I passed the ragged tents of the Carnival, kept walking. The streets began to slope down, toward the river. The air went thick with the stench of the slaughterhouses and the leather tanneries and the paper mills. Big sixteen-horse lumber wagons thundered past, their wheels striking sparks on the broken, rutted cobblestones.
There, in the shadow of the crematorium smokestacks, one of the widow’s coins bought me a rickshaw to Market Street, a cab to the good side of the Riverfront district, and a full-blown brass-and-velvet carriage with glass in the windows and cushions on the seats for the ride across the Brown River and onto the Hill.
My carriage clattered on to the New Bridge, nearly ran down the slowest of the traditional trio of clowns who capered and danced at each end. They scattered, cursing, as the driver snapped his reigns and the team’s hooves
clop-clopped
sharply on the fresh cobbles. The bridge arched up and Brown River fell away below, until we rose over the water so high it actually sparkled and the stench of the cattle-barges was lost in the wind.
I grinned and waved at strangers. Carriages and coins, like the song says—I was having wild fantasies about new shoes, and a haircut.
I wasn’t fooling the carriage driver, though. He kept his lips pinched and his shaggy grey eyebrows curled in a scowl and when he called me “Sir,” he let me know he’d rather be using more colorful honorifics. He had me made for a burglar or a pimp or a blackmailer, out for a lark in the Heights, pockets full of ill-gotten gain.
“Sir,” he said, using his special tone again. “Will you be entering the grounds of the Merlat estate, or should I pull to the tradesman’s entrance at the rear?”
“You are an amusing wight,” I said with a small laugh. “Tradesman’s entrance, indeed.
Haw-haw.
” I let him stew.
“Just drive past, won’t you?” I said. “I need a good look at the grounds. Especially things like doors, gates, dog kennels. A man in my line has to know these things before he goes to work.”
He shut up and drove.
Massive oaks lined the streets, wide green lawns flanked the sidewalks and huge old pre-War mansions loomed up like slate-roofed mountains against the cool blue sky. The air smelled of cut grass and honeysuckle. No potholes in the cobblestone streets, no filth choking the gutters, no bodies, sleeping or otherwise, sprawled on the sidewalks—my, what a gulf the Brown River spans.
I checked street-side ward-posts for brass-wrought house numbers. Three-forty-four was a four-storied behemoth with gingerbread trim and arrowhead turrets.
Three-forty-five looked like a wedding cake with doors.
Three-forty-six, three-forty-seven—and there it was, three-forty-eight.
House Merlat. I whistled and gawked.
The front lawn was ten acres, every inch of it lush and verdant. Flowerbeds and walking gardens lined the yard and the paved carriage track. Blue spallow and red highland roses and white ardenia waved in the breeze—all the colors of Rannit’s flag.
Lurking here and there amidst the shrubs and flowers was an assortment of pigeon-spotted ornamental statuary—knights of old with swords uplifted, ruined columns surrounding pools filled with water-lilies, the odd sad angel in flowing Old Kingdom robes. A squirrel fussed at me from atop a knight’s armored head.
A dozen blood-oaks and a lone gnarled madbark tree shaded the angels and the flowers. And though someone had mowed the lawn recently, oak leaves lay where they fell. Between the unraked leaves and the early signs of shagginess in the untrimmed hedges and the walking corpses in the yard after dark, I imagined that the widow’s neighbors were waxing quite peevish.
Above the flowers and the shrubs and the oaks, though, loomed House Merlat itself.
Five stories. Four towers. Doors the size of garrison gates, windows of leaded glass, again worked with the form of Rannit’s standard and a shield-and-gryphon design that I took to be the sigil of House Merlat. The gutters and roofs were copper, green with age; the walls soot-stained granite behind a growth of unkempt ivy.
I made a quick count, found twenty-two windows on the street-face of the bottom floor alone. Twenty-two windows, and all but one of them shuttered and barred.
“Cheerful little hut,” I said. My driver grunted.
We passed it by. I had the driver turn and pass again, ignoring his subtle commentary about prisons and the Watch.
“Well, well,” I muttered. “Look at that.”
Ward-walls. I’d missed both of them the first time, too bedazzled by visions of the good life to see the telltale signs of spiked iron behind the fireflowers that bordered the Merlat lawn. I squinted, counted spikes and saw that every fifth fence-spike sported a fist-sized ball of smoky glass. The glass would glow faintly after dark—and anyone walking too close would be treated to a fatal bolt of rich man’s lightning.
The ward-walls were new, I judged. The Merlat’s rows of fireflowers, obviously planted to hide the ranks of ugly iron spikes, were all white and blue, with none of the red petals that show up after the second season.
We were only barely past when a flat, open delivery wagon, its bed filled with thick wrought-iron door and window bars worked in intricate oak-leaf patterns, pulled into the drive of the Merlat’s southern neighbors. A gang of carpenters emerged from a hedge-maze, all wiping their hands on their pants and grabbing up their tools.
Ward-walls. Bars on the windows, bars on the doors—all done in a hurry, too. The Merlat’s neighbors weren’t happy. You’d think a family of sidhe had just moved in.
Or, perhaps, a well-heeled revenant.
“Driver,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s head for Monument Hill. I think I’ll lay out flowers on dear old ‘Nuncle’ Tim.”
He snorted and snapped his reigns and didn’t even bother with a “Sir.”
Cost him his tip, that bit of cheek.
Curfew in Rannit falls with the sun. The night belongs to the half-dead, the Watch and anybody crazy enough to risk running afoul of the former or tripping over the recumbent, snoring forms of the latter.
Curfew fell, and the big old bells on the Square clanged nine times. Before the last notes had faded Mama Hog herself was yelling “Boy, wake up,” and banging on my door.
I swung my feet off my desk, put my sandwich down on a plate and hurried to the door.
Mama Hog looked up and grinned. “The Widow Merlat found you,” she said, not asking but reporting.
“She did indeed,” I said, opening the door. “What a chucklesome old dear. She’s coming by later for tea and a séance.”
Mama cackled and trundled inside. “The Widow Merlat’s got the fear, boy,” she said. “Got it bad.” Mama plopped down into my client’s chair and started eyeing my sandwich.
“You make that?”
“It’s from Eddie’s,” I said. “Tear off a hunk.”
She tore, bit, chewed.
“You sent me a lunatic, Mama,” I said, shaking my finger. “Shame on you.”
Bite, chew, swallow. Then Mama wiped her lips on her sleeve and grinned. “She ain’t crazy, boy,” Mama said. “She’s ec-cen-tric. Ain’t that the word for rich folks?”
“She thinks her dead husband spends his evening knock-knock-knocking at her door,” I said. “Eccentric doesn’t cover that, Mama, and you know it.”
Mama shrugged and chewed.
“I have no love for the idle rich,” I said. “But I’ve got no desire to fleece sad old widow women, either.” I went behind my desk, pulled back my chair and sat. “Why not send her to a doctor or a priest, Mama?” I said. “Why me? Why a finder?”
My sandwich—melted Lowridge cheese on smoked Pinford ham—was vanishing fast. I grabbed a hunk when Mama paused to speak.
“The widow ain’t crazy, boy,” she said. “Could be she ain’t seeing things, either.”
I shook my head and swallowed. “Your cards tell you that?”
Mama Hog nodded. “Cards say she’s got a hard rain coming, boy,” she said. “Turned up the Dead Man, and the Storm, and the Last Dancer, all in the same hand. Dead Man’s rain. That ain’t good.” Mama grabbed another morsel of sandwich, guffawed around it. “But I don’t need cards to see the sun. The Widow Merlat is headed for a bad time. She knows it. I know it. You’d best know it, too.”
“Dead is dead, Mama,” I said. “That’s what I know.”
Mama grinned. “There’s other things you need to know, boy. Things about the ones that come back.”
“First thing being that they don’t,” I said.
Mama pretended not to hear.
“Rev’nants only walk at night,” she said. “It’s got to be pitch dark.”
“Do tell.”
“You can’t catch ’em coming out of the ground,” said Mama. “It’s no good trying. They’re like haunts, that way. Solid as rock one minute, thin as fog the next.”
“Sounds handy,” I said. “Do their underbritches get all misty and ethereal too, or is that one of the things man was not meant to know?”
“Don’t look in his eyes, boy. Don’t look in his eyes, or breathe air he’s breathed.”
“I won’t even ask about borrowing his toothbrush,” I said.
Mama slapped my desktop with both her hands.
“You listen,” she hissed. “Believe or not, but you listen.”
“I’ve got all night.”
“His mouth will be open,” said Mama. “Wide open. He’s been saving a scream, all that time in the ground. Saving up a scream for the one that put him there.” Mama lifted a stubby finger and shook it in my face. “Don’t you listen when he screams. You put your hands over your ears and you yell loud as you can, but don’t you listen. Cause if you do, you’ll hear that scream for the rest of your days, and there ain’t nothing nobody nowhere can do for you then.”
Silence fell. Only after Curfew do we get any silence, in my neighborhood. I let it linger for a moment.
I leaned forward, put my eyes down even with Mama’s, motioned her closer, spoke.
“Boo.”
Mama glared. “Don’t get in his way, boy,” she said. “He didn’t come back for you. But that won’t mean nothing if you get in the way.”
“Dead is dead, Mama,” I said.
Mama sighed. “Dead is dead,” she agreed. “Sometimes, though, good and dead ain’t dead enough.”
Mama rose, brushed crumbs of my sandwich off her chin, and headed for the door.
“When you going to the widow’s house, boy?” she asked, as she turned my bolt.
“First thing tomorrow,” I said. “Going to stay a few days, see what I can see. If Old Bones shows up, I’ll stuff my ears with cotton and give him your regards.”
Mama rolled her eyes. “You watch yourself,” she said. “And not just at night.”
I frowned. “Meaning?”
Mama shook her head. “Meaning them Merlat kids would as soon gut you as say hello,” she said. “Bad ’uns, the lot of ’em.”
“Whoa, Mama,” I said, rising. “You know something about the Merlat kids, sit back down. I’m a lot more likely to run into one of them than their dear departed daddy.”
Mama didn’t go out, but she didn’t back away from the door either. “Told you all I know. They bad. All of ’em.”
“How many would that be?” I asked. “Two? Four? Ten? Tell me something I can use, Mama. That was a good sandwich you gobbled.”
Mama made a snuffling noise. “Three of ’em,” she said. “Two men. One a gambler. One on weed. One woman. Not sure what she is, but I know it ain’t good.”
“Did one of them have anything to do with Papa Merlat’s plot on the Hill?”
“I reckon they all did,” said Mama. “But not in the way you mean. You be careful, boy. Real careful.”
Then she opened my door and was gone.
I thought about following her. I’ve broken Curfew before, just like everyone else, but I didn’t get up, and Mama’s footsteps were fast and then gone.
She’d said what she meant to say. I brushed crumbs off my desk, found a bottle of beer in a drawer and settled back to watch the dark.
Chapter Two
“This will do,” I told my driver. “Pull over.”
The cab rolled to a halt. I opened the door and hauled out my Army-tan duffel bag.
The cabbie looked down at me and wrinkled his brow. “Look, pal,” he said. “I don’t mean to tell you your business, but this ain’t the place for the likes of us come sundown.”
I’d hauled a handful of coppers out of my pocket to count out for the fare, and I was so shocked I lost my place. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I’ve got a job. I’ll be indoors. The Merlats aren’t half-dead, and even if the neighbors are they don’t bother the help—do they?”
The cabbie’s eyes darted up and down the empty, tree-lined sidewalk. “It ain’t the half-dead you need to watch,” he said, and then he pointed with his chin at the Merlat house. “It’s them.”
I put out my hand, and he took the coins. Before I could ask him anything else he snapped his reigns and was gone.
I watched him go. I considered chasing him down and asking him if he’d like more coins, but rich people tend to look down on common folk running through their lawns, so I heaved my duffel bag over my shoulder and set off for House Merlat.
I think I even whistled. It was hard not to, that morning—the sun was up, the birds were singing, I had a sock stuffed with silver and a rich man’s bed to sleep in.