entrance to a narrow, four-storey inn. Yellow light descended from the lantern hooked under the sign, revealing a doorman leaning against the door’s ornate frame. A solid kout hung from the man’s leather belt, and one of his beefy hands moved to rest on the weapon as he watched Emancipor’s approach.
“On your way, old man,” he growled.
Emancipor stopped at the light’s edge, reeling slightly. “Got me an appointment,” he said, straightening up and thrusting out his chin.
“Not here you don’t.”
“Manservant. Got the job, I do.”
The doorman scowled, lifting a hand to scratch above his ridged brow. “Not for long, I’d say, from the look and smell of you. Mind…” He scratched some more, then grinned. “You’re on time, anyway. At least, I’m meaning, they’re awake by now, I’d guess. Go on in and tell the scriber-he’ll lead you on.”
“I’ll do just that, my good man.”
The doorman opened the door and, walking carefully, Emancipor managed to navigate through the doorway without bumping the frames. He paused as the door closed behind him, blinking in the bright light coming from a half-dozen candles set on ledges opposite the cloak rack-follower of D’rek, by the look of the gilded bowl on a ledge below the candles.
He stepped closer and looked into the bowl, to see a writhing mass of white worms, faintly pink with some poor animal’s blood. Emancipor gagged, hands pressing against the wall. He felt a rush of foamy, bitter ale at the back of his throat and-with nowhere else in range of his sight-he vomited into the bowl.
Through foam-flecked amber bile, the worms jerked about, as if drowning.
Reeling, Emancipor wiped at his mouth, then at the side of the bowl. He turned from the wall. The air was heady with some Stygg incense, sweet as rotting fruit-enough to mask the vomit, he hoped. Emancipor swallowed back another gag reflex, then drew a careful, measured breath.
A voice spoke from further in and to his right. “Yes?”
Emancipor watched as a bent, thin old man, his fingertips stained black with ink, stepped timidly into view. Upon seeing him, the scriber snapped upright, glaring. “Has Dalg that crag-headed ox gone out of his mind?” He rushed forward. “Out, out!” He shooed with his hands, then stopped in alarm as Emancipor said boldly, “Mind your manners, sir! I but paused to make an offering, uh, to the Worm of Autumn. I am the manservant, if you pl’zz. Arrived punctual, as instructed. Lead me to my employer, sir, and be quick abou’ it.” Before I let heave another offering, D’rek forgive me.
He watched the scriber’s wrinkled face race through a thespian’s array of emotions, ending on fearful regard, the black tip of his tongue darting back and forth over his dry lips. After a moment of this-which Emancipor watched with fascination-the scriber suddenly smiled. “Clever me, eh? Wisely done, sir.” He tapped his nose. “Aye. Burn knows, it’s the only way I’d show up to work for them two-not that I mean ill of them, mind you that. But I’m as clever as any man, I say, and fit to stinking drunk well suits the hour, the shadow’s cast from them two, and all right demeanor and the like, eh? Mind you,” he took Emancipor’s arm and guided him toward the stairs that led to the rooms, “you’ll likely get fired, this being your first night and all, but even so. They’re on the top floor, best rooms in the house, if you don’t mind the bats under the eaves, and I’d wager it’s rum to them and all.”
The climb and the lighter feeling in his stomach sobered Emancipor somewhat. By the time they reached the fourth landing, walked down the narrow hall and stopped in front of the last door on the right, he was beginning to realise that the scriber’s ramble had, however confusedly, imparted something odd about his new employers- new? Have I been hired, then? No, no recollection of that — and he tried to think of what it might be… without success. He came to his mind sufficiently to claw through his grey-streaked hair while the wheezing scriber softly scratched on the door. After a moment the latch lifted and the door swung silently open.
“Kind sir,” the scriber said hastily, ducking his head, “your manservant is here.” He bowed even further, then backed his way down the hall.
Emancipor drew a deep breath, then lifted his gaze to meet the cold regard of the man before him. A shiver rippled down his spine as he felt the full weight of those lifeless grey eyes, but somehow he managed not to flinch, nor drop his gaze, and so studied the man even as he himself was studied. The pale eyes were set far back in a chalky, angular face, the forehead high and squared at the temples, the greying hair swept back and of mariner’s length-long and tied in a single tail. An iron-streaked, pointed beard jutted from the man’s square, solid chin. He looked to be in his forties, and was dressed in a long, fur-trimmed morning robe-far too warm for Lamentable Moll- and had clasped his long-fingered, ringless hands in front of his silk-cord belt.
Emancipor cleared his throat. “Most excellent sir!” he boomed. Too loud, dammit.
The skin tightened fractionally around the man’s eyes.
In a less boisterous tone, Emancipor added, “I am Emancipor Reese, able manservant, coachman, cook-”
“You are drunk,” the man said, his accent unlike anything Emancipor had ever heard before. “And, your nose is broken, although it appears the bleeding has slowed.”
“My humblest apologies, sir,” Emancipor managed. “For the drink, I blame grief. For the nose, I blame a wooden post, or poss’bly the cobblestones.”
“Grief?”
“I mourn, sir, a most terr’ble personal trag’dy.”
“How unfortunate. Step inside, then, Mister Reese.”
The chambers within occupied a quarter of the top floor, opulently fitted with two large poster-beds, both covered in twisted linen, a scriber’s desk with drawers and a leather writing-pad, and a low stool before it. Bad frescos set in cheap panels adorned the walls. To the desk’s left was a large walk-in wardrobe, its doors open and nothing inside. Beside it was the entrance to a private bathing area, a bead-patterned, soft-hide curtain blocking it from view. Four battered chest-high travel trunks lined one wall; only one open and revealing fine clothes of foreign style, on iron hangers. There was no one else in the room, but somehow the presence of a second person remained to give proof to the tousled bed. The only truly odd thing in the room was a plate-sized piece of grey slate, lying on the nearest bed. Emancipor frowned at it, then he sighed and swung a placid smile at the man, who stood calmly by the door, which he now closed, setting the loop-lock over the latch. A tall one. Makes bowing easier to cheat.
“Have you any references, Mister Reese?”
“Oh yes, of course!” Emancipor found he was nodding without pause. He tried to stop, but couldn’t. “My wife, Subly. Thirty-one years-”
“I meant, your previous employer.”
“Dead.”
“Before him, then.”
“Dead.”
The man raised one thin eyebrow. “And before him?”
“Dead.”
“And?”
“And before that I was a cockswain on the able trader, Searime, for twenty years doing the Stygg run down Bloodwalk Strait.”
“Ahh, and this ship and her captain?”
“Sixty fathoms down, off Ridry Shelf.”
The second eyebrow rose to join the other one. “Quite a pedigree, Mister Reese.”
Emancipor blinked. How did he do that, with the eyebrows? “Yes, sir. Fine men, all of them.”
“Do you… mourn these losses nightly?”
“Excuse me? Oh. No sir, I do not. The day after, kind sir. Only then. Poor Baltro was a fair man-”
“Baltro? Merchant Baltro? Was he not the most recent victim of this madman who haunts the night?”
“Indeed he was. I, sir, was the last man to see him alive.”
The man’s eyebrows rose higher.
“I mean,” Emancipor added, “except for the killer, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I’ve never had a complaint.”
“I gathered that, Mister Reese.” He opened his hands to gesture with one to the stool at the desk. “Please be seated, whilst I endeavour to describe the duties expected of my manservant.”
