The Devil's Company

squeezing, as though it belonged to a succulent whore.

This poor fellow’s face was twisted in pain and humiliation, but when he saw us, he somehow understood we were not with his enemies, and some expression of sympathy in my eyes may have prompted him to speak. “Teaser’s escaped,” he called to me. “He’s gone out the front with the big blackie.”

I began to move toward the front of the house. A pair of constables moved forward to block my path, but I barreled against them with my shoulder, and they fell away easily enough, making room for me and Elias—cowering close behind me—to pass.

Once we pushed through the main room, we were mostly out of the fray. A trio of constables chased after us, but not very hard, mostly for form’s sake, so they could explain later that their efforts to apprehend us failed. No one paid these men enough to risk their lives. Arresting a pack of mollies was easy enough work, but best to leave masked bandits for the soldiers.

At the door, a pair of Reformation men stood keeping watch, but when they saw us come charging they quickly moved aside. One moved so fast he lost his balance and fell in my way, and I had to leap over him to keep from stumbling. Outside on the street a crowd had begun to gather, and they hardly knew what to make of us, but our appearance was met mostly with drunken cheers.

Fortunately the stoop was fairly well raised and gave me a sufficient view of the surrounding areas. I looked back and forth, and then I saw them. It was Teaser—I recognized him in an instant, despite the gloom of the street—and he was being pulled along by a very large and surprisingly graceful man. It was dark and I could not see his face, but I had no doubt that Teaser’s abductor was none other than Aadil.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

OLBORN IS FULL OF COUNTLESS LITTLE STREETS AND DARK ALLEYS, so it might, at first glance, seem the ideal place to make one’s escape, but many of these alleys are dead ends, and even a tough like Aadil, I reasoned, would not want to face two pursuers and manage a prisoner while pinned in a corner. I was therefore not very surprised when I saw that he ran down Cow Lane and toward the sheep pens. Perhaps he meant to lose us among the animals.

Elias and I both stripped our masks from our faces and dashed after Teaser and his abductor. Rain had begun to fall—not hard, but enough to turn the snow to slush and make the encrusted ice dangerously slick. We barreled forward as best we could upon so dangerous a surface, but it soon became apparent that we no longer had Aadil and Teaser in our sights. Elias began to slow down in defeat, but I would not have it. “To the docks,” I said. “He’ll try and take his prisoner across the water.”

Elias nodded, no doubt disappointed that our running was not yet at an end. But, tired though he may have been, he followed me as we wound our way through the dark streets only to emerge under the open sky of night near the docks. I heard now the chorus of human life: the oyster girls and meat-pie men calling their wares, the cackling of whores, the laughing of drunkards, and, of course, the endless cries of the watermen. “Scholars, will you have whores?” they called, an ancient pun on scullers and oars. The quip was as old as the city itself, perhaps, but never lost its spice for this easily entertained lot.

We stopped now on the docks, thick with rich and poor alike, all making their way off or onto boats. Then we heard the shouts upon the water. In accordance with another hoary custom, no respect for rank and class was afforded to those who dared to step foot in a boat, and so low men might call what lascivious words they had to high-born ladies or wealthy gentlemen. The king himself, if he deigned to cross the river by boat, would be afforded no deference, though I doubted he knew enough English to understand what insults might be lobbed at him.

Elias was breathing heavily, looking with unfocused eyes at the countless bodies that surrounded us. I gazed out upon the river, illuminated by a hundred lanterns of a hundred boatmen, a mirror of the starry dome of sky above us. There, not fifteen feet from shore, sat an enormous man, his back to us, and Teaser, facing forward. Between them the boatman rowed. Teaser could not have made his escape, for it would be certain death to plunge into those cold waters, even if he could swim. He was held now on a floating prison.

I grabbed Elias by the arm, dragged him down the dock stairs, and pushed him onto the first empty boat we found. I climbed in after him.

“Ho-ho,” the boatman said. He was a young fellow, his shoulders thick with muscles. “A couple of young sparks out for a quiet ride, is it?”

“Shut up,” I snapped, and jutted out a finger toward Aadil. “See you that boat? There’s extra coin in it if you can overtake them.”

He gave me a sideways glance but hopped in all the same and shoved off. He might have been a saucy fellow, but for all that, he knew how to put some grit into his labors, and we were soon pushing through the waves. The water here smelled half of the sea, half of sewage, and it lapped furiously against the sides of the boat.

“What is it now?” the boatman asked. “That spark made off with your catamite?”

“Do shut your mouth, fellow,” Elias snapped.

“Fellow, is it? I shall fellow you with this here oar, and say it was the first time a whore ever touched your fundament.”

“Saying it shan’t make it so,” Elias groused.

“Don’t bother,” I told him. “These boatmen will tell you up is down, only to see if doing so will agitate you.”

“Up is down, my spark,” the rower said. “All but fools know that, for it is only the great who tell us which is which, and if we care to look for ourselves we shall find out different.”

We were making some significant progress, I must say, and we closed the gap between ourselves and Aadil’s boat. At least I thought it was Aadil, for in the dark of the water, with only our lanterns to light our way, it was not always easy to tell which boat was which. Nevertheless, I felt reasonably certain. When I saw a figure in the boat we pursued turn around, and then urge his boatman to row faster, I knew we still hunted our true quarry.

“They’ve seen us,” I told the boatman. “Faster.”

“It don’t get any faster than this,” he answered, no longer having the wind for banter.

In the boat, the silhouette of Aadil turned again, snapped something at the boatman, and when he didn’t get what he wished, I observed him shoving the boatman aside. He began to row himself.

Somehow my own boatman caught sight of this, and once more found the strength within to run his mouth. “What’s this?” he shouted over to the other boatman. “You let that spark steal your whore?”

“I’ll get it back,” he called over, “and you’ll find it soon enough lodged in your sweet-smelling shitter.”

“No doubt,” our boatman called, “for it is but a shitten stick you wield, and it seeks the fundament the way a baby or a whoremonger seeks your mother’s bubbies.”

“Your mother has no bubbies,” the other called back, “for she was naught but a hairy he-bear who conceived you after being swived in the arse by a libertine hunter who knew neither arse from cunny—such a man being your father, or perhaps an ape of Africk; who can tell the one from the other?”

“And your father,” our boatman returned, “was the whoreson bum-firking daughter—”

“Quiet!” I cried, loud enough to be heard not just by our boatman but by the other as well.

In that instant, I heard the other’s oars quiet and when I looked over, even in the dark I could see them lifting out of the water. From the boat I heard a strange and yet familiar voice shout, “Weaver, is that you?” The voice contained hope and humor—and nothing at all unpleasant.

“Who is that?” I answered back.

“’Tis Aadil,” he said. And then he let out an enormous laugh. “Here I have been exhausting myself, fleeing as though there were someone dangerous after us, and all along it was only you?”

I could not but note his speech. Every time I had heard him open his mouth, he had grunted his words like a beastly savage. Now, though he spoke in the same musical accent he had always used, his speech was refined, grammatically proper, and on an equal footing to anyone born here.

I hardly knew what to say. “What is this?” was the best I could manage.

He let out another rich laugh. “I think,” he called over to us, “it is time we talked to each other in somewhat more frank terms. Let’s meet at the docks, and we’ll find someplace to tell each other our stories.”

MERCIFULLY, OUR BOATMEN seemed to understand that something most unexpected had passed between