The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) (2 page)

They were face-down in the bowls and sopping up stew before Mama could hand out spoons.

Mama grinned, showing off her remaining front tooth.

“So, what are these here urchins hiring a finder for, pray tell?”

“Someone snatched their dog. Cut the leash and took him in the park.”

Mama’s grin vanished. “You’d best find them another dog,” she said. “I reckon them what took it has intentions of using it as a bait dog.”

Saffy swallowed hard and cleared her throat. I made frantic shushing motions at Mama.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “Her dog’s name is Cornbread. Saffy. Tell Mama here how the bad man talked.”

Saffy repeated the man’s words, complete with accent.

“Mama, that accent sound like anybody you know?”

She shook her shaggy head. “I reckon not. Though there’s all kinds of foreigners coming out of Prince these days. Some of them talks outlandish, I hears.”

Dogfighting is illegal in Rannit. And not much practiced. Too many War vets came home alive because a dog warned them Trolls were closing in. Anybody caught fighting dogs for sport tended to meet with the kind of displeasure that takes months to heal, if one survives it at all.

Maybe they didn’t think that way in Prince.

Mama leaned against my desk and watched my new clients eat.

“Reckon it must be nice, bein’ able to give away work for free,” she muttered. “‘Course, now that you got Gertriss bearing most of the load, you can afford to be all charitable, can’t ye?”

Mama’s great-niece Gertriss is now my junior partner. Since Mama brought Gertriss to Rannit to be trained up in the card-and-potion trade, Gertriss’s defection to the noble art of Finding has been a sore spot with Mama of late.

“I certainly can,” I replied with a big grin. “I’ve even got time to help you run your business, Mama. Set me up a table, and I’ll start reading the cards this afternoon. Can’t be much to it. The card with the skulls means death, right? And the one with the swords means conflict?”

By then I was talking to Mama’s back as she stomped out of my office muttering about ingrates and the poor upbringing of those who failed to respect their elders.

Ted looked up at me, stew leaving greasy trails in the soot on his chin. “You got a mouth on you, Mister.”

“So I’m told.” I noted his observation on my pad in a show of attention to detail. “Finish the stew. You two need to run along home and I need to start looking for Cornbread.” I pointed at the address I’d scribbled on my pad. “I can find you here?”

Ted nodded. “First door on the right, second story. Grandpa’s deaf. Grandma can hear but not speak. She’ll know your name.”

“Fine. Scoot.”

They drained their bowls. I fussed with my notes and pretended not to see the loaf of bread or both Mama’s spoons find their way into any shabby little pockets.

When they were gone, I put the empty bowls back in Mama’s basket and swept the few crumbs that had escaped off my desk.

I put the basket by Mama’s door when she refused to answer my knock. “Got a few hours before Curfew,” I said, loud enough for Mama to hear. “I’m heading down to the docks to ask around about newcomers from Prince. Darla will worry unless somebody sends a kid to my house with a note telling her I’ll be late, but that can’t be helped, since Mama isn’t home and I’m pressed for time. Woe is me, alas, and etcetera.”

With that, I hailed a passing cab and bade the driver to head for the docks.

He jokingly asked if I was looking for trouble, heading for the docks this late in the day, and I jokingly replied I was, and where better to look?

I tossed him a coin, and off we went, toward the setting sun.

Chapter Three

You smell the choking stink of the docks a good five blocks before you see the Brown River.

Tanneries line the Brown to the north, belching out foul smoke and pouring a noxious, oily slime into the river itself. Crowded in among the tanneries are the paper mills and the ironworks and the slaughterhouses, each with their own unique and pungent odor.

Above them all, the sooty black smokestacks of the crematoriums loom, wafting out black columns of ash. They add another stack every year, I’m told, to keep up with the number of cold, bloodless corpses the dead wagons haul out of alleys every morning. The bodies must be burned or they will turn into penniless, hungry halfdead, and the Dark Houses have no more use for the poor than do the rich.

So the crematorium smokestacks puff, and the fires below burn, and we all pretend we don’t see the soot or taste the bitter ashes.

I checked my fancy, brass pocket-watch as my cab rattled to a halt four blocks from the Brown. I had a good three hours before Curfew. A good three hours before the law allowed the halfdead to go a-hunting, when anyone caught outdoors or squatting was considered fair game.

My Avalante pin would protect me, in theory, if I was out past Curfew and encountered peckish halfdead. The pin had worked before—barely—but my plan was to be safe inside our tidy little house on Middling Lane with Darla before the final peal of the Curfew bells rang out.

I tipped the cabbie and pushed down my hat and made damned sure Toadsticker was visible at my side. It’s illegal for anyone except officers of the Watch or uniformed military to wear blades in Rannit, and I was neither, so I made sure Toadsticker’s steel gleamed as he swung at my side.

I sauntered off, taking in the docks as I moved deeper toward its heart.

 
The storm that blew down the Brown in advance of an army six months ago left devastation in its wake. No part of Rannit had escaped the storm’s wrath. Places I expected to see were gone. New structures rose up, most finished or nearly so, some still showing bones of timbers and covered with scaffolds and ramps.

The cracked sidewalk was packed. By the time I’d made a block, foot traffic was so thick wagons could hardly get through.

People shoved and laughed and shouted and fought. The stink of cheap beer and cheaper rotgut whiskey managed to overpower the stench of the slaughterhouses now and then. Louder than the din of shouting and bellowing, music sounded, from dozens of close-packed bars.

I picked a joint at random and shouldered my way inside. I caught a few glares, but the sight of Toadsticker and the set of my manly jaw kept events from progressing to fisticuffs.

There were eighty avid non-bathers packed into a space built for twenty-five. The single barman, who dripped sweat in such volume he appeared to have just emerged from a swim in the Brown, shouted at me above the roar. “Whiskey or beer?”

“Beer,” I shouted. I flipped him a coin and he filled a dirty glass. I showed him another coin and crooked my finger in an invitation to lean closer.

“My money here wants to know about people with strange accents,” I said.

“Hell, mister, half this bunch is from Bel Loit and the other half are Princers. They all talk funny.”

I sighed and flashed a second coin. “Any of them rounding up bait dogs, for dog fights?”

“Hell if I know.” He hesitated, grabbed a single coin. “This is just a drinking house. Keep heading for the water. That’s where all the trouble starts.”

I nodded, put the second coin down on his greasy bar. “You hear anything else, send word to the finder named Markhat on Cambrit. I’ll pay.”

My coin vanished, and he was off to fill another filthy glass with a thin, yellow liquid that laid only the most tenuous of claims to being beer.

I gave my alleged beer to the nearest wobbling ne’er-do-well and pushed my way back to the street.

The next bar I tried had a name.
Eager Horace’s
, read the hastily carved placard above the door.
Good eats, good drinks.

The stink of the place gave the lie to both claims.

More blank stares and shrugs from the barman. Another pair of my coins stayed behind.

I had to pull Toadsticker at the Sipping Sailor when a pair of drunks decided I was a dandy who didn’t respect the dignity of the honest working man. I kneed a bleary-eyed man in the groin in a place called Shank’s Joy House after he decided I was wearing his hat. When the fight broke out in the Bargemaster Inn, I smashed a window with a stool and led the panicked charge into the street the instant I smelled smoke.

By the time I was half a block away, flames were licking at the walls of the Bargemaster. The street quickly became a mad press of people fleeing the scene, bearing the fruits of their looting, meeting those rushing toward the fire with an eye for the odd bit of theft.

I hit another dozen bars before I reached River Street, which runs north and south along the Brown. I’d nearly emptied my pockets, and I hadn’t gotten a single, whispered hint as to where I might find heavily accented dogfight enthusiasts.

I crossed River and headed south. The bars and eateries and inns were on my left. To my right stretched the wharfs and the docks and the weatherworn warehouses and then the sluggish face of the Brown, all but invisible in the dark.

There were boats moving out on the water. Barges drifted past, slow and ponderous, their cargo lashed in stacks to their wide, flat hulls. Smaller craft bobbed between them, heading for the docks.

I stopped by a bent streetlamp when I realized a line of half a dozen barges, far out on the water, weren’t moving at all. Each was brightly lit, far brighter than their cousins closer to the riverbanks, and I could see people, mobs of them, milling about under the lights.

“A question, my good man,” I said, smiling my finest smile at a man ambling past and whistling. “Those barges. They aren’t moving, and it looks like they’re hauling whole neighborhoods. Why?”

My new friend stopped whistling. “Princers,” he said, spitting into the street. “They take to the water after dark. Got some damn fool notion the halfdead can’t cross running water.”

“You serious?”

He shrugged. “Hell yes. There’s another pair of barges farther south. Gonna be a bad night when the vamps decide to get their fancy shoes wet.”

I nodded. Halfdead deterred by running water? That was an old wives’ tale disproven long ago. The only thing that deterred the halfdead was the Curfew, and its terms made no mention of water, running or otherwise.

My whistling friend spat again and ambled away.

I kept walking. I listened. I watched. I dropped my few remaining coins here and there. Many a barkeep benefitted from my largess that night, but I was no closer to finding any wee doggies than I was when I stepped out of my cab.

I pushed the last of my advance on finding Hurry-Up Pete into the pudgy fist of a barkeep who suggested I find better uses for my time, just as the first warning bell of Curfew struck.

I hoofed it north and then east. I received a good cussing by stepping in front of a cab on Market, but I got a ride, and I was climbing the three steps to my porch before the Big Bell rang out Curfew proper.

Darla met me at our door. She had flour on the tip of her nose and a revolver in her right hand.

“Welcome home,” she said, smiling. “I’ve baked us a pie!”

“Did you shoot it before or after you rolled the crust?” I kissed her. Kissing happens sometimes. Darla is careful to keep her revolver aimed at the floor when it does.

“Before, silly,” she said. She wrinkled her nose. “You’ve been somewhere unsavory.”

“Duty demanded that I carouse and cavort on the docks,” I said. We made our way to the kitchen, where supper laid waiting on the stove and a pie baked in the oven. “This is the earthy aroma of the noble working man.”

“I can’t picture you cavorting,” she said. “Do you start off with your left foot or your right?”

Tiny feet scampered across our roof.

The neighbors have squirrels. We have a banshee.

Darla’s smile died. “She’s been up there since dark.” She opened the oven and pulled out a tray of cookies. “I’ve been trying to coax her inside, but she won’t come.”

Buttercup, our resident banshee, is the size and shape of a pre-teen girl who hasn’t enjoyed many good meals. Darla’s fresh-baked sugar cookies are her favorite, and the mere scent of them usually brings her inside in a hurry.

I hugged Darla. Having a banshee walk the roof when your spouse is working a case can’t be the best way to pass an evening at home.

“She’s probably just playing with her head-bone,” I said. “Anyway, look, I’m here and all in one piece.”

The scampering on the roof stopped. Tiny, bare feet ran into the kitchen, and skinny arms hugged my waist.

Banshees don’t bother with doors.

“Hello, Buttercup,” I said, tousling her ragged mop of golden hair. “Darla made you cookies.”

Buttercup squealed and leaped. Cookies began vanishing in a veritable hail of crumbs.

“That’s hot, honey,” said Darla. Buttercup snatched up another one and crammed it in her already-full mouth, grinning.

There might be things out there capable of injuring Buttercup. Old magics. Powerful sorcerers. Eldritch spells. Hot cookies, though, aren’t on the list.

Darla began uncovering pans. I helped by getting in the way and received a playful slap on my hand when I dared grab one of Buttercup’s cookies.