loaded with dry goods. A man on a boneshaker bicycle whizzed along the sidewalk. Two pretty girls with red ribbons in their hair skipped arm in arm across the street, lifting their bare knees high, their high-pitched laughter like the little lame balloon man’s whistle, far and wee.
“‘Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill,’” he said quietly. “‘Come Shepherd, and again begin the quest!’”
He turned from the window and said, “I was ten, and my father took my little sister and me from our little village of Lech to Stubenbach, where a band of Gypsies had arrived with their traveling show. It was just the three of us; my mother refused to go and warned Papa he must watch us with an eagle eye, for the Gypsies were widely believed to steal children. ‘Devil-worshippers,’ she called them. But my Papa, though only a poor farmer, had the heart of an adventurer, and so we went. There were dancers and acrobats and fortune-tellers—and the food!
“It had the body of a lion, the head of an eagle, and a python for a tail. A fake, and not a very good fake. They had sutured the parts together with thick black twine, but I did not come to that conclusion until many years later. I was a child. I saw the beast with a child’s eyes, eyes that could not look away. What sort of thing is this and how could it
He turned back to the window. The sun broke over the buildings on the eastern side of the street, flooding the avenue with golden light.
“That day was the beginning.”
“I was fifteen, and my first monster had the same name as me,” Jacob Torrance said. “He came home after a night with his mistress and a bottle of rotgut and started beating my mother with the business end of a joiner’s mallet. So I picked up the closest thing at hand—just happened to be his Springfield musket—and blew a hole the size of a turnip through the back of his head. Been killing monsters ever since.”
Von Helrung was frowning. “Thomas Arkwright was no monster until you made him one.”
“Thomas Arkwright was an agent for the British intelligence service.”
“How do you know this? Did Arkwright tell you? No! You
“Besides Kearns, there are at least two sets of players at this poker table,
“Why would the English send a spy to infiltrate our ranks if Kearns holds the key to the
“Getting to that. Arkwright obviously knew Warthrop had the
“Needed him… for what?” Von Helrung appeared confused.
“Not sure. But I’m pretty sure that Jack Kearns had the
Von Helrung thought for a moment, and then snorted with disgust.
“And Arkwright is sent here to track Warthrop tracking the
“That’s where I think the first set of players comes in. Kearns went to someone else, another government— maybe the French, no love lost there—and he’s playing them off each other.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Warthrop does. That’s the next step. And I say we don’t waste time taking it. They’ll be expecting Arkwright back soon, and Arkwright isn’t coming back… soon or any other time.”
“Because you killed him,” I piped up. I was still furious at him. “You didn’t have to do what you did.”
“Think so? And anyway, I killed him in only the loosest definition of the word.”
“Why did you kill him, Jacob?” von Helrung asked quietly. “What did you fear?”
Torrance said nothing at first; he played with his signet ring.