papers.”
There were no papers. One-Eye was able to detect nothing hidden anywhere. If I wanted to trace the papers, I’d have to start with the crew. Someone had to help Raven take them off.
We left the ship. Goblin and Pawnbroker found a good spot from which they could watch it. Silent and Otto took off on Raven’s trail. The rest of us went back and wakened the Lieutenant. He thought taking the ship was a good idea.
He’d never liked Raven much. I think he was motivated by more than practical considerations.
Chapter Forty-Two
Meadenvil
The refugee
The rumors and incredible stories swept through Meadenvil rapidly. Shed heard about the ship from Juniper within hours of her arrival. He was stunned. The Black Company run out? Crushed by their masters? That made no sense. What the hell was going on up there?
His mother. Sal. His friends. What had become of them? If half the stories were true, Juniper was a desolation. The battle with the black castle had consumed the city.
He wanted desperately to go find somebody, ask about his people. He fought the urge. He had to forget his homeland. Knowing that Croaker and his bunch, the whole thing could be a trick to smoke him out.
For a day he remained in hiding, in his rented room, debating, till he convinced himself that he should do nothing. If the Company was on the run, it would be leaving again. Soon. Us former masters would be looking for it.
Would the Taken come after him, too? No. They had no quarrel with him. They did not care about his crimes. Only the Custodians wanted him... He wondered about Bullock, rotting in prison, accused of Raven’s murder. He did not understand that at all, but was too nervous to investigate. The answer was not significant in the equation of Marron Shed’s survival.
After his day in isolation he decided to resume his quest for a place of business. He was looking for a partnership in a tavern, having decided to stick with what he knew.
It had to be a better place. One that would not lead him into financial difficulties the way the Lily had. Each time he recalled the Lily, he suffered moments of homesickness and nostalgia, of bottomless loneliness. He had been a loner all his life, but never alone. This exile was filled with pain.
He was walking a narrow, shadowed street, slogging uphill through mud left by a nighttime rain, when something in the corner of his eye sent chills to the deeps of his soul. He stopped and whirled so swiftly he knocked another pedestrian down. As he helped the man rise, apologizing profusely, he glared into the shadows of an alley.
“Conscience playing tricks on me, I guess,” he murmured, after parting with his victim. But he knew better. He had seen it. Had heard his name called softly. He went to the mouth of the gap between buildings. But it had not waited for him.
A block later he laughed nervously, trying to convince himself it had been a trick of imagination after all. What the hell would the castle creatures be doing in Meadenvil? They’d been wiped out... But the Company guys who had fled here didn’t know that for sure, did they? They had run off before the fight was over. They just hoped their bosses had won, because the other side was even worse than theirs.
He was being silly. How could the creature have gotten here? No ship’s master would sell passage to a thing like that.
“Shed, you’re worrying yourself silly about nothing.” He entered a tavern called The Ruby Glass, operated by a man named Selkirk. Shed’s landlord had recommended both.
Their discussions were fruitful. Shed agreed to return the following afternoon.
Shed was sharing a beer with his prospective partner. His proposition seemed beneficial, for Selkirk had satisfied himself as to his character and now was trying to sell him on the Ruby Glass. “Night business will pick up once the scare is over.”
“Scare?”
“Yeah. Some people have disappeared around the neighborhood. Five or six in the last week. After dark. Not the kind usually grabbed by the press gangs. So people have been staying inside. We aren’t getting the usual night
traffic.”
The temperature seemed to drop forty degrees. Shed sat rigid as a board, eyes vacant, the old fear sliding through him like the passage of snakes. His fingers rose to the shape of the amulet hidden beneath his shirt. “Hey, Marron, what’s the matter?” “That’s how it started in Juniper,” he said, unaware that he was speaking. “Only it was just the dead. But they wanted them living. If they could get them. I have to go.” “Shed? What the hell is wrong?” He came out of it momentarily. “Oh. Sorry, Selkirk. Yeah. We have a deal. But there’s something I have to do first. Something I need to check on.” “What?”
“Nothing to do with you. With us. We’re ready to go. I’ll bring my stuff up tomorrow and we can get together with the people we need to close the deal legally. I just have something else to do right now.”
He went out of the place practically running, not sure what he could do or where he could start, not even if he was sane in his assumption. But he was sure that what had happened in Juniper would reoccur in Meadenvil. And a lot faster if the creatures were doing their own collecting. He touched his amulet again, wondering how much protection it afforded. Was it puissant? Or just a promise? He hurried to his rooming house, where people were patient with his questions, knowing he was from out of town. He asked about Raven. The murder had been the talk of the town, what with a foreign policeman having been charged on the accusation of his own men. But nobody knew anything. There was no eyewitness to Raven’s death except Asa. And Asa was in Juniper. Probably dead.
The Black Company would not have wanted him turning witness against them.
He shed an impulse to contact the survivors. They might want him out of the way, too.
He was on his own with this.
The place where Raven had died seemed a likely place to start. Who knew where that was? Asa. Asa was not available. Who else? How about Bullock?
His guts knotted. Bullock represented everything he feared back home. In a cage here, but still very much a symbol. Could he face the man?
Would the man tell him anything?
Finding Bullock was no problem. The main prison did not move. Finding the courage to face him, even from beyond bars, was another matter. But this entire city lay under a shadow.
Torment racked Shed. Guilt cut him apart. He had done things that left him unable to endure himself. He had committed crimes for which there was no way of making restitution. Yet here was something...
“You’re a fool, Marron Shed,” he told himself. “Don’t worry about it. Meadenvil can look out for itself. Just move on to another city.”
But something deeper than cowardice told him he could not run. And not just from himself. A creature from the black castle had appeared in Meadenvil. Two men who had had dealings with the castle had come here. That could not be coincidence. Suppose he moved on? What was to keep the creatures from turning up again, wherever he went?
He had made a deal with a devil. On a gut level he sensed that the net in which he had been taken had to be unwoven strand by strand.
He moved the every-day, cowardly Shed to a throne far behind his eyes and brought forward the Shed who had hunted with Krage and eventually killed his tormentor.
He did not recall the cock-and-bull story he used to get past the wards, but did bullshit his way in to see Bullock.
The Inquisitor had lost none of his spirit. He came to the bars spitting and cursing and promising Shed an excruciating death.
