“Yes, sir.”
“And Lieutenant Sardec…”
“Sir?”
“Next time please be a little more careful before discussing your duties with anybody not in this regiment. No matter who they are.”
“I will, sir.”
“That will be all, Lieutenant.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Getting in and out of the camp proved easier than Rik had expected. No one had stopped them from getting back to his bothy and claiming his rucksack. A quick check to make sure everything was still in place, to pick up some of his special gear and they were ready to head back.
At the gates the sentries had checked their passes with a mixture of resentment and envy but they had done nothing to stop them. Now they were back in Mama Horne’s, drinking deep and preparing for tonight’s meeting. Weasel had booked the room. Rik had written a note concerning the new arrangements to Bertragh and read the merchant’s tetchy reply to his compatriots. There was not a lot else they could do now except wait.
“That should be the last,” he told Weasel and the Barbarian, pointing to their full wine cups as he rose to seek out Rena. “You’ll need your wits about you tonight.”
“My wits are always about me,” said the Barbarian.
“Half of them anyway,” said Weasel. Rik was disconcerted, though, that they paid attention to him. Weasel gulped down his goblet’s contents and then shouted for chai. He was obviously more nervous than he looked. Rik was not surprised. Not only was he looking forward to taking possession of a small fortune, he was anticipating getting rid of something that could get them all burned at the stake if the Inquisition caught them.
Outside in the street, preparations were well under way for the Solace carnival. From a hundred households came the smell of frying fish and cinnamon scented wine. Children ran everywhere wearing masks of beasts and monsters and demons. Incense burned in the small shrines in every shop front. People flowed past in their temple best, heading for the mid-day service. At moonrise, Mourning would officially be at an end and the food and drink would flow. For quite a few people staggering out of the grog-shops, it looked like it had finished already.
“Do you want to go to temple?” Rena asked.
Rik shook his head. “I stopped going a long time ago when Leon and I busted out of the orphanage.”
She gave him a sidelong glance then returned to looking at the children skipping in a ring around the pig rummaging in one of the garbage mounds. “You never knew your mother and father?”
“No.”
“You know anything about them?”
“They said my father was an Exalted and my mother was a street girl but how could they know. I talked to one old woman who remembered my mother being brought to the poorhouse. She claimed she gibbered something about a Terrarch and blasphemy as she gave birth.”
“Couldn’t you ask your mother?”
“She died while I was being born. Or so they said. You never know. Maybe she ran off afterwards. These things happen.”
“How can you think that of your own mother?”
“I was born in Sorrow, remember? A hundred worse things happen every day.”
She reached out and took his hand as though in sympathy. He wanted none of it, and let her hand go. He found himself oddly angry without knowing why. He thought he had come to terms with this all a long time ago.
“You’ve known Leon a long time then,” she said, obviously trying to change the subject. A young boy in an angel mask fled screaming from two girls garbed as demons. He bounced off Rik as he raced passed. Automatically Rik checked his purse, but nothing was taken. Rena noticed the action.
“You’re very suspicious.”
“I’ve known Leon since we both could walk,” said Rik choosing to ignore the statement. Somewhere in a side street someone was banging on some drums. Someone else was tuning up a fiddle. People were getting ready to have a party. They turned down another narrow alleyway. A man screamed at Rik and came straight at him with a hatchet. He stepped to one side and the man raced passed chasing a chicken down an even narrower alley. It looked like someone’s feast day meal was making a break for it.
Rik glanced around warily, keeping his hands near his weapons. He felt at home here in the maze of the Pit, in the way he did in Sorrow but this was not his home. The bully boys did not know him. The pickpockets would still chance their hands. It did not matter that it was Solace to them. The predators were always hungry. He half expected some of the Agante hill-men to come out of the side alleyways but they did not.
Ahead of him, he could smell the river, murky water and sewage flow mingling with the smell of plants and cooking food. They emerged onto a small muddy bank. On one side of them was a tavern built on a stilt-borne platform over the river. It was an extension of a stone building on the riverside, and some of the stonework flowed onto the platform itself. Rik had seen such buildings before. Inevitably they crumbled into the water.
On the other side of the river, he could see warehouses and wharves and barges tied up on the waterfront. Most of them were occupied only by skeleton crews and watchmen now. By nightfall even those would be drunk, and then the river gangs would come out. From here he could see Bertragh’s go-down. He wanted to get another look at it while there was still light. Later, he thought, they would take a walk by the place. It never hurt to take a second look.
“Let’s have a drink here,” said Rik leading Rena into the bustle of the tavern. The men here were poor and hard-faced, mostly dockside labourers and the sort of scum who scavenged a living by the river banks. Their clothes had a damp, sodden look, and mud trailed from the cuffs of their trousers. They were not used to seeing a young and pretty girl. Some of them licked their lips appreciatively. Rik grinned nastily and placed his hands ostentatiously on the hilt of his weapons. The tavern goers swiftly looked away.
They took a table on the platform overlooking the river, and Rik called for grog. Rena declined asking for small beer. Rik paid for both and told the tavern-keeper to leave the bottle. Coin changed hands.
“What are you thinking?” asked the girl.
Why did women always ask you that, Rik wondered? “I was thinking about those boats. A lot of them are going to be robbed by dawn tomorrow if there’s anything worth taking on them.”
“Why do you always think about such things?”
“Upbringing, I guess. I saw a lot of that stuff happen in Sorrow.”
“There are poor people everywhere. Desperate enough to steal.” She said it as if it were somehow worse than selling your body on the street. Certainly it was in the eyes of the law. Property was a sacred thing to the Exalted and those who aped them. Crimes against property were treated with the same severity as heresy.
“Yes, there are,” said Rik.
“Is that why you became a soldier?” Rik did not want to explain to her the whole business with Antonio and Sabena. It was too depressing to recount, and you never knew, word of his presence might even reach the gang lord from here. Hopefully by now he had long forgotten Rik but it was never good to take chances with these things.
“No.”
“Why then?”
“I needed a job.”
“A job that could kill you?”
“You can get killed crossing the road. You can get killed by robbers. You can get killed by the plague.” He saw by the way she winced that he had opened an old wound. “Sorry.”
“No matter.”
“It’s better to be the man carrying the gun, than the man whose pig is carried away by the man with the gun.”
