Rachel snorted. “Save your sermons. I’ve no intention of killing myself. Look over there, corpse face.” She gestured towards the broken pane, the glass she’d smashed to make her knives. Already there were ghosts rising through the dark red mist beyond. It would only be a matter of time until one of them noticed and came to investigate. “I’m afraid it broke,” she said. “Quite suddenly and inexplicably.”
Culver cursed. “You stupid bitch. Did you want to get yourself possessed? The whole room will have to be blessed now.” He dragged a hand through his short hair, thinking for a moment, before he looked back at her. “Sod the waiting list,” he said. “We’ll temper you and the angel tonight.”
4
Fog always brought more victims to the Widow’s Hook. The damp grey air had filled the lanes around the broth shop for three days now, softening mud walls and wilting the eaves of gin dens and hovels until the whole neighborhood seemed about to sink back into the wet brown earth. In such weather newcomers easily became lost in Sandport, and there had been no shortage of those recently: rich refugees who’d arrived by churchship after the chained city of Deepgate fell. Inevitably, some of these would wander into places they would have preferred to avoid. So when Jack Caulker heard the piper outside the Hook squawk out his warning medley, he leaned back on his stool, downed the last of his fishbeer, and gave the nod to Hammer Eric by the door.
It seemed another stranger was about to venture inside.
They had robbed and murdered nine so far-if you didn’t include the beggar woman, who’d had nothing worth selling but her long yellow hair-and dragged their bodies down to the river for the crabs to pick clean. And still the victims came. Few of Sandport’s barges or skiffs would risk sailing for Shale or Clune in this unholy murk, and so plenty of Deepgate’s merchants and nobles had been trapped here. So many had been turning up at the Widow’s Hook recently that Jack Caulker had been able to afford himself a room upstairs. Now he spent his nights in drunken stupor, swilling the finest fishbeers and raising a toast each time the fog bells rang out by the docks. By day he gorged himself on eel broth and chowder while he waited for the next job. He was growing fat around the waist and fatter in his purse. It was a nasty, immoral business, but somebody had to do it, and Caulker had paid the Hook’s proprietor a handsome sum to ensure that that somebody was him.
He scraped his stool back, shared a grin with his accomplice, stood up, and froze on the spot-
— as the door opened to reveal the oddest-looking person he could have imagined.
The stranger blocked the doorway like a fifty-ton boulder, a half-naked giant with darkly painted skin. He wore brown leather shorts and little else, exposing more painted flab than Caulker would have thought possible for one man to carry. Some sort of enormous wood and leather construction engulfed his upper body: a flotation aid perhaps-for it seemed too sparse for armour.
As the giant ducked out of the fog and squeezed his great bulk inside the Widow’s Hook, all conversation withered around him. Spoons slid back into bowls of chowder; half-raised cups were lowered. By the light of the cooking fires Caulker suddenly saw what those closest to the door had already noticed. The fat man’s body had not been painted: the colour was due to skin as dark as hull tar. His huge black fists were as big as mast-hammers, while his chest rose and fell like a deepwater swell.
But the rope was the strangest thing of all. A taut, arm-thick span of greased hemp stretched out from behind the man’s shoulders, straight as a dock pole, and curved taut around the underside of the door lintel, where it disappeared from sight. His wood and leather construction appeared to be a harness of some kind; the man must be tethered to something outside the Widow’s Hook, and something high up by the look of it.
“My name is John Anchor,” the stranger announced. “I am told there is an angel’s corpse here, yes?”
Nobody spoke. The regulars in the Hook were freshwater men: crabbers, river fishers and boat builders, a couple of barge pilots down from the Shale Forests, and few-if any-would have heard any whisper of the Gallows Fog before. But Jack Caulker, who had worked on missionary cogs before his cutthroat days, and had sailed to the Volcanic Isles, knew the legend well enough for the sight of this stranger to bring a furrow to his cynical brow. Temple sailors had spoken often of the Adamantine Man who walked across the ocean floors. A queer mist was said to accompany him: the Gallows Fog, which hid the floating hell he dragged across the world. Salt sailors feared such weather greatly, for east of the Isles, it was claimed, no ship could sail through such a miasma. All superstitious piss, of course, Caulker reckoned, yet Deepgate’s seamen blamed every deepwater wreck on the Gallows Fog, and you’d be damned before you’d find one of them who’d sail a league beyond the Isles for fear of encountering it. Caulker studied the visitor with a mounting sense of wonder. Here was a man dragging a rope. It had to be fixed to
But a skyship full of the dead?
Here? In
Hammer Eric had backed away, the namesake weapon at his hip looking more like a toothpick now than a carpenter’s tool, next to this tethered giant. Most of the broth shop clientele had turned their eyes to Caulker; in their own small way they respected him. The cutthroat had been educated, he had traveled, and he knew how to handle himself in a fight.
It would do his reputation no good to let them see him spooked.
“Come in, friend.” Caulker raised his empty cup to the stranger. “Merrigan Foley, the boss of this fine establishment, charges nobody nothing but a bowl of chowder to see the damn thing. It’s there, plain as you like, on the wall above the counter.” He gestured over to where the bloody black corpse had been nailed up. A group of Ban-Heshette goatherds had arrived carrying it two days ago, claiming to have discovered the boy in a ditch somewhere south of Deepgate. It was the temple angel, they’d claimed. Its wings had been convincing enough for Foley to dip into his purse, though not nearly as deep as the desert folk had wanted him to. As curiosities went it was rather pathetic: just a mess of tanned bones and white feathers pinned to a rude cross, barely even recognizable as an archon-not nearly as impressive as the shape-shifting demon that show-woman had displayed recently. Yet news of the angel had brought a steady stream of curious patrons into the Hook, for which both Foley and Caulker were glad. They’d even had a group of Spine take lodging here just to study the thing at their leisure.
John Anchor studied the gruesome exhibit for a moment, then frowned. “The angel I hunt has dark wings,” he said. “This is not her corpse.”
Caulker raised an eyebrow. The angel he
This was not entirely a lie. The river men’s gossip was as thick here as anywhere along the banks of the Coyle.
“Explain your problem,” he added. “Sandporters are known for their generosity and their friendship to foreigners. If we can help, we will.”
John Anchor nodded. “I seek a
Caulker’s brow furrowed. “Carnival?” Folks said she had risen from the abyss when Deepgate fell, and then fled into the Deadsands. Nobody knew for certain what had happened to her since, but that small fact need not affect the potential profit to be made here. The cutthroat was happy enough to sell rumors and lies, and he’d even embellish them some for an extra coin. He gave the stranger a smile and a knowledgeable nod. “Aye,” he said. “I think we can do business.”
The tethered man smacked his hands together and strode forward purposefully, heaving the massive rope behind him. Yard after yard of tough hemp scraped splinters from the underside of the door lintel. The timber creaked and bowed under what must have been enormous pressure, then suddenly snapped. Smooth as a wire through cheese, the rope tore upwards through three feet of mud-brick wall above the door and then came to rest against a stout ceiling beam. This joist gave an ominous groan. Anchor did not appear to notice the destruction behind him. He marched up to Caulker as though he had forgotten he was tethered. “Well met,” he said. “I am a stranger here. Does salt have value in this land?”
