The Anvil of the World aotwu-1

by Kage Baker

  “Assist me, Smith. What time is it?”

  “Halfway between Third and Fourth Prayer Interval,” said Smith, lifting Lord Ermenwyr into a sitting position.

  “Doesn’t tell me a lot, does it, since I don’t worship your gods, and I wouldn’t pray to them even if I did,” moaned Lord Ermenwyr. “Is it drawing on toward evening, or are my eyes simply dying in their sockets?”

  “It’ll be sunset in half an hour,” Smith said, fetching him a carafe of water and pouring him a cup.

  “I wish I really was a vampire; I’d be feeling great about now.” Lord Ermenwyr looked around sourly. “But I am alone, abandoned by all who ever claimed they loved me.”

  “We are still here, Master,” said a slightly reproachful voice. Smith turned, startled to note the four bodyguards lined up against the wall on either side of the balcony window. The glamour was off them and their true nature was quite evident; they resembled nothing so much as a quartet of standing stones with eyes and teeth, looming in the shadows.

  “Well, aren’t you the faithful ones,” said Lord Ermenwyr, sipping from his cup. “Careful where you sit, Smith. The Variable Magnificent’s undoubtedly lurking around in the shape of an especially ugly end table or hassock.”

  “No, I’m not,” said a voice from the bedroom, and Lord Eyrdway stepped into view. Smith had to stare a moment to be certain it was really he; for he had altered his height, appearing several inches shorter, and lengthened his nose, and moreover was wearing a full suit of immaculate formal evening dress.

  “Hey!” Lord Ermenwyr cried in outrage. “I didn’t say you could wear my clothes! You’ll get slime all over them.”

  “Ha-ha, you fell for it,” Lord Eyrdway said. “I wouldn’t wear your old suits anyway; the trouser crotches wouldn’t fit me. I only copied them. It’s all me, see?” He turned to display himself. “I’m going to go out and find a party. Who’ll recognize me with clothes on?”

  “Want to hear me waste advice, Smith?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Listen: Eyrdway, don’t drink. If you do, you will begin to boast, and as you’re not at home in the land of spoiled darlings, someone will take offense at your boasting and call you out, and then you’ll kill him, and then the bad people will chase you again. You don’t want that to happen, do you, Way-way?”

  “It won’t happen, Worm-worm,” his brother told him, grinning evilly. “I’m going to be clever. I’m going to be brilliant, in fact.”

  “Of course you will,” Lord Ermenwyr repeated, sagging back on the cushions. “How silly of me to imagine for a moment you’ll get yourself into trouble. Go. Have a wonderful time.” He sat forward abruptly and his voice sharpened, “But those had better not be my pearl earrings you’re wearing!”

  “No, I copied those too,” said Lord Eyrdway, shooting his neck forward out of his collar a good two yards so he could dangle the earrings before his brother’s eyes. “You think I’d touch something that had been in your ears? Ugh!”

  “Retract yourself! The last thing I need in my condition is a close-up of your face,” said Lord Ermenwyr, swatting at him with one of the cushions. “Perfidious princox!”

  “I know you are, but what am I?”

  “Get out!”

  “I’m going,” Lord Eyrdway said, dancing to the door, colliding with it, then flinging it wide. “Look out, Salesh; you’ve never seen true youth and beauty until tonight!”

  Lord Ermenwyr gagged.

  “Open a window, Smith. I’d rather not vomit all over your carpets.”

  “You could do with a little fresh air,” Smith said, opening the window and letting out some of the smoke. “No wonder you stop breathing all the time.”

  “It’s not my fault I’m chronically ill,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I was born sickly. It’s Daddy’s fault, probably. He didn’t infuse me with enough of the life force when he begot me. And the rest is Eyrdway’s fault. He used to try to smother me in the cradle when Nursie wasn’t looking, you know.”

  “I guess these things happen in families,” said Smith. He took up a sofa cushion and used it as a fan to wave smoke out the window.

  “Oh, the horror of siblings,” Lord Ermenwyr said, closing his bloodshot eyes. “You’re an orphan, aren’t you, Smith? Lucky man. Yet you’ve got people who love you. Nobody would shed a tear if I gasped out my irrevocable last.”

  “You’re just saying that because you haven’t had your medication,” said Smith encouragingly. “Where’s Willowspear, anyway?”

  “Vision questing, I assume,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “Do you know how to give an injection?”

  “A what?” Smith frowned in puzzlement.

  “Where you shoot medicine into someone’s arm through a needle?”

  Smith blanched. “Is that a demon thing?”

  “I’d forgotten your race is dismally backward in medical practice,” Lord Ermenwyr sighed. “Fetch me the green box on my dresser, and I’ll show you.”

  Smith found the box, and watched in horrified fascination as Lord Ermenwyr drew out a glass tube shaped like a hummingbird, with a long needle for a beak. Removing a tiny cartridge of something poison-green from the box, he flipped up the hummingbird’s tail feathers and loaded the cartridge; then opened and shut its tiny wings experimentally, until a livid green droplet appeared at the end of the needle.

  “And Mr. Hummyhum is ready to play now,” said Lord Ermenwyr, rolling up his sleeve. Taking out an atomizer, he squeezed its bulb until a fine mist of something aromatic wet his arm; then, with a practiced jab, he gave himself an injection. Smith flinched.

  “There. My pointless life is prolonged another night,” said Lord Ermenwyr wearily. “What are you looking so pale about? You’re an old hand at sticking sharp things into people.”

  “It’s different when you’re killing,” said Smith. “But when you’re saving a life … it just seems perverse, somehow. Stabbing somebody to keep them alive, brr!”

  “Remind me to tell you about invasive surgery sometime,” said Lord Ermenwyr, ejecting the spent cartridge and putting the hummingbird away. “Or trepanning! Think of it as making a doorway to let evil spirits out of the body, if it’ll help.”

  “No, thanks,” said Smith fervently. He couldn’t take his eyes off the glass bird, however. “You could shoot poison into somebody with one of those things to kill them, and it’d barely leave a mark, would it?”

  “You wouldn’t even need poison,” Lord Ermenwyr told him, rubbing his arm. “A bubble of air could do it. It’s not the sort of murder you could do by stealth very easily, though. Well, maybe you could. What, are you still trying to find out who killed that wretched journalist?”

  Smith nodded.

  “I know who didn’t kill him, and I know what he didn’t die of. That’s about it.”

  “What did he die of, by the way?”

  “I’ve no idea. There’s not a mark on him.”

  “You haven’t done an autopsy?” Lord Ermenwyr turned to stare at him. Smith stared back. “Oh, don’t tell me you people don’t do autopsies either!”

  “I don’t think we do,” Smith admitted. “What’s an autopsy?”

  Lord Ermenwyr explained.

  “But that’s desecrating the corpse!” yelled Smith. “Ye gods, you’d have the angry ghost and every one of his ancestors after you in this world and the next!”

  “All you have to do is tell them you’re conducting a forensic analysis,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “I’ve never had any trouble.”

  “I still couldn’t do it,” said Smith. “That’s even worse than sticking needles into somebody. Cutting up a corpse in cold blood’s an abomination.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about abominations, not me,” said Lord Ermenwyr, beginning to grin as his medication took affect. “Look here, why don’t I do the job for you? I take it the idea of a demon fooling around with a corpse doesn’t violate your sense of propriety quite as badly?”

  “I guess it would be different for you,” Smith conceded.


  “Well then!” Lord Ermenwyr sprang to his feet. “I’ve even got a set of autopsy tools with me. Isn’t that lucky? One ought never to travel unprepared, at least that’s what Daddy says. The restaurant’s closed tonight, isn’t it? We can just open him up in the kitchen!”

  “No!” Smith protested. “What if he decided to haunt in there, ever after? The restaurant’s our whole reputation. We could be ruined!”

  “And it wouldn’t be terribly sanitary, either, I suppose,” Lord Ermenwyr said, rummaging in a drawer. “Where did I leave that bone saw? No matter; we’ll just wait until everyone’s gone off to Festival, and we’ll bring him up here. More privacy!”

  Smith went downstairs and waited, nervously, as one by one the guests came down in their Festival costumes and walked out or ordered bearers to take them into the heart of town, where most of the evening’s Festival activities were going on. Mrs. Smith emerged from the kitchen, followed by Crucible and Pinion bearing between them the Sea Dragon Bombe on a vast platter. It was glorious to see, spreading wings like fans of ruby glass, and light glittered on its thousand emerald scales.

  Mrs. Smith herself was no less resplendent, swathed in tented magnificence of peacock-blue satin and cloth of gold, her hair elaborately coifed, her lips crimsoned. A wave of perfume went before and followed her.

  “We’re off to the civic banqueting hall. Wish me luck, Smith,” she said. “I’ll need it. I’ve just been informed the Anchor Street Bakery got a shipment of superfine manchet flour from Old Troon Mills this morning.”

  “Good luck,” said Smith. “They use too much butter-cream, anyway.”

  “And the bombe is loaded with aphrodisiacs,” said Mrs. Smith, pulling out her best smoking tube—black jade, a foot long and elaborately carved—and setting it between her teeth. “So we must hope for the best. Be a dear and give us a light?”

  Smith gave her a light and a kiss. As he leaned close, Mrs. Smith murmured; “Burnbright’s gone out with young Willowspear.”

  “You mean to the Festival?” Smith started.

  “They spent ages out there together on the parapet,” she said. “When I went into the bar to get a bottle of passion-fruit liqueur for the serving sauce, they came sneaking through. Thought I didn’t see them. But I saw their faces; I know that look. They ran out through the garden and went over the wall. I don’t expect they’ll be back until morning, but you might leave the side door unlocked.”

  Smith was trying to imagine Willowspear doing something as earthly as scrambling over a wall with a girl. “Right,” he said, nodding slowly. “Side door. Well. Return victorious, Mrs. Smith.”

  “Death to our enemies,” she replied grimly. Pulling her yards of train over one arm and puffing out clouds of smoke, she strode forth into the night, and Crucible and Pinion followed her with the bombe.

  Leaving Bellows on duty in the lobby and the two other Smiths in the bar to deal with any late-night emergencies, Smith hurried upstairs and rapped twice on Lord Ermenwyr’s door. It was immediately flung wide by Lord Ermenwyr, who stood there grinning from ear to ear.

  “All clear?”

  “All clear.”

  “Come on, boys!” He shot out of his room past Smith and went clattering down the stairs, and the four bodyguards thundered after him.

  “Er—” Smith waved frantically, attempting to direct attention to the fact that Cutt had his head on backward. Lord Ermenwyr turned, spotted the problem, giggled, and corrected it with a wave of his hand.

  “Sorry,” he said in a loud stage whisper. “Come on, where’s the you-know?”

  Smith hurried down to join them and led the party back to the kitchen, where they descended into the cold cellar. Coppercut was gray and stiff as a board, which put smuggling him upstairs in an empty barrel out of the question. At last, after a certain amount of grisly hilarity and impractical, not to say criminal, suggestions, they settled for draping the corpse in sacking and carrying him out. Smith prayed there wouldn’t be any guests in the lobby, and there weren’t; after Bellows gave them the all clear and waved them through, they took the body up the stairs, tottering under it like a crowd of mismatched ants toting a dead beetle.

  Thoroughly unnerved by the time they were back in Lord Ermenwyr’s suite, Smith was relieved to see neither black candles nor dark-fumed incense lit, but only bright lamps arranged around a table that had been tidily covered with oilcloth. On a smaller table close at hand were laid out edged tools of distressingly culinary design.

  “Let’s just plop him down over there,” said Lord Ermenwyr, slipping out from under the corpse to shut the door. “Boys, cut his clothes off.”

  “Don’t cut them, for gods’ sake,” said Smith. “I’ve still got to hand him over to Crossbrace tomorrow. If he’s naked with a big hole in him, that’ll raise some questions, won’t it?”

  “Too true,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “All right; just get the clothes off him somehow, boys.”

  The bodyguards set to their task obligingly, and though Coppercut’s body went through some maneuvers that could best be described as terribly undignified, his clothes came off at last.

  “It’s like one of those puzzles,” growled Crish happily, holding up Coppercut’s tunic. “You can do it; you just have to think really hard.”

  “Good for you,” said Lord Ermenwyr, removing his own jacket and shirt. He stripped a sheet from the bed and tied it around his neck like an immense trailing napkin. Smith paced nervously, watching the proceedings and silently apologizing to Coppercut.

  “Now then.” Lord Ermenwyr stepped up to the corpse and studied it. “What have we got? A male Child of the Sun, dead roughly a day and a half. Looks to be in the prime of life. No signs of chronic illness present. Well-healed scar on the right side, between the third and fourth ribs. Someone once took a shot at you with, hm, a pistol bolt? Missed anything vital, though. Otherwise unscarred and well nourished. Some evidence of initial processes of putrefaction.”

  Smith groaned. “Get on with it, please!”

  “You want me to find out what killed him, don’t you?” Lord Ermenwyr replied. He peered into Coppercut’s eyes and ears, felt gingerly all over his skull. “No evidence of head injury. Nobody sneaked up and coshed him from behind. Signs of asphyxia present. Internal suffocation? I’m betting on poison. Let’s see the stomach contents.”

  He selected a small knife from the table at his elbow and made a long incision down Coppercut’s front. Smith, watching, felt himself break out in a cold sweat.

  “Let’s see, where does your race keep their stomachs? I remember now… here we go. Come and help me, Smith. Oh, all right! Strangel, hand him the lamp and you come help me. Honestly, Smith, what kind of an assassin were you?”

  “A quick one,” Smith panted, averting his face. “Even on the battlefield you have to hack off arms and heads and things, but—but it’s all in the heat of the moment. It’s nothing like this. I guess you learned how from your lord father?”

  The bodyguards started to genuflect and narrowly stopped themselves, as lamplight flickered crazily in the room and Crish nearly dropped what Lord Ermenwyr had given him to hold.

  “Steady,” warned Lord Ermenwyr. “No … I learned it from Mother, if you want to know the truth. It’s her opinion that if you study the processes of death, you can save other lives. Don’t imagine she trembles over the dissecting table either, Smith. She has nerves of ice. Real Good can be as ruthless as Evil when it wants to accomplish something, let me tell you.”

  “I guess so.” Smith wiped his brow and got control of his nerves.

  “He didn’t eat much. I’d say his stomach was empty when he got here. Had … wine, had Mrs. Smith’s delightful fried eel… looks like a bit of buttered roll… what’s this stuff?”

  “He ate his appetizer,” Smith stated. “I think it was fish.”

  “Fish, yes. Those dreadful little raw fish petits fours Salesh is so proud of? That’s what these are, then. I can’t imagine how you people manage to eat the
m, especially with all those incendiary sauces … oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think I’ve found what did for him, Smith,” said Lord Ermenwyr in an odd voice. He reached for a pair of tweezers and picked something out of the depths of Coppercut, and held it out into the lamplight, turning it this way and that. Smith peered at it. It was a small gray lump of matter.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Unless I’m much mistaken—” Lord Ermenwyr took up a finely ground lens in a frame and screwed it into his eye. He studied the object closely. “And I’m not, this is a bloatfish liver.”

  “And that would be?”

  Lord Ermenwyr removed the lens and regarded him. “You were a weapons man, weren’t you? Not a poisons man. I’d bet you’ve never sold fish, either.”

  “No, I never did. Bloatfish liver is poisonous?”

  “Deadly poisonous.” Lord Ermenwyr spoke with an unaccustomed gravity. “The rest of the fish is safe to eat, but the liver is so full of toxin most cities have an ordinance requiring that it be removed before the fish can be sold. Perhaps Salesh isn’t as safety-conscious. In any case, this got into his fish appetizer. He had three minutes to live from the moment he swallowed it down.”

  Smith groaned. “So it was his dinner. Not Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think you have to worry about losing your catering license,” said Lord Ermenwyr, setting aside the liver and beginning to replace Coppercut’s organs. “This wasn’t negligence. It was deliberate murder. The liver was incised laterally to make sure the poison was released. Anyway, you don’t just stick a whole bloatfish liver inside a Salesh Roll by mistake!”

  Smith bowed his head and swore quietly.

  Coppercut had been sutured up and was having his garments wrestled back on when there came a sharp knock at the door.

  “What?” demanded Lord Ermenwyr, removing his makeshift apron and reaching for his shirt.

  “It’s me,” said Lord Eyrdway from the hallway.

  “Bathroom,” hissed Lord Ermenwyr to his bodyguards, gesturing at the corpse. They grabbed it up and carried it off. “He tends to get overexcited if he sees cadavers,” he explained to Smith in an undertone, then raised his voice. “You’re back early. What’s the matter? Wasn’t Salesh impressed with your beauty?” he inquired, buttoning up his shirt.