CHAPTER
29
An
Uninvited Guest
ANGUS LOK LEFT his
room in the Crater, taking his very few possessions with him. He
hadn’t yet decided whether or not he would return, but his policy
was the same either way. Be ready.
The room was
acceptable to him in all essential ways. It was in a private
lodging house, not an inn, located at the front of the building
with a window looking down on the street. It had a bed, a washstand
and a chamber pot, nothing else. Its landlord catered discreetly to
men and women who were taking the Holy Cure; a middle-aged,
hopeful, soft-bodied clientele with just enough money to finance a
trip to the city for the required twenty-nine days of the cure.
Angus could imagine the Phage looking for him in many, many places,
but in a house filled with mildly religious, gout-ridden invalids
stinking of sulfur he felt relatively safe.
If they found him
they would strike him down.
You never left the
Phage.
You never killed the
Phage.
And you never
interfered with their plans.
That was three and
counting. For a certainty they were on his trail. He knew how they
operated. He had lived this life from the other side. He had
been the tracker, the one quietly
making inquiries at inns and alehouses, blacksmiths and feed
stores, slipping into stables at night and checking the boxes,
swapping stories with local whores. When necessary he had done more
than track. Stay alive in the Phage long enough and sooner or later
you’d find blood on your hands.
They dressed it up,
of course, wrapped themselves in cloth-of-gold. They were the
Brotherhood of the Long Watch and they pushed back against the
darkness, taking the long view, identifying threats, consolidating
strengths, moving in ways subtle and unsubtle to remake and prepare
the world.
The question was, who
watched the Phage?
Angus wished them
harm, every one of them. And they wished him that harm right
back.
He was careful as he
made his way north through the Crater. It was God’s Day and the
streets were quiet. In Morning Star any copper coins exposed to
daylight today were God’s due. It meant business went inside and
candles and lamps were lit early so that coins could be exchanged
in man’s light, not daylight, and God could be denied his piece.
The barter market was open by the river but Angus avoided that
particular noisy busyness and instead took a route that followed
the city’s west wall.
Chapel houses were
open and the low and monotonous bellow of horns urged people to
come and pray. It was still early and the light was golden as it
cut along the streets. Apart from a brief excursion for food Angus
had not left the lodging house in three days and he experienced the
morning and the city as separate from him. Waiting was not a thing
he did well, but in this he had little choice. All normal avenues
were closed in this city. People he would typically use for
information could not be trusted. The Phage was one conversation
away from them all.
His best chance of
finding the Maiden was through her hands. This was her city and she
had lived, secreted within it, for many years. Angus could only
imagine what duplicities she practiced to keep herself hidden in
plain sight. She was the Crouching Maiden and that was what she was
known for: staying still, keeping low, letting the shadows gather
around her mutable female form. Describing her to strangers was
impossible: no two people looking straight at her saw the same
thing. That was why the hands were so important. She could not work
her magic on the imperfect substance of burned flesh.
And she was hurting.
Somewhere the Maiden was hurting and in pain and somewhere a doctor
was treating her. Her hands were the tools of her trade and she
would not entrust them to some backstreet drunken healer. Mobility
could not be lost. Lose her grip on a knife and she was dead. She
would have no choice but to seek out a fine surgeon, and Angus’
instincts told him she would do so in Morning Star. This was a city
with hundreds of doctors to choose from. This was her
home.
Even on God’s Day,
Spice Gate broadcast its location for all to detect and Angus
turned east, away from the wall, when he smelled the odors of
pepper and garlic. His intention was to approach the surgeon’s
street from a different direction than his last visit. Caution
ruled the game this morning. He could not dismiss the possibility
that the woman in the moneylender’s had passed along word of his
arrival to the Phage. Nor could he dismiss the fact that by simply
inquiring about a woman with burned hands, the surgeon’s apprentice
had drawn the attention of Magdalena Crouch herself. Burned or
unburned the Maiden was the most dangerous assassin in the
North.
Angus Lok moved
through the city’s northwestern corner like a specter, gray-coated,
toeing the shadows, avoiding open spaces. He scribed a
quarter-league circle around the surgeon’s house and moved no
closer until he had circumvented it. A six-story building with a
dovecote open to the sky was the tallest structure in the area and
he looked at it closely, but kept walking. He rejected the second
tallest structure—a tower manse with a roof of domed copper—and
settled on the third tallest, a four-storied timbered house with
windows looking across to the surgeon’s building and street. Angus
entered the building’s back courtyard and tried the
door.
It opened into a
kitchen. A pretty maid with blond hair barely contained by a white
cap turned to face him. “They all out?” he asked, not giving her
time to think.
“They’re at chapel,
yes.”
“I’d better wait
then.”
The girl looked
uncertain. Her slender fingers danced across the surface of her
apron.
“Very well, I’ll go,”
Angus told her, “but you’ll have to
tell the master that I’m not sure when I can return.” He turned,
put his hand on the door.
“Wait.
Stay.”
Angus completed a
full spin. “I’ll wait upstairs. I know the way.”
She followed him
nervously as he crossed the kitchen to the interior
door.
“What time do you
expect them back?”
“They just
left.”
Two hours then. Good.
“Fetch me a cup of hot broth to the solar. Quick now, girl. I’ve
had a long journey.”
The maid reversed her
course, heading back toward the stove, and Angus took the doorway,
looked around, and then made his way through the house. Young maids
were a knowable commodity. Give them orders and they had a tendency
to obey.
She found him ten
minutes later, nodding off in a padded chair in the house’s large
and comfortable primary common room, the solar. All houses of a
certain size and prosperity possessed such a chamber.
“Leave me now,” Angus
told the maid, accepting a cup of hot fragrant liquid from her
delicately shaking hands. “Wake me when the master
returns.”
The maid bobbed a
curtsy and left.
Angus listened to her
footsteps descend the stairs, set the cup down on the floor, and
then exited the room. A hallway led to stairs which led to the
third and fourth stories. He climbed both flights of stairs, took a
moment to orient himself within the geography of the house, and
then selected a door which opened onto space at the front of the
house.
It was an attic room
with a sharply slanted ceiling and unplastered wood walls. A
stained mattress and a handful of wicker boxes, piled unevenly
against the interior wall, were the only contents. A single window
faced south. Its shutters were tightly closed.
Angus opened one of
the shutters gradually over minutes, easing it back, keeping in the
shadow behind the second shutter. The rear of the surgeon’s house,
its walled yard, kitchen door and window, were clearly visible.
Beyond that the south end of the street and a small bar-shaped
section at the north end could be viewed through the spaces between
houses. Angus spread his weight evenly between his feet, settling
in for a long wait.
An hour passed. The
surgeon’s kitchen door opened and a man with gray hair—probably the
surgeon himself—came out and pissed against the wall. The street
was quiet. People walked its length, either alone or in groups of
two or three, with purpose. No one loitered. An old man with a cane
took his own good time reaching a house at the street’s north end,
but Angus found nothing in the man’s appearance or behavior to
raise alarm.
In the second hour
two children, boys of about eight or nine, ran into the center of
the street and began playing a game that involved hurling a sealed
waterskin at one another. Angus didn’t like this. When people
stayed in place he got worried. And the Phage were not above using
children.
He watched the boys,
increasingly aware that time was running out. Go, he told them silently.
They stayed. He could
hear their excited laughter and the crude oneupmanship of their
taunts. The taller of the boys was dark-skinned and black-haired
with a dusty tunic and no cloak. The other boy was smaller but
perhaps older with red hair and pink skin. He was wearing the kind
of roughly pieced deerhide favored by bush hunters.
Angus closed the
shutter. Time to go.
Swiftly and quietly
he made his way down through the house. The maid was in the
kitchen—he could hear her clacking pots—so he took the front door
and slipped out into the street. The sun was still shining but a
smoky haze rising from the city stopped it from being bright. Angus
walked to the corner, cut a turn, headed for the south end of the
surgeon’s street.
Years of training did
not prevent the acceleration of his heartbeat. This could be
simple. Or not. Making the turn onto the surgeon’s street, he
deliberately slowed his pace. The arrangement with the apprentice
was that the young man would walk out to meet Angus at midday. It
was a minute before midday. Angus wanted to give the apprentice
plenty of time to see him, to observe him perhaps for a moment or
two, to set his young mind at ease.
The boys were still
playing. They were engaged in an unheated argument over the rules
of the game. “Possession’s mine,” claimed the taller, younger boy.
“You dropped it.”
Angus tracked all the
movements on the street. The boys, a woman walking with a cane, a
girl leading a horse laden with milk pails. Two crows were pecking
through dirt that had accumulated in a wheel rut. Angus’ gaze
jumped from the birds to the surgeon’s door as light streaked
across the varnished wood. The door was opening.
He did not reach for
one of his knives, though the instinct was there. He continued
walking, easily, almost jauntily, toward the house and its door. A
figure was emerging from the dimness of the entryway and every
nerve in Angus’ spine was trained upon it. Size was right . . .
shape was right. The figure stepped into the light.
It was the
apprentice, looking younger and softer than Angus remembered. The
young man had shaved and donned stiff-looking formal clothes,
probably his best. Angus peered into the dim interior behind the
apprentice. He saw nothing, but knew better than to allow himself
the luxury of relief.
The apprentice raised
his gaze and made eye contact. Angus returned it. The apprentice
closed the door. Angus adjusted his pace, timing it so that he and
the apprentice would fall into step as they met. You could tell a
lot from a man’s neck, see what muscles were working in his throat
and jaw. Angus could tell the apprentice had information. You could
see it weighing down the muscles in his tongue.
They fell into step,
walking north. The apprentice was the first to speak. “How’s the
arm?”
Angus made a seesaw
motion with his head. “Been worse.” Moving his hand against his
coat, he made the silver coins stored there jingle softly. “Have
you found her?”
The apprentice kept
his gaze ahead. His eyes were still bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“Money first.”
He was learning.
Angus took out the cloth bag and tamped it into the apprentice’s
cupped hand. More money than he would earn in five years. Maybe
ten.
The apprentice slid
the bag under his good half-cloak. A second passed while he seated
it.
Angus said, “Where is
she?”
He wanted to talk,
that was the thing about information. Once you had it, it was a
pleasure akin to relief to pass it on. “She’s calling herself Anna
Roach and she’s—”
Angus slammed into
the apprentice as the word ‘she’ left his mouth. The red-haired
pink-skinned boy had hurled the waterskin directly at the
apprentice, and as Angus and the apprentice slammed into the ground
the waterskin burst right by the apprentice’s face.
It was not filled
with water.
The two boys tore off
down the street.
Angus rolled onto his
knees and dragged the apprentice away from the lye. He could smell
it burning the young man’s face. He felt pinprick sizzles on his
own face and hands where the splash had caught him.
“Who’s treating her?”
Angus said.
The apprentice looked
at him. His just-shaved face was beginning to singe as if it were
being held to a flame.
“Who?”
“Sarcosa.”
Angus heard the
tht of a crossbolt lever being
released. Grabbing the apprentice by the back of his cloak, Angus
hauled the young man’s torso against his own, using the apprentice
as a shield. A crossbolt lanced into the apprentice’s shoulder with
such force that Angus’ teeth smashed together.
Rising, he threw away
the young man.
The crossbolt had
come from the tower manse with the copper roof. Angus knew exactly
how long it took to crank and cock a crossbow and as he sprinted
away from the apprentice he worked out the bowman’s angle of sight.
Reaching the first alley between houses he darted into the gap. As
long as he was close to a building on an east-west axis he was
safe.
He ran east toward
the river, scrambling over walls, jumping fences, tearing through
courtyards and private spaces. He had been a fool. He knew the two boys hadn’t been right. Someone had
paid them to play there. Someone had given them a waterskin lined
with God-knew-what so that it could hold lye, and instructed them
to throw it at the two men meeting outside the house. It had been a
diversion, something to slow down the mark. Once he, Angus Lok, was
on the ground he was a sitting target.
Of course they
weren’t interested in the apprentice. He was just the means, the
lure.
This had the Phage
written all over it. The Crouching Maiden would not have set such a
clumsy trap. Crossbolts at distance weren’t her style. She played
with superior odds.
Out of breath, Angus
slowed to a walk. He calculated he had put half a league between
himself and the manse tower and as there was no sign of pursuit he
felt safe. Lungs pumping, he headed for the riverbank.
The big black maw of
the Burned Fortress swallowed the Eclipse two hundred yards
upstream. Angus watched the water swirl above the drop. He jumped
the floodwall and hiked down the bank. Kneeling in the mud, he
splashed water on his hands and face. It cooled the burned specks
on his skin. He rested for a while, not thinking.
He wasn’t young
anymore. How much longer could he outrun threats?
Not for the first
time he wondered if he was doing this in the right order. If Cassy
was alive, if the lack of her body at the gravesite meant that she
hadn’t died that night, then wouldn’t it be better to track her
first?
It had seemed clear:
Take down the Maiden at all cost. Anyone who knew anything about
the Maiden would tell you that she never failed to kill a mark.
Once she took a commission with your name on it you were dead.
Sooner or later you were dead. That meant Cassy was in grave
danger.
He was a father; he
had to take that danger away.
Abruptly, he stood.
He could not think of his daughter, of the possibility of her being
alive.
It was too much for a
man to hope for. It would drive him insane.
Angus peeled along
from the river, heading south. He needed to wash, and mend and
launder his clothes. There were wormholes in his coat where lye had
burned through the fabric. He considered returning to the lodging
house—he had paid for ten days—but he knew from being a tracker
that it was a mistake to follow patterns. Once someone identified a
pattern in your behavior they could anticipate your next move. And
there was no doubt in his mind: The Phage were on him.
It was not worth
worrying about how they had come to learn of his arrival in the
city. Anyone—gate guard, market stall holder, drunk in the
street—could have identified him and passed along the information
to the Phage. They watched for their enemies. The important
question was: Did the Phage know what the apprentice knew? Did they
possess the Maiden’s latest alias and the name of her
doctor?
Angus Lok knew and
didn’t care for the answer. He had to proceed as if the Phage knew
everything. They had known enough to lay a trap at exactly the
right place and time. And although their traps left something
wanting their intelligence rarely did. That meant they were likely
ahead of him. Even aware of that fact, what choice did he have but
to continue? He would not, could not,
stop looking for the Maiden. Angus Lok and Magdalena Crouch could
not exist in the same world. It would not continue to
happen.
Finally he was
getting close to tracking her down.
Anna
Roach.
Sarcosa.
She was here.
Somewhere in this city she was rubbing ointment into her burned
hands, sipping tea to slake her thirst, speaking to people who
could not see the truth of what she was. She would be cautious, but
it was too late. She had already made the fatal mistake. She had
followed a pattern. She had returned home.
Angus Lok took the
Turret Bridge and crossed to the east side of the city. It was
God’s Day and the bridgekeeper could not charge a toll for passage
so the fact that Angus had no money made no difference. He had
abandoned the purse containing his savings at the exact same place
and time he’d abandoned the apprentice.
He did not care about
the money . . . and he could no longer remember the young man’s
name.