13.

2^ND EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE EMPIRE CLUB, CORMA

Tucker Pettigrew was busy sweeping a pile of chadras chits into his sorting tray when the woman slid into the seat across from him. He didn’t pay her much mind. The chits were all kinds of odd shapes—octagons and triangles and half-moons and such—and he knew from experience that if he didn’t keep an eye on their clattersome trip from his winnings pile to his sorting tray, they’d go caroming off into every dark corner of the crowded card house.

Stupid foreign game, chadras. He could play it well enough, sure. Well enough he’d emptied three other men’s trays and sent them packing after just two hours of play. The automatic trays, which could count up a body’s winnings with all manner of clever clockwork tricks, were interesting little gadgets, no doubt, but Tucker made his living keeping ledgers and locks sealed tight. The thought of a simple tray replacing any part of his job seemed patently ridiculous. But it was what all the best card houses were changing out to, and so he’d been stuck with it, and damned if his fingers seemed a mite too drunk to funnel all the chits in without a spill.

Tucker blinked, staring at the strange woman in the chair opposite. His stare turned into a squint. She smiled.

A wine stem neck and a close-clipped burr of hair. Chestnut eyes and dark, lacquer-smooth skin. The smile was a spare, slight thing, as carefully policed as a street corner in Coventry Passage. She wore a tab-collared jacket of an almost military cut, a pin bearing globe, book, and scales dotting the space just below the thumbprint of her throat.

Ecclesiastical Commission, Tucker thought, first. And, Huh, next.

“Hello,” she said.

Tucker sniffed. “H’lo. You’ll need at least one more to start the table again. Prob’ly want to check the rules if you mean to—”

“I’m Reverend Doctor Deliverance Tegura.”

Tucker fumbled his tray on the felt-topped table. His winnings hopped and clattered inside their maze of pins, but they stayed put. The tray’s clockwork counter spun up a figure he could just blearily make out. Fascinating device, that tray. He wondered how it measured its contents. By weight? Contact points on the tray? He shook his head, remembering the woman belatedly.

“Didn’t ask your name,” he muttered.

“That’s true,” Deliverance Tegura agreed. “But the social graces require both a greeting and an introduction, and I thought at least one of us ought to observe them.”

Tucker pushed back from the table, wobbled, and stood straight. He was in uniform, too, though an accountant-turnkey’s Oldtemple uniform was nothing much compared to a proper EC getup. He was government. The EC wasn’t law and order—it was something more than that, something outside of it, or above it. Adjacent to it. He didn’t rightly know. Most folks seemed to think his uniform called for him answering to the likes of this woman. Tonight, he wasn’t in the mood. He’d won, and gloated, and now he wanted to take his chits off to the exchequer and see them turned into proper clink.

“Well, hello an’ goodbye, and I’m Tucker Pettigrew, by the bye. ’Night, your Reverendfulness.”

“I was hoping to buy you a drink.”

Her expression hadn’t changed. This wasn’t an advance. Tucker wouldn’t have believed himself so lucky. He’d spent the last twenty years keeping books and locks in Oldtemple prison. It was an ugly place. He knew very well the ugliness it had imprinted on him in return. Pinch-faced, pale, and prone to snappish smallness. It had been years since he’d had a woman for anything other than coin.

Tucker snorted. “Bit late for that. Might be topped off for the night.”

“Dinner, then? I need a little of your time, Master Pettigrew, and I would like to make it worth your while.”

Tucker considered the contents of his tray. He shrugged.

“They do meals on the floor below.”

They went downstairs, slipping past smoky tables crowded round with other patrons looking to fill their trays. It didn’t much matter to Tucker what the woman wanted. He had a few guesses what she’d come to him for. Bribery was likeliest. There was probably someone on his level of Oldtemple she wanted sprung fast and cheap, or maybe buried deeper in the red ledger. Names and records confused, or lost. He’d done it all. Not often enough that he made a show of it, not like those other crank-headed twats working the debtors’ prison. One, a turnkey named Wallace—or had it been Willis?—came up with a fee structure, and had been dim enough to have it printed on little paste cards for the convenience of his would-be clientele. He was in a cell of his own, now, but on one of the prison hulks rusting out in Misery Bay.

Tucker ordered a mince pie, an ale, and a plate of curried potato crisps. Deliverance Tegura ordered bitter chocolate over ice and milk, though she spent more time stirring than drinking it.

She let him plow through half the potatoes and three bites of pie before she bothered with questions beyond the how-do-you-dos of his job. The food was sponging up his sour mood and the stale drink clouding his thoughts. The questions, he realized, were not about confirming he was an Oldtemple turnkey, but that he was a specific turnkey.

“Do you remember a debtor named Clara Downshire, Master Pettigrew?”

“I do, yeah. Paid out around the end of last year. Hard to forget her.” More stirring. The woman tapped her spoon against the rim of her glass. “Can you elaborate?”

“She was daft.”

“Many of your residents become at least a little neurotically agitated during their stay, if I understand correctly.”

There hadn’t been any particular judgment in the woman’s tone, but Tucker didn’t sit easy with the suggestion, however vague, that he was responsible for that fact.

“Mine no more than anybody else’s,” he answered sharply.

“My apologies. Could you explain a little about Mrs. Downshire’s peculiarities?”

“Could. What’re they to you?”

“I work for the Commission, tracking data on mental health concerns and recovery patterns in subjects of judicial discipline,” she explained. “From time to time, I’m called upon to investigate specific cases in closer detail. Case studies, as it were. Mrs. Downshire’s case was randomly selected.”

Tucker snorted. “Begging your pardon, Reverend, but if you believe that, somebody’s fed you a bloody line.”

Tegura raised an eyebrow. “Explain, please.”

“Clara Downshire made her share of fuss. Every turnkey in the house knew her. It’s too rich a coincidence your bosses would pull a case at random and have it be the most notorious crackpot in the whole brick-house.”

“Really.” The word was as cold and flat as an iced-over pond. “Lemme tell you a story about Clara fucking Downshire, your worship. You can even quote me in your records.”

Tegura didn’t produce a notebook. Tucker didn’t care. The thought of the madwoman always heated him up. He didn’t hate her—that would have been like hating an ugly wall fixture, futile and foolish. He was, in a way, almost proud of having been her turnkey. She made a hell of a story over ales on a tenday leave, always good for humor and shock and even a little twinge of horror. Clara Downshire was an interesting piece of work, and Tucker—who understood himself too well to imagine he was in the least way personally interesting—had become secondarily famous by virtue of her proximity. Life had been oddly emptier without her addled stories to pass along, amusing (or distracting) his chadras opponents.

“So, this Downshire woman,” Tucker began, “she landed in Old-temple ages ago after a horse kicked her in the head and rattled her up something awful. Don’t get me wrong; it weren’t as bad as some I’ve seen. She could eat and dress and toilet herself and all. But she was daft as a goose and nearly as ornery. Had three brats all doing time with her, until they finally went their ways, off to get jobs or get dead. The littlest one, Rebecca or Regina or something like that, she was in and out every tenday at least, leaving money in her mum’s coffer and checking the ledger. Made it damned hard to do anything but keep the columns honest, you know?”

The Reverend Doctor Tegura nodded solemnly. “Go on.”

“So I had to deal with the little bitch whinging at me about every last quarter-clink, and her mother muttering all her usual nonsense.”

“Usual in what way?”

“She’d say hello to you, and call you by the wrong name—but not altogether wrong. She damned well knew my name, I can tell you, but she always called me by my father’s. Said we looked alike.”

Tegura shrugged. “I’m not sure why that’s a significant detail.”

“My father was a sailor on a Trimeeni sky freighter. He buggered off the month I was born and I never knew aught of him, at least not until last summer. Then he showed up with his hat out hoping to play me for some sentimental arse. He’d hobbled himself with the rope off the mizzenmast, see, and hadn’t money for a clockwork prosthetic. Had it in his head I’d help him foot the bill. I didn’t, but I saw him long enough to see what Downshire meant. I’m his very image.”

“Don’t most men resemble their fathers?”

“But how would she know the blighter’s name? How would she know to ask me about my leg all the time, whenever it rained, whenever the floor was slick from a frost? She knew things about him I’d never told her, and knew ‘em before I’d ever met him. Before it even happened that he’d been crippled. And she thought that was me.”

“That would be most disconcerting.”

“Damned right it was. She had a bad spell of sickness—lady concerns, you understand—a ways back, and so we sent one of the laundresses to tend her through it. The woman flat refused to come back after the second day. Called Mrs. Downshire a witch. This laundress, she was an irrational savage, one of the last Leonine refugees off the boat from one of the Ecumenical missions—” Tucker paused, considering for the first time that Tegura might also be such a savage. “Sorry. I mean, in any case, the laundress was scared stiff as a sheet. Said Downshire told her the whole story of her childhood.”

Tegura raised an eyebrow. “Not Mrs. Downshire’s childhood, I take it.”

“No, ma’am. The laundress’s, and her whole family, too. And she knew stories about someone the laundress had never heard of, some little boy named Darby. Well, wouldn’t you know, the woman turns up fat as a hen with a baby on the way a few months later, and now her Darby’s living a life all but scripted from Downshire’s fancies.”

“Interesting you call them that. Scripted. Fancies. You believe they’re hoaxes of some kind?”

Tucker scowled into his ale. “That’d be a comfort. But no. There’s something to ‘em, and I was happy to see the woman gone when her debt was paid.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

“I concern myself with the debtors while they owe the courts and their creditors. Past that, it’s no lookout of mine.”

“She’s living in the Mercy Commission Home out in Southeby.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s very expensive. Did she have a benefactor you’re aware of?”

“Her? Nah. The wee girl of hers, though,” Tucker mused. “She came in around the start of Elevenmonth last year with some fancy toff. Sharp as a knife and colder than snow, that cove. I figured she must have played bed-warmer for him. A few days after, Mrs. Downshire was paid out and gone. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I.”

Tucker studied the woman’s smooth, studious face with a growing sense of unease. “Clara Downshire wasn’t any random file your people picked.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“You’re not looking to give me trouble?”

“Trouble? Oh, no, Master Pettigrew. You’ve been most helpful.” She set a stack of coin between them and rose, dusting at her skirts. “I only required you for a little confirmation.”

Tucker’s keen eye for coin counted the stack before it even struck the table. “Confirmation of what?” he asked, shoveling up the sovereigns.

“That Mrs. Downshire has a certain insight worthy of careful research. Thank you, Master Pettigrew. And one more thing?”

“Hm?”

“We have never met, you and I.”

“Don’t know who you are, lady, but I’ll thank you to back off my chadras tray,” he replied gamely.

“I beg your pardon,” she purred and slipped from the table with a tiny touch of her fingers to her forehead—a salute. A farewell.

The money lasted Tucker the rest of the night. He put it to good use, and a few hours on, had drunk enough to ensure he would forget the statuesque woman and her steady, measuring stare, after all.