The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (213 page)

At its muddy margins, the city consisted mostly of wretched tents, scenes better left unwitnessed by mankind assaulting the eye through wind-stirred flaps. Buildings were botched together from split pine and high hopes, held up by the drunks slumped against both sides, women risking their lives to lean from wonky balconies and beckon in the business.

‘It’s got bigger,’ said Corlin, peering through the jam of wet traffic that clogged the main street.

‘Lot bigger,’ grunted Savian.

‘I’d have trouble saying better, though.’

Shy was trying to imagine worse. A parade of crazed expressions reeled at them through the litter-strewn mud. Faces fit for some nightmare stage show. A demented carnival permanently in town. Off-key giggling split the jagged night and moans of pleasure or horror, the calls of pawnbrokers and the snorts of livestock, the groaning of ruined bedsteads and the squeaking of ruined violins. All composing a desperate music together, no two bars alike, spilling into the night through ill-fitting doors and windows, roars of laughter at a joke or a good spin of the gaming wheel hardly to be told from roars of anger at an insult or the bad turn of a card.

‘Merciful heaven,’ muttered Majud, one sleeve across his face against the ever-shifting stench.

‘Enough to make a man believe in God,’ said Temple. ‘And that He’s somewhere else.’

Ruins loomed from the wet night. Columns on inhuman scale towered to either side of the main street, so thick three men couldn’t have linked their arms around them. Some were toppled short, some sheared off ten strides up, some still standing so high the tops were lost to the dark above, the shifting torchlight picking out stained carvings, letters, runes in alphabets centuries forgotten, mementoes of ancient happenings, winners and losers a thousand years dust.

‘What did this place used to be?’ muttered Shy, neck aching from looking up.

‘Cleaner, at a guess,’ said Lamb.

Shacks had sprouted around those ancient columns like unruly fungi from the trunks of dead trees. Folk had built teetering scaffolds up them, and chiselled bent props into them, and hung ropes from the tops and even slung walkways between, until some were entirely obscured by incompetent carpentry, turned to nightmare ships run thousands of miles aground, decked out in torches and lanterns and garish advertising for every vice imaginable, the whole so precarious you could see the buildings shifting when the breeze got stiff.

The valley opened up as the remnants of the Fellowship threaded its way further and the general mood intensified to something between orgy, riot and an outbreak of fever. Wild-eyed revellers rushed at it all open-mouthed, fixed on ripping through a lifetime of fun before sunup, as if violence and debauch wouldn’t be there on the morrow.

Shy had a feeling they would.

‘It’s like a battle,’ grunted Savian.

‘But without any sides,’ said Corlin.

‘Or any victory,’ said Lamb.

‘Just a million defeats,’ muttered Temple.

Men tottered and lurched, limped and spun with gaits grotesque or comical, drunk beyond reason, or crippled in head or body, or half-mad from long months spent digging alone in high extremities where words were a memory. Shy directed her horse around a man making a spatter all down his own bare legs, trousers about ankles in the muck, cock in one wobbling hand while he slobbered at a bottle in the other.

‘Where the hell do you start?’ Shy heard Goldy asking her pimp. He had no answer.

The competition was humbling, all right. The women came in every shape, colour and age, lolling in the national undress of a score of different nations and displaying flesh by the acre. Gooseflesh, mostly, since the weather was tending chilly. Some cooed and simpered or blew kisses, others shrieked unconvincing promises about the quality of their services at the torchlit dark, still others abandoned even that much subtlety and thrust their hips at the passing Fellowship with the most warlike expressions. One let a pair of pendulous, blue-veined teats dangle over the rail of a balcony and called out, ‘What d’you think o’ these?’

Shy thought they looked about as appealing as a pair of rotten hams. You never can tell what’ll light the fire in some folk, though. A man looked up eagerly with one hand down the front of his trousers noticeably yanking away, others stepping around him like a wank in the street was nothing to remark upon. Shy blew out her cheeks.

‘I been to some low-down places and I done some low-down shit when I got there, but I never saw the like o’ this.’

‘Likewise,’ muttered Lamb, frowning about with one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Seemed to Shy it rested there a lot these days, and had got pretty comfortable too. He weren’t the only one with steel to hand, mind you. The air of menace was thick enough to chew, gangs of ugly-faced and ugly-purposed men haunting the porches, armed past their armpits, aiming flinty frowns across at groups no better favoured on the other side of the way.

While they were stopped waiting for the traffic to clear, a thug with too much chin and nowhere near enough forehead stepped up to Majud’s wagon and growled, ‘Which side o’ the street you on?’

Never a man to be rushed, Majud considered a moment before answering. ‘I have purchased a plot on which I mean to site a business, but until I see it—’

‘He ain’t talking about plots, fool,’ snorted another tough with hair so greasy he looked like he’d dipped his head in cold stew. ‘He means are you on the Mayor’s side or Papa Ring’s side?’

‘I am here to do business.’ Majud snapped his reins and his wagon lurched on. ‘Not to take sides.’

‘Only thing on neither side o’ the street is the sewer!’ shouted Chinny after him. ‘You want to go in the fucking sewer, do you?’

The way grew wider and busier still, a crawling sea of muck, the columns even higher above it, the ruin of an ancient theatre cut from the hillside where the valley split in two ahead of them. Sweet was waiting near a sprawling heap of building like a hundred shacks piled on top of each other. Looked as if some optimist had taken a stab at it with whitewash but given up halfway and left the rest to slowly peel, like a giant lizard in the midst of moulting.

‘This here is Papa Ring’s Emporium of Romance, Song and Dry Goods, known locally as the Whitehouse,’ Sweet informed Shy as she hitched her horse. ‘Over yonder,’ and the old scout nodded across the stream that split the street in two, serving at once for drinking water and sewer and crossed by a muddle of stepping stones, wet planks and improvised bridges, ‘is the Mayor’s Church of Dice.’

The Mayor had occupied the ruins of some old temple – a set of pillars with half a moss-caked pediment on top – and filled in the gaps with a riot of planks to consecrate a place of worship for some very different idols.

‘Though, being honest,’ continued Sweet, ‘they both offer fucking, drink and gambling so the distinction is largely in the signage. Come on, the Mayor’s keen to meet you.’ He stepped back to let a wagon clatter past, showering mud from its back wheels over all and sundry, then set off across the street.

‘What shall I do?’ called Temple, still on his mule with a faceful of panic.

‘Take in the sights. Reckon there’s a lifetime of material for a preacher. But if you’re tempted by a sample, don’t forget you got debts!’ Shy forded the road after Lamb, trying to pick the firmest patches as the slop threatened to suck her boots right off, around a monstrous boulder she realised was the head of a fallen statue, half its face mud-sunk while the other still wore a pitted frown of majesty, then up the steps of the Mayor’s Church of Dice, between two groups of frowning thugs and into the light.

The heat was a slap, such a reek of sweltering bodies that Shy – no stranger to the unwashed – felt for a moment like she might drown in it. Fires were stoked high and the air was hazy with their smoke, and chagga smoke, and the smoke from cheap lamps burning cheap oil with a fizz and sputter, and her eyes set right away to watering. Stained walls half green wood and half moss-crusted stone trickled with the wet of desperate breath. Mounted in alcoves above the swarming humanity were a dozen sets of dusty Imperial armour that must’ve belonged to some general of antiquity and his guards, the proud past staring down in faceless disapproval at the sorry now.

‘It gets worse?’ muttered Lamb.

‘What gets better?’ asked Sweet.

The air rang with the rattle of thrown dice and bellowed odds, thrown insults and bellowed warnings. There was a band banging away like their lives were at stake and some drunken prospectors were singing along but didn’t know even a quarter of the words and were making up the balance with swears at random. A man reeled past clutching at a broken nose and blundered into the counter – gleaming wood and more’n likely the only thing in the place that came near clean – stretching what looked like half a mile and every inch crammed with clients clamouring for drink. Stepping back, Shy nearly tripped over a card-game. One of the players had a woman astride him, sucking at his face like he’d a gold nugget down his gullet and with just a bit more effort she’d get her tongue around it.

‘Dab Sweet?’ called a man with a beard seemed to go right up to his eyes, slapping the scout on the arm. ‘Look, Sweet’s back!’

‘Aye, and brought a Fellowship with me.’

‘No trouble with old Sangeed on the way?’

‘There was,’ said Sweet. ‘As a result of which he’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘No doubt o’ that.’ He jerked his thumb at Lamb. ‘It was this lad did—’

But the man with all the beard was already clambering up on the nearest table sending glasses, cards and counters clattering. ‘Listen up, all o’ you! Dab Sweet killed that fucker Sangeed! That old Ghost bastard’s dead!’

‘A cheer for Dab Sweet!’ someone roared, a surge of approval battered the mildewed rafters and the band struck up an even wilder tune than before.

‘Hold on,’ said Sweet, ‘Wasn’t me killed him—’

Lamb steered him on. ‘Silence is the warrior’s best armour, the saying goes. Just show us to the Mayor.’

They threaded through the heaving crowd, past a cage where a pair of clerks weighed out gold dust and coins in a hundred currencies and transformed it through the alchemy of the abacus to gambling chips and back. A few of the men Lamb brushed out of the way didn’t much care for it, turned with a harsh word in mind, but soon reconsidered when they saw his face. Same face that, slack and sorry, boys used to laugh at back in Squaredeal. He was a man much changed since those days, all right. Or maybe just a man revealed.

A couple of nail-eyed thugs blocked the bottom of the stairs but Sweet called, ‘These two are here to see the Mayor!’ and bundled them up with a deal of back-slappery, along a balcony overlooking the swarming hall and to a heavy door flanked by two more hard faces.

‘Here we go,’ said Sweet, and knocked.

It was a woman who answered. ‘Welcome to Crease,’ she said.

She wore a black dress with a shine to the fabric, long-sleeved and buttoned all the way to her throat. Late in her forties was Shy’s guess, hair streaked with grey. She must’ve been quite the beauty in her day, though, and her day weren’t entirely past either. She took Shy’s hand in one of hers and clasped it with the other one besides and said, ‘You must be Shy. And Lamb.’ She gave Lamb’s weathered paw the same treatment, and he thanked her too late in a creaky voice and took his battered hat off as an afterthought, sparse hair overdue for a cut left flapping at all angles.

But the woman smiled like she’d never been treated to so gallant a gesture. She shut the door and with its solid click into the frame the madness outside was shut away and all was calm and reasonable. ‘Do sit. Master Sweet has told me of your troubles. Your stolen children. A terrible thing.’ And she had such pain in her face you’d have thought it was her babies had vanished.

‘Aye,’ muttered Shy, not sure what to do with that much sympathy.

‘Would either of you care for a drink?’ She poured four healthy measures of spirit without need for an answer. ‘Please forgive this place, it’s a struggle to get good furniture out here, as you can imagine.’

‘Guess we’ll manage,’ said Shy, even though it was about the most comfortable chair she’d ever sat in and about the nicest room besides, Kantic hangings at the windows, candles in lamps of coloured glass, a great desk with a black leather top just a little stained with bottle rings.

She’d real fine manners, Shy thought, this woman, as she handed out the drinks. Not that haughty, down-the-nose kind that idiots thought lifted you above the crowd. The kind that made you feel you were worth something even if you were dog-tired and dog-filthy and had near worn the arse out of your trousers and not even you could tell how many hundred miles of dusty plain you’d covered since your last bath.

Shy took a sip, noted the drink was just as far out of her class as everything else, cleared her throat and said, ‘We were hoping to see the Mayor.’

The woman perched herself against the edge of the desk – Shy had a feeling she’d have looked comfortable sitting on an open razor – and said, ‘You are.’

‘Hoping?’

‘Seeing her.’

Lamb shifted awkwardly in his chair, like it was too comfortable for him to be comfortable in.

‘You’re a woman?’ asked Shy, head somewhat scrambled from the hell outside and the clean calm in here.

The Mayor only smiled. She did that a lot but somehow you never tired of it. ‘They have other words for what I am on the other side of the street, but, yes.’ She tossed down her drink in a way that suggested it wasn’t her first, wouldn’t be her last and wouldn’t make much difference either. ‘Sweet tells me you’re looking for someone.’

‘Man by the name of Grega Cantliss,’ said Shy.

‘I know Cantliss. Preening scum. He robs and murders for Papa Ring.’

‘Where can we find him?’ asked Lamb.

‘I believe he’s been out of town. But I expect he’ll be back before long.’

‘How long are we talking about?’ asked Shy.

‘Forty-three days.’

That kicked the guts out of her. She’d built herself up to good news, or at least to news. Kept herself going with thoughts of Pit and Ro’s smiling faces and happy hugs of reunion. Should’ve known better but hope’s like damp – however much you try to keep it out there’s always a little gets in. She knocked back the balance of her drink, not near so sweet now, and hissed, ‘Shit.’