Chapter 10 Night Visitor

The cellar job was a slug.

It was a big slug, I'll admit. The cellar was under a wine merchant's house in the third ring, behind the pale gold wall, the first time I'd been through it, and the slug had got in through a crack in the old drains and was living in the merchant's best red. It was about the length of a rowboat and the colour of liver, and it had eaten two barrels, a cat, and most of the cellar door. The merchant's steward called it a cellar crawler and said it had already sent an Iron party running with their boots dissolved.

Salt, it turned out. Same as any slug. I got three sacks off the merchant's cook, put a line of it across the bottom of the stairs so it couldn't come up, and then dealt with it from the far end where it couldn't turn. It took about an hour, most of which was cleaning up. The steward signed my sheet with his nose pinched shut and the clerk at the Guild paid me fourteen silver without looking up.

Fourteen silver. With the dog and the testing fee and the sewer, that put me at about twenty-three gold. A hundred and seventy-seven to go. Back where I'd been on the road, near enough, a week ago. It didn't feel like much of a week, put like that. But there was a week's rent paid, and Hal's coat sewn, and a roof over my head, and I'd only been here five days.

I cashed the bounty chit at the Crown office by the river on the way back, too, because Fen had warned me on the road to do it before someone in the Crown office decided Haines had been worth less than he was. Eight gold, in a little cloth bag. It didn't change the sum, since I'd been counting it already, but it was nice to hear it clink.

Then I went down to the Ram's Head to keep my word to Fen.

* * *

The Ram's Head was by the wool exchange in the first ring, a long low tavern with sheep's skulls nailed over the door and a smell of lanolin and gravy. It was the friendliest place I'd been in Harrowgate. Half the men in there were wool factors and the other half were drovers, and every one of them knew Fen. He saw me come in and stood up on his bench and shouted my name, and then shouted, "This is him! The one I told you about!" and a lot of heads turned.

"What did you tell them?" I said, when I'd got to his table.

"Everything." He beamed. "Sit down. Dunny! Two chops for my friend! He's paying for nothing tonight."

Dunny turned out to be a huge bald man with a scar across his scalp like a ploughed furrow. He brought me two mutton chops the size of my hand, and potatoes, and gravy in a jug, and he looked at me while he put them down.

"Fen says you caught a crossbow bolt," he said.

"Two," said Fen. "One for me. He caught mine."

"They were slow," I said.

Dunny studied me a bit longer. "I fought a bear once," he said, and went back to the bar.

The chops were as good as Fen had said. Better. He talked the whole time I ate them, which I didn't mind at all. Wool was down this year. Marta had written, and little Rose had lost a tooth. The exchange was full of rumours, he said, about the frontier. Somebody was buying up land out east, all along the edge of the Greywild, and nobody knew who.

"The Crown?" I said.

"Something with a lot of money and no name. It's all done through agents." He tapped his nose. "Land gets cheap when the taxes go up. Funny how the taxes always go up first."

I thought about Bram, and the Corran place, and the Selby place. I didn't say anything. Fen looked at my face and changed the subject to his daughters, which he was very good at.

"They're talking about you at the exchange, you know," he said, over the last of the gravy. "The sewer. Fitch's boy. They're calling you the Level One. Like it's a title. Like the Witch, or the Knight-Captain. The Level One." He grinned. "The drovers have got a book going on what you'll do next."

"What are the odds?"

"Short on dying," said Fen cheerfully. "Long on everything else. I've got a silver on you finding a dragon in a cupboard."

It was late when I left. Fen walked me to the door and held my arm a moment.

"You go straight home," he said. "Don't take the back lanes this time of night."

"I'll be fine."

"I know you'll be fine," said Fen. "It's whoever you meet I'm worried about."

* * *

I took the back lanes.

Not on purpose. The fog came in off the river about midnight, thick and white and wet, and inside ten minutes every street in the second ring looked like every other street. I got turned round twice. The third time, I came out into a narrow lane between two high walls with a lamp at the far end, and stopped, because there was a woman standing under the lamp.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

She was tall, and slim, and very pale, with black hair piled up on her head and held with silver pins, and she wore a gown the colour of dark red wine that left her shoulders bare to the fog. Her face was the kind you see carved on old church tombs. Her eyes, when she turned them on me, were a dark gold, like honey held up to a candle.

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"Oh," she said. "There you are."

Her voice was low and amused and seemed to come from a lot closer than she was standing.

"Evening, miss," I said. "You lost too?"

"Lost." She laughed. It was a lovely laugh with something behind it, like a cat purring with its claws out. "Darling, I have never been lost in my life. I followed you from the Ram's Head. I could smell you three streets away." She walked towards me, and she didn't make any sound on the cobbles at all. "Do you have any idea how long it has been since anything smelled interesting? A hundred years. More. Everyone in this city smells of the same three things. Fear, and perfume, and boiled cabbage." She stopped in front of me and breathed in, slowly, with her eyes half closed. "You smell like a thunderstorm."

"Probably the coat," I said. "It's oilskin."

She opened her eyes. They'd changed. The gold had gone deep and bright, like the inside of a forge, and she looked into my face, close, and when she spoke her voice went down into my bones like the cold off the Ledger Stone.

"Be still," she said.

"I am still," I said. "You all right, miss? You've gone a funny colour round the eyes."

She stared at me.

"Be still," she said again, harder, and the lamp at the end of the lane flickered.

"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "You want me to walk you home? It's not safe out here in this fog. Not for a lady on her own."

For a moment her face did something complicated, as if three or four different feelings were trying to get through the same door. Then she laughed again, high and delighted, and put one cold hand flat on my chest.

"Oh, you are wonderful," she said. "You have no idea, do you? Not the faintest. Hold still, darling. This will only sting."

She went up on her toes and bit me in the neck.

* * *

It did sting. It was about like a horsefly. I said, "Ow. Here, steady on," and put a hand on her shoulder to ease her off, and then I didn't, because she'd stopped moving.

She'd swallowed once. Maybe twice. Then she'd gone completely still against me, with her mouth on my neck and her hand on my chest, still as a fence post.

Then she let go and stepped back.

Her eyes were enormous. The forge light had gone out of them, and they were just gold again, and wet. Her mouth was red. She put her fingertips to her lips like she'd never felt them before.

"Oh," she said. It came out very small.

"You all right?"

"Oh," she said again. "Oh. Oh, my."

Her knees went. I caught her. She leaned back in my arms and looked up at the fog, and she started to laugh, a soft breathless laugh with no claws in it at all, like a girl on a swing.

"I can see colours," she told me. "Did you know the fog has colours in it? I didn't. I haven't seen a colour properly since the old king died. Not the one before. The one before that." She reached up and patted my face. "You taste like bread. Like warm bread and lightning and the morning after rain. What are you? What are you? No, don't tell me, I don't want to know, I want to..."

Her eyes rolled up, and her head fell back against my arm, and she was gone.

Out cold. Smiling.

I stood in the lane holding her and didn't know what to do.

She wasn't breathing. That gave me a nasty turn, until I got my ear down by her mouth and heard her hum. She was humming in her sleep, some old tune, very happily, without any breath at all. She was cold as the lane was cold, and when I looked properly at her mouth there were two long white teeth at the top that went down over her bottom lip.

Grandad's stories had vampires in them. Grandad's stories also had a talking pig in them, so I'd never put much weight on either. But here she was, cold and humming and not breathing, with my blood on her chin.

I touched my neck. Two little holes. They'd already stopped bleeding.

"Well," I said to her. "You've had a big night."

That was clearly what it was. She'd come out of some party all dressed up, I'd lay money on it, with too much wine in her, and gone looking for supper on the way home, the way people do. Then she'd had a bit more than she should, on top of all that, and keeled over. I'd seen blokes do the same at the Black Hound after harvest. You don't leave them in the lane. You get them home.

* * *

She had a little silver case on a chain at her waist. Inside it were calling cards, thick and cream-coloured, with a black edge.

Countess Elodie Vane. Vane House. Lantern Row.

I didn't know where Lantern Row was. But the first watchman I found, half a lane later, did. He held his lamp up, saw who I was carrying, and went white.

"Shit," he said. "Oh, shit. Oh, shit." He dropped the lamp and pointed up the hill with his whole arm, and didn't follow.

It was the third ring, through the gold wall. The guards on the gate came out with their halberds down when they saw me coming out of the fog with a woman in my arms, and then they saw her face, and their halberds went up again so fast one of them hit the arch.

"Is she," said the sergeant. He looked at my neck. "Did she. Are you."

"She's had a big night," I said. "I'm taking her home."

Behind him, one of the young guards leaned over to another and whispered, loud enough for the whole street, "He's still walking. Sarge, he's still walking."

"Shut up, Dobbin," said the sergeant, and opened the gate. He didn't ask anything else. None of them did. They watched me all the way up the street, and when I looked back they were still standing there in a row.

Vane House was black stone, tall and narrow, with a red door and no lights in any window. I knocked. After a long while the door opened, and a very old man in a black coat looked out at me. He had a face like a folded letter and the stillest eyes I've ever seen.

He looked at the Countess in my arms. He looked at my neck. His eyes came to me last, standing upright on his front step, and for a moment his stillness slipped.

"Did Madam dine, sir?" he said.

"She had a nip," I said.

"I see." He was quiet a moment. "Forgive me, sir. Madam's guests do not generally walk her home. They are generally carried out."

"She's light," I said. "Where do you want her?"

He showed me to a long room full of dark furniture, and I laid her on a couch there. She curled up on her side like a cat, still smiling, still humming. The old man put a fur over her, very gently.

At the door, he held out a small heavy purse. "For your trouble, sir."

"No, you're right," I said. "I don't take money for walking a lady home."

He looked at me with those still eyes for a long time.

"Madam will wish to know your name," he said.

"Tobin Marsh. I'm at Widow Ostry's, Candle Lane." I thought about it. "Tell her to drink some water in the morning. It helps."

"I shall tell her," he said, "exactly that."

* * *

It was nearly three when I got back to Ostry's. I let myself in quiet and went up the stairs in my socks with my boots in my hand.

Miss Quill was sitting on the second-floor landing in a grey dressing gown, with a candle beside her and a ledger on her knees. I don't think she slept much. She looked up as I came round the turn, and then her eyes went to my collar and stayed there.

"Mister Marsh," she said. "What happened to your neck?"

"A lady bit me."

She didn't say anything.

"A countess, I think," I said. "Vane. She'd had a big night. I took her home."

Miss Quill closed the ledger, very slowly, the way you'd close a door on a room with something asleep in it.

"Countess Elodie Vane," she said.

"That's her. Do you know her?"

"Everyone knows her," said Miss Quill. "Goodnight, Mister Marsh."

"Night, Miss Quill."

I went up to bed. When I looked back from the top of the next flight, she was still sitting on the landing with the candle burning down, staring at nothing, with both hands flat on the closed ledger like she was trying to hold it shut.