by Ian Whates
Dewar would far rather keep busy than not. He joined the three men in getting the cargo clothed up. This consisted of lifting two vast, heavy sheets, infused with tar as protection against any rain, over the mass of crates, one from either end. They fetched the aft sheet first. Dewar took one side, Abe the other, while the two lads clambered on top of the crates. Even with four this proved back-breaking work and Dewar could only wonder how they would have managed with just the three of them. Eventually, both sheets were in place, which just left the ties – strong ropes pulled tight against the cargo and cloths to keep both firmly in place – two dozen in all, ranging along the length of the hold. Again they worked as a team, with Dewar now on top of the crates, passing rope and holding it taut; Abe preferring to trust his son to tie the actual knots rather than a stranger.
With less effort involved, Dewar spared more attention to his surroundings. The river ran through a deep canyon. Sheer cliffs rising on either side. The course ran remarkably straight and he had to wonder whether it was entirely natural. Of course, diverting such a major river would be a remarkable feat for anybody, but would it be an impossible one for those who had built a city of nearly a hundred tiers into the very heart of a mountain?
By the time they'd finished the final tie and Abe had expressed terse satisfaction, the barge had emerged from the gorge and was moving through more open countryside.
They passed fishing boats and then a village. Children ran along the bank, their shrill laughter carrying across the water like the distant whisperings of playful spirits. Dewar hardly noticed. He sat slumped against one side of the cargo, aching in muscles he'd forgotten he had. It was a long time since he'd attempted any form of labour as physical as this. Perhaps volunteering to help hadn't been such a good idea, particularly bearing in mind the journey ahead, but, on the other hand, he always said that the best way to strengthen any tool – the body included – was to temper it. The fire in his joints would doubtless do him good in the long run, or so he tried to tell himself.
Abe came over to join him. A sense of mutual respect approaching camaraderie had begun to develop in the wake of the task so recently shared, and Dewar felt he'd been accepted by the bargemen in a way that the rest of the party hadn't.
"You ever made fenders?" Abe asked.
"Can't say that I have."
"'S not hard. I'll show you." He handed Dewar a length of rope. "Just follow me."
The assassin watched the first assured movement of stubby fingers and rope, and then copied. He'd always been good with his hands and prided himself on being a quick learner. In short time he'd picked up the knack and began to see how this was all coming together. Realising as much, Abe picked up his own pace and completed a plump oval of interwoven rope – a wasp nest made of string – long before Dewar had finished his novice effort. Once the assassin felt his own was close enough to the bargeman's, he held it up for the other's approval.
Abe took the would-be fender and hefted in his hand, as if weighing it. "Not bad," he said. "A bit slow, perhaps, but all in all not bad at all."
High praise indeed.
Confident that his charge could come to no harm here in the middle of the Thair, Dewar took the opportunity to ignore his companions as best he could. That didn't prevent him from noting that the Thaistess, Mildra, was surprisingly young for a priestess and might even have been considered attractive in a haughty, well-scrubbed sort of way, were she ever to wear anything other than the ubiquitous green robes of her calling. She seemed to spend a lot of time in conversation with Tom, doubtless trying to convert him to her spurious faith. Dewar promptly made a unilateral decision that his duties extended to physical wellbeing alone and didn't include such things as intellectual poisoning. If the kid really was that gullible, let the pair of them get on with it.
He was awake when the two of them sneaked out of the cabin on the first night, and briefly entertained the notion that there might be something more than friendship between them, but dismissed the thought. One was only a kid for goodness sake, while the other was a priestess, and, as far as Dewar was aware, the Thaissians hadn't yet sunk so low as to use sex to ensnare their victims.
The second day on the barge was a more relaxed one, which was just as well, because Dewar's muscles were telling him in no uncertain terms just how much they resented the previous day's misuse. As the sun slipped down below the tree line, the barge arrived at Crosston, which was as far as the boat went. Here the cargo would be unloaded and a new one sought for the return trip to Thaiburley.
Dewar bid Abe and his family a fond farewell and led the party towards a nearby inn on Abe's recommendation, a place where the bargeman assured him they'd find good food, decent ale and a soft bed for the night. Intriguingly, the tavern was called the Four Spoke Inn.
FIVE
Kat paused, considering the hurried scrawl before her with bemusement but no real concern. Everybody knew that things were changing in the streets; this was merely further evidence of that fact. It was the second time she had seen this particular motif daubed onto the wall of a building, which pretty much confirmed that here was the badge of some gang or other staking a claim to the area. This used to be Thunderheads territory. Not any more, it would seem.
Daubed in white, the sign was a simple one, which showed either a lack of imagination or a degree of intelligence in recognising that not everyone rendering it was likely to be an artist. It consisted of an oval, a circle stretched horizontally, with what were obviously intended to be a pair of fangs dangling from the upper 'lip': a mouth in the process of either screaming or biting.
This second example was a lot more competently executed than the first, and where that one had looked almost comical, this had an air of the sinister about it and made a far more effective warning. Particularly as the door beside it had been kicked in, as if for emphasis. "We Mean Business!" the shattered wood and gaping hole seemed to declare.
Kat moved on. The previous night had proved frustrating. They had come so close to their quarry that she could almost taste success – or the leading trio of hunters had, even managing to get off a single shot with a crossbow, and the quarrel seemed to hit home; hence the inhuman scream that had spurred Kat on. Yet by the time she and the main force of Tattooed Men had arrived on the scene the Soul Thief had vanished, and they'd found no further trace of the monster that night. It was like trying to hunt down a shadow, or a fragment of mist in a fog.
Hence Kat's early morning outing, even though she was dog-tired. If they were ever going to catch the Soul Thief they needed to try something different, they needed an edge. And Kat had a plan. Not a particularly noble one, but if everything worked as she hoped, the only victim would be her mother's murderer; and Kat could live with that.
She only hoped that the new order represented by this graffiti-scrawl didn't mean there had been wholesale changes in this area of the streets. The last thing she needed was for Annie to have moved on. Kat had already made one visit that morning which she'd been putting off and called in a favour in the process. She'd hate to have gone to all that trouble for nothing.
In the event, her concerns proved groundless. Annie sat on her accustomed step, engrossed in a game of flip with a street-nick, a kid Kat felt sure she vaguely recognised as having run with the Blood Herons. There was a reassuring sense of the familiar to the scene, as Annie took a flat, rounded stone in her leathery hand and, with a flick of her wrist, sent the stone spiralling into the air – this could just as easily have been happening weeks ago, before the City Below went to hell in a handcart. After spinning through several rotations, the stone thudded to the ground between Annie and where the nick squatted. It landed beside another similar stone, both displaying a white cross emblazoned on their upper face. A pair, which entitled Annie to flip over a nearby stone, one that currently showed a single white stripe. The flip converted that stone from the boy's to Annie's, revealing the cross it bore on the reverse side. Annie now had five in a row. Game over.
> "Huh," the old woman cackled gleefully. "That's three to me!"
"Yeah," the boy said, with a tone of sullen resignation that made Kat grin, "I know, I'll get started on cleaning out the kitchen."
"Good boy; and do it properly, mind!"
Kat waited until the lad had disappeared inside before bending to pick up one of Annie's winning row of five. She held the smooth stone in her hand. As she'd suspected, it was weighted, deliberately imbalanced so that it was bound to land with the cross exposed more often than not. The difference was only slight, but it was there.
Kat shook her head. "Hasn't he caught on yet?"
Annie shrugged. "He's new. He will eventually, but till then, might as well make the most of 'im."
The first time Kat encountered Annie, she hadn't even been certain there was a person beneath what seemed to be nothing more than a heap of rags piled haphazardly on the step, until the old woman moved. Only then did a human form become discernible among the sacking and the cloth and the filth. In streets where poverty was the norm there was nothing unusual about a person wearing threadbare and tattered clothing, but Annie seemed to live in the rags which others threw out when they found newer, better and cleaner rags. Even her lank grey hair was a matted and unkempt mess – a pile of dust and fluff that sat atop the apparent mound of discarded cloth. Yet this was Annie, and no one expected her to be any different.
"Now, what can I do for you, my little Death Queen?"
Kat shifted uncomfortably. This was the second time in a space of hours that someone had used that all-butforgotten title.
Annie was many things; a smelly, filthy old woman, a beneficial mentor to the waifs and strays who couldn't find a place even within the street-nick gangs, a collector and dispenser for the various waves of gossip that coursed regularly through the streets and, most importantly for Kat's purposes, a fixer, a broker, a deal-maker.
If you wanted something and couldn't get it through any of the usual sources, if you'd exhausted every other possible avenue, you came to Annie. She wasn't cheap, but if what you were after was out there, Annie would find it. Kat had discovered long ago that Annie had a weakness for pretty things, for baubles and trinkets, and that there was one sort the old woman coveted above all else.
The sun globes had only just been warming up as Kat hurried down the oddly featureless street, passing quickly between twin rows of houses without any windows. She never had figured out why the flatheads' buildings were built this way – after all, the flatheads themselves seemed to revel in basking in the sun globes' warmth, so you'd think they'd want to open their homes up to it rather than shut it out – but there you are.
Returning to the Jeradine quarter was something Kat had been putting off, and she wasn't entirely certain why; perhaps it was merely a reluctance to return to the patterns her life had fallen into during the recent past. She hadn't been here since the day Ty-gen bribed her into seeing the street-nick Tom safely back to his home turf; and what an eventful trip that had proved to be. Technically, she'd completed that task successfully by her reckoning, but she had never come back to collect her commission. Then again, she'd had no need of it until now.
Not many of the Jeradine were around at this early hour, and those few of the tall, bipedal reptilians that she did encounter ignored her, as usual.
Despite the buildings looking much alike, she had no trouble finding the one she was looking for. A Jeradine's face is pretty much unreadable to a human, but Kat thought she detected a hint of surprise in Ty-gen's eyes as he opened the door to her knock.
"Hello, Ty-gen," she said, a little awkwardly, "remember me?"
The flathead pointed at his throat, and Kat realised he wasn't wearing his voice simulator, so couldn't reply. He stepped back inside and gestured for the girl to follow, leaving her in the front room as he disappeared into the back. Funny, but she'd never seen him before without the 'translator' – his name for the little crystal mechanism – and had assumed he always wore it. Seconds later the Jeradine reappeared, with the familiar black band around his throat, fronted by the faceted grey khybul construct. Before all this started Kat had earned a pretty good living selling the delicate and beautiful khybul sculptures that Ty-gen produced to contacts she'd made up-City, yet she felt little empathy with that part of her past, so recently abandoned, which now felt as if it had taken place in somebody else's life entirely.
"Kat, seeing you once more brings me great pleasure and relief."
The flat, emotionless voice produced by the translator and the Jeradine's awkwardly formal sentence structures still made her smile, whatever her misgivings about coming back here.
"Yeah, it's good to see you too, Ty-gen."
"Have you returned in order to resume our previous trading relationship?"
"No, no, at least not just yet," Kat added quickly, not wanting to close the door too firmly on any possibility when life could be so unpredictable. She took a deep breath, feeling a bit ashamed that she had sought out the Jeradine again only now when she wanted something. "I got that boy, Tom, all the way across town to the edge of Blue Claw territory like you asked." Which was pretty much true in as far as it went.
"Ah, and now you have come to collect your reward."
"Yes, no… well, sort of."
"I have kept the sculpture safe for you here."
With a sweep of his arm, the Jeradine pulled back a curtain in the wall behind him, to reveal a particularly large and intricate khybul sculpture; a magnificent city of impossibly tall, sweeping walls topped by tiny, needle-point towers, the whole lit artfully from within the alcove that held it. Thaiburley, the city of dreams, in miniature. This remained perhaps the most beautiful single thing Kat had ever seen, yet she shook her head.
"No, I don't want that."
"Oh?"
"Don't get me wrong." The last thing she wanted to do was offend the Jeradine. "It's incredible, wonderful, the best thing you've ever done; but I was thinking about this as I took Tom across the under-City. What would I do with something like that? You know how I live. If I attempted to keep this it would only get stolen or, worse still, damaged or even broken completely."
"What do you wish as reward in its stead, then?"
"I thought perhaps I could take a few smaller pieces – you know, less valuable ones, easier to keep – three, say."
"I see."
"And… well, perhaps you could let me have one now?"
"I've got something for you, Annie." Kat produced the sparkling crystal statuette which Ty-gen had handed over without hesitation or comment. It was the image of an eagle or some other bird of prey, wings spread, feet clasping a rock which also formed the figure's stand. The rays of the sun globes twinkled from the bird's outstretched wings as Kat turned it slowly.
She watched as the old woman's eyes lit up with excitement and avarice; a look which was quickly replaced by a narrow-eyed calculating stare. "And what would Annie have to find for you to get her hands on this lovely bauble?"
The encounter two nights ago with the aged apothaker had brought Annie to mind. Kat still had the phial the woman had thrust upon her tucked away in a pocket. She didn't know whether this 'luck potion' would work or not, but there had to be something they could do to affect the Soul Thief, and she finally had a good idea what that might be.
"Demon dust," she said simply.
"Demon dust?" Annie repeated the word slowly and nodded wisely. "Why, you plannin' on invadin' the Upper Heights?"
"No, nothing like that. I saw some used once, that's all; it took out a demon hound in the blink of an eye." At odd moments in the past few days Kat had found herself thinking of Tom and wondering what had become of him. She'd heard rumour of a boy with extraordinary power who had saved the whole of the under-City. She knew at once this could only be Tom. No point in dwelling on him though; by now he'd doubtless been whisked away up-City to live a life of pampered luxury. Out of her world for good, and, besides, she had more pressing concerns.
A
nnie had evidently been mulling over her words. "Heard there were plenty o' reasons for folk to stay off the streets last night; the Tattooed Men among 'em."
"We weren't the only ones out hunting, Annie," Kat said quietly.
"Heard that, too. So, you and yer sister patched things up then?"
"I wouldn't exactly say that."
Annie nodded and pursed her lips. She then skewered Kat with an intense gaze that seemed to strip away all her carefully built defences and pierce right through to the marrow. "Only one thing I can think of that'd see the Death Queens runnin' side by side again. Yer lookin' to bring down the Soul Thief, aren't yer?"
Kat said nothing; she simply returned the old woman's stare with an intensity all her own.
Annie thought for a second and then said, "I've heard of demon dust, yes, but I've never come across the stuff meself, nor even anyone who's actually seen it before, let alone who knows how to make it." Kat's heart sank. "For all that, I might know of someone who can help yer.
