Tomorrow, the Killing

17

Back at the Earl I ditched the suit for my regular attire and slipped a long dirk into my belt. The unmade bed seemed more inviting than usual, but I forced myself to settle for a hard snarl of breath. The vapor was sweet and sickening as raw honey, and I let it expand into my cranium, pushing the general’s decline, the whole Montgomery family, out of my thoughts. I had another meeting to attend this morning, and it was to take place in very different surroundings.

Suddenly the vial was empty. I tossed it aside and grabbed another one, then tripped myself out.

The Isthmus did not welcome trespassers, indeed, seemed to have been deliberately laid out to repel them. It runs southeast of the Beggar’s Ramparts, along that corner of the docks which extends into the borders of Kirentown, though few enough heretics found themselves in the maze of narrow alleyways and unpaved side streets. Indeed, it was rare to see anyone whose skin tended north of ebony.

As such, it was one of the few sections of Rigus with which I was not intimately familiar, though in fairness, only a current resident could claim to be. The neighborhood was in a constant state of flux – no sooner was a shack erected, cheap wood with a thick cloth overhang, than it was torn down and replaced with another, or erased entirely. The Isthmus was a living outgrowth of an insular and dispossessed people, instinctively arranged to confuse and impede outsiders.

As a rule, the guard don’t do their duty – but even on those rare occasions when the fancy strikes them, they don’t do it here. To those unacquainted with the terrain, which was to say anyone not born and still living there, cutting through the gangways and tenements was a sure sentence of death.

I had memorized the directions Yancey had given me before coming – nothing says ‘mug me’ like standing around a street corner staring at a set of notes. But out of necessity, since the Isthmus is without street names or administrative markings of any kind, he was forced to rely on local landmarks as points of navigation – and since these were apt to be the victim of vandals or the Islanders’ constant redevelopment schemes, my going was slow. It was a chancy thing, even early in the day. The thugs and sharps who lived and worked here were too small fish to have heard of my reputation as a man it was best not to try and rob, and my skin marked me as a potential target. So I stitched a scowl across my face and kept my hand on the hilt of my dagger, and while I didn’t look in the eyes of any of the adolescent hyenas that lolled outside of every third domicile, neither did I look away.

And after a few false starts and wrong turns, I found myself in front of the house of Mazzie of the Stained Bone.

The high-class practitioners, the real Artists, Academy-trained and government recognized, could afford to do what they did any way they felt like doing it. Some preferred to keep up appearances – dark robes and grim prophecies, staining their beards white and letting them grow down to the floor. But for every one of those there were two you couldn’t tell from a solid shopkeeper or banker, who went about their business without pretense or drama. The bottom feeders and base dwellers didn’t have that luxury. They needed the public to know who they were and what they did, needed to advertise their services while warning off anyone that might want to do them harm.

Still, standing in the sun outside of Mazzie’s hovel, I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t laying it on a bit thick. The shack she inhabited was, in the broad-strokes, largely indistinguishable from those that surrounded it, but she’d gone to an elaborate effort to peacock it. Near every inch of the outside was festooned with the trappings of her profession, or at least those that the ignorant public was familiar with. Strange shapes and odd patterns had been drawn on the walls with discolored paint, labyrinthine squiggles without beginning or end, exotic figures just recognizable enough to be disturbing. Tufts of feathers added accent, ornamentation of bone and offal. These last let off quite a stench. I doubted any were more than decorative – a functioning Working is too expensive to keep hung outside to be rained on. Still, they fulfilled their purpose, which was to creep hell out of anyone looking at them. Outside of staking the corpse of a newborn outside her door, there was little Mazzie could possibly have done to more actively ward off guests.

The way I saw it, there were two possibilities. The first was that Mazzie was a fraud, and the elaborate show she put on was just that, her reputation earned by trickery and theater. This I more or less discounted – Yancey was no fool, and I doubted his recommendation would be so far off base. And besides, what little had made its way out from the slums of her activities hinted at more than parlor tricks and sleight of hand. The second possibility, considerably more disturbing, was that Mazzie of the Stained Bone was just what she seemed to be – a witch-woman, heir to millennia of folk-traditions and rituals, beliefs that had flourished out of reach of the rigid High Laws that constrained the Art within the Empire proper. Not exactly the sort of person to whom you wanted to entrust the education of your surrogate child.

But then again my options were distinctly limited. Since the founding of the Academy during the Great War, the government had tightened their control over the nation’s practitioners, one more way to centralize and strengthen its rule. I knew by grim example that the Crown had no more rigid sense of ethics than the most twisted back alley conjurer. Nothing Mazzie could teach Wren would be any worse than what he’d learn from the authorities, and at least it would go down unleavened with hypocrisy.

I held my nose and snatched up my balls, then knocked loudly on the door.

‘Enter,’ said a voice from inside, and I did.

The interior was everything one would have expected from the front. Whatever other benefits it offered, Mazzie’s profession had not made her a wealthy woman – or if it had, she’d put little of the coin into home furnishings. Her hovel was a single room with a curtain pulled against the back wall to provide some privacy for the sleeping area. One corner was taken up with a large iron stove, cooking away despite the heat. A shutter hole in the ceiling was open, leaking in a few strands of sunlight on the sole inhabitant.

Short and squat, black as soot and sin, Mazzie of the Stained Bone sat in a chair behind the table. The end of a fat cigar nested itself in her crooked teeth. She inspected me with a set of brown eyes rich as chocolate – in another woman they would have been called beautiful. Her stubbed nose flared as if to catch my scent, a wide hoop of ivory curling out from one nostril. She might have been thirty, or forty, or fifty. She might have been a hundred. She might never have been born.

‘I’m the Warden. Yancey the Rhymer sent word I was coming.’ I hoped this was true.

‘I know who you are. Sit down,’ she said, nodding at the chair opposite. ‘Let’s speak.’

I did as bidden. My stool was identical to the one Mazzie was settled over, though her ample buttocks at least provided some cushion against the stiff wood.

‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ she began, ‘but I don’t think you’d like my blend.’

‘I’m not here for tea.’

‘What you here for then?’

I took out my tobacco pouch and started on a smoke. ‘Shouldn’t you know?’

‘You give out a lot of samples, in your business?’

‘Not so many.’

She rolled her thick cheroot to the end of her mouth. ‘Guess we in similar lines.’

‘Course, in my line, word gets out that I’m not reliable, that I ain’t selling what I’m talking, my customers are apt to take it serious. Apt to come visit me some evening, pull my tongue through my throat.’

‘I can see how that might happen.’

‘So what’s the verdict?’ I sealed my smoke and caught the end between my teeth, then lit it with the stroke of a match. ‘We in similar lines?’

She dropped a length of ash onto the dirt floor. ‘We are indeed.’

‘Somehow I thought we might be.’ We sat puffing at each other, the difference in size between my thin spliff and the hogleg rooted in her mouth giving me a distinct feeling of inferiority. ‘I’ve a boy needs training.’

She’d known already, either a tip from Yancey or from some other, more arcane source. ‘No reason to bother old Mazzie. They got a school for that.’

‘You registered with the Crown, Mazzie? They take a tax off your . . .’ I waved my hand at the squalor, ‘. . . enterprise?’

‘The Crown? I’ve lived under three of them, child – two back in Miradin, and the last twenty-five years under your Queen Bess,’ she said, ticking royalty off on her broad fingers. ‘Ain’t none of them done nothing for Mazzie.’

‘It seems neither of us are staunch monarchists, then.’

She scratched aimlessly at her chin. ‘Never taken on no white child. No boy child neither.’

‘I’ll leave him in the sun awhile. Nothing to be done about the cock.’

‘No light thing, taking on an apprentice.’

I pulled a purse from my pocket and dropped it onto the table, startling a fly enjoying an early afternoon repast. ‘That even the scales?’

She stared at it evenly, as if to read gold through the leather. ‘More to it than ochres and argents. You certain you know what you’re asking?’

‘Enlighten me.’

She weighed over the request like I’d asked for possession of her eldest son. Then she shrugged with something bordering on annoyance and started speaking. ‘Take ten thousand babies, put them in a cage.’

‘I’m not going to do that.’

‘Watch them for ten years, maybe twelve. Watch them until the one half starts to bleed, and the other half starts to look at the first. One of those children, maybe one of those children, they’ll start doing things the rest of them can’t.’

‘What do you do with the rejects?’

Mazzie was good at ignoring me. ‘You take that child, you show her how to focus what she has. Teach her what you were taught, maybe give her books from people that learned something and wrote it down before they died. But it ain’t like being a cobbler, first come the leather, then you hammer in the nails.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s a reason they call it the Art – you got to have the feel, you understand?’

‘I’m following along.’

‘Everybody who does it, they’ve got a different way of doing it, depends on how their mind runs. Some folk like to build things, force a working onto a blade or a jewel or a clock. Some folk can listen to things that no one else hears but are always right about what they say. Some folk force the world into things that it isn’t, coils of fire streaming from their fingers, cool the air till it’s thick as ice. Some folk get caught looking up into the night when the moon’s still fresh, wonder what’s looking back at them.’

The conversation had turned a bit dark, in my estimation, though you wouldn’t have known it from Mazzie’s grin. ‘They the ones that end up being trouble. They stop looking at you when they speak, have trouble remembering the two of you is human, and the things they’ve been looking at ain’t. Back in Miradin we used to put the ones that forgot beneath a wall of stone, weigh it down till there wasn’t nothing left. Here they burn them.’ She shrugged. ‘Not their fault, really – they just doing what comes natural. Everybody’s got a knack.’

‘What’s your knack, Mazzie?’

She smiled but didn’t answer. ‘Point being, the road is crooked. Some of the paths end in a coffin. Some of the paths end in worse places. You’d best be sure of what you’re asking from me, before you go ahead and ask it.’

‘That was a nice speech,’ I said. ‘But you left something out of it.’

‘Yeah?’

‘That one child in the ten thousand, that girl who can do things the others can’t – if you don’t teach her to control what she has she’ll burn her brain into mush, be left staring at the walls. I’m well aware of the dangers posed by the Art. If I had my way I’d reach inside the boy and strip the spark right from his soul, leave him just the same as the rest of us. Barring that, the least I can do is make sure he doesn’t go mad before his fifteenth name day.’

‘Seems like maybe you know more about this than you let on.’

I could have told her that the man who’d all but raised me had been the greatest practitioner in the Empire, and the girl I’d grown up beside had become perhaps the most evil. ‘I’ve picked up a piece here and there.’

‘How old is your boy?’

‘Thirteen? Fourteen, maybe.’

‘Awfully old to just be starting.’

‘Then we ought not waste time.’

She never seemed to blink. I’m sure she did, sometimes, but try as I might I couldn’t catch her. ‘I’d need to give him a look first.’

‘I didn’t take this for a correspondence school.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Wren.’

‘Tell Wren to come see me in four days’ time. Tell him to wear this on his arm,’ she said, pulling out a feathered charm from somewhere on her person and sliding it over. ‘And folk won’t bother him.’

‘You got so much pull around here, Mazzie?’

She stretched back her lips. You might have called it a smile, if you were being careless. ‘Enough.’

I put the charm into my satchel. ‘I’ll tell him.’

It was miserable in that fucking hut, our smoke and the fumes from her stove thickening the air. Still, I was seated, and so tired from the summer and the walk that I lingered despite the obvious conclusion of our conversation.

She looked at me cross-eyed over her cup of muddy tea. ‘Death hangs around you thick as flies on shit.’

By the Lost One, it never fails – you can’t spend five minutes with one of these two-copper soothsayers without getting an earful of dark augury and grim forewarning. ‘I thought you said you don’t give out samples. Sounds like you’ve been rolling the bones for me.’

‘Don’t need the bones to see what you are. Your victims swirl around you and scream in your ear, cursing at you day and night.’

‘Funny – with all that noise I sleep like a baby.’

She smiled like she’d won a bet. ‘No, you don’t.’

‘Maybe not, but I take a lot of uppers.’ I tapped the purse on the table. ‘You’ll get another one of these every month. You teach him the basics – how to focus his mind, a few simple charms, not to bake his brain by drawing in too much. And leave out all the nonsense you do for the look-sees. He comes home chanting gibberish or trying to sacrifice any of our chickens and his mother will have my hide.’

She didn’t say anything to that, not for a little while, just stared at me. Then she shoved the coin back over in my direction. ‘I haven’t promised you anything,’ she said. ‘You come back and see me after I’ve talked to the boy. I’ll give you my decision then.’

I pocketed the money pouch and stood. ‘I’m counting the hours.’

There were ways back to the Earl that didn’t require me to swing past the Queen’s Palace. I should have taken one. I wasn’t planning on a visit – as far as I was concerned I was done with the Montgomerys. I’d told her father that. I’d been telling myself the same.

I could see the crowd about a block away, a small knot of people, growing fast. A handful of hoax had a loose cordon bottling up the mouth of the alley. At some point they’d figure out whose child they had lying under a sheet, and once they did the ice would be down here double-time, but it hadn’t happened yet. The ranking officer was a fiend for the dice, in my pocket on top of what I spread around to his bosses, and I gave him a nod and he let me through without saying anything.

There was no reason to look. I knew what was under there, had known since I’d seen the herd, known since I’d left her room the night before. I looked anyway.

You think, being strangled, how bad could that be? Hold your breath for a while, the lights go dim. But it’s not like that at all. Calloused hands around the soft of your neck, the beaming eyes of a man willing you to death, trying to scream and failing. The white rings around Rhaine’s sky blues were punctured, blossoms of blood leaking in. A thick patch of her scarlet hair had been torn out, either in the struggle or afterward, as a trophy. Her nose was broken back into her face. Her throat was discolored, green and black.

I threw the sheet over her and moved to stand, but the heat, I say the heat, set me back on one knee. The guards turned away, embarrassed at my weakness and not wanting to cause offense. They knew who buttered their bread. I pulled myself back to my feet, managing to make it out of sight before reaching for the vial of breath I had in my satchel. I was very proud of my restraint.