groaned as he hit it and grabbed hold. He smacked his face against the wooden planking, and almost spat out his baton.
He scrambled with his feet, hauled with his arms, and managed to get an elbow hooked over the top. Then there was a hard blow to his left boot, and he looked down to see one of the dogs biting on it, shaking its head from side to side. He felt no pain, so could only guess that its teeth had sunk into the low heel.
The other two hounds were rushing up, and within that one quick glance, he registered the wrongness of them. Matted hair, caked with all manner of noisome dirt; jaws agape, but entirely dry, no sheen of spit even on their pale and limp tongues; lifeless eyes. Silent, as surely no dogs would be at such a moment.
Choking back what might easily become blind terror, Quire struggled to drag himself up and over the gate, but the weight of the creature pulling at his leg was too much. Another of them sank down and began tearing at the foot of the gate with teeth and paws alike. The third jumped at him. Somehow he managed to sway his body just enough to avoid its teeth. It fell back, lost its footing and rolled.
Quire straightened his left ankle, pointing his naked foot. It slid free from the boot and the dog dropped back to the ground, trophy firmly grasped in its jaws. In an ungainly windmill of legs and arms, Quire pulled himself up and toppled over the gate. He hit the paved yard on the far side hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs and set his head spinning. He let the baton fall from his mouth and lay on his back, groaning.
A furious attack was now launched upon the gate. There was a gap of perhaps half an inch between it and the ground. It was a chaos of snapping teeth and scraping claws. All three dogs were breaking away fragments of wood, sending cracks running up through the planks. They were sure to do themselves harm with such ferocious brutality, but Quire was almost certain that that would be of no great consequence or concern to them. These were surely beasts of the same kind as the man he had fought on the ice. The gate would yield before they did.
Quire rolled carefully on to his hands and knees. His fall had done him no lasting damage, but it felt as though most parts of him were aching. He looked about, trying and failing to ignore the ever more ominous sounds of wood breaking apart. It was a cooper’s shop and yard. The walls were higher than the gate, though there were several barrels standing about that might give him enough of a start to get out and over without doing himself worse injury than he had already suffered.
He got to his feet, cursing as his bare foot inevitably found a tack or sharp pebble the night had hidden. One of the dogs had got its paws and a good part of its head through a ragged hole in the bottom of the gate. Some of the planks were splitting away from one another and starting to lift as the beast thrust itself forward again and again. Quire stopped and picked up his baton. It was heavy, but he was not sure it would crack open a dog’s skull quickly enough. The doors of the workshop itself were shut, and had a light chain and lock across them. He went to the window to look inside, but could make nothing out. The gate creaked and cracked ominously behind him.
Quire kicked at the workshop doors once, twice. Thrice, and the lock gave, the chain fell slack and he was in. It seemed to him that running was not likely to improve his position greatly, and if the dogs were set on coming in under the gate, that would give him as good a target to aim at as he was ever likely to get. He had seen coopers using some vicious-looking tools to work wood in the past; he could only hope that this one was no different. Any craftsman in his right mind would have his best tools away home with him, but the old ones, the no longer used ones, they might still be here.
Within moments he re-emerged into the yard clutching a broadaxe. It was short-handled, wide-headed. Not of the sharpest sort, as best a quick run of his thumb along the blade could tell, but a great deal better than a baton.
He had to move more quickly than he had anticipated, for the first of the dogs was almost in. Its mouth a mass of broken teeth and wood splinters, it was dragging itself through on its belly. It snapped at him as he drew near, and lunged, but the gate was strong enough—just—to keep it pinned for a moment longer.
That was all Quire needed. He hacked down at the dog’s neck. That first blow did not go deep, but it parted the skin, and it taught Quire the weight and balance of the weapon. His second opened a yawning wound, exposing meat and bone and gristle. The third widened it, and the fourth went through and separated head from shuddering body.
The jaw still worked, as that head rolled free. It snapped shut, and slowly opened. The headless torso still scraped feebly at the ground. There was no blood. Just a spreading slick of some stinking liquid of imprecise, pallid shade. A stench of decay and rot burst from the stump of the neck.
The other two dogs were still ripping the gate to pieces, bit by bit. If they came both at once, Quire suspected he might have a problem.
Someone was shouting. Quire looked round and up. At one of the windows high on the Canongate tenements, a woman was leaning out, a lantern in her hand.
“Watch! Watch!” she was screeching, and a fairer sound Quire had never heard. “Thieves in the yards! Thieves on the South Back!”
Another window was lifted, another voice—a man’s this time—added to the hue and cry. Through it, Quire heard a single long, thin whistle, coming from somewhere out on the South Back. At once, the two remaining dogs broke off from their attack, and Quire heard the soft tap-tap of their brisk walk away.
He waited for the span of several deep, restorative breaths, revelling in the continued accusatory yells coming from that blessed woman. He doubted she could even see him, especially waving a lantern around in her own face, but he blew her a kiss anyway.
Then he dropped the broadaxe, sat down heavily on his backside and stared at the dog’s head lying at his feet.
Surgeon’s Square
Quire did not bother to knock at the door of the Royal Infirmary’s autopsy room. He pushed it open and walked straight in, for he did not mean to be refused an invitation.
Robert Christison and a pair of assistants were gathered about a corpse on one of the slabs, all clad in soiled aprons, all leaning over the open body with expressions of rapt interest. Quire’s abrupt appearance brought them erect, and interest was replaced upon their faces by alarm at the dishevelled apparition manifested before them.
“Sergeant Quire?” Christison said in surprise.
He held some strange sort of tongs or pincers in his hand, and tapped at the air with them, in Quire’s general direction.
“You are looking rather the worse for wear, Sergeant,” he said.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that, sir.”
Quire could hardly dispute it. He was unshaven, his chin and cheeks darkened by grizzled stubble. His eyes must, he knew, betray the sleepless night he had just passed, and the heavy sack he had cradled in his arms was filthy. He presented more the appearance of an indigent than a sergeant of police, no doubt.
“I don’t believe I was expecting a visit from you,” Christison observed. “Even the police are not encouraged to wander too freely into rooms such as this, you know, Sergeant.”
“I’m just hoping for a few minutes of your time, sir. I think you’ll find them well spent.”
Christison spread his hands above the partially dissected corpse. Though Quire was trying not to look too directly at the gruesome spectacle, he could not help but see that it was a woman, perhaps fifty or so years old.
“I am, as you can see, engaged in rather important business at the moment. Extremely important, I would say. This woman’s death was taken for an unhappy accident—an excess of laudanum—until certain aspects of the case drew my notice. Certain bruising about her person, to be precise, suggestive of forced administration of the drug.
“The body will not take a bruise after death. Were you aware of that, Sergeant? Or, to be more precise, the bruising that occurs after death is distinctive and does not result from force or blows, as might be the case in life. I am, I believe, the first in the country to have demonstrated and documented this with what might be called the proper rigour of the scientific method.”
Quire shifted uncomfortably. The sack he carried was heavy, and his weaker arm was aching.
