I set in into my pocket, and dug out a tarnished bit of silver. ‘This is for you,’ I said, ‘for coming out here in the heat. Make sure Eloway keeps his greedy little hands off it.’ The runner smiled and disappeared.
‘Who was that?’ Wren asked from behind me. One thing he hadn’t lost since I’d fished him out the gutter was his preternatural capacity for quiet. He’d have been fierce at second-story work, though I supposed it was my job to keep him out of that sort of line.
‘Your replacement. I need someone working for me I can rely on not to disappear all day.’
‘Adolphus had me putting up fliers,’ he said, his face red from excitement and not just the heat.
‘Putting up fliers?’
‘For the Association. For the big rally they’re having next week. To remind the Throne of the sacrifices they made for the country, and to renew the bonds of fellowship too long allowed to remain fallow.’
He’d learned these last words that morning. I disliked hearing him parrot them. ‘And where’s the man himself?’
‘They’re having a meeting at the local chapter. They want to vote Adolphus chair.’ He puffed his chest out, proud of the giant’s accomplishments. Under different circumstances I would have found it rather touching. ‘They say he was a hero, that he held the line at Aunis all by himself.’
‘Did they now?’
‘They said I couldn’t stay. They said it was for veterans only.’ This slight appeared not to have bothered him. ‘They seem all right to me.’
There was no reason to be angry at Wren for following his father’s orders. I found that I was, all the same. ‘But then you don’t know anything, so your opinion isn’t worth as much as mine.’
It was a cheap shot, but it set him down a notch. ‘I was just doing what Adolphus told me.’
‘Adolphus is a grown man, and can make his own mistakes – you’re a child who eats off my sufferance. So long as that continues, what I say gets the last ring in your ears.’ I sipped through my lemonade, wishing it was liquor. ‘You see Yancey before you decided to enlist?’
He nodded, no longer smiling. ‘Said he’s got a gig in Brennock, at the Pig and Fiddle.’
‘He say when?’
‘After eight.’
‘If Adolphus is too busy playing soldier to take care of his responsibilities, then they fall on you. Go help Adeline with dinner. And don’t ever make me wait on a message again.’
He gave me a pretty good eye-fuck on the way to the back, but he went. It seemed like today was my day to be the prick. A lot of days are like that, if we’re being honest.
I took up a spot in the yard and re-lit the joint I’d fallen asleep over. When that wasn’t enough I rolled another, and when that wasn’t enough I figured nothing would be, and settled back to watch evening cross the cityscape.
13
I ate an early dinner then started off for Brennock. It was half a trek, and I broke up the monotony with a hit of breath when it felt appropriate, as it often did.
This section of the city was mostly industrial, cavernous mills and foundries with little nightlife to speak of. Yancey’s having to play there was a sign of the blight that had overtaken his career, a sharp reversal from the decade of uninterrupted success his talent and drive had earned him.
While playing a private party a year back some noble had said something or done something that made Yancey decide to arrange his face into a different pattern – an understandable impulse, if self-defeating in the long run. He’d gotten out after five months, which was shorter than I had expected – putting a digit on a noble pays out the same as murdering a dockworker. Yancey wasn’t soft, but the time he’d spent inside had done him no favors. His eyes were older and there was an occasional tremor to his vibrato. More than that, having gained a reputation for brutalizing members of the audience, his old fans weren’t quite so enthused about having him round. He’d been forced into accepting gigs he’d have laughed off not long earlier, which was why I found myself in a shitty bar in an ugly part of the city, surrounded by a group of people who seemed distinctly unenthused to be consuming the poetic stylings of one Yancey the Rhymer.
Ironically his misfortune had been a boon for me – since being deprived of the opportunity to make money off his craft he’d had to put more work into his sideline: playing middleman for rich folks who wanted my services. I felt a little bad about it, but then we’re all making our bread off someone’s misery. Me more than most, I supposed.
Happily I’d come between sets, so I didn’t need to watch him demonstrate his abilities to an unappreciative audience. He was at the counter dripping honey into the ear of a waitress two stone past pretty. She laughed and slapped at him playfully with a dishrag. Whatever else the Rhymer had lost, he could still string together a sentence.
‘If it ain’t the Duke himself.’ He ticked his bare skull toward a side booth and turned back to the maid. ‘Pour two beers for us, sugar – my man and I need to hash out some truth, and that always goes better well lubricated.’
The waitress went to get us our drinks, and I followed Yancey to the corner.
Yancey was a small man, with a coiled intensity that kept him constantly in motion. In the past he’d run to thin and wiry, biceps like pulled rope, but his time inside had bloated him and hemmed a ring of flesh around his midsection. Despite that his face seemed thinner and somehow paler, though his lineage was uncrossed Islander and his skin black as ink. He’d always been something of a coxcomb, his sense of style near as sharp as his ear, but lately that too had gone to pot, a casualty of his loss of income or interest.
My ass had barely scraped the wooden bench before he leaned in and tapped a finger against his nose. ‘You got a toot for me?’
‘Fresh out.’
‘Pity.’ Breath was a habit Yancey had taken to with unfortunate enthusiasm. ‘So how you been?’
‘I wouldn’t mind getting rained on, like everyone else in the city. How ’bout you?’
‘Nah, the heat don’t bother me.’
‘What’s your secret?’
‘I get my dick sucked a lot.’
‘I didn’t know that helped.’
‘It helps with everything.’ The server came by holding a pair of tankards in front of a pair of plump breasts. ‘Something about these Vaalan girls,’ he said after she left, sucking his teeth and falling silent – words failing him, for once.
‘I’d prefer a woman I could share a carriage seat with.’
‘More for me.’
‘A lot more.’
Yancey laughed. ‘Your boy said you wanted to speak to me on something.’ His grin was wide. ‘I remember when he came up to my waist, and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Child’s growing.’
‘As it turns out, he’s the purpose of the conversation.’
He motioned for me to continue. ‘Your mouth ain’t sewn shut.’
No one was listening, but I took a look around anyway. ‘Wren has the gift.’
‘Indeed.’ He took a sip from his brew, white foam around his pink lips.
‘I need someone who can give him the ins and outs of it, and who isn’t affiliated with the Throne – someone as far off their map as you can get.’
‘I’m no practitioner.’
‘But somewhere, in your long list of acquaintances, I suspect you’ve a person who fits my description.’
The Islanders had fled their homeland a millennium back, taking to the seas as it disappeared beneath the waves, a catastrophe so inconceivable and distant it had long ago merged into myth. Centuries of living as half- wanted guests in foreign lands had given them an aversion to government that was virtually a racial trait. Their entire civilization flourished out of sight of the authorities. They had their own banking houses, their own religious
