quivered, tongues sought for nectar, and slender Youth kicked off its golden sandals and got down to business. Life pulsed and shivered, deliciously, deliriously, in every imaginable variation on one act; but it had finished with Sharplin Coppercut.
Mrs. Smith had retired when he went to her, and was sitting up in bed smoking, calmly reading a broadside. The staff inhabited the long attic that ran the length of the hotel, divided into several rooms, far enough above the garden for the sounds of massed passion to be a little less evident as it filtered up through the one narrow gabled window.
“Not going out, Smith?” she inquired. Her gaze fell on the case he carried, and she looked up at him in sharp inquiry. “Dear, dear, have we had a contretemps of some kind?”
“You said Sharplin Coppercut isn’t a food critic,” said Smith. “What kind of journalist is he, then?”
“He’s a scandalmonger,” Mrs. Smith replied. “Writes a column that runs in all the broadsides. A master of dirty innuendo and shocking revelation. He’s done some unauthorized biographies of assorted famous persons, too, instant best-sellers if I recall correctly. I’ve read one or two. Racy stuff. Mean-spirited, however.”
“He dressed pretty well, for somebody living on a writer’s salary,” said Smith.
“You’re speaking of him in the past tense,” observed Mrs. Smith.
“Well, he’s dead.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Mrs. Smith, taking a drag and exhaling smoke. “I assume you mean he’s been murdered?”
“It looks that way.” Smith sagged into a chair.
“Hmph.” Mrs. Smith regarded the scribe’s case. “My guess would be, he blackmailed the wrong person. They do say he made more money being paid not to write, if you understand me. Had a network of spies in every city digging up dirt for him. Did his research, too. It was what made his stuff so entertaining, you see—never indulged in empty insinuation. When that man threw mud, it stuck.”
“Why would he have been writing about the House Spell-metal scandal?” Smith wondered. Mrs. Smith’s eyes widened.
“He was fool enough to blackmail those people? They’re still angry about it, and they’ve got a long reach. How d’you know that was who did for him?”
Smith explained how the body had been found and about the scroll fragments that had survived the fire. “I’ve been trying to remember what the scandal was all about,” he said. “I was working on a long-run freighter back then, and we didn’t put into port much, so I don’t think I ever heard the whole story.”
Mrs. Smith made a face. “I believe it requires a stiff drink, Smith,” she said.
Getting out of bed, she pulled a dressing gown on over her voluminous shift and poured herself an impromptu cocktail from the bottles on her dresser. She poured one for Smith too, and when they were both settled again said, “I’ll tell you as much as I know. It was in all the broadsides at the time; there were ballads, and somebody even attempted to mount a play on the subject, but House Spellmetal had it suppressed with breathtaking speed. D’you remember a self-proclaimed prophet, called himself the Sunborn?”
“Vaguely,” said Smith. “Came to a bad end, didn’t he?”
“Very. That was at the end of the story, however. It all started out in wine and roses, as they used to say. He was a charismatic. Could charm the birds down out of the trees and anyone’s clothes off. Preached deliverance through excess; with him it was Festival all year long, every day. If he’d confined himself to having a good time, he might still be with us.
“Unfortunately, he really believed what he taught.” Mrs. Smith shook her head.
“He was the one House Spellmetal went after,” Smith recalled.
“So he was.”
“And there was a massacre, wasn’t there? Why?”
Mrs. Smith had a long sip of her drink before answering.
“He had a band of followers,” she said at last. “Like any charismatic. One of the things he advocated was free love between the races, so he had quite a mixed bag of people at his, ahem, services. They were driven out of every place they settled in. At last the Sunborn had a vision that he and his lovers were to found a holy city where all might live according to his creed, greenies included.
“And then, somehow or other, the heir to House Spell-metal fell under his influence.”
“That was it,” Smith said. “And the Spellmetals disapproved.”
“Of course they did. The boy was young and thick as two planks, but he adored the Sunborn and he was, of course, rich. So he offered the Sunborn and his followers a huge estate House Spellmetal owned, up near their marble quarries, to be the site of the new holy city. Away they all went and moved into the family mansion there. The boy’s father was beside himself.
“You can guess the rest. House Spellmetal raised an army and went up there to get the boy back and forcibly evict the rest of them, with the exception of the Sunborn, whom they intended to skin alive. They didn’t get him alive, however. They didn’t get anybody alive. There was an armed standoff and finally a massacre.”
Smith shook his head. Mrs. Smith finished her drink.
“I have heard,” she said, “that Konderon Spellmetal strode in through the broken wall and found his son dead in the arms of an equally dead Yendri girl, pierced with one arrow in the very act itself. I’ve heard he swore eternal vengeance on any follower of the Sunborn, and hasn’t thought of another thing since that hour.”
“But they all died,” said Smith.
“Apparently there were a few who fled out through the back, just before the massacre.” Mrs. Smith shrugged and stared into her empty glass before setting it aside. “Women and children, mostly. The Spellmetals had a body they said was the Sunborn’s skinned, but there have always been rumors it wasn’t really him, and he’s supposed t
o have been sighted over the years here and there. One couple, a man and his wife and baby, went straight to the law and turned themselves in. They weren’t mixed-race, and it turned out they hadn’t really been part of the cult; they’d just been the Sunborn’s cousins or something like that.
“They were acquitted. They hadn’t got five steps out of the Temple of the Law when an assassin hired by House Spellmetal put a pair of bolts right through their hearts. Needless to say, any remaining survivors stayed well underground after that.”
“So they must have fabulous prices on their heads,” Smith mused.
“I imagine so. Konderon Spellmetal’s still alive.”
“So Coppercut might have tracked one of them down and threatened him or her with exposure,” said Smith. “Or he might have been proposing to rake it all up again in a book, against House Spellmetal’s wishes.”
“Occasionally the broadsheets like to do Where-Are-They-Now retrospectives,” said Mrs. Smith.
“But whoever killed him went through his papers and burned anything to do with the scandal,” Smith theorized. “I wonder if they got it all?”
He opened the scribe’s case and drew out those papers that remained inside. Mrs. Smith watched him as he shuffled through them.
“They must have been interrupted before they could finish. Anything of note?”
Smith blinked at the pages. They were notes taken in the hasty backhand, apparently copied from city files, and they appeared to trace adoption records for an infant girl, of the house name Sunbolt. She’d been made a ward of the court of the city of Karkateen. There were brief summaries of depositions from persons involved, and then the note that the venue for the child’s case had been changed to Mount Flame. There, after medical certification that she was likely to grow up into the necessary physical type for such work, the infant had been placed in the Mount Flame Mother House for Runners.
The next few pages were all notes of interviews with various persons, concerning the five young runners who had entered active service in the twelfth year of the reign of Chairman Giltbrand.
