INTERLUDE 1B: WHEN A WALL IS INCONVENIENT
“To understand the dynamic, you have only to look at the number of bodies dredged at the Nightlocks and the Flood-dam each month. The crime statistics in the relevant areas of Hightown and Hilltown demonstrate those districts can be handily disregarded; North and South Lowtown are roughly equivalent, averaged over the year. And yet, even controlling for population, nine times the corpses at the Nightlocks. The conclusion is obvious, laid out in bloaters by the boatload: the murder rate in New Sticktown has, frankly, gotten completely out of hand.”
– the Lady Justice Tethra, in session before the Justice Council, Belara 852 NE
It was way past bedtime for most, but he couldn’t rest. Never could. He went over and over his papers, double-checking his numbers, sitting at his desk wearing only his nightgown and the big fluffy sock-shoe-things from Hilltown they called ‘slippers’. He knew that someone willing to be critical of him would point out that if he fell asleep at six in the morning and got up at two in the afternoon, he was still getting eight hours, and would probably be able to keep to a normal schedule if he put in the effort the reset his habits.
But he didn’t surround himself with the kind of people willing to be critical of him.
He was more than capable of self-criticism. One didn’t get as far in life as he had by refusing to stop every now and again for the odd moment of cold, hard introspection. But that wasn’t what you wanted from a lackey.
He knew he was fat. He knew he was balding. He knew he could stop eating so much, he could go to bed at eleven o’clock, put out the candles, lock away his distractions and force himself to sleep through sheer boredom. When he grew up, they had nothing. His mother and father and sister had starved to death. He’d been a living skeleton when the orphanage took him in, and when, five years later, he robbed the priest who ran the orphanage at knife-point on his way out of there, the old man scathingly informed him that on the night they found him and dragged him in he’d been given no better than a one-in-three chance of surviving. “But ’e’s as light as an empty pillercase, an’ ‘alf as full”, one of the men who brought him in had said, apparently. He didn’t delude himself – he knew it was no excuse, that his bad habits were his fault. But still, he knew his upbringing was the reason.
He’d been a Cutter-Boy, Knuckle-Head and even a Wallsider in his time, before ending up with the Bertie Boys and his hands on a not-insignificant chunk of Helbert’s Bend real estate. And along the way to getting rich, he found that among all the luxuries wealth could afford him, only two were worthwhile. Only two brought the kind of pleasure that wasn’t fakery. Fine dwellings and exquisite furnishings and expensive clothes – these things were designed to turn idiots into walking advertisements, deluding yet more of those fools, those with too much money to know what was really of value.
The first was power. The second was food.
He wasn’t difficult. It didn’t take much to make him happy. The food part was simple, given his resources; he didn’t need the posh stuff, and if you were alright with bacon and pork and thick gravy and plenty of spuds, you’d get on fine at his table – not that others got to eat from it, of course. He ate alone. Oh, others were allowed to be in the room, but they couldn’t be eating too. That wouldn’t project the right message; it just wouldn’t do. Not that his Gentlemen were prone to snacking anyway.
And he knew that being a landlord was the closest he was going to get to being a lord, of any kind, but that was okay by him so long as he got to exert his influence over others, feel the little upsurge of bliss when he made someone’s day or ruined someone’s life. It was this, the very moment in which someone’s fate changed due to his decision, that made him happiest. He often made his mind up on a whim, taking out his current mood on whichever morsel of humanity was pleading their case in his face at the time. If he’d had a particularly nice lunch he’d be able to let some idiots slip through the net, give them a reprieve on their rent – or perhaps even give them some measure of a reward for their faithful tenancy, if their plight touched him through the layers of detachment that had built up over the years, separating him from the lowborn from which he’d arisen, every bit as real as the layers of fat he could feel growing around his heart.
Twice, that’d happened. Usually, him taking his current mood out on someone ended with them in tears, himself smiling, and his money-pouch feeling considerably heavier.
His own apartment was two roads across and one up from Mud Lane, a two-storey double-apartment at the top of a rare brick-built, four-floor building on Lossen Run. He owned the whole building, so his neighbours were the tenants he had least trouble with; they knew to be on their best behaviour, what with dozens of Gentlemen making the way up and down the stairwells at all hours. Those who couldn’t maintain the expected standards tended to find themselves out on the kerb in short order.
Sometimes he’d stand at his big bedside window, looking out onto the street, just thinking about his little empire, how far he’d come.
The technically-quadruple apartment was itself mostly filled with his lackeys. There’d be two of his boys outside his locked bedroom door, always – probably Garet and Lev, at this time of the night, or morning, whatever. Probably half a dozen more Gentlemen scattered through the lounges and bedrooms in the upstairs rooms adjoining his own. The rooms in the lower floor of his two-storey residence had been knocked through to form a big gathering area, and the twenty-strong night shift would be in and out at all hours, as many as half of them showing their presence on the streets at any given time. The rest would be here at base, downstairs in the gathering area – for protection, of course. You didn’t become someone like Peltos without screwing-over a few friends as well as enemies over the years – there’d been as many attempts on his life in the last three years as in the first thirty. And he’d grown up rough.
The whole business with that boy was messing with his head. That was why he couldn’t sleep. That was why no matter how many times he did these dropping figures they didn’t add up the same twice.
He needed sleep. His body knew it even if his mind didn’t. His eyes were slow, responding sluggishly to his commands, blurring over the moment he lost focus.
The sand in the top of his hourglass was running low. He’d have to stay up another ten minutes to turn it over, at least. The markings down the side worked out to quarter-hours, and the whole top emptied in a total of three hours. It wouldn’t do to go from the chair at the desk to the bed without turning it over – what if he couldn’t sleep, and got up again? he wouldn’t know what time it was anymore! – and it wasn’t like he could turn it over till it was empty – then he’d have to remember to knock ten minutes off every time he tried to figure out the time.
Not that the time would actually matter. Someone in the flat would have it, if he asked, recently-taken from the clock at Foundstone Circle, which was set twice a day from the Master Clock in Hightown. But not being able to just tell it at a glance from his hourglass would drive him mad, and give him even more reasons to avoid sleep.
What had the freaky-looking magister called him? That was it – Kastyr Mortenn. Yes, that boy was bad for business. Lying for years, hiding people in the flat of his dead parents. So yes, fine, they technically hadn’t missed any payments. But it was the lying that did it for him. It was a form of disrespect. Someone who thought they could lie to you didn’t think enough of you to fear you, and that wouldn’t do. The boy had to be intimidated. He had to know his place.
Some place not owned by me.
Tomorrow night. He’d sleep on it first, and, more importantly, have breakfast on it. He might even be asleep early enough to make it a morning-breakfast rather than an afternoon-breakfast, if he was lucky.
He gave the numbers part of a third go-over, turned over the damned hourglass, then eased himself up out of the creaking chair. He tried not to show it, but the combination of weight and age was starting to get to him. Everything hurt, but his ankles… Even druid-healing had proven temporary. And he doubted he was even half as fast with a dagger as he’d been when he’d actually had the skills to set his little enterprise up. If he had to start over, now, he’d be dead within a week.
But, he consoled himself, moving towards the bed, at least he knew that. Better to operate with both eyes wide open, aware of both his strengths and shortcomings, than to blunder in unaware of his weaknesses. He didn’t have to get his own hands dirty. He had the hands of others for that. He’d evolved beyond being the one with his hand on the knife. It saddened him somewhat, to recognise how far behind him his youth really was. It’d been exciting back then –
He suddenly heard a deep thudding, getting rapidly closer. The building was shaking.
He wobbled on his unsteady feet.
That was when his bedside window exploded inwards, the whole wall buckling.
He was too slow to reel backwards as thousands of shards of glass peppered his belly, his feet, the bed and the rug; thankfully he was still too far from his bed to get caught by any of the big pieces. But his half-hearted attempt to react, to reel, merely threw him off-balance. His ankles gave out and he fell back instead, thudding into the floor with a resounding boom. It was only because it was trained into him by instinct to keep his head forward that he wasn’t knocked out cold.
Its head filling the window-frame, two scaly three-clawed feet ripping into the masonry beneath the window to get a grip – was a huge dragon.
The freaky-looking, tattoo-covered magister was sitting astride its neck, her black robe flapping in the chill pre-dawn breeze. She was staring at him, and she didn’t look happy.
“Peltos Kemmenon.” Her voice was croaky and deep, her glare almost painful to endure; he turned his head aside, cringing.
“Boss? Boss!” Lev’s cries through the door were muffled.
Peltos didn’t want to hang around to hear any more. Not caring to hide his abject terror, he scrambled backwards and tried to get to his feet, agonisingly aware that the door was locked from the inside. But his slippers, which had mercifully spared him from stepping in any of the scattered glass with his bare flesh, now betrayed him, not letting him find purchase for his weight.
– in my bedroom there is a dropping dragon in my bedroom there is a dropping dragon –
He tried to roll over to crawl, but now his girth betrayed him – he knew it was going to take him the best part of ten seconds just to get onto his front, and there was no way he could generate the force required to move towards the door on his back –
“Mr. Kemmenon,” she spoke slowly and precisely, seemingly quite nonchalant about the fact his Gentlemen were now hammering on the bedroom door, “I’ve got some questions for you.”
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He gave up, flopped down again.
From his angle he could only see her with his right eye (over the shoulder of the dragon there is a dropping dragon…) – then he caught the smirk on her face, and that gave him back a bit of his oomph.
“Please don’t let it eat me!” he screamed.
She chuckled, and patted her dragon on the neck; it craned its head forward and moved further into the room, simply breaking his bed under its claws. It moved closer and closer to him, until his belly was all he could see reflected in its huge, red-burning eye.
It looked like it was smirking too, a curve to its tooth-lined reptilian maw.
She slid down its side, then stepped towards him until she stood by his feet.
“Cri-criminal damage!”
She looked back at the wall, then down at him again.
“The word you’re looking for is collateral, my dear Mr. Kemmenon. Collateral damage. Orrrrrr maybe just, I don’t know, ‘reasonable measures to ensure minimal risks’… yeah, that’s how I’ll sell it. Would you really have come quietly if I’d knocked on the front door? I think there’s going to be far less loss of life this way. I mean, why wait for a warrant when doing it this way is so much more fun, and safer?”
“Wha…”
Here was the world that revolved around him suddenly slowing in its spin, coming to a stop and crashing down cataclysmically into nothing. Phrases like warrant and come quietly and loss of life echoed in his mind.
Boom, boom, boom; his Gentlemen at the door.
It was a damned expensive door, and its lock was a specially-made thing that had three bolts operating off the one key.
Take the hinges off, idiots! he shrieked, but the sound came out as nothing more than a strangled “eep”.
“So what’s really scratching away at me is, have you actually taken it on as your purpose or something – to ruin other people’s lives?” She drawled on so slowly, so casually, so… demeaningly – he caught himself digging his nails into his palms, and forced himself to break it off – “Or are you just doing it because you’re genuinely clueless about the way your actions affect others?”
He stared up at her.
“In other words, are you evil? Or just a buffoon?”
The moment he let a trace of infuriation put the shadow of a scowl on his features the dragon’s head seemed to swell up, the floor shaking as if its foothold on the walls was shifting –
Then it opened its mouth and roared.
Its breath was the breath of a thing that had eaten whole animals raw in a single gulp, a deafening, stomach-churning explosion of carrion wind, exploding right in his face.
He couldn’t fight the shaking that took control of his limbs, so he lay there, legs and arms jerking around, tapping his knuckles and heels on the rug.
The sorceress erupted into laughter moments before he heard the door fall into the room.
Her laughter died as quickly as it’d started.
“Oh, man.” Then a coldness entered her voice: “I warn you to stay back. I made a promise not to feed my girl any live humans anymore, and I really don’t want to have to apologise.”
The dragon moved its head on its sinuous neck, scanning the Gentlemen who were crowded in the doorway.
The sounds made by the feet of his henchmen had come to a sudden, quite understandable halt. Her threats didn’t sound idle.
“I learnt my lesson, anyway.” Her lip curled. “Ghost Host! Sakhamen diir.”
It was already cold in here with the best part of one wall missing, but the temperature in the room dropped noticeably again in the space of a heartbeat; he swivelled his head to look –
A line of six, well, ghosts, had been interposed between his recumbent form and the recoiling Gentlemen in the doorway – he could see Garet and Lev and his other boys through them, their grey-purple forms transparent as they flickered and floated.
The shapes of men, women, all attired in formal dinner suits and dresses, but with their backs turned to him – their faces must’ve been pretty horrifying though, given that Garet and Lev blenched back into their colleagues piled up in the landing behind them.
“Garet!” Peltos’s cry came out shrill.
With a look of resolution on his face but with none of his usual confidence in his actual motions, Garet took a tentative step forwards.
The ghost opposite Garet mirrored his movement instantly, flickering closer, the hem of her dress twelve inches off the floor.
Out of sheer reflex Garet jabbed with his left – his fist just sank through the ghost, and he leapt back, howling, clutching his wrist.
“Ai! Boss, boss it’s cold!”
The ghost flickered back to her previous position; even through her vaporous form Peltos could see that his underling’s whole hand was blue, the fingers frozen in position.
“Or, you could repair the wall and the window out of the sixteen plat, I guess.”
The sorceress’s voice had taken on a musing quality, and he cranked his head back around to look up at her, feeling suddenly disoriented.
“Come on, I already told you I’m not here to serve a warrant. I’m technically off the clock, but I scaled the building with a demon and tore a wall off your house because I was just dying to see you wet your nightgown.”
He looked down towards his crotch reflexively, not that he could actually see it. He hadn’t noticed when it happened. Probably when the dragon-demon roared.
“I’m actually here to deliver Mortenn’s money. Sixteen plat. Unless you want to argue about the amount now?”
She reached up and stroked one of her dragon’s horns affectionately.
He retained enough composure to shake his head, but once he gave the command to his neck muscles the movement itself came as a jolt, so that a bit of spittle shot from his mouth.
Her smile widened. “You could report this, you know. My infraction.”
It was a bland statement, just there on its own like that. It felt like there should’ve been a second part of the sentence, a ‘but’ or ‘however’…
He twitched. “I – I –“
“Man, I almost want you to. My lovely companion here is hungry, and I’m just dying for an excuse. You would make such a fine repast. No evidence left.” She leaned against the huge jaw of the beast serenely, then sighed. “Even if I can’t feed you to her – now I’m not making any promises… but as far as I’m concerned, scum like you are one of the main things holding this place back… You grow up here?”
He nodded frantically when it hit him that she was actually asking him a question.
– please I don’t want to be eaten, anything but that, don’t let it eat me –
“I’ve been here a few years, seen a few things, but I know what it’s like out there, and this place could be special. You could be a part of that, man. But instead you choose to be a bully. So maybe we don’t start out by eating you. Maybe we could just go after your illicit businesses, ‘P. D. Kemmenon’… I’m not bad at wards now. They almost never explode when tripped, these days, and I took a glance at the files. I do know where most of your warehouses are.”
He closed his eyes, doing his best not to show how much this sudden turn in the conversation petrified him.
“So don’t repair the wall. Report me instead, show someone what I did, and give me a reason to make it personal… But I think you’d be better off following some advice. Ever think it might be time to straighten up your ways? Clean up your activities, start being fair with people? There’s more for you to gain than you know.”
He heard her robes rustling, and opened his eyes to watch her remount her demon.
“So what’s it to be? You going to repair your wall?”
If he’d nodded frantically at her earlier question, this time it got hysterical.
She smirked, and derisively dropped a small black bag near his feet that jingled with the tell-tale ring of coins.
“Think of it this way – you just stopped some little kids becoming homeless. Three of ‘em. Right there, with your mind.” Out of nowhere, he felt his eyes tear up. “Keep flexing that I-won’t-be-a-jerk muscle.” She shook her head. “Come, Fe. Peltos is off the menu – for now. Sakhamen faneir.”
With a shuddering rumble of shifting bricks, the demon slid back through the opening, descending with its mistress back towards the street. The temperature in the room told him the six freezing things behind him had departed too.
Since she mentioned his other business dealings, his warehouses, his mind had been whirling with thoughts of impending disaster.
She knows about the product? Then immediately: No, there’s no way. No way she doesn’t bring me in after this, if she knew.
She’ll find out if we make an issue of her ‘infraction’, though.
Virtually none of the magical herbs, plants or fungi in circulation outside Mund were permitted inside the city walls – only those cultivated by the Unwilted Bloom and sold through the Magisterium-licensed firms. Such things had to be carefully tested, they said; carefully controlled, more like, he knew.
He had plenty of the benign ones in copious quantities, sacks of wane and fume, but some of the ones he had in his warehouses were the bad ones. Crates of whitestick and nailbiter; and, most nerve-wrackingly, a barrel of inkatra bulbs.
Inkatra was the new thing, just hitting the streets. Most importantly for the supplier, the bulbs were ecstasy-inducing, addictive; and, most importantly for the customer, they granted abilities. Any normal person, with zero magical experience, could try their hand at summoning a ghost, shooting lightning from their fingers, reading someone’s mind… A couple of weeks back Peltos had been invited to watch a demonstration; a giggling kid – just a scruffy, unlettered fourteen-year-old – whose cat started following his orders after he ate one of the bulbs. ‘Chase your tail.’ ‘Cover one eye with your paw.’ ‘Try to meow Blackrush Blues.’
The effect itself lasted approximately four minutes, only worked on the one animal, and it took less than an hour for the boy to emerge from his reverie and start begging for some more.
What would happen if an actual mage got hold of some? Who knew. Probably nothing, seeing as mages had to focus, perform precise actions, in order to cast their spells. The kid he’d watched enchant his own cat – that kid wouldn’t have been able to tie a knot in a piece of string, never mind remember a ritual, or whatever it was a mage did. It wasn’t likely to happen anyway; inkatra wasn’t an upmarket herb like whitestick that’d let you go about your daily business with your colleagues none the wiser about the source of your uncanny sharpness, your acuity of thought. No, inkatra would become your world.
But Peltos wasn’t a supplier. Wasn’t a customer, either. What the young magister-girl didn’t understand about the real world was that everything was connected. Peltos was in league with the Bertie Boys, and he was only going to get a fraction of the profits of the sales; the main share was going to Gram and Wyre, and he would only be able to dip into the part that got added to the kitty. His position didn’t come freely, and his name was attached to people, places and events that could incriminate him.
No, the most important thing, to Peltos’s mind, was that possession of any power-granting unverified herb was a capital offence. He’d be hanged, if they could find a gallows sturdy-enough to bear his weight.
Maybe the girl was right. She might not understand the finer details of how the underworld worked, but perhaps that only helped her see it more clearly. It wouldn’t be impossible to start extricating himself from the tangled webs he’d helped weave, here in Helbert’s Bend. Sometimes it took that kind of innocence, youth, to see the big picture. He’d gotten lost in the details somewhere between his first crime and his thousandth. He’d made it his business to make as many enemies as possible. It was just that he had to call them friends – think of them as friends – even as he knew Gram would rather have slit his throat than give him a penny were they not Bertie Boy brethren.
This was a warning. Not from the Magisterium – from the gods.
Stopping three kids from being made homeless. Three kids that could’ve gone to an orphanage like he had. Three kids who wouldn’t have to end up half-dead like he’d been, just because of a moment of mercy. He’d never really thought about it that way.
Surely in all those arguments he’d relished with his tenants they’d said similar things? He couldn’t recall. But that was when he was in his stride, talking over them with aplomb, their cries falling on deaf ears.
It seemed it took a dragon roaring in his face to unblock those ears, wake him up.
This had been far too close for comfort.
And how many orphans had he already made?
So when his Gentlemen came forward to pull him to his feet, muttering their apologies and excuses, he wasn’t listening, or even embarrassed about the wet spot on his garment – his mind flamed with things he needed to do.
Clean up my activities. “Get word to Ginnel Gram and Wyre Lulton. We need to move the product before the sun’s up. Magisters are onto us.” Check she wasn’t lying. “You! Pick up that pouch on the floor, give it here… Get a pan and brush up this glass.” Cover it up like any other bit of bad business. “You. Contact a brickie and glazier, I need this repairing pronto; here, take this to cover it, and don’t you even think of short-changing me…” I’m hungry. “Someone fetch me a bacon sarnie before I throw up. Go!”
They began to scatter on their various missions, but the last thing on his list resounded in his head.
Start being fair with people?
“And, ah… Lev? Check Garet’s okay? Thank you.”
He didn’t see them freeze in the doorway but he heard them stop, and could imagine the perplexed looks crossing their faces as they regarded one another
Instead he turned aside to his wardrobe and used its doors to shield himself from view as he donned a fresh nightgown.
I’ve evolved beyond being the one with my hand on the knife.
He was actually smiling as he redressed.
It was only once he closed the doors again that he saw them, looking back at him in alarm.
He sighed.
It was going to be a long road.
“Go!” he yelled.
This time, they went.