He took the criticism with equanimity. ‘I’ll work on that,’ he said, and seemed even to mean it. Then he nodded at the Muscle. ‘Don’t rough him up too bad,’ Adisu said. ‘We’ve got all night for that.’
Zaga pulled a length of chain from his back pocket and came towards me, whirling the metal above his head in a steady loop. It was meant to fix my attention, so I ignored it, let it bounce down off my forehead and above my eye. It hurt like a motherfucker, hurt through what I’d already suffered, but it left me ready for Zaga’s follow up. He came in behind the lash and he met the edge of my knife, left off with a chunk of flesh missing from the hand he’d stretched out to grab me.
Adisu laughed and clapped twice ‘That was a nice move, Warden.’
Zaga seemed less enthused. This time he made no attempt at subtlety, just bull-rushed me back against the wall, pinning down my arms. I leaned into him, brought my mouth to where his neck met his shoulder, tore a chunk of flesh from it, tasted blood. He screamed and dropped me and scuttled backwards.
Our struggle seemed no longer to amuse Adisu. ‘Can’t you do a fucking thing I ask you?’ he said to his man, angrily. A knife appeared in his hands, and he started to circle around to my right.
He needn’t have bothered. The wounds I’d given Zaga had done more to enrage than slow him, and his bear hug had left me faint and short of breath. I wouldn’t last another pass. Black dots clouded my vision, like I’d been staring too long into a fire.
I guess that was why I missed her entrance, didn’t realize she was there till she spoke. I guess the others were pretty taken with the action in front of them, because they seemed as surprised as I was. ‘What you boys doing out here, with the sun so bright and your souls so dark?’
Mazzie leaned against the walls of a tenement. I’d only seen her sitting, and by candlelight, and she was shorter and uglier than I’d thought, bad skin and fat legs. Her calico dress was faded, and stuck to her flesh with sweat. But her words had been accompanied by a gust of wind, the first breeze in a fortnight. A cold one, too cold – it set the spine shivering, unsettled the mind.
Adisu felt it. A moment before he’d been as eager as a virgin in a whorehouse, but you could see him start to wither. ‘I got no quarrel with you, Auntie. This is between me and the man here.’
‘Little bird, little bird,’ Mazzie continued. ‘What you doing so far from home?’
‘This is my home,’ Adisu said, then gestured at me. ‘I’m dealing with a trespasser.’
‘This is
‘He wasn’t breastfed,’ I said, but no one seemed to hear. I’d become a sideshow at my own execution.
‘You got no call to be here, witch,’ Adisu said. ‘Get going, before I set a man on you.’
It might have been a trick of the light but Mazzie’s eyes seemed black as ink, as a tomb, as the void. She spoke in the singsong she always used, with the same gentle lilt, but it was as threatening as cold steel. ‘I see it now, little bird. Poor, poor thing. Broken from the beginning, broken right from the egg. The things been done to you, you never had no kind of chance.’
‘I’m warning you, keep that fucking mouth shut!’
‘When he used to sneak into your room at night, the things he did. It comes back to you, don’t it? When you go under, when sleep comes. You can snort breath all you want, but you gotta drop down sometime. And he’s waiting when it does, isn’t he? Waiting for you, just like when you was a child.’
‘Shut her up,’ Adisu said to the muscle, his voice cracking.
‘Any hand you touch me with is gonna rot off before dusk,’ Mazzie answered, though she kept the sloe pools of her eyes on Adisu. ‘By tomorrow it’ll be in your other arm, then your legs and your ears and your tongue and your cock. By the full moon you’ll be wagging stumps at passers-by, and hoping they drop coin in your cup.’
Zaga looked at Mazzie for a long while. Then he took a small but distinct step backwards.
‘He set the crack in your mind, didn’t he? And it only gets wider, little bird, wider and darker. One day it’ll swallow you up, swallow you right up and there won’t be nothing left. You’ll do it yourself, I think, hoping it’ll get you free of him. But I’ve seen what comes next, little bird – and I’m sad to say it, but he’ll be waiting for you there too.’
The slim hold Adisu had maintained on sanity was slipping fast. ‘I couldn’t do nothing to stop it,’ he said, almost pleading. ‘I wasn’t but four or five.’
The cheroot sparked to life. Zaga jumped about a foot and a half. ‘You fade away now, little bird,’ Mazzie said. ‘This is no place for you anymore.’
The mad are capable of depths of passion unknown to the sane, and during our association I’d seen most every emotion played in extremity across Adisu’s face. Fury, joy, despair. But I’d never seen fear. Now that was all there was, emanating out like a stench, enveloping the man he’d brought with him. He turned and broke without even glancing at me, so utterly had he forgotten his revenge in the terror of the moment. Zaga was close on his heels.
That was the last I ever saw of Adisu. They found him floating off the docks a week or so later. He’d been in there long enough that determining the cause of death was no longer possible, or so I was told. I figured he’d topped himself, but it didn’t seem at all impossible to imagine it was reparations from one of his boys, or payback from a competitor. Let’s just say there were a lot of dry eyes in Rigus, the day Adisu the Damned was pulled out of the harbor.
Mazzie watched them disappear, puffing her smoke, eyes gradually returning to their customary cocoa. ‘How you holding up, Warden?’ she asked.
‘Peachy keen,’ I said, then tumbled forward into the muck.
39
The first thing I saw on waking was a thick circlet of flies hovering above my head, tumbling over each other in excitement at the upcoming feast. It was a few moments before I had the strength to brush them away. Their buzzing seemed to intensify, as if angered to discover I wasn’t yet dead. I could empathize with their disappointment.
I was lying on a bed. It was lumpy and hard, but it wasn’t a shallow grave, so I didn’t have much cause to complain. Mazzie was in the opposite corner of the shack, hovering over her stove, spooning one of the pots. If she noticed I’d revived, she didn’t make any point of congratulating me on it. For my part, I was happy for the silence to go on indefinitely.
Only death goes on forever. After a while whatever task Mazzie had set herself seemed complete. She filled a brass cup from one of the kettles, then brought it over to me.
‘First thing to be said – if it was just a question of you being made a corpse, I wouldn’t have bothered to walk outside my house.’
‘All right.’
‘I don’t want you thinking that you matter to me.’
‘Not for a moment.’
‘But you were right when you said there’s something special in that boy. And you were right when you said it’ll ruin him if he doesn’t get help. I don’t just mean with the Art. He’s got wildness in him, and if it ain’t shaped he’ll get himself knifed in an alley even if I keep him from burning out his brain. He needs someone to look out for him, and the Firstborn seems to have decided that would be you.’
‘I understand,’ I said, and I did.
She nodded and shoved the cup into my hands. ‘Drink this.’
It was mostly cheap whiskey leavened with honey. What wasn’t cheap whiskey leavened with honey was the foulest rot I’d ever tasted.
‘Don’t you puke on my sheets,’ she said.
I managed to follow her directive, but it took some doing. ‘Is this going to fix me up?’
‘There’s no kind of medicine to fix your type of broken.’
I wasn’t in any position to argue with that. All the same I finished the rest of what was in my cup.
‘The drink will speed up your healing. In an hour, you’ll look like hell but won’t feel like it. In five, you won’t look like it. Least,’ she smiled nastily, ‘not because of the bruising.’
‘I’m grateful,’ I said.
