Kage Baker - The Anvil of the World

Smith groaned and put his head in his hands.

“Eyrdway, they needed that body!” Lord Ermenwyr sprang to his feet.

“Oops.” Lord Eyrdway looked at Smith and Mrs. Smith. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” Lord Ermenwyr told them. “He’ll make it up to you. Won’t you, Variable Nincompoop?”

“Oh, drop dead again,” his brother replied. He looked at “Smith. “Seriously, though, is there anything I can do to help?”

Salesh in the aftermath of Festival is a quiet place.

Laughing Youth isn’t laughing as it shuffles along, wishing its golden sandals weren’t so bright. Don’t even ask about what Age is doing. It’s too gruesome.

City Warden Crossbrace had spent much of the last two days in a darkened alcove, so he found the sunlight painfully brilliant as he tottered up Front Street toward the Hotel Grandview. His uniform had the same wrinkles and creases it had had before he’d thrown it off, shortly after bidding Smith a good evening. His head felt curiously dented, and all in all he’d much rather have been home in bed. But a sense of duty drove him, as well as an awareness of the fact that corpses don’t keep forever and that the worse shape they were in when reported at last, the more questions would be asked.

Still, by the time he stepped through the Grandview’s street entrance, he was wondering how big around Copper-cut’s body was in relation to that nice capacious drainpipe, and how much of a bribe he might get out of Smith for suggesting that they just stuff the dead man down the pipe and forget he’d ever been there.

When his eyes had adjusted to the pleasant gloom of the lobby, he spotted Smith sitting at the desk, sipping from a mug of tea. He looked tired, but as though he felt better than Crossbrace.

“Morning, Crossbrace,” he said, in an offensively placid voice.

“Morning, Smith,” Crossbrace replied. “We may as well get down to business. What’ve you got for me?”

“Well, something surprising happened—” Smith began, just as Sharplin Coppercut strode into the lobby.

“You must be the City Warden,” he said. “Hello! I’m afraid I caused a fuss over nothing. Silly me, I forgot to tell anybody I occasionally go catatonic. I don’t know why it happens, but there you are. I was sitting in my lovely room enjoying the sunset and, bang! Next thing I know I’m waking up on a slab of ice in this good man’s storeroom. I was so embarrassed!”

Crossbrace blinked at him.

“You went catatonic?”

“Mm-hm.” Coppercut leaned back against the desk and folded his hands, with his thumbtips making jittery little circles around each other. He cocked a bright parrotlike eye at Crossbrace. “Crash, blank, I was gone.”

“But—” Even with the condition he was in, Crossbrace remained a Warden. “But in that case—why’d you write that note?”

“Note? What note?”

“That note you appeared to have been writing when you had your spell,” Smith said helpfully. “Remember that you’d sat down at the writing desk? It looked like you wrote Avenge My Murder.”

“Oh, that!” said Coppercut. “Well. I’m a writer, you know, and—I had this brilliant idea while I was eating, so I got up to write it down. It was—er—that I needed to get in touch with a friend of mine. Aven Gemymurd.”

“Of House Gemymurd in Mount Flame City?” Smith improvised.

“Yes! That’s it. They’re, er, not very well known. Secretive family. So it occurred to me they must have something to hide, you see?” Coppercut squinted his eyes, getting into his role. “So I thought I’d just visit my old friend Aven and see if I could dig up any dish on his family! Ha-ha.”

Crossbrace peered at him, still baffled.

“You look like you could use a cold drink, Crossbrace,” said Smith, setting down his tea mug and sliding out from behind the desk. “It’s nice and dark and cool in the bar.”

The hell with it, thought Crossbrace. “I’d like that,” he said. As he followed Smith to the bar, he addressed Copper-cut over his shoulder: “You know, sir, you might want to invest in one of those medical alert tattoos people get. It might save you from being tossed on a funeral pyre before your time.”

“Yes, I think I’ll do that,” said Coppercut, following them into the bar. “What a good idea! Because you know, Warden, that there are attempts on my life all the time, because I’m so widely hated, and anybody might make a mistake and think—”

“Coppercut?” A small scowling man appeared out of nowhere, twisting his mustaches. “You’re late for our interview. I was going to give you all kinds of trashy details about the life of my late father, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right!” exclaimed Coppercut, as the small man grabbed his elbow and steered him out of the bar. “How stupid of me—but I get like this, you know, when I’ve just waked up after a catatonic fit, very disorganized—nice meeting you, City Warden, sir!”

“So you got your Safety Certificate,” said Lord Ermenwyr with satisfaction, exhaling green smoke. “And the Variable Magnificent is safely on his way home.”

He was sitting with Smith and Mrs. Smith at their best terrace table, as they watched the first stars pinpricking out of the twilight. Like an earthbound echo, Crucible and Pinion moved from table to table lighting the lamps and oil heaters.

“I thought he couldn’t go home until he’d got enough money to pay back your lord father,” said Smith, dodging an elbow as Lord Ermenwyr’s bodyguards genuflected.

Lord Ermenwyr snickered.

“Much as he was looking forward to joining the Boys’ Own Street Corner Brigade, it doesn’t look as though it’ll be necessary. The late unlamented Mr. Coppercut carried his private accounts book with him, as it turns out. Had more gold socked away in the First Bank of Mount Flame than Freskin the Dictator! Eyrdway’s quite taken with pretending to be a famous scandalmonger. Plans to masquerade as Coppercut a bit longer.”

“Is that safe?” Mrs. Smith inquired. “Given the enemies Mr. Coppercut had?”

“Probably not,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “If he’s sensible, he’ll hit the bank first, pay back Daddy, then party the rest of the fortune away before anyone suspects he’s an imposter. That’s what I told him to do. Will he listen? Or will I run into him in some low bar in six months’ time, ragged and grotesquely daubed with cosmetics, vainly attempting to interest potential buyers? I can but hope.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and smiled at it beatifically, as though he beheld a vision of fraternal degradation therein.

“You must have been horrible little children,” said Mrs. Smith, shaking her head.

“Utterly, dear Mrs. Smith.”

“Did your lord brother clean out your bathroom before he left?” Smith inquired cautiously.

“Of course he didn’t,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “He never cleans up any mess. That’s for law-abiding little shrimps like me, or so I was informed when I attempted to get him to at least take a sponge to the ring in the tub. I just smiled and offered him the contents of Mr. Coppercut’s traveling medicine chest. He was delighted, assuming it was full of recreational drugs. Since bothering to read labels is also only for law-abiding little shrimps, he’ll be unpleasantly surprised to learn that Mr. Coppercut suffered from chronic constipation.”

“So your bathroom…”

“Oh, don’t worry; I had the boys scrub down the walls. Only a medium could detect that anything unpleasant happened there now,” Lord Ermenwyr said.

“And the…”

“Got rid of them last night. We collected all the, er, odds and ends and crept down to your back area drain under cover of darkness. Dumped them in and pitched most of a barrel of Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder in after them. Poof!” Lord Ermenwyr blew smoke to emphasize his point. “All gone, except for a couple of indignant shades, and I gave them directions to the closest resort in Paradise, with my profound apologies and a coupon for two free massages at the gym. But, Smith, I meant to ask you—where does that drain empty out?”