The Virtu (17 page)

“We’ll have to find a hotel,” I said.

“Yeah. Bet Klepsydra’s got a lot of ‘em.”

“Shut up,” I said. I recognized that particular form of being absolutely unhelpful without actually starting an argument. Cabaline wizards excelled at its more subtle and sophisticated variants. “Both of you, stay here.”

Theokrita was more than happy to recommend hotels, even after I curbed her enthusiasm by mentioning that distasteful word, “budget.” Glancing over her shoulder, I noticed a man in Imperial uniform deep in discussion with Leontes and Ingvard, and surmised that that must be the Customs officer. His presence meant it probably would not be much longer before we were expected to disembark.

I extracted myself from what was promising to be an exhaustive review of every hotel in Klepsydra and returned to the cabin, where the silence was thick enough to cut.

“The Pig-whistle on Blue Lantern Street,” I said to Mildmay, and repeated the directions Theokrita had given me. “Does that satisfy your lordship?”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this the fuck over with.”

Powers, I was so fucking mad I could hardly see straight. I could have garotted Felix and never thought about it twice. I
would
have told him to go fuck himself, except that the person who’d really get fucked over if I did was the girl. And I hadn’t liked her much when she was a guy, and I didn’t like her no better now—her making sheep’s eyes at Felix and him acting like he didn’t notice—but it wasn’t the sort of thing she ought to end up dead over, any more than Felix being a complete fucking prick was.

So I let her braid my hair the way she did hers, and we swapped coats, which wasn’t comfortable for neither of us, but we could get by, and her and Felix went out so they could be sure they got off the ship as soon as they could. The goons might not be completely fooled, but they’d be inclined to wait instead of follow. And then I could make like I was sneaking off, and they’d be sure to come after me, and wouldn’t that be fucking grand? Felix was awfully flip about it, but I was betting he didn’t know hired goons the way I did. And if everything went right, he wouldn’t have to.

You know, that made me mad, too, the way I’d catch myself trying to protect him, like he was still crazy and not to blame for the fucked up situation he’d landed us in. Well, landed me in.

“Fuck it,” I said under my breath and tried to stop thinking.

After a while, I heard everybody clomping down the gangplank. I hoped Felix had got his damn rings back, because I had a feeling I knew who’d be sent after ‘em if he’d forgot.

Climb the wall in front of you, Milly-Fox, I said to myself. I judged time the way I always had on a job, doing “Jeniard’s Lover” in my head. Last time I’d done that, I’d been in Mélusine on a hotel roof in the rain, coming down with the Winter Fever, fixing to meet Mavortian von Heber for the first time. All I’d known about Felix Harrowgate was that he was the hocus who’d broken the Virtu. That life had sucked, but I wished I could get back to it and tell myself to tell Mavortian to fuck off. Because both my legs had worked right then, and I didn’t have a prick of a hocus ordering me around like his own personal dog.

I finished up with “Jeniard’s Lover” and went out on deck. There was nobody around—I mean, nobody I knew—and one look was enough to spot the fat Kekropian leaning against a warehouse and pretending like he wasn’t watching the
White Otter
. At worst, if there’d been two guys set to watch, we’d split them up. But I was betting this guy was it for look-out, and Felix and Arakhne had got past him. There’s a reason smart people don’t hire goons.

If I’d actually wanted to get off the ship without being seen, I’d‘ve gone over the side and swum for it. So I was just as glad that wasn’t the point here, because I was
pretty
sure I’d be able to make it, but not, you know, completely convinced. Small favors—all I had to do was act like I thought I was being all sneaky, which was mostly wearing this big hat that Arakhne’d pulled out of her luggage. Stupid thing, and if that was the best she could do, it was no wonder there were goons waiting for her, but it was doing what I wanted just fine. Which was mainly getting in the way of the goon getting a good look at my face.

I saw the goon see me and pretended like I didn’t. Felix and Arakhne were heading north for the Pig-whistle, so I headed straight west, inland, and the goon fell in behind me. My limp was little enough now that it didn’t matter so much—and when I thought of all the work I’d put in, it made me want to sit down and laugh until I puked, that
this
was the good I got out of it. First major street I crossed, I looked around, and sure enough the goon had picked up some friends. Three or four of them, although it was hard to tell without turning around to count.

That was probably the lot, then, and now I had to figure out how I was going to get
them
to figure out I wasn’t a stupid little Troian girl. What they did then was anybody’s guess, but as long as they didn’t catch on to the truth, it didn’t much matter.

I wished—a lot—that I could have picked this whole stupid game up and dropped it down in Mélusine. Didn’t even have to be the Lower City, although that would’ve been best. ‘Cause I could guess about which way to go and which not in this city, but that’s all I was doing. Guessing.

And, wouldn’t you know it, I guessed wrong.

One of Keeper’s friends used to say,
If you’re gonna fuck up, go ahead and fuck up big.
Now Keeper didn’t like that, along of how she thought you shouldn’t be fucking up in the first place, but I’d always kind of liked it. So I guess I should’ve been glad to see myself taking Cleophée’s advice, only of course there was the part where I ended up in deep shit.

I’d turned left down a perfectly ordinary-looking street, aiming to work a little farther from Felix and Arakhne before I did anything about making the goons lose interest. It was getting on toward the septad-day, and the crowd had been thinning out, so I didn’t pay quite enough attention quite soon enough to the way there wasn’t nobody on this piece of road except the goons and me.

And then I turned a corner and found out why. Fucking dead end was why, and the goons must’ve been laughing their asses off, ‘cause I went to head back quick the other way, and there they were. All six of them.

I said, “Do y’all want something?”

The looks on their faces were almost worth it. They’d been following the red braids and the way I’d been acting like I thought I might be followed.

“You ain’t a girl,” one of them said, like I’d done it on purpose to insult him.

“Never said I was.” I figured I’d better keep on like a cit. “Y’all looking for somebody?”

“Yeah,” said the guy at the back. “Maybe you’ve seen her. Red-haired girl, about your height. Named Arakhne, although of course she might be calling herself something else.”

He wasn’t no dummy. He’d smelled the rat.

“Nope,” I said. “Sorry. Stranger in town.”

“Oh this girl ain’t a local,” the guy in the back said. The six of them were spreading out, boxing me in, and a good look at that guy, the one with the brains, sent my heart down into my stomach. He was broad as a fucking church door, and wasn’t none of it fat. Fuck, I thought and took a careful step back.

“Fact is,” Church Door went on, “we’d heard pretty reliable that she was on that ship you came off of, so I’m thinking maybe you can tell us where she is.”

“Nope.”

“Now is that ‘cause you
can’t
or ’cause you
won’t
?”

“No girls on board. Nice middle-aged society lady, but I don’t figure it’s her you’re after.”

The goons were still closing in.

“How about boys?” said Church Door, and I wasn’t fooling him one little bit.

“Fuck it,” I said and got rid of that fucking hat.

Now six on one ain’t good odds. Wouldn’t‘ve been good odds even if I hadn’t been a crip, although at least then I’d’ve had the option to try and outrun them. Things were messy for a little while, but they ended up about like we’d all expected, with me on the ground and Church Door’s boot on my neck. Now most of his goons were cussing and bleeding, and one of ‘em was just starting to come ’round, but the meat of the situation was my neck and his boot, which was what my friend Zephyr would have called unambiguous.

“Let’s take this somewhere private,” Church Door said. “‘Less you feel like just answering the question.”

I didn’t waste my breath on saying nothing. Church Door kicked me twice in the head and once more for luck, and while I didn’t exactly miss nothing, it all got real uninteresting for a while. The goons hauled me up and dragged me after Church Door. I don’t know quite where we went or how we got there, along of, like I said, being not interested at the time. When things cleared up, we were in a big, echoey, empty building, an abandoned warehouse or something. I was lucky—small fucking favors—that they hadn’t really been ready for catching somebody other than that damn stupid girl. They didn’t even have a chair to tie me to or anything, just dumped me on the floor. Not that it looked like Church Door needed a chair—or anything else. He looked like maybe he didn’t need nothing more than his fingers to cause all the pain he wanted.

“It’s a simple question, friend,” he said. “Tell us where the girl is, and we’ll let you go.”

I kept my mouth shut and watched him circling in on me.

“You ain’t Troian, no matter what color your hair is. She don’t mean nothing to you.”

Which was true, but also not the point. I kept on saying nothing, and he kept on circling. He was enjoying himself, and that was bad bad news. And I was still kind of a little off, so when he came in, I wasn’t fast enough, and he got his hand knotted in my hair, right at the base of my skull. I wondered when the braids had come undone, and then Church Door got my attention by jerking my head back almost hard enough to break my neck.

“Whereas me,” he said, “I could come to mean quite a lot to you.” And he grinned.

I’d seen worse than him. I’d been in the Boneprince at night with Vey Coruscant. I’d done things myself—things I wasn’t proud of, but they’d make this two-centime goon piss himself if he knew about them. Which, of course, he didn’t, so they didn’t hardly matter. It wasn’t like he was going to sit still for me to tell him.

I kept my mouth shut and let him hit me. But he must have figured out somehow—felt it, smelled it, I don’t know—that wasn’t going to get him nowhere, because after he hit me once, he let go of me and stepped back.

“We could kill you, you know,” he said.

I just watched him.

“You don’t mean any more to us than that girl does to you.” He stared at me a moment longer, then said, “Griff, hand me your knife.”

Fuck him, he’d found my weak point. I could hear it in his voice. It’s ‘cause of the scar—I know it is and it don’t help none. It’s the thing I can’t stand, the idea of somebody making my face worse. I was on my feet without even meaning to be, and Church Door was grinning again.

If I’d been tied up, I don’t know what he might have got me to say. But he was a cocky bastard, and I was a crip about half his size, and I hadn’t put on no particularly exciting show in the first go-round. And he didn’t know how I’d got that fucking scar in the first place. He waved his goons back.

Now, my leg was singing Ervenzian opera, and my head felt like somebody’d replaced the bones with iron, and there were all kinds of bruises I was only starting to feel. But my body still remembered how knife fights worked, and Church Door didn’t look like he was planning so much on fighting as just cutting. His fucking mistake.

I dodged his first swing at me, and that made the bastard laugh. Be laughing out the other side of your face in a minute, I thought, but I knew I had to end this quick, before he either got bored or realized he was outclassed and called his goons in again to hold me down.

So the next swing I dodged inside instead of out, jammed his wrist, got the knife, and drove it back between my own elbow and side and into his gut. I rolled myself clear because jumping would have been just begging for my leg to take me down. Up on my feet again, turned around, and Church Door was staring at me with this look on his face that said plain as daylight how that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Then his knees buckled and he pitched forward, driving the knife further into his belly with his own weight. If he wasn’t dead now, he would be soon.

I looked around at the five goons. They were staring at me like a bunch of cows, but at least it didn’t look like none of them were getting any bright ideas.

I said, slow and careful, “I ain’t got no fight with the rest of y’all. ‘Less you make me.”

After a second, the one called Griff, the one who’d given Church Door his knife, shook his head.

“Good. And the law don’t hear about the body, right?”

One of the others spat. “Law don’t give a shit.”

“Okay. Then I’m gonna leave and you ain’t gonna follow me and we ain’t ever gonna see each other again. Okay?”

This time they all nodded. I backed to the door, slow and careful, and they stood there and watched me go. Like cows.

I slammed the door shut behind me and set off north, wishing like fuck that I could run.

The Pig-whistle had seen better days, but the rooms were large, clean, and comfortable. Their rates were reasonable, though sadly not reasonable enough that Mildmay and I could afford separate rooms. Arakhne’s funds seemed to be plentiful; she bespoke a room for herself under the name Phaëthon Yarth and then followed me up to the room Mildmay and I would share.

I longed with all my heart to tell her to go away, longed to have the chance to do more than merely check that my rings were all in their case, all unharmed, but she was still wide-eyed and skittish, and it was clear I would have had to use force to get her on the other side of the door.

I took my shoes off and lay down. She perched on the chair by the window and kept an anxious watch on the street. She tried once or twice to engage me in conversation, but I pretended to be sleepy and she gave up, only sighing deeply from time to time to remind me of the burdens under which she labored.