Tarnished (13 page)

Part of me wanted to applaud. Instead, I dropped my pipe into the lap of a decently dressed man with neatly barbered blond chops and half ran out the door.

He’d known something. At the very least, he’d known this Woolsey bloke. I could sense it, as if a shimmering thread connected me to his mind. He’d known something, or I’d eat my hat.

The hall was empty as I pushed into it; not even the Chinese hostess in attendance. I sprinted through the entryway, pushed out into the damp fog, and spun in a hard, tight circle.

The details of the night screamed at me, but long practice allowed me to filter it into recognizable parcels. The fog reeked of rotting river water tonight, sewage and rubbish conspiring to undercut the rough, gritty flavor of coal smoke.

The iron-worked gas lamps tried their best to shed light on my quarry’s trail, but the fog roiled in a miasma as thick and reflective as mirrored glass, and I saw no trace of his silhouette in the dark.

The slick cobbles beneath my feet easily swallowed any trail, and as I spun in helpless frustration, I kicked at them.

A clatter echoed from behind me, and I turned to scrutinize the shadowed edge of the slick, faceless building. Gritting my teeth, I sprinted toward the noise, my fingers already slipping into the top of my shirt.

A form loomed out from the dark, and before I could find traction on the wet stone under my feet, I collided with a chest that didn’t stagger half as much I did.

A midnight blue overcoat looked almost black in the lamplight, settling over decently wide shoulders. As I found my balance against the brownstone brick, I looked up into the rigid face of Lord Cornelius Kerrigan Compton and felt my jaw drop.

He hesitated, the hand holding the fashionable walking stick deftly brushing at his shoulder as if he could wipe away any stain I may have left, but he did incline his head sharply. “Your pardon,” he said evenly.

The tone suggested bone-deep propriety was all that forced the courtesy. His gaze raked over me briefly, but didn’t linger for longer than it took the words to leave his lips. He was clearly focused on whatever task brought him below the drift.

“Er,” I managed, but he was already moving on, long before I had time to make sense of shock screaming through me.

I watched him enter the opium den I’d only just vacated and forgot how to breathe.

Could it be?

Did my Lord Compton’s secrets go as far as mine?

It took me a long moment, but eventually, I remembered how to close my mouth.

I
t was as if I’d taken a draught of liquid sunshine. Running into Lord Compton, quite literally, had jostled my anger at losing the mysterious rumormonger into something frenetic and bright—glittering and full of vigor.

I shed my street clothing as I traveled across Limehouse, leaving my collector’s garb open for all to see. I dug out my mask and goggles, needing them for the task I levied upon myself next.

At the same alley I’d found the would-be Baker boy, I paused in the dark and adjusted my various accoutrements. My tool belt was solidly locked in place, strapped down and unlikely to flap open. My fog-prevention lenses were secure, my gloves exchanged for ones with a particular molded substance on the fingers and palms.

Assured I was as ready as I could ever be, I spread my arms, touched both ends of the alley easily, and kicked my feet up on either wall.

No matter what training I had as a youth, there are certain things the human muscles just aren’t willing to do. Straddling an alleyway to climb to the roof is one. With my legs split wide open, I held myself straight, splayed my arms for balance and slowly inched my way up. My legs and hips burned by the time my head cleared the roof, and I hooked my fingers into the edge with a sigh of relief.

It would hold. I locked my grip, leveraged my weight over to one side and hung for a moment. Arms shaking ever so slightly, I bent at the waist, pulled my straightened legs up, up, up until my toes were pointed to the sky.

“
Allez, hop!
” I muttered, and bent backward almost double until my feet touched the rooftop. Completing the walkover was the easy bit, and soon I was on my feet and upright again.

My back complained. Just enough.

I was, after all, getting a sight too old for such antics. There was a reason most circus performers were children.

I studied the vista laid out before me, arranging the yellow lens over one eye until it sat more comfortably against my socket. The fog drifted like a living thing, pouring over the roof edge as if it could climb to the very pinnacle. The smell was somehow not as intense up on first tier of rooftops, and visibility seemed much clearer.

Around me, as far as the fog would let me see, iron structures climbed up and up and up. They were the feet of London above, brilliant architectural foundations that supported elements deemed too valuable or necessary to leave below.

I had heard the palace had been raised
en masse
, leaving only the crypts behind. I’d never looked.

There was something about tombs, even royal ones, that I found frightfully sinister.

I headed for Baker territory, but cautiously. They called the rooftops Cat’s Crossing. The theory being that only the city’s rampant strays were foolish, and dexterous, enough to attempt to travel by rooftop.

Cats, I supposed, and those of us with good reason to risk it.

I wasn’t the only enterprising sort to use the rooftops as a safer means of anything—not that the slick roofs and steep peaks could be called safe by anyone but the terminally insane—and I knew for a fact that the Bakers posted men above.

Well, children, really. They were smaller, lighter and much more agile, as I’d mentioned. And lacked an appropriate fear of death from tall heights.

I moved swiftly, my feet sure, sometimes scaling the pointed apexes of the buildings I used like a path, sometimes leaping between them.

I saw the sentries before they saw me. It was one of many benefits of these goggles of mine. Dodging them proved to be as simple as waiting for them to move on, or moving around them on silent feet.

Once in the heart of Baker territory—you knew it because of the terrible smell of rotting fish, twice as thick here than anywhere in the East End—I paused.

Now the slower game.

I crept to the edge of the roof I hugged, foot by booted foot, inch by inch, hand over gloved hand. I waited for what seemed like hours—I would guess only about thirty minutes. I let my mind wander.

I lay on the edge of a yawning crevasse, and in my mind, I balanced a series of spinning plates. Light glimmered off of each one, and each bore a color. Blue for Compton, and his strange interest. Wicked serpent green for Micajah Hawke and his relentless lies.

Zylphia was a whisper in my ear, and a disk of bloody red spun just over my head. I didn’t know what that was, but it tasted of murder and rage and I dwelled for some time on the matter as I waited.

A mind saturated in opium works twice as fast, and yet three times as slow. Caught on the edge of a thousand thoughts, I startled when I heard the cursing pitch of a masculine voice.

My grin was fierce. I was lucky. I could recognize Ishmael’s dark baritone from blocks away.

I peered over the edge and saw a group of men, many in shabby dockhand clothes, a few in whatever it was they could scrape together. Some carried hafts of broken wood, others weapons I couldn’t see well in the dark.

They were a short distance away, walking together, complaining, I think. Had I any skill in it, I could have summoned enough saliva to spit at Ishmael and likely tagged him from here.

Fortunately for us both, I was not a good spitter.

I eased the upper portion of my dark-clad body over the rooftop, hooked my feet against the ledge, and felt in my pockets for something to throw.

I found a single pence.

Eh, it was as good as anything else.

Taking careful aim, I threw the coin at Ishmael’s feet. It landed with a soft
whup
, all but lost under the staccato argument taking place between three members of the group.

Frowning, I watched as they walked over it. Blast, I’d have to get down to street level to—

A large form detached itself from the group.

Victory! I resisted the urge to punch the air with my fist, tamping down the surge of elation I felt as Ishmael Communion stepped into clearer focus.

He was a very big, very broad man of color. His wide, flat features and pugnacious nose had always marked him as a bruiser, and if there were any doubt, his scarred knuckles would finish the tale.

He was an ox of a man, with a head he kept free of hair or hats. He wore a kerchief around his neck, overalls like I’d seen Americans wear in some of the more mocking caricatures, and a particularly large overcoat in patched fustion.

He stepped into my alley, not once looking up, and I heard clothing rustle.

I narrowed my eyes, soundless and unseen just over his head. If I wanted to, I could poke the very top of his skull before he let fly the stream of urine.

I reached out an arm to do just that, then froze as he rumbled, deep as a train car in the vast Underground, “What in God’s own are you doing, girl?”

So he
had
seen me. I slowly withdrew my arm, my feet straining to hold me. “Where were you?” I hissed.

The voices continued to rattle back and forth, insults and demands, and he glanced over his shoulder. This time, when he glanced up, I caught a glimpse of dark, dark eyes. The whites were yellowed, as if tinged permanently by the pea soup that surrounded us. “You came,” he whispered harshly, “to ask that?”

Ishmael had an unbelievable grasp of the King’s English. I’d always wanted to ask why and how, but had never summoned the nerve.

Instead, I frowned. “Why are you angry?”

“If you are found—” He didn’t need to finish it. If I was caught in Baker territory, I’d be killed. If they found me to be a woman, there’d be worse.

The Brick Street Bakery was a sweet-enough name, but there was nothing sweet about the men in it.

“That’s why I sent a boy,” I told him, conversationally reasonable, for all I was hanging ten feet above the ground by the flexed arches of my feet.

I didn’t have to see well to note the grimace that split his thick, fleshy lips. “Girl, that boy got strung up in his own gibbets.”

The blood, already pushed to my head because of my angle, suddenly pounded in my skull. “What?” I gasped.

Too loud. The voices stopped. Then, “Communion!”

“Lay off,” my friend barked. “I’m taking a whittle.”

I didn’t giggle. I wanted to, the part of my brain still steeped in the calming cushion of opium thought his word comical, but the rest of me was still reeling. That boy? Dead?

“How?” I whispered.

“You had best be scarce for a while,” Ishmael warned. “That boy—his name was Rufus. You were seen with him by several of the abram men.” In the silence that followed, I heard a stream of liquid splat against the wall.

I grimaced as the odor reached me.

Abram men, I knew, were thieves and beggars pretending to be so mad that they could scarcely afford to dress themselves. They begged for coin amid
faux
fits.

They were also some of the keenest eyes and ears in London below.

“I swear to you,” I said tightly, earnestly. “Ishmael, I swear on my mother’s grave, I didn’t kill your boy. Why would I? I don’t take those contracts, you know that.”

“I know that,” Ishmael rumbled. The stream of relief continued unabated, thick and loud as it splattered. “And you know that. They don’t know that.”

I braced my hands on the wall, swallowing hard to get the knot of pressure and anger and guilt out of my throat. “When was he found?”

“Not long ago. Them?” He nodded vaguely toward the alley mouth. “They found him.”

Damn it. How soon after I’d given him my coin had he been killed? And why? “I’ll get out, then,” I managed. “Just one thing.”

“Communion!” roared a man from beyond the alley.

“Quickly,” my friend rumbled, his gaze on the wall.

“Do you know anything about a Professor Woolsey?”

He thought it over as the stream of urine finally died. I thanked God I couldn’t see that well in the dark. Ishmael’s privacy was something I had no intention of ever breaching. The smell was bad enough.

“No,” he finally said. “Try the Menagerie? Your sweets might have heard.”

“They aren’t
my
sweets,” I shot back. I stiffened my body, caught one edge of the roof with the very tips of my fingers, and hesitated long enough to add, “But I’ll send your love to Zylphia.”

Ishmael’s growl followed me over the roof. “Coming!” he intoned, impatient. “Can’t a bloke relieve himself in peace?”

I scooted up on the roof as far as I dared, then counted slowly. I didn’t move, holding my position far longer than strictly necessary. I didn’t want to risk it, not until I was positive the men below had moved on.