He recognized the voice and wished to the gods he didn't. With his sword still at the ready, he straightened up. "Yeah, it's me. What do you want. Zip?" The Rankan waited while the PFLS leader came down the street. There was an ugly shadow across the young man's face-courtesy of the treachery he'd found at Chenaya's hands. He'd been proud that Sanctuary had never marked him. Those days were probably over.
"You keepin' your promises. Commander?"
Walegrin shifted his weight nervously and with evident distaste slid his sword back into its scabbard. "Yeah, I'm keeping promises. You got a problem you can't handle?"
There was no love lost between these men. Zip had wielded the ax that had hacked Illyra's gut open and broken her daughter in two. They'd meant to fight to the death that day-only Tempus's accidental intervention had stopped them. Walegrin judged it extremely likely that he'd finish the job someday; someday after Tempus was gone and Zip's absence wouldn't raise embarrassing questions.
"Not me personally-unless you lied to your priest and the Riddler both. Well, you coming with me?"
Liking it not at all, Walegrin fell in step behind Zip and followed him into the alleyways. The truth was, and the garrison commander knew it, that Zip's feelings were never very personal. He and Illyra had had a run-in more than a year ago and he'd stabbed her then-but that had had nothing to do with his attack on her daughter and neither had meant that Zip felt any more strongly about her than he felt about anyone. Tempus's Ratfall farce had probably secured Zip's loyalty and good behavior about as well as it could be secured.
There wasn't really any reason for Walegrin's sweat to go cold as they tunnelled through another cellar and he knew he'd not get back to a street he recognized without help before
sunrise.
They were at another of the PFLS safe-houses, an old, uninviting structure whose only doorway opened on a blind courtyard. Glancing at the rooftops, Walegrin knew they weren't a stone's throw from the Wideway-but he'd never imagined this house and its courtyard existed. He wondered how many other boltholes like this the PFLS retained and if even Tempus truly had them under control.
"It's upstairs," Zip called and vanished through the half-ruined doorway.
It took a few moments for Walegrin's eyes to adjust to the faint-shadowed darkness of the house. By the time they had, he'd heard the groaning and flailing about in the upper room- the room to which Zip was leading him. The Torch had offered to keep Zip and the two other piffles who had survived Chenaya's ambush in sanctuary at the palace until their wounds had healed. Zip had refused for both himself and his men; Walegrin figured he regretted it now.
Certainly the smell of blood was strong enough in the airless room they were crowded into. A lump-tallow candle provided sputtering, smoky light. Walegrin took the sconce from the wall and studied the place. He shoved a smaller man aside and headed for the comer where the whimpering was coming from, then brought himself up short.
"It's a woman!"
"It usually is," Zip replied. "She's been like this for three days. Around sunset we thought she was going to have it, finally. But it's only gotten worse. You gonna help?"
Walegrin knelt down and had his worst suspicions confirmed. This was no hell-cat PFLS fighter; this wasn't even the result of a private quarrel; no, this was a girl, a child really, lying on the filthy wood, her clothes long since torn and discarded, laboring to get a child out of her belly.
"Sweet Sabellia's tits," he swore softly.
The girl opened her eyes. She tried to say something to him but the sounds that came from her were too ragged for him to understand.
"I could stitch up a cut, maybe. Maybe get Thrush.... Shit on a stick. Zip-I can't do anything for her. I'm not a goddamned midwife." He stood up and took a step away.
"She needs a midwife," another voice told him, the man he'd pushed aside who was no more a man than the girl in the comer was a woman.
"She needs more than a midwife. She needs a bloody miracle!"
"We'll settle for a midwife," Zip countered.
"You're crazy. Zip. Three days she's been here? Three days? Maybe two days ago; maybe even at sunset she needed a midwife. You can't possibly move her; she's half-dead already."
"She's not!" the youth shouted, his outrage turning to tears. "She needs a midwife-that's all." He turned to Zip, not Walegrin. "You said-you said you'd find someone."
The PFLS leader's facade of uncaring arrogance cracked a bit-enough so the garrison commander could recognize a familiar despair. You made your men trust you so you could ask them to do the impossible and get results, but then they turned around and asked you to do the impossible as well. Walegrin didn't need to like, or even respect. Zip to sympathize with him.
"What about it? You know anyone?" Zip asked.
"Who'd come here? At this hour?"
Walegrin twisted his bronze circlet free, pushed the loose hair off his forehead, and blew a lungful of air through his teeth. The unborn baby chose that moment to send its mother into a back-wrenching arc of pain and terror. As she thrashed about Walegrin saw more than he wanted to see: a tiny leg dangling below the girl's crotch. Even he knew babes were supposed to enter the world the other way around.
He locked stares with Zip and racked his memory for a competent, but foolhardy, midwife.
Molin Torchholder had told him, back when he'd begun taking orders from the priest, that in the Rankan Empire a place's population was usually about fifteen times its tax roll. Until the coming of the Beysib, the Prince had collected taxes, or tried to collect taxes, from some four hundred citizens: Say 6,000 people in the city, not counting Beysibs and newcomers, and Walegrin knew, or could recognize, most of them.
He had a memory for faces and names; had made a hobby of it since his childhood right here in Sanctuary: Moreover his mind was sufficiently flexible to recognize people years after he'd last seen them. He'd recognized Zip, remembering him as a street tough about his own age-always surrounded by followers, always fighting, never winning. He'd recognized another not long ago: a lady living in moderate style and comfort near Weaver's Way.
"Maybe," he told them and headed for the door.
"I'll be going with you," Zip countered and preceded him down the stairs.
They left a different way than they'd come, squat-walking through a gap Walegrin would not have noticed without Zip to lead him. The safe-house shared a wall with a dilapidated warehouse. A warehouse which should have been empty, judging by the way Zip recoiled when they confronted the burning lamps and the little man coming toward them.
"Muznut!" Zip shouted and the bald little man came to a shame-faced stop.
Dressed in drab Sanctuary rags, it took Walegrin a moment to realize he was actually looking at a Beysib who was well-known to, if not exactly friendly with, the PFLS leader. He didn't recognize the foreigner, but he'd know him the next time they crossed paths.
"We share with them, for a price," Zip tried to explain. "Some fish want to get out of the water." He turned to the Beysib and snarled: "Get back to your tub boat, old man. You've got no business here after sundown!"
The man's eyes went wide and glassy, like he'd seen a ghost, then he turned and ran. Zip stood staring after him.
"Umm," Walegrin said, pretending disinterest. "I thought we were in a hurry. If this is your shortcut to Weaver's Way, I don't think much of it." He sniffed disdainfully, as the locals expected the Rankans to do, and took note of the smells in the air. Only one was worth remembering: distilled light oil such as he had smelled when Chenaya ambushed the PFLS and they'd retaliated with their fire-bottles.