Frank Tuttle - The Broken Bell

Three-leg Cat was even in attendance. He graced me with a rough purr while I filled his bowl with dried jerky from a tin. I sat and watched him eat and found myself waiting to hear Mama come knocking at my door.

But Mama was away, and if she had any sense she’d stay away until the invasion was done. Gertriss was helping Evis deplete the Regency ’s store of cigars and brandy. Darla was at work, and when she left for home she’d find a trio of soldiers assigned as her bodyguards, with instructions to see her home and keep her there.

Which left me on my own.

Three-leg read my thoughts and disputed them with a coarse meow. I scratched his knobby head and listened to the street noise.

I judged it to be nearly four of the clock. Since the exchange at the Timbers was scheduled for the traditional midnight hour, I had eight hours to prepare.

First, I read Lethway’s letter. That didn’t take long. He just named the place and the time. I found the lack of idle pleasantries and well wishes somewhat disheartening.

I took off my shoes and loosened my tie and propped my sock feet up on my desk. Then I took out the dingus Victor had given me, studied it intently for a moment and went to sleep right there with the deadly thing in my hand.

When I woke, it was dark. I sprang to my feet to find legs and feet gone numb, and I stomped and cursed and made my way to my door.

I stuck my head out, breathed a sigh of relief. Old Mr. Bull’s windows were still alight. I could hear the Arwheat brothers down the street rolling down their shutters. It was barely Curfew, then. I hadn’t slept through my best chance of getting stabbed to death since the end of the War.

“Hurrah,” I said to the empty street. Even Three-leg was gone, engaged in feline errands all his own.

I changed my clothes and made what preparations I could. I wrote out a few letters, including a will. One was addressed to Mama. One to Gertriss. One to Evis. The longest was Darla’s.

Then I gathered my various implements and stood inside my open door.

That’s all I’ll leave behind if I die tonight, I thought. One middling fancy desk and a pair of beat-up chairs. Half a crown of clothes in my closet. Three bottles of beer in my icebox. One half-burnt door. One Three-leg Cat, expert at producing foul odors.

Hell of a legacy.

I shut my door, locked it, and tried to shake the feeling that I was putting my back to Cambrit for the very last time.

I had my borrowed Avalante cab meet me in front of the Velvet. Immune to Curfew and the law, the Velvet was teeming with carriages and cabs, even after Curfew. Another fancy black carriage idling at the curb wasn’t going to attract any attention.

Randal, still lost in his too-large coat, snapped to attention when he saw me ambling his way. I was afraid he was going to start Sirring me in public, but he bit his tongue and sat silent while I clambered inside.

I’d laid things out for him earlier. He waited until my door slammed shut and then we were off, another black carriage lost in the night.

Randal took a circuitous route southward, keeping to sleepy little backstreets when possible. He seemed to be having so much fun I didn’t have the heart to tell him we weren’t being followed.

I hadn’t really expected that we would be. Lethway knew where I’d be, at midnight. The kidnappers knew it too, courtesy of his letter. Pratt I’d told myself.

No need to chase the rabbit when he’s hell-bent to hop right into the nice hot oven.

I’d formulated and rejected half a dozen plans concerning the meeting with at the Timbers. Bring in twenty or more armed soldiers?

Too noisy. The kidnappers would bolt. Lives would probably be lost in the fracas. While my stunt with the Army earlier in the day had paid off, there’d been little risk of bloodshed. Tonight, bloodshed was inevitable.

Sneak in back, employing my Army-honed stealthy wiles to slither snakelike through the trash, thus entering the fray unawares?

Too many eyes expecting just that. If the sorcerer was anything like the ones I’d known in the War, each nook and every cranny within sight of the Timbers was now filled with magical traps and sundry arcane gotchas.

No, a sneaking slither worked once, but it wasn’t going to work again.

Stealth was out. Brute force too.

That left me with only one option, and all the weight of all the hardware strapped to my belt or secreted in my pockets wasn’t nearly as reassuring as I hoped it would be.

On the seat beside me sat a doctor’s black leather instrument bag and the black stovepipe hat favored by the local sawbones. I opened up the doctor’s bag and found it filled with vials of dark liquids, tiny sealed bowls of various powders, and of course, the sharp, glittering implements of the healing trade.

I tried on the hat. It fit, but was too tall for the confines of the carriage, so back on the seat it went.

I grabbed a couple of vials at random and studied the tiny labels affixed to each. Tincture, Drd hwthrn , read one. Infusion, garlic amp;wort , read the other.

I put them both in my coat pocket and snapped the case shut.

Randal’s random route kept us moving for nearly two hours. I counted out distant peals of bells, and when I could delay the inevitable no longer I knocked twice on the roof. Randal turned us toward the Timbers, and whatever festivities the Angel of Fate had contrived.

The carriage rolled away.

The street was dark and empty. Above, stars probably shone and twinkled, but the buildings rose up like canyons and only a fool would have raised his eyes heavenward when so many perils lurked below.

I straightened my physician’s hat and marched across the street, my skin prickling at the sensation of being watched from the dark. Knowing the watching eyes were attached to hands holding crossbows made the prickling feelings worse.

The empty street offered no cover. If a bolt or an arrow were loosed, I’d not know it until I felt it sink in my chest.

Five steps, six steps, eight steps, ten.

They’d think I was crazy, stomping up to their front door like that.

Twelve paces. Fourteen. Almost to the curb.

I was counting on someone in charge being either cautious or curious.

I made it across the street.

I made it to the weathered door.

I knocked.

“I am Doctor Hammonds,” I shouted. “The Colonel sent me. It was all explained in the letter.”

Silence. Not the scrape of a careless boot, not the ghost of an errant whisper.

I remembered every dealing with every doctor I’d ever had the displeasure to meet.

“I will not stand here all night,” I shouted. “You know my business. I have no interest in yours. Admit me, or I leave. Now.”

The door inched back, just enough to reveal an eye-and a bit below that, the razor-sharp head of a crossbow bolt.

“Can you treat your own fatal wounds, Doctor?”

I snorted.

“If I’m not seen, upright and alive by the Colonel, there will be no exchange,” I said. “You did read the letter? I am here to check his son’s physical condition. If Carris Lethway has been permanently disabled…”

“We have received no letter.”

I sighed.

“I have a copy in my coat pocket. I warned the Colonel against using addicts as messengers. May I produce it without being maimed?”

“You may.”

I reached carefully into my pocket. The letter was there, signed by Lethway, or at least by a scribble that looked much the same.

I poked it through the door.

“Don’t move.”

“I have no intention of leaving,” I said, though the door closed in my face.

I waited.

The letter was a good one. I think I captured the Colonel’s brusque air of old-world superiority quite well. It told the kidnappers a Doctor Hammond was being sent ahead to ascertain Carris’s condition, and that if the good Doctor wasn’t seen idling in the street in front of the Timbers when the Colonel’s carriage arrived there would be no exchange at all.