“Missus Hog claimed you broke Curfew all the time,” sputtered Gertriss, unable to tear her eyes away from the antics of the bridge clowns that paced our cab as we crossed over the canal at Drade.
I shrugged. “I’ve had to break Curfew a few times,” I said. A clown caught hold of the cab’s window and capered along with us, gibbering and hooting at Gertriss until the cabbie landed a whack on the top of his head with a stout shaft of oak. “That doesn’t mean you can do it. If you’re ever caught out, and you hear that bell ring, you get indoors if you have to break in somewhere, you understand? The halfdead won’t enter a business or a dwelling. That’s the law. They don’t break it.” Because they don’t have to, I added, mentally. The sad fact is that there is a more than sufficient supply of idiots and criminals. So many, in fact, that most Curfew-breakers never see a halfdead, much less wind up dead by one.
Gertriss nodded, still mesmerized by the capering clowns. “Too, I have this,” I said. I produced the medallion Evis gave me, a while back-it marked me as a friend of House Avalante, and while that wasn’t an iron-clad assurance of safety, it meant that anyone harming the wearer would face the wrath of a Dark House, and even other Dark Houses weren’t usually that hungry.
The cab clattered along, and Gertriss drank it all in, gabbing happily along the way. I managed to learn that she’d been a farmhand back home, mainly dealin’ with hogs. She reported she was the oldest of six sisters, and she had once seen a Troll in the woods taking a shit in a creek. Not exactly a sterling resume for becoming a street-wise finder. But there was an intelligence behind her countrified accent and naivete, so I resolved to give her a chance. One chance, and no more, and if Mama took that hard that was just too bad.
We reached Darla’s, and I paid the cabbie, and as Gertriss noted the fare she got her first taste of the high cost of living in the city.
I shrugged and grinned. “Welcome to Rannit,” I said, pulling her quickly onto the sidewalk before a passing cab spun her out of the way.
She looked up and around, gawking openly at the wonders of three-story wood-front buildings and the glass windows that revealed everything from jewelry to clothing to fancy lamps for milady’s tea room.
“This is Darla’s,” I said, easing her toward Darla’s fancy oak and glass entry. “Darla is a friend of mine.”
“More’n a friend, way I hear it,” said Gertriss with a sly grin.
“It’s a wonder Mama Hog ever gets any sooths said, the way she gossips,” I noted. A bell on the door chimed, and Darla herself came darting out from the back, a long black gown twin to the one Lady Werewilk had been wearing in her hands.
“Darla dearest.” I probably smiled. “I’d like you to meet someone.”
Darla smiled back. She has a good smile. And big luminous brown eyes and short dark hair. She draped the gown over a mannequin and came quickly over to meet us.
“Miss Darla, this is Gertriss.” Gertriss blushed and wondered what to do, until Darla stuck out her hand to shake. “Gertriss is Mama Hog’s niece. She’s come to Rannit to learn Mama’s trade.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Gertriss. “I’m working with Mister Markhat, for now.”
Darla lifted a narrow brown eyebrow and tried to hide a grin. She’d sized up the whole morning’s events faster than I could have explained them.
“We start our first case in the morning,” I said. “Miss Gertriss needs some new clothes.”
Darla nodded and took my hand and squeezed it. The twinkle in her eye said “And then she needs to burn all her old ones.”
“You know, I believe we have some casual day-wear that would fit without much alteration,” she said. She eyed Miss Gertriss critically, walking around her, while Gertriss blushed even deeper.
Darla didn’t start out as a dressmaker. But since she lost her job at the Velvet-my fault, I’m afraid-and was now co-owner of the dress shop with Martha Hoobin, she’d become quite a competent seamstress in her own right, as well as the book-keeper and general money manager.
“I’m thinking three new outfits, one new nightgown, two pairs of shoes, one pair of slippers, a bathrobe, a dressing gown, two pairs of lady’s trousers, four blouses, two hats and a coat,” said Darla, as she walked. “I’ll just add all that to your account, shall I, Mister Markhat?”
She grinned, full of sudden mischief.
I sighed. “Make it three hats,” I said. “No one’s ever accused me of being cheap.”
Darla laughed. “Three it is, then,” she said. “Now, Mister Markhat, if you’ll excuse us, I need to take some measurements, and we won’t need your services for that. Why don’t you go pester some vampires or tug at ogre beards for, say, two hours? Then you and I have a lunch date, if you’ll recall.”
I didn’t recall, but being a quick-thinking street-wise finder I merely nodded quickly.
“Back in two hours, then,” I said.
Darla stood on her tiptoes and planted an ambush kiss on my lips. Her perfume enveloped me, and I scandalized Gertriss by wrapping Darla up in my arms and kissing her back, maybe longer than propriety demanded.
“Not a minute longer than two hours,” she said, when she stepped back.
I nodded, breathed in more perfume, and headed out the door.
Chapter Three
I had two hours to kill. Ordinarily, I’d have headed to Eddie’s for a beer, but that day, I decided to immerse myself in the heady, erudite world of Rannit’s burgeoning art community.
My previous experience with art was limited to sneering at outdoor statues of War Hero This or General That, and cheering on the pigeons that managed to sum up my opinion of them perfectly, day after day.
My mother once found a case of mostly-empty paint jars and a pair of camelhair brushes, and she painted a surprisingly good portrait of my father with it, and even though she ran out of black before finishing his moustache and his right eye was a darker blue than his left, her painting hung above out mantel for all my childhood. That was the only fine art the Markhats had ever owned.
It’s never a good idea to head into the heart of a mess that may well center around some walk of life you know nothing about. That worried me about the well-dressed Lady Werewilk’s situation. I might be staring right at the obvious lynchpin of the whole thing, but because I don’t know my red paints from my antebellum surrealists, I might not ever see it.
So I told the cabbie to head for Mount Cloud and ignored his snort of derision.
Mount Cloud isn’t a street. It’s a neighborhood, one I’d only passed through a few times. It’s where the Regent’s Museum had stood, until the fire in the opening years of the War had gutted it. Reconstruction had only just begun, and although the surviving pieces of Rannit’s thousand-year art history were still safely tucked away somewhere in a deep, secret Regency subbasement, the neighborhood itself was lousy with galleries and art sellers of every description.
We clopped along. I tried to recall what little I’d ever known about art-it was once taught, here and there, before the War brought such frivolity to a halt-and decided I remembered only two things.
One was that bad old King Throfold had outlawed the depiction of bare-chested ladies in 1276. The other was that the worth of such paintings had tripled or quadrupled immediately thereafter, which resulted in a veritable flood of bare-chested ladies in paintings for two centuries thereafter.
I was never much of a student, but for some reason that stuck with me.
I grinned and wondered for the thousandth time if that hadn’t been King Throfold’s idea all along and then the cab pulled onto Cannon and I had arrived.