Corroded Page 7

  The trembling in my knees eased.

  I was in fact, being followed, but I was suddenly certain that it was no sweet tooth come to finish what he’d started in that bloody fog.

  If it had been, I was rather sure that I would not have seen traces of him as often as I saw glimpses of this less clever cat. I couldn’t know if it were a footpad after my pockets, meager as they promised to be, or something else, but it would be easy enough to learn.

  Sliding my hands into my coat pockets, I whistled again as I sauntered down a narrow street dividing this larger thoroughfare. The tune was something jaunty and heedless—a giveaway, really, for only those up to no good whistle so easily in the cold streets. The damp bit at my ears and reddened my nose, but the warm tide of adrenaline as it trickled through my leaden veins took care of any discomfort I might have felt.

  This, then, was something more fun. Unplanned, to be certain, but oh, how I relished the chase.

  Even if I were the quarry.

  More fool, he who followed me.

  I made my way down this narrow street, led us both out of the dull roar of the thoroughfare and into the quiet of the lesser traveled lanes. Now, though I made no sign I heard, I could pick out the faint echo of footsteps not mine as I splashed my way noisily through gathered puddles and shuffled over crumbling cobble.

  There was a small apothecary down this way, its windows not as grimy as expected but covered by shelving displaying what wares the druggist could afford to sell. I paused here, pressing my face against the glass and cupping one hand against the glare from the lantern overhead.

  I took the opportunity to glance down the road, but saw nothing untoward.

  My pursuer was somewhat more clever than I assumed.

  Fair. Stepping back, hands once more in my pockets, I continued my aimless route, studying my surroundings for any opportunity to force he who followed me into the open. I could not see him, yet I was sure that he had not given up on me. I was all too happy to return the courtesy.

  I itched for the challenge.

  An unfortunate circumstance for my challenger, whose trail I found again when I passed an alley mouth and caught a telltale swirl of black-streaked fog—the kind of eddy left when a body moves quickly through it.

  I turned into the alley mouth, trod deliberately through an ankle-deep puddle until the splashes echoed down the eerily blank lane. I taunted my pursuer with such calculated brevity, painted myself as the hapless victim heedless of my own danger. My whistle bounced uncannily from wall to wall, then vanished into the suffocating shroud between them.

  With single-minded intensity, I followed that alley, encouraged by the clatter of a foot against loose cobble, or the muffled thump of refuse kicked aside.

  I felt as if I might laugh. I felt unstoppable. Here I was, an angry widow who’d just pledged the impossible to the Karakash Veil, and it was as if I’d done no such thing. As if I were destined to be victorious over all comers.

  It was not to my benefit to be so reckless, but this day’s opponent would not be the one to teach me this.

  The footsteps flagged. The alley was soon rife with the gasping breaths of one who could run no farther. My whistle did not cease as I allowed my pursuer to close the gap between us, slowing my pace. The tune did not falter as a silhouette slowly parted from the fog around us.

  Yet what was to be a trilling crescendo to my chase cracked when a resigned, feminine voice said, “If I’d known this alley was this long, I’d never’ve dipped into it.”

  My good cheer fled abruptly. The Devil’s own nerve. “Collectors,” I pointed out, frigid as the coming winter, “always know the lay of the streets. Maddie Ruth Halbard, you go home right this moment.”

  She peeled herself from the clinging haze, and now I recognized easily her shape—unlike myself, she did not hide in trousers, or bulk her figure in too-big coats. The daft child wore her woolen skirt plain as day, though the heavy boots she sported beneath did her ensemble no favors. She was red-cheeked and holding one hand to her chest, as if her heart had not eased its thumping, and I could very much relate to this.

  Mine now slammed in place, bolstered by the fire of my wrath.

  “Please don’t be cross,” she began, but I did not let her finish the foolish sentiment.

  “I’ve a mind to drag you to Hawke himself and make him deal with you,” I snarled over her. She blanched, nearly going bone-white in the gray shadows. “You could have been hurt!”

  “I knew what I did.” She sounded for all the world as if she truly believed it.

  “Of course you did.” Derision dripped from my every word as I gestured to the narrow alley around us. “Which is how you found yourself here, is it?”

  “With you.”

  “Yes, with me,” I repeated, “but I could have been anyone, you foolish thing.”

  “You weren’t, though,” she said, with the same reasonable calm I employed when I was being stubborn and knew it. My teeth ground with frustration. “I knew it were you, I followed you.”

  “No,” I returned, employing that calm now. I took a deep breath, forcing my fingers open. “You followed me down the street. You lost sight of me when you stepped in here. You had no way of knowing I would turn this way—there is no bloody reason why a sane person would,” I added emphatically. “For all you knew, I could be a Ferryman gone astray, or a footpad searching for an easy fogle. Yours, to be precise.”

  Her expression did not soften from its brittle determination. “I could have handled it.”

  There was just no reasoning with her. “Why were you following me?” I demanded, taking a step closer that I knew she would find intimidating. Claims of handling aside, she was a smart girl—if her pride would ease off long enough to let her intelligence shine.

  “I wasn’t.” Maddie Ruth took a step back, one I followed with another in her direction. She looked up, as if she’d find help in the rusted grates set into the wall above our heads. Then, quickly, “I mean, I was, but it wasn’t for you.”

  “Talk sense,” I suggested, rather quite coolly.

  She fidgeted her weight, one foot to the other. “I was following you just to the collector wall.”

  As if this somehow made her choices more tolerable? I glowered. “Do you think this a—”

  —think this is a game, Miss Black?

  The question died upon my lips even as it formed behind them. Suddenly, in my recollection, I saw Hawke glaring down at me as if I were naught but a nuisance, bloody-minded enough to attempt to stare him down as he held my arm in a secure grip. Close enough to make me acutely aware of the violence he could be capable of, were I to taunt him beyond patience.

  I was turning into a replica of the very Devil himself.

  Maddie Ruth’s chin rose.

  Groaning out loud, I spun away from her and threw my hands into the chill damp as if I would beg supplication from invisible spirits. “I refuse!”

  She was silent. Perhaps wary, now, for my outburst was not the sort a sane person may deliver.

  I whirled on her, finger extended. Her eyes widened in her cold-chapped face. “You,” I half-snarled, lost on a tide of anger that was self-directed as much as aimed at my erstwhile shadow. “You and I are returning to the Menagerie right this moment, and you’d best pray—”

  “No.” A finality that was not as firm as she should have wished. “You cannot force me,” she added quickly, as if it would help. How little she understood. Or, perhaps, understood all too well, for even as she did her level best to stare me down upon my own streets, Maddie Ruth clutched the lapels of her coat. Oh, would that maidenly modesty would help her—she’d find no peace from me.

  Then, jarring me from my ire, I noticed the creases of straps pulled tight across her shoulders, as if she carried a pack behind her, all in stitched leather. They strained, pulled back on her shoulders—a heavy enough burden that I briefly admired her strength of back. If not quite that of her spine.

  I opened my mouth to
ask what in heaven’s name she’d dragged from the Menagerie.

  Instinct, that fog-sense of rhythm and motion learned by them what spend most of their time within the drift, plucked a warning chord along my senses.

  My gaze slid beyond Maddie Ruth’s ill-advised determination, narrowed on the blank canvas of gray surrounding us.

  She saw opportunity, drew in a breath—to plead, to make her case, I didn’t know. It did not matter. I raised my hand, cutting off her voice with a sharp slash demanding silence.

  We were no longer alone.

  “Come here,” I said softly, my eyes on the fog.

  Maybe there was hope for the girl’s obedience, after all. She said nothing at all, her gaze straying over her shoulder as she obeyed by quiet directive. Her footsteps were too loud in the brimming silence.

  And then there were too many echoes to put my concerns at ease.

  “Stay close,” was all I managed to say before two shapes lumbered from the fog. Particulars were difficult enough, but I’d spent too much time in the murk—usually at night—to lose the ability of perception now. Two men. One squat and broad, one taller and thin but stooped.

  Two sets of blatantly forthright eyes, two kinds of cool, self-satisfied leers. One, the lean one, tossed a blade hand to hand, as if it were merely a toy he fidgeted with.

  I allowed my lips to curve into a smile. “Dicker.”

  He jolted, coming to an abrupt stop. “’Ow you know me name?” he demanded, gap-toothed confusion lending a little thrill of victory to my calm.

  I couldn’t tell him the truth—that when last I’d come face to face with the bloke and his Ferrymen crew, I’d been a red-haired lady chasing an invisible woman in a cloak. Dicker had cracked me a good one across the face, effortlessly cruel in the presence of his mates, and my fingers itched to return the favor.

  Instead, I cleared my throat roughly, and spit the contents upon the damp street. Charming, really, but there were no ladies present here. “This isn’t Ferryman land,” I pointed out.

  The stocky bloke sized the both of us up. Then, his mate. “Who’re them?”

  Dicker shrugged, his small, dark eyes firmly on me. Smart one, really. Of the two of us, Maddie Ruth was naught but a skirt-wearing kinchin mort posing no threat.

  Unlike her, I’d shown some knowledge, and displayed no fear.

  “Mebbe they live ’ere,” he suggested.

  “Maybe you want to let us pass,” I offered instead. I could have invoked Ishmael Communion’s name—as a known man of the Brick Street Bakers, they’d have heard of him, at least. But it didn’t escape me that I was still out for a Baker’s collection, and it seemed unfair to invoke their protection with one hand and deliver one of their own with the otherother, so I said nothing.

  The Ferrymen exchanged a glance; I read the shared commitment upon each unattractive scowl as they bolstered each other’s nerve. Maddie Ruth shifted behind me, her shoulder brushing against the back of my arm.

  Damn that girl to perdition, I could not very well engage both men without concern for her well-being. One, certainly, and perhaps both if Maddie Ruth was not present—but the truth was not so kind. I was blind in this alley, ignorant of whether these two Ferrymen were walking alone or as part of a large group.

  There was a maneuver used by low pads—the smart ones, unfortunately—that involved herding marks deeper into alleys and into the arms of a larger crowd of thieves. A loss of one’s possessions was only the start, and I could not engage either without knowing if more waited somewhere nearby to deliver a drubbing.

  Neither appeared willing to back down.

  I really, truly did not want to try this tact, not in front of the girl; she’d take the bloody phrase and run, I just knew it. Unfortunately, I had no choice. “Collector’s business, gents,” I said quietly. I watched Dicker’s reptilian eyes widen some; his mate did not appear impressed. “You want to let us pass, you do.”

  “Tchaw.” A scornful sound from the short one. “Ain’t no collector here.”

  Leather creaked behind me. I wanted to reach back, seize Maddie Ruth’s arm to hold her still, but I feared losing my tenuous control of this volatile situation.

  Dicker hesitated for only a breath before rolling his lanky shoulders. The blade he toyed with winked in the murky daylight. “Right. ‘And over the lot, and maybe we leave the bird alone.”

  Laughable. Of all the gangs—the Brick Street Bakers, the West End Militia, the Hackney Horribles, and still more rising and falling season to season—it was the Black Fish Ferrymen known to be among the worst of them. My own run-in with them had proven they weren’t likely to let a bit of skirt wander away without at least a foray into humiliation. As cross as I was with Maddie Ruth, I did not wish her harmed.

  I allowed myself a short sigh, annoyance clear as a whip crack in the alley’s echoes. “Have it your way,” I said, and took a small step-forward—weight on the balls of my feet, hands held loosely in preparation for anything they threw at me.

  Leather creaked loudly. Maddie Ruth called, “Duck, please!”

  The men looked from me to the very person I was trying to protect, undoing my bravado with a simple, girlish command.

  I rounded on her, exasperation so great that I presented my back to the Ferrymen.

  Only to glimpse a thing of copper and brass hoisted in the shorter girl’s hands, a wide tube and what looked to be vents of some kind carved into the brass facing. It was ugly, unwieldy, held up by leather and facing me.

  I dropped to the mucky street just as Maddie Ruth’s finger depressed the trigger. Air vented, there was a dull thoop as I’d never heard before, and as at least one set of footsteps pattered behind me, I felt a breeze wobble my hat askew.

  I turned to my back on the pitted cobble, open-mouthed with shock. A long dark tube unfolded in mid-air, spread into a net of woven rope silkier than any flax twist usually seen. Uncurling until it looked to be a spider’s web, with weights attached to each point, it sailed through the damp with startling ease. IIt slapped into Dicker—whose ire earned him the arguable honor of being first taken down by the netting. The weights yanked him backward, yelling all the way, and slammed him into his mate, who yelped in pain as the same weights wrapped tight around him and likely clobbered whatever bits of skull and flesh they found.

  I watched this unfold as if in a dream, not quite certain if I’d managed to walk into an opium fantasy or not.

  Certainly what little I’d imbibed would not affect me quite so obviously.

  The men tumbled, a tangle of netted limbs, and Maddie Ruth grasped my shoulder. “I can’t reload here,” she said breathlessly.

  I looked up at her, my eyes wide. “Maddie Ruth,” I said, certain of nothing but this, “you and I shall talk again.”

  “Aye, as you say,” she said hurriedly, her gaze flicking now to the deeper alley where shouts now bounced in reply to the tangled Ferrymen. She shouldered the weapon the leather straps had been securing, once more placing it upon her back. “I think there’s more coming. What do we do?”

  Of course there was more. Hadn’t I thought so?

  I allowed myself a small smile as I stood. “Now you do exactly as I say,” I told her, and pointed up. “Do you see the line just above us?”

  “The wash line?” She looked up, fear and excitement combining to give her a blotchy sort of wash. Her brown eyes were too wide, but sparkling.

  I knew that confusion. The rush of victory replete with the knowledge that such victories would be short-lived if things went poorly. I had often made my own choices upon such a balance.

  “Step on my hands,” I told her. “Grasp the line and stand upon it, then reach for the ledge just above that.”

  Her mouth gaped. “I can’t!”

  “‘Tis easier than it sounds, you know.”

  “Is not!”

  Frustration filled me. “For the love of all that is holy, Maddie Ruth, you will be the death of one of us.” I spat this out on a mutte
red tide of aggravation as I surveyed the wash line, the ledge of the wall just above. “Stay here.”

  “But—”

  “Do as I say, girl!”

  Authority, as they say, is not the measure of whether others are willing to obey, but the confidence that they will do so whether they wish to or not. It is a thing ingrained in one, and often displayed by those who sit among the peerage.

  I was not truly Society, not in the way my late husband had been, but I had spent countless hours among them, learning to shape my words as a weapon and my demeanor as armor.

  Maddie Ruth bore no chance. Too young, I think. Too uncertain.

  She shut her mouth, pressing herself back against the crumbling wall as if she could disappear into it.

  The alley now echoed with the hue and cry of men, and the Ferrymen swore wildly, angrily. Rather uncreatively, to be honest. I’d heard them all already.

  Measuring the distance between the alley walls with my gaze, I processed my plan as quickly as I dared and launched myself at the first wall. “Allez hop,” I grunted, just as my feet found purchase on the rough surface and propelled me towards the other. Like a grubby frog, I jumped from wall to wall, climbing with the grace of the acrobat I used to be until the wash line—a useless bit of rope that was not meant for laundering at all—was within reach.

  My knees ached with the effort, and my body would not thank me after. Had I paused to consider the foolishness of this maneuver, I don’t know that I would have maintained the momentum to climb this way, but the skills shaped by mostly forgotten childhood are not so easily dismissed. On the final leap, as if by rote, my arms extended on the last spring, my fingers found the rope, and I allowed my momentum to carry my weight once forward, once backward. Another forward, and this time, I curled my body up, pulled my legs in, and landed squarely atop the rope as if it were a bar and I the tightrope walker atop it.

  The loose support made certain of my awkward balance, and it took me precious seconds to regain sure footing.