So, I found this short story from 2016 in my folders and decided I might as well put it up here. It has hints of both my original set of books, and my most recent one (which I was about to write at the time). And also politics…
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She was one of the good ones.
The phrase rolled around Cirica’s head as she stared down at the body. Drenching summer rain had washed away the pooling blood, hiding the dark stains on her torn wool dress. The Northerners still hadn’t quite learned how to dress for summer in the South.
Hitching up her dress, Belaria knelt and gently rolled the body onto its back. It squelched on the muddy cobbles, a stiff arm flopping out to splash painlessly in cold water. Dark hair plastered across a face that had been pale enough in life. The lips had not been so blue, however, nor the eyes so empty.
“Four or five wounds,” Belaria said, her voice huskier than normal. “Stabbed with a broad blade, not a belt-knife.”
“A man?”
“In all probability.”
Cirica turned to the watchman who’d been first on the scene. “Any witnesses?”
He shook his head. Half his face was scars, and his right arm never appeared from beneath his cloak. An ex-soldier, like most of the Watch’s men. No longer fit to fight, nor for anything else but hauling a pike about Buona’s troubled streets.
“Who found her?”
“Baker’s girl on her rounds, just before mornchime.”
Belaria was already shaking her head. “She can’t have been dead long.”
Who would be out that early, and why would Agnetha have been herself? She didn’t seem to have any particular occupation, but was always helping someone or other, usually another of the Drannic community. It wasn’t that she was particular, it’s just that they called on her more often. Maybe the northerners had a name for what she was to everyone. All Cirica knew was that nobody had ever spoken ill of her, even the commissaire who she bothered hand and fist about the conditions in the Tumbles.
She was one of the good ones, all right.
Even that phrase, uttered innocently by her own brother when the runner woke them with the news, was a symptom of the plague of hate on their streets. Acceptability for a few, scorn for the masses, when they only came here for work, for the war effort. Who could blame them with the North in the state it had been since the Cataclysm.
She caught sight of her own dark skin as she brought her hand up to wipe her face. Such short memories we have; our own grandmother a full-blood Ankhar, her people displaced from the highlands where the war now rumbled on and on, far to the south.
Not far enough.
“Right, call for a cart or stretcher and get her to the recorder. No barrows; do it properly.”
“Where are we going?” asked Belaria.
“Where do you think…”
Belaria rolled her eyes, then her broad shoulders, and followed.
***
Squeezed between two older hostelries, the printing office did not impose on the casual passer-by. Inky glass in the bow-front windows gave Cirica no preview of the occupants, but she new if Gonlago wasn’t there, he would be next door. Better to catch him in the office, though, without as many witnesses.
She shoved open the door, the bell ringing angrily. Two boys and a girl looked up from the presses, eyes white in ink-smudge faces. They didn’t matter; she had come for the man standing over the proofing table with his shrew-faced assistant. To his credit, Gonlago turned around slowly, the sneer on his face only growing when he clapped eyes on his visitors.
“Ah, so it is the fat detector and her draft-dodging goon. What brings me the dubious pleasure of your company this time.”
“Murder.”
“Ah. And you think I did it. No doubt you have concocted the evidence already?”
Cirica smiled, her hand resting on the pommel of her rapier. “No, I doubt you have the courage to kill, sweet Gonlago. One of the vermin that reads your pamphlets, however, may just be the sort we’re looking for.”
“I can hardly be held responsible for the actions of my readership, dear lady, nor do I have a list of subscribers. ‘The Word on the Streets’ is free to all.”
She took a step closer. “Ah, but that’s where you are mistaken. I will hold you responsible for this and any other death on my watch.”
Gonlago stepped up to her and stared down his long nose. “The magistrates and the commissaire will never stand for this. You’ve got no evidence.”
Pulling a damp bit of paper from the breast of her jerkin, Cirica watched his eyes flicker with doubt. “This was found near the body,” she lied. “Consider yourself shut down.”
“That proves nothing. My pamphlet can hardly stand trial for murder!”
“You misunderstand, Gonlago. I am shutting you down for littering.”
His face nose wrinkled as if with a bad smell. “Littering?”
“Littering.” She stepped into him. “You distribute this trash on the streets with no provision for disposal. Since you have no paying customers, they do not take ownership of it, and you are responsible.”
Her knee came up into his groin, the codpiece proving little protection. She caught him as he crumbled, and whispered in his ear. “Just as you are responsible for her murder, spewing this bile onto my streets.”
Two shadows detached from the back wall, but halted when Belaria took a long stride forward. Cirica let Gonlago fall, put a boot into his ribs. “You never even asked her name.”
“What do I care,” he spat. “They can go back where they came from, northern barbarians. That witch had it coming.”
The room disappeared in a red mist, and for a moment Gonlago’s miserable life hung by the thinnest of Britha’s threads. Then Cirica remembered her oath, and those depending on her. And turned away. “Burn it.”
“The press?” Belaria asked, eyes never leaving the thugs at the back of the room.
If only. “No, the latest edition.”
“The commissaire will hear of this,” Gonlago croaked.
Yes, she would, thought Cirica, refusing to let her shoulders slump. She had better find the actual killer before then, and, Britha’s mercy, some connection to Gonlago’s screed with him. It may have only been fit for wiping one’s arse, but the toad had powerful friends who shared his opinions. Today was not the day to take them on.
***
They got nowhere knocking on doors, or door-frames. The Northerners living fistful-to-the-room in the warren-like tenements saw her and Belaria as just two more members of the Watch, and the Watch weren’t their friends. Cirica didn’t blame them; few people recognised the distinction between the Watch and the Hunters.
They were supposed to be Gryf’s Bloodhounds, sniffing out any drain on the war effort, any sedition, any sabotage. Agnetha wasn’t really her remit, but she could probably justify it. If she wrapped it up quickly. They wouldn’t understand what she had meant.
Some people – people like Gonlago, like some of the Watch – thought there was no need to hunt the enemy in their midst. Just round up all the refugees, all the foreigners, everyone not like us. Move them all outside the city walls, into the camps that teemed with new arrivals even after all these years.
As absurd as it was to draw boundaries when half the city lay outside the old walls, the lines of blood were even harder to demarcate. Half the migrants were other Midarians, half the work-shy mouths to feed were old soldiers, all of them were on the same side in this cursed war. Would they deport Cirica’s gran for being Ankhar, though she’d never seen the highlands? Was she herself safe, two generations later? Where did you draw the line?
That way led to madness; but then, a lot of people were mad.
Even she would admit the Drannii could make it easier on themselves. Once a moon, fire threatened the Tumbles, all because they would not abandon their love of open hearths. They clung to their mother tongue, their rustic fashion, their absurd beards. But who could blame them, when they had done so through waves of conquest and occupation, only to be defeated and driven out by the shift of the seasons?
They worked hard, you couldn’t deny that. Too hard, probably, to the more relaxed Midarian mindset. And for so very little, too. Almost none of them could afford the pyre-pennies, so the dead went down in barrows to the factory furnaces. Sometimes the same factory where they worked, if they were lucky.
Agnetha had fought for them, and in doing so had fought for everyone, for the whole city, for the future. She didn’t care about the war; she cared about people.
That was why Cirica would find whoever did this.
***
In the end, she found him by accident. Britha’s gifts never came unfettered, though; he had five friends with him, and none the sort of man Cirica was happy to meet in a rainy alley before the hour she usually had her breakfast. Like most men still in Buona, they were specimens unfit for military service – young, old, crippled, Par-brained, often in combination. With their very place in society determined by their inadequacies, no wonder it made them predisposed to bitterness.
All this, and Britha had not yet allowed Cirica her morning cup of tea.
She had almost ignored the noise complaint for the more pressing matter at hand, and she had not come expecting a fight. Six men in a launderer’s yard at this time of the morning should have raised more suspicion, but, after all, she only sought one. Instead of soldiers on leave awaiting their clean uniforms, however, she found a man washing his own shirt, surrounded by his boisterous friends.
The water was red.
“Step away from your friend and you can go free.”
They didn’t listen. Men rarely did.
“Dranc lovers. You’re as bad as them, betraying your city. Well, we’re taking it back.”
They all had daggers, and two were butch enough to wear small swords. Cirica cursed as she drew her rapier and dagger, knowing that her training, such as it was, did not give her much confidence against two opponents – and that was on her best days.
Fortunately, she had Belaria at her side. The wastrels before them had either not heard of her reputation, or let the dress fool them. Cirica preferred leathers herself, but Belaria patrolled the streets as if she were at court. Occasionally, more courtesan than court, though Cirica said nothing. It’s not as if the dresses had any impact on her duelling, as their attackers would soon find out.
“Last warning, boys,” she said, crossing her dagger over her down-pointing blade.
“We’ll make you squeal, you fat bitch, while your freak friend watches.”
Nice chaps, shame to have to kill them. Hopefully.
The first attack was angry, clumsy, and she parried it with pleasing ease. The man dodged back from her counter-thrust, however, and his friend rushed in on her left side. Inside the rapier, she had only the dagger, but managed to catch his blade. The impact jarred her arm, and took the power out of the punch she had aimed at his face with the hilt of her sword. A quillon gauged his cheek and he jumped away.
First exchange and no real score. She set again, glad she faced neither of the lads with the small swords. The first of her assailants was winding a sheet around his arm, while the second was holding his cheek and panting with mounting rage. She flicked at them with the long blade, hoping to keep them both at bay.
Then came the first scream, closely followed by the second, and the fight went out of them. Weapons clanged to the flagstones, and their remaining adversaries froze, faces draining just like their friends’ bodies.
“Help him, for gods’ sake,” she spat.
One was past saving, but the other might survive if they stopped the bleeding. She never liked wasting life if she didn’t have to, even scum like this. Yul knew they could use every man or woman in the war effort, whether here, at the front, or in the prison gangs.
The dead man was the killer, and Cirica wondered if Belaria had made sure it was so. Yul knew it wasn’t like her to miss. Cirica felt nothing, looking down at his half-naked body with the small puncture over his heart. Barely more than a boy, never enough to be a man.
The wounded youth groaned as his friend pushed a wadded sheet against his side. Rain plastered dark hair across his grimace. Cirica felt sick. To have to spare the rest of these shits, war or no…but no, they were not to blame. The district was rife with hate, and fear. Four centuries of war, and all it brought with it, would do that to a city. A nation.
A whole world.
Cirica wiped her blades as dry as she could before sheathing them. Women emerged from the laundry interior, tutted about the mess made on sheets that weren’t even theirs. A girl collected the daggers while two of the sturdier washerwomen held the surrendered swords on the captives. Belaria took their names, abodes and occupations – to no-one’s surprise, they had none of the latter. The neighbour’s boy was sent for the watch. The day began.
“Someone fetch a barrow for the body.”
James Latimer 