‘Cantliss… at Camling’s…’ he managed to splutter.
Lamb stood a moment, eyes wide, then he strode for the door, brushing the guards out of his way, and Savian strode after.
‘Everything all right?’ The Mayor stood on the balcony outside her rooms in a Gurkish dressing gown, a pale scar showing in the hollow between her collar bones. Temple blinked up, wondering if Lamb had been in there with her, then pulled his borrowed coat around him and hurried after the others without speaking. ‘Put some trousers on!’ she called after him.
When Temple struggled up the steps of the hostelry, Lamb had Camling by the collar and had dragged him most of the way over his own counter with one hand, sword in the other and the proprietor desperately squealing, ‘They just dragged her out! The Whitehouse, maybe, I have no notion, it was none of my doing!’
Lamb shoved Camling tottering away and stood, breath growling in his throat. Then he put the sword carefully on the counter and his palms flat before it, fingers spreading out, the wood gleaming in the space where the middle one should have been. Savian walked around behind the counter, shouldering Camling out of the way, took a glass and bottle from a high shelf, blew out one then pulled the cork from the other.
‘You need a hand, you got mine,’ he grunted as he poured.
Lamb nodded. ‘You should know lending me a hand can be bad for your health.’
Savian coughed as he nudged the glass across. ‘My health’s a mess.’
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Temple.
‘Have a drink.’ And Lamb picked up the glass and drained it, white stubble on his throat shifting. Savian tipped the bottle to fill it again.
‘Lamb!’ Lord Ingelstad walked in somewhat unsteadily, his face pale and his waistcoat covered in stains. ‘He said you’d be here!’
‘Who said?’
Ingelstad gave a helpless chuckle as he tossed his hat on the counter, a few wisps of stray hair left standing vertically from his head. ‘Strangest thing. After that fun at Majud’s place, I was playing cards over at Papa Ring’s. Entirely lost track of time and I was somewhat behind financially, I’ll admit, and a gentleman came in to tell Papa something, and he told me he’d forget my debt if I brought you a message.’
‘What message?’ Lamb drank again, and Savian filled his glass again.
Ingelstad squinted at the wall. ‘He said he’s playing host to a friend of yours… and he’d very much like to be a gracious host… but you’ll have to kiss the mud tomorrow night. He said you’ll be dropping anyway, so you might as well drop willingly and you can both walk out of Crease free people. He said you have his word on that. He was very particular about it. You have his word, apparently.’
‘Well, ain’t I the lucky one,’ said Lamb.
Lord Ingelstad squinted over at Temple as though only just noticing his unusual attire. ‘It appears some people have had an even heavier night than I.’
‘Can you take a message back?’ asked Lamb.
‘I daresay a few more minutes won’t make any difference to Lady Ingelstad’s temper at this point. I am doomed whatever.’
‘Then tell Papa Ring I’ll keep his word safe and sound. And I hope he’ll do the same for his guest.’
The nobleman yawned as he jammed his hat back on. ‘Riddles, riddles.
Then off to bed for me!’ And he strutted back out into the street.
‘What are you going to do?’ whispered Temple.
‘There was a time I’d have gone charging over there without a thought for the costs and got bloody.’ Lamb lifted the glass and looked at it for a moment. ‘But my father always said patience is the king of virtues. A man has to be realistic. Has to be.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Wait. Think. Prepare.’ Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. ‘Then get bloody.’
High Stakes
‘A trim?’ asked Faukin, directing his blank, bland, professional smile towards the mirror. ‘Or something more radical?’
‘Shave it all off, hair and beard, close to the skull as you can get.’
Faukin nodded as though that would have been his choice. The client always knows best, after all. ‘A wet shave of the pate, then.’
‘Wouldn’t want to give the other bastard anything to hold on to. And I reckon it’s a little late to damage my looks, don’t you?’
Faukin gave his blank, bland, professional chuckle and began, comb struggling with the tangles in Lamb’s thick hair, the snipping of the scissors cutting the silence up into neat little fragments. Outside the window the noise of the swelling crowd grew louder, more excited, and the tension in the room swelled with it. The grey cuttings spilled down the sheet, scattered across the boards in those tantalising patterns that looked to hold some meaning one could never quite grasp.
Lamb stirred at them with his foot. ‘Where does it all go, eh?’
‘Our time or the hair?’
‘Either one.’
‘In the case of the time, I would ask a philosopher rather than a barber. In the case of the hair, it is swept up and thrown out. Unless on occasion one might have a lady friend who would care to be entrusted with a lock…’
Lamb glanced over at the Mayor. She stood at the window, keeping one eye on Lamb’s preparations and the other on those in the street, a slender silhouette against the sunset. He dismissed the notion with an explosive snort. ‘One moment it’s a part of you, the next it’s rubbish.’
‘We treat whole men like rubbish, why not their hair?’
Lamb sighed. ‘I guess you’ve got the right of it.’
Faukin gave the razor a good slapping on the strap. Clients usually appreciated a flourish, a mirror flash of lamplight on steel, an edge of drama to proceedings.
‘Careful,’ said the Mayor, evidently in need of no extra drama today. Faukin had to confess to being considerably more scared of her than he was of Lamb. The Northman he knew for a ruthless killer, but suspected him of harbouring principles of a kind. He had no such suspicions about the Mayor. So he gave his blank, bland, professional bow, ceased his sharpening, brushed up a lather and worked it into Lamb’s hair and beard, then began to shave with patient, careful, hissing strokes.
‘Don’t it ever bother you that it always grows back?’ asked Lamb. ‘There’s no beating it, is there?’
‘Could not the same be said of every profession? The merchant sells one thing to buy another. The farmer harvests one set of crops to plant another. The blacksmith—’
‘Kill a man and he stays dead,’ said Lamb, simply.
‘But… if I might observe without causing offence… killers rarely stop at one. Once you begin, there is always someone else that needs killing.’
Lamb’s eyes moved to Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You’re a philosopher after all.’
‘On a strictly amateur footing.’ Faukin worked the warm towel with a flourish and presented Lamb shorn, as it were, a truly daunting array of scars laid bare. In all his years as a barber, including three in the service of a mercenary company, he had never attended upon a head so battered, dented and otherwise manhandled.
‘Huh.’ Lamb leaned closer to the mirror, working his lopsided jaw and wrinkling his bent nose as though to convince himself it was indeed his own visage gazing back. ‘There’s the face of an evil bastard, eh?’
‘I would venture to say a face is no more evil than a coat. It is the man beneath, and his actions, that count.’
‘No doubt.’ Lamb looked up at Faukin for a moment, and then back to himself. ‘And there’s the face of an evil bastard. You done the best a man could with it, though. Ain’t your fault what you’re given to work with.’