‘Thanks,’ he said, but I didn’t think he really meant it.
‘Thank me again.’
‘I think once was enough.’
‘I got you a tutor.’
Wren was not prone to strong displays of emotion. Frankly, it was one of the things I liked about him. But still I was expecting something more than nothing, which was pretty much what I got. ‘Yeah?’
‘She’s an Islander, supposed to know her craft. Name of Mazzie.’
‘Mazzie of the Stained Bone?’ he asked, suddenly wary.
‘You’ve got your first meeting with her in four days.’
‘The veterans are having a big rally, getting ready for their march. I told Adolphus I’d come along and help out.’
‘When I first picked you up, you couldn’t pass an apple cart without knocking it over – now you’re happy playing regimental mascot.’
‘He’s going to give a speech.’
I hadn’t expected that. ‘A speech?’
Wren nodded.
‘I’ve heard that man stutter through his name. What’s it on?’
‘The war.’
‘It’s over. We won. Sorry to spoil it.’ The glare reflected off everything, off the windows and the ground and the clouds. I envied Wren his cover. ‘You been bugging me about this for years – don’t tell me your feet have gone cold all of a sudden.’
He ran his hand through an ungainly mess of hair. ‘I’ve . . . heard things about Mazzie.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Those things weren’t nice.’ It was as close as the boy would get to admitting he was nervous.
‘You like it here?’
‘Well enough.’
‘You think you’d prefer a spot in the Academy, locked up for the next ten years, brainwashed till you walk in lockstep?’
‘No.’
‘Then we’ve got a limited slate of options. Whatever else Mazzie is, she’s not working for the Crown, and that’s the most important thing. Listen to what she has to say, follow her directions, and don’t offer no lip – but keep your ears open and your eyes up. She does anything that seems off, don’t be slow telling me.’
‘And?’
I tossed the knife into the dust. ‘And I’ll handle it.’
I guess that was enough for him, ’cause he nodded and went back to his game. Like I said, Wren wasn’t big on histrionics.
My room was hot as an oven, stagnant even with the windows open. I’d have given ten ochres for a fresh breeze, had there been someone to accept the offer. I stripped off my shirt and tried to catch a few hours of sleep, but between the day and the breath I wasn’t having much luck. I pinched a spread of dreamvine across a layer of tobacco and puffed it into the sour air. When it was out I rolled another. It wasn’t quite slumber I fell into, more a state of pleasant catatonia, but I was happy enough to have found it just the same. Time slumped against itself. It was late afternoon when a rumbling from the floor below brought me up from my stupor. After a few wasted minutes trying to recover it I put my shirt back on and descended to the kitchen.
Adolphus was down to his skivvies, restocking supplies we didn’t need, a happy pretext by which to cause a great deal of commotion.
‘You can stop. I’m here.’
He turned a scowl on me. Above it his one eye leered angrily. Normally he bowed to etiquette with a stretch of cloth over his empty socket, but today he hadn’t. It’s not such an easy thing to argue with a man while you’re staring at the inside of his head, and I’d come off second best on more than one conversation because of it. I think he planned it that way – Adolphus was better at guile than he liked to let on. ‘Gotta get ready for tonight.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure we’ll have a run on sherry. You gonna tell me what’s wrong, or I am going to have to guess?’
He grunted but kept to his work.
‘You miss your mother. You lost your half of the bar at dice. You’ve fallen in love with a dancing boy and want to run off to the Free Cities. Stop me if I’m close.’
He set a half-keg of cider on the ground, then turned to me. ‘Wren says you’re sending him to see some darkie witch-woman.’
‘You got the broad strokes down.’
‘Since when do you make that kind of decision without me?’
‘You’re a tough man to get a finger on these days, Adolphus, what with all this running about pretending that you’re still a soldier.’
‘I’ve got a right to know what’s going on with him.’
‘And now you do.’
‘You’re gonna send him down to the Isthmus, let some hag teach him to read the future in a pig’s entrails?’
‘It’s Mazzie’s lack of qualifications you object to? I knew a First Sorcerer once, but he’s dead. Course, if you’ve got a suggestion, you’re welcome to throw it into the ring.’
‘I don’t see what the point is. He’ll grow into it.’
‘It’s not a pair of trousers – either we teach him to handle it or we wait until it burns out his mind. And while we’re on the subject of Wren’s future, what are you doing trying to turn him into a drummer boy?’
A back the length of a half-pike rose and fell. ‘He likes it.’
‘He’d like it if you spiked his tea with ouroboros root, but we’re not going to fucking do it. It’s our job to make sure he does what’s smart, not what he enjoys.’
‘Isn’t like I took him to a recruitment center.’
‘You’re setting a bad example. He’s a boy – he likes blood and loud noises and the naked threat of force. There’s no need to encourage him.’
‘That wasn’t all it was.’
‘I shortened it for the sake of brevity. Since you’ve got me going, I don’t like him hanging around with the crew of miscreants you’ve decided to make your new best friends.’
‘You deal with worse people.’
‘I’m a drug dealer, so that’s not much of a recommend-ation.’ I discovered my pouch of dreamvine was still in my pocket. I thought about rolling up a spliff but thought better of it. Then I thought better of that and went ahead and started on it. ‘Your man Joachim Pretories, Roland Montgomery’s successor, the Private Soldier’s best friend. How much you think he’s worth?’
Adolphus’s eye got shifty. ‘I never thought about it.’
I pinched shut the paper and lit it with a match. ‘I got time.’
‘I guess he gets a stipend. The dues they collect go to the wounded, and to the widows and children.’
‘Every penny, I’m sure, but you haven’t answered my question. What is Joachim Pretories worth?’
‘I dunno. I’m not his banker.’
‘He can lay hand on twenty thousand ochres, or I’m a nun.’
‘Bullshit. Joachim Pretories is an honest man.’
‘A unique specimen, then – we ought to frame him and mount him on the wall.’
‘You jape like a monkey, but I’ve yet to hear any evidence.’
‘Close your eyes tight enough, you’ll miss the sunrise. Pretories is no different than the head of any other mob. He’s got his base, and he’s got his muscle.’
‘The Association isn’t a syndicate,’ he growled, close enough to savage to be a warning, for all that I didn’t heed it.
‘How many men you think Roussel’s killed since he mustered out? I bet it’s more than he ever did in uniform.’
‘You’re no saint yourself.’
‘And I recognize my own.’
‘If you hate them so much, why’d you throw in with them?’
I ashed the joint onto the floor. ‘You heard about that, huh?’
‘I did.’ And he didn’t seem happy about it.
‘I’m in an ugly line of work, Adolphus. I have to spend time with a lot of ugly people.’
‘This is some . . . some scheme of yours?’ he asked, horrified and bewildered, like I’d spat on a statue of the Firstborn.
‘Not at all. I woke up this morning and remembered how much I loved soldiering
, and the joy that would stir in my breast to find myself once again in the ranks.’
‘I don’t want to know about it,’ he said, waving his hand as if to ward me away, fat jiggling around the white of his undershirt.
‘That fits well with my plan of not telling you.’ But I continued just the same. ‘These men aren’t who you think they are – tell me you’re not so desperate to relive your youth that you’ve blinded yourself to that fact.’
‘Not everyone’s as crooked as you.’
‘Sure they are – they just go through more effort to hide it.’
There was a lot of nastiness floating around the bar, and with evening falling I had an errand that excused my quick absence. Upstairs I pulled a long black trunk from below my bed. Inside was a cache of weapons I don’t generally need for day-to-day work. I put a knife in my sleeve and in my boot. Then I tied a trench blade to my belt, the short, wide-edged cutting swords that had been universal on both sides during the war. They weren’t enough for what was coming, but they were all I had.
22
Evening is an undignified time to perspire, but that’s mostly what I did on the walk over to Estroun. Weeks of drought had turned the Andel into something that could only kindly be described as a stream, a brackish trickle of water winding its way to the docks. A girl about Wren’s age stood silently in the dry riverbed, watching me cross the bridge. She wore a cotton dress and had a bruise running the length of her face. In one hand she held an empty bucket. After a moment her eyes narrowed, and she spat into the current and walked off. I knew how she felt.
The Eighth Daeva Tavern took up most of the block, three towering stories and a rooftop deck that had the best view of the city north of the Aerie. To walk into it was to be whisked into a chaotic and licentious skein, a citadel of, if not debauchery, at the very least excess. It was a popular hangout for a curiously broad range of the population – bravos blowing a week’s worth of thuggery on one memorable evening, slumming nobles from the Heights dipping their toes into the city’s underbelly. All and sundry were welcome, so long as you had the coin and kept the peace. Aiding the first were a dozen barmen on every floor who passed out dreamvine as easy as whiskey, along with an impressive selection of gaming tables and an equally inspiring stable of whores. Ensuring the second a hand-picked squad of bouncers swept the premises regularly, unmissably large gentlemen in handsome attire loose enough to throw a punch without rupturing a seam. These were supplemented by a subtler detail, a sprinkling of wiry boys sipping watered-down beer and keeping keen eyes on the proceedings. You could do all the business you wanted in Estroun outside of the Eighth Daeva, so long as you kicked up your percentage to the man who owned it, but the bar itself was inviolate. Such was the implicit guarantee that inspired so diverse a swath of the population to revelry, a promise backed by the full faith and credit of the Swell Man.
The heat had done nothing to diminish the crowd, twenty or thirty people bottle-necked outside. I slipped to the front and took up a spot by the doorman, a brawny Vaalan with sad eyes that missed nothing. As a rule, weapons were not allowed in the Eighth Daeva, but I’m not part of the normal trade, so he glossed over my armaments. ‘Hello, Warden.’
‘How’s the day, Koos?’
He reviewed the foremost applicant, a silken courtesan a few years past prime, then waved her in without enthusiasm. ‘I’m not one to complain. Not about the weather, or the stink. Or the Crown, or the plague, or my pay.’
‘You’re not one to complain,’ I agreed.
‘No sir, I am not. Boss is on the floor somewhere – you shouldn’t have trouble catching up with him.’
‘Hold solid, Koos.’
‘I’m a rock, Warden.’
I don’t particularly like Swell’s joint. Humanity is tiring enough one-to-one – I never saw what was so recreational about culling a bunch and dumping them into an enclosed area. And the Daeva was too deliberately a place to see and be seen, and I wasn’t much for the spotlight – a side effect of my business dealings, I suppose. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by the sheer jubilant cacophony. From one flight up I could hear a band banging out a tune, the roof shaking in unison. Down at sea level things were a bit calmer, gallants staking their claim on the whores and the not far from it, the unloved or out of pocket drawn up despairingly against the walls.
It was a good night in the Daeva. It was always a good night in the Daeva, and Reginald Tibbs, the Swell Man, worked hard to make sure of it. He had any number of other interests, varied and lucrative, but the Daeva was his mistress. Koos had told me he was on the floor, but I hadn’t needed the report. Tibbs was always on the floor, glad-handing patrons, buying drinks, laughing and chatting. He’d well earned his nickname. I caught the sway of his stovepipe in the midst of a bulge of handsome women and rich men, hanging on the wit he saw fit to dribble.
Everything about Tibbs was over-large, garish and vulgar, from the royal purple of his top hat to his canary yellow boots, bright with silver trim. A waxed mustache curlicued up to striking green eyes, countered by a forking beard that stretched down nearly to his stomach. The rest of his outfit was as expensive as it was tasteless, perfectly tailored and contrasting violently in color. He had a walk that kept pace with the sprint of lesser men, his towering midsection held in place by a pair of stork-like legs. A performance, to be sure, but one with a purpose – while your eyes trailed the dazzle, a steel trap marked you, jotted down your net worth to the copper, memorized any detail that might one day be of use. I liked Tibbs more than I distrusted him, and I checked my purse after every meeting.
He saw me and cut short his conversation, forging ahead at a step his bodyguards were hard pressed to match. He took my hand with two of his and nearly pumped it out of its socket. It was the same greeting he gave to everyone, but I liked to think he meant it more with me. ‘If it isn’t the Warden himself, slipped out from his caverns beneath Low Town to pay a call on his old friend.’
‘Long time, Tibbs.’
‘Too long, Warden, too long.’ He had a voice like a slick of lamp oil. ‘Not a day goes past that I don’t lament your long absence. Don’t I say that every day, Nissim, that I wished the Warden would manage us a visit?’
Nissim was the suitably sized Islander at his shoulder. He always seemed to be on the verge of speaking but never quite got there, and today was no exception. Tibbs answered his own question in the affirmative. ‘Every day I say it!’
‘I bet that’s tiring.’
‘You’re here now, and I suppose it’s up to me to make sure you come back! What’s your pleasure? Try your luck at dice?’ He blew on his closed hands and threw a set of imaginary bones. ‘No? Who am I asking – the Warden makes his own luck! How about a shot to warm the belly? Not that you need it on a night like this – I tell you, I’m on my third pair of silk underwear!’ He laughed again, and slapped me on the back hard enough to loosen teeth.
‘Actually, I was hoping you might have time for a private chat.’
‘It breaks my heart to think this is not a social call.’
‘I’ll let you stand me a whiskey, if that would keep it beating.’
Tibbs’s smile was as wide as his teeth were crooked. ‘Best done in the back, I suppose.’ He was leading me in that direction when a man filtered out from the crowd and whispered something in his ear. Tibbs towered over him, as he did most people, and had to bend nearly double to facilitate conversation. A few sentences passed between them, eclipsed by the din of the bar. After a moment he straightened up and nodded. ‘It seems I have one small piece of business to deal with before we begin.’
‘Lead on,’ I said, following him behind the counter and through a small door offering access to the catacombs below.
The basement was hard stone, nothing smooth or elegant about it. Rows of liquor bottles on iron racks, crates of the same in the corner. We went through another door into another room, more or less indistinguishable from the first – except that in the center of it a m
an lay bound across a small table. A crew of heavies stood over him, professionals, impersonally waiting to execute the word from high.
Tibbs doffed his hat and held it to his chest, looking on sadly. ‘Charlus, Charlus, Charlus.’ Melancholy grew with repetition.
Charlus’s eyes flickered up, then back down to the ground. ‘Hello Mr Tibbs,’ he said.
Charlus was a Tarasaighn in his early twenties, thin and dirty, all elbows and knees. I wondered why Koos had let him into the place, looking like he did. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him before, but then I don’t have the head space to keep track of every purse-cutter in the city, what with most of it filled by narcotics and regret.
Tibbs squatted down level, eye-to-eye with the captive. ‘This is the second time, Charlus.’
Charlus nodded, an awkward motion given his position. ‘I know, Mr Tibbs. I’m sorry.’
Tibbs shook his head with a sense of disappointed wonder. ‘The second time, Charlus.’
‘I know, Mr Tibbs. Like I said, I’m sorry.’ He seemed to mean it.
‘No one works the bar, Charlus. I run a reputable establishment. The highborn come here because they know they won’t be bothered.’
‘I know, Mr Tibbs.’
‘Didn’t I give you a goose last Midwinter, to take home to your woman?’
‘It was New Year’s,’ Charlie answered sorrowfully. ‘And we greatly appreciated it.’
Tibbs nodded, standing. ‘So it was,’ he said. He curled his mustaches, then pronounced a sentence. ‘Two fingers – the little ones.’
‘Thank you, Mr Tibbs! Thank you,’ Charlus said, choking with gratitude.
Tibbs ducked back down and wagged a digit in the face of his victim. ‘This is the last time I go light on you – any more trouble and it’s the chop.’ He snapped his right hand against the wrist of his left.
The top of Charlus’s head shook back and forth in the negative. ‘Never again, Mr Tibbs, I promise.’
‘Give your woman my compliments,’ he said, again assuming his full height. He nodded towards the next room and I followed him into it, Nissim and the rest remaining.
Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town 2) Page 13
