We found Droit outside, his borrowed sword drawn and another body lying at his feet. The general was talking to a very wary Sergeant Connas. The tense set of her shoulders relaxed when she saw me walk up.
“General Droit’s with you, Captain?”
“Yeah, I got ambushed and these two helped me escape. There, uh, there was a fire, but the building’s safe now. I don’t think the damage is too bad.”
“Yes, sen.” Her face was neutral. “Should I fill out a report?”
“Might want to send some building inspectors in, but I’ll do the paperwork, thanks. It’s sentinel business.” I looked down at the unmasked corpse. Another sentinel I knew vaguely from the Vigilance. I looked back up at the sergeant. “Don’t suppose you’d be comfortable keeping all this to yourself for now?”
“You’ll owe me three beers.”
“Done,” I promised. “In fact, I’ll owe you an all-night drinking binge, if you give me a hand.”
“With what, Captain?
“Two things. First, there’s been a rash of missing kids down in Dockside; have you heard anything about it?”
“I read your report. Clerks are already pulling the records from this summer and compiling a missing-persons list as follow-up.”
“Perfect. Second, I’m going to interview a suspect this evening, and I might need backup if more of these masked clowns show up. Will you be on duty?”
“No, sen. Where should I meet you?”
I grinned and asked her to keep her ears open around Dockside that night and she nodded and promised to bring along a few buddies who had nothing better to do than hang out in the bad part of town drinking cheap gin.
After she saluted and left, I turned to Droit.
“Kill any others?”
“Two got away. One will have a bandage on his left arm, and the other has a nice long cut along their scalp.” He shrugged. “I’m rusty.”
“At least it’ll make them easy to identify.” I sighed. “The three you killed are all Vigilance sentinels.”
“What did they want with you?”
“They’re some kind of anti-Reverence cult recruiting members. When I told them I wasn’t the joining type, they decided to nix me and I called you.” I gave him a sidelong look. “Thanks for showing up.”
“You said you didn’t know me well enough to call me.”
“That was then.”
Droit nudged the body with the toe of his boot.
“I hope you don’t intend to abuse this newfound power of yours.”
“Nope. Wouldn’t want you thinking there’s anything special between us.”
That startled a smirk from him.
“Did you have any luck chasing down Jack Rake?” I pressed.
“He gave us a location; I’m not sure it’s going to be useful.”
I turned to Axton. “Is he still alive?”
He shook his head, which is what I’d figured.
“Dammit, Droit!”
He shrugged.
“Now Cislunar has one less flesh vendor to worry about.”
“Nice. Real professional. Why didn’t you stop him, Ax?”
Axton looked puzzled.
“Why?”
Great. Maybe teaming up the only-slightly-reformed Butcher and a jailbird anatomist hadn’t been such a smart idea. On the other hand, they’d just saved my life, so I couldn’t gripe too much. I muttered under my breath, then shrugged it off. No use crying over spilled blood.
“All right. We better get these bodies under wraps, especially since you just killed one with an unlicensed weapon.”
Droit sheathed the sword. “I’m sure there’s a license for it somewhere.”
“Does the constable who owned it want it back?”
“I’ll return it tomorrow.”
“We can take the bodies to my place, captain,” Axton suggested. “Nobody will ask any questions.”
I filled them in on my half of the investigation as we hunted down a wagon. Within half an hour we’d carted the three corpses back to Axton’s cellar apartment, where he laid them in a back room. His place was as spartan as Droit’s, but the emptiness in his rooms had the air of abject poverty rather than lifestyle choice. The only thing he owned in abundance was paper: a handful of dog-eared books and lots and lots of pages of handwritten notes and sketches. The place was filthy and reeked of mildew and the sewers. Kinda explained his own distinctive odor.
“What are you going to do with them?” I asked as he closed the door.
“Do you need them back?”
I grappled with my conscience again and then shook my head. My conscience was a weakling. He gave a quick nod.
“I’ll pickle the organs, boil off the flesh, rewire the bones, and sell the articulated skeletons to medical students at the University.”
“I — swell.” I ran a hand over my face. His answer had been a little too fast and easy and my conscience came up swinging. “Look, wait on that, okay? I should find out if they got families first.”
“All right.” He hesitated. “But I’ll need to do something soon, before they rot.”
“It’s getting late,” Droit said, before I could come up with any kind of reply. “We’re supposed to be finding that girl of yours, aren’t we?”
“Milka, yeah. Aronson said he’d meet us there. Unless he was one of the sentinels who got away.”
Droit smiled nastily at the thought, and I hoped like hell that Aronson didn’t show up with any fresh injuries.
By the time we got to the Cock and Ball, the sun had set and the cold was as bitter as a jealous wife’s heart. Aronson was standing in the doorway, wearing a heavy cashmere coat, leather gloves, and a dark hat. He was reading the Sun-Herald, one of those nicely printed high-class newspapers, and he looked completely out of place.
“Hey, pal. Mind taking off your hat and gloves?”
He gave me a quizzical look, folding the paper, and then complied with my request. No rings, no bandages. Droit reached over and pulled down his collar. No chains around his neck that might carry a ring, either. Then he punched the Nobilis’s left arm.
Aronson winced, but not as much as he would if he’d had a fresh wound, and gave his cousin a sharp look.
“If you want to start something, Tegeus, you’ll find that I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
“Easy, you two,” I said, before Droit could answer. I explained what had happened and Aronson called me a name for suspecting him and I let it slide because I would have been offended by the accusation, too, and then we all went into the tavern. Droit marched purposefully toward a corner table. The three men already there looked at him and at my brass Watch badge and at our two silver Vigilance pins and grabbed their drinks and cleared out.
Droit took the chair by the wall. I pulled out a cigar and offered one to the Nobilis, who declined.
No sign of Milka’s sister. We settled in to wait.
“What will happen once we find her?” Axton ventured at last, toying with his mug of ale. “Will the Vigilance take her, or will she be handed to the justice system?”
“If she’s calling transients, she’s a sentinel. The murder file will get pulled and sealed and filed as closed, without her name ever getting written down. The Vigilance will pay the vics’ families some hush money if it has to, but it sounds to me like nobody misses the bastards.”
“Then the Vigilance is still that powerful,” he whispered, as if to himself.
“Always has been. It ain’t nice and it ain’t legal, but it’s the way the world works.”
“And in return for a clean record and training, Milka will work for the Vigilance the rest of her life.” Droit’s eyes never stopped watching the crowd behind us. “You didn’t escape the gangs of your childhood, Lorencz. You simply joined a bigger one.”
“Don’t blow hot air,” I dismissed him. “There’s a big difference between the gangs and the Vigilance. For one thing, I was given a choi–” I stopped as I remembered the ‘choice’ I’d just been offered by my peers. Droit’s lips twitched.
“After we retrieve Milka, we can set aside the murder cases,” Aronson said, glossing over the moment. “However, we’ll still have two questions left. First, is any of this linked to nix smuggling, and second, what is keeping the Line from repairing itself?”
“And third, what’s with the group that nabbed me?” I added. “They threatened to nix me, themselves.”
“Maybe they’re involved in the hopscotch murders,” Droit suggested. “Maybe they’re behind everything.”
“I hope not, because that means the Vigilance is pretty damn compromised.” I ground out what was left of my smoke on the table. “But I don’t trust coincidence.”
“Can anything be done about the damage to the Line?” Axton asked.
“The Vigilance has sent out a request to suspend all but necessary calls,” Aronson replied. “The best thing we can do is to give the Line time to repair itself.”
“That fight in the tenement didn’t help,” I admitted. Aronson tapped his fingers on the tabletop, frowning.
“I’m going to look into this, Captain Lorencz. I sit on the Vigilance’s board — if we have a sentinel conspiracy on our hands, it’s my job to stop it. Especially if their ‘experiments’ have anything to do with the damage to the Line.”
“Shouldn’t we go after them instead of the girl, then?” Droit asked, looking brighter at the possibility of impending violence.
“Look, there’s only one case here that all four of us are on,” I reminded them, knocking back my small beer and shuddering. It tasted like barley water. “Officially, I’m looking for nix smugglers and Droit’s my backup. Aronson, the Vigilance and Line problems are all yours. Ax … hell, I ain’t even supposed to be working with you. The ME’s not happy with you. Not that I don’t appreciate you coming in and getting my arse out of that burning building, mind you, which is more than Droit bothered to do.”
“So what does that mean? You’re dismissing us?” Aronson asked, sounding nettled. “That’s rather high-handed, after getting us involved in the first place.”
“You ain’t involved; that’s the point. I called you in when I saw the pall and I called Axton in when I saw the body, and that was that. Now we grab Milka, hand her to the Vigilance, and the hopscotch case is closed.” I sighed. “All I’ve gotta do after that is find the nix.”
“Which involves me again,” the Nobilis said, sounding satisfied that he wasn’t being dismissed like an unwanted servant, after all.
“Except,” Axton added in a soft voice, “we don’t have Milka yet.”
Resigned, I stood and walked over to the bar and asked for Lotta, sliding a farthing across to expedite matters.
“Ain’t seen her around lately.” The girl took the coin. “I’ll send ’er back to you if she comes in.”
“Who, Lotta?” A red-haired drab at a small table looked up. She was drinking with two other women, all of them underdressed for the cold. She eyed me with a combination of suspicion and pity, her sharp eyes flickering over my brass badge and silver pin. “What you want her for?”
“Nothing bad,” I said, walking over to their table. “I just want to ask her a few questions and I’m paying for the answers. Any idea where I can find her or her kid sister Milka?”
The women exchanged looks and I got a bad feeling.
“Lotta’s dead,” one said at last. “She died a fortnight ago.”
I cussed and pulled up a chair. “What happened?”
“Cully carved her up with a knife,” the red-head said. “You want to arrest someone, brassy? Pull in Wry Dick, that bastard.” She leaned over and spat on the floor.
“Wry Dick.” I drew in a deep breath and let it trickle back out through my teeth. “You don’t need to worry about Wry Dick. He got himself killed last night.”
That news won general approbation from the women, who clanked their tankards to toast his demise. While they celebrated, I mused darkly about Lotta dying two weeks ago, around the same time Shaze moved out of his apartment.
“What about her little sister?” I asked, more determined than ever to find her. “Milka, right?”
More exchanged glances.
“Aw, the kid got herself a cove,” the red-head told me. “I heard some fancy gent took her in.”
“Who?” I demanded.
Headshakes and shrugs. I pulled out one of the conspirators’ rings. “Did he wear a ring like this?”
“I ain’t never seen him.” The woman glanced up at me, frowning. “You think he’s trouble?”
“Ain’t they all?” one of her friends cracked.
“I don’t know yet,” I replied seriously. “Did you catch his name?”
“Milka didn’t tell us nothin’ except to give us Lotta’s gear and say she found herself someplace to stay. We figured she done good. She ain’t all that pretty, but I guess she had what he wanted.”
“Big tits,” one of the other women said sagely. “That little girl’s gonna have herself a rack when she grows out. Lotta did.”
“Lotta What-You-Want,” the other woman said fondly. “Kyrchye keep her.” They raised their tankards again to toast their dead friend.
I glanced back at the table where my companions were sitting. They were watching me with interest.
“Look, I really need to find her. Do you know anyone who might still be in touch with her?”
“Lessee.” The red-head pursed her lips, thinking. “You might try the parish ward. She spent last winter in a workhouse.”
“Yeah, Lotta got the shakes and sent Milka there to keep her fed,” another nodded. “Girl musta stayed a few months. Maybe she made some friends.”
“Anything else?”
They shrugged, and I couldn’t tell if they were withholding information or honestly not sure.
“Thank you.” I stood and set down a pound note. “My name’s Arcady Lorencz, and I work over at the Bright Street station.”
“Lorencz? The Firebitch? You the one burned down that building last summer!”
I nodded. The women laughed, but it didn’t sound mean, so I left them to it and walked back to my table to fill them in.
“Do you think Milka’s new patron is one of your conspirators?” Aronson asked, sounding distressed again by the whole child-whore thing.
“I think he’s Shaze,” I said, grimly. “The timeline works.”
“Talk me through it,” he prompted.
“Okay, let’s say Milka’s a sentinel who’s just beginning to manifest. Somehow she learns how to call this guy Far and starts teaching other kids. A guy knifes her sister and she’s suddenly out on the street. Shaze takes her in … I don’t know, maybe he heard about her ability? She finally finds Wry Dick, maybe with Shaze’s help, and calls up this Far person, the kiddy killer-for-hire. He kills Dick.”
“Wry Dick was one of the child-slavers Arlin fingered,” Droit said. “Maybe he tried to kidnap her.”
“If you’d kept Jack Rake alive, we coulda asked him about it.”
“I have an address we can look into tomorrow.”
“Fine.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “And we need to know more about the kidnapped children, and we need to find Shaze.”
“Let me ask around about Shaze,” Aronson said, standing. “I’ll see if I can find somebody who knows him well enough for a call.”
“Sergeant Connas said they’re pulling together a list of names.” I groaned and stood. “Should we meet tomorrow to compare notes?”
Everyone seemed to like that plan, so we headed out, Aronson nearly calling himself a balesteed before I reminded him that we were supposed to be preserving the Line. He didn’t look happy as he began the long walk out of Dockside to a neighborhood where he could hire a coach. I walked back to my flat with Droit, checking the address Jack Rake had given him in the battered old pocket atlas I’d picked up from Jim Hanks.
We stopped as we regarded the shattered door to my flat. Droit slipped in first, blades in hand.
“It’s clear,” he announced a moment later. “But somebody smeared shit all over your walls.”
“Swell,” I muttered, stepping inside and looking at the wreckage. “I been meaning to repaint, anyway.”