The Five Faces (The Markhat Files) (6 page)

I was still running when Evis pulled me under an awning and into a terrified fishmonger’s stall, away from the rain of masonry and lumber outside.

“I
told
you it was potent,” said Evis, his face split in a gleeful halfdead smile.

I watched people scatter, watched the rain of debris come crashing down.

“For you, Peaches,” I said. “Rest easy now.”

Evis had the good grace not to ask.

Later, we joined the curious throngs out in the street.

Watch wagons rolled hither and yon. Blue-capped Watchmen charged up this street or down the other, blowing their whistles and bellowing orders and generally making a damned fine show of bluster and aimless determination. Every conversation offered wild speculation as to the cause of the blast and wholly inaccurate opinions as to its nature and source.

A tall, leaning column of smoke still billowed from the location of the warehouse we had so hurriedly vacated. People shielded their eyes against the afternoon sun and watched smoke rise and spread.

Evis could hardly contain his glee.

“I’ll bet you ten crowns the hole is fifty feet deep,” he whispered, wary of the ring of curious onlookers that maintained a careful distance from him. “Hell, make that sixty feet.” He rubbed his gloved hands together. “And that’s from the rejected batch.”

I nodded but didn’t take the bet. My ears were still ringing from the blast, and the cobbles beneath my feet were all loose and uneven from the shock.

Evis made no suggestion that we head back to Avalante. He hadn’t even insisted on hiding in the darkest corner of a deserted bar. I decided Evis wanted word to get out that a rare, daytime halfdead was roaming the docks right after the explosion, and then I decided that if I was right, I didn’t want to pursue that line of speculation even a single step further.

“So much for walled cities,” I noted.

Evis chuckled. “Don’t be so glum. You got what you wanted, after all.”

“Seems you did too.”

“I have no idea what you mean, but if I did, I would merely acknowledge a rare and happy convergence of disparate goals. Now then. I believe you mentioned something about a late-night meeting, suggested by an anonymous note?”

I watched street kids snatch up anything shiny amid the debris while bellowing Watchmen tried to disperse them with kicks and clubs.

“Hell with that. It’s a set-up. If the note sender really wanted my money, they’d have hiked to my door.”

Evis nodded. “Obviously.”

“I’ll let the Watch Captain Holder keep that meeting, if he’s interested.” I folded my arms over my chest. “No, I think I’ll pay this Chuckles fellow a visit instead.” There was even a good chance, I reflected, that Mr. Chuckles was the one who’d sent the invitation.

“Mr. Chuckles may be less than hospitable if he decides you are the party responsible for redistributing his dog-fighting operation over eight city blocks. Not to mention a goodly number of what was presumably his staff.”

I shrugged. “I can find my own way home. Thanks for the party. I owe you one, and then some.”

Evis bristled beneath his silk and his glasses.

“Nonsense. I haven’t had this much fun in years.” One slender hand vanished beneath the black silk and reappeared with a pair of familiar cigars. “Shall we find some shade and wait for dusk?”

“Are you ever going to tell me what the hell has gotten into you?”

He didn’t smile.

“Are you?”

“There’s a place a block away,” I said. “No windows. Smells like the devil’s own latrine.”

Evis clipped the ends off the Lowland Sweets. “Sounds amusing,” he said. “Lead the way.”

Chapter Six

Neither Evis nor I touched our thin, sour beers.

Instead, we smoked and waited. The barkeep glared at us the whole time. The place was empty because of Evis. Thirsty patrons stumbled through the bar’s doors and stumbled out just as quickly when they spied Evis lurking in the corner. Ordinarily, I’d have tossed the barkeep a crown or two to make up for the loss, but it wasn’t a charitable kind of day.

Evis didn’t speak. Only his occasional pulls at his cigar let me know he was still awake. I followed suit.

Watch whistles kept blowing outside. We heard the peal of Fire Brigade bells. Muffled conversations just outside the door hinted at a hole in the ground ‘as deep as the High House is tall.’

That was the only time Evis looked alert, smiling his toothy, smug smile.

We were both on our second cigar when a tall blonde in a tight, red skirt marched in.

The brim of her fashionable day hat covered her face, but not the ends of her long, golden curls. She stopped right where all the others had, turned on her heel, and hurried back out into the street.

I let her go. Evis puffed away but didn’t otherwise stir.

“Going to see a man about a horse,” I said. The barkeep snorted. I rose and put on my hat. “Be right back.”

Catching up to Gertriss only took a block. She helped by lingering at a storefront, although I could just as easily have followed the stares aimed her way by male passersby.

She saw me coming and strolled into a loud, busy fish-market a few fronts down. I followed and found her waiting in a relatively quiet corner of the malodorous place.

“Boss,” she whispered. She took a half step forward, as though wanting to hug, but stopping herself short. “Damn, boss, we were sure you were dead.”

“Not even a little bit,” I replied. “And who’s we?”

“Mama. Darla. Three-leg. The Watch is all over the office. Mama has half the street kids on the far side of the Brown out looking for you. I’m so glad to see you I could hug you, but I won’t.”

I nodded. The Watch knew I was interested in the warehouse. I hadn’t yet decided how Holder would play it, when confronted with a smoking crater decorated with bits of viscera. A long sojourn in the Old Ruth on my part certainly wasn’t out of the question, even with Avalante’s objections.

“Well, you can call off Mama’s army of urchins. I’m fine. Evis is fine. We’re just having a smoke and waiting for dusk.”

“Like hell you are. I heard the blast all the way in East town. And then there’s this.”

She reached into her trim, leather purse, pushed aside the butt of a sleek, black pistol, and withdrew a ragged sheet of brown butcher’s paper.

“Buttercup drew this.”

I unfolded it.

I’d seen Buttercup’s little banshee hands doodle on scraps of Mama’s butcher paper before. Buttercup might be a thousand years old, but her scribblings are so clumsy and childish you’d never suspect her age when confronted by her art.

Until I saw her latest work, that is.

No stick figures. No big, loopy flowers scrawled beneath a wobbly sun.

Buttercup had drawn me.

I was sitting in the dark, a bundle across my lap. My face was downcast, my shoulders slumped.

Behind me was a heap of dogs.

And behind that, shapes scurried. Somehow, using only a few lines here and there, Buttercup had captured motion without depicting form. Figures moved, shuffling, gathering, but shuffling and gathering without revealing any details of their nature.

All, that is, save one.

One hulking silhouette towered above the rest. The man, if man it was, emerged from the ranks of shadows, arms outstretched, hands like hooks reaching out toward my unguarded back.

Its eyes were wide and staring. Its mouth was set in a furious scream.

It was perhaps two long strides from falling upon me.

“She drew this?”

Gertriss nodded. “Look at the bottom.”

I moved my hand.

Across the bottom of the paper, in a row, Buttercup had drawn five faces. The faces were different from the rest of the drawing—whereas the figures above were marvels of economy and skill, the faces were crude, blocky caricatures. Not childish, not innocent. Cruel and harsh and spare.

“I suppose Mama is beside herself.”

Gertriss took the drawing and folded it hurriedly. “You think?” She shoved it back in her purse but kept her hand on the butt of her revolver. “I don’t pretend to understand precisely what Buttercup is, boss, but if that’s not some kind of banshee omen, I’m an Ogre’s wife.”

I grunted. “Darla know about this yet?”

Gertriss shot me a
you’ve-got-to-be-kidding
look.

“Of course she does,” I said. “Mama’s involved. Dammit.”

“Any of that mean anything to you?”
 

“Some of it.” She opened her mouth to ask, but I shushed her with a look of my own. “The less you know the better, right now. Look. Call off the rescue mission. I’m fine. If any Watchmen ask, I had nothing to do with any warehouses that might have blown up earlier today. I’m following a lead down on the docks. Tell Holder I’ll drop by the Watch house on Candle Street later. Tell Mama to hide the rest of her butcher paper. And tell Darla I’ll be home before midnight and not to worry.”

She frowned but nodded.

“How’d you get Evis mixed up in all this?” she asked. “Don’t bother denying it. You couldn’t have gotten any you-know-what otherwise.”

“He volunteered,” I whispered. “Hell, he practically twisted my arm. Something’s up with him, Gertriss. Might you know anything about that?”

She shook her head. “He’s been on edge lately. Moody. Distracted. Says it’s just business.”

“And of course you’d tell me everything.”

She smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Of course I would, boss. Just like you always tell me.”

“You wound me, junior partner. But fair enough. And thanks for coming looking.”

“Finding you is never hard, boss. I just follow the trail of carnage.”

“Beat it. Don’t let Holder scare you, either. He’s crippled by his own integrity.”

“I hope you’re right.”

She stepped in and hugged me then, fast and hard. Then she was gone, sideways glances and a subtle perfume in her wake.

I feigned a sudden interest in frozen fish long enough to let her hit the street. Then I headed back to the bar, hands in my pockets, whistling a happy tune.

Evis hadn’t moved. But my chair had. The barkeep was wiping his glasses but his face was pale and his hands were shaking.

Seems I wasn’t the only one at our table to enjoy a brief conversation with a business associate.

“An old friend drop around for a bite?” I asked.

I saw his dead white eyes shift behind his dark spectacles.

“Not here,” he said. “Another hour. Then we’ll leave. And talk.”

I put my hat down on the table. Fresh cigars were lit. I took pity on the barman and flipped him a heavy coin.

He caught it mid-flight, but he never took his eyes off the door.

We smoked in silence, while the docks came back to life around us.

It still wasn’t dark outside.

But the sun was dropping fast, and the shadows of the storefronts and bars and whorehouses left wide swaths of the street in deep shadow. We kept to those, and the crowds kept their distance, and after a time Evis broke his silence.

“The House is troubled,” he began by way of preamble. A pair of tipsy working girls waved at us as they passed. One even bared her neck to Evis.

Weed robs them of judgment early.

“I can see that,” I replied. “Troubled at the general condition of Man, or is something specific keeping the House up days?”

“Avalante has no interest in the drug trade,” he said. “Not the trade itself, or its attendant atrocities. We monitor the activity, of course, but we do not intervene.”

I made no mention of blowing up a warehouse earlier, though I was relatively certain that fell under the broad category of intervention.

“House Lethe has, for the last century, conducted and controlled the drug trade here. They profited enormously, of course, with no regard for the consequences. Their abuses had grown so egregious there was talk within the House of making a mild correction.”

“A mild correction in the form of a hole as deep as the High House is tall?”

Another pair of afternoon ladies sashayed past, all giggles and winks.

“But something has changed.”

“Lethe simply ceded their authority,” said Evis. “All at once. Without resistance.”

We stopped to let an Ogre huff and puff past with his manure wagon in tow.

“Did we have anything to do with that?”

“No. Word went out yesterday. I was to be informed in a meeting this afternoon.”

“I don’t understand. Why would they do that? More to the point, why does Avalante care? You wanted House Lethe brought to heel.”

Evis darted through a bright patch of sun, and I joined him in the shadows on the other side.

“We wanted the situation adjusted. Consider this, Markhat. Lethe just walked away from an estimated two million crowns a month in weed revenue alone. Two million crowns.” He turned to face me. “Something convinced the least rational of all the Dark Houses that it was worth twenty-four million crowns a year to simply walk away from the drug trade on the docks.”