by Ian Whates
He ended up having to slap her face a few times just to keep her quiet, but she'd asked for it. All of this he could recall, but her name continued to elude him.
"Maria," he said at length, trying the sound of it, but knew immediately it wasn't right. "No, Marta." That sounded better. "Yes, it was Marta, I'm sure."
From nowhere, pain exploded in his stomach. It took a split second to register his drinking companion's swift movement towards him which had preceded the pain. Instinctively, he brought his hands up to cover the hurt, feeling dampness and warmth, while the pain blossomed into agony. The strength seemed to have drained from his legs, which were suddenly unable to support him. His knees buckled and he slumped against a hard surface, a wall, which he commenced to slowly slide down.
Then a hand reached inside his tunic. He watched it emerge with his purse and other valuables before focusing on the face of his "friend", on eyes that were suddenly hard and bright and clear and focused.
"Martha," a voice said coldly. "Her name is Martha."
He felt a hand lifted, his ring removed. The face withdrew and the man turned away. Hal watched as the fellow sauntered off, a long shadow cast by the single flickering lantern. His vision seemed to be narrowing, as if shutters were slowly being drawn in from the sides. He continued to watch the man's back as it receded and his life continued to flow out from between his fingers, until the shutters closed entirely.
Dewar strode away from the dying bargeman. He had gone for the belly strike deliberately. The resultant wound was painful as well as fatal, and lacked the immediacy of a cut throat or a stab to the heart. The man would die more slowly, which suited the assassin just fine. He wanted the brecker to suffer.
That morning, once he had returned with Martha to the shack she both worked from and lived in, the girl had gingerly removed her clothes. Only then did he appreciate the full extent of the beating she'd received. There were vivid bruises to her throat, shoulders, arms, hip, thigh, back and to the ribcage, just below her right breast. There were cuts to both arms and severe scratching to her stomach, shoulders and back, where fingernails had raked blood. She suffered his expert fingers tracing the line of each rib, barely flinching as his touch brought obvious pain and refusing to break down, though a tear trickled from the corner of one eye and he felt her tremble more than once, as if struggling for control.
"Nothing broken," he concluded. "You were lucky."
She snorted. "You call this luck? He beat the shit out of me and then stole every penny I 'ad - my jewellery, everything. Some luck."
He doubted that. "You mean you hadn't stashed some coin somewhere safe?"
"Of course. I wasn't countin' that."
Silly him; naturally she wasn't counting that. Despite the circumstances, he smiled, though it was a shallow, surface-skimming expression. Beneath it a familiar emotion stirred; one that he welcomed like an old friend: rage. Dewar's rage was not of the scorching, incandescent variety, liable to flare magnificently and die away all too quickly. No, his formed rather an implacable, ice cold centre; cold enough to burn and very slow to disappear.
Martha was one of his people, one of those he depended on for information. True, he no longer lived in the City Below and his contact with the girl was sporadic at best these days, but how could he expect her to continue working for him and trusting him with secrets if he didn't look out for her during those times he was here? What would others think if they heard that he had seen her like this and done nothing? Professional pride was at stake.
His intention in escorting her home had been to have sex, to prove a point and remind her who was in control here, but, having seen the extent of the injuries, he changed his mind and so indicated that she should get dressed again.
"On, off - make yer breckin' mind up," the girl muttered. Yet he could tell she was relieved, and doubted she would be entertaining many clients for a day or two.
He made sure she understood that his need for information was urgent and told her that he would visit her again that night, stressing his expectation that she have something for him by then. After giving her some coins, he then left to see to various matters, one of which involved a guardsman and a spill dragon, and another the tracking down of a bargeman by the name of Hal.
That at least had been straightforward enough. There were few barges docked at the time and Hal was not an especially common name. Dewar chose his moment carefully, approaching only once the man was already in his cups, perhaps not deeply into them as yet, but far enough. Separating him from his friends proved easier than the assassin had dared hope, after which events ran like clockwork. He deliberately led the man into a near-abandoned area of the slums, an alley so out of the way that not even the locals had bothered to give it a name. A single lantern burned at its entrance, but other than that, darkness ruled. There was little chance of the body being discovered before morning. If then.
Dewar shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing them as he walked. It rarely got cold in the City Below, not really, but a chill wind sometimes blew in off the Thair and at night, with the sun globes dormant, the temperature could occasionally drop to less than warm, particularly this close to the walls and the river.
Local wisdom insisted that it was unwise to venture out alone at night down here. There were denizens of the City Below that no sane person would want to meet, creatures that preyed on the vulnerable and the unwary. The lamplighters started their evening's duty early and worked in pairs, while the razzers rarely ventured out at all after globes out. When they did it was with considerable reluctance and invariably in force. After dark, even the street-nicks went about their business in groups. Personally, Dewar had always enjoyed the under-City at night and felt the dangers to be exaggerated. Besides, half the inhabitants lived in poorly constructed hovels which were only one step away from being on the streets anyway.
Of course, there was always the possibility that somewhere along the line he himself had become part of the problem and one of the reasons people stayed indoors. The thought amused him.
Yet perhaps he was out of practice, or perhaps it was simply the feeling of general unrest that had seeped into his awareness via the myriad snippets of information and rumour that accumulated through the day, but he felt less assured than he normally would. A sense of wrongness gripped the City Below, permeating each nook and cranny, oozing into every brick of every building and even into the flimsy walls of the shanties. Something was definitely out of kilter here, and for the first time he could remember, Dewar no longer felt completely safe being out on the streets at night.
He couldn't shake the feeling that he was being watched, an almost electric tingling ran through his body: a state of high alertness which had served him well in the past. He kept walking but one hand hovered close to the various weapons at his belt and his gaze swept the shadows, trying to penetrate their darkness.
There was the suggestion of movement in one and he froze. It was nothing overt, the merest hint of a black form shifting in the depths of an equally black pool, but so attuned were his senses that he didn't doubt them for an instant. The only question concerned the degree of menace.
Dewar carefully removed his kairuken. An integral element of certain fighting disciplines in the far north, the kairuken was still virtually unknown in Thaiburley. Its business end was a razor-edged star-shaped disk, which was fired from a powerful spring-release catapult. Dewar considered it to be the best of both worlds - far more compact and easier to reload than a crossbow, it was also lethal over a considerably greater distance than any hand-thrown weapon.
One large, saucer-like eye stared out at him from the shadows as he raised the weapon. Small, whatever it was - and it certainly wasn't a rat or a spill dragon. He still kept half an eye focused on the peripheries, wary in case this was a distraction to mask the approach of some other threat.
Then the thing moved. It flowed from the shadow and along the wall. Slender, stretching, and so swift that even fully alert
Dewar was almost too slow. The brief glimpse the assassin caught suggested a cross between a long, thin monkey and a spider. Instinct took over and he fired as it moved, the silver disk flashing across the intervening space and striking the wall a fraction behind the sinuous form. Or had it? There was a jerk as if the thing had been hit and then the creature was gone. Difficult to be certain, but it looked as if something other than just the disk might have fallen to the ground.
Dewar sprinted over, to scour the floor in search of whatever had dropped. He found it almost immediately: a section of leg, no longer than his thumb, ending in a wickedly sharp clawed foot. Impossible to make out details in this dimness, but something felt wrong.
He retrieved his disk and, still clutching the severed section of limb, hurried towards more brightly lit environs.
Standing directly under a street lamp, he was able to see the thing more clearly. Fur, blood and wires, like something the dog master might come up with, but there had been nothing canine about this creature. Was the dog master branching out, or was somebody else moving in on his territory? And had the construct's presence been pure coincidence, or had it been watching Dewar?
The assassin frowned. He preferred to be asking the questions rather than puzzling over them. The sooner he could finish here and get back to the Heights the better. This return to his former home grew more disconcerting by the hour.
At least he could be confident that the Kite Guard's visit here was proving a frustrating one. Before waylaying the bargeman, he had met briefly with his new contact within the watch. Evidently Tylus had failed to gain the sort of support he might have hoped for and instead had been given the assistance of just a single officer, one of the newest and least competent in the department. The irony of that did not escape the assassin.
Dewar continued on his way, knowing that there was still much to do before he could allow himself to acknowledge his body's mounting weariness.
The first port of call was Martha's.
His initial knock was greeted with a yell of, "Go away. I ain't workin'."
He was not in the least surprised to find her alone, having left her that morning with a generous amount of coin so that she could afford to recover from her injuries without the need to see any punters for a day or two.
Her greeting of, "Oh, it's you," when she did recognise him was hardly the most heart-warming of welcomes, although he gained the impression that the girl was actually pleased to see him, probably because she found herself at something of a loose end without her usual level of company.
She was even more pleased when he presented the various items lifted from the dying bargeman.
Her gaze and then her hands fell immediately on a bracelet, a plain silver band, which had been cosseted with the man's purse. She ran her fingers along its inner surface, as if to make certain of a mark or engraving. "That's mine. Where did you...?"
She stopped, presumably her own imagination supplying the answer.
"I've just been having a drink or two with your old friend, Hal. He won't be needing these anymore."
She clasped the bracelet to her with both hands and he wondered what memories that simple trinket represented. Were those tears in her eyes? She looked up at him, a fragile smile ghosting across her lips. For a dreadful second he thought she was going to thank him and was grateful when she refrained, uncertain how he would have handled that.
"There's more here than he took from you, I'd guess," he said a little awkwardly into the silence. "Should see you all right until you feel up to working again."
The girl nodded. "It'll come in handy no doubt."
"Now, about this street-nick..."
"Don't worry, I found 'im for you. The Blue Claw made a deal with the Scorpions; passage both ways for one of theirs to use the Scorpions' steps. This wasn't no market trip - something special. The boy went up but never came back, least not by those stairs.
At last, the break he needed. "Good. You've done well."
"There's more. This ain't what I've heard, just what I can tell you."
"Go on."
"There's a lad runs with the Claw, name of Tom. Cute little fella and slippery as an eel. No one's better at hiding than Tom, 'e can slip in and out o' places you wouldn't believe. If the Blue Claw were gonna send anyone to do the impossible, it'd be him."
Dewar found he was smiling. He knew his faith in Martha had not been misplaced. "Thank you." It was rare for him to say those words to an informant. After all, their reward was the hard currency of solid coin exchanged for the far less tangible but often more valuable one of information, what need had they of thanks? But in this instance the girl deserved it.
Despite harbouring fears that his mind was too active, Tom dropped off to sleep almost immediately. His dreams were vivid ones, as his subconscious tried to process the images and experiences from the previous night's escapade, at the fore of his thoughts again after describing everything to Kat.
He saw once more the small, furred creature with wide hostile eyes, which arched its back and snarled at him, revealing sharp canines all too capable of leaving their mark on soft human flesh. He had no idea whether this was a wayward pet or some sort of verminous scavenger, but he opted to give it as wide a berth as possible. Instead of running away, the creature came to the top of the stairs and peered at him as he descended to the next Row, as if to make certain that he really was going.
Soon after, he found himself suspended above a scene of total wonder. Beneath him there opened up a vista that he could only think of as jungle. A kaleidoscope of plants and shrubs and trees stretched out as far as he could see. Everything was so bright - the world seemed depicted in tones of vivid greens, with more variety of shade and sheen and depth of colour than he could ever have imagined. Interspersed here and there with this bewildering verdancy were explosions of other colours, as blooms forced their way out of the shrubbery to claim a space and be seen - here a stand of tall stems topped with purple flowers, there a bush crowned with bright yellow sunbursts and beside it another that dripped with fronds of white, all rippled through with pink. Used to the blandness of the slums, this explosion of life was a revelation that went beyond anything he had imagined finding in the heart of the city.
No, not a jungle; he realised how wrong that initial impression had been. This was more a park, though far removed from the few wretched patches of open land which went by that name in the under-City. There was a pattern to all this apparent chaos - open areas of meadow interlinked by grassy paths which picked their way through the bushes and plants. The more he looked, the more obvious the hand of design became. The landscape was not the product of nature but of artifice.
Tom was doing his best at this point not to dwell on the most striking aspect of the situation, but soon arrived at a moment when he was left with little choice. Though solid in itself, the flight of stairs he was descending appeared to be unsupported, somehow suspended in mid-air, the bottom step ending a little distance above the canopy of the park's trees and leading onto apparently open sky.
Tom could feel the dizziness that assailed him on the city's walls stirring at the back of his mind and he fought to suppress it. This was no bottomless drop; there would be no terrifying plummet such as he'd been through before. This time the ground was clearly visible, and he could imagine himself surviving such a drop, provided the landing proved soft enough.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps there was some mechanism at play to ensure that anyone stepping off the bottom step landed comfortably and unhurt, something which the people familiar with this Row took for granted but which he, a stranger, was unaware of. Maybe that was the whole point of the arrangement: to impress unsuspecting strangers.
So thinking, Tom was able to keep his fears at bay as he came to the end of the stairs and considered what to do next. He sat on the final step, intending to dangle his legs over the edge, but immediately encountered a problem. Where there looked to be open space, his heels struck an apparently solid surface, at
a level with the stairs' foot, where by rights the floor ought to have been. Still not venturing from the step, he shifted onto his knees and began to feel all around with both hands. Sure enough, touch reported the presence of a solid floor, conflicting with what his eyes saw. They continued to insist that there was nothing there, not even glass.
Tom got to his feet, still on the bottom step, and looked around, searching for the next flight of stairs that would lead downwards. Finally he spotted them, a short distance to his left. Only then, with a goal located, did he risk placing one foot on the presumed floor. For long seconds he stood there, one foot on the step and one on solid space, experimentally transferring his weight between the two, testing and then testing again.
Not entirely convinced but realising that he had no other option, Tom took a deep breath and finally abandoned the stairs. Each step was a battle against his own misgivings; every forward foot was placed tentatively, with the expectation that at any moment he might find himself tumbling down towards the parkland below. Yet the floor proved firm. He had no idea how it worked, what this daunting surface was composed of; there was no reflection or minor distortion to suggest its presence, nothing whatsoever to alert sight - that most relied-upon of senses - to the existence of a floor at all. But it held.
He made a determined effort not to look down, keeping his gaze centred on the stairway he was making for. Not that this was exactly ideal either, since that particular flight promised to be an unnerving experience in its own right. Whereas the stairs he had just abandoned had been ordinary enough in their construction, these were anything but. Each individual step hung suspended in the air, apparently unconnected to its neighbours above and below.
After what seemed an age he reached the stairs and started his descent. Whereas his walk to them had been a tentative one, he now opted to throw caution to the wind and ran down the steps, wanting to get them over with, while being afraid that the invisible supports might collapse at any moment.
