Farewell to the Liar

by D. K. Fields

  ‘You’re sure it’s a good idea, you going to hear the Rustan story?’ she asked Ruth.

  ‘It’s not about it being a good idea, Cora. It’s essential. I’m a storyteller. I need to hear the other realms’ tales. We’re all part of the same spoked wheel.’

  ‘Then why do some realms want to smash that wheel?’

  ‘Because that’s the easier response to what’s happening with the Tear.’ Ruth spoke as if this was the most simple truth in the Union, as if she were giving a lesson to Seminary children not yet able to tie their own shoes. ‘To hurt instead of help. That’s what Morton wants. And I’m not going to let that happen.’

  Eleven

  Though Cora was nervous about Ruth going to hear the Rustan story, it was a relief to have the day arrive, and to know they’d be leaving the city as soon as the Rustan ’teller spoke their final words – as long as she and Ruth could get in and out of the Water Gardens in one piece.

  Cora was on her way there now, due to meet Ruth at the spot on the perimeter where security was thought to be weakest. She hoped her sister was right about that. Getting stopped by purple tunics or constables would be a quick way to alert Lowlander Chambers Morton’s people to Ruth’s presence.

  It was a warm morning and looked to be a dry one, which was something. Hearing a story at the Water Gardens in the rain would be a grim prospect. There was little shelter there ordinarily, bar the bandstand at the centre where she guessed the storyteller would stand. Rain would likely put extra pressure on the ’teller, who would have to work harder to keep the voters’ attention.

  So it was a risk then, to be given the Water Gardens as a story venue. Was that some doing of Morton, leaning on Electoral Affairs? These days, Cora found it hard not to imagine Morton’s fingerprints on every part of the Commission. She could only guess how deep the corruption went, and those guesses were grim. But lucky for the Rustans, it was turning out nice.

  ‘Don’t you have a hole to be digging?’ someone grumbled nearby. Grumbled at her, because here she was in this ridiculous Seeder get-up, stitched vines climbing up her arms and a broad hat pulled so low over her eyes she could barely see. And that included getting a clear view of the lumpen Fenestiran now uncomfortably close to her, the smell of beer on the man’s breath – this early? That was elections for you.

  ‘I said—’

  Cora rammed her ’dusters into his gut. The arc of her fist was small, given the press of people in the street, but she put some strength into it, and he went down gasping, which felt good. The people immediately around her moved back, like a river parting around a rock. Cora kept walking.

  From her lodging house she’d caught a Clotham’s coach – the fare paid by Ruth’s coins – then walked for a stretch, doubling back on herself by a few streets. She’d stepped into a whorehouse wearing her own worn wool trousers and grubby shirt, and left by the back entrance clad in the Seeder clothes. Then she’d caught a second coach and told the driver to take the long way round to the north side of the Water Gardens. She hadn’t seen the woman with the baby again, the one who’d followed her into the tool-sharpener’s shop, but the old man studying the pavement outside her lodging house this morning had looked a little too interested in the kerb stones, so she’d spent time throwing him off her scent.

  Now she was safely among the people making their way to the official gates into the Gardens, hoping to get seats in the public gallery. If they couldn’t get in, they’d stand outside, blocking the way of coaches and gigs, harassed by pennysheet sellers and those hawking pies, chequers shouting the changing numbers. People often talked about the atmosphere outside story sites – how the air seemed to hum with the power of the story being told nearby, the guesswork about its contents, the odds on a win. Cora had heard plenty of that talk in the front bar of the Dancing Oak, and from Constable Jenkins, but she’d never understood it.

  In the three days since the Rustan Hook had opened and she’d watched the children hurl themselves across the Seat of the Commoner, Serus at her side, Cora had felt she’d been twiddling her thumbs. She’d been to the Oak but with no money to spend it was a noisy, sweaty form of torture just to be there. And there were only so many times she wanted to go down into the passageways accessed by Beulah’s keys to confuse those following her. So she’d stayed in her lodging house and read the pennysheets.

  The ’sheets’ opinion of the Rustan Hook was mixed. Those who’d been lucky enough to see the children’s display thought it was the best Hook of the election – better, even, than the Seeders’ mostins. But there was a problem: the children only performed when they wanted to.

  According to the hack writer of The Daily Tales, many – himself included – had queued for hours to see the Hook, only to find that, once inside the Seat of the Commoner, nothing happened apart from odd giggles from the eaves, before a purple tunic told them their ten dull minutes were up, and they had to make room for the next group. And even worse, it had rained constantly since the Hook opened, so the crowds were damp as well as disappointed.

  The effect of all this was that the odds on the Rustans winning the election had halved. In that morning’s edition of The Fenestiran Times, the head of the Rustan election delegation had expressed her regret, but Cora suspected this would be half-hearted. The Rustans wanted the Wayward to win, and Cora strongly suspected that their story would help prepare the way for it, just as the Caskers had done, right at the start of the election.

  The people ahead of her were slowing, the way becoming blocked. This appeared to be the queue to get inside the north gate. There were four entrance points to the Water Gardens: one on each side of the square that was the site. From here, the sunken Gardens were hidden by the buildings that flanked them on this side, but she could hear the slow tumble of water beyond. Her way in lay elsewhere. Cora elbowed her way past the north gate, past the purple tunics counting people in, checking wrists and ankles for the marks of Black Jeffrey but with less care than they had at the previous stories. The plague seemed to have well and truly passed, but there was worse to come for the Union. Much worse.

  She came to one of the many bridges that crossed the River Stave. The buildings fell away and the Gardens came into view on her left: an unlikely patch of countryside in the middle of the capital. The Gardens were a little way below street level, the waterways fed by the Stave, which was partly diverted at this point in its journey to the open sea by a series of complicated sluices. The pennysheets had been reporting problems at the sluices for as long as Cora had been reading: clogged, crumbling, too easy for a body to fall into them after a night in a whorehouse. The repair costs kept the entry price to the Gardens high – one reason Cora hadn’t visited in years. That and the forced nature of the place. There was something unnatural about it.

  Visitors to Fenest often fell into the trap of believing the Gardens were built by the Caskers, and there was a kind of sense in that: the small canals that snaked through the lush grass and the rockeries, the floral displays and the viewing platforms – such things spoke of the people who lived on the waterways of the Union. But in fact, it was a Perlish merchant who’d built the Water Gardens, two generations back, winning the land from an old Fenestiran family in a game of cards. As she thought about it now, Cora realised it was a reverse of one of the ‘tales within tales’ of the Perlish election story.

  When her mother was a child, she’d known the last surviving member of the family that originally owned the land: an old woman with grey hair down to her knees who was so bitter about her family’s losses that all her teeth had fallen out. That was what bile did to you. Or so Ruth had told Cora, even though the old woman had been dead long before Ruth and Cora were born. When their mother had spoken of ‘Dear Alexa’ it had been to bemoan the sad end of a ‘great’ Fenestiran family at the ignoble hands of ‘new money’ from Perlanse. According to their mother, the Perlish merchant had no right to even presume to join the card game, let alone make such a vulgar bet and then go on to win.
But that was Madeleine Gorderheim’s story. Another was the story held by common consensus in the memory of Fenest, that ‘Dear Alexa’ was not only hopeless at cards, but also arrogant and lacking any kind of vision for the land in question – aside from refusing to let anyone build on it and so drive up the value.

  Cora stopped on the bridge to look down at the work of the Perlish merchant. To her eye, the hand of Perlanse was all too clear in the tightly controlled borders of flower beds, the painful neatness of colour and the ridiculous wrought iron that curled and flourished everywhere on the paths: benches, lamp posts, even bird houses. If the Water Gardens really had been made by Caskers then the narrow, humped bridges over the little canals would be replaced by uneven boardwalks with smoky lamps, with beer stops every few metres. That would be more to Cora’s taste, but even she had to admit that the Water Gardens were looking good today in the late spring sunshine.

  The bell rang out from the Seat of the Poet across the city, marking the hour. It was time to meet Ruth.

  On the other side of the bridge from where Cora had stopped, there was an alley – narrow and uninviting, even by Fenest’s standards, and easy to miss. Cora glanced up and down the street. No sign of the man who’d been outside her lodging house that morning. No sign of anyone else paying a bit too much attention to her either, though there were still plenty of people about, making their way to the north gate and enjoying that much-talked-about ‘atmosphere’. Without checking her stride, she ducked into the alley then round its many dark turns as it wound between houses and took a course it had no business having. This was the kind of thing Galdensuttir had been talking about. Though the Water Gardens appeared tightly walled in and with limited gates, in reality there were many ways to slip inside: old cracks in the walls that were conveniently left unpatched.

  As Cora made her way along cobbles that were slippery from the last few days of rain, she saw a figure ahead. Too shadowy to see if they were wearing purple. She gripped her knuckledusters, flexed her arm, ready to strike, but then the figure turned, and she saw a hat like the one she was wearing.

  ‘Thought maybe you weren’t coming,’ Ruth said.

  ‘And miss an election story?’

  Ruth shook her head at Cora’s sarcasm. ‘You know, there are many people who are desperate to hear this story.’

  ‘I know – I just had to fight my way through a load of them. You have any trouble getting here?’

  ‘No, but we’re not inside yet.’

  ‘After you.’ Cora gestured for Ruth to go first down the narrow, twisting staircase that lay at the end of the alley.

  ‘How kind,’ Ruth said flatly.

  The short flight of stairs brought them to the level of the Gardens, but they still had some cover: a long-closed pie stall flanked the stairs, hiding them from view. Ruth adjusted Cora’s hat, Cora lit a bindleleaf, and they stepped out, into a riot of colour and noise.

  Twelve

  At ground level, it was impossible to map the space of the Water Gardens as Cora had done from the bridge. Now that she was on one of the many twisting paths that wound between the flower beds and shrubs and fountains, and had crossed the canals to where all the food seller stalls were set up, she had no idea which way to go. The place was packed with people from all corners of the Union laughing, pointing, shouting, and among them, purple tunics and blue-jacketed constables attempted to keep order.

  ‘This place is a maze!’ she said to Ruth.

  Ruth pointed. ‘There – the garbing pavilion. See it?’

  Cora stopped, narrowly avoiding tripping over a weeping child sat in the middle of the path, and saw the large, white tent that was part of every election story – the voters would be inside getting into their robes and masks, being handed their voting stones.

  ‘We’ll head for the pavilion,’ Ruth said. ‘The public gallery will be nearby.’

  ‘Let’s hope so. We don’t have—’

  ‘Oi – where did you two spring from?’

  It was a purple tunic barrelling their way towards them. The wearer of said tunic, uniform of those working for Electoral Affairs, was a lad of around eighteen. First posting, Cora guessed. From the way he was throwing his arms around and shouting about illegal entry, she guessed he’d go far. People were starting to look.

  Ruth’s face greyed. ‘Cora – what are we going to do?’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t worry. I have a feeling this young man is about to regret stopping us.’

  ‘What do you—’

  ‘Argh! He kicked me! He kicked me!’

  All eyes turned then to the source of the bawling voice that had drowned out that of the purple tunic. At the lad’s feet, sprawled on the path and shouting as if her young life depended on it, was Marcus: pennysheet seller, informant, loudest child in the Union. Cora was almost glad to see her, though hearing her was a different matter. She wasn’t sure how old Marcus was, because Marcus herself didn’t know, but she had the lungs of a burly adult Casker captain.

  ‘Get me a constable!’ Marcus boomed. ‘I want this villain done for assault.’ The tunic made the mistake of trying to help Marcus to her feet, which only made her shout louder, which Cora hadn’t thought was possible. ‘Don’t try to shut me up! All these people saw. Didn’t you? Didn’t you see him kick me?’

  ‘I take it this is your handiwork?’ Ruth said.

  ‘Marcus is a blunt yet powerful instrument, and she’s always on time.’

  ‘She’s called Marcus?’

  ‘Named on Drunkard’s Day, but more reliable than that member of the Audience. See – problem solved.’ The purple tunic was scurrying away in the opposite direction. Marcus hopped smartly to her feet, and the crowd closed over the moment.

  ‘Effective, if painful,’ Ruth said. ‘Messenger take me, she’s coming over to shout at you now, Cora.’

  ‘Not if she wants the marks I’ve promised her. Morning, Marcus.’

  The girl spat, rubbed her grubby sleeve across her mouth and looked Cora up and down. ‘You moving south, Detective?’

  ‘What? Oh, the clothes… It’s only temporary. And I’m not a detective anymore.’

  ‘Once you’ve had one of them badges and been allowed to hit people, you’re always one of them, I say.’ Marcus sniffed. ‘I told Jenkins that when I seen her. I said, Jenkins, Detective Cora don’t need no badge to go hitting people. She’ll hit ’em if they needs hitting.’

  Cora took hold of the girl’s hood, aware of Ruth’s raised eyebrows, and pulled Marcus behind a flowering shrub in an effort to avoid everyone in the Water Garden staring at them. Ruth hovered nearby.

  ‘Any news from Jenkins?’ Cora asked Marcus.

  The girl pulled herself free of Cora’s grip. ‘See – you are the same as always! Jenkins says to tell you… Now what was it?’ She made a show of biting her lip, lifting her eyes to the few thin clouds above. ‘Um…’

  ‘I know how this tale goes,’ Cora said, and took out her worryingly light coin purse. ‘Information first, and quickly. I’ve got a story to hear. A new one.’

  Marcus grinned. ‘I seen Jenkins this morning, and she said to tell you, the Wayward bloke you wanted her to watch, she seen him in a pastry shop.’

  ‘There had better be more to this than a Wayward buying pastries.’

  ‘There is! The pastry shop was near the Assembly building, the one where the window keeps getting broken. You know, it’s got the—’

  ‘The point, Marcus.’

  The pennysheet girl rolled her eyes. ‘All right, all right. Your Wayward was in there, and then another bloke come in and sit with him, and Jenkins says this second man is someone important. She says to tell you he works in the office of the Seeder Chambers, that one you don’t like.’

  That was one way to describe Lowlander Chambers Morton.

  ‘Cora – we need to go.’ Ruth was glancing anxiously up and down the paths, and Cora could see for herself that the crowds had thinned: people must be taking their seats.

&nbs
p; ‘What else did Jenkins say?’ Cora asked Marcus.

  ‘She sat near them and heard a bit of them talking. The man from the Assembly asked your Wayward if he’d done the job right, and your Wayward went all shifty and said partly, and the man from the Assembly got all shouty and said, “She won’t be pleased,” or something like that.’

  She? Morton. And the job was likely the fire at the distiller’s, with the aim to kill Ruth.

  Marcus was rushing now. ‘Then, your Wayward’ – Marcus jabbed a finger at Cora – ‘he promises the Assembly bloke that he won’t fail again. That’ll he’ll do it right next time, whatever it is he’s meant to be doing. And the Assembly bloke says, see that you do, or you’ll be joining her at the bottom of a river.’

  Ruth grumbled behind her. Cora had heard enough. She dropped a few coins into Marcus’s outstretched, grimy hand and turned away. But Marcus stopped her.

  ‘Detective, there’s more. Jenkins says your Wayward told the Assembly bloke there are many rivers. She said I had to make sure I told you that – “many rivers” – and that you have to keep away from them.’

  ‘Keep delivering the ’sheets to Bernswick station,’ Cora said, ‘and you know where to find me if Jenkins sends more information.’

  It was only after Marcus had disappeared into the maze of paths that Cora remembered she wouldn’t be around for the next few days. The girl would figure something out. She was resourceful enough.

  ‘So,’ Cora said, turning to Ruth, ‘now we know Tannir is in Morton’s pay, and that he’s planning something else.’

  Cora glanced up and down the paths, which were now empty: not a good thing. Quiet had settled around them. The only noise was that of water: the fountains, the sluices. The back of her neck prickled.

  Ruth set off down one of the paths, heading for the centre of the Water Gardens. ‘Come on, Cora – we don’t have much time.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ Cora called after her, all the while looking about her, trying to check the many paths and bridges around them. ‘Marcus thinks there’ll be more to come.’