She shook her head with something approaching disappointment. “You in trouble again? Always gotta stir the pot, by the Firstborn. Smirk all you want, you aren’t a child. Closer my age than Yancey’s, am I wrong?”
I hoped that wasn’t true, though it might have been.
“He’s on the roof.” She slapped my arm with a damp dishrag. “Tell him lunch is ready when he wants it.” Her eyes turned steely. “He stays out of anything you’re into-don’t forget you’re a guest in my home.”
I kissed her lightly on the cheek and made my way upstairs.
Yancey’s house buttresses the Beggar’s Ramparts, a steep canyon that acts as de facto divide between the Islanders and the white citizens of the docks. At ground level the crevasse was filled with trash, and the sight of it would belie the suggestion that the divide was a positive addition to the landscape-but from on high the break from the skyline it offered was actually quite soothing. When I came up the Rhymer was lighting a banana leaf stuffed with dreamvine. We shared the blunt and the view for a few quiet moments.
“I need two favors,” I began.
Yancey had one of the best laughs I’d ever heard, rich and full. His whole body shook with mirth. “You’ve got a way of beginning a conversation.”
“I’m quite the charmer,” I acknowledged. “First, I need someone who can give me the word on Beaconfield.”
“Ain’t me, man, I only met him twice now.” He smiled conspiratorially and his voice dipped an octave. “Besides, it ain’t wise for the help to pay too much attention to the master of the house, you hear true?” He breathed out a trail of smoke rings, verdant greens and bright oranges. The wind carried them south toward the harbor, the bustle of the docks vaguely discernible even at this distance. “I might know somebody, though. You ever hear of Mairi the Dark-eyed, runs a place north of downtown called the Velvet Hutch?”
“A house of worship, no doubt.”
“You bet your life on that, brother. Praise the Firstborn!” He chuckled and slapped me on the back. “Nah, man, she’s an old friend. Word is she used to be the Crown Prince’s mistress, back in the day. Now she sells high- class tail to nobles and rich bankers, and”-he winked at me-“she’s on first names with every skeleton in every closet from here to Miradin.”
“Quite the necromancer.”
“She’s multitalented.” he confirmed. “I’ll send word that you’re coming by to see her.”
“That’s the first favor-you won’t like the second one. I need you to disappear for a little while.”
He slumped against the railing, the hog leg dangling from his lips. “Come on now, don’t tell me that.”
“Take a trip to the coast for a few days, or if you want to stay in the city go visit your Asher friends. Just keep away from your usual hangouts and don’t perform.”
“I ain’t in the mood for taking no trip, man.”
“If it’s about money…” I began.
“Ain’t about money, man. I got enough money-I don’t need to beg coin.” His eyes cut through the haze of smoke with dull ferocity. “It’s you-you fuck shit up, it’s all you ever do. You a poison-everyone you meet is worse for it, you know that? Every single person. I ain’t got no problems with nobody, then I do you a kindness and what happens?” His tone had switched from condemnation to regret. “I’m an exile in my own fucking city.” He sighed and took another hit, spewing multicolored fog into the air. “This about the Blade?”
“Yes.”
“I told you he was dangerous. Don’t you listen to anyone?”
“Probably not enough.”
“Why he after you?”
“I’m pretty sure-”
Yancey cut me off with a chop of his hand. “Never mind, man. I don’t want to know.”
That was probably for the best. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“I ain’t holding my breath.”
We leaned against the barrier for a long time afterward, passing the blunt back and forth until it was down to the roach. Finally Yancey broke the silence. “Mom try and hook you up again?”
“Esti Ibrahim, I believe her name was.”
He sucked his teeth in contemplation. “Makes the best fried fish in Rigus, but she’s got an ass like the stove you’d fry it on.”
“That was some damn good fish,” I acknowledged.
He snickered at that, and I should have joined in, as a courtesy if nothing else. But the talk with Meskie had me out of sorts, and I was finding it tough to be a cheery companion. “So you’ll talk to Mairi for me?”
The Rhymer’s glimmer of humor died quick, and he turned moodily back toward the rail. “I told you I would, didn’t I? I look out for my people. When I say I’m gonna do something, it ends up getting done. I’ll send someone by after lunch; you can go see her whenever the hell you want.” He took one last puff of vine and belched out a cloud of vermilion. “If there ain’t nothing else I can do for you, how about you get the fuck off my roof. I gotta figure out where I’m gonna be sleeping tonight.”
Yancey’s profession demanded a certain skill with his tongue, and I’d earned the rough edge of it. To punctuate his dismissal he flicked the end of the butt over the edge and into the expanse below. I wondered if we’d ever smoke another. With nothing left to do I cut downstairs and out the front, making sure not to catch Ma Dukes on the way out. After today she probably wouldn’t be so keen to find me a mate.
Another bridge burned, I supposed.
I headed back to the Earl and killed the rest of the afternoon catching up on lost sleep. Around six I slipped out, first sending Wren on a bullshit errand to make sure he couldn’t follow. My last interaction with Crispin was at that boundary of antagonistic and intimate that didn’t require a spectator, and it seemed likely this one would go in the same direction, particularly as Crispin would probably make me shine his shoes in exchange for the information he had discovered. The Oathkeeper knew I would have.
The walk to Herm’s Bridge was a rare moment of silence, a brief half hour in the dimming light of the evening. It was the time of year when it pays to be conscious of every last ray of sunshine and gust of warm air, the fading heat soon to be submerged beneath winter’s implacable thrall. For a few minutes the events of the last two days lay half forgotten in the recesses of my mind.
I suppose it’s the nature of reverie to end.
A body doesn’t look like anything else, and even with the spread of night blurring the landscape I was certain the one lying at the foot of the crossing was Crispin’s. I broke into a quick jog, knowing it was useless, that what had come for Crispin hadn’t left him injured.
He’d been terribly mutilated, his fine face bruised and battered, his aquiline nose caked with blood and pus. One eye had burst in the socket, white ooze leaking, the gleam of his iris offset inside. His face was frozen in a hideous grimace, and at some point during his torment he had bitten through most of the flesh of his cheek.
It was dark but not that dark, and Herm Bridge isn’t a back alley but a minor thoroughfare. Someone else would stumble on the body soon. I knelt beside his corpse and tried not to think about the time he had invited me to his family’s house for Midwinter, his eccentric mother and spinster sister playing the grand piano, all of us drinking rum punch till I passed out by the fire. I slipped my hand into his coat pocket. Nothing. A quick search of the rest of his clothing revealed the same. I told myself that the stench was hallucinatory, that he hadn’t been dead long enough to rot, and the cold would keep him whole for a while longer anyway, that I needed to concentrate on my task. It’s what he would have done. By the book.
Finally I hit on the bright idea of checking his hands, and after a moment of frustration in opening their vise- clench, found a half-torn sheet of paper Crispin had been holding-whether to keep it from his attacker or as some sort of a talisman I would never know.
It was a government form. At the top was a bureaucratic code, followed by a warning against unauthorized viewing. Below, under the title Practitioners, Operation Ingress was a list of names and a one-word description of their status- Active, Inactive, Deceased. I was unsurprised to see a great many marked with the third. I scanned to the bottom and felt my heart stutter a beat-the last legible name on the list, just above the tear, read Johnathan Brightfellow.
So Beaconfield was behind it after all. It was a hell of a way to have my suspicions confirmed. A hell of a way.
I did one more thing then, something that I barely thought about even while I was doing it, something cheap
