by Frank Tuttle
Getting downtown took longer than usual. It wasn’t so much the measure of traffic, but the kind-Army tallboys and long, fat cargo wagons were everywhere, bringing lesser vehicles to a halt and driving some off the streets entirely and generally wreaking the same sort of mayhem on honest Rannites that they were ostensibly there to prevent.
I sat back and waited with the patience of a monk.
Finally, though, the address I’d provided hove into view, and a peek out my window told me my orders, given before I left for Avalante, had indeed been attended to.
Rannit’s enforcement of laws was, by necessity, streamlined considerably during the War. Which meant the Old North Gallows were allowed to fall into what some called a shameful state of disrepair, as convicts found themselves in the uniform of the Kingdom rather than in the grip of a noose.
Today, though, two unfortunate souls dangled from new ropes, keeping themselves breathing only by standing on their tiptoes. A pair of soldiers at the bottom of the steps kept the hooting crowd from pulling the hangman’s lever, but was doing nothing to stop the barrage of garbage that was obviously aimed at the lever and intended to send the noosed men plunging to their deaths.
In fact, the grinning soldiers were shouting out suggestions to the mob, which was rooting around industriously in search of more trash to throw.
I bade Randal to stop and shouldered my way through the mob. I had to show Toadsticker’s hilt and six inches of steel once, but after that, a path miraculously cleared before me.
The soldiers snapped to attention as I neared.
“Relax, boys. I’m not in uniform. Let’s keep things informal.”
“Yes, sir.”
I sighed. “They have anything to say?”
“Not a thing, sir. Won’t even tell us their names.”
I grunted. I hadn’t really expected them to talk. I was hoping a few hours standing tiptoe on a gallows would impress upon them the precarious nature of their position.
I took the thirteen steps up the gallows at a jaunty gait.
“Good afternoon, gents. Welcome to Rannit. I trust your accommodations are to your liking?”
I had a tall one with a face full of foreign tattoos and a short one with a scar that ran from his left ear and across his throat before vanishing on the way to his right shoulder.
Neither was gagged. Neither was talking.
“I see. No talking from you two, is that it? Commendable. Loyal to the last.”
Again, no response, save for glares and clenched jaws.
“Pity. The men you’re being loyal to are all dead. There was quite the bloodbath at the Timbers, right about the time you two were picked up. Quite the bloodbath. Even your wand-waver bought it. The Lethway kid too. So there’s no real reason to keep you gentlemen hanging any more, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
I stepped over to the hangman’s lever and gave it a push.
It was iron. Old rusted iron. It moved, but only barely, with an agonized metallic screech.
“Should have had them oil it. No matter.”
I put my shoulder against it and pushed. Hard.
Metal squealed, and the lever began to move.
“We know names,” said the tall one.
“Shut the Hell up,” hissed the scarred man. “He’s bluffing.”
I gave the lever a damned good shove. It moved a quarter of the way across its travel.
“Names. You said they were all dead. I know the names of the ones who weren’t there.”
“Not interested.” I let go of the lever and rubbed my hands together. “Hey. You down there.” I pointed toward a drunken behemoth of a man who stood at the back edge of the mob. “Come up here and give me a hand, will you?”
“Aye, for a pair of coppers.”
“Done.” I fished in my pocket and held up the coins. “Let’s get them hung. I have a dinner date.”
The big man began to shove his way through the crowd.
“Damn you, we never laid a finger on anyone,” snarled the talkative half of the pair. “You can’t do this! We’ve not even been charged!”
I leaned against the lever. It moved again, and the falling floor beneath the men dropped, just a bit, but enough to jerk their ropes taut.
“Stricken,” spat the tall one. “We were hired by Stricken. But he was hired by someone else. Someone high up.”
My helper reached the steps and came stomping up them.
“Sure he is. These are your last words, you know. Better start calling on Angels.”
“They call her Silver Eyes. Wand-waver. Big doings, I hear. Mixed up with the ones coming. I know things. Big things. For Angel’s sake, please, don’t.”
“That’s old news.” My helper came stomp-stomping over. I put two coppers in his dirty hand and nodded at the lever.
“Happy trails, gentlemen.”
We gripped it, both of us.
And then we pushed.
He spat out names. I didn’t recognize many of them. But in that brief time between the lever’s first movement and the end of its travel, the tall one reeled off six strange names between pleas for mercy.
The lever went loose. The false floors dropped. Both men went plunging down.
All the way to the trash-strewn ground, where they lay kicking and squirming.
I noticed that even Shorty had pissed himself.
The crowd roared. A fresh rain of garbage fell. The man I’d paid two coppers to commit a pair of murders looked up at me with eyes gone wary.
“That ain’t my fault. I ain’t givin’ this here money back. I ain’t.”
“Wouldn’t dream of asking for it. Scoot. With the thanks of a grateful nation.”
He scooted.
I followed him down the hangman’s stairs.
The soldiers were standing over the pair, poking them with swords to make sure they stayed put.
Both cussed me with considerable enthusiasm.
“Get what you needed?” asked a soldier.
“More than I needed.” I took a moment to scribble out a note, fold it and write Hisvin’s name on the outside. “Give this to your ranking officer,” I said. “Tell him he’s to give it to his. Up the line, until the Corpsemaster sees it. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about these two?”
“Put them somewhere damp in case the Corpsemaster wants them later.”
That got me a fresh round of cussing.
I put my back to them and headed for my carriage.
Randal was darting through the crowd ahead of me. I guessed he’d watched the whole thing.
He clambered back to his perch, took up the reins and regarded me with a face devoid of any hint of mischief.
“Where to, sir?”
I chuckled and told him to head for Cambrit.
My office was, much to my surprise, intact. There was a letter from Lethway lying unopened on the floor. My desk was shoved around, and my hat-rack was knocked over, but the lack of fresh blood and recent fires was encouraging. I supposed that the pair I’d nearly hung hadn’t put up much of a fight. Wise of them, considering that I’d sent fifty nervous soldiers to fetch them.
Three-leg Cat was even in attendance. He graced me with a rough purr while I filled his bowl with dried jerky from a tin. I sat and watched him eat and found myself waiting to hear Mama come knocking at my door.
But Mama was away, and if she had any sense she’d stay away until the invasion was done. Gertriss was helping Evis deplete the Regency’s store of cigars and brandy. Darla was at work, and when she left for home she’d find a trio of soldiers assigned as her bodyguards, with instructions to see her home and keep her there.
Which left me on my own.
Three-leg read my thoughts and disputed them with a coarse meow. I scratched his knobby head and listened to the street noise.
I judged it to be nearly four of the clock. Since the exchange at the Timbers was scheduled for the traditional midnight hour, I had eight hours to prepar
e.
First, I read Lethway’s letter. That didn’t take long. He just named the place and the time. I found the lack of idle pleasantries and well wishes somewhat disheartening.
I took off my shoes and loosened my tie and propped my sock feet up on my desk. Then I took out the dingus Victor had given me, studied it intently for a moment and went to sleep right there with the deadly thing in my hand.
When I woke, it was dark. I sprang to my feet to find legs and feet gone numb, and I stomped and cursed and made my way to my door.
I stuck my head out, breathed a sigh of relief. Old Mr. Bull’s windows were still alight. I could hear the Arwheat brothers down the street rolling down their shutters. It was barely Curfew, then. I hadn’t slept through my best chance of getting stabbed to death since the end of the War.
“Hurrah,” I said to the empty street. Even Three-leg was gone, engaged in feline errands all his own.
I changed my clothes and made what preparations I could. I wrote out a few letters, including a will. One was addressed to Mama. One to Gertriss. One to Evis. The longest was Darla’s.
Then I gathered my various implements and stood inside my open door.
That’s all I’ll leave behind if I die tonight, I thought. One middling fancy desk and a pair of beat-up chairs. Half a crown of clothes in my closet. Three bottles of beer in my icebox. One half-burnt door. One Three-leg Cat, expert at producing foul odors.
Hell of a legacy.
I shut my door, locked it, and tried to shake the feeling that I was putting my back to Cambrit for the very last time.
I had my borrowed Avalante cab meet me in front of the Velvet. Immune to Curfew and the law, the Velvet was teeming with carriages and cabs, even after Curfew. Another fancy black carriage idling at the curb wasn’t going to attract any attention.
Randal, still lost in his too-large coat, snapped to attention when he saw me ambling his way. I was afraid he was going to start Sirring me in public, but he bit his tongue and sat silent while I clambered inside.
I’d laid things out for him earlier. He waited until my door slammed shut and then we were off, another black carriage lost in the night.
Randal took a circuitous route southward, keeping to sleepy little backstreets when possible. He seemed to be having so much fun I didn’t have the heart to tell him we weren’t being followed.
I hadn’t really expected that we would be. Lethway knew where I’d be, at midnight. The kidnappers knew it too, courtesy of his letter. Pratt I’d told myself.
No need to chase the rabbit when he’s hell-bent to hop right into the nice hot oven.
I’d formulated and rejected half a dozen plans concerning the meeting with at the Timbers. Bring in twenty or more armed soldiers?
Too noisy. The kidnappers would bolt. Lives would probably be lost in the fracas. While my stunt with the Army earlier in the day had paid off, there’d been little risk of bloodshed. Tonight, bloodshed was inevitable.
Sneak in back, employing my Army-honed stealthy wiles to slither snakelike through the trash, thus entering the fray unawares?
Too many eyes expecting just that. If the sorcerer was anything like the ones I’d known in the War, each nook and every cranny within sight of the Timbers was now filled with magical traps and sundry arcane gotchas.
No, a sneaking slither worked once, but it wasn’t going to work again.
Stealth was out. Brute force too.
That left me with only one option, and all the weight of all the hardware strapped to my belt or secreted in my pockets wasn’t nearly as reassuring as I hoped it would be.
On the seat beside me sat a doctor’s black leather instrument bag and the black stovepipe hat favored by the local sawbones. I opened up the doctor’s bag and found it filled with vials of dark liquids, tiny sealed bowls of various powders, and of course, the sharp, glittering implements of the healing trade.
I tried on the hat. It fit, but was too tall for the confines of the carriage, so back on the seat it went.
I grabbed a couple of vials at random and studied the tiny labels affixed to each. Tincture, Drd hwthrn, read one. Infusion, garlic amp;wort, read the other.
I put them both in my coat pocket and snapped the case shut.
Randal’s random route kept us moving for nearly two hours. I counted out distant peals of bells, and when I could delay the inevitable no longer I knocked twice on the roof. Randal turned us toward the Timbers, and whatever festivities the Angel of Fate had contrived.
The carriage rolled away.
The street was dark and empty. Above, stars probably shone and twinkled, but the buildings rose up like canyons and only a fool would have raised his eyes heavenward when so many perils lurked below.
I straightened my physician’s hat and marched across the street, my skin prickling at the sensation of being watched from the dark. Knowing the watching eyes were attached to hands holding crossbows made the prickling feelings worse.
The empty street offered no cover. If a bolt or an arrow were loosed, I’d not know it until I felt it sink in my chest.
Five steps, six steps, eight steps, ten.
They’d think I was crazy, stomping up to their front door like that.
Twelve paces. Fourteen. Almost to the curb.
I was counting on someone in charge being either cautious or curious.
I made it across the street.
I made it to the weathered door.
I knocked.
“I am Doctor Hammonds,” I shouted. “The Colonel sent me. It was all explained in the letter.”
Silence. Not the scrape of a careless boot, not the ghost of an errant whisper.
I remembered every dealing with every doctor I’d ever had the displeasure to meet.
“I will not stand here all night,” I shouted. “You know my business. I have no interest in yours. Admit me, or I leave. Now.”
The door inched back, just enough to reveal an eye-and a bit below that, the razor-sharp head of a crossbow bolt.
“Can you treat your own fatal wounds, Doctor?”
I snorted.
“If I’m not seen, upright and alive by the Colonel, there will be no exchange,” I said. “You did read the letter? I am here to check his son’s physical condition. If Carris Lethway has been permanently disabled…”
“We have received no letter.”
I sighed.
“I have a copy in my coat pocket. I warned the Colonel against using addicts as messengers. May I produce it without being maimed?”
“You may.”
I reached carefully into my pocket. The letter was there, signed by Lethway, or at least by a scribble that looked much the same.
I poked it through the door.
“Don’t move.”
“I have no intention of leaving,” I said, though the door closed in my face.
I waited.
The letter was a good one. I think I captured the Colonel’s brusque air of old-world superiority quite well. It told the kidnappers a Doctor Hammond was being sent ahead to ascertain Carris’s condition, and that if the good Doctor wasn’t seen idling in the street in front of the Timbers when the Colonel’s carriage arrived there would be no exchange at all.
Weedheads make poor couriers. I imagined the kidnappers lost a missive or two themselves when their messengers fell into sewers or climbed to the nearest rooftop, thinking they could fly.
It was plausible enough to be believed.
And unlikely enough to get me killed.
The door opened again, this time, all the way.
“You do anything but poke at the kid, and we’ll gut you where you stand. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly.”
“Take his sword.”
I let them wrench Toadsticker from his scabbard. They didn’t look any further.
They didn’t need to.
When the street door closed, a grim-looking worthy decked out in pre-war chain mail lifted a rag off a magelamp. The room was
suddenly bright as dusk and full of armed, hard-faced men.
I’d figured a dozen. I counted nineteen. And I heard voices coming from somewhere in the shadows beyond the room.
Angels, I’d walked into a villain’s nest.
“He don’t look like no doctor to me,” offered a stranger.
“I have served the Colonel for four years now,” I snapped. “And owned my own practice for ten before that.”
“Well, you’re gonna be retiring tonight,” muttered another. Laughter sounded from all nearby.
I half-turned to face the man who’d let me in, guessing he was, if not in charge, at least more than halfway up the ladder. If he was at the top, his name was Japeth Stricken. But somehow, I doubted Stricken would be the one opening any streetside doors in the dark.
“Where is Carris Lethway?”
“Check his bag, then take him down. Kill him if he blinks funny.”
My bag was snatched away. The contents were dumped onto a table, rifled through and finally dumped back in the back, except for a pair of the larger scalpels.
Victor’s deadly gift was among the implements they handled. It received no more scrutiny than did the vials of mugwort or the rolls of bandages.
The bag was thrown at my chest. I caught it and glared.
Ungentle hands pushed me from behind. The ring of men parted, but did not look away. I was led out of the circle of light, shoved down a dirty hallway that smelled of piss and pushed through a door that was solid and new.
Hands shoved. I went flying ass-over-chin down a short flight of stairs. I lost my bag and my hat went flying and when I finally stopped rolling I lay face down on a cold stone floor with something warm and wet oozing slowly across my chest.
The cellar was lit by a table filled with candles. Two men stood by it, smirking. One wore the robes of a wand-waver. The other was dressed in an outlandish leather suit.
Tied to chair on the other side of the table was a slumped man with a bag over his head.
I picked myself up, felt at the wetness on my chest. My hand came away smelling of garlic, and I remembered the vials I had stowed in my pocket.
“I could have been killed,” I said. I found my hat, which was a bit flattened, and pushed it back into shape before affixing it once again to my head.
