A trench blade isn’t built for thrusting, but it would do. I slipped the point through his chest. He gasped and brought his hands up around it reflexively, cutting his palms on the metal. Then he was gone. I wrenched the weapon out of his rib cage and got to my feet.
I hadn’t killed a man in three years. Hurt plenty, sure, but Harelip and his ilk were still above ground, or if they weren’t, it wasn’t because of me.
Bad business all around.
I had underestimated the Blade-he had moved quickly and surely, and if his approach lacked subtlety, it had very nearly made up for it with brutal efficacy. But then he’d underestimated me too, as the scattered corpses of his companions could attest. I doubted Beaconfield could muster another attack, but it still seemed imprudent to head back to the Earl. I’d stop by one of the apartments I kept scattered about the city and check back in tomorrow.
With the flush of combat fading, my body began to remember its injuries, my ankle sore from where I had landed on it, and the wound on my arm starting to ache unpleasantly. I wiped my blade with a spare rag and moved to leave. Brennock was a manufacturing center, and I thought it unlikely anyone had heard the screams, but I didn’t care to wait around to see my suspicions confirmed. Slipping through the broken front door out into the night, I discovered the snow had picked up again, heavier than before, and I headed into it, knowing whatever tracks I left would soon be covered.
I woke the next morning in a single-room apartment in the shadier section of Offbend to discover that the cut running across my left arm had turned into a nasty-colored thing, bright and livid. I put on my clothes and coat, trying to avoid contact with the wound as I did so. Walking out, I banged my shoulder against the wall of the flophouse and had to stop myself from screaming.
I couldn’t go back to the Earl like this-they’d be cutting off my arm in half a day. And I didn’t want to alarm Celia any worse than I already had, so the Aerie was out too. Instead I headed south toward the harbor and a street doctor I knew, an aged Kiren woman who sewed up injuries in the back of a dress shop. She couldn’t speak a word of Rigun, and her dialect of heretic was sufficiently unrelated to mine as to make dialogue effectively impossible, but despite that and her irascible temper she was as good a battle medic as you could ask for, quick, practiced, and discreet.
The snowfall had ceased, although it seemed to have continued through most of the night and would likely pick up again in an hour or two. In the brief interlude, however, it felt like the whole city was out on the streets, the thoroughfares packed with lovers walking arm in arm, and children celebrating the approaching festivities. These manifestations of the season started to die off as I made it to Kirentown, whose inhabitants were uninterested in the upcoming holiday, assuming they were even aware of it.
I turned down a nondescript side street, hoping the ache in my chest didn’t signal a fever. The alley was organized according to the commercial instincts of the heretics, a dozen shops subdividing the hundred-yard stretch of street, each announcing its wares with brightly colored signs covered with Kiren characters and pidgin Rigun. I stepped into one midway down the alley, distinguished only by its curiously bland bill, a small, fading tablet that read simply DRESS.
Inside sat a frowning grandmother, ancient as stone, the sort of creature whose youth seemed even theoretically impossible, as if she had sprung from the womb wizened and oak-tree old. She was surrounded on all sides by bolts of colored cloth and bright ribbons, strewn about without regard for organization or aesthetic. Anyone foolish enough to enter in the hopes of purchasing the advertised merchandise would find themselves quickly disabused by the state of disrepair, but then the old bitch made more than enough with her illicit dealings to forgo the troublesome sideline of legitimate mercantilism.
The proprietress waved me to the back room without comment. It was tiny and dirty, with a swivel stool in the center. The walls were occupied by shelves of medical supplies, poultices, drafts, and alchemical ingredients of all kinds. Most of these were almost certainly useless, but then medicine is half illusion anyway, and two thirds among the heretics.
I sat down on the chair and began to disrobe, the dowager looking on unhappily. Once my shirt was off she took hold of my arm, not roughly but with less tenderness than I’d have preferred given the agony shooting through my left side. She inspected my injury and chattered away in her foreign tongue, the words indecipherable but the tone astringent.
“What do you want from me? You’re right, I should have seen it coming-Beaconfield as much as warned me. I figured he’d need longer to man himself into it.”
She started pulling jars from her shelves, inspecting and re-inspecting the unlabeled bottles in a fashion that did not do wonders for my confidence. She settled on one and poured the contents into a strange-looking kettle, then set that on the iron furnace pumping heat from the corner of the room. We waited for it to boil, time the matron spent glowering at me and muttering incomprehensible pejoratives. Then she pulled out a small vial from a fold in her robes and shook it enticingly.
“I probably shouldn’t-I have a pretty firm no-opiates-before-brunch rule.”
She pushed it at me again, insisting in her singsong.
I sighed and waved her forward. “It’s on your conscience.”
She pulled a tiny dropper out of the vial and placed a bead on my tongue. It tasted acrid and unpleasant. The drug went back into her pocket, replaced by a small blade she cleaned with a length of cloth.
My vision was spinning and it was hard to concentrate. She pointed to my arm. I tried to think of something witty but couldn’t. “Do it,” I said.
With one firm hand she pushed my shoulder back against the chair and dragged her blade quickly against the abscess that had formed where the Blade’s man had tagged me. I bit my tongue till I tasted blood.
Grandma moved on to the next part of her work without offering much in the way of sympathy. While she was puttering about in the corner I made the poor decision to inspect the now reopened wound, with predictable effects on my digestive track. Seeing me turn green, she dashed over and smacked me once across the cheek, pointing her finger in my face and letting forth with a stream of invective. I twisted my head away from the laceration, and she returned to the stove and poured the contents of the now steaming kettle into a small clay cup.
She moved back toward my chair, and the look in her eyes was enough to let me know that what was coming wasn’t going to be fun. I gripped the underside of my seat as tightly as my body would allow and nodded. She raised the tumbler.
Then I did scream, a bright exultation of torment as she dribbled the boiling liquid into my wound, the fierce heat torture against my torn muscle. I took a few deep breaths while water drained from my eyes.
“Why don’t you break that vial back out?”
She ignored me, waiting for the wax to harden. After a moment she pulled out a blunt iron tool and began to scrape away the excess resin.
“You’re a fucking cunt,” I said. “Sakra’s swinging cock, I hate you.”
It was impossible to imagine she hadn’t picked up a smattering of obscenities during her long years of providing medical attention to criminals, but if she understood me she gave no sign. The pain receded to a dull warmth, and I sat in silence as she pulled out a needle and began sewing up my arm. Whatever was in that bottle was absolutely amazing-I was barely aware she was even there. After a few minutes she cocked her head curiously and gibbered what sounded like a question.
“I told you. The Smiling Blade did this-you should be proud. I’m not some bullyboy stumbling in here ’cause he lost a knife fight. Important people are trying to kill me.”
She smirked and drew her thumb across her throat, the universal symbol for murder, evil being man’s mother tongue.
“I’d love to, believe me, but you can’t just sneak into the bedroom of a noble and put a razor to his windpipe.”
By that point her interest had faded and she went back to sewing shut my wound. I enjoyed a comfortable few moments basking in a static narcotic glow, so deeply anesthetized that I didn’t even notice she was done until she shook my shoulder roughly, threatening to undo the work she had just completed.
I brushed her hand off and looked at her craftsmanship. It was first-rate, as always. “Thanks,” I said. “Hopefully I won’t see you again for a while.”
She muttered something that suggested she held little faith in my prophetic abilities and held up five
