Deputy Athena Marion decided to let him stew a little longer. It felt good to have him there, but she was not sure how long she could keep him in custody. Eyewitness testimony from the priestesses could only go so far. It would not be enough to convict. Not with Thorne’s lawyers gathering outside the barracks gates like a swarm of starving locusts. She took a hard swig from her rum bottle. It felt good to drink over victory rather than a failure. But her head still pounded something fierce, and all the liquor did was mildly counteract how egregiously weary she felt. Like she had been struck in the noggin with a boulder in her sleep. She needed a line of pink. But the evidence chamber was currently out of bounds to her. Woodrow and Willison were reorganising stacks of boxes containing evidence against Adrian Thorne and the two dullards were taking too bollocking long. She heard a sharp knock on her chamber door. Malborne emerged, scratching his black goatee. “Thorne wishes to plead insanity,” he said informally, reaching for the rum bottle on her desk.
Athena snatched the bottle back from him and snarled. “I ordered no one to speak to him,” she said stiffly, taking a glug of the sweet, burning honey.
“A watchman’s daughter overdosed on one of his botched elixirs. He burst into the dungeon to beat him bloody. It took six of us to pull him off the poor bastard.” Malborne shrugged and removed his black kettle-hat and swiped the inside of it with a stained cloth. “We were about to shut Thorne away again when he begged ‘send me to Clayhold! Oh, be merciful, for I am a forsaken madman!’ After his rantings from the night before, I don’t half doubt him.”
This was strange tidings to Athena. She glared incredulously and dropped her quill. She was writing a parchment to King Sigismund regarding Thorne’s arrest but was hesitant to send it. The King would want to hold court and give Thorne a fair trial. He was a lord, after all, and it would give him many opportunities to find a loophole out of his crimes, as he had done many times before. Athena had always suspected that the Gargoyle had a predilection for rigging juries, but never could find the evidence to prove it. Nevertheless, it was the right thing to do. It was hard being an honourable watchwoman in this city, yet someone had to be. But apparently Thorne was not looking for a way out. He was looking for a way in. “Why would he want to be shipped to Clayhold Asylum?” Athena asked sceptically, wondering what game Thorne was playing.
“How should I bloody know? The old goblin is a loon. Why make sense of him? He ordered his men to attack some priestesses in a chapel. He’s paranoid and seems to think something is after him.”
Athena sighed to herself. “Maybe he really is mad. He isn’t the same conniving bastard he used to be.” She remembered her days as a novice watchwoman and all the bodies she had to recover from the ends of Hook Harbour. All of them were stupid enough to cross the Gargoyle’s path. So many stabbings and so many drug overdoses. Such needless death. All the fault of one man. Maybe I will have a crack at him myself. She lunged the rum bottle into Malborne’s stomach. “I need a break,” she said stiffly.
She felt a thousand eyes follow her through the hallways of the Dorfchester barracks. There were rows of watchmen, all in soot-black armour and chain mail. She tried to keep her eyes forward. She could feel the contemptuous gazes. Many of them did not want her in the silver. Many of them did not even want her in the black.
She needed air to clear her head, to clear the dizziness. She shut the barracks door behind, and the sunlight assaulted her senses so much she almost hissed at it. When she adjusted, she watched the people on the other side of the street. A blacksmith repeatedly slammed a blunt and rusty hammer onto a great sword, the blade glowing a gloriously bright orange under the morning sun. A peasant woman was yelling hoarsely at her small child to stop chasing the black street cat that had its tail puffed up, escaping around a nearby alleyway. At a butcher’s stall further down, an old Arkovian couple were shouting at each other in their native tongue, furiously chopping chicken meat to take their aggression out. The city was simpler during the day. When she was growing up the night was to be survived, the streets a stone jungle but in the daylight the monsters would retreat into their pits and the sun would watch over her.
“Excuse me…” Athena flinched back at the sudden voice. It was a girl no older than thirteen. She was clearly a peasant as her clothes were torn and covered in mud and her unkempt hair was greasy. “Are you the Deputy? Deputy Marion?” the Waif asked unsurely.
Damn the spirits, must I have to deal with another one of these urchins? “Yes, I suppose I am,” she admitted reluctantly. The peasant girl grabbed Athena’s arm and lightly pulled it. Athena snatched it away sharply. “What in all the underworlds do you think you’re doing?” She gave the urchin a nasty enough look her away.
“Come with me, please,” the Waif said, shockingly assertive.
“I haven’t got time to play.”
“You are still a watchwoman, yes?” the Waif asked innocently and earnestly.
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The Deputy rolled her eyes. “Yes.”
“Then you’re sworn to protect everyone in New Jade City. Even a lowly peasant girl such as myself. Am I correct?”
What spirit did I wrong today to deserve this? She sighed heavier. Her choice was between following this strange girl across the streets or returning to the judging eyes of her peers and a half-crazed crime lord. “Fine. Lead the way.”
It did not surprise Athena that this girl lived in the Shards. What she had described as “Just around the corner” took them all the way from the approachable streets of Dorfchester to a slum in the most problematic borough in the city. Dirty rags of clothes hanged on washing lines between the grey rotting buildings high above and there was an unpleasant stench in the air, one of slime, waste, and hopelessness. Athena continued to follow the Waif through the rookery as she skipped ahead. The Deputy had to ignore the pleas from beggars and the vulgar insults from locals in the borough who did not see it fit for a woman to be the city deputy. She expected to be escorted into one of the overcrowded apartments, but instead the Waif stood aside a small shack put together with damp wooden logs and rusted iron ramps. She gestured to the door and curtsied as if she was letting her into some grand flamboyant ballroom. Athena almost found herself smiling at that. “What’s your name, girl?” the Deputy asked.
“Tilly,” the Waif said and curtsied again.
“Tilly, I have to ask. Why bring me all the way here? Why can’t you just tell me what happened?”
“Because it’s not what happened. It’s who is missing, and I have to show you.”
The drawing was miraculously detailed considering it was drawn by a small mute child. The dispersed freckles around the cheeks and the varied wrinkles under the eyes give a good indication of the mother’s middle age and the shoulder-length black hair. If the context were not so bleak, Tilly’s little mute sister might have looked proudly upon her work instead of looking misty-eyed and morose.
“How long has she been missing for?” Athena asked, taking the drawing from the small child without asking and observing it intently.
“Five years,” Tilly said. She was skinning a dead rabbit over a manky wooden table with half-cut raw vegetables sprawled across it. “One night we were waiting for her to return home with supper, but she never did and our fast was not broken that night.” The Waif forcefully dragged the rusty dagger down the rabbit’s stomach. Athena had seen many dark and unspeakable things during her time in the City Watch, yet she found herself flinching away at the sight. She had a bizarre fondness for rabbits. Even for the Shards, this is a sad way to live.
“If your mother has been gone for that long, then she’s as good as dead now,” Athena frigidly concluded. She handed the portrait back to the small, mute child. “Sorry. Why bring this up now?”
Tilly dropped her rusty knife and turned to look at the Deputy. Her jovial face was absent. “Do you know how hard it is to find a city guard that gives a shit? They don’t listen to anyone who isn’t in a finely made doublet. I read about you in the papers, and you sounded genuine about wanting to make things better. I waited outside the City Watch barracks day and night. Sometimes one of your guards would kick me and tell me to scurry away like the flee that I was.”
“And how long have you been doing that for?” the Deputy asked.
“Long enough.”
Athena sighed. “Well Tilly, I’m sorry you wasted your time trying to find me. People go missing in this city all the time. If you have any recent crimes that happened within the past weeks rather than years, then I would be happy to investigate them to make amends.”
Tilly’s mute sister started bursting into tears and blubbering. The Waif went over to cradle her and lightly shushed her. As Athena watched Tilly rock the child back and forth, it felt dissonantly familiar. She is no different from Hiroko when she watched over me and Hideo. A child sprung to adulthood too early to look after the youngest. “Tell me about your mother,” Athena found herself asking. “A name for a start. Maybe I could find a connection or lead, but the chances will be slim. I do not wish to keep you lingering in false hope.”
“Her name was… is Gilda Fitzpatrick,” Tilly said, correcting herself as she gave her little sister a crudely made straw doll to hold. It seemed to work as the child’s wailing finally ceased. “She was a washerwoman for the local lord in the district at the time. The lord was most frugal, however. She could not afford to keep me and Greta fed, especially as she was just a babe at the time. Sometimes she would be gone for nights, we do not know where, but she would return eventually with something for us to eat and coin in her purse. Some nights she felt so desperate she dabbled in dark arts in the hopes of bringing better fortune for us.”
Athena scowled incredulously at the last part of the Waif’s tale. “Well Tilly, I’m afraid to say your mother was a charlatan. There is no such thing as dark magic or witches.”
“But what of the demon that attacked the Duke in the papers?” She asked in strange wonder. “Or the murmurings on the street of a ninja who appears in the night with lightning in his hands?”
“How can you even afford a paper?” Athena asked dubiously.
“I didn’t pay for it. Please, Deputy Marion, can you promise me and Greta that you will try to give us an answer? You say she is most likely dead. I can accept that. But you can still find out why. All we ask for is closure.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said truthfully, for she would do her best. If a day would ever come when a breadcrumb trail was , she would follow it. If the person or people responsible for her death were found, she would arrest and hang them. If the answer and closure were to present themselves, she would seize it. But this was New Jade City, and in the cities, justice is merely a fairy tale.
Tilly courteously escorted the Deputy outside and gave her some cooked rabbit to take home with her along with Greta’s portrait of her missing mother. As she parted, she could hear Tilly coughing violently behind her before closing the shack’s door. Athena wondered if the Waif would survive long enough for her to find an answer.