Full Fathom Five (13 page)

The clock ticked on the wall. Normally it was too quiet to hear.

“I didn’t expect anything,” he said. “I hope you won’t push me away just because of what you think I want from you. Give me a chance to be your friend, at least.”

“Leave.”

The clock chimed. She didn’t count the hour.

“Okay,” he said, and stood. He donned his jacket, and brushed off the front of his shirt, though Kai saw no dirt there. “I’m going. You can keep the flowers.”

“I will.”

He opened the door. Outside, the night spread.

She sat in his chair, no, her chair, and watched the door close behind him. The fence gate swung shut, too, the latch settled, and she heard the cat’s whine of the wards. The house stank of dust and stale life.

The island is our prison. Bullshit. Kavekana didn’t trap anyone. People took care of that themselves.

She carried his coffee cup to the kitchen and dumped the milky dregs into the sink. She filled the mug, washed it inside and out, and left it upside down on the drying rack. The soap smell did not cut the dust, or the age, or the space. Was this what they called depression? Probably not. Drunkenness. Adulthood. She’d imagined standing here as a kid: her own house, free of family and the stink of the working harbor. Standing in skin that fit her soul. The skin felt good, and the body, but the rest of her life, she wasn’t sure.

She watched her reflection in the window glass for longer than people should, and saw inside the lines and shadows everyone she had been.

She left the kitchen, turned out the lights there and in the parlor, and walked into her bedroom, where she knelt and prayed to absent gods until sleep came for her, charged with painful dreams.

14

Izza sat on her hands in the wooden chair in the bright room where the Penitent had brought her, and looked everywhere but into the cop’s eyes.

“Isobel. That’s your name, it says here. Isobel Sola. Not local.”

Not at the cop’s eyes, or his body. Bad luck to look at watchmen or Penitents. Shouldn’t have glanced over her shoulder when she was running, even. They’d taken the purse. A dumb thing to worry her, but she hoped to get some soul out of this at least.

If she got out of this.

“You’re from the Gleb, right?”

She shrugged.

He examined the form, most of which she’d left blank. She’d chosen the first name because Izza and Isobel were close enough that she would respond to it naturally if called. The last name she made up from whole cloth. “Parents, anyone we can call?”

Another shrug.

“If no one comes to vouch for you, I’ll have to stick you in a cell until the hearing. You don’t want that. I don’t, either.”

A cell was the first step. Once you got used to walls, easy enough for the walls to close in, to wrap you round in rock until you screamed and screamed and lost yourself. She didn’t look at the cop, but she wanted to. Wondered if he had a clan scar on his wrist, or fang tracks in his arm. Had he done time inside a Penitent, or was he just a joiner? Which was worse?

He lifted a paper from the pile on his desk. Her paper. She’d never had a file before. She needed a way out, but didn’t see one, so kept quiet.

“Can you talk, kid?”

She shook her head.

No need for him to know she could, anyway.

A sigh, movement: a head settling into hands. Tired cop. She might have run for it then, but a dozen others stood between her and outside, not to mention the Penitents on guard. She ran the odds in her head, and came up long.

“The woman you stole the purse from, she’s deciding whether to press charges. If she does, you’ll face a hearing. You’re too young for community service. Just. Keep on this road, though, and you’ll learn what Penitence feels like. You don’t want that.”

That last bit of sincerity answered her question. He’d done time. He’d changed. She tightened her grip on the chair.

“Right. Fine. Who am I talking to, anyway.” He made a note on the paper, sighed, and stood. His chair legs scraped against tile. He lumbered around the desk, and set his hand on her arm. She didn’t pull back, didn’t resist, but she sagged into the chair, and he had to wrench her shoulder to drag her to her feet. She didn’t look at him even then. The floorboards of his office were pale and straight and even.

“Come on.”

She didn’t. He pulled harder, and she fell out of the chair into the desk. She almost choked, but recovered her balance.

From the hall, a voice: “Mike. Someone’s here for the kid.”

Had Cat found her? Izza hadn’t told her where she’d gone, and anyway the woman wouldn’t go so near Penitents, not after their first encounter. But for a second Izza hoped.

The hand released her arm. She looked pointedly away from the cop, at the wall decorated with engraved plaques, awards for deeds of dubious virtue. In Kathic, the yellow crust on teeth was called a plaque.

“Really.”

“In the receiving hall. Says she’s his apprentice.”

His. Not Cat, then.

“How’d he know to come here?”

“Says he has a tracking glyph on her. She snuck out yesterday.”

The first cop, the hard one, examined her, slantwise, skeptical. “You have a boss looking for you?”

She nodded, once, because it was a way out.

“What you do for him? What kind of an apprentice are you?”

She mimed sweeping.

He grinned when he got the joke. “And you’re sure you want to go back?”

She heard a stitch of sympathy in his voice. He could think whatever he wanted, so long as he let her go. She nodded. This time she let herself look, if not quite at him, at least near him. Three deep wrinkles cut across his forehead. A disbeliever, a raiser of eyebrows.

“Fine,” he said, and led her back through the office to the bright receiving hall. She spent the walk wondering how she might tell her rescuer from the others waiting; the cop was suspicious already, and if she didn’t recognize her supposed boss, or he didn’t recognize her, the game was up. She walked ahead of him a few steps, fast as she dared. She remembered the route from when they brought her in: between the desks, beneath the yellowed lights and the exhausted gaze of half-dead officers propped up by bad coffee and a soured sense of duty.

The waiting room was small, well lit, pale, with metal furniture bolted to the floor. Behind a tall wood desk sat the duty officer, cap pulled low over her head. Izza recognized the hollows under her eyes, the face harder than usual for a woman of her age: a former crook, Penitent-reformed.

Few possible saviors among the room’s other occupants. Two women in their forties, one in a suit, another wearing a ratty shirt blazoned with the logo of an Iskari band last famous two decades ago, both seated, both reading old magazines. A bearded man sprawled across three chairs, hands bound, a spreading stain on his crotch. A thin kid she didn’t recognize, knees jutting through ripped trousers, sat balled up beside the bearded drunk. A round-bellied Iskari gentleman in a green velvet suit, threadbare at elbows and underarms, stood by the door. The green-clothed man dressed poorly for an Iskari, and formally for an islander; a visitor who’d been a long time on the island. Shifting nervously from foot to foot. Waiting.

She didn’t recognize the man, but her choice was clear. Whatever he wanted, she could escape him more easily than the watch station. Probably.

She pulled out of the cop’s grip, walked up to the Iskari, and held out her hand, firm, level with his stomach. He looked from the hand, to her, and she hoped he could read the determined set of her mouth. Get the message. Strong body language. Set lips. Don’t act as if you think I can talk.

He accepted her hand, and shook it. “I thought I’d lost you.” His palms and his face were damp. Velvet wasn’t good for Kavekana’s heat, or the other way around. Deep green eyes bulged in deeper sockets. His lips twitched when he wasn’t talking. “You’re late, Marthe.”

She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb.

“You’re late, and this man says you’re a criminal.”

Another shrug. She patted her chest, and mimed throwing her heart onto the grimy tiles.

He looked from her to the cop. “What do I owe?”

“Her name’s not Marthe.”

“Surely she did not write her true name on the form you gave her. Thinking no doubt that if she could protect her name, she might be able to resolve this trouble without my discovery. Apologies. She is energetic. As befits her calling.”

“Most masters would let a runaway apprentice stew ’til morning.”

“I am not most masters.” He pinched his faded lapels, and rose up on tiptoe. “I am Edmond Margot, master bard and scion of the Cepheid Margots. And while a few evenings’ jail is good poetic experience, my apprentice’s time is precious at this juncture. An interruption in her exercises could lead to the loss of her improvisational seed, and with it months of work.”

“Lot of mute poets out there?”

“She is not mute,” Margot said. “She is merely bound to silence for the period of a year. It is a deeply held belief of my fellowship that only those who cannot speak place the proper value on words. Now.” He reached inside his coat. “What security do you require for her freedom?”

The cop rapped his knuckles against the watch desk.

“A hundred thaums,” the duty officer said without looking up from her ledger.

Margot paid it, though his hands trembled as he placed the coins on the desk. Izza could feel the soulstuff wound inside them: more than they asked. “Is that sufficient?”

Again, Izza risked a glance at the cop’s face, and saw a war there end in defeat. She wondered if he would have felt the same whatever he chose.

“Sure. Leave your address and name with us, so we can find you when the victim decides to press charges. And if.”

“Already done.” He bowed. “A pleasure, as is my every encounter with the local constabulary.”

“Take care of her, Margot. This town can be a dangerous place.”

Was that a hint of threat in the officer’s voice? A protective display? Whichever, Izza grabbed the poet’s hand and pulled him after her, onto the street.

The station’s were the only burning lights in an otherwise respectable cul-de-sac, the kind of place Izza wouldn’t have dared visit even in daylight. Far above her comfort level on the risk-value curve. People around here had souls, but they didn’t come free or easy. You could grab a drunk’s or gambler’s soulstuff no problem: their spirits flowed outside their skin. Artists were the same way, and musicians, and priests. Three months back and a lifetime ago she’d skimmed ten thaums off a Kosite who’d stopped to watch two kids fight over a pineapple in the mud. Conditions like that made for great graft: empathy roused the mark’s soul, easy to nab a corner without their noticing. That’s why she set up the fight in the first place. Ivy and Nick got a cut, of course, to make up for their bruises and dirty clothes. They all split the pineapple after.

Margot walked beside her with the quick high step of a man getting away with something. She walked faster when she saw that, because if the cops did, they’d give chase. Her savior, it seemed, was not used to this kind of thing.

They cleared a few blocks from the station, and turned downhill toward shore. The street shrank, and packed earth replaced cobblestones; white plaster buildings sprouted awnings, decks, and tables barricaded by citronella torches. Far enough. She slowed. So did he.

“You’re not mute,” he said. “Are you?”

She reached into her mouth, and produced a thin gold disk from beneath her tongue. “No. Just hiding.” She held the disk out for his inspection, firmly gripped between thumb and forefinger.

He touched the disk, and his eyes widened. “A lot of soul here.”

“People put more of themselves in the things they own than they think.” She vanished the coin into a hidden pocket. “Memories.” She touched the sleeve of his jacket. “I could get a few thaums out of this, I bet.”

“They said you stole a woman’s purse. You stole…” He groped in the air in front of him, actually groped for the word with his fingers. She’d never seen a person do that before. “You stole the idea of her purse. Her connection to her purse.” He laughed. The laugh was the only part of him that didn’t sound nervous. Big bellied, joyful. She looked up and down the street, wondering who might be listening. The laugh ended, and he wiped tears from his eyes. This too she’d never seen. Most people she knew had little use for tears. Especially the kids.

“Who are you? How did you find me? And what do you want?”

He removed his spectacles and polished them on the lapel of his coat.

“If you get weird,” she said, “I’ll leave.”

He replaced his spectacles. “May I ask you a question?”

“No.”

“I saw you,” he said. He held out his hand. She stepped back. “I saw you held by the Watch, in that station. A vision, clear as mine used to be. I came to find you. I’m wondering. I don’t … I don’t know how to say this. I’m looking for the Blue Lady. I’ve lost her. Can you help me find her again?”

Izza stared from his palm to his bulging green eyes, and back again to the hand.

The Lady. How did he know that name? How could he have known?

Didn’t matter. In the end, this was just another cry for help.

You can’t leave
. Nick stood in the broken warehouse of her mind.

Margot reached for her.

She ran.

“No!”

She was fast, and young, and though a Penitent might catch her on an open stretch no fat Iskari poet could do the same. She crested the fire escape, scampered onto the roof, and threw a handful of gravel onto the roof of the next house over so he’d think she’d run farther. Then she lay sprawled, and listened.

“I miss her, too!” he shouted from the street, not after her so much as at the stars. His voice was ragged with fear and longing. “I need her!” Footsteps on concrete. “Help me.” Fainter now, and distant. His back turned, given up.

Soundless, she stood. Margot shuffled down dockside streets, green dyed black by night. The moon hung low in the west, a sliver sharp as a smile. She followed him.

Across the street, blind eyes watched them go.