Frank Tuttle - The Broken Bell

“I’ll do what I can.” A brief cloud of worry crossed his big wide face. “I don’t think Lethway is on to me yet, Markhat. But he’s suspicious of something, even if he doesn’t know what or who yet. He’s playing this one close.”

“He knows his neck is on the line. Don’t be too pushy. We can manage without a script. I have friends of my own.”

“So I hear. Any of them going to show?”

I shrugged. “One never knows.”

Mr. Pratt grunted. He let the silence linger for a moment and then called for his driver to pull to the curb.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

I leaped out.

Spook Timbers. Never heard of it. Didn’t like the sound of it.

So naturally that’s where I headed.

South Rannit managed to avoid the post-War frenzy of renovation and gentrification that swept across the rest of the city in freshly polished, patent leather boots.

South Rannit houses the slaughterhouses and the cattle yards and the tanneries and the paper mills and all the other industries that produce the kind of noise and waste that ruin patent leather boots in a single pair of steps. The streets are pitted, winding affairs dotted with potholes. The potholes themselves are disguised with pools of filthy factory waste-water, which shows iridescent coatings of strange oils to the sun and feeds the hundreds of thousands of fat black flies that fill the stinking air with a buzzing, biting fog.

My cabby cussed and shouted at other drivers and sought to dodge each and every pothole, lest he break a wheel or injure his pony with a single unlucky guess. Twice he threatened to stop and put me out, and twice I offered him more coin to proceed.

I had on my good boots, and I wasn’t eager to soil them in that brackish, oily sludge a moment sooner than necessity demanded.

I lost track of streets and had to trust my cabman’s growled pronouncement that we had arrived. I bade him to keep driving a couple of blocks, just in case the hollow, pane-less eyes of the old mill concealed smaller but brighter eyes of their own.

He cussed me but obliged. Out of sight of the Spook Timbers, I handed out coins in sufficient quantity to still the cabman’s tongue and entice him to leave South Rannit by any way save the one he had come.

Then I set my doomed boots on the broken cobbles, put a mildly drunken wobble in my step, and made my way toward the nearest cattleman’s pub for a pint of piss-poor beer and an earful of local gossip.

I got both, beer and gossip, in spades.

It took a while, of course. I had to establish myself as a beef buyer for a meat packing firm on Bay Street. Since buyers for meat packing firms were as common as rats and nearly as well loved in the quaint folkish environs of the Steer and Hammer Pub, blending in wasn’t terribly difficult.

A less experienced infiltrator might have been tempted to loosen local tongues by buying a few rounds. Not Markhat, no, no-I pinched my coppers until they squealed, as any genuine buyer would, and endeared myself by losing a few rounds of darts I might otherwise have won.

After that, I was seated with a table of guffawing old men who kept calling me different names while they told me all the things old men like to tell and young men have no ears for.

But I had ears. And in between the sad tale of Ronny and Olga’s failed marriage and Bertram and Heather’s doomed crippled sons, I learned a few things about the neighborhood that fanned the flames of suspicion Pratt had ignited earlier in the day.

The Spook Timbers came up, again and again. Half my tablemates had worked there, when it had been a going concern. Old Letter Half-Hand displayed his maimed hand as he introduced himself, noting that he’d left four fingers in the Timbers and damned if one day he didn’t plan to march in and ask for them back.

The Timbers had been many things, since the Willow Creek had dried up and the big grinding wheels had ground to a permanent halt. An inn, a hospital, an apothecary, a whorehouse.

During the War, gangs had used it as a headquarters. The Watch had chased them out come the Truce, and the Timbers had stood empty ever since.

Until…

It was the until I had been hoping for.

Lethway’s plan of a Brown River Bridge swap was the preferred method for most kidnappers. It reduced the opportunities for treachery on both sides. It was public. It was quick. And the bridge clowns were helpful about redirecting traffic while the exchange took place, and remaining neutral and blind throughout.

Local kidnappers would have known that. Bold kidnappers would have agreed anyway.

I suspected these kidnappers were neither. And as such, I wondered-might they suggest, as a meeting place, the very spot in which they’d held their victim the entire time?

It was a daft thing to do. A thing so daft Lethway was almost certainly unlikely to even consider it. And if Pratt was right, Lethway hadn’t.

But there’s one thing that can be said about Mrs. Markhat’s favorite son.

He’s no stranger to daft ideas.

It had its advantages. No movement across an unfamiliar town. No shuffling of guards. No searching out a meeting place for hidden ambushes.

No, instead, they’d just hunker down, out of sight, and watch. If fresh new faces started showing up, they could always pull back and vanish. If Lethway did try to set up an ambush, the kidnappers would be able to watch it take shape.

And then there were the dogs.

It was a small thing. Half-Hand always dropped a couple of stale biscuits by a ruined doorframe in the Spook Timber’s north end. He’d spied a mama dog in the dark chamber beyond, nursing half a dozen spotted puppies, and like me the old man had a soft spot for dogs.

He’d left the biscuits every day for a month, that is, until the day he’d passed to find the doorway filled with chunks of brick and the mama dog and puppies gone.

He’d found her, a block away, nestled under a porch with her pups in tow.

Half-hand was worried that gangs might be moving back into the Timbers, because, as he noted, even busted bricks don’t stack themselves in street-side doorways overnight.

It was a long shot.

But Carris Lethway was being held somewhere in Rannit. The Spook Timbers seemed ideal-abandoned, derelict and big enough to serve as a hiding place for half a dozen secretive thugs and one reluctant guest.

Maybe, just maybe, they’d been daft enough to waggle the name right under Lethway’s nose.

Disengaging from my gaggle of newfound friends took perhaps an hour. I’d been nursing the same beer for twice that time, so the wobble in my walk was just there for show.

I stumbled outside, bracing myself on the wall. I wasn’t in view of the Timbers but it never hurts to assume keen eyes might be watching. I stumbled into the nearest alley and proceeded to make my way toward the Timbers.

It took me two hours to make what was probably three blocks. I stuck to whatever cover I could find-heaps of trash, leaning fences, the narrow, filth-choked alleys between bars and stores and Angels know what. There’s a trick to moving slowly. I hadn’t done much of it since the War, but I hadn’t quite forgotten, either.

The sun sank so low it might as well have been midnight there among the alleys and the narrow places. There was no wind, not even a breath, and the stench from the tanneries and the slaughterhouses settled heavy upon me. My clothes were soiled and wet. I dabbed mud below my eyes, so my cheeks wouldn’t shine, and my transformation from upright citizen to foul creature of the sewers was sadly complete.

It was only then that I dared a direct look at the Timbers from behind a heap of rotting hides dumped in an alley in clear defiance of the Regent’s new refuse statutes.

The place rose up three stories. Most of the roof was gone. Portions of the north wall had been consumed in a fire that burned so long ago the soot was weathered white.