flowered, as yellow and bitter and poisonous in their eruption as the acid that gave them life.
Blocks of white stone cartwheeled amid catastrophic debris made weightless by the transcendent moment of concussion. Small bits of mortar and chunks of broken rock turned into deadly projectiles. Nuggets of bridge fell like hail in profusion.
An amber-gray cloud drifted west with the wind, a haze that once connected two sides of a river.
The demolition team knew their business.
“Lord,” said Garen softly. “There are no other houses to go to.”
Roric looked at the captain, startled, suspicious.
“You mean to—?”
“I mean to serve the Duchy of Stonehold,” said Garen with simple candor. “And the Feldman House . . . to its end.”
A ripple of doubt clouded Roric’s face for a moment, then disappeared as he saw that Garen meant what he said. He felt like weeping anew but didn’t.
“All right . . . all right.” He looked at his shoes, nodding ridiculously as a father might nod to his son, allowing him to accompany him somewhere dangerous despite his better judgment. “If that’s what you want.” He cleared his throat of the last trace of the burning fumes. “If that’s what you want . . .”
CHAPTER 19
Some claimed Ghoul Court was a pornocracy without the reach of Isca’s city watch. It was the lair of people who made their living off atrocities: parnels, hippospadians and magsmen. Blink-fencers hawked stolen eyeglasses in the street while small-time crooks distributed cigarettes loaded with powdered aspirin.
Pavement nymphs performed services up against the moldering foundations of huge brick warehouses or in congested alleys where flying buttresses provided shelter from the rain. They painted their faces with colorful designs meant to ward off the bortghast rumored to haunt the corner of Knife and Heath.
Flesh-tailors from Bloodsump Lane arrived promptly for abuse at the hands of their masters. They lolled in green-lit second-story dens, staring from odd angled positions where they had fallen into chairs and filthy beds. For hours they would look at grungy plaster surfaces where flies and roaches outmaneuvered gravity, tasting the walls for flecks of organic spew.
Zane Vhortghast was a common specter here though no one called him Zane. In the Court he went by Peter Lark, a minor manipulator of the threads. He led a charmed life despite his disconcerting connections to thugs and underworld guilds. If anyone paid him enough it was known that he could produce a body like magic, floating in the Bragget Canal before dawn the next day.
He wasn’t a big fish but he wasn’t a guppy either. He passed with disturbing anonymity through the Court. Only those that knew him classed him as a dangerous man. But that was the spymaster’s desire, to go unnoticed while still being “plugged in.”
Zane kept a small apartment in the Court for show. He never slept there but took some time every month to embellish the charade.
He kept a pile of rumpled sheets on an iron bed frame and a partially dissolved bar of soap in his shower. The soap had cemented itself to the tray and seemed morose, surrounded by exposed pipes and tiles the color of toilet bowl stains.
A half-drained bottle of Pplarian whiskey sat on the floor by the bed.
There were some fake time cards from one of the factories in Growl Mort, a change of clothes, a worn-out toothbrush and a knife that looked like it might have once been used for murder.
Zane looked out from his balcony. It was barely large enough to accommodate him standing.
The sun was just slipping into a drunken red-faced coma behind heavily decayed buildings to the east. The sky was pink as nockstress flesh by the time little orange squares began to flicker in the darkening walls and edifices that pressed the street. People lit candles and oil lamps, moving light from room to room.
The streetlamps remained ornate blackened scepters. Metholinate to Ghoul Court had been rationed, said the papers. In reality it had been turned off.
Zane felt the indignation boiling just under the surface. The population wouldn’t stand for it much longer.
Just the previous week, a man had tried to tap in under the street to siphon his own supply. He was smoking at the time and the explosion had thrown him through the bricks. He came out of the tunnel, through the street and into the open air, popping up like toast.
A team of city engineers had come in to fix the damage, guarded by a squad of five knights in full battle gear. That was something new. Not even the hardest criminals thought about tangling with the knights. They were quite possibly the first outsiders not to leave in fear.
Zane Vhortghast knew they wouldn’t be the last.
Caliph’s plan for cleansing the Court would see action soon and it would not be a gentle clean.
Part of Zane bemoaned the time he had sunk into the Court. He would lose most of his contacts to prison or they would become casualties of the raid. On the other hand, if it worked, it meant he would not have to invest any more time chasing phantoms.
From his balcony, Fifth Street extended north like a latrine. Great peaked canisters, water towers and grinding engines squatted on rooftops like deformed metal goblins. They muffled the desultory moans emanating from windows with sashes thrown open to the night.
The struggling cries of Ghoul Court’s diverse clientele issued lustily through the thick humid air. Zane imagined their sweating bodies for a moment wrestling in the dark, enduring the hot weather as they worked out anxieties linked to the encroaching war.
A bottle broke in an alley and someone screamed. Three dark shapes trampled across the street, carrying clothes and other plunder.
A knock sounded at the paper-thin door. Zane turned and crossed the room in four steps. He opened it, revealing a hallway that was darker than his room and smelled far worse.
“Hey Peter.” A skeletal lad with mad black hair and deliberate scars up and down his arms stood wavering on the threshold. He had a birdcage in one hand. “Got yer tweet.”
Zane jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. He squeezed them meticulously, pushing them out between his thumb and forefinger one at a time into his other palm.
“Three gryphs is robbery.”
The dizzy man smiled and loosely extended his hand.
“Yeah, well, you know any other bird-duffers?”
“Plenty.”
The man sneered and gave Zane/Peter the cage.
“Don’t spend it all on sweet red,” said Zane.
The man made an obscene gesture in reply and stumbled off into the dark.
Zane closed the door and locked it out of habit. He turned up the oil lamp on a small badly beaten desk and pulled off the cloth covering the cage.
He swore.
It was a pathetic sight. The pigeon was black from soot and badly torn as though it had been stuck in and then ripped out of a chimney pipe. The chirurgery had been preformed ruthlessly and recently. Blood still caked the feathers all around the excised flesh. The skull was pink and the bird cried piteously.
Heartless as he was, cruelty to animals was something Zane Vhortghast could not stomach—which was why he ate the insensible meat produced under Thief Town as opposed to beef, rationalizing that meat wasn’t really an animal. It was more like plant life that grew in the dark. More like fungus.
He swallowed a lump in his throat and set the cage aside in disgust. He wondered if the thing could even make the flight. It was a long way. Farther than he himself had ever traveled.
He had to hurry. He had been sweating it out waiting for the duffer.
Tonight was the twenty-fourth of Lume, the night the High King was taking his tart to the opera. Zane had promised to be there when they arrived, overseeing the security detail assigned to the building.
