ceramics, leather-work, woodturning and lapidary, musical instruments and elegant furniture were crafted there.
I was prospecting for drugs, just as a gold miner follows rules to find deposits. Scolopendium is illegal everywhere except the Plainslands-in Awia the laws have been tight for fifty years and counting; in Hacilith’s deprived streets the problem is at its most serious; and at the Lowespass trenches its use is tackled very severely. But centipede fern grows wild in Ladygrace, the sparsely populated foothills of southern Darkling. The governor of Hacilith tried to pay the Neithernor villagers to burn the moorland hillsides and destroy the plants but thankfully they never succumbed to the offer. Scolopendium extracted from the fern fronds flows out of Ladygrace together with more well-known drugs, and addicts’ money is sucked back in along the same routes. The ban is almost impossible to enforce.
To find scolopendium in a town look for boundaries, for example the edge between rich and poor districts, or between streets of different trades-where houses begin at the edge of the market or where at night people empty from cafes into clubs. The prospector should investigate places where newly arrived travelers are lingering. Longshoremen with cargoes from Hacilith are the most promising, because a handful of cat hidden in a cabin is worth twice as much as a richly stocked hold. When I was a dealer I witnessed even the most scrupulous merchants give in to greed. I determined not to buy from the pushers at the dockside, but they would only be a couple of links down the chain from one of the more powerful traffickers I know.
Buildings give clues: dirty windows and peeling paint in a rich district, or a tidy house in the middle of a slum. This is because they are houses where business is done. When I’m hooked, I read the signs subconsciously; a sixth sense guides me to a fix.
I walked past clustered half-timbered buildings with warm red brick in herringbone designs. Stonecrop grew out of the walls that were topped with triangular cerulean-blue tiles and bearded with long, gray lichen. The town looked like a grounded sunset.
Following my rules brought me to the quayside. Awndyn harbor was a mass of boats. At low tide they all beached, propped up against each other, and fishermen walked across their wooden decks from harbor wall to sand spit. At full tide they all sailed together, a flotilla of bottle green and white, Awndyn’s dolphin insignia leaping on prows and mastheads. As dusk fell, I watched them unloading, passing meters of loose netting in human chains to the jetty, where boys rocked wooden carts on iron wheels back and forth to get them moving on the rails. The boys were paid a penny a half day to shunt the heavy carts to a warehouse where fisherwives unloaded the catch into crates of salt and sawdust.
After dark it began to drizzle sleet. The road was plastered in a thin layer of wet brown mud. I walked along the seafront and passed the Teredo Mill, a tall cider mill with peeling rose-pink window frames, dove-holes in diamond shapes in its ochre-colored walls. It was roofed with white squares cut from sections of Insect paper. Last harvest’s apples had been pressed so the intense sweet smell that hung around the mill in autumn was replaced by the heady reek of fermentation.
A group of young apprentice brewers were sheltering in the underpass where a path ran under the waterwheel’s cobbled sluice. The wheel was raised from its millstream and clean water flowed along the conduit above their heads. They were smoking cigarettes after a day’s work. One of the promenade street lamps cast my shadow long across the road. The brewers regarded me curiously. The youngest had dyed purple hair, baggy checkered trousers and a black coat that reached the floor. I checked him out for the marks of an addict, drew a blank. Well, I haven’t hit gold but I’m very close. We fell into the quiet of mutual examination, until he nudged his friend and bowed. He walked over the road to me. “Comet?”
“Yes?”
“It is…it is you?” He looked back to his friends, who all made “Go on” motions.
I didn’t want their presence to scare away the sort of character I was really looking for. I was about to tell him to get lost but something of my Hacilith self was reflected in him. He didn’t know what to say-there was awe in his eyes like tears. His coworkers crowded around with eager expressions. They were a little too well-heeled to be true rebels. “So you’ve met the Emperor’s Messenger,” I said. “How can I help you?”
“Did you see the duel between Gio and Wrenn?”
“What’s the new Serein like?”
“Tell us the tactic he used!”
“Tell us if he’s married,” a girl said. Her lanky body had a passing resemblance to a Rhydanne woman and momentarily I had to control myself.
“I just flew here…” I said.
“Is it true there’s never been a Swordsman as good as Wrenn?”
I tried, “I’ve just returned from Darkling. Let me tell you-”
“I don’t believe Wrenn taught himself. He must be a genius!”
“My name’s Dunnock,” said the boy with purple hair. “I study music-in the governor’s arty set, but she demands a lot of her circle.”
Wonderful, I thought; other Eszai have the Fourlands’ best vying to be trained by them in the Select Fyrd; I attract gangs of disaffected youth. I tried a simple approach. “Actually the Governor sent me to find a man called Cinna Bawtere. I’ve been ordered to arrest him. Have you heard of him?”
“What if we have?”
“Why do you want to arrest him?”
I rounded on Dunnock. “Show me where his lair is these days.”
The brewers, now quiet, ushered me through the underpass. My leather-soled boots squeaked on the tiling; then we turned left on Seething Lane away from the sea, past the puppet-maker’s shop and into the artists’ quarter.
Shop signs projected above doorways: CROSSBOW CLOCKWORK LTD and FYRD RECRUITMENT LOWESPASS VICTORY HOUSE. APPLEJACK AND FINE TEREDO CALVADOS. Bleak graffiti sporadically decorated the walls between them, declaring, “Ban the Ballista” and
The local resentment of Awian refugees was worse than I thought. It made me angry-they weren’t to blame for being made homeless by the Insect swarm. In fact, I thought guiltily, the swarm had largely been my fault. I knew that Tern was trying to persuade the Wrought armorers back to continue their vital tradition in her manor. Her blacksmiths worked extremely hard wherever they had been forced to settle.
The Swindlestock Bar was dead center of the artists’ quarter. It was built inside the mouth of a gigantic Insect tunnel, like a gray hood with a rough, deeply shadowed papier-mache texture. The tunnel had been cut from the Paperlands and shipped south for building material; the nightclub’s front projected from its opening, with two stories of green-glazed bricks and black beams. Paper curved down to the ground, looking like a huge worm cast. Windows had been cut in it. Outside the door, a sloughed Insect skin hung in an iron gibbet, its six spiked legs sticking out. It was transparent brown and gnarled; it revolved slowly, a dead weight in the sea breeze.
I know some clubs in Awndyn that could be described as meat markets. This was more of a delicatessen. Green light so pale it was almost gray reflected on the water pooled between the cobbles. The vague and eerie light came from cylindrical glass jars by the club’s open door-larvae lamps-lanterns full of glow-worm larvae. The doorman picked one up and shook it to make it brighter.
The brewers nodded at the doorman and walked straight in. Inside, the floor was malachite-colored tiles, the decor ebony with a matte shine. In a deep fireplace sea-driftwood burned with copper-green sparks. A lone musician up on the stage was salivating into a saxophone. He played exceptionally; he must have been one of Swallow’s students. The larvae lamps emphasized his sallow face as he leaned across their shifting light. He paused, recognizing me, and his eyebrows sprang right into his hairline, then he started up another low, sexy drone, playing his very best as if I was a talent spotter.
The brewers vanished into the press of bodies around the stage. Dunnock turned to me and pointed at the ceiling. “Check upstairs. They ask to see track marks,” he added, agitated. “You’re not wearing a sword.”
I raised a hand to calm him. “I don’t need a sword to arrest the likes of Bawtere.”
“Wow. They’re never going to believe this back at the vats.”
“Keep it a secret!” I said. I elbowed through the dancers’ slow jazz wave to the stairs. They creaked as I climbed them. At the top, a bull’s-eye lantern swung in front of my face, startling me, and a voice rasped, “Oo’s
