Jess’s voice bellowed from the kitchen. ‘Chud says we ain’t got none o’ that crap!’
‘She’ll serve just fine, I think,’ Rallick murmured under his breath.
The squat man’s brows wrinkled, pained. ‘Oh dear. I must have been dreaming …’ A quick shrug. ‘Oh well. Biscuits and tea, then. Oh! And a crust of burnt toast for my friend here.’
Rallick could hear his clenched teeth grinding. ‘Kruppe, I just-’
A raised hand forestalled him. ‘Explain not, old friend! No need for explanations … please sit!’ Growling, Rallick pulled a chair out with his heel, eased down and leaned back, hands on his thighs. ‘Kruppe understands. Why, it is on everyone’s sighing lips these days, dear friend. The city’s two most deadly killers tamed by love’s soothing embrace!’
Rallick’s front chair legs struck the floor with a bang. ‘What?’
‘Do not worry! Kruppe’s feelings shall recover.’ He peeled a sliver of wrinkled dried fruit from the table, sniffed it, then popped it into his mouth. ‘Sustenance, Jess! We are positively expiring here!’ He shook his head, sighed dreamily. ‘It is an old story, yes, friend? Love is found and old friends are forgotten. Kruppe does not wonder why you have been neglectful of us these last months. The two of you haunt the rooftops in flighty trysts, no doubt. Like bats in love.’
‘Kruppe …’ Rallick ground out.
‘Soon a brood of baby killers to follow. I see it now. Knives in the crib and garrottes in the playpen.’
‘Kruppe!’
The fat man lifted his eyes to blink innocently up at Rallick. ‘Yes?’
‘I just want to know if Cro- Cutter is in town.’
‘Kruppe wonders …’ Something strangled the man’s voice and he choked. Pudgy fingers fished in his mouth, emerging with the mangled stringy sliver of fruit, which he then carefully smeared back on to the table. ‘Jess! One need not cross the Cinnamon Wastes for tea!’
The big woman emerged from the kitchen, tray in hand. Her white linen shirt had been hastily laced, revealing a great deal of flesh. She glared at Kruppe, thumped the tray down, nodded to Rallick. ‘Good to see you, sir.’
‘Jess. How’s Meese doing these days?’
‘She comes round most evenings.’
‘You manage?’
She pushed back her hair, waved to the empty tables. ‘I’m worked off my feet.’
Rallick also eyed the empty common room. He frowned as if struck by a new thought. The woman walked back to the kitchen doors, her hips rolling like ships at sea. Rallick cleared his throat. ‘Just who does own this place anyway, Kruppe?’
‘Friend Rallick was asking after young Cutter …’
Rallick slid his gaze back. ‘Yes?’
Kruppe peered into the depths of the teapot. ‘Kruppe wonders why.’
Snarling, Rallick stood, pushing back his chair. ‘Is he here or not?’
Lifting a knife and a biscuit, the little man peered up with a steady gaze. ‘Kruppe assures friend Rallick that equally loved young vagabond is most assuredly not in our fair city.’ He raised the biscuit. ‘Crumpet?’
Rallick’s chest, which had been clenched in one coiled breath since the inspection of certain wounds hours earlier, eased in a long exhalation, and he nodded, ‘Good … good.’
Kruppe’s eyes had narrowed in their pockets of fat. ‘Again — Kruppe wonders why.’
But Rallick had turned away. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He called to the kitchen. ‘Jess.’
Kruppe threw his arms wide. ‘But breakfast has only just arrived!’
Rallick pushed open the door in a bright wash of sunlight and walked out, the door swinging closed behind.
Shrugging, the fat man scooped up a smear of jam. ‘And to think Kruppe named impatient friend civilized. Kruppe was egregiously in error!’
In the harsh morning light Scholar Ebbin trudged up the muddy unpaved street of the pure-gatherers in the Gadrobi district. A dusty leather bag pulled at one shoulder and he wore a wide-brimmed hat yanked down firmly on his head. He stopped at a shuttered storefront of age-gnawed wood on worn stone foundations, banged on the solid door and waited. Across the street, between the cart traffic and crowds of market-goers, he noted the blue uniform of the Wardens. The sight was a surprise to him; while crime was endemic in this district, attention from the Wardens was rare. They had a wagon with them and appeared to be moving something.
The door vibrated as bars and locks were removed. It grated in its jambs to open a sliver. Darkness lay within. ‘Ah,’ a thin voice breathed, ‘it is you, good scholar. Enter.’
Ebbin edged in sideways and the door ground shut. In the relative dark he was blind for the moment but he could make out a hunched dark figure securing bars and bolts again. ‘You are ever mindful of thieves, Aman. Yet … rather a barrier to commerce, I would imagine.’
‘Darujhistan has fallen very far, good scholar,’ the bent man answered in his breathless voice. ‘Very far indeed. It is not like the old days of peace and strict adherence to the laws of its rulers. As for commerce … I service a select few who know where to find me, yes?’ He chuckled drily.
The unease that his visits here always engendered within Ebbin was not relieved by these comments. He thought of how his own whispered and circumspect enquiries into the subtleties of wardings, Warren-anchored barriers and the avoidance thereof led him step by step and source by source to this one man and his seemingly unpatronized shop. Yet to maintain appearances he answered genially enough, ‘Of course, Aman. Very select,’ and he laughed modestly as well.
Aman ushered him into the shop proper, one foot dragging in his crippled walk, back twisted from some accident of birth. His hands too were crippled — malformed and bent as if having been caught within some mangling instrument. He shuffled behind his counter where a raised platform allowed him to peer over it, looming like some sort of gangly bird of prey.
Ebbin’s vision was now adjusting to the permanent gloom in the shop, and he gently set his satchel on the counter.
‘You have something for me?’ Aman asked, cocking a brow already higher than its fellow.
‘Yes.’ He untied the leather strapping, eased out a wrapped object. ‘From the lowest I’ve gone so far.’
Setting the package between them, Ebbin carefully parted the thick felt outer wrappings then a sheer inner layer of silk to reveal what appeared to be nothing more than a fragment of eggshell, albeit one from an egg of impossibly huge dimensions. Aman bent forward even further, his canted nose almost touching the object. Seeing him up close Ebbin was struck by the deformed shape of his knobbly skull beneath its patchy pelt of filmy grey hair. Perhaps sensing his attention, Aman pulled away.
‘A magnificent specimen, good scholar. Beautiful.’ The shopkeeper lit a lamp from a wall-sconced lantern, set it on the counter. ‘May I?’ Ebbin gestured an invitation. For all his bent root-like fingers, the man lifted the fragment smoothly, held it before the flame. Ebbin crouched to peer: the flame was visible as a blurred glow through the fragment, which was astonishing enough, but the entire piece had somehow taken up the light and now glowed, warm, soft and luminous, like the dawn in miniature.
Aman sighed, almost nostalgically it seemed. ‘I invite you to imagine, if you would, good scholar, entire structures of such stone, carved and polished to near pure translucency, glowing with the cold blue flames of the city. A magnificent sight it must have been, yes?’
‘Yes. Darujhistan in the great Imperial Age of the Tyrants. At least, so it has been conjectured.’
The bulbous eyes moved to his, blinked. ‘Of course.’
‘Is it treated?’
Aman returned the piece to its cloths and began rewrapping it. ‘We shall see. It will have to be tested. Should it prove a fragment from a container utilized in certain, ah … esoteric … rituals from that age, then it may be resold for a great deal to those eager to reuse it for their own … well … similar research.’