“Oh my gosh, Isha, where have you brought me? Is it a burrow for bandits? Is it a retreat for robbers? I mean, just look at how dark and shadowy and greasy and sticky it is!”
I very nearly shoved Faith back out of the Leaky Bucket. “Keep your voice down!” I hissed. If any of the regulars here took offense to her commentary – or existence, for that matter – we were going to have much more serious problems than a dislocated shoulder.
“No, no, no – you misunderstand me! I love this place! I mean, is that a bloodstain?”
I followed her gaze to a patch of floor under one of the bar stools. The splintered wood indeed looked as if it had been reddened by blood sometime in the distant past, before Mardin took over the place and brokered his DMZ. The bar stool had a pair of legs next to it. I followed them up to meet Bazso’s inquiring gaze.
With an apologetic duck of the head, I towed my crewmate across the room. Thank all the forgotten gods that the tavern was practically empty so early in the morning. Most of those present were Lampblacks on business. The entire way to the bar, Faith craned her head this way and that, banging into tables and gawking around at all the gang members, who gawked right back.
“They’re so totally lovable!” she enthused. A few of the more grizzled veterans blinked, not having been called “lovable” since about the age of three (and probably not even then).
During our final approach to the bar, Bazso straightened up and tipped his hat politely to both of us. “What brings you and your friend here, Isha?” he asked courteously.
Please let the doctor be around. I didn’t think I could endure one more moment of Faith. “Is Sawbones around?”
“Are you hurt?” he demanded, scrutinizing me for signs of injury.
In reply, I jerked a disgusted thumb at my crewmate, who still hadn’t finished gaping at his gang. She tugged on my arm. “Aren’t they the cutest, Isha? Aren’t they just the best? Oh, they’re so delightfully lovable!”
“More lovable than you,” I muttered.
“Oh, Isha, you say the sweetest things!” In a flurry of pink silk and lace, she glommed onto me, embracing my arm and beaming angelically.
Behind the bar, Mardin made a strangled sound that might have been a chuckle and hastily ducked down to rummage among his bottles. Bazso simply raised one eyebrow. Gritting my teeth, I extricated myself while casting “Please save me now!” glances at him.
Looking half amused and half bemused, he called out, “Henner, fetch Sawbones.”
A moment later, the Lampblack doctor strode out of a back room, still rolling down his sleeves. A sheepish-looking thug limped out after him, a bandage around one hairy calf. “What is the problem here?” the doctor inquired, looking at Bazso, Faith, and me in turn.
If I let Faith explain, we’d be here all day. “She – ” I began.
She didn’t let me finish. “Well, you see,” she exclaimed with fake earnestness, “some of my bones aren’t in the right place and I’d like them to be!” She turned sideways and flattened the bows on her shoulder so he could see its outline.
Matter-of-factly, Sawbones confirmed her diagnosis. “Yes, that does appear to be the case.” Delicately probing the joint with his fingertips, he said without glancing up, “Mardin, a shot of whiskey, please?”
The proprietor slammed one down on the bar. Faith picked it up, gave it a cursory examination, decided to skip the rhapsodizing, and downed it in one gulp. With horrified fascination, Bazso, Mardin, Sawbones, and I all watched as her eyes teared up and her mouth opened wide. She just barely kept herself from sputtering.
“All right, come with me, miss.” Sawbones escorted her into the back room and shut the door firmly.
Bazso watched them go, then shook his head a little and turned back to me. Picking up the bottle of whiskey, he put a hand on the small of my back. “Come, Isha, have a seat. You look as if you need a break.” He guided me to his usual booth, where he poured us each a glass. Heaving a sigh of relief, I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and sipped it. “So that’s one of your new railcar-mates?”
I moaned and opened my eyes again. “Yes,” I replied ruefully.
“She’s certainly an…original character,” he observed mildly.
“Yes,” I repeated, with feeling.
From the back room came an ear-splitting shriek.
“So how is the new place working out?”
Dodging the unspoken question – “Are you going to move back to Crow’s Foot now?” – I shrugged. “It’s fine. Been doing a little decorating.” With traps and tripwires. Dispensing with subtlety, I changed the topic. “Last time, you never finished telling me why you and Mylera hate each other so much.”
“You’re still on about that?” he asked in a neutral tone.
I downed the rest of my whiskey and raised him an eyebrow.
After a pause, he said, “Well, you know me,” and gestured at the empty glass on the table. “Mylera worships She Who Slays in Darkness.” He grimaced. “That cult,” he pronounced with distaste, “has sold out to the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh. It has curried a relationship with them for protection.”
From Ash’s many theological treatises, I’d gathered that the Church of Ecstasy was itself a cult, albeit a successful one that had achieved state religion-hood at the expense of the Empty Vessel. One author also remarked that the Church of Ecstasy honored no gods, and speculated that its public humanist face was but a façade for dark rituals and demon worship.
“Tell me more about the Empty Vessel,” I said. Ash’s book on forgotten gods had vaguely alluded to an ancient practice of hollowing devotees, or removing their spirits and leaving only an empty living body. I sincerely hoped that the practice had died out along with the cult’s influence.
His face lighting up, Bazso opened his mouth to launch into a long explanation. At that moment, the door to the back room swung open and we heard Faith saying to Sawbones, “You’re as kind as you are beautiful!” Catching sight of me, she waved cheekily and bounced towards the booth.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
At the same time, the front door of the Leaky Bucket banged open. In stormed Pickett at the head of a knot of Lampblacks dragging a scruffy man in torn docker clothing who cursed and fought every step of the way.
“Bazso!” Pickett snapped. “You have to see this.”
“Now is not a good time,” he replied tersely.
“No. You have to see this now.” She stomped over with her prize. “I told you someone was sabotaging supplies down at the docks. We caught him.”
Pushing a Lampblack out of the way, she seized the docker by the back of the neck and slammed him face first onto our table, narrowly missing my whiskey glass. Then she roughly yanked down his collar to reveal a bee tattoo – the symbol of the Hive.
Bazso’s face went grim. “You’re right. Take him to the back.” He was already sliding out of the booth and straightening his top hat. I, too, stood quickly, calculating how best to get into that interrogation chamber.
Faith sidled up to me and whispered in my ear, “I love getting involved in other people’s tragedies.”
I stamped on her foot. She ignored me.
For the benefit of the tavern-goers, she proclaimed, “His bee tattoo is so cute! But don’t you think it would look better if he added some flowers next to it? Maybe a peony for devotion, and a spray of asphodel for ‘my regrets follow you to the grave’?”
Maybe Bazso should turn the torture over to her.
The Lampblacks were already dragging their captive across the room, the few civilian customers hurriedly getting out of their way and going up to Mardin to pay their tabs. Leaving Faith behind, I bustled after the gang as if I should by rights aid in the interrogation.
Of course, Pickett had to notice me angling to slip through the doorway. Seizing my elbow, she shoved me backward. “No. This is Lampblack business.”
Under Bazso’s watchful eye, Henner and the others were tying the prisoner to a sturdy chair while he kicked and twisted. Since the leaders of the Hive, wealthy merchants all, never dirtied their own white-gloved hands, and since he didn’t look like one of their elite mercenaries, I guessed that he really was a docker.
“Bazso,” I appealed. “Bazso, I can help!”
Glancing away from the prisoner for a moment, he met my eyes, made a quick decision, and nodded curtly. “She stays,” he ordered Pickett, who heaved a sigh of disgust and grabbed my elbow again, this time to yank me into the room.
“Stay out of the way,” she snapped, pushing me roughly into a corner.
Unnoticed by the second-in-command, Faith strolled right in after us, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a girl in a frilly pink dress to attend a brutal gang interrogation.
And maybe, for her, it was.
She observed the proceedings with a disapproving expression and critiqued their technique without bothering to keep her voice down. “Oooh, that’s not elegant at all.” “No, no, if they twisted his arm and bent his finger the other way at the same time, it would hurt so much more.” “Personally, I’d use needles for that. Daggers are so passé, don’t you think?”
I blanked my face and spoke not a single word.
I was remembering.
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Two years ago.
A dank and dirty office in the Lampblack headquarters. Streaks of blood, not all of it mine, staining the moldy floorboards and soaking my tunic and leggings as I curled, fetus-like, beside a broken chair.
Overhead, on an old writing desk behind a wall of hard-faced thugs, lay Grandfather. I can help you, child. I’ve helped you before.
No.
A callused hand seized my hair and forced my head back, nearly breaking my neck. Venomous grey eyes glared out of a weather-beaten face. The woman who headed the interrogation demanded harshly, “Are you ready to talk now?”
I batted feebly at her hands. “Please, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” My words came out in a hopeless whisper.
Without releasing my hair, she struck me so hard across the face that my vision went black.
Is this how a member of your line dies? Beaten to death by common thugs in a filthy coal warehouse in the middle of nowhere? Just reach out for me, child.
No….
But my resolve was weakening, and Grandfather knew it.
A booted foot kicked me in the stomach, and I screamed and balled up and tried to protect my head as the blows rained down.
Through the pain, I heard movement from the direction of the door. The bodies that pressed around me, beating me, kicking me, backed away abruptly, leaving me gasping painfully for breath.
The woman rasped, “Bazso, she’s a tough one.”
A man’s voice replied, “Let me have a look.” Footsteps vibrated the floorboards and came to a stop next to me. I whimpered and huddled up even tighter. Grandfather battered at the edges of my mind.
To my surprise, a gentle hand brushed back my bloody hair, and I timidly peered up – right into a pair of light blue eyes. Instinct made me jerk back and half-scramble to a sitting position before I realized that it wasn’t him, just another thug, albeit one disguised as a gentleman in a foppish silk top hat and tidy brown waistcoat.
Some of my relief must have shown on my face, because the man – Bazso, the woman had called him – sat back on his heels and gave me a considering look.
“You’re not from around here,” he observed mildly.
“Obviously not,” came the woman’s scornful voice. “She’s a filthy red sash. Although what she’s doing in our territory she refuses to say.”
“Are you a red sash?” he asked me calmly.
My temper flared. “How can I be a sash of any sort, red or otherwise? I’m a human, last time I checked.” My little speech might have been more impressive if it hadn’t come out as a hoarse croak.
Nonetheless, the woman was outraged. “Why, you little – ”
“Pickett.” Bazso, who must be her boss, lifted one hand and cut her off. Still scrutinizing me, he asked, “So you don’t know what a red sash is?”
“Besides a particularly gaudy fashion accessory?” I retorted, then braced for a slap.
Instead, he smiled very faintly and stood. “It’s all right,” he told the others. “She’s not one of them. You can let her go.” He took a few steps towards the doorway, stopped, and returned to crouch next to me. “Have Sawbones take a look at her,” he directed over his shoulder. Then, to me, “Here, miss. Buy yourself some new clothing. It’s not safe to go around this area dressed like that.” He knotted a fistful of silver slugs into a handkerchief, pressed it into my hand, and strode out of the room.
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I liked to think that Pickett couldn’t have broken me.
I liked to think that I was tougher than this docker, who was groaning and cursing and teetering on the edge of surrender thanks to the same “inelegant” treatment I’d endured.
This time, though, it was Bazso who grabbed the man’s hair and forced his head back until I thought his neck would break. It was Bazso who leaned close and hissed, “Are you ready to talk now?”
“Yes!” blubbered the man. “Yes! Oh, yes! Please!”
Relaxing his hold just a little, Bazso demanded, “Who do you work for?”
“The Hive!” cried the man. “The Hive! Honest!”
Beside me, Faith tsked, “Now, personally, I think psychological torture is just so much more refined. And cleaner. Definitely cleaner.” She nodded at the blood spattered all over the floor.
Pickett ground her teeth and glared meaningfully at Henner, as if she wanted him to throw both of us out. Poor, loyal Henner looked as if he couldn’t fathom who Faith was and why she was present – but Bazso didn’t seem to object and Bazso knew best.
If the head of the Lampblacks overheard Faith’s running commentary on his techniques, he gave no sign of it. Intensely, he asked the prisoner, “And why does the Hive want to interfere with my business down at the docks?”
“They want to take over! They’re expanding! They want the docks! They want to push you and the Red Sashes out, or make you pay them! That’s all I know! Honest!”
After a few more questions, Bazso agreed that, indeed, the man had honestly told us everything he knew. Clapping him on the shoulder, he said approvingly, “Good man.”
With a nod at Pickett and Henner, he rolled down his sleeves, straightened his waistcoat, and ushered the rest of us back out into the common room.
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A couple days later, my hand-wringing archivist reported that Mistress Karstas had appeared at the Sensorium again, and this time he’d positioned himself so he could hear her request. “She wanted a memory of a gang interrogation,” he whispered, as if terrified that Faith would pop up behind him and subject him to one. “From the perspective of the interrogee.”
Somehow, that didn’t surprise me. “Did you have one?”
Gulping, he nodded. “Madame Keitel gave her a strange look but invited her into the archive to pick one herself. She chose a really…horrible one. Lots of…beatings. And blood.” After a pause to collect himself, he added, “I thought maybe you’d want to know – a while back, something happened to Madame Keitel. Someone beat her up. Mistress Karstas has been asking questions about that.”
When I returned to the railcar, Ash told me offhandedly that Faith had borrowed a coin from the crew coffers for her personal projects.