by Ed McDonald
I sat facing the door all night, sword across my knees.
Just let them try.
12
When I woke, stiff and gum-eyed in my chair, she was gone. Stolen out in the night like a regretful lover. The guilt and disappointment I felt were the same as if she had been.
Her money watched me from the table like some cheap whore on display. Somehow it had lost its shine. Unable to stomach its accusatory gaze I threw on a coat and headed out into a chilling wind.
‘Big Dog says you shouldn’t be getting mixed up with the cream again,’ Tnota said when I laid out my woes. It was only an hour past dawn but he’d just opened a jar of black ale. Would have been rude not to partake.
‘Sounds suspiciously like your advice put into the jaws of a god,’ I grunted at him. I put my boots up on the opposite bench.
‘Good advice no matter where it comes from, captain,’ Nenn said, joining us, yawning sleepily. She scratched at the discoloured spot on her belly. ‘She must have been paying you well.’
‘Well enough.’
The good news of the day was that Nenn was back on her feet, stomach a darker shade of flesh than it had been but intact and not stinking. She had a cluster of large red chillies in a brown paper bag. She took one out and crunched into it, seeds and all. She saw me wince, shrugged and stuffed another into her mouth.
‘I can’t help it. Ever since I got fixed, it’s all I want to eat. Mouth’s on fucking fire.’ I declined the large red fruit she tried to offer me.
‘At least your only witness isn’t going to go spreading his mouth,’ Tnota said. ‘Should probably wash your hands though.’ He was right. Crusts of dark blood lurked beneath my fingernails. Putting a knife through a man’s ribs isn’t clean work.
‘Any chance the one you stabbed up could have crawled out of there?’ Nenn asked. Practical as ever.
‘None. He burned.’ I allowed myself a satisfied nod. Burning was a bad way to go, but my reserves of empathy were usually exhausted on orphans and puppies, a lot higher up the list than arsonists and arseholes. ‘But the other man, the one with roses around his arms – he knew me. Recognised me at least.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He called me “captain”. Slip of the tongue, maybe.’
‘Anyone who’s been around Valengrad the past twenty years would know you,’ Nenn said. She snorted back chilli-induced snot, eyes streaming. Then she bit into another. ‘Boys from the Spills. Soldiers. Mercenaries. Hells, they could have been shopkeepers.’
‘Pretty good with a sword for a shopkeep. And they weren’t looting, they went to Gleck’s to destroy. Those books had to be worth thousands. Only time men go trash a place that way, they’ve had orders. I want to know whose.’
Nenn gave me a sour look.
‘The witch paying you to ask around or you taking this on yourself?’ Nenn asked. She thumped down on the bench and poured herself a generous quantity of the ale. There was hostility in her tone. I felt the urge to arch my back like a hissing cat, go on the defensive.
‘Always worth knowing who the man you fought is,’ I said. ‘You know my policy on unfinished business.’
‘Kill it with knives,’ Tnota added helpfully.
‘Knives, axes, fire. Don’t care as long as it gets finished. Loose ends tend to unravel things. Besides, the bastard burned Gleck’s house to the ground. It was a good house. If Gleck comes back, he’s going to be pissed as hell.’
We mulled that over for a while. The early day drinking made it easy to be maudlin and Gleck had been one of us. If he’d still been around he’d probably have been sat drinking at that table.
A bare-chested young man stumbled from out of the back of Tnota’s apartments. He was Fracan like Tnota, the same thick, curly black hair, but half his age. He gabbled something at Tnota in their nasal language, and Tnota barked something back at him, annoyed. The Fracan shrugged and shuffled away again. Nenn and I shared a look. We’d long ago stopped asking Tnota about his ever-changing stream of guests. Some kind of Fracan custom we’d never understand.
‘Maybe I should go find Ezabeth,’ I suggested.
‘You’re not deep enough in her latrine already?’ Nenn snapped. Her eyes were streaming from the chillies. I could feel their heat in my nostrils, and I hadn’t even touched them. Crazy bitch. Fixing had that effect sometimes. Changed people.
‘I know you don’t like the cream, but I feel like I ought to help her out. On account that she used to work with Gleck. Feels like I should get involved somehow.’
‘Leave that three-fingered bitch well alone. She’ll rain nothing but turds down on you,’ Nenn said. She alternated between clenching her jaw and sucking in cold air to fight back against the chillies. Nenn had never had any love for the nobility, but even by her own standards she seemed hostile.
‘Never met a cream was up to something good,’ Tnota said, bridging the void he saw growing between us. He gave me one of his yellow-toothed grins. ‘Easy to forget which side of the milk you were born on, though, captain.’
I’d never told them that I’d known Ezabeth before. To them she was just some noblewoman Spinner whose carriage we’d borrowed. Tried to remind myself that that was all she was to me as well. Didn’t matter that she was beautiful and powerful and had a spine woven from ropes of steel. Didn’t matter that when I was around her I felt something in me lift. She was rich and energised, brilliant and dazzling. This morning she’d be working on her theorems, and here I was getting drunk before nine in the morning with a southern queer and a noseless she-wolf.
‘You think your girlfriend will tell the Iron Goat you were there when Gleck’s house burned?’ Nenn asked. She wiped tears from burning eyes.
‘Fucking hope not. The less he’s involved the better. Last time I saw him he didn’t look good either. Cracking under the pressure, maybe.’
‘Can’t blame him.’ Tnota stretched out, treating us to the odour of his armpits. ‘Marshal Wechsel and his boys up at Three-Six must be shitting themselves. You think there’s any truth to it? About the drudge making a push?’
I shook my head. Wished I had the confidence to say it out loud.
I spent the day finding whisper-men in the Spills, trying to get any information I could on a man for hire with roses tattooed around his arms. One false lead and a wasted day later, the sky was fully dark as I made my way home. I was surprised to see a small child approaching; most beggar children hid through the night, with good reason. I don’t like children. They remind me of what should have been. What was taken from me. This one walked right up to me. I thought it was a girl, but then I realised it was a boy in a dress. One of Saravor’s grey-skinned things, blank staring eyes, no fear. The kid held out its hand as if to pass me something. I stopped, swallowed and opened my palm.
The child dropped the head of a starling into my hand, then wandered away into the dark. No wonder it had no fear. Going home to that madhouse was probably worse than anything that happened out on the streets.
The bird’s head stared up at me. Then in a high, piping voice, it chirruped, ‘Ten days until your first instalment is due! Twenty thousand, cash or bankers note.’
‘Any chance I can get an extension?’ I muttered. I didn’t expect a reply, but the bird head somehow coughed out a final word.
‘No.’
I swear that somehow it was grinning.
13
A dismal week of stinking grey rain and cheap inebriation passed before Prince Herono’s man came to find me.
‘You’re wanted,’ Stannard told me. ‘Best not to keep the prince waiting, there’s a good chap.’
I didn’t like Stannard. He had too much wax in his moustache, and since he carried a prince’s authority, he knew that he’d done well for himself. It showed in the way he puffed out his fading chest, and that made me want to say no.
I was anx
ious as I climbed aboard the carriage. Either she had work for me, which would be good as I desperately needed to find a way to pay Saravor, or she’d found out that I’d been at Maldon’s house the night it burned. I could hear fate’s coin spinning above my head.
The carriage bounced and jarred me across town and out. I’d thought to be taken back to the phos mill, but this time it was the Willows. We passed the Tanza residence, the windows curtained, the building dark.
‘Try to make yourself presentable, there’s a good fellow,’ Stannard said. ‘You smell like you’ve been in that shit stain of a tavern for a full week.’ A spookily accurate assessment. I allowed the rest of the journey to pass in friendless silence. No point wasting good conversation on a grunt risen above his station.
The roads into Willows were as smooth as they come, which is to say that I felt every jostle and bounce and the booze in my guts sloshed around like water in the bilge of a ship.
Herono’s Valengrad residence made the Tanza house seem a hovel. Vast white pillars of the classical style ranked up along a frontage wider than most streets are long. Semi-nude statues of long-abandoned deities struck dramatic poses over gardens of hedgerow mazes and late summer flowers. I guessed correctly that she’d have suits of polished, antiquated armour standing watch along her red-carpeted hallways and portraits of princes past glaring down from above.
Funny how the princes could afford to finance their monuments to excess while Marshal Venzer was crying out for soldiers, munitions and supplies.
‘You know the rules already,’ Stannard said as he admitted me. ‘First sound of trouble and I’ll be in there with half a dozen boys. You understand.’
I ignored him. I figured that Stannard’s growls and threats were what he mistook for power. Men of his calibre didn’t understand that real power goes unspoken. A man like Marshal Venzer didn’t bluster and threaten his enemies, he simply told them what he expected of them. They either fell in or found themselves broken, crushed, reduced to nothing beneath the weight of his efficiency. No brags about his victories, no crowing over the vanquished. Real power shows itself through the disregard one has for those that defy it.
I found the prince sitting in an office beneath a vast oil painting of herself. It showed her in her prime, two eyes in her head, a sabre across one shoulder and a scroll in her hand. Might and learning, the great balance of princedom. The painter had shown the broken Misery in the background. His paints hadn’t quite conveyed the endless depth of the fierce white-bronze cracks in the sky, the life within them. Maybe nobody could.
‘Captain. Take a seat,’ Herono said. I took the seat.
‘What can I do for you, your grace?’
‘My cousin has gone missing,’ Herono said. ‘Disappeared. Three days past she failed to return home. Her servants were expecting her for dinner, but she failed to materialise. I am deeply concerned about what may have befallen her.’
I felt a little twist inside, a turning of my heart. I tried not to let it show on my face. It was a week since that night at Gleck’s house when the arsonists had turned the crossbow on her. My back was rigid at the thought that the hooded man might have decided to finish the job.
‘I don’t know anything of her whereabouts, your grace,’ I said.
‘Of course not. But you do have great experience in hunting men down. The men on my payroll have done their best to locate her, but while Stannard and the old brigade are very good at following orders they are not men of initiative. You’ll be rewarded, handsomely, if you can locate and rescue her.’ Prince Herono leaned back in her chair, her single eye bright and unblinking. ‘And should someone have done her harm, then bring her abusers to me. I will see to it that they understand the fullness of their error. No one casts their dice against my house lightly.’
I negotiated a steep price for my services and Herono tossed coins at me like they were so many flakes of sawdust, but the real gold was a letter granting me her authority. She put her weight behind me, heavier than lead. With a letter like that in my pocket I could order a whole regiment to strip naked and dance for me if I wanted to. I wouldn’t, but I could have. I agreed to contact her as soon as I had anything worthwhile to report. As I left her abode, the broken sky in the Misery let forth a long, ululating howl, mirroring the trembling in my guts.
People always think that finding them will be hard, but people are creatures of habit. We all have basic necessities of existence that must be fulfilled. We eat, seek shelter, sleep, drink, crap. Everything we do has to exist within that framework, you just have to figure out what makes a person unique from their countrymen, pry open the details that make them vulnerable to discovery. I didn’t know Ezabeth well, but she had hers as much as anyone.
I couldn’t believe that someone had got to her without Herono hearing about it. Ezabeth was cautious. Resourceful. When it came to her magic, very powerful. If she’d seen them coming, she wouldn’t have gone quietly. I was thinking flares of light, detonations. Folks would have heard, talked, and even a simple man like Stannard would have got wind of it. That meant either she hadn’t seen it coming, or, more likely, that her disappearance was a choice.
Ezabeth had enemies, but she could have turned to her cousin for protection. Only Prince Adenauer and Marshal Venzer could match Herono for power in Valengrad and her Blue Brigade veterans were tough old boys. Why would she vanish? I welcomed Herono’s money but I’d have looked for Ezabeth anyway. I’d already gone in on this hand.
When you want to track someone down, you start at their home. Ezabeth hadn’t been in Valengrad long, but the Tanza property still had servants. We paid them a visit.
An aged woman with a hunched back and a twitch in her eye admitted us with a measure of reluctance that the boot I wedged in the door overcame. I had her summon the other staff: a cook, a gardener and two maids. From their disgruntled looks it was evident that they considered our presence an intrusion but they were fearful enough not to voice it.
‘I can only tell you what I told the prince’s men,’ the old woman told us. ‘The mistress set off in the early morning, as she did most days, and never returned. There’s nowt more to be told.’
Stannard and his men had done a number on some of the staff, tried to batter the information out of them. They were simple soldiers, though, hardly great thinkers and they didn’t understand Ezabeth.
It took me less than ten minutes to find a locked box in her room. Her private papers were more or less exactly what I’d expected. Lots of diagrams of lunar orbits, mathematical calculations, theories laid out in neat lines of black ink. But there were letters she had received amongst them, dating back more than a year. The letters wasted no time with pleasantries save her name, and their contents was the same phos-spinning babble that her other writing presented, but each was signed simply ‘O.L.’ On its own that wasn’t enough, but it was something to work with.
‘Nenn, get me a list of every Spinner in Valengrad and find one with the initials O.L. If you don’t find anyone, then a list of every Talent in the mills as well. Can’t be just anyone who understands this crap. Seems Ezabeth had a friend here after all.’
As Nenn departed I leafed to the next document in the pile. A pamphlet, the kind that got pinned all over church doors and street corners. Such leaflets weren’t uncommon. Clerics, doomsayers, even merchants used them to advertise their bargains. This was different, though. The title read: THE SLAVES OF THE ENGINE. Familiar blasphemy leapt off the page at me. The Talents are worked until their minds shatter like glass. Their lives are sold for profit and greed!
The pamphlet showed tomorrow’s date
‘Damn it.’
The paper crumpled in my fist. She hadn’t picked it up, she’d written it herself. She was planning to hurl caution from the battlements. If this hit the streets I’d be given another commission to find her, but I’d be dragging her to a gallows instead of home. I was already
in too deep to let that happen.
Shit on fire. I was probably one of the only people in the city who thought she wasn’t light-blind already, and even I thought that was madness. She had to be stopped.
Trails are not always formed of footprints. I knew where to go.
The ink on the page was smeared. Not unusual for many of the small press pamphleteers, eager to get their poorly spelt messages out to a largely uncaring public. I crossed town, walking briskly into the biting wind and the ever present simmer of bad nerves that spread around me like a musk. The pamphlet proudly proclaimed the printer to be Pieter Dytwin, but after having read the contents it was a wonder he’d allowed his name to be attached to it. Ezabeth named the princes as traitors, subverting the supply of phos that should have been going into the Engine. She wrote about the plight of the Talents, their mistreatment. She called Marshal Venzer a conspirator. If copies of the pamphlet hit the street then Pieter Dytwin would find a new residence in the darkest, deepest cells of the citadel – if he retained his grip on mortality for long enough to get there.
The printing shop was clanking and pumping, phos-powered presses stamping sheets with carefully laid type. Nobody challenged me when I entered the workshop, the young three typesetters too occupied with placing the rows of standardised letters into the blocks while two journeyman printers worked the press. As I waited for them to complete their batch I picked up one of the freshly finished sheets they were working on. Mother Aggie’s Recipe For Spiced Mutton Pie. Spirits alone knew who’d be looking to turn a profit putting that out when all the sheep had been driven up to Three-Six to feed Marshal Wechsel and his army, but printers weren’t fussy about your message as long as they were getting paid.
There were limits to that greed, though, and Pieter Dytwin should have known them.
