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L O D E S T O N E
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SHADOW
1
She walked in, her pursed lips almost as tight as her hips, the bold and impudent gold of her necklace reflecting like a buttercup on her upturned chin. When she began talking she seemed passionate in her beliefs. And in those green eyes, bafflement, blinked through long lashes. Bafflement that I could not be moved by her cause or her beauty. Oh, she believed all right. In some shit or other. She was positively on a mission. But I didn't do missions for anyone but myself. Besides, for someone on a mission, the way her wealth snuggled up to her body looked positively indecent on a woman wearing enough money on her to do justice to all that rich flesh. The bejewelled fingers of her right hand rested nonchalantly at her waist, absorbing what little light was cast in the room by the candle, projecting flame back at me as fierce as her disdain. A rose-hued lexil on her index finger, a black oreate on her forefinger and a pale blue luciad on her pinkie. With her other hand she grasped the handle of her rapier. Like the rest of her you couldn’t tell whether it was all just for show. When she spoke she cut and clipped sentences out at me like pieces of broken glass and had a way of murmuring the ones amounting to orders as if they were lines in a seduction.
She gave me a name. And wanted me to find the girl it belonged to. It wasn't necessary for me to know why. She expressed hurt at the girl's absence. She was concerned for her welfare but at the same time described the girl's state like an accusation: vulnerable, susceptible, dutiful. And flung off the girl's attributes as if she bore a grudge against every single one: red hair, hazel eyes, pale complexion, young, slender. She feared that the “susceptible creature” could come to great harm if she wasn't found. She hinted at “unsavoury sorts” abroad. Maybe. Someone the girl had dealings with regularly. Maybe. Time was of the “utmost essence”. No maybe there. Plenty of concern for a simple serving girl, to be sure. In fact, Damesen Maybe traipsed through a whole gamut of dramatic poses more befitting a board treader acting the lady in distress in some cheap mummery play than a lady of court. An she did it all with such bold aplomb that if I'd had flowers in my hand I would have thrown the damned things at her. No flowers, just the glass of vaki I sipped from and set down on the table when she finished talking. I wiped my hand under my nose and detected a flicker of offence. Hmm. For all that aloof nobility her vanity still had time to worry about more earthly matters, which was exactly where my brain and the open neck of her lace-edged shirt was heading. No doubt she looked a vision at prayers dressed like that. Her dark hair, chestnut maybe – hard to tell under the dim light – was bound severely behind her, a thick plait framing her high smooth forehead. At once beautiful and forbidding. Was I moved by her? Something in me moved all right. I just wasn't showing it. Maybe there were some missions apart from my own I did do.
“How much?”
“Three hundred vecs. Half now. Half on completion.”
“Three hundred, did you say?” My tone betrayed scant interest. I closed the battered volume of Manalavean's Annals I had been reading and pushed it to one side on the table. Took another sip from the glass of vaki in front of me. Three hundred! I was choking inside. A fistful of considerations did sling shots inside my skull, rattling around in there and causing sparks in my eyes. One of them was giving me a bigger headache than all the rest, the one that had started four days ago when Sydar had warned me: “Don't go home, Shader”. Four days. The first two of 'em skulking around straw-lined hovels, the last two beholden to Sydar's hospitality. Friend or no friend, as far as I was concerned I had outstayed my welcome. It was getting embarrassing. Three hundred would buy me some time. Enough even to relocate. Shit, three hundred would buy me a lot of time. The Collectors could fucking choke on it. For a while at least. And for a while at least that would mean I wouldn't be choking on bits of myself.
I patted the book in front of me. Looked up at the damesen, doing my best line in dubious. She breathed in deeply, bridled at me. She thought me unimpressed. I wasn't unimpressed. I was dumbstruck. Close your mouth Shader there are moths in the room. Besides the money, a woman used to getting her way who wasn't getting it was a sight to behold all by itself. Especially one stacked like her. She stuck out a petulant, girlish pout in the face of my silence, only there was nothing girlish about the rest of her she had stuck out. “All right,” I said with deliberate slowness. “Although my schedule is rather busy right now,” she raised her eyes at that, whether in surprise or disbelieving contempt, I could take my pick. “I can see you are upset about this... ” She angled her head slightly, maybe in grateful acknowledgement, or maybe just sheer incomprehension at the concept of a feeling. “The girl – Felta – her welfare obviously means a lot to you... ” She gave me a slow blink in response. Whether ecstatic consummation in anticipation of my “yes” or just sheer relief that the sordid necessity would soon be over, I could take my pick again. The woman had more moves than a tribe of Azuki girls performing the cleansing ritual. “After giving your cause careful consideration...” I held out my hand without standing up. “I'll do it.” The pout turned into a contemptuous smirk. The smirk turned into a sneer. She looked down at me, making a regal show of her disgust at my naked greed. The way she looked at my hand I might as well have been offering her a dog turd. As for greed, she obviously has no idea how hard it was to live with it. Or more likely she had every idea.
“Thank you,” she said, but with such forthright sincerity in her voice as she looked into my eyes that despite everything I suspected about her, I was either an aspiring lover she had finally deigned to yield to right then and there, or right then and there we would both be a vision at prayers in the candlelight, kneeling and giving thanks to Mathar, uplifted into soul-purging ecstasy by her surge of reverential passion. But I doubted it. Her right hand still rested on the handle of her rapier as her left slipped into a pocket of her unbuttoned green tunic beneath her other barely hidden treasures. Her movement rippled the stale air and I got a hint of her scent. Some musky concoction with a sniff of lemon. It stung my brain with intoxication like caeen juice. What prayer I offered was in the form of a silent obscenity along with a request for the filthy minded demons whispering suggestions in my ear to get behind me. She took out a pouch and tossed it onto the table. It thumped into the open bottle of vaki standing between us. Instinctively my hand lunged for the pouch before it slid off the table, ignoring the vaki as it spilled everywhere. That seemed to amuse her. She thought she had learned something.
“There are fifteen parillon, there,” she said. “Half your fee up front. Hallow Mint seal. A sound one hundred and fifty vecs. They'll stand good the length and breadth of Takrann.”
“I'm glad to hear it. First thing I'm going to do is buy another bottle of vaki.” As her gaze brushed slowly past me those green eyes were like an ice cold stream running across my flesh. She was good. And the better she got the more convinced I became that she was about as sincere as the soul rattling around in my otherwise empty pocket.
“I want you to find out where she is. How you do so is your business. Bring her to me.”
“Damesen, last time I looked I wasn't a carthorse. I don't do fetching and carrying. I'll find her and tell you where she is, that's all. For what you're asking and given where I'll have to look, that's a lot.”
“You're getting a lot.”
I shook my head. “Not for fetching and carrying. Fair enough?” The smile she gave me could mean a thousand different things to a thousand different men, but it only ever meant one thing: the one thing each man most wanted it to mean. It was a great smile.
“Fair enough. I will return in three days.”
“Then I'll do my best to be around.”
“Don't try and cross me.”
“Wouldn't dream of it, damesen.”
“Three days.”
“Not here.”
“Where?”
“The Crow’s Crown. Know it?”
“No.”
If you’re lying damesen, you do it beautifully. “You’ll find it. You found this one and you found me. Ask the innkeeper there. At twilight knell. Just tell him you’re the one looking for a name. Exactly that. Just the innkeeper. Anyone else, I’ll know it and then I’m gone.”
“I don’t think you want to do that. But your caution is promising. The Crow’s Crown, then. Three days.”
I nodded. “Speaking of names?” I ventured. In answer, she bathed my suggestion in her cold green stream.
“Three days. Then we’ll see what you have found for your fifteen parillon.”
“Thirty,” I corrected her.
“Only on completion. And frankly, by the looks of you I doubt you can complete anything.”
“I may surprise you.”
“For thirty parillon you’d better.”
“I'll do my best,” I told her. She said nothing. I had been admiring the sharpness of her tongue which was in indirect proportion to all those sumptuous curves. The way she simply shrugged at my last remark in stony silence was equally impressive. So that's what refined and delicate damesens learned at court? Consummate contempt. And gorgeous with it. She pointed her buttercup chin at the money pouch in my hand as she stood by the door. As she opened the door, light from the sconces in the hallway spilled into the room. Yes, chestnut. Before turning her back on me she deigned to break her silence.
“Do better,” she said and left.
Everybody in Port Kurskt had a price. After she'd gone I barely had time to consider what hers might be. She was chucking parillon around like chicken feed and had got me clucking. First things first: find out where she puts her head down at night – and who with. I made my goodbyes to Sydar, handed over ten parillon for safe keeping, Sydar skimming one of them for the privilege. No need to remember to tip him extra for the safe room I’d coughed up for earlier, just to keep him sweet for the next time. He reminded me. That's what I liked about Sydar, he understood better than anybody I knew that business and friendship mixed as well as shit and sugar. So we never mixed it. Unpaid debt to the Collectors or not – sure, I was no different to anyone else in Port Kurskt as to how that tallied - after days of crummy safe houses I was getting homesick. I had to face it. The Lists was gone. Considering what it had cost me to 'borrow' it I should have got myself back to my bothole the moment Sydar had told me not to go home. I'd risked my scarred neck for that damned piece of dusty garbage and there it waited, calm as you please for the Collectors to do what exactly their name said they did - and likely wipe their arses on it for good measure. They'd shit over all my belongings - Oh, they'd do that just for the fun of it, just to let me know they'd paid me a courtesy call. It was time to go home. Maybe it was still in one piece. I laughed at the thought. They of all people knew the value of any and everything as payment in kind for a slab of some poor bastard's offal. They knew and they'd got their paws into every nook and cranny of my place for sure. They'd found the Lists. I was fooling myself that it was still in my botlhole if the Collectors had already paid me a visit. If! They'd been to my botlhole, turned it over, inside out, turned it every which way. Yes, time to go home. But first things first.
"Seen her before, Sydar?"
"Nope."
"Know her name?"
"Nope."
"What do you think?"
"Trouble. But too late now, you took her money."
"So did you."
"That I did."
"And mine."
"You get looked after."
"That I do. See you around."
"Let's hope so. Don't go home, Shader."
Yes, I always felt better at the business end of things with Sydar. Putting me up as a friend with Collectors on my tail? That made me uncomfortable. It smelled like mixing shit with sugar to me. Next thing I knew I'd be telling myself I was concerned for his safety. I couldn't have that. I made haste to follow the damesen. Always prudent to find out who you work for. It might be necessary to terminate your employ with them at very short notice. Before they decided to terminate you.
I barely latched onto her on leaving Sydar’s place, she wasn’t exactly out for an early evening stroll, that was for sure. I wondered what she made of the outskirts of the Haren Quarter while I followed her. Take any city in the land – with the exception of Hevelijan where the streets are as clean as Their Graces’ thoughts, or so it is said – and you’ll find the usual garbage. The usual ordure in the alleyways. The usual urchins subject to exploitation, abuse and torture skidding through them. The usual low life born to it, wallowing in piss, booze and slime. The usual men who were old and rich enough to know better than to lose their money but thought coin could resurrect their dead youth. The usual girls who were too young to know better about such men but did and who readily took the ageing fools' coin to aid their deluded attempts at resurrection. Becoming seasoned whores with plenty of cash passing through their practised hands but only ever end up rolling in the other stuff. Not her. It was never like that with her. The usual sick twisted fucks drawn to such places to find them, mixing with the moneyed court puppies looking for a thrill. Yes, the usual dark quarter city shit: drunkards, buggers, caeen addicts, rapists, child abusers, violent tavern keepers, crooked militia, hapless stable boys, haggard old ladies whose flesh was once fresh. Men who would kill for a fuck of an evening. Women who were killed when they were. 'All life is here' indeed and heart and soul were tired of it. What was left of both that didn't reside at the altar of Kurskt's royal mint. No. It wasn't necessary to describe the citadel. It was only necessary to describe the citadel within. The dark corners, our curious incomprehensible habits, the ghastly fascination sticking to us like pig slop in a trough. Our appetites inside. The shape of them, the smell of them. Our striving towards the light, to look up when the instinctive inclination was to rummage our nose about in the dirty navel below.
Where was she heading? Walking right into robbery and rape by the look of things if she headed as sure as she seemed to be, towards the Raggler side of the docks. With relief I caught sight of her again as I turned into the trader trawl of Andak Street. She had acquired a coarse grey woollen shawl reaching almost to her ankles. Now where by Mathar did she get that from? Maybe she'd had it stuffed down her tunic all that time. It was good enough for what she wanted it for. If she came face to face with any woman along those snares and violated their patch, she could maybe give as good as she might get. As for any man, he would be too busy wondering at the rest of her at eye level to look down and wonder at the incongruity of that coarse shawl against the fine cut of her boots.
'Our souls tread barefoot in this world’, Monalavean had written in his Annals. 'One man's boots may be finer than another's, but his feet stink all the same'. And a woman's? Monalavean hadn't much to say about women. I considered invalidating the entire edifice of his revered sagery by that alone. "Books'll be the death of you," Sydar was fond of telling me. No time to peruse the spread of them on several stalls I was passing, pick up a bargain. Yet another 'only surviving copy' of Kultur's Meditations Upon The Lifeblood. It took all sorts to be an owl arse. Maybe in the hope that when you eventually lifted your head up from being steeped in text the world would be a different place. It never was. It only felt like it was when you were sniffing parchment. Right then and there I could think of a dozen worse ways I could have expended the time. But not what the skyrers on the floor before me were doing, huddled in their Seekers' Circle. I almost tripped over them. One of them swore. Coming down from a higher plane momentarily. Trying to descry the future with a handful of broken stones, a studied form of madness, if nothing else. Although time spent hiding in the shadows of threat and fear while humanity was spewing out of the worst of itself was hardly a better way to pass the days than those old crones. I hurried my owl arse along. A learned quote was likely to get your teeth kicked in on Kurskt's streets, although it could make some mouth breather pause long enough to give you an edge. Sydar was probably right. I'd found it easy to put a price on most things, even myself, just like everyone else, except books.
Monalavean, the absence of women notwithstanding, fine boots or no, certainly had a point about the soul treading barefoot. People all around me were running headlong towards that better life, the call barking inside their skulls with all the lucidity of a madman - and when they fell and smacked their skulls, hard enough to knock all that nonsense out of them, still no room for common sense, still desperately crawling on all fours in pursuit of it. It was hard to tell most of the time whether you were running or falling through life. But you knew when you were crawling, all right. Meanwhile, the damesen was positively gliding ahead of me.
The unwelcome whiff of frying kwell from the main vendor drag drifting up from the dockside hit my nostrils. The damesen took a right turn up into Tally Street with such familiar ease she may as well have been blindfolded. I was glad to leave the kwell smell behind me. How anyone could take pleasure from gnawing on those fishy tubers was beyond me. A bellyful of living on them when life was a rat brat scurrying through the shadows, lapping down at the dockside with the rest of the scum. That would do it for you. In one stinking rush of memory rammed up my nose the squalor felt as close as yesterday to me and I wanted to be away from it. Damnably unwelcome. As was the pitiful bastard who barged his rat face in front of mine. I shoved him aside as he sidled up to me. It wasn't hard to spot the professional shakers when you've done some serious begging. One shove wasn't enough, though. He persisted. The stringy mass of his body twisted into a wheedling, sickly smile of imprecations. If there was piss and booze reeking from him it wasn't strong enough to kill the reek of kwell. Or to warrant any of my coin. “Fuck.” I shoved him aside a second time. “Off.” Shoved him so hard he staggered sideways. The healthy snarl he afforded me in return as he straightened his mock-shrivelled frame reassured me about my lack of spontaneous humanity.
There she was again. She took a left, back down towards the dockside – if I didn't know any better I would think she was attempting a shake-off, which was just silly because she would have to be aware someone was following her in the first place and that would be silly because it was me. Losing my edge, maybe - if I'd ever had one. We were back along the trader trawl of Andak Street, following its busy path which edged above and along the docks in an undulating line, the innumerable smaller streets tapering down to the dockside depositing their muddy little streams of souls with just as many intent on struggling up, like would-be muscular salmon straining to deposit their splendid seed at the very centre of the city and at the top of the world. Well, as for that, little salmons, Islukivi Market and Tolar's Keep weren't so grand last time I saw. And yet there always seemed to be more people coming in than going out to sea and fortune. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. Which suggested that what was out there couldn't be all that wonderful considering what they were all being drawn to. I looked northwards, to the depth and breadth of Kurskt Bay. From where I was standing, on a clear day you could just discern the tops of the very grandest monuments of Kurskt's poorer cousin.
To be sure Varkon was worse than second best when it came to trade and history. No Library of Lightening there, either, which called into question whether a city without one could be called a city at all. That was the sort of stuff the Council members clashed skulls on, no doubt. So Varkon had identity problems, for all its grand edifices thrusting upwards to make it feel better about its shortcomings. Things were quieter there, safer, but then they always were when there was so much less at stake. Maybe I could detect the faint glow of its presence to the north as the night drew on, enough to make me wonder what it must have looked like five hundred years ago when it was being torched. A foolhardy beacon for presaging the invasion of the mighty city of Kurskt as it turned out. But that night gutted the penchant for grandeur in Varkon all right. Varkon looked happy enough in its weak glow, out there, in the world, a vague presence to be sure, but content within its own confines. North was good, but I was heading south and I didn't like it. South towards a clogged and ragged tumble of stone and shadow, which grew darker the further I ventured towards it. The glowfires were still spawning, scribbling little pinpoints of light in the deepening night air, dodging the rising smoke of sulphur and lime from the night torches and the noisome smell of frying kwell, visible in its offence to the senses. Summer was clinging on a little longer then, those innumerable bright yellow needle fingers flying through the air. And it was welcome, amid all the silly talk about the Dark Rains coming again. There was rhyme and reason to the glowfires' frantic scribble of flight. Desperate to copulate and scatter their eggs before their brief week of life was done and they croaked it, a study in minature of the people all around them. As they frittered about frantically they gave an impressive display of not having a clue.
The damesen obviously wasn't traversing the trader trawl to purchase honeyed sweet potatoes, she was breezing past all the fare. The way she was put together she certainly wasn't short of a decent meal or two and yet she glided like shadow cast by a length of errant silk ribbon. Looked like she was heading for Raggler territory. There was nowhere else to go unless there was some palace I didn't know about squashed between the stacks of hovels. Only one good thing about going towards Raggler territory. No militia. But the one place you wished there was. North was good. South was bad. Go far enough south and you'd end up wading through the Furg marshes and nests of Kraks. That's how good south was. Not that you'd ever get that far when you'd hit Raggler territory. That told you something about Takrann. Go far enough south and the city had washed its hands of you altogether. Because you were on your own in Raggler territory, apart from all the countless diseased, disadvantaged, and depraved losers that tended to be clogging the dwellings at the fringes there. South was bad. It was very simple. I asked myself if Raggler territory was worth it for another fifteen parillon. Shit. Three thousand wasn't. On she glided. While I was just about ready to purchase a passage to Varkon.
As I walked further south towards the one place nobody should want to be, especially a damesen of the court and least of all me, the docks and the sea to my left, the stacked hierarchy of the city to the right, as if in protest at my own folly I made an instinctive turn of my head towards the city side. There. I could still see them, the spires of the Library of Lightening of Kurskt between a rare gap in the line of two storeys, like twin jewels studded half way up The Green Steps leading all the way to the keep at the top of Tolar's Hill. A reminder that there was a world elsewhere. The white stone Library spires overlooking the hunched abodes that threatened to spill over into the sea stretching out before them. The spires rose above the mire of human uncertainty, pointing upwards to, well, God knows where. I wished I was rooting around inside the Library walls, an obscure tome in my hands. An owl arse cultivating dream sores in a world elsewhere. Book upon book bound to last turn upon turn of history, the ghosts of lords and slaves tumbling from the darkened aisles in draperies of dust and cobwebs through momentary escapes of light. Roll upon roll of parchments, so many of them that there was enough kindling to set fire to the world. The very soul of Takrann encased in skins of boiled leather. There were those in the know who said The Map of Souls itself was lost in there. I might have got as excited about that as the next legitimate scholar or thief of one, except that it seemed to be one hidden away in every Library of Lightening in Takrann.
The Library pricked my conscience as sharply as its spires pricking the sky. Go home, Shader. Never mind The Map of Souls, mere fable murmured about by the glass-eyed library gossip of dry-skinned relikers. Go home. I had to consider The Lists gone. The Collectors had sifted through the mouse droppings beneath the floorboards of my botlhole, while there I was, wandering my merry way towards Raggler territory, following some woman with more front than Ravenstone Wall, my soul tinkling away in my pocket. Yes, it was time to go home. But after I'd done with the damesen. only, the way I followed her so slavishly it was like I really was on a mission for her.
Wrapping the shawl tight to her body as she weaved through the crowd, the damesen was heading for Raggler territory, all right. Not for three thousand would I follow her. Never mind fifteen. The way she used those hips she could smooth the edge off flint. I could just detect the line of her rapier on one side amid the distraction of her supple undulations. I shook my head, looked up. The air above was a dun stain spreading up into the sky, the heat from diseased and dying things, visible, while the night tried to play catch up. A spit of rain greeted my gaze upwards. The gutters would get to drink their fill again. Nothing new come sunshine or rain. Nothing. No need to chart the course of the citadel’s rain pipes above cobbled paths as the new city poets were inclined, with their soulless word hordes to fit their soulless worlds, breathlessly telling how the runnels flow, halt, bubble, glug, clog and overspill with the inevitable downpour across all corners and in so doing, take in a fabulously squalid descriptive detour of the mundane weirdness and injustice writhing beneath them amid steaming filth. As if it was some new sort of weirdness. But it was nothing new. Figments of perverse fancy. A hollow pursuit. No purpose would be served in that unless you could chart the citadel within. Everyone's feet stank. Like the man said: “Our souls tread barefoot in this world”.
“Damn it!”
Familiarity breeds a certain contempt indeed: I had contemptuously taken as much notice of my familiar surroundings as I had of following the damesen. I’m not exactly sure where I lost her. In fact I’m not exactly sure that I lost her at all. The distinct feeling registered that she had lost me. Now it had already occurred, even to a fool like me that I had been hired by her to do a job she could carry out perfectly well herself. If she lost the robber’s banquet on her fingers, the mugger’s cash blessing for life around her neck and dressed down a bit - she could likely wander pretty much where she pleased. She could. She was. She had. With a coarse shawl and a swing of her hips she had bested me. She could take care of herself. That's all I had learned. So why hire me? Because you are a damn fool, Shader. A woman stands in front of you, thrusts out her hip and she’s got you dribbling like one of the crazies in Dunderk Asylum.
Something much more worrying than having lost the damesen loomed. Made me want to scratch the scar on my neck. I cast an anxious side glance for the second time as I turned another corner. I had little doubt about it. A flash of movement amid milling faces. No sooner seen than it was gone. Someone was following me. I increased my pace. Bastard was still there. My first thought was the beggar, but from what blurred glances I gained the gait was different, the figure much taller, even accounting for the height the hood might add to it. I barged past two market women nattering in the middle of the thoroughfare, worrying about addressing my bad manners later as I cut through their busy tongues, but they had no worries about bad-mouthing me then and there. I wanted to assure them that it was certainly bigger than that - but no time. I increased my brisk pace to shorter, faster strides. I looked over my shoulder to see a head bobbing rapidly between the crowd, hurrying in my footsteps, the place where the face and eyes should be, a blur in the shadow of the hood worn by my pursuer. All pretence was over. I wasn't being followed, I was being chased, bold as you please. And whoever it was, he was intent on getting me. The cheek of it. My pride bridled. Just one man after me? Chasing me down the street like a chicken? But just one Collector was another proposition altogether.
As my brisk pace turned into an undignified jog, I hastily considered my options. There were two I could readily think of but I surprised myself in the midst of the moment that I had time to dally with a fantastical third: stopping and chatting with the fellow and having a perfectly reasonable conversation with him as to what my business was about; that it was mutually beneficial to both parties; that I had fifteen parillon at hand - Shall we go and fetch it then and there? Certainly! Splendid! And another fifteen to come. Your associates can have the lot. We'd sip a glass of vaki together at a tavern table, smoke some balca, slap some serving lass's backside and shake hands at the end of it, all very sensible, all very reasonable, agreeing to see each other on the morrow where I would hand over the other fifteen parillon with another very pleasant shaking of hands. Simple. I'd disarm him with such a move. I'd give him bold as you please. Only I knew that some bored person at court, desirous of getting in touch with the spirit of existence would pay much more than thirty parillon for my heart and liver in their cultist dalliances. Especially the heart and liver of one hallowed. No secret among Collectors. No secret between either of us that when it came to it, I was better off dead to them. As for the dalliers at court, their bored spirits were more important than my vaki-soaked offal. All the rage among court, getting in touch with the spirit of one's existence. Sick fucks. The very idea enraged them in their enthusiasm to get in touch with it. If you were one of those who could afford to get in touch. It cost you. Bits of someone else's body required for the flesh to meet the soul in some bollocks mad ritual or other that put the skryers to shame. Even supping with God was a commodity you could buy. I knew it, the Collectors knew it. My hastening footfall knew it. Those bastards would take my money and they would still take me. Well I wasn't about to be taken, not like that. If they took me it would be kicking and screaming. So I was back to my only two options except both of them were also of the screaming kind: the stand and fight kicking and screaming kind. Or the other kind: the running and screaming kind. Maybe the screaming was to come but running was what I was doing, Running like a hounded dog. Just one man? My legs had already decided things for me. Clearly they wanted to remain attached to the rest of my body.
Running through the crowd, my elbows antagonised oaths, threats and obscene insults from the folk they connected with, human flesh was beginning to take on the sticky consistency of melting rock sugar for all the haste I was making through it. Another figure stood out ahead of me, on the rise of the street as it swooped upwards. Like an immovable dark pillar set there, amid a river of people on either side. I panicked, lost my footing in a tangle with the ankle of a petki merchant, his clothing reeked of the pungent spice, assaulting my nose as I as I hit the ground. A boot, massive in its proximity to my face swung my way. I got kicked, a far from friendly whack on the sholuder, whether by accident or design it did not matter. It hurt. I lay momentarily upon my back, a worthless body forgotten in the flow, Kurskt's famous compassion on resplendent display as I lay there, arms spread out like a mage momentarily parting an unstoppable sea around him, the pungency of petki spice up my nose, my face set to be trampled to mush.
Instinctively I rolled to my left to dodge another booted foot, seeking to mash my skull, once, twice, three times I rolled over, like a furled rug swiped into a side street. The petki began to smell very good down there. There beneath the crowd I was as good as invisible. Stay down. I did. I waited. Drew my dagger as one booted foot after another swept close to me. Slowly, I raised myself from the ground into a crouch, hesitating before I stood upright. I put my dagger away, brushed the dust and dirt off me and smiled. Through no skill of my own, I'd lost the bastards.
My smile didn't last long. If Collectors were pitched outside Sydar's place that was me fairly buggered. Oh, I had plenty of friends besides the Collectors wanting to have words with me, to be sure, but who else would take the trouble to chase me through the streets? What did make me wonder was why they hadn't simply grabbed me by the balls as soon as I stepped outside Sydar's. I'd lost them for a while. Which led me to another thought: had it been Collectors, they would have caught me, then who else by Mathar was it who also wanted a piece of me?
I put aside the question of whether I could return to Sydar's place later that night. Coin was the solution. It always was. Find the girl and I got the coin. Coin solved everything in the world. Coin could buy you anything. Do anything. No sooner had you told someone that than a line of noble folk were jostling to tell you it couldn't. Bollocks to that. They were the ones who usually had coin and could afford the luxury of gainsaying the truth of it. Same over. Same old. Money was power, not knowledge or love. It was positively indecent for people to keep up the pretence that it was anything but otherwise. Nothing could be better designed to make you spit than a rich person who told you that coin wasn't the answer. They knew it was. The damesen knew it. I couldn't see her telling me that coin could buy you everything except love or happiness or whatever. That woman's heart was flat and circular for sure, smooth-palmed on the outside, tarnished on the inside, the sumptuous outer resplendence wrapped round it all like the finest, softest calfskin purse. The heart inside had the worn face of King Tolar embossed on it, or I was a Collector.
I'd barely taken the time to ask myself why she wanted the girl anyway. Then I reminded myself that the why wasn't my business. I tried to stop thinking about the why too much. Reminding myself that after I’d done the thing I got paid to do I didn’t worry about the why. It was the client's mess then. If there was ever a sniff of something seriously wrong my policy was always to decline. Granted three hundred vecs was a lot of excuses not to. But that particular deal wasn’t just a sniff, it wafted overwhelmingly aromatic towards me. A cure for kwell to be sure. Lemon, ambergris and sellith tincture on clean bathed skin - and I should have known better. Me, of all men, hallowed as I was. Always poking my nose where I shouldn’t. And that meant the Haren Quarter and that mad fucker Maggan. Because if anyone knew what had happened to the girl, that whoremaster did.
I wasn't about to walk into Maggan’s den without a bargaining chip. The damesen had got my thinking crooked. I saw another woman in the crowd that caused my body to twitch at the sight because I swore she was the image of the damesen. Okay, so she was cloaked with finery upon her fingers. I told myself to look around me, to count them all. I was jumpy all right. So dazzled by the damesen's three hundred vecs that the subject of expenses had never entered my head. Maybe if I had been thinking with my head as I had drooled over her other valuables it might have done. Because finding myself contemplating knocking at the door of Toda Fakek was not a cost I had calculated for. The crumbly old mage was cheap for sure, if not reliable. Cheap was relative where hokes were concerned: wards, sleights, mysters, earth shakers, sky clouders, you paid through the nose wherever you went. No, hokes didn't come cheap, even when purchased from a crumbly old fart like Toda. Besides, Toda had something you couldn't put a price on: discretion. I headed back north, slipping into one of the side streets that put me above the line of Andak Street and the two jesters who had been following me. Yes, north was good.
I looked for Toda but didn't find him sitting among the elders at the kineti tables along Tari Street. His fellow elders, the old merchants, tailors, userers, crippled old soldiers or self-proclaimed mages were making their tableti moves at the same time as they were making sense of the world through balca smoke and hacking coughs. All rumy-eyed over the past they were, as serving boys, a tumble of little legs and tousled wits fussed about them. The elders never changed but all around them their world certainly seemed to. They never noticed, either, too busy setting the present to rights over kafa, vaki, tableti play and sterterous breathing - as usual - only they were doing it well enough without Toda that evening. I couldn't see him anywhere. The old man was at home, then. My body twitched in sudden discomfort. Again. Out of the corner of my eye, a blur like, well, like money - a bejewelled smile flying through the crowd. Gone. Damned if I wasn't seeing damesens everywhere.
