When Mama let Gertriss go, they were both crying, both trying hard to hide it.
I rose. “We all need another beer.” I left and took my time.
When I came back, beers in hand, Three-leg Cat was perched on Mama’s lap, purring and preening as she scratched him behind his one intact ear. Gertriss was fussing with her makeup, squinting into one of the new tiny glass mirrors ladies have begun to carry in their purses this season.
I distributed beers. Mama’s first bottle was empty. Gertriss had hardly touched hers. I hate to see good beer get warm, so I took it.
I gathered the emotional storm was over. But there were still things I needed to know. “So the Sprangs came here looking for money.”
“Mostly.” Mama took a draught and belched, loud as any man, and Gertriss laughed. “Vengeance, too, after they heard Gertriss had took up with a man. They can’t take no vengeance on women. But they’ve got their eyes set on you, boy, thanks to me.”
I shrugged. “How much money are we talking here?”
“Mama’s eyes went hard. “You ain’t thinking about paying them road apples, ’ere you?”
“Why not? If the price is right, it seems like a good way to get rid of them for good. How much?”
“Eight crowns,” said Gertriss softly. “In Old Kingdom coin. They won’t take Regency paper, or anything but gold.”
I snorted. “Hell. Eight crowns. Fine. I can afford that. I’ll pay them, when they get out of the Old Ruth. By then they’ll be so ready to get the Hell out of Rannit they probably won’t stop running long enough to count it.”
“I can’t let you do that, Mr. Markhat.”
“What is it with Hog women? I said I’d pay them. It’s not a fortune. If you want, call it a loan. Even on what your cheapskate boss pays you, eight crowns won’t take that long.” I frowned. From their expressions, I was missing something fundamental to the situation. “This is some Old Law country thing, isn’t it? Do I also have to give them an ear? Agree to consort with their oldest, ugliest daughter? Spill it. I’m a city man, remember?”
Mama sighed. “Tell him the rest, child. I’m liable to tell it wrong.”
I put my beer down a little too hard.
“Wrong or right, ladies, somebody better start telling me something right now.”
Gertriss cleared her throat. “I didn’t know this, until today. I swear I didn’t, Mr. Markhat. Mama just told me.”
“Keep talking.”
“Harald. Harald—he had a brother.”
“Lots of people do. So?”
“He’s dead too.”
Silence. Gertriss was on the verge of tears. I looked to Mama.
“Kilt with the same knife that kilt Harald,” she said. “On the same night. The Suthoms reckon Gertriss kilt him too.”
Gertriss wouldn’t meet my eyes. My mouth went dry.
“I have to ask, Gertriss. You know I do. Did you kill them both?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t know nothing about the other Suthom boy ’til today,” said Mama. “The Sprangs got big mouths. They talked it all up and down the Old Ruth, about how they come to Rannit to put the vengeance on the man what took up with the woman what killed the Suthom boys. I reckon they aims to kill you, boy, and then go home and collect a reward from the Suthoms. So I ain’t sure eight crowns is going to stop this mess. I ain’t sure at all.”
I swallowed the rest of Gertriss’s warm beer, opened my cold bottle, and took a swig of it too.
“And I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. Funny old thing, life.”
Gertriss burst out crying, and I thought seriously about joining her.
It was nearly Curfew before I got the women settled enough to finish talking things out.
We were all out of beer. My throat was dryer than the Regent’s tears. Gertriss had cried away most of her make-up, leaving nothing but dark circles under her eyes. Even red-nosed and a bit raccoonish, she was still fetching.
Mama was gruffing and puffing and threatening to set out for Pot Lockney at first light to “set them Suthoms straight.” I’d dissuaded her from that notion only barely, and at the cost of most of my voice.
I’d filled two notebook pages with times and names and dates and places. I wasn’t ready to leap to my feet and declare the identity of the real murderer of Harald Suthom’s brother Ash, but I had my suspicions.
“I still say they can’t know the same knife killed both Suthoms,” I said. “Especially if the second body wasn’t found for nearly a month.”
Mama shook her head. “Old woman Nilkill says it were the same. She fancies herself a blood witch. If she says both Suthom’s blood is on that knife, that makes it so, boy, in Pot Lockney.”
“How convenient. And they know it’s Gertriss’s knife how, exactly?”
Gertriss sighed. “I carved my name in it when I was ten.”
I groaned. “Well, at least now I know you didn’t kill the second Suthom, Miss. You’re too smart to use a signed knife.”
“Boy!”
“Sorry, sorry, fine. So Harald Suthom meets his well-deserved demise at around eight of the clock. Gertriss is on the road by nine. Sometime in the next few days, Ash Suthom is dispatched with the same knife, wrapped in old burlap, and laid to rest in a briar patch. He lies there until a bear pulls him out and scatters him over old man Ferlong’s cotton patch. That about right?”
Mama and Gertriss exchanged glances, then nodded yes in unison.
“Since we know Gertriss didn’t kill Ash on her way out of Pot Lockney, that means somebody else did. Any idea who? Was Ash as charming and well-loved as his older brother?”
Mama shrugged. “Ain’t none of them Suthoms worth a damn. But I’d never heard tell of Ash ’til today.”
“He was quiet,” said Gertriss. “Never heard him speak. People were scared of him, just for being a Suthom, but I never heard any stories about him. He worked the cows. He paid his bills. He didn’t cause any trouble at the inn. That’s all I know. Except that I didn’t kill him.”
I doodled on the paper, drawing a little stick man with a knife in his back.
“So who found Harald?”
Gertriss looked at Mama.
“Way I hear it, it was his foreman, come looking to roust him out and get started working. They knowed he’d been to see Gertriss, he’d bragged about it. Came in and found him dead in her bed, and her gone.”
I gave my little stick man Xs for eyes.
“So for all we know this foreman took the knife out of Harald and then left it in Ash.”
Mama shrugged. “Ain’t no way for me to know that, boy. Nor you.”
“And then a bear helpfully pulls the corpse out of a briar patch and makes sure he gets a proper burial, right after the good people of Pot Lockney remove a signed knife from his back. How fortuitous. Miss, the next time you go to all the trouble to wrap a corpse and drag it into a briar patch, you might consider removing the murder weapon at some point during the festivities. Especially if said weapon carries your name.”
Mama opened her mouth to gruff at me, but caught on. Gertriss got there faster.
“Someone wants me blamed for Ash’s murder.”
“Oh yes. Bear my ass. They hoped the body would be found, but it wasn’t. So they helped matters along. Now, we’re looking at one of two things here. One, they knew you’d killed Harald, and they knew you’d left town. That made you the perfect pick for killing Ash, too, nothing personal, just business. Or second, somebody back home hates you enough to kill a second man just to make sure you’d be hanged for killing the first. Who would want to do that to you, Miss? Who hates you that much?”
“No one.” She shook her head. “Honest, Mr. Markhat. Nobody.”
I dropped my pencil and leaned back in my chair. Fatigue was settling over me like a coat made of rocks.
“All right. We can worry about who killed the Suthoms later. Right now, here’s what we do.”
And I spent my last bit of wile making plans for the night.
Chapter Six
The Big Bell clanged out midnight before I lay my weary head down to sleep.
My plan to keep Mama and Gertriss safe from any lingering Sprangs involved installing a pair of ogres at Mama’s door. I chose ogres because they’re out and about after Curfew, and are thus easy to find, and because short of a Troll or a brace of the Corpsemaster’s newfangled cannons there isn’t a better deterrent against mischief than half a ton of implacable ogre.
I lucked out and managed to catch up with a Hooga, who agreed to bring his cousin Hooga in on the deal. Don’t ask me how ogres keep identities established when they all bear the same name. But this was a Hooga I knew from Darla’s old job at the Velvet, and we were still on an eye-dipping basis, which practically makes us littermates according to Mama’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things ogre.
I’d given Gertriss orders that she wasn’t to venture outdoors for anything. She didn’t like that, any more than Mama liked hearing the same, but I had to trust they understood the necessity of staying safe behind a wall of ogres until we had a handle on the Sprangs.
So I handed out coins right and left and made sure the Hoogas understood spilling blood was only to be done as a last resort.
That done, I turned my attention to the bigger picture, a task made well nigh impossible by my sudden tragic lack of beer.
After the Hoogas trundled away with Gertriss, Mama and Buttercup, I put my feet on my desk and got out a pad, and tried to make sense of my sundry confusions by putting them down on paper in the form of questions.
Where is Carris Lethway?
appeared at the top of my page.
Who or what compelled him to leave, and why?
followed.
Exhaustion does strange things to the mind. I didn’t realize I’d written
Who has more animosity toward the marriage between Carris and Tamar—the Lethways or the Fields?
until after I’d written the last word.
I put a big question mark under that.
More entries followed—
Was I really drafted?
was asked twice, with heavy underlines, and
When to tell Darla?
below that.
Finally, I scribbled something unflattering concerning Corpsemasters and wild goats and headed to bed.
I dreamed that night. I saw cannons, rows and rows and ranks and ranks of them, hurling thunder and belching flame. I saw the sky criss-crossed with lingering smokes, heard the shriek and howl of battle.
I wasn’t alone, in my dream. The Corpsemaster was there. Not as a corpse, either. She was a woman—a somewhat plain, somewhat aged, somewhat weary woman, with tired green eyes and messy grey hair and a face that had long ago forgotten how to smile.
It seems we talked, at great length, about Rannit and the Regent and battles and wars. I don’t recall anything that was said, or asked, or answered, save that it seemed a great loss of life was both looming and inevitable.
When I woke, in that middle of the night’s deep dark, I was not rested. Something stirred in the shadows of my room, and for an instant I thought I spied Three-leg, stretching before prowling out to terrorize his streets.
But it was Buttercup in my room, crouched by my bed, her tiny face wrinkled in worry.
Before I could speak, she handed me a ragged sock-doll, hugged my neck and vanished.
Damned if I didn’t sleep well after that, a banshee’s tattered doll suspiciously close to my pillow.
Morning came, bringing with it sunlight and singing birds and Three-leg’s insistence that I rise at once. I pushed him off the bed twice before he roused me by raking claws across my bare back.
While Three-leg dined, I gathered clean clothes and wrapped them in a bundle and stepped out into the street after a quick peek through my barely-opened door. I stopped by Mama’s briefly on my way to the bathhouse. The Hoogas were in place, upright and immovable as granite statues. I don’t speak enough ogre to do more than say hello, but my old friend Hooga can nod for yes and shake for no, and thus I was able to establish that Mama had received no visitors during the night.
I started to knock, but decided on a bath first. I bade the Hoogas good morning, and when I emerged from the hot water a half-hour later I was shaved and soaped and not quite smiling.
Rannit was stirring to life around me. Old Mr. Bull was on his stoop, sweeping away whatever imaginary soil collected during the night. The newcomers to the neighborhood, the Arwheat brothers, were taking the iron shutters off their windows and trading shouts in their harsh Southlands tongue. They smiled and waved as I passed, and went back to screaming at each other the instant I returned their greeting.
Mama met me at her door and thrust a steaming mug of coffee at me before I even spoke.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Here’s something for you, boys.” Mama reached inside and came out with two black hunks of ogre hash. The Hoogas took them, sniffed them, and ate them without ever taking their big ogre eyes off the street.
“Come on in, boy. Ain’t nobody up yet but me an’ you.”
I dipped eyes with Hooga and followed Mama indoors.
Mama keeps her windows covered with burlap curtains. The only light comes from candles. The candles are handmade by Mama herself, and while I’m sure each has a specific arcane purpose they all smell like sun-baked manure.
I breathe through my mouth when I visit Mama, most days.
Her card and potion shop was dark and fragrant, but not quiet. Two sets of snores sounded from the back, and neither was dainty.
I sank onto Mama’s rickety client’s chair and sipped her coffee.
“So, no Sprangs came calling last night.”
“Nobody came calling.” Mama spoke softly. “Not that I figured they would.”
“I don’t like this any more than you, Mama. I’m paying the Hoogas, remember?”
“Wasting your coin, you are.”
I shrugged. Maybe I was. Wouldn’t be the first time.
“We can’t keep her in that room forever, boy. Nor me.”
“I know.” Mama’s coffee wasn’t half bad. Or maybe the stench of her blue-flamed candles was making it hard to taste the chicory she prefers.
“So, what you reckon on doing about it?”
“I reckon on talking to the Sprangs again,” I said. “In fact, I’ve given some thought to bailing them out myself.”
“Boy!” Mama forgot to be quiet. The snoring continued. She glared and forced herself back into her chair and shook her head. “Why would you do a damn fool thing such as that?”