Tomorrow, the Killing

48

It’s a sure thing, Warden. You know I wouldn’t steer you wrong.’

It was late afternoon, a week or so after the march. I was sitting at a table outside our front door, trying to move as little as possible, which demands more effort than you’d think. The rain had been coming down more or less constantly since it had started. Walking soaked a man to the skin in half a minute, and the streets had turned from dust to quagmire. It almost made one miss the heat – almost. The storm was finally showing signs of easing, but it hadn’t yet, and I was happy for the overhang that kept me from its reach. I’d been mixing whiskey with water since noon, and started doing away with the water not long after.

‘Ten ochres will get you a hundred in a month, month and a half at the outset. How’s that for a return?’

Tully the Hook was a choke head. If he had other characteristics I don’t remember them. He’d swung by a few minutes earlier, the storm nothing against the chance to fill his lungs with wyrm on my copper.

‘Now sure, I could take care of it myself, but then I figured, why not bring the Warden in on this one? There’s a man, I said, there’s a man what knows his business. There’s a man what knows an opportunity when he sees it, and if this ain’t an opportunity, I’ll eat my hat!’

He’d have eaten a turd wrapped in broken glass if he thought it would get him a pipeful of stem. On principle alone, I ought to have injured him – clearly my reputation was weak beer if a mutt like Tully thought he could waste my time and not risk violence. But every part of me still hurt – walking downstairs left me winded and bitter. I had a vial of breath in my pocket, the same one that had been there for four days, but for some damn fool reason I wouldn’t let myself use it.

‘The whole city’s off-balance – now’s the time to make a move. These Islander folks, all they need is a little push. They’ll do the lifting, dig?’

I took another swig of the whiskey, then set my head on the table. It was not soft. ‘Tully, you say one more word I’m going to kill you and leave your body in an alley. You know I’ll do it.’

There was a sputtering sound of disagreement, but it didn’t harden into speech. Maybe my name still hung together after all. Time passed. Half drunk with my eyes closed I wasn’t sure how much.

The muffled fall of steps alerted me to Tully’s return. Dumb motherfucker couldn’t figure when to make an exit. I pulled a knife out from my boot and slammed it in the table, brought my face up after it, trying to think of something threatening to say.

Wren stared back at me, little impressed. ‘That’s a nice knife.’

‘I . . . thought you were . . .’

‘Tully flitted out the back.’

I nodded uncomfortably, then waved at the opposite bench. Wren set himself into it but didn’t speak. The blade went back in my boot.

We stared at each other for a while. It wasn’t exactly riveting entertainment. The sky was a patchwork fabric of sunlight streaming through the clouds. My whiskey was almost gone. A long pull from the bottle and I lost my last reason for sticking around.

‘Rain’s letting up,’ I said.

‘Looks that way.’

‘I gotta run a thing over to a guy. Fancy a stroll?’

After a moment he nodded, and I pulled myself wearily to my feet, and we started off.

Walking pulled at the spot of stomach that I didn’t have anymore, and reminded me of the dozen other injuries I’d sustained the past week. I was too old to survive many more of these. I was surprised I’d survived this one, truth be told. Wren eased himself down to my pace. It was a while before I mustered the courage to say anything.

‘How’re the lessons going?’

‘All right.’

‘Mazzie doing right by you?’

‘She hasn’t cut me up and made me into a stew, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Yet,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t cut you up and made you into a stew, yet.’

He didn’t laugh. The welt on his face was faded but noticeable. I didn’t like looking at it, but wouldn’t let myself look away.

‘You learn to do anything beside spin colors?’

‘Learning to move things without touching them.’

‘I imagine that might be useful.’

The mud pulled at my boots – I had to tug them loose with every step. Despite the break in the weather, we were the only ones on the streets, hobbling down boulevards a dozen stout men could pass abreast. As we edged toward Offbend we started to pass the first signs of the riot, burned-out shells of houses, charred staircases ascending into nothingness, stone cellar skeletons of quaint A-frames. It had taken fifteen years, but the war had come to Rigus. I hoped this was its parting shot, and not the introductory rampage of a successor.

‘I needed you gone,’ I said finally. ‘Things were set to get bad – there wasn’t any time to do it soft. You stuck around any longer, you wouldn’t be here now.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘As for the rest . . . It could have been handled better.’

We stopped in front of a bar. I walked in, then I walked out. My bag was light a few things that had been in it, my purse correspondingly heavier. We started back towards the docks.

‘Adolphus says Pretories was a traitor, says he was working for Black House,’ Wren began.

‘Yeah?’

‘Says he had Roland killed so he could take over the veterans.’

‘He went along with it, at least.’

‘Why’d he do it?’

I’d been mulling that question over for a while now, ever since I’d watched him die, in fact. I wish we’d had the chance to talk it over, foolish as that sounded. The usual lust for power and money? Was he tired of running the master’s water? Or had he an inkling that Roland was cracked, that someone needed to step in? No sin in refusing to follow a man off a cliff, though there is one in tripping him. ‘We don’t always know why we do things,’ I said.

‘What happens to the Association now?’

‘Same as always. Things don’t really change.’ Though I wasn’t quite sure I believed that. The riots had been a rare black eye for the Old Man. Blame the violence on some renegade offshoot of the Association all you want – at the end of the day, a fair portion of the city was in ashes, and that’s not something that the head of national security is supposed to let happen. I doubted he’d intended it to go quite as it had. Maybe he was losing his touch. It was a disturbing thought, the Old Man growing old. Like the weakening of the tides, the stilling of the wind.

‘How about you and Adolphus?’

We’d yet to speak more than pleasantries, muttered greetings when we passed in the stairwell. I was having trouble meeting his eyes, or he was mine. ‘I don’t have an answer to everything.’

The sun took advantage of its short window to glare off every bit of scrap metal and glass, but it did nothing to ease our passage through six inches of sludge. Outside the front door of a one-room shack a child played naked in a puddle, burbling happily, youth and grime obscuring the sex. Its mother appeared from the egress and shrieked incomprehensibly, dragged her seed out of the muck and started on a beating. I averted my eyes – I’d learned my lesson on family quarrels.

‘How much of it did you set up?’ Wren asked.

‘Less than I thought at the time.’

‘Was it worth it?’

I considered that for a while before answering. ‘Probably not.’

We hooked a right off Light Street and down a narrow alley, cobblestone, thank the Firstborn. It curved its way through a row of tenements, taking us away from the main streets.

‘This isn’t the way back to the Earl,’ Wren said.

‘You got something to do?’

After a hundred yards the road narrowed till we had to walk in file, Wren sprinting on ahead, me pulling myself after as best I could. The defile ended at a little plateau that hovered above a corner of the harbor, a few dozen square feet of dirt and sand cropped into a low hill that rose out of the bay. The water was dark and choppy, blurring at the horizon with the clouds above it. In the jetty below the remains of a handful of skiffs lay dashed against the rocks, casualties of the storm.

‘Did they at least get what was coming to them?’ Wren asked.

‘Who?’

‘The guilty.’

He looked so small at that moment, so damn young. There was a scrub tree growing up out of the rocks, and I leaned against it and rolled up a cigarette. It was burnt down to a nub before I answered. ‘Not all of them.’

That didn’t seem to satisfy him. It didn’t satisfy me either, but it was all I had to offer. Another few minutes watching the roiling ocean, and I led us back home.