CHAPTER 2 #2
The silence got uncomfortable. The muffled sounds of prisoners talking and moving around in the other rooms didn’t help. Slate dug for another handkerchief, didn’t find one, and tried to locate an unobtrusive patch of sleeve.
The warden cleared his throat. “It’s not too late to put him back.”
The door opened, and Caliban came through. He looked considerably better in the clean clothes, which were too large rather than too small. He was still dirty and bedraggled and his beard was truly unfortunate, but now he only looked very bad instead of like death warmed over.
A decent bath and a shave, and we might aspire to “human.” Or, err, demon. Something.
He can’t still be possessed. They wouldn’t put him in a regular prison if he had a demon in him. He’d be so loaded down with spells and irons that he couldn’t sneeze without banishing himself.
Well, assuming he was even possessed in the first place. He might just be mad, after all.
He seems sane enough at the moment, except for the twitchiness. ‘Course, if I was in a cell for a season, I’d likely be twitchy myself.
Slate was probably the only one who noticed the way Caliban paused before stepping through the doorway, as if he still could not quite believe that there were such things as open doors before him.
“Right!” said Slate brightly, turning to the warden. “I assume you have something for me to sign?”
“What? Err…yes…” The warden rummaged through a stack of papers on his desk, then in a desk drawer. Slate read a few, upside down, and picked one out.
“This it?”
“Oh, yes, err…”
She signed it with a flourish. Paperwork, at least, Slate understood. “And a copy for me, and one for you, and…excellent!” She folded hers up, saluted with the corner, and strolled out of the guardroom.
Her heart was pounding. It usually pounded when she offered people documents, but generally that was because she had forged them and was waiting to see if she’d get caught. It was interesting to learn that being on the correct side of legality didn’t help much.
The warden didn’t stop them. Slate hadn’t expected him to. Once papers were signed, people seemed to give up. It was a strange sort of magic.
The door led to a hallway, which led to another hallway, and then to a flight of stairs with a pair of guards. Sir Caliban fell into step behind her, a pace back and to her left, a practiced distance. He’s probably been an honor guard more times than I can count. Slate’s lips twitched.
What the guards might have thought of the small, drab woman and her grim escort was anyone’s guess.
She wondered if they even recognized that he was a famous mass murderer.
Guards tended to rotate regularly—prison duty was a punishment, not a reward—and many of them might not even recognize him on this side of the bars.
Of course, anyone with an ounce of sense ought to recognize that a grimy man in ill-fitted clothes, who paced like a bodyguard, was not in the normal run of events. But that was bureaucracy for you. Get past the first layer of guards, present official-looking paperwork, and nobody asked questions.
They swept by the guards unchallenged. Slate felt a small bubble of triumph, or possibly hysteria.
There were more corridors and more halls and more guards. None of them challenged her, even when they left the prison and entered a corridor more suited to a palace.
“This really is foolishness,” said Caliban in an undertone behind her. “The warden should have given you guards—an escort—something. Letting a woman walk out of here with a murderer—I’d have his skin if he were serving under me.”
He sounded genuinely outraged. Slate had to laugh.
“Relax, mister murderer, you’re not getting off that lightly.”
She turned her head as she spoke, in time to catch his grimace.
“Sorry. Sir Murderer, should I say?”
“Whatever you like, madam,” he said, not meeting her eyes.
Still raw. He can say it, but he doesn’t like it when I do. Interesting. Not surprising, but the way he speaks, you’d think he’d hide it better. Ah, well.
“Here we are.” She turned down another, narrower hallway, and knocked on a door at the bottom of a shallow step. Caliban stood behind her, feet apart, his hands folded behind him.
Good lord, is that parade rest? I think it is.
Brenner is going to have a field day.
She knocked on the door again, a bit louder.
“Enter,” said a voice from inside.
The room was small and cluttered and full of papers. The Captain of the Guard, an iron-haired, iron-eyed man, looked up when she entered.
“I beg your—oh, it’s you. Do you have a report, Mistress Slate?”
“Sir. Uh.” What was the proper military form for this sort of report?
To hell with it, I’m a civilian, even if they’ve drafted me into this lunacy. They can bloody well deal with it. “I…err…found one.”
The Captain nodded. “Very well, then.”
Caliban hung back at the doorway for just a moment, then stepped into the room as hesitantly as if it were cold water.
“God’s balls!”
“A pleasure to see you as well, Captain,” said Caliban, inclining his head. One hand went to his side, as if to touch a non-existent sword-hilt, then dropped.
Slate was pretty sure that no one in the room missed that. She waited for the captain to turn to her and demand an explanation, or demand that Caliban be sent back to his cell or—well, something.
After a minute, while the two men continued to stare at each other like two tigers in a very small cage, Slate stopped holding her breath.
Can’t they yell at each other or have a manly hug or something and get it over with?
She read some of the papers upside down on the Captain’s desk while she waited. Most of them had to do with duty rosters. There was an interesting one about a sweep of the gutterside slums. Apparently unlicensed prostitution was up. She hadn’t known that.
“My god, Caliban, you look like hell.”
Slate glanced up, and saw the Captain staring at the former knight with an expression less of horror than chagrin.
Hmm, they really do know each other. I suppose there’s no reason a Captain of the Guard wouldn’t know a famous temple knight. Maybe they worked together doing…knight…stuff…
“I’ve been possessed, arrested, exorcised, and locked in a cell for four months. There’s a dead demon rotting somewhere in the back of my soul. What do you expect?”
That does sound unpleasant. Hmm, I wonder what a rotting demon’s like? Maybe he smells it the way I smell rosemary.
God, that’d be awful. Poor bastard.
Slate went back to reading. It looked like the Stone Bitches were about to get arrested. That was a shame, really: they’d hired her a time or two to produce false bills of sale. Decent people. Understood craftsmanship.
“Ah. Yes.” The Captain actually seemed to be at a bit of a loss. He glanced over at Slate, cleared his throat, and gathered up his papers. “I didn’t expect—are you sure you want—?”
“Yes,” said Slate.
“Yes,” said Caliban.
There was an awkward silence. Slate wondered which one of them he’d actually been talking to.
Deprived of other people’s mail to read, she studied her feet again.
“Well.” The Captain dropped his papers and ran a hand through his hair. “You realize, Lord—Sir Caliban, you would be answering to Mistress Slate here. She is nominally in charge of your mission, by the Dowager’s order. You’d—ah—support and render aid. And so forth.”
Caliban made a small, ironic bow in her direction. “Madam.”
Slate glanced at the Captain, wondering if he’d hoped that would be a deal breaker. Apparently it wasn’t. The Captain sighed.
“Sit down. I’ll call for the…ah… hell.”
With this fragmentary statement, the Captain swept out of the room. Caliban looked after him. Slate wondered if he’d noticed himself flinching back from the man’s movement.
“Hmm,” the paladin said.
“If you make a run for it, you could probably get out of the palace,” she said by way of conversation. “I don’t know if you can kill the front guards barehanded, but it’s probably worth a shot. I’d leave the city right away, mind you.”
He looked at her, his eyes widening.
“Just a thought.” She sat down on the edge of the desk and began reading the warrants for the Stone Bitches again.
“You’re a very odd woman,” he said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
The door opened again. The Captain ushered a heavyset man inside. He was bald, with the variegated pattern of shine indicating that he was probably shaving his head to avoid showing how badly his hair was thinning. His thick fingers were wrapped around the handle of a large leather case.
“Sit,” the Captain ordered Caliban. And: “Stop reading my mail.”
Caliban quirked an eyebrow and sat. The bald man knelt next to the chair and rolled up the sleeve of the knight’s tunic. Slate stopped reading the Captain’s mail, put one heel up on the desk and hugged her knee to her chest.
The bald man opened his case, and took out a set of needles and a jar of black ink. A wave of rosemary welled up and smacked Slate across the nose.
Gods, I go months without this happening, and now this. Dammit, Grandma, if they hadn’t burned you at the stake, I’d light you myself.
“I’m getting a tattoo,” said Caliban evenly. “Why?”
The Captain pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Let me start at the beginning. You know that we’re losing the war with Anuket City, I assume?”
Caliban smiled sourly. “They weren’t admitting that when I got locked up, but most of us suspected.”
“We’re still not admitting it, but yes, we are. The problem is the Anuket troops—the Clockwork Boys, as they call ‘em. As fast as the army cuts them down—which frankly isn’t very fast—more show up. They’re not human. We don’t know how to stop them except sheer brute dismemberment.”
Slate could feel her eyes watering. She snuffled.
“Here.” The Captain dug through papers and came up with a hunk of debris. It looked like a cross between the inside of a clock and a piece of drift wood. Tiny gears and cogwheels encrusted the sides like barnacles.