Babylon Steel (17 page)

The little redhead paid his bill, bid farewell to his friends and got up to go. I followed, and as we both pushed our way from the warm steam into the chilly street, I leaned down and muttered, “Want some free advice? Take some training in swordplay, mate. It can get you stage work, and anyway, in this city it’s always useful.”

He looked up, surprised. “Thanks, but I can’t afford it.”

“Try Bressler’s in South Side. He’ll often do free lessons for errand runs.” I winked at him and went my way. My good deed for the day. And a useful reminder that I needed a little freshener myself; I’d managed in that fight, but they were amateurs. I’d have to set up a session with Previous. Normally we practiced every week, but with one thing and another we’d become slack.

Once out of the noise and warmth, I started thinking about that damn drawing on the wall again. Had I seen a skull, or not? Did it even mean anything?

I should ask the Chief. Or Fain. One of them would know. I was putting it off, like the accounts.

But it was only a suspicion. The faintest of suspicions, really.

Because if they were here, I’d have to run again. I’d spent twenty years doing little else; I’d thought myself settled, finally, and safe.

I
’D ALMOST REACHED
home when I heard something that sounded like my name, though it was more wheeze than word. I turned around. It was Glinchen, half-collapsed in the middle of the street, one hand to hir considerable chest, panting like a dog.

“Glinchen? What is it? Are you all right?”

Ze flapped a hand at me and eventually got enough breath to say, “You... walk too fast. You come. Is girl.”

“What girl? What’s happened?”

“Girl is dead.”

“What? Which... oh, not Enthemmerlee. The yellow-eyed girl? Glinchen?”

“I don’t know. Only know is new girl, and now she dead. You come.”

“All right.”

As we headed towards King of Stone, me going half-mad with impatience as I slowed to keep at Glinchen’s pace, I was hoping, desperately, that the girl wasn’t Enthemmerlee. But even while I hoped, a cold conviction grew in my belly that I had failed to save someone I could have,
should
have saved.

“How did you hear?”

“I was down Slip Street, it all go quiet, you know? Then someone come running out say girl is dead, what we do, and I remember you looking for girl maybe in trouble, and I come for find you.”

Every area of the city has its scents and sounds; they change as you move. Round the Hall of Mirrors it’s muted chatter, the swish of silk, the clatter of well-shod hooves, the hard click of heels. Perfume and clean linen, cut flowers and high-priced food.

As you pass through the residential area in between, things go quieter. There are more gardens, the shops are smaller, there are fewer eating places; less noise, less smell, less everything. Things are tucked away behind closed doors and curtained windows.

Then you get into King of Stone. Coming in this way, from Buckler Row, you move from murky shadows into smoky light. Cheap lamp-oil and tallow candles. Skinny urchins run everywhere, mostly barefoot, and you don’t want to look what they’re treading in. They play strange, complicated games that involve chalking patterns on the paving or the walls and shrieking a lot – furred, feathered or skin-clad, children shriek. There are stalls selling food from half the planes, and the smells come at you in waves; delicious or gagging. The smell of cloud, earthy and a little damp, like fungus, the fatty reek of burning oil and tallow. The underlying smell is, always, sewage. You forget to notice after a while.

There are performers singing or reciting – often enough with a friend in the crowd dipping purses while people’s attentions are elsewhere – there are people playing cups, people standing in doorways and gossiping. Processions clamour through the streets, ceremonies from worlds away, worlds that sometimes exist only in memory. Dancing and drums and cymbals and instruments I don’t even have a name for.

Around Twomoon, things usually get even crazier for a couple of days, and then they lock down.

But tonight it was different. Fewer children running through the street, more parents on watch, eyeing those who were, and the freelancers huddling round the stalls with steaming cups in their hands, or bunching two and three to a doorway.

It’s not the safest place for whoring, but there’s plenty of business, and the more adventurous respectables often come down here for a taste of something they can’t get at home. A stabbing, like as not.

Glinchen pointed to a pair of grimy buildings that leaned together as if they were muttering over some ugly secret. Broken windows, stuffed with cloth to keep the cold out, looked like blind, bandaged eyes.

Someone who seemed to be the same race as the child I’d questioned about Enthemmerlee, with that same dusty skin, was standing by the open door, her arms wrapped around herself, whispering a stream of something. Maybe prayers. I couldn’t tell.

“In there. Upstairs,” Glinchen said. The stairs led straight up from the tiny, crumbling hallway, into a grey gloom.

I looked at the woman. “You called the militia?”

She didn’t respond. I tried again, in pidgin and a couple of other languages, but she only looked at me, whispering and whispering.

“Has
anyone
called them?” I said to Glinchen.

Glinchen shrugged.

“Glinchen...”

“Oh, no, no, no. I not go talking to the millies, me.”

“Things are different, now.”

“Yeah, maybe, you all cosy-cosy with the Chief. You be careful, baba.”

“Glinchen, someone has to tell them.”

“You look first. See if your girl. Then you go tell millies if you want, hah?”

I looked up the dank webby stairwell, feeling my stomach contract.

“All right.” I had to know.

I found the room easily enough; there were only three. One was empty, presumably because of the gaping hole in the middle of the floor. Broken planks dark with rot surrounded it like a mouthful of decaying teeth. In the doorway of the next room stood a creature of indeterminate species or gender, with skin the colour of mouldy bread, clutching a tattered coat around itself, watching me with big wet eyes like black fruit. It tilted its head towards the end room.

I took a breath and went in.

The room was grey: grey rags at the windows, grey walls, grey cover on the bed. It had the fungal smell of cloud and dingy sex.

She lay on the bed, looking as though she’d flung herself back in laughter, or exasperation, her arms above her head. Her face was swollen and dusky, but the rest of her was very pale, like something grown in the dark.

She was slight, with thin wrists and fragile ankles. I moved closer, taking the little portrait out of my pocket. The locket glimmered dully. Even crusted with gilding as it was, it didn’t really shine. It was meant for ballrooms with a thousand candles, charming rainbows from the guests’ jewels; for negotiations in fine, high-windowed rooms between the scions of great families. It struggled to glitter in this dank little rathole with its torn curtain and stained bed.

And I could tell, even with the poor girl’s face swollen that way, that it wasn’t her. This girl’s eyes, traced now with red, were brown.

I wished her a good journey, and put the locket away.

I heard the feet on the stairs and knew even before I turned around. “Hey, Chief.”

“Babylon. What are you doing here?” In the grey murk, his face looked weary, and older.

“One of the freelancers fetched me.”

“You should have sent for us.”

“I was going to.”

“Straight away, Babylon. Not after you’d come up here and had a look.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I just... I needed to know whether it was the girl I’m looking for.”

“Is it?”

“No.”

“Right then. Come out of there.”

We went out on the landing. He’d brought two more militia with him; I didn’t know either of them. He nodded them into the room and turned to me.

“Aren’t you in enough trouble, Steel? What were those Vessels doing around your jalla?”

“Huh? Oh, that. Yeah. Nothing, I mean, they decided to make an example of us, or something, standing around scaring off clients, but someone told them they were breaking the law. They’ve not been back. Yet, anyway. Why?”

“And I’m supposed to clear it up if you decide to get into a barney with them, am I?”

“I didn’t!”

“You went to their temple. You walked right in there. Dammit.” He took a breath, and said, “never mind. No-one’s dead, this time anyway. Who fetched you here?”

“Chief...”

“Who told you, Babylon? The landlady?”

“The woman outside? No. One of the freelancers came to find me.”

“I need to talk to them.”

“They didn’t see anything.”

“You don’t know that. This is my job, not yours. Tell me who fetched you and don’t... muck... me... about.” A suggestion of a growl roughened his voice.

“You sound like that, you’re going to scare hir to death.”

“Hir? Glinchen?”

I cursed myself for the slip.

“Not the most reliable witness,” Bitternut said. “I’m amazed ze didn’t fall down the stairs.”

“Glinchen didn’t come up here. And was sober, last I saw.”

“Time I find hir, ze’ll be too pissed to talk. Let’s walk.”

I followed him down the stairs.

“Anything else you haven’t told me?” he said, as we reached the street.

There was a small, muttering crowd, but Glinchen, of course, was nowhere in sight – ze’d taken off at the first sight of the millies. Still, I’d bet on hir being around somewhere, too curious to leave.

“Just that Glinchen said she was new. That was why I thought maybe it was the missing girl,” I said.

“Well we can both thank our stars it wasn’t.”

“What, because the missing girl’s the daughter of some noble or other? So this one doesn’t matter? She’s still someone’s daughter, Chief. Dead in a shitty back room because of some sick little...”

“Of course she matters
.”Quietly as he spoke, I’d never heard the Chief sound quite so angry. “Do you think I don’t care, just because no-one knew who she was? What I mean, Babylon, if you’ve
quite
finished making assumptions, is that at least with this girl we won’t have some idiot from the Diplomatic Section turning up and demanding we hand over the body
right now
before there’s an Incident, and we might actually be able to conduct a proper investigation and find the murdering bastard.”

“I...”

“If even
you
think like that, I’m not surprised none of the bloody freelancers will talk to me. I thought you had better sense, Babylon Steel, I really did. Get out of here. Go home.” Before I could answer, he turned away.

The sun had dipped below the horizon, and the sky where it had been was streaked with bloody stains.

My whole body felt coated in lead. I went looking for Glinchen but without luck. I could have slapped the stupid creature, even though ze’d thought ze was doing the right thing. Why’d ze have to put me at odds with the Chief? And what else was going on with him, was it the coming Change? He wasn’t usually so damn touchy.

My mind swung from the Chief to that poor girl, that miserable little room. That’s what too many people think whoring is. Sex as something to use, instead of something to worship – an ugly life and an ugly ending.

Murder happens, of course. Whores get killed. But it’s unusual in Scalentine. We look out for each other, and the militia treat us like citizens, too. Well, most of them. The last Chief was an exception, from what I understand – but then, he was bad news for everyone, not just for whores.

Scalentine’s different, thanks be to the All, but there’s a lot of people on a lot of planes who think sex is evil in and of itself, and so is anyone associated with it.

Which is simply crazed. We all come from it; human or Fey, god or genie – it’s how we started. It’s how life begins. People like the Vessels hate that, and you ask me, they end up just plain hating life.

Talk of a demon... I was halfway up Buckler Row when I spotted two Vessels. They were moving slowly, and as I got closer I realised why. I could see the front man’s eyes glittering in the holes of his Purity mask, as they skittered nervously from side to side, glancing into the shadowed mouths of alleyways.

The man behind him had a hand on his shoulder, and his Purity mask was smoothly white from brow to chin. There were no eye-holes.

Why would a blind man insist on being led into the worst part of the city with night coming on?

“Hey,” I said. “Hey, you.”

The front man jumped like a rabbit, causing the blind one to lose his grip on his shoulder. Both masks swung towards me. Sighted or blind, I wasn’t sure which was creepier; but even with their faces covered I could tell this pair were nervous.

“I want to know what you’re doing here. I know you don’t talk to females, but you’d damn well better talk to this one.”

The blind one recovered his grip on the front man’s shoulder and I saw his fingers tighten hard.

The front man stared past me.

“There’s been a murder,” I said. “Do you understand? Someone is
dead.
”

The blind one turned to his fellow. “Terrible things happen among the unfortunates of this city
.
There is lust, and hatred; there is fury and despair. Thus we walk among them, to shine the light of the Purest into the dark places.”

“Thus do we shine the light,” his companion responded, his voice quavering.

“So you’ve been down here spreading the light of the Purest. Tell me, how does the Purest feel about people getting murdered?”

Still addressing his companion, the blind one said, “We upon whom the Purest has chosen to shed enlightenment know that the Purest does not experience feelings. The Purest is beyond them. Emotions weight the spirit and corrupt the mind. It is time we returned to the Temple, brother.”

His grip tightened again. The sighted one glanced at me. Buckler Row is well lit, in comparison with some places; I could see his eyes behind the mask. They didn’t look like those of a murderer. They looked frightened. He shook his head, a tiny fraction. A denial? A warning? I couldn’t tell.