I got both, beer and gossip, in spades.
It took a while, of course. I had to establish myself as a beef buyer for a meat packing firm on Bay Street. Since buyers for meat packing firms were as common as rats and nearly as well loved in the quaint folkish environs of the Steer and Hammer Pub, blending in wasn’t terribly difficult.
A less experienced infiltrator might have been tempted to loosen local tongues by buying a few rounds. Not Markhat, no, no-I pinched my coppers until they squealed, as any genuine buyer would, and endeared myself by losing a few rounds of darts I might otherwise have won.
After that, I was seated with a table of guffawing old men who kept calling me different names while they told me all the things old men like to tell and young men have no ears for.
But I had ears. And in between the sad tale of Ronny and Olga’s failed marriage and Bertram and Heather’s doomed crippled sons, I learned a few things about the neighborhood that fanned the flames of suspicion Pratt had ignited earlier in the day.
The Spook Timbers came up, again and again. Half my tablemates had worked there, when it had been a going concern. Old Letter Half-Hand displayed his maimed hand as he introduced himself, noting that he’d left four fingers in the Timbers and damned if one day he didn’t plan to march in and ask for them back.
The Timbers had been many things, since the Willow Creek had dried up and the big grinding wheels had ground to a permanent halt. An inn, a hospital, an apothecary, a whorehouse.
During the War, gangs had used it as a headquarters. The Watch had chased them out come the Truce, and the Timbers had stood empty ever since.
Until…
It was the until I had been hoping for.
Lethway’s plan of a Brown River Bridge swap was the preferred method for most kidnappers. It reduced the opportunities for treachery on both sides. It was public. It was quick. And the bridge clowns were helpful about redirecting traffic while the exchange took place, and remaining neutral and blind throughout.
Local kidnappers would have known that. Bold kidnappers would have agreed anyway.
I suspected these kidnappers were neither. And as such, I wondered-might they suggest, as a meeting place, the very spot in which they’d held their victim the entire time?
It was a daft thing to do. A thing so daft Lethway was almost certainly unlikely to even consider it. And if Pratt was right, Lethway hadn’t.
But there’s one thing that can be said about Mrs. Markhat’s favorite son.
He’s no stranger to daft ideas.
It had its advantages. No movement across an unfamiliar town. No shuffling of guards. No searching out a meeting place for hidden ambushes.
No, instead, they’d just hunker down, out of sight, and watch. If fresh new faces started showing up, they could always pull back and vanish. If Lethway did try to set up an ambush, the kidnappers would be able to watch it take shape.
And then there were the dogs.
It was a small thing. Half-Hand always dropped a couple of stale biscuits by a ruined doorframe in the Spook Timber’s north end. He’d spied a mama dog in the dark chamber beyond, nursing half a dozen spotted puppies, and like me the old man had a soft spot for dogs.
He’d left the biscuits every day for a month, that is, until the day he’d passed to find the doorway filled with chunks of brick and the mama dog and puppies gone.
He’d found her, a block away, nestled under a porch with her pups in tow.
Half-hand was worried that gangs might be moving back into the Timbers, because, as he noted, even busted bricks don’t stack themselves in street-side doorways overnight.
It was a long shot.
But Carris Lethway was being held somewhere in Rannit. The Spook Timbers seemed ideal-abandoned, derelict and big enough to serve as a hiding place for half a dozen secretive thugs and one reluctant guest.
Maybe, just maybe, they’d been daft enough to waggle the name right under Lethway’s nose.
Disengaging from my gaggle of newfound friends took perhaps an hour. I’d been nursing the same beer for twice that time, so the wobble in my walk was just there for show.
I stumbled outside, bracing myself on the wall. I wasn’t in view of the Timbers but it never hurts to assume keen eyes might be watching. I stumbled into the nearest alley and proceeded to make my way toward the Timbers.
It took me two hours to make what was probably three blocks. I stuck to whatever cover I could find-heaps of trash, leaning fences, the narrow, filth-choked alleys between bars and stores and Angels know what. There’s a trick to moving slowly. I hadn’t done much of it since the War, but I hadn’t quite forgotten, either.
The sun sank so low it might as well have been midnight there among the alleys and the narrow places. There was no wind, not even a breath, and the stench from the tanneries and the slaughterhouses settled heavy upon me. My clothes were soiled and wet. I dabbed mud below my eyes, so my cheeks wouldn’t shine, and my transformation from upright citizen to foul creature of the sewers was sadly complete.
It was only then that I dared a direct look at the Timbers from behind a heap of rotting hides dumped in an alley in clear defiance of the Regent’s new refuse statutes.
The place rose up three stories. Most of the roof was gone. Portions of the north wall had been consumed in a fire that burned so long ago the soot was weathered white.
Nothing stirred. Nothing sounded.
I pulled up something sticky and malodorous and slowly, slowly, laid it beside my face. Couldn’t show the outline of a head if a sudden light should shine behind me. Rats scampered at the movement. Two fled across the back of my legs, heavy as cats, and probably as large.
I waited. Counted my breaths. I flexed my muscles, toe to head and back again, to keep my limbs from going stiff.
A bell clanged out Curfew.
The sounds of traffic and reveling stopped. Some streets in Rannit treat Curfew as a tired old joke.
This wasn’t one of them.
I hadn’t stuck my Avalante pin to my lapel. I didn’t move to do so. No halfdead I’d ever met would stoop to feed on anyone who stank as I did. But from the silence and the tightly shuttered windows and the streets that didn’t serve even a single absent-minded drunk, I suspected the halfdead had fed in this neighborhood, and recently.
I waited, and waited, and waited some more. I fought off sleep by reminding myself what the rats were likely to do if they thought I was unconscious.
No more bells rang. The Square was so far away the Big Bell could be struck all night and I’d never hear it.
I’d decided it was nearly midnight when a tiny brief light flared in a gap in the Timber’s second floor wall.
It flared and hung there for a single heartbeat. Then it died in a sudden brief wave.
A match. Someone had lit a fancy newfangled match.
And that tiny red pinprick of light that flared and dimmed and flared again was a smokestick, being sucked and puffed to life.
I let out my breath. The tiny red glow persisted.
Smokesticks are an affectation of the rich and the near rich. So are matches.
Both are likely beyond the means of any poor derelict reduced to hiding in the dubious shelter of the Timbers after Curfew.
I could have danced.
Long shots do pay out, every now and then.
And if my tobacco-fancying friend in the Timbers was who I thought he was, then Carris Lethway was there too.
Almost in sight. But well beyond my reach.
They’d be doubly vigilant, after Curfew. Not necessarily against Lethway or the Watch, but against the
