Kage Baker - The Anvil of the World

“You don’t think she did it?” Smith scowled.

“Oh, I suppose not. Say, did you have plans for the body?” Lord Ermenwyr turned back and looked at him hopefully.

“Yes. The City Warden is coming for it after Festival.”

“Damn. In that case, what about sending out for a sheep?” The lordling dug in his purse and dropped a silver piece on the desk. “That ought to take care of it. Just have the porter lead it straight up to my suite. I’m going back to bed now. Would the divine Mrs. Smith be so kind as to send up a tray of tea and clear broth?”

“I’ll see it done, lord,” said Smith, eyeing the silver piece and wondering where he was going to get a live sheep during Festival.

“Thanks. Come along, boys.” Lord Ermenwyr turned on his heel and headed back toward the stairs, with his bodyguards following closely. At the door of the bar he leaned in and yelled: “If you’ve quite finished, Willowspear, I believe my heartbeat’s developing an alarming irregularity. You might want to come along and pray over me or something. Assuming you’ve no objection, Burnbright dearest?”

There was a murmur from the bar, and Willowspear hurried out, looking back over his shoulder. “Remember that mantra, child,” he said, and turned to follow his master up the stairs.

“Burnbright,” Smith called.

A moment later she came through the doorway, reluctant to look at him. Burnbright was in as bad a shape as a young person can be after a night of tears and orchid extract, which was a lot better than Smith himself would have been under the same circumstances. She dug a knuckle into one slightly swollen eye, and asked, “What?”

“What happened, up there with Mr. Coppercut?” Her mouth trembled. She kept her gaze on the floor as she said; “I thought he wanted me to run him a message. He didn’t have any messages. He told me he knew who I really was. Told me all this story about these people who got themselves killed when I was a baby, or something. Said he knew who fostered me out to my mother house. Said I had guilty blood and some big noise House Smeltmetal or somebody would pay a lot of money for my head. Said he could set bounty hunters after me with a snap of his fingers!”

She looked up at Smith in still-simmering outrage. “I told him it was a lot of lies. He said he could prove it, and he said he was going to write about me being one of the survivors, so everybody’d know who I am and where I live. Unless I paid him. And I said I didn’t have any money. And he said that wasn’t what he wanted.”

“Bastard,” said Smith. “And…?

“What d’you think he wanted?” Burnbright clenched her little fists. “And … and he said there were other things he wanted me to do. I got up to run at that, and he couldn’t stop me, but he told me to think it over. He said to come back when I’d calmed down. Said he’d be waiting. So I ran away.”

“You went downstairs to hide?”

“I needed to think,” said Burnbright, blushing. “And Mrs. Smith caught me and gave me what for because I was drinking. So I went upstairs, but I’d been thinking, well, it’s Festival after all and maybe it’s not so wrong. But it seemed awfully unfair, now of all times! But then I thought maybe he’d leave me alone after—and nobody’d ever know if I… well anyway, I went in to see him. But—” She paused, gulped.

“He was dead?”

Burnbright nodded quickly, giving him a furtive look of relief. “Sitting there in the firelight, just like in a ghost story. So I left.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with getting him killed? Didn’t put drain cleaner in his food?” asked Smith, just to have it said and done with. Burnbright shook her head.

“Though that would have been a really good idea,” she admitted. Her eyes widened. “Did somebody do that? Eeeew!! It must have eaten through him like—”

“We don’t know how he died,” said Smith. “I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” Burnbright maintained. “As mean as he was, he probably had lots of enemies. And now he can’t hurt anybody else!” she added brightly.

“Did you touch anything in the room when you were there?”

“Nothing,” Burnbright said. “You’re not supposed to, are you, at a murder scene? There were lots of murders in Mount Flame City; everyone there knows what to do when you stumble on a body. Leave fast and keep your mouth shut!”

“All right. So you haven’t told anybody?”

Burnbright flushed and looked away. “Just that… doctor. Because I… he asked me what was the matter. But he won’t tell. He’s very spiritual.”

“For a greenie, eh?”

“I never met one like him,” said Burnbright earnestly. “And he’s beautiful. Don’t you think? I could just stare at that face for hours.”

“Well, don’t,” Smith told her, too weary to be amused. “Go help the porters cleaning up the terrace.”

“Okay!” Burnbright hurried off. Smith watched her go, pressing his tea mug to the spot on his left temple where his headache was worst. The heat felt good.

He was still sitting like that, mulling over what he’d just learned, when a man came running in from the street.

Smith straightened up and blinked at him suspiciously, not because of the stranger’s precipitate appearance but because he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. There was a blurred quality to the man’s outline, an evanescent play of uncertain colors. For a moment Smith wondered whether Coppercut’s ghost wasn’t on the loose, perhaps objecting to his body being laid out on three blocks of ice between a barrel of pickled oysters and a double flitch of bacon.

But as he neared the desk, stumbling slightly, the stranger seemed to solidify and focus. Tall and slender, he wore nothing but an elaborately worked silver collar and a matching ornament of a sheathlike nature over his loins. It being the middle of Festival, this was nothing to attract attention; but there was something unsettlingly familiar about the young man’s face.

His features were smooth and regular, handsome to the point of prettiness. His hair was thickly curling, and there was a lot of it. His wide eyes were cold, glittering, and utterly mad.

“Hello,” he said, wafting wine fumes at Smith. “I understand this is a, er, friendly hotel. Can I see your thing you write people’s names in?”

His voice was familiar too. Smith peered at him.

“You mean the registration book?”

“Of course,” said the youth, just as three more strangers ran through the doorway and Smith placed the likeness. If Lord Ermenwyr were taller, and clean-shaven, and had more hair, and didn’t squint so much—

“There he is!” roared one of the men.

“Die, cheating filth!” roared another.

“Vengeance!” roared the third.

The youth said something unprintable and vanished. Smith found himself holding two mugs of tea.

The three men halted in their advance across the lobby.

“He’s done it again!” said the first stranger.

“There he is!” The second pointed at the tea mug in Smith’s left hand.

“Vengeance!” repeated the third man, and they resumed their headlong rush. But they were now rushing at Smith.

They were unaware of Smith’s past, however, or his particular talent, and so, ten seconds later, they were all dead.

One had Smith’s left boot knife embedded in his right eye to the hilt. One had Smith’s right boot knife embedded in his left eye, also to the hilt. The third had Smith’s tea mug protruding from a depression in his forehead. Looking very surprised, they stood swaying a moment before tottering backward and collapsing on the lobby carpet. No less surprised, Smith groaned and, getting to his feet, came around the side of the desk to examine the bodies. Quite dead.