Moth and Spark (13 page)

After the sweet there was more standing and talking. As he inquired politely about the doings of yet another simpering lady, the falsity of it disgusted him. He was full of sharp restless energy. He needed to be doing. As soon as he courteously could, he broke off the conversation and sent for Bron.

The captain came mercifully quickly. Corin excused himself and went out. It was much cooler in the corridor. They moved a few feet from the door.

“Get six men ready for a ride,” he said.

“It’s pouring again.”

He realized that he wanted something more than exercise. He wanted to make things move. “All the better. It will seem that much more urgent.”

“I’m going to arrange backups if you’re the bait,” Bron said with a resigned expression that Corin knew well on his face. No doubt he was thinking to himself that this was one of the nights he would earn his pay. “Where are we going?”

He intended to give some sort of vague answer, but his voice became someone else’s. “The Flats.” His tongue felt heavy in his mouth. He made no effort to retract the words.

The door to the room opened as he spoke and a servant came out with a wheeled cart of dishes. Bron was silent, which meant that whatever he
was about to say, it was not a simple,
Yes, sir.
As soon as the door was shut and the servant out of earshot he said, “My lord, you’re crazy. I can’t take you there at night, not if I have three dozen men.”

Corin wondered with a trace of amusement what would happen if the courtiers heard that. Bron had said more blunt things in the past. He said, “I’m not going tavern-crawling. There’s one man I want to see.” The words came again in a patterning he had not meant. Whatever tangled and blocked his speech was stronger, speaking for him. He could resist it, change his mind, stammer into something else. He did not want to. The impulse had power, and he would never know what it was if he did not yield to it.

Bron said, “Don’t tell me it’s Liko. I thought you were done with him.”

“He can still be useful.” He realized something that gave reason to the impulse, that showed he had not gone mad himself. “If anyone knows about what killed Cade, it’s him.” Gerod had reported that morning on a discouraging lack of progress about the murder.

“Let Gerod do it, sir.”

“No.”

Bron made one last try. “Let me bring him here, or somewhere safer. It will do him good to be out in the wet, might get him clean.”

He was right, it was a dangerous thing to do and Liko lived in squalor. Nevertheless, he would go. “That’s missing the point. You heard me, Bron. Ten minutes.” He kept his tone calm. His father had told him once, when he was very young, that the instant he had to angrily repeat an order, or win an argument by walking away, he had slipped.

Bron looked at him, clearly evaluating if he had pushed as far as he could, then said, “I need a little longer for the backups, sir.”

“Fine. But don’t dawdle.”

By the time they reached the Flats, Corin thought he had perhaps let arrogance get the best of him. The rain was not torrential, but it was hard and steady. Paved and cobbled streets were slick, potholes masqueraded as puddles, the lamps could not dispel the gloom. The unpaved streets and alleys had become quagmires of sticky heavy mud. If the men were not thinking curses at him, the horses were.

In daytime the Flats was a busy loud area full of men loading and unloading barges from up- or downriver, piling goods onto carts to be taken to market or warehouses or wagons to go elsewhere, and laboring on the boats. The boats were not the immense oceangoing vessels that put in at Dele but smaller slower ships that fought the current with oars and noisy steam-paddles. The canal docks had everything that any waterfront did, sawyers and ropemakers and burly laborers, scrawny opportunistic cats, a square neat brick wharfmaster’s house, blacksmiths and their hod carriers. There were plenty of illegal deals made, of course, but not at knifepoint. At night it was another story: the stevedores were gone, replaced by hired thugs guarding the boats and the goods, the taverns and brothels were full, and brawls were common and often large. The rain would quell some of the usual violence and roughness, but only some. Corin usually hated having an escort, though he had long ago conceded to it. It galled him sometimes, to be a man and still subject to the will of his father, but the policy on this had been laid out long ago. He remembered vividly a chastisement when he was fifteen or sixteen.
You can risk your own neck and I can’t stop you,
Aram had said
, but I will stop you risking soldiers’ lives for your own pleasure.
He had said,
It’s a formality, I’ll go alone
, and the king had for the first and only time in Corin’s life struck him. It had not been hard, but the mere fact of it had shocked him into pained silence.
You are the prince. You are never alone
.
The men are not for you but for Caithen.
In the Flats it was a necessary precaution, not a formality. If he went alone he faced a good chance of a fight, not because he was the prince but because a solitary man was prey.

There were not many lights on the streets they went on. The buildings were cramped and shabby, the dirt streets narrow and dark. The rain had washed away some of the usual garbage and rot but reinvigorated the odors of what remained. Wet, skinny, miserable-looking women huddled in doorways. They did not call out to ply their trade; men on horseback probably terrified them. They no doubt expected the city watch to haul them off to prison. Here and there were dark heaps of rags that were actually men in stupors or illness. In the narrow spaces between buildings people had erected miserable little sheds covered with scavenged sheet metal. The rain beat loudly on it.

They were not going to the worst parts, where the buildings were
falling apart, with holes in the roofs and no doors or shutters, the insides thick with filth and refuse. A man might die there and lie unburied on the street for days while the rats and the dogs and the crows worked at him. Many of the houses were abandoned, which had made them into gathering places for young men to rape women and kill one another. A few went up in fire every winter. Fire was the only thing that had a chance to cleanse the place, but it was always stopped lest it spread.

Every city had such places; it had been that way as long as there were cities. Humanity invariably sorted itself, and some people were the dregs. That knowledge did not make Corin any less ashamed that there was such a place in his city, on his watch. He kept such thoughts to himself. Nothing would divest him of authority sooner than to notice that the poor were people. Charity was women’s work. He was glad of the rain, not only because it drove people in but because it prevented the men from talking to one another, saying things he did not want to hear.

He led them down to the wharf before going to Liko’s. The black water, pocked with raindrops, lapped against the slimy pilings and stone walls of the quays. Boats rocked and creaked on their lines. Dull light from the lanterns on a few decks was the only illumination. The smiths had banked their fires and shut the doors. It was empty of people; even the mad, who walked disheveled and shouting in the streets, had taken cover from the rain. The birds and rats had all found refuge of some sort. It was still, lifeless. Across the water he saw only the darkness of the river bluffs.

He remembered a time when he had snuck out of his rooms at university and down to the Liden docks at night with a few other students. They went into a tavern, where he immediately discovered he was more fastidious than he had thought, and he slipped back out. A watchman confronted him while he sat at the end of a pier, legs dangling over the water.
You be careful, lad,
said the watchman.
If you fall in there’s no one going to get you out.
He said,
I won’t fall. I’m not cup-shot.
The watchman lowered the lantern and asked,
Have you ever seen a drowned man?
Corin had to admit that he had not. He did not tell the man about the deaths he had seen in other forms. The watchman said,
There’s no winning against water. Once you tire and slip under, you won’t break free. All you will do is struggle and then die. Come step back.

That had been before Tyrekh, when he still thought that nothing lay
ahead of him except the same rule with a light hand over a placid country that his father had. Both of them had hardened since then.

He surveyed the docks carefully again. He was not sure what he was looking for. The water seemed menacing, the maw of some ravenous beast that would devour everything. It was ancient, cold, powerful. The boats were flimsy things that would break apart at the first surge. He imagined slipping after all, clutching helplessly at the slick wood of the pier and sliding on into the blackness, a cold weight bearing down on him, terror as his aching lungs gave up. He shuddered and turned his horse.

Liko’s house was on a corner. It was the only one visible in any direction that had light coming out around the shutters and between the boards. There was not enough wind to move the cracked wooden sign hanging outside the door. Corin dismounted and rapped hard on the door with the handle of his knife. Bron and two other men were beside him, swords drawn.

The door opened and there was Liko, holding a candle that guttered fiercely in the draft. A few roaches scuttled into a darker corner. “Oh,” he said. “You. Come in, but there’s only room for three of you.”

A skinny girl wearing only a thin dirty white shift was sitting on a wooden chair, the skirt hiked up to the middle of her thighs, her legs spread. The dark circles of her nipples were obvious through the fabric even in the dim light. She could not have been more than fifteen. Liko gave her a coin and said, “Get out, and keep your mouth shut.” She got out. Bron and Alric did not sheathe their swords, and Corin did not ask them to.

There was an open flask on the table, but Liko did not appear to be drunk yet. It was hard to tell, but his eyes seemed clear. He was short, dirty, and gamy-smelling, with unwashed poorly cut brown hair and several weeks’ worth of beard. His shirt was stained, and his pants were shiny at the knees and fraying at the ankles. He had been a well-off gentleman before he let the bottle take him. His family had petitioned successfully to have him cut off from the entail. Corin disliked him but did not underestimate him. He was clever, cunning even, and a survivor. He knew everything that happened in the district and in much of the rest of the city, and though he did not control it he knew who did. He made a living of sorts by selling useless medicines and even more
useless advice to people more desperate than himself, and information to anyone who would pay for it. Corin tolerated his disrespect because he preferred it to groveling.

The room was not so much tiny as it was crowded. There were splintering crates stacked everywhere, a table, a bookshelf filled with dirty glass bottles and jars like an apothecary’s, another bookshelf filled with a few books and many more yellowing pamphlets, ragged cloths draping broken chairs, and, unbelievably, a fortune-teller’s glass ball. A few very old skulls, one missing its jaw, were on top of one of the bookshelves. It stank of urine and old vomit, cheap wine and vinegar. A sweet rottenness that was sulfur, and made him think of dragon. There was another smell too, something acrid. He looked around again and saw a distilling apparatus in one corner. That made this easier. It would give away far too much to ask directly about the blood-dust.

“Doing alchemy now, are you,” he said, gesturing at the distiller. “Lead into gold? Love potions or poisons?”

“There’s no alchemy in chemistry. Particulate matter cares nothing of the motions of the heavens. What people want, I supply.” Liko spoke pompously, as though he were trying to sell his wares.

“What do they want these days?”

“A little of this, a little of that. Herbs don’t cure everything.” His eyes narrowed. “You don’t think I sold what killed Lord Cade, do you?”

Right to the heart of the matter. Liko being who he was, it was not unreasonable for him to think he might be suspected of it. That was why Corin had come, after all. “Did you?”

“Not with knowledge of it. I’m not in the business of making poisons, whatever you may think. But I may have sold an ingredient or two.” He waved broadly at the shelves. “One metal can act in many different ways depending on how it is combined. I can’t answer for what other people do.”

“What
do
you know about Cade’s death?”

“I know only fleet-footed Rumor blazing among us. It’s all the talk.”

That had a good chance of being true. Few things would make more compelling gossip than murder in the palace. “What else does rumor say? Did he owe Akelon money?”

“Yes. But he was making payments. Akelon wouldn’t have killed him, if that’s what you’re after. And no, I don’t know where Cade got the money.”

“Do you know who killed him?”

A hesitation. No doubt he was hoping to be paid first. “No.”

Corin put a hand on his sword hilt and said softly, “You’ve heard something, or you guess something. Tell me.”