Brown River Queen (3 page)

“My favorite.”

My beloved grinned. “You’d be content eating with that old knife you keep in your boot.”

“As long as I’m eating.”
 

“I got you a new hat, too. You’ll love it. Solid black with a dark grey band.” She turned and adjusted the hat I was wearing. “Elegant with just a touch of roguishness.”

I nodded. “That’s me. Elephant with a touch of robbery. But you aren’t fooling anyone, dearest. Confess. You’re in cahoots with my junior partner, aren’t you?”

We stopped to let a nanny and her pair of shrieking infants pass.
 

The quizzical expression Darla turned toward me was flawless, right down to the tilt of her head and the barely-raised eyebrows.

“In cahoots how?”

I laid my finger on the hatbox’s ornate stamping. “A new black hat. From Carfax. I’m no hat maker, Darla dear, but I know how they rank, and this is the top of the pile.”

“You need a new hat.”

“For our cruise on Evis’s new boat. Since we’ll be rubbing well-dressed elbows with the upper crusts of Rannit’s worthies.”

“Will it help if I flutter my eyelashes and pretend I’ve never heard of Evis?”

“Nope. When did Gertriss tell you?”

“Yesterday. I got myself an evening gown. Black as a crow’s feather. Slit up the side, up to here.” She indicated a spot high up on her right hip.

“You’ll cause a riot.”

She laughed. “Well, if I do, you’re being paid to quell it. Speaking of being paid, how much did you manage to drag out of the poor pale soul?”

“A thousand crowns. In gold.”

She clutched my arm and danced a step.

“A thousand?”

I nodded. “Easy. Without that arm, my suit won’t hang straight. Yes. We’re rich, my dear. Almost rich enough to buy hats from Carfax and gowns from—”

“Eloise’s.”

“Eloise’s, then. So, what’s for lunch? Caviar and hundred-year-old brandy?”

“Sandwiches. Ham. Two slices, since we’re rich.”

I kissed her cheek. “See how quickly decadence takes over? Next we’ll be hiring servants to fan our brows and sleeping on pillows stuffed with money.”

We stopped on the corner while a blue-capped Watchman waved a pair of lumber wagons through the intersection. Darla said something but it was lost in the rumble of wagon wheels and the clip-clop of heavy hooves.

A dozen other pedestrians took up positions beside or behind us while the wagons thundered past.
 

I was still trying to puzzle out what Darla might have said when a slightly-built young woman dressed all in black tapped me on my left shoulder, smiled at me, and plunged a long sharp knife directly toward my favorite kidney.

I dropped my heavy parcel in the vicinity of her toes and slapped the blade away. Her dainty hand darted under mine,
 
reversed, and bore in on my gut. She never lost her smile.

I half-turned and let her put a rip in my jacket and stepped back. She tried to follow and nearly tripped over Darla’s fireflower-embossed silverware and my good new hat.
 

It was only then that I heard the shrill and rising banshee’s scream.

The smiling woman with the knife heard it too. Buttercup’s volume is in no way limited by her diminutive stature. Her inhuman howl rose up and up, higher and higher, reaching for a crescendo no human lungs would ever approach, much less match.

The woman hesitated.
 

I had it in mind to rush her. Grab her knife hand, take a cut if need be, but knock her off her feet and put a knee in her gut and hold her knife hand down until someone could grab the blade.

Instead, Darla, my newlywed wife, simply grabbed the woman by her hair and threw her into the street.

One brief shriek and it was over. The driver of the wagon that ran my would-be murderess down never slowed and certainly didn’t halt.
 

I turned in a quick circle as my Army knife made its way into my hand. People were shouting and pointing. Some turned away in horror. Others crowded closer to the curb for a better look at the ruined body in the street. No one approached us with mayhem in mind or appeared to slink guiltily away into the crowd.

Buttercup’s hair-raising banshee cry faded quickly. I scanned the nearby rooftops, caught a brief glimpse of a tiny, wild-haired figure scampering away.

Darla pressed herself close.

“Are you wounded?”

“No. You?”

“No.” I felt Darla shiver. Watch whistles blew up and down the street. The Watchman directing traffic came stomping our way.

“What do I say?”

“Crazy woman pulled a knife on me. I pushed her away. She fell into the street.”

“What if someone saw?”

“They’ll get half a dozen different stories anyway. I pushed. She fell.”

“What about Buttercup?”

“I didn’t hear a thing. Did you?”

She shivered again. “That woman. Did you know her?”

“No. Never met her. You?”

Darla shook her head. I saw various eyes cast wholly innocent glances down at our parcel so I snatched it up before it sprouted shoes and ambled away.

“She meant to kill you. Right here on the street.”
 

“Maybe she couldn’t abide black hats.”

Watchmen stormed into the street, whistles blowing, arms raised against traffic. Blood was pooling and spreading around the crumpled body on the cobblestones. I looked but couldn’t see the knife.

A pair of Watchmen shouldered their way through the crowd. I recognized their faces about the time they recognized mine.

“Well, ain’t this a surprise,” said one. He spat on the sidewalk in open defiance of the Regent’s new ordinance against gratuitous expectoration on public thoroughfares. “Markhat next to a body.”

“I reckon you didn’t have nothin’ to do with this, either,” said the other.

“I wish I could say I was just a bystander,” I said. “But today’s your lucky day because I pushed that woman right in front of a beer wagon.”

I returned Darla’s fierce hug and put the parcel in her hands. “Go on home,” I said as the Watchmen exchanged frowns and put themselves on either side of me. “This is likely to take all day.”
 

Chapter Three

Evis paced, a wine glass of something thick and dark in his left hand and a Lowland Sweet glowing red in the other.

“And you swear you didn’t know the woman? We’re the only ones here, you know. Your sordid secrets are safe with me.”

I cussed, but not at length or with true passion. My time spent with the Watch had left me hoarse and tired. Evis puffed and sipped until I was done.

“So she’s not an old flame inflamed by your recent nuptials.”

I opened my mouth to cuss some more but decided on a long draught of Avalante’s good red wine instead.
 

“You can ask me that another half dozen times and I’ll answer the same. I never met the woman. I certainly never pitched any woo in her direction. Not my type.”

“You said she was a looker.”

“She was, but she smiled while she stabbed. Which means she enjoyed stabbing people. Not exactly a quality I look for in a woman.”

Evis nodded. “All right. Strange woman with a fondness for knives tries to gut you on a street corner with a crowd of dozens all around and the Watch waving at traffic not fifty feet away. You drop a box of fancy spoons on her toes. Your wife takes an exception to the whole affair, and strange woman winds up tragically deceased, but you take the credit for her mishap.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“The Watch buying your story?”

“The important parts are true. A dozen people saw her try to knife an unarmed man.”

“Not very discreet with her murderous rages, was she? A noontime stabbing on a busy street. I’d say she wanted plenty of witnesses.”

“Same thought occurred to me.” It was a troubling thought. Especially knowing that, had the knife found its mark and the lady had vanished into the crowd, the Watch would have sighed and rolled their eyes and written my untimely demise down to the fury of a woman scorned.

Evis drained his glass and sat down behind his desk. The single small candle illuminating the room barely lit his face, but I saw his brow crease in a pale frown.

“All this within hours of my leaving your office this morning.” He leaned forward, fingertips together, his bloodless skin ghostly in the flickering candlelight. “I’m not a believer in coincidence these days, Markhat.”
 

“You think someone doesn’t want me on the
Queen?
”

Evis sighed and the candle flame flickered, nearly extinguished. “No. I can’t even entertain that thought. We’ve been so careful, finder. So damned careful.”

“Maybe Avalante has been careful. Maybe the Regent’s people haven’t. Or maybe this has nothing to do with Avalante or Regents or steamboats at all. Maybe the woman just woke up batty and grabbed a knife and didn’t like my shoelaces.”

“Too bad we can’t ask her.”

“Darla didn’t mean to kill her.”

“Not what I meant.” His dead eyes met mine. “If the old spook was around, we could just let her rummage around in the body. She can yank memories out of fresh ones.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“She’d probably roast me if she knew I knew.”
 

“So the Corpsemaster is really gone? Not just napping somewhere?”

If it’s possible for a candlelit halfdead to look any more glum, Evis did just that. “We’ve been watching the dead wagons, Markhat. Since she dropped out of sight, they’ve been pulling nearly twice the usual number of bodies out of alleys in the wrong parts of town. Bodies that show no recent wounds. To quote a certain dead wagon loader, ‘they look like they was walkin’ around one minute an’ dead the next.’“

I cussed some more.

The Corpsemaster used the War to secretly swell her ranks with the dead. They had returned to Rannit alongside everyone else, with none the wiser, and since they’d slowly inserted themselves into the social order as drunks and weed addicts and street people
—
invisible to the living, but always awaiting the Corpsemaster’s commands.

Evis nodded. “Yes. They’re just falling over dead, practically in rows. That doesn’t bode well for us ever seeing the Corpsemaster’s black carriage again, does it?”

“You think she really bought it going up against the three wand-wavers from Prince?”

Evis shrugged. “Beginning to look that way.”

“You still getting a Captain’s pay?”

“Every month like clockwork. You?”

“Same here. In old coins.”

Evis leaned back into the comfort of the shadows. “The House considers it vital that the Corpsemaster’s status is known before we entertain the Regent, Markhat. If she’s dead or incapacitated, well, we need to know.”

I groaned. “Oh no. Nothing doing, even for old friends, even for old friends who yanked me out of a Watch house earlier today. I paid the Corpsemaster a visit once, yes, but I’m not about to repeat that. Please extend to the House my sincere regrets, but knocking on the old spook’s door a second time is not something I’m willing to do.”

“You won’t be the one knocking,” said Evis. He snuffed out his cigar in a solid silver ashtray and sighed, tired and raspy. “I’ll have that honor. And it isn’t the House asking you to go. It’s me. As a friend. I don’t want to go there alone.”

I cussed, dry mouth and all, with passion this time.

Evis had the courtesy not to grin with victory.

I didn’t lie to Darla.

I sat down with her on our new porch and we watched the neighbors across Middling Lane argue over where to plant a pair of knee-high rosebushes. The man of the house, who Darla dubbed Fussy Britches, wanted one at each corner of the steps leading up to their cheery blue door. The missus claimed they’d grow out and wind up being in the way. I named her the Queen for her imperious tone and habit of employing the royal “we” in reference to the digging of the holes.

Darla and I held hands. Our shoulders touched. We spoke in whispers while the controversy over the rosebushes raged back and forth.

I laid it all out. I was heading for the old spook’s house, after Curfew, with Evis and any Avalante foot soldiers he cared to bring along. Darla knew about the iron key the Corpsemaster once gave me. She knew what little I knew about the room the key unlocked.
 

I half expected Darla to insist on coming along. But if I surprised her by eschewing the easy lie, she surprised me by accepting the whole business as calmly as if I’d just announced a stroll around the neighborhood in the cool of the evening.

The rosebushes wound up at each end of the house. Fussy Britches did the digging with a rusty shovel and a fair amount of grunting and face-mopping. Her Majesty, the Queen of Middling Lane, put hands on hips and helped out by glaring at the excavated dirt so that it didn’t dare make a sudden dash for freedom.