There was a harsh ripping sound, and the wind blew suddenly cold about his knee.
Morveer peered down. His trouser-leg had caught upon a spike bent upwards well above the others, and torn almost as far as his rump. He thrashed his foot, trying to untangle it, but only succeeded in entrapping it more thoroughly.
"Damn it." Plainly, this had not been part of the plan. Faint smoke was curling now from the balustrade around which the rope was knotted. It appeared the acid was acting more swiftly than anticipated.
"Damn it." He swung himself back to the roof of the bank and perched beside the smoking knot, gripping the rope with one hand. He slid his scalpel from an inside pocket, reached forwards and cut the flapping cloth away from the spike with a few deft strokes. One, two, three and it was almost done, neat as a surgeon. The final stroke and—
"Ah!" He realised with annoyance, then mounting horror, that he had nicked his ankle with the blade. "Damn it!" The edge was tainted with Larync tincture and, since the stuff had always given him a swell of nausea in the mornings, he had allowed his resistance to it to fade. It would not be fatal. Not of itself. But it might cause him to drop off a rope, and he had developed no immunity to a flailing plunge onto hard, hard cobblestones. The irony was bitter indeed. Most practitioners of his profession were killed, after all, by their own agents.
He pulled one glove off with his teeth and fumbled through his many pockets for that particular antidote, gurgling curses around the leather, swaying this way and that as the chill wind gusted up and spread gooseflesh all the way down his bare leg. Tiny tubes of glass rattled against his fingertips, each one etched with a mark that enabled him to identify it by touch.
Under the circumstances, though, the operation was still a testing one. He burped and felt a rush of nausea, a sudden painful shifting in his stomach. His fingers found the right mark. He let the glove fall from his mouth, pulled the phial from his coat with a trembling hand, dragged the cork out with his teeth and sucked up the contents.
He gagged on the bitter extract, spluttered sour spit down onto the faraway cobbles. He clung tight to the rope, fighting dizziness, the black street seeming to tip round and round him. He was a child again, and helpless. He gasped, whimpered, clung on with both hands. As desperately as he had clung to his mother's corpse when they came to take him.
Slowly the antidote had its effect. The dark world steadied, his stomach ceased its mad churning. The lane was beneath him, the sky above, back in their customary positions. His attention was drawn sharply to the knots again, smoking more than ever now and making a slight hissing sound. He could distinctly smell the acrid odour as they burned through.
"Damn it!" He hooked both legs over the rope and set off, pitifully weak from the self-administered dose of Larync. The air hissed in his throat, tightened now by the unmistakable grip of fear. If the cord burned through before he reached the other side, what then? His guts cramped up and he had to pause for a moment, teeth gritted, wobbling up and down in empty air.
On again, but he was lamentably fatigued. His arms trembled, his hands shuffled, bare palm and bare leg burning from friction. Well beyond halfway now, and creeping onwards. He let his head hang back, sucking in air for one more effort. He saw Friendly, an arm out towards him, big hand no more than a few strides distant. He saw Day, staring, and Morveer wondered with some annoyance if he could detect the barest hint of a smile on her shadowy face.
Then there was a faint ripping sound from the far end of the rope.
The bottom dropped out of Morveer's stomach and he was falling, falling, swinging downwards, chill air whooshing in through his gaping mouth. The side of the crumbling building plunged towards him. He started to let go a mad wail, just like the one he made when they tore him from his mother's dead hand. There was a sickening impact that drove his breath out, cut his scream off, tore the cord from his grasping hands.
There was a crashing, a tearing of wood. He was falling, clawing at the air, mind a cauldron of mad despair, eyes bulging sightless. Falling, arms flailing, legs kicking helplessly, the world reeling around him, wind rushing at his face. Falling, falling… no further than a stride or two. His cheek slapped against floorboards, fragments of wood clattering down around him
"Eh?" he muttered.
He was shocked to find himself snatched around the neck, dragged into the air and rammed against a wall with bowel-loosening force, breath driven out in a long wheeze for the second time in a few moments.
"You! What the fuck?" Shivers. The Northman was, for some reason still obscure, entirely naked. The grubby room behind him was dimly lit by some coals banked up in a grate. Morveer's eyes wandered down to the bed. Murcatto was in it, propped up on her elbows, rumpled shirt hanging open, breasts flattened against her ribs. She peered at him with no more than a mild surprise, as if she'd opened her front door to see a visitor she had not been expecting until later.
Morveer's mind clicked into place. Despite the embarrassment of the position, the residual pulsing of mortal terror and the tingling scratches on his face and hands, he began to chuckle. The rope had snapped ahead of time and, by some freak but hugely welcome chance, he had swung down in a perfect arc and straight through the rotten shutters of one of the rooms in the crumbling house. One had to appreciate the irony.
"It seems there is such a thing as a happy accident after all!" he cackled.
Murcatto squinted over from the bed, eyes somewhat unfocused. She had a set of curious scars, he noticed, following the lines of her ribs on one side.
"Why you smoking?" she croaked.
Morveer's eyes slid to the husk-pipe on the boards beside the bed, a ready explanation for her lack of surprise at the unorthodox manner of his entrance. "You are confused, but it is easy to see why. I believe it is you that has been smoking. That stuff is absolute poison, you realise. Absolute—"
Her arm stretched out, limp finger pointing towards his chest. "Smoking, idiot." He looked down. A few acrid wisps were curling up from his shirt.
"Damn it!" he squeaked as Shivers took a shocked step back and let him fall. He tore his jacket off, fragments of glass from the shattered acid bottle tinkling to the boards. He scrabbled with his shirt, the front of which had begun to bubble, ripped it open and flung it on the floor. It lay there, smoking noticeably and filling the grubby chamber with a foul reek. The three of them stared at it, by a turn of fate that surely no one could have anticipated, all now at least half-naked.
"My apologies." Morveer cleared his throat. "Plainly, this was not part of the plan."
Repaid in Full
Monza frowned at the bed, and she frowned at Shivers in it. He lay flat out, blanket rumpled across his stomach. One big long arm hung off the edge of the mattress, white hand lying limp on its back against the floorboards. One big foot stuck from under the blanket, black crescents of dirt under the nails. His face was turned towards her, peaceful as a child's, eyes shut, mouth slightly open. His chest, and the long scar across it, rose and fell gently with his breathing.
By the light of day, it all seemed like a serious error.
She tossed the coins at Shivers and they jingled onto his chest and scattered across the bed. He jerked awake, blinking around.
"Whassis?" He stared blearily down at the silver stuck to his chest.