They listened with an intensity far more mature than their years should have allowed. I wasn’t going to mind parting with that portion of the treasure. It would probably be more money than any of them had ever seen.
Sad thing was, I knew it would probably be just that, for the rest of their lives.
Once they were fed and instructed, I placed myself at the head of the line, and led my very own soot-faced parade all the way across town and to the very heart of Regency Avenue. I made sure my soiled army understood their mission, made sure they knew the lay of the streets and the way the neighborhood had grown and shifted. We went up and down the street, then up and down Talent and Farstair and Wicker and Holt, where I hoped at least a few former residents of Cawling might have settled.
That down, and dark and the Curfew approaching, I led my parade back to the printer’s, and we waited outside for the handbills. True to their word, the staff of Carson and Sons made the deadline, and as the Big Bell banged out the last hour before Curfew I was divvying up waybills and handing out final instructions.
I told them all to wait until first light before they struck out. And I could see it written plain on their dirty faces that none of them meant to let things like the Curfew or the prospect of a grisly death deter them from making their wage.
I’d not truly thought through my promise of a bonus to the lad who brought the gift horse to my door. But it was too late to change the plan.
I just hoped the vampires would leave them be in favor of older, cleaner fare.
My brave mob dispersed, waybills clutched in their eager hands, the promise of coin burning like true love in their thin, little chests.
I went home feeling dirty.
I sat in my office, daring that lamp-flame to find a wind in the dead still air. It didn’t.
But it did illuminate my waybill.
SEEKING MARRIS SELLWAY, it read. FORMERLY OF CAWLING STREET. MOVED AFTER WAR.
The printers had inserted a little artistic do-dad below that. It did help to space out the words.
SOUGHT BY THE FINDER NAMED MARKHAT ON CAMBRIT STREET. LOOK FOR THE DOOR WITH THE FINDER’S EYE.
And below that, a perfect rendition of the same.
THE PERSON BRINGING THIS WAYBILL AND ACCURATE INFORMATION CONCERNING THE WHEREABOUTS OF MISS MARRIS SELLWAY FORMERLY OF CAWLING STREET WILL RECEIVE TWENTY (20) OLD KINGDOM CROWNS. THE FINDER WISHES NO ILL TOWARD MISS SELLWAY. AN INHERITANCE IS INVOLVED.
Below that, the printer had decided to reinforce the point by adding a crude drawing of a pile of coins.
And below that, centered, was a number. I’d assigned a range of numbers to each kid, and the one who brought in the winning talker would get a gold crown of his very own.
And they’d all get a half crown just for handing out each and every one of their waybills.
So I sat, and I did what I’d done so many nights when I’d served my six in the Army. I got my whetstone and my oil and my leather rag, and I laid into my old Army double-edged combat knife while I listened for footsteps heading my way.
It didn’t take long. I’d loosed a band of half-starved kids out past Curfew, and hunger scared them a lot worse than any vague threat of the halfdead.
Mumbles and a knocking at my door. I scooped my whetstone and oil and cloth into a drawer and accidentally left my knife in its sheath under my shirt before I opened my door.
One of my urchins-owner of Waybill Number Six, called himself Skillet-stood there. He was kicking his companion in the backside, an act rendered simple since the companion was on his knees retching on my sidewalk.
“He knowed the woman,” said Skillet. His eyes were old and hard, and if they had any fear they didn’t show a hint of it.
He was maybe ten.
He kicked the man again and yanked his face up by his wild mane of filthy hair.
The retching gentleman was maybe ten years my junior. Maybe. With weedheads it’s hard to tell. He didn’t have any teeth left. His eyes were sunken and vacant. The smell oozing off his trembling frame would have set ogres to gasping and backpedaling.
“Right,” I said. The weedhead bowed his head and vomited again, narrowly missing my shoes, and I decided an invitation to come inside was out of the question.
“He got a name?”
“Stick,” said the kid.
I didn’t bat an eye.
“Stick it is, then,” was all I said. “Well, Mr. Stick, you don’t look so good. Life take a hard turn after you left the Bloods?”
His head snapped up, and I saw recognition in his rheumy eyes.
Fate was finally showing the Markhats of the world a bit of long overdue love.
I dropped down to my haunches so I could meet Stick eye to eye. I didn’t figure I’d have time to wait for him to sober up and stand to meet mine.
“So, tell me about this woman, Stick. Start with her name.”
He had to get through a bout of dry heaving and coughing, but he finally managed to croak out a name.
“Sellway. Mary Sellway. Or Mardis. Something.”
I nodded. “Marris. But that much is printed on the waybill, Stick.”
Stick snorted. “Ain’t been to no school. Can’t read.”
“What a shame. Still. You want my coin, you’ve got to do better than that.”
Stick started growling and grinding his empty gums, the way weeders do when they start losing it. I let him see my knife and watched him slowly calculate his chances of taking me on and living.
He opted for more dry-heaving and a brief bout of uncontrollable shaking instead.
“She. Had a kid,” he managed to say. “Girl. Doris. Darcy. Something.”
I nodded. I’d purposely left that part out. Just a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
“You need to think really hard about what you say next, Stick.” I paused and let the words sink in. “Really hard.”
He gulped and nodded.
“Where is Marris Sellway, right now?”
He licked his lips. He took a deep breath. He struggled to put the right words together in the right order.
And then his pupils flared, his muscles went slack, and he passed out face-first into the liquid remains of his last pitiful meal.
Skillet kicked him and spat out a stream of cursing that would have made my old sergeant proud.
Stick was beyond feeling, though. I cussed a bit myself.
“Look, mister, I brung him. You heard what he said. He’s the real thing.”
“You’ll get paid.” I sighed. “Help me haul his stupid butt inside. Be my luck the halfdead will get him if I leave him on the sidewalk.”
We both picked out bits of Stick that were the least encrusted in filth and wrestled his limp form inside my door. I rolled him onto his side so he wouldn’t choke and put a handful of copper into Skillet’s outstretched hand.
The kid’s grin was the only thing about him that still looked young.
“You can stay here too,” I said. “It’s not safe out there.”
The coins vanished. A kitchen knife, honed down to a wicked edge, replaced them. “I got a little sister to watch,” he said.
I just nodded. “Come back around tomorrow. You’ll get the rest then.”
He nodded and was gone. I never once heard a footstep.
Stick moaned and twitched. His attendant stench wasted no time in pervading my office. I lit every candle I had, pulled my favorite lead-weighted head-knocker out of its hiding place under my desk, and settled in for a long and malodorous night.
Chapter Three
The bathhouse attendant, a blind old man named Waters, gathered up Stick’s clothes with the end of his cane and without a word hurled them into the furnace.
“That there man stinks,” offered Waters. “Use all that soap. I’ll go fetch more.”
And off he went grimacing and muttering.
I gave Stick a couple of good hard slaps, which roused him to mutter but not open his eyes.
So I hauled him up by the scruff of his neck and simply tossed his ugly, naked butt into the big, hot, copper bathtub.