Tomorrow, the Killing

39

The first thing I saw on waking was a thick circlet of flies hovering above my head, tumbling over each other in excitement at the upcoming feast. It was a few moments before I had the strength to brush them away. Their buzzing seemed to intensify, as if angered to discover I wasn’t yet dead. I could empathize with their disappointment.

I was lying on a bed. It was lumpy and hard, but it wasn’t a shallow grave, so I didn’t have much cause to complain. Mazzie was in the opposite corner of the shack, hovering over her stove, spooning one of the pots. If she noticed I’d revived, she didn’t make any point of congratulating me on it. For my part, I was happy for the silence to go on indefinitely.

Only death goes on forever. After a while whatever task Mazzie had set herself seemed complete. She filled a brass cup from one of the kettles, then brought it over to me.

‘First thing to be said – if it was just a question of you being made a corpse, I wouldn’t have bothered to walk outside my house.’

‘All right.’

‘I don’t want you thinking that you matter to me.’

‘Not for a moment.’

‘But you were right when you said there’s something special in that boy. And you were right when you said it’ll ruin him if he doesn’t get help. I don’t just mean with the Art. He’s got wildness in him, and if it ain’t shaped he’ll get himself knifed in an alley even if I keep him from burning out his brain. He needs someone to look out for him, and the Firstborn seems to have decided that would be you.’

‘I understand,’ I said, and I did.

She nodded and shoved the cup into my hands. ‘Drink this.’

It was mostly cheap whiskey leavened with honey. What wasn’t cheap whiskey leavened with honey was the foulest rot I’d ever tasted.

‘Don’t you puke on my sheets,’ she said.

I managed to follow her directive, but it took some doing. ‘Is this going to fix me up?’

‘There’s no kind of medicine to fix your type of broken.’

I wasn’t in any position to argue with that. All the same I finished the rest of what was in my cup.

‘The drink will speed up your healing. In an hour, you’ll look like hell but won’t feel like it. In five, you won’t look like it. Least,’ she smiled nastily, ‘not because of the bruising.’

‘I’m grateful,’ I said.

‘You don’t need to be grateful – it’s like I said, I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for the boy.’

‘I’ll make sure he sends his thanks along as well.’ I slumped back into the bed. The thing I’d drunk felt worse in my stomach than it had going down, as if the substance itself conspired to ensure its release by tearing its way out through my intestinal tract.

‘You can stay here another quarter hour,’ Mazzie said, dropping herself into the chair with a sigh. ‘Then you have to leave.’

‘You got another appointment?’

‘No.’

After a few minutes the bubbling in my gut leavened out near as quick as it had come. A dull, warm glow fell over me. ‘The stuff you were saying before,’ I said. ‘About what was coming for me.’

‘Yeah?’

‘All that true?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I guess there’s nothing I can do to head it off?’

‘All sorts of things you could do,’ she said. ‘You could go down to the docks, book the first passage to the Free Cities. You could go to the man you fixing to do wrong to, tell him what you’re going to do, see how he treats you. You could stuff your pockets with rocks and go swimming in the bay.’ She tapped the ash off her cheroot. ‘But you’re not going to do any of those things, so why ask? The future isn’t set in stone – it’s you that can’t bring himself to change.’

I spent a few more of Mazzie’s promised fifteen minutes thinking about that. Then I pushed myself to my feet. ‘I’ll take my leave of you then, Mazzie of the Stained Bone. With appreciation for the hospitality, and hopes I won’t need to avail myself of it again for a while.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘Send the boy around early part of next week, if you’re still alive by then.’

That last was an open bet, and not one I’d have wanted to give odds on.