First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © D.K. Fields, 2019
The moral right of D.K. Fields to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover Designer: Helen Crawford-White
Authors photograph: Two Cats in the Yard Photography
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789542486
ISBN (XTPB): 9781789542493
ISBN (E): 9781789542479
Head of Zeus Ltd
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For Mike, for Vancouver
Welcome Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Map
The Swaying Audience
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Abject Reveller, god of: loneliness, old age, fish
Affable Old Hand, god of: order, nostalgia, punctuality
Beguiled Picknicker, god of: festivals, incense, insect bites
Blind Devotee, god of: mothers, love, the sun
Bloated Professional, god of: wealth, debt, shined shoes
Calm Luminary, god of: peace, light, the forest
Courageous Rogue, god of: hunting, charity, thin swords
Curious Stowaway, god of: rites of passage, secrets, summer and the longest day
Deaf Relative, god of: hospitality
Delicate Tout, god of: herbs, prudence, drought
Engaged Matron, god of: childbirth
Exiled Washerwoman, god of: sanitation, rivers, obstacles
Faithful Companion, god of: marriage, loyalty, dancing
Filthy Builder, god of: clay, walls, buckets
Frail Beholder, god of: beauty, spectacles, masks
Generous Neighbour, god of: harvest, fertility, the first day of the month
Gilded Keeper, god of: justice, fairness, cages
Grateful Latecomer, god of: good fortune, spontaneity, autumn
Heckling Drunkard, god of: jokes, drink, fools
Honoured Bailiff, god of: thieves, the dark, bruises
Insolent Bore, god of: wind, bindleleaf, borders
Inspired Whisperer, god of: truth, wisdom, silk
Jittery Wit, god of: madness, lamps, volcanoes
Keen Musician, god of: destiny, wine and oil
Lazy Painter, god of: rain, noon, hair
Missing Lover, god of: forbidden love, youth, thunder
Moral Student, god of: the horizon, knowledge, mountains
Needled Critic, god of: criticism, bad weather, insincerity
Nodding Child, god of: sleep and dreams, innocence
Overdressed Liar, god of: butlers, beards, mischief
Overlooked Amateur, god of: jilted lovers, the wronged, apprentices
Pale Widow, god of: death and renewal, winter, burrowing animals, the moon
Penniless Poet, god of: song, poetry, money by nefarious means
Prized Dandy, god of: clothes, virility, bouquets
Querulous Weaver, god of: revenge, plots, pipes
Reformed Trumpeter, god of: earthquakes, the spoken word
Restless Patron, god of: employment, contracts and bonds, spring
Scandalous Dissenter, god of: protest, petition, dangerous animals
Senseless Brawler, god of: war, chequers, fire
Stalled Commoner, god of: home and hearth, decisions, crowds
The Mute, god of: Silence
Travelling Partner, god of: journeys, danger and misfortune, knives
Ugly Messenger, god of: pennysheets, handicrafts, dogs
Valiant Glutton, god of: cooking, trade, cattle
Vicious Beginner, god of: milk and nursing, midnight, ignorance
Weary Governess, god of: schooling, cats
Wide-eyed Inker, god of: tattoos, colour, sunsets
Withering Fishwife, god of: dusk, chastity, flooding
Yawning Hawker, god of: dawn, comfort, grain
Zealous Stitcher, god of: healing and mending
The night her sister left, Cora told her first story to the Stowaway. He was the member of the Audience for such tales: people coming and people going, growing up and leaving home. But not that other kind of leaving. The lasting kind. A story of that sort was better told to the Widow.
Cora’s story for the Stowaway began with sudden waking.
*
It was the sound of breaking glass, somewhere downstairs, that pulled her from sleep. Then there was quiet, and that was worse than the shock of the noise. Her heart beat with a thump she could hear. The silence grew until the air of her bedroom felt sharp with it. Then there was a bump, a bang.
Footsteps below.
Her parents, returning from their engagement? They both liked a drink with company, and their meeting tonight was an important one. Her mother had talked about it all week. Perhaps her father had been clumsy with his nightcap. Perhaps that meant it hadn’t gone well, whatever had been so important. Cora waited to catch his muffled apologies and her mother’s scolding – safe, known noises – but neither came. It wasn’t a night for such expected things; the night felt full of secrets and their dangers.
That was how the Stowaway liked it. Cora thought of the story she could tell, if she only knew a little more, and gently placed her feet on the floorboards. The wood was cold against her bare skin, but she couldn’t find her slippers, and couldn’t stop for them. She needed to get down there.
She snuck onto the landing, then to her parents’ room, stepping as lightly as she could. Their door was open, their bed empty. She crept to her older sister’s room. Ruth must have heard it by now. Ruth would go down with her.
‘Ruth!’ she whispered.
But Ruth wasn’t there. Cora said her sister’s name again, uselessly, as if Ruth might be hiding somewhere and this was her idea of a game, a joke, because Ruth did that sometimes, when their parents were out. She slipped behind doors, tucked her tall, thin frame into cupboards, where by rights a body shouldn’t have been able to fit, then grabbed Cora as she passed, unsuspecting.
And now Ruth had left her in the house, alone, and people had come to rob them. Cora took an empty candlestick from Ruth’s shelves, dislodging a pile of Seminary papers covered in her sister’s neat writing, and held it up like a small but heavy club.
Cora wasn’t entirely surprised by Ruth’s absence. It had been the way of things recently. Her sister had kept late hours the last few weeks, not coming home when Seminary classes finished but disappearing into the darkness of the winter evenings, missing dinner. Their parents, usually so strict about their daughters sitting up to table with them, had seemed not to notice that their eldest child wasn’t there. Nothing had been right for weeks. And now this.
At the top of the stairs, Cora paused. Below, in the hallway, light spilled from beneath the closed study door. Her parents’ shared study: a room of locked drawers, glass-fronted cabinets, and animal heads mounted on the walls. The noises were coming from there. Perhaps her parents had come home after all, and there was business after the meeting that kept them from their bed. There had been worrying and fretting when they left the house earlier that evening. Cora knew better than to ask her parents about their work in the trading halls. They never welcomed such questions. That hadn’t stopped Ruth asking them, again and again, in the last few weeks.
A shriek of metal sounded from the study. That couldn’t be her parents, who never slammed a drawer, never even dropped a ledger.
Cora crept down the stairs, her grip on the candlestick weapon almost painful. A cold draught blew from under the study door and swirled around her. She took a deep breath, then kicked the door.
There was light, and… And she couldn’t believe it: Ruth, a chisel in hand, looking as relieved to see Cora as Cora was to see her.
‘Ruth! I thought you were a robber! What are you doing?’
‘You should go back to bed.’ Ruth bent over their father’s desk and rammed the chisel into the top drawer’s lock.
Cora moved towards her sister but as she did so she stepped on something sharp. At once there was pain, hot in her foot. Glass was scattered across the floor. The door of the cabinet beside Ruth was broken. The cabinet had been packed with wine-coloured ledgers, which were now spread across the floor, their cream innards spilling. And, beside them, small smears of blood. Cora’s blood.
Ruth didn’t look up from her frantic efforts. ‘I didn’t want you to… you should go back to bed.’
With some considerable effort, she wrenched open the drawer and grabbed a handful of papers from inside. She rifled through them then gave a cry – of joy or pain, Cora didn’t know.
‘You mustn’t, Ruth! It’s not allowed.’
Her sister appeared not to hear her, only glanced at the study window, which was wide open. Someone was out there, in the garden, a dark shape among the flowerbeds. Cora still held the candlestick and now she was ready to use it.
‘Who’s making you do this? I’ll—’
Ruth’s hand on her arm. Her thin face flushed.
‘It’s all here,’ she said, and shook the papers, as if that should mean something. ‘The whole place is rotten, right through the middle. You’ve been at the Seminary long enough; haven’t you felt it?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Cora’s foot throbbed.
‘The Commission, Cora! Audience-sake, this whole city. It’s built on lies. There’s power in stories and a story of power.’ She thrust the papers at Cora. ‘This – this is the story of that power, and it consumes people.’
‘Who? Who are you talking about, Ruth?’
But Ruth only shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to believe it of them, but I can’t pretend anymore. I don’t want any part of it and neither should you, Cora. Come with me.’
‘Where are you going at this time of night?’
‘Anywhere but here.’
And then Cora saw it: the bag by the window. She dropped the candlestick and it chipped the edge of a flagstone. Her mother would be livid.
‘You’re… You’re running away?’ she managed to stutter, though the question seemed ridiculous.
‘I have to. Please – come with me.’
‘But you’ve only got a year left at the Seminary,’ Cora said. ‘Don’t you want to finish?’
‘You’re not listening! There isn’t much time. They’ll be back soon.’ Ruth darted to the window, taking the papers with her.
‘Wait – Ruth!’
Like a strange kind of echo, her sister’s name was whispered urgently from the garden.
‘Last chance, will you come with me?’ Ruth said, sitting on the window ledge and lowering her feet over the other side.
But Cora was backing away. ‘I can’t.’
‘Then you’ll have to find your own way out.’
‘Ruth—’
And then, if the Stowaway would believe it, her sister was gone.
*
As Cora sat on the bottom stair and tried to pull the glass from her foot, she began her story to the Stowaway. A story told through sobs – that didn’t help the telling, but she hoped the Stowaway would understand.
It was only later, much later, that Cora realised the story would have been better told to the Widow after all: Ruth’s leaving turned out to be a tale of death for everyone in Cora’s house, one way or another.
The body was left there to be found. At least, that was how it looked.
Not dumped in the back doorway of the slop-shop, or the whorehouse, or the chequers’ halls that ran the length of the alleyway. It hadn’t been hidden behind the pile of rain-softened crates and their rotted food scraps that lent the early morning air a staleness it didn’t deserve. The body was in the open, face-up.
A blue-clad figure stood watch beside it, glancing up and down the alley to the streets at either end, her hand gripping her baton.
‘Expecting an ambush, Constable?’ Cora called.
On seeing her, the young woman made an effort to compose herself.
Detective Cora Gorderheim, Bernswick Division, looked hard in her pockets for a few pennies. The gig driver, as grey and simple as his Clotham’s uniform, showed no surprise when Cora paid the exact fare and no more. The gig lumbered off along Hatch Street, which was slow to rouse itself that morning, and Cora made her way down the alleyway to the constable.
‘Jackson, isn’t it?’ Cora said, recognising the young woman from the station’s briefing room. Recognising her buck teeth more, if she were honest.
‘It’s Jenkins, Detective Gorderheim.’
‘Right then, Jenkins. Get yourself out on Hatch Street and wait for the stitcher – he’s on his way.’
‘Wait for him, Detective?’
‘That’s what I said.’ Cora took her bindleleaf tin from the pocket of her old red coat and was annoyed to find she hadn’t any rolled smokes among the loose leaves and papers. She snapped the tin shut. ‘Get yourself out on the street. And once Pruett arrives, start knocking on doors to see what people saw or heard last night – that’s if they’ll admit to being anything but blind and deaf. I’ll keep an eye on our friend here.’
Jenkins set off at a near trot towards the end of the alley.
‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ Cora said to the body. She squatted beside him and felt the pull of the damage done to her foot all those years ago. The dull heat of the tendon, and of her anger too. She shook away the thought of Ruth, as she always did, and spoke to the dead man. ‘I’d say you’re not from around here.’
In fact, she’d bet her bindleleaf that the dead man was a Wayward. He was lying on one of their cloaks, the kind made of stiffened skin and lined with all manner of pockets. Lying on it, but not as if he’d fallen while wearing the thing. More like someone had spread it neatly beneath him. But that was where the niceties ended: this Wayward had joined the Audience after some violence.
His mouth had been sewn shut.
No wonder the constable had been nervous.
Daylight had just about regained its claim on the world and in its weak glow Cora took a better look at the man’s face. Two lengths of string wound their way through his lips. No, something tougher than string. Cora touched one of the ends hanging from the Wayward’s bottom lip. Feeling through the dried blood, she was sure the lengths were boot laces – the kind from sturdy work boots. One black, one white. Or, white originally. Now that lace was stained with blood. Blood that had also poured down the Wayward’s chin and onto his smock. He was rusty with it.
She eased his chin up. Strangled was the story of the fat, purpled ring of skin around his neck. Pruett, the stitcher at Bernswick Station, would officially determine the cause of death, once he dragged himself from the depths of the cold room. Knife wounds and smashed skulls were Cora’s bread and butter – she’d seen it all in this part of the city. Her part. But not this kind of mutilation. This was new.
She rolled a smoke and saw that the end of her coat had caught the murk that lay between the cobbles. A constant feature of the glorious city of Fenest, capital of the Union of Realms. Come rain, come sun, there was always something dark and dirty to be found in the gaps.
A single lamp still burned at the door nearest her. A lamp-man had found the body. He was in such a hurry to get to the station he’d abandoned his rounds and left one lamp unextinguished. Cora thanked him out loud, and used the lamp to light up, taking a deep drag.
Detective Sergeant Hearst, Cora’s commanding officer, had also been in a hurry when he’d shaken Cora awake in a corner of the briefing room. He had a dead man and an address: the alley that connected Hatch Street and Green Row. The alley between the Swan’s Teeth Inn and Mrs Hawksley’s whorehouse was how Cora knew it.
‘Everyone was in a hurry – except whoever did this to you, right, friend?’ Cora said to the dead man.
Someone who had designs to sew a man’s mouth shut wasn’t about rushing things. That, and the cloak laid out all nice, made no sense for a back-alley mugging gone too far, or a fight over one of Hawksley’s whores.
Maybe it was a Wayward thing? The Wayward people – and realms were people, not so much a place – spent their lives crossing the Northern Steppes and all the other lands of the Union, moving their herds and building other people’s fences. That would wear away at you, make you capable of anything. It had certainly worn away at this man, Cora thought, looking down at him. He was about forty years of age, but it was hard to be sure. ‘Weathered’ would be a kind way of putting it.
Wherever you lived in the Union – Fenest, the Steppes, the Tear – life left its mark. Some said those realms that lived near the capital had it easier, that the Perlish and the Seeders were softer for that, and Cora could believe it. She’d heard stories about life down in the far south. How the Torn managed to not only live in the Tear but thrive there was no small wonder, and the Rustans likewise. For all their lofty peaks, the Rusting Mountains were still right in the middle of the Tear. And the Caskers on their boats weren’t that far from it, either, when you stopped and stared at a map of the Union. This Wayward now at her feet looked rough as used nails. In her time in the police she’d seen plenty of Seeders looking no better. Perhaps nowhere in the Union offered a softer life. Certainly not Fenest at any rate.
Footsteps echoed at the end of the alley. Without looking up she said, ‘This is a new one, Pruett.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, Gorderheim.’
Hurrying towards her was a stocky figure in a worn brown suit, a battered tub hat pulled low over his ears. Someone she hadn’t expected, but knew all too well: Butterman, writer for The Spoke, Fenest’s largest-selling pennysheet.
‘Disappointed doesn’t begin to describe my feelings on seeing you, Butterman,’ she said. ‘You’re paying your sources well these days.’
‘This one didn’t cost us a penny,’ Butterman said, his breathing laboured as he bent to look at the Wayward’s face. ‘They weren’t wrong about the mouth. What will the Widow make of it, I wonder?’
‘You knew about the mouth?’ she said, unable to keep the surprise from her voice.
‘The source was detailed. And insistent.’
‘And here you are, before even the stitcher has seen the body.’ She blew smoke into Butterman’s face and was pleased when his coughing forced him to move away.
‘How long until Pruett gets here?’ he said.
Cora shrugged.
‘Helpful as ever, Gorderheim. I’ve enough here to start the story, at least.’
‘And in time for the afternoon edition,’ Cora said. ‘Why doesn’t that feel like coincidence?’
‘Hard getting space in any edition right now.’
‘The election?’
Butterman grunted. ‘For two months there’s been nothing in this whole city but that. Trust me, I’d rather be covering fights over Mrs Hawksley’s whores.’
‘I thought you just made it all up anyway,’ Cora said.
‘Only when we can’t be bothered to follow the tips,’ he said, and grinned.
‘So what made you get up early for this one?’
‘Note said there was something special about it.’ He nodded towards the sewn mouth. ‘They weren’t wrong.’
‘Is the source one of your regulars?’
‘Come now, Detective Gorderheim. You know I can’t reveal that.’
‘There’s a difference between “can’t” and “won’t”.’
Butterman ignored her and scribbled in his notebook.
She flicked away the stub of her smoke. ‘At least tell me—’
‘My job is to write the stories, Detective. Your job is to investigate them. I assume that’s what you’re doing when you visit the back room of the Dancing Oak? Or is that something more—’
‘You know I can’t reveal my sources, Butterman.’
‘Then I s’pose we’ll each keep our council, won’t we? Now, any comment for the readers of The Spoke about another body found in the gutters of Fenest?’
Now it was Cora’s turn to grunt.
‘Thought not,’ he said. Then something behind Cora caught Butterman’s eye. ‘But here’s a man who might be less tight-lipped than you and the dead.’
Cora turned to see the stitcher, Pruett, making his way towards them from Hatch Street. Constable Jenkins had stayed with Pruett’s assistant and the cart on the street.
‘Morning, Pruett,’ Butterman said cheerfully. ‘Care to comment on—’
‘The Audience won’t want to hear your stories, Butterman, and neither do I.’ Pruett opened his black stitcher’s bag. Inside was a jumble of cloths and metal tools, none of which looked clean.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Butterman said. ‘My readers will be glad of a change from the election.’
Pruett reached into his bag and drew out a small saw, the teeth of which were flecked with white powder. Bone dust from the last person Pruett had opened. He pointed the saw at the pennysheet hack.
‘The only stories I’m interested in hearing are those of the dead. So, unless you want to join them, I suggest you get back under the stone you’ve just crawled out from.’
Butterman backed away, palms raised. ‘No need for that kind of ugliness, is there? I’ll send a lad for the report.’ And then to Cora: ‘See you at the Oak, Detective.’ He touched the rim of his battered tub hat and headed down the alleyway.
Pruett looked at the dead man for the first time. He didn’t recoil on seeing the Wayward’s sewn mouth, but a flicker of distaste passed across his face.
‘No wonder the ’sheets are keen,’ he said.
‘Presses can’t be stopped.’
‘But do they have to see the bodies before I do? You let them get away with too much.’
‘Butterman had a tip,’ Cora said. ‘He nearly beat me to it. Someone wanted this body found.’
‘That so? Who is he, then?’
‘Still unidentified. Discovered by the lamp-man just before dawn.’
Pruett began to rifle through his bag. He looked to have come straight from working in the cold room: the parts of his shirt visible beneath his tattered wool coat were flecked with blood and smears of something Cora didn’t want to speculate on. At least he’d taken off his apron.
He knelt beside the dead Wayward. Cora knew better than to speak to him while he was assessing a body. She moved away to roll another smoke. More of the alley had revealed itself in the strengthening morning light. A rat scuffled in the crates of rotten vegetables. Two storeys up, a scrap of blue cloth was caught in the closed window of Mrs Hawksley’s place. Cora briefly allowed herself to imagine the warm bed on the other side.
‘Not dead more than a few hours,’ Pruett said.
‘And killed somewhere else.’
‘I’d say so. No sign of a struggle hereabouts.’
‘Risk of witnesses,’ Cora said, ‘that time of night. Mrs Hawksley’s whores keep late company. Strangled?’
‘Likely, but I’ll know more when I’ve got him back to the cold room.’ Pruett signalled to his assistant, Bowen, to get the stretcher from the back of the cart.
Cora stood back to let Pruett and the assistant move the body, and enjoyed the last of her smoke. Time to get back to the station and tell Sergeant Hearst what she’d found. Another body in the gutters of Fenest. Was that all it was? Just another victim of the city? Wayward weren’t two-a-penny in Fenest, but they were just as likely to be killed over a drink, a bet, a woman as someone from another realm, and it was an election year, after all. That brought almost as many extra dead bodies as there were voters.
But the sewn mouth, and the tip to bring The Spoke?
Pruett and Bowen lifted the stretcher and Cora checked the cobbles beneath where the dead man had lain. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But as she stood, she saw something on the alley wall at eye level.
It was a smear of red-white dirt, directly above where the body had been. The mark was finger-length and crumbled at her touch. There were no other marks like it anywhere else that she could see.
Pruett had noticed her inspection and stopped.
‘More of the city’s filth?’ the stitcher called back.
‘Perhaps.’
Cora fished a grubby handkerchief from her coat and carefully collected some of the flaky dirt.
They went on their way again, the men bearing the Wayward, Cora just behind them. The unevenness of the cobbles meant the body teetered on the stretcher, jiggling the laces erupting from his mouth, as if the dead man were trying to tell his last tale.
Back at the station, Cora and Pruett parted ways: the stitcher to the cold room beneath street level, where he would examine the Wayward’s body, Cora to her cupboard-office opposite the briefing room.
She’d occupied the same spot since she’d made detective, more than ten years ago now, and had resisted all attempts to move her somewhere more in keeping with her rank – the kind of fancy rooms detectives had in other divisions. Part of the reason Cora had stayed in such a cramped office was the fact her parents would have been appalled by it.
A daughter in the police force was bad enough, after all that expensive Seminary schooling and a guaranteed job in the Commission’s Wheelhouse. The Gorderheim name might not have had the power it once did, thanks to Ruth running off and the stories in the pennysheets, but her mother insisted it still counted for something. Cora was a chance to rebuild what was lost.
But a police constable, the lowest rung of one of the lowest professions in the city? That was hardly the kind of thing that would impress those who mattered in Fenest. Madeline Gorderheim had often been heard disparaging the police of Fenest at receptions and parties, even after her own daughter joined the force. And here Cora was now, all these years later, only a little further up the ranks and in a space no bigger than where the constables kept the coffee supplies. Not that Cora’s parents would be coming to visit her office, of course, given that they’d both joined the Audience long since: her father in that terrible first week after Ruth had left, and her mother only five years later.
But just the thought of their disappointed faces was enough to lend her office-cupboard some charm. After all, windows were overrated, and if Cora had more space she’d only fill it with chequers’ slips and the other detritus she seemed to collect. From her desk – an old card table – she could hear the constables in the briefing room that served as canteen, dormitory and the place where investigatory announcements were made. She could hear them even with both doors closed. That the constables often forgot that fact was no bad thing.
Sergeant Hearst forgot nothing. Cora had just inked her pen to start her report on the body in the alleyway when her commanding officer blocked the little light that found its way into her office.
‘Well?’ Hearst said, closing the door.
He was slight, a head shorter than Cora. There was a fine dusting of sandy-coloured crumbs on one of his elbows. He’d been feeding the pigeons on the station roof again.
‘The lamp-man claims he found the body just before four this morning,’ Cora said. ‘That’s his regular spring time for dousing in the alley. Does Hatch Street too.’
‘And did our lamp-man see anyone else at the scene?’
‘Only the rats,’ Cora said.
‘I’ve heard Mrs Hawksley’s whores called many things, but that’s a new one.’
‘Same chance of catching something.’ She put her pen back in the inkwell. ‘But the girls and boys had finished for the night. No one about but our lamp-man.’
‘Any reason to suspect he isn’t telling us the truth?’
‘None that I can find,’ Cora said. ‘I sent the new constable, the one with the teeth—’
‘Jenkins,’ Hearst said.
‘I sent her door-knocking round that way. In the meantime.’ Cora sifted through the papers on her desk until she found her notes. ‘Apparently, the lamp-man has been dousing in the alley since he was old enough to lift the pole. He’s a regular at the Seat of the Commoner and gives money to the Orphan Fund.’
‘Sounds like one of our more commendable citizens. And Pruett’s report?’
‘I’m going down now,’ she said. ‘He should be ready to hear the Wayward’s stories.’
‘Wayward?’ Hearst said, his voice losing its former lightness.
‘That’s right.’
Hearst noticed the crumbs of bird seed on his elbow and spent a moment picking them off. Cora waited.
‘A Wayward in the alley behind Mrs Hawksley’s,’ Hearst said, checking his other arm for seed. ‘No mystery as to what he was doing there, I suppose.’
‘The whores don’t usually sew their customers’ mouths shut.’
His attention was on her again, his eyes wide. ‘What?’
She told him about the laces through the Wayward’s lips, and about Butterman getting to the scene almost as she did.
‘Well, well,’ Hearst said. ‘Perhaps the afternoon pennysheets will tell us more. But in the meantime—’
‘Pruett. I know. I’m going.’ Cora stood with a practised care that didn’t disturb the piles of paperwork.
Once they were out in the corridor, Hearst caught her arm.
‘Sillian is to be kept informed about this one,’ he said in a low voice.
‘Sillian? Why?’
Hearst shrugged. ‘As if she’d tell me. But I’m telling you: she wants to know.’ He turned and went into the briefing room and Cora heard the constables scrambling to attention.
As she made her way down the steps that led to the cold room, Cora asked herself why Chief Inspector Sillian, head of the Bernswick Division of the Fenestiran police force, was so interested in a dead Wayward behind a whorehouse. She hoped the stitcher had the answer.
*
Despite the bone chill that gave the cold room its name, Cora found Pruett in his usual state when examining: his old wool coat was hanging on the butcher’s hook behind him – looking for all the world like a body waiting its turn on the table – and he’d rolled his shirt sleeves past his elbows. His grey apron was smeared, stained.
The Wayward was on the examining table. Pruett was behind his head, using pliers to grip one of the laces still threaded through the dead man’s lips. The cold room was full of such tools and they winked in the light of the many lamps dotted about, giving a strange gleam to the dark purpose of the place.
‘So, who is it that I’ve been getting to know?’ Pruett said.
‘Was hoping you’d tell me,’ Cora said. ‘Nothing to identify him in his clothes? No letters? Bills?’
‘Bowen did the rifling.’
Pruett’s assistant was mixing something foul-looking in a large mortar. He had to work it hard, which put a little colour in his cheeks, but his breath still misted in front of him.
‘Not so much as a pennysheet,’ Bowen said, wiping his forehead clear of cold sweat.
‘Pity,’ Cora said.
Pruett tugged at the lace. When it didn’t give, he yanked it, and the lace came free of the small, ragged holes that lined the Wayward’s top and bottom lips. A ‘W’, being un-inked.
‘That’s got you,’ Pruett murmured. He dropped the lace into a small bowl and set about removing the one that remained.
Cora picked up the bowl and looked at the black lace. Other than being stiff with dried blood, it appeared ordinary enough. But it had been used to sew someone’s mouth shut – that made it anything but ordinary.
She turned to look at the figure on the table. Now that he was stripped of his clothes, laid out on stone rather than his cloak, Cora asked herself if she’d still know he was Wayward. The contrast between his sun-stained face and arms and the chalky flesh of the rest of him was clear enough. But she’d seen as much on Casker dockers and Seeder farmhands. And the red glistening of his exposed guts would be as everyone else’s. When Pruett got to someone with his saws and clamps, Bowen standing by with pails to catch the heart and lungs and all the rest, it didn’t matter which realm they were.
Another yank and Pruett had the second lace moving. Like the black one, this slowly left the Wayward’s flesh. As the lips parted at last, free of what had bound them, the dead man moaned.
Cora stumbled back from the table and knocked over a pile of tools, which made the floor’s stone ring like the Poet’s bells. Pruett, unperturbed, widened the Wayward’s mouth and peered inside.
‘Nothing obvious here. Tongue looks healthy enough. Thought there might have been something stowed in the mouth to warrant the stitching.’ He dropped the pliers into the bowl with the laces.
‘And that… that noise?’ Cora said.
‘Air escaping. Happens more often than you’d think.’
‘It sounded like he was speaking.’
Pruett gave a grim laugh. ‘The dead do speak, Gorderheim, but not in any language you’d understand.’
‘So what did this dead Wayward tell you?’ she said.
‘That he was in good health, up until he was killed.’
‘And how was he killed?’
‘Strangulation.’ Pruett waved at the series of bruises that ringed the Wayward’s neck. ‘You saw the marks.’
‘To crush someone’s throat with your bare hands,’ Cora said, ‘you can’t be rushing.’
‘Which would tie in with you thinking the deed was done elsewhere and the body brought to the alley afterwards. But you’re wrong about the bare hands.’
‘What?’
‘Those marks are too thin to be made by fingers.’
Cora bent closer to the Wayward, holding her breath against the cloying smell of blood that rose from the man’s punctured lips. Bowen brought a lamp to aid her.
‘A rope then?’ she said. ‘You think he was strung up?’
Pruett shook his head. ‘Neck isn’t damaged enough. Remember the boy found swinging from the North Gate last summer? The one who’d kept the women in the cellar?’
‘The mob got to him,’ Cora said.
‘And his neck was broken from the body’s weight.’
‘You can’t mistake a hanging,’ Bowen called over, almost cheerfully.
‘So what happened to our friend here?’ Cora asked.
‘Garrotted,’ Pruett said. ‘Sitting or standing.’
‘And the weapon?’
‘A thin length of cord, I’d say. Not too roughly made, given the lack of burn marks.’
‘But thicker than these?’ Cora picked up the bowl that held the laces. One black, one white.
‘I’d put a mark on it, whatever the odds,’ Pruett said, and looked at her slyly.
Cora shoved the bowl at him. ‘What about the dirt I picked up?’
‘Hm?’
‘The mark on the wall, next to the body.’
Pruett waved in the direction of the shelves that lined the back of the cold room. ‘Bowen put it in a jar, and if you’re really lucky he might have added a label too.’
Cora saw the briefest curl of Bowen’s lips before the assistant went over to the shelves and reached for a tiny jar amidst the chaos of glass and stoppers and wooden boxes.
He handed it to Cora and muttered, ‘Someone has to keep track of things in this place.’
She nodded her thanks and held the jar to a lamp to examine the red-white dirt it held. No more than half a teaspoon’s worth.
‘What do you think this is then, Pruett?’
‘Plague.’
Cora fumbled the jar onto a nearby table and stepped smartly away from it. ‘What?’
‘That’s my theory, anyway. What else do you expect from the muck of this city?’
‘You’re telling me you don’t know what this is, and, more importantly, you don’t care.’
‘Exactly right, Detective.’
‘You won’t mind if I take it then?’
‘I think we can live without it, though I doubt you’ve got room in that cupboard of yours for too many—’
The door at the top of the stairs was flung open and a red-faced constable appeared above them. ‘Five dead at the Derby Pump, Mr Pruett!’
Pruett groaned. ‘Move this one to the back door, Bowen. I’ll send someone for the burning as we go.’
‘And Sergeant Hearst says to tell you,’ the constable called down, ‘it’s a mess. Some of them was wheelwrights. They went at each other with piping and such.’
‘I need you to keep the Wayward,’ Cora told the stitcher.
Pruett shrugged on his coat. ‘When there’s five more on their way? What’s so special about this one?’
‘Everything,’ Cora said.
‘Two days,’ Pruett said. ‘The rate this city murders people, I won’t have room for him for any longer.’ He and Bowen readied themselves to leave.
Cora looked at the laces in the bowl again. One black, one white.
The door closed behind the men. She took out her bindleleaf tin and rolled a new smoke.
One black lace, one white.
She lit up, then put the small jar of dirt into her coat, her fingers brushing against the many slips of paper that lined her pocket. She didn’t need to take them out to see what they were, or that the name of the Oak was written on each of them. She didn’t have a choice now, did she? She’d have to go. The laces had decided her. Whoever sewed the Wayward’s mouth had done so to send a message, and the colours of the laces were deliberately chosen. Of that she was certain, and she was beginning to see why.
One black, one white. The twin colours of the coats worn by the chequers: those takers of bets big and small, rich and poor. If you gave them your Senseless, Penniless, Heckling, your Curious, they’d make stories worthy of the Audience, win or lose. Had the Wayward over-played his hand and been unable to pay?
She left the cold room. Tonight she would see what the betting world knew of the dead Wayward, and learn the night’s numbers while she was at it.
It was raining, Painter be damned. Cora became aware of it as she left her desk, despite the lack of a window in her office. The water knuckled hard on the station roof two floors up, and was quietly finding its way inside too, no doubt. Anyone spending the night in the cells would be witness to the wet creep across the floor. In the cold room, Bowen would be putting down the sandbags again.
She was late leaving the station, but the briefing room was still noisy – the election meant long days for the constables. As she stepped into the street, there was the reason: despite the rain, there were people everywhere. And somewhere among them, the Wayward’s killer. The kind of person who sewed a man’s mouth shut. She quickened her step.
It wasn’t just Fenest’s own in the crowds. People came from far and wide for the election, though most wouldn’t hear the stories. It was the occasion that drew all six realms to Fenest, to the heart of the Union. They came just for the atmosphere, and here it was, pissing all over them. She pulled up her collar and stepped into the throng.
Once every five years an election took place on her doorstep, and somehow every five years she managed to forget how awful it all was. The whole business of it: each realm sent a storyteller to Fenest and, over the course of a few weeks, those storytellers told their tales to win votes for their realms – votes cast by stones. And the prize was power. It was just as Ruth had said, all those years ago: there was power in stories and a story of power. Cora spat. Ruth hadn’t hung around long enough to see what that really meant. Things were different once the easy lessons of the Seminary were left behind.
But in the election, stories were the means to power, because every ‘yes’ vote, every black stone cast for a story, got that realm a seat in the Assembly. And the realm with the most Assembly seats at the close of the election gained the power to shape what happened across the Union for the next five years, including in Fenest. Just being an administrative capital, Fenest didn’t get its own storyteller or election story. Though the capital was in charge of proceedings, Cora, like every other Fenestiran, was stuck with whoever won for five long years. Until the wheel turned again and brought the next election. Until this moment.
In some ways, these weeks leading up to the first story were the worst. Newcomers to the city had to find their way among the locals. There was always a spike in cut-purses and the Brawler heard more stories in his Seat than usual. Perhaps the Wayward found behind Mrs Hawksley’s was just one of the expected victims of the election. Caught in the fever pitch and consumed by the chequers’ halls – betting being one of Fenest’s most popular attractions. Not that things would settle down even when the election started and the stories began. Then the constables would be needed for crowd control at the story sites. Demand for seats in the public gallery always outstripped supply and it was often ugly.
The constables could get to work out here, Cora thought, dodging a group of young Perlish men oiled and tucked into their fancy clothes. Thin smoke drifted from bindleleaf held at arm’s length in lacquered holders. Enjoying the last days of Perlish control of the Assembly, she guessed; the Perlish realm, both damn Duchies of them, had won the previous election. Try as she might, she couldn’t remember anything about the story that had won the Perlish power last time. Their tenure as ruling realm would likely stay much more memorable: tax exemptions for luxuries while basic provisions in Fenest went unfunded. This was the state of things for the other realms too, so the pennysheets said. And here was one such dereliction now: a pothole yawned before her, full of greasy-looking water.
Cora wasn’t going anywhere fast, but the rain was getting heavier. She ducked into an alley she knew she shouldn’t, but she needed to make a stop before the Oak and do it before she drowned. Picking her way through piles of muck and streams of slops and who-knew-what-else took some doing. Which was why she didn’t see tonight’s trouble until the knife flashed towards her chest.
Two of them, a man and a woman, both as dirty as the alley they were thieving in.
‘Pockets, now!’ the man said.
‘All right, easy does it. But you’re not going to like what I’ve got.’ Cora reached into her coat and pulled out her badge. The woman saw silver and, Poet hear her, she looked pleased – as if it might be something valuable. But the man understood. He hesitated, his knife dropping just a touch. ‘That’s right,’ Cora said. ‘Picked the wrong one tonight.’
A look passed between them. It screamed desperation as loudly as their tattered tunics.
The man lunged. Cora caught his wrist and pulled, hard, overbalancing him. One shove and he was sprawling among the alley’s detritus.
They weren’t tough, but they could run. The woman was gone so quick Cora started to doubt she’d been there at all. The man was up and off before Cora had even taken a step. She sifted the sodden pennysheets and rotten crates with her foot, just in case he’d dropped the knife. It was no great surprise to find he hadn’t – that blade was his livelihood. Shined special for the Partner and the out-of-towners.
Cora let her breath settle back to its usual bindleleaf-induced pace and counted herself as fortunate as the Latecomer that the pair hadn’t been real trouble. The Wayward hadn’t been so lucky. When she got moving again she kept her wits about her, ignoring what she stepped in, until she emerged from the alleys and into an even more perilous part of the city: the administrative quarter. Least in the alleyways people were honest about stealing from you.
She made her way along wide, well-lit streets where important people walked from one important building to another. It was almost possible to pretend she was one of them. But then, when she looked up at the enormous pale stone walls and thin windows of the Wheelhouse, she felt about as small as a cutpurse impressed by a flash of silver. There was nothing about collecting her pittance of pay that made her feel important.
The Wheelhouse was squat and square, despite its name. It was home to the Commission – the civil service of Fenest. Even at this hour of the evening, lamps still burned in all the windows. The main doors were open and the front desk was manned. Clerks in washed-out purple rushed to and fro, arms overflowing with scrolls and ledgers. The Commission recorded every aspect of life in Fenest – the city, the people, the stories, all the hours of all the days. Cora was just another employee, paid, logged, weighed and measured by the Commission.
Her badge was checked at the front desk, as it always was, despite the regularity of her visits to the Wheelhouse. When she’d first joined the police, Cora had wondered if badge-checking was a policy designed to make employees feel as if they could at any moment be rejected – a way to ensure complicity with Commission systems. Now she didn’t bother wasting thought on such questions. The Commission was the Commission. It was above her pay grade to fathom it.
After all these years she knew her way through the ugly marble-floored corridors to the small office deep in the bowels of the building. She nodded to the men and women she passed, most of them blind as the Devotee behind their thick spectacles. If any of them had seen the sun this year, it was only because they were under orders to log that it still hung in the sky. No one looked healthy, least of all Henry.
He grunted a greeting as Cora entered the office. He’d put on weight again. He barely fit behind his desk, his gut resting on the top so he had to lift it to turn a page – something he did without thought. The smell of his sweat filled the room, and Cora felt guilty for letting some of it escape into the corridor.
‘Gorderheim.’ He strained to reach a stack of ledgers. ‘Gorderheim. Gorder— yes. Every month I wonder if it’ll be our last together.’ He smiled, his lips thin in his face. He used to be all hands and smiles back when Cora was younger, and he was quicker.
‘Don’t say that, Henry. You’ve got another year in you, I’m sure.’
He hacked a laugh that quickly turned into a cough. ‘Not ’nother election though, eh?’
‘They making you do overtime?’
‘And then again,’ he said.
‘All part of the Commission’s greatest work.’
He looked hard at her for a moment, unsure if she was serious. For her part, she wasn’t sure herself. What she’d said sounded like something from a pennysheet, and one that was particularly well-disposed to the Commission. There wouldn’t be much relief from talking about the election now: there was a week to go until the first story was told.
And until then, the Commission’s army of civil servants and bureaucrats would be drawing up lists, making lists of lists, copying everything in triplicate and filing it all somewhere in the Wheelhouse, never to be seen again.
‘Between you, me, and the Stowaway, they’ve put me on voters,’ Henry said, pride dripping down his chin alongside the sweat.
‘Oh?’
‘Three hundred of Fenest’s finest scum and lowlifes, every district of the city represented an’ accounted for.’
A pool of three hundred men and women from Fenest. For each story, fifty new names were drawn from the pool; fifty people who not only got to hear a storyteller’s tale, but also had to pass judgement on it. And on that realm. Had to choose: a white stone or a black, with the prize a term in power, ruling over all the other realms and Fenest too. Were the voters the lucky ones? To listen to an election story was a privilege Cora had enjoyed before Ruth left, but to say whether that story deserved a vote, deserved seats in the Assembly? It was a burden Cora didn’t want. Which was just as well: Commission staff, including the police, weren’t eligible to vote. One of the few perks of the job.
‘Voter lists. You’re a big wheel, Henry, right enough.’
‘Flatter all you like, Gorderheim.’
Cora waited, expecting a ‘but’ to follow. It didn’t. She cleared her throat. ‘As good as it is to catch up, I’m afraid I have to get to business.’
‘Oak tonight, is it?’
‘Where else?’
He chuckled unpleasantly. ‘Lot of out-of-towners with wool between their ears and heavy purses.’
‘Heavier than mine.’
‘Now, now, Detective. The Commission compensates us all as per our station.’ He turned his chair like a barge turned in a river. From a locked chest he produced a small stack of coins, which he placed carefully on the desktop; Commission regulations said he couldn’t pass her the money directly. How they loved their pointless rules.
Cora stashed her pay inside her coat, in three separate pockets. It wasn’t much, but she couldn’t afford to lose it all at once – not even ringside. Most months she managed to double it or better on the same day she saw Henry. Tonight, that would be a struggle. She had actual work to do.
‘Audience save us from an election, right, Henry?’
She didn’t wait for an answer, instead closing the door on the purple-clad clerk. As she strode away from the reek of stale sweat, she decided she had a second thing from that night to tell the Grateful Latecomer: this wasn’t her world. The Commission, with all its petty concerns and wheels-within-Wheelhouses, was something she only had to worry about one day a month – pay day. Silence take it the rest of the time.
The rain-drenched streets of Fenest never felt so sweet as when she left the Wheelhouse behind.
*