‘But then you said you weren’t going to let me have lots of men in the city, so what’s the point of me going with you anywhere? You’ll end up just like Ma, chaining me in some cellar! What are you doing with that?’
He advanced on her, hefting the candlestick. ‘Is that how you really want it? You want me to hire you out for the night, to whoever’s got the coin?’
‘Oh, will you? Yes, please! What are you doing with that candlestick?’ she backed up on the bed. ‘How many bodies have you buried behind the tax office, that’s what I’m wondering now!’
‘Don’t be silly. Tax collectors want people to live forever, of course. Getting older and older, so we can strip from them every single hard-won coin.’
‘Put that thing down!’
‘Oh, I’ll put something down all right. Count on it.’ He raised the candlestick.
Red leapt at his face.
He swung with all his strength.
Emancipor Reese clawed fruitlessly at the lock on the door. Behind him, Feloovil laughed a deep, throaty laugh. ‘It’s no use, Mancy, we’ve got you for the night, and when I say we’re going to cover your body in kisses, I do mean it, don’t I? Kisses and bites and nips and—’
‘Open this damned door!’ Emancipor snarled, spinning round and reaching for his sword.
But Feloovil had raised one hand. ‘Shh! Listen! I hear voices in my daughter’s room! Voices! Gods below, it’s Spilgit!’ She collected up her tunic from the floor and began pulling it on. ‘That’s it, he’s a dead man for this. And I’m calling in his tab, too. Can’t pay, can’t leave, ever. Can’t pay, it’s the backyard for you!’
Edging away from the door as Feloovil produced a key from somewhere beneath her tunic, Emancipor drew his shortsword. ‘Good, open it, aye. Before things get ugly here.’
‘Ugly?’ She barked a laugh. ‘You’re about to see ugly, Mancy, like no ugly you’ve ever seen in that miserable, sheltered existence you call a life.’ She unlocked the door.
They were startled by a loud thump on the wall, followed by broken plaster striking the floor beside Feloovil’s bed.
Something had come through the wall, halfway to the ceiling. As the dust cloud cleared, Emancipor saw a lizard cat’s head, its nose draining blood, its eyes blinking but not synchronously. It seemed to be winking at them.
With Feloovil standing motionless, staring at the cat’s head, Emancipor made his move, pushing hard to get past her and into the corridor. Without a look back, he rushed for the stairs. Behind him he heard Feloovil bellow, and someone else was now screaming. Reaching the stairs, Emancipor plunged downward – and coming fast behind him was another set of footsteps. Growling a curse, Emancipor looked back over one shoulder. But it was Spilgit who was on his way down, with Feloovil thundering after him.
Reaching the ground floor, Emancipor ran down the length of the bar to the door.
It opened then, revealing Hordilo, who pointed a finger at Emancipor and said, ‘You!’
Despite the bitter cold, the half-frozen sand Whuffine turned over with his shovel stank of urine. He’d already excavated a decent hole, and had begun to wonder if his memory had failed him, when his shovel struck something hard. Redoubling his efforts, he quickly worked the object loose, and lifted into view a pitted and suitably stained stone idol. Grunting, he heaved it out of the pit and set it down on the sand for a closer look.
It had been a few years since he’d buried the thing beneath his piss trench, but the chisel work now looked centuries old. Come the spring, after the winter’s hard weathering, he could load it onto his cart and take it into the village. If anything, this one was better than the last effort, and hadn’t Witch Hurl paid a bagful of silver coins for that one? For all he knew, Fangatooth might be just as happy to kneel in worship before an idol from the Ancient Times.
The creation of true art had a way of serendipity, and if he hadn’t snapped off a nipple on the final touches with the last one, he’d never have found the need to rework it into a mouth instead, and then do the same to the other nipple, inventing a whole new goddess of earth, sex, milk and whatever. This time, he had elaborated on the theme, adding a third mouth, down below.
Hearing more voices from the beach, he climbed out of the stinking pit and brushed gritty sand from his hands.
The boat was back, and this time the three sailors were piling out to scrabble their way up towards the trail, the bandaged one limping and already falling behind the others.
Collecting his shovel, Whuffine awaited them.
‘Come to your senses, did you? No wonder. There’s another blow coming in …’
But the three simply swept past, gasping, moaning and whimpering as they hurried up the trail. Whuffine stared after them, frowning. ‘I’ve got warm broth!’ he shouted, to no effect. Shrugging, he set down the shovel again and collected up the idol. He’d walk it down to the water, off to the left of the sands where the rocks made ragged spines reaching out into the bay. Lodged amidst those rocks, the idol would sit, gnawed by salt and cold and hard waves day and night for the next few months.
Whuffine was halfway to the spines when he saw the other boat, coming in fast.
Gasping in pain, Spilgit limped up the street. If Feloovil hadn’t stumbled at the last moment, that knife would have found his back instead of his right calf. Shivering with shock, he approached his office. It took a strange person to decide to become a tax collector, and over the past month he had come to the conclusion that maybe he wasn’t cut out for it.
He thought back to his days in Elin, when he was first apprenticed to the trade. Taxation in a city ruled by pirates was a bold notion, to be sure, and its practice was a vicious affair. They’d all trained in weapons and the detection of poison, and a few of his fellow apprentices had indeed plunged into the grey arts. On one day each year, the day that taxes were due, not even the Enclave bodyguards attached to each and every collector could be trusted. Spilgit’s final year in the city had seen almost sixty per cent losses in the Guild, and more than one chest of tax revenue disappeared in the chaos.
He’d thought this distant posting would be a welcome escape from the horrors of Elin’s Day of Blood and Taxes. He’d displayed few of the necessary talents to imagine a long and prosperous life in Elin as a tax collector. He wasn’t coldhearted enough. He lacked the essential knot of cruelty in his soul, the small-minded descent into arbitrary necessities upon which collectors founded their arguments justifying blatant theft and the bullying and threats essential to successful extortion. Instead, he had revealed a soft ear for sob stories, for terrible tragedies and sudden house fires and mysterious burglaries and missing coin. He wept for the limping man tottering on his stick, for the snotty runts clinging to a destitute mother smelling of wine and sour milk, for the wealthy landowner swearing that he had not a single coin in his purse.
The worst of it was, he had actually believed that the taxes he collected went to answering worthy needs, and all the necessities of governance and the maintenance of law and order, when in truth most of it filled the war-chests of gouty nobles whose only talent was hoarding.
No, this journey into the empty wastelands out here in the realm’s dubious borderlands had taught him much, about himself, and about the world in general. Feloovil’s attempted murder would go unpunished. She offered too essential a service in Spendrugle. He, Spilgit, was the unwanted man.
Pushing open the door to his office, he staggered inside and made his way to the lone chair. The wood-stove still emanated remnants of heat and he fed more scraps of driftwood onto the coals. But that was all before today. I’m not the same man I used to be. I’m not soft anymore. I am now capable of murder, and when I return to Elin, with that idiotic lovely cow in tow, why, I will sell her and feel not a single qualm, since she’ll be blissfully happy.