The Wheels was squalid and damp, but then it always had been. This was one of the worst parts of Ellinburg, but it was also one of the most profitable territories to control. No one wanted to live near a tannery, no, but they might well enjoy the money from one.
Ma Aditi and the Gutcutters owned the Wheels, but I knew that she wasn’t back from the war yet, so I hoped that meant most of her boys weren’t either. Even so, we went carefully, keeping our hands close to the hilts of our weapons as we made our way along the treacherous path with the oily-looking river lapping at its bank a few feet below us.
It was quiet down by the water, and as we drew closer we could hear the great wooden wheels themselves turning on their axles, groaning rhythmically to themselves. Scummy white froth drifted downstream toward us where the river had been churned up by the movement, and in places I could see things floating in it. Turds, mostly, but there was the odd dead rat.
We were in the Wheels, all right.
“Keep your eyes open,” I said quietly, “and don’t draw attention.”
I could feel eyes on me like the flies on a hot Abingon night, making my skin crawl. There were high buildings on our left, their damp timber flanks rearing above the path and keeping us in shadow. Across the water to the east was nothing. It was just open marshland stretching into the distance. The river formed the fourth wall of Ellinburg, and they would be desperate raiders indeed who tried to cross the marshes, and then that wide expanse of flowing filth.
“Someone’s watching us,” Anne said.
“I know,” I murmured. “Someone always is, in the Wheels. It’s probably just children.”
It probably was, but even children are dangerous if there are enough of them and they’re armed. I didn’t know how many there were, but they would be armed all right. You could bet on that, in the Wheels. The path ended in a sheer drop down to rotting wooden pilings that had once supported a jetty, but on the left there was a cobbled alley leading up between two buildings. About twenty feet ahead of us the first of the great wheels was turning and groaning.
“There’s folk up there,” Anne said.
I turned and looked up the alley toward Dock Road, where three cloaked figures were hiding in the shadows at the top in a way that said murder as loud as if they had been shouting it.
“Stinkers and Wheelers don’t get on,” I explained. “We didn’t come along the riverbank for the fresh air. Going through the streets wouldn’t have been good for our health. I don’t think those fine fellows know who we are, but they’re giving us the hard eye just because of which direction we’ve come from. The river path is all right, though, usually—Old Kurt insists there’s free access to his door for everyone, wherever they’re from.”
“And these Wheelers listen to him, do they?”
“Yes, Anne, they do, and more to the point so do the Gutcutters. Old Kurt is . . . well, I told you that people call him a cunning man. He’s that all right, in both senses of the word. He knows how to win respect and get his own way, and I admire that. Whether he knows how to do magic, though, that’s another matter.”
“I don’t want him to do magic,” Anne said, somewhat sharply. “I just want him to tell us about it.”
“Aye, well, he can do that,” I said. “Some of what he says might even be true, I wouldn’t know.”
I led the way into the alley, keeping my eyes on the fellows at the far end. Halfway along the narrow cobbled space, set into the side of an otherwise blank brick wall, was Old Kurt’s door.
The building he lived in had been a workshop of some sort once, but many years ago Old Kurt had paid my da to brick the frontage up for him and seal it off from the street. He’d had Da bash a hole through the alley wall and make a new entrance there instead, so that Wheelers and Stinkers alike might have access to his door without having to fight their way there.
That was how I had first met him: as a ten-year-old ’prentice boy mixing lime mortar in this alley for Da and trying not to get my head kicked in while I was doing it. Kurt had made a point of picking a Stink man to do the work instead of a Wheeler, although that had caused some hard words at the time.
Kurt had been old even then, or had looked it to my young eyes anyway, and I had over thirty years to me now. Old Kurt was still there, though; I could tell that from the rat that was nailed to the outside of his front door.
He always nailed a fresh rat to his door every fifth day, and this one didn’t look to be more than two or three days old. As to why he did it, well, I supposed that was his business, but it told folk he was still alive if nothing else.
I rapped loudly on the door and called out the words.
“Wisdom sought is wisdom bought, and I have coin to pay,” I said loudly.
A moment later the door creaked open and Old Kurt’s face peered out at me from the shadows inside.
“You’d better have, Tomas Piety,” he said. “Oh, and this fine lady too! Welcome, welcome. Come you in, and mind your heads.”
I looked at Bloody Anne with her scar and her daggers and her stained, dirty men’s clothes, and wondered if Old Kurt had ever seen a fine lady in his life. Probably not, I thought. We followed Kurt into his house, which was dimly lit with lamps on account of most of the windows having been boarded up. The place was squalid and it stank, but there were treasures in there too. Odd things, things you wouldn’t necessarily notice if you didn’t know to look for them.
The sword hanging over the mantel, its scabbard thick with cobwebs, had once belonged to a king. The skull on the windowsill, the one with its temple bashed in, had supposedly belonged to the same king. That brass candlestick with dried crusty tallow all over it was really solid gold. Or so Old Kurt had told me when I was a boy, anyway.
I smiled at the memories. He was a horrible old man with a house full of shit, to my mind, but he had been the one who had chased those Wheeler boys off me while I had been mixing my mortar in the alley outside. Not my da, Old Kurt had done that. Da had thought fighting was good for a boy, that it made a man of him. Although considering what went on in our house at nights I’d have thought that was the last thing Da wanted. I didn’t want to think about that now, though. Not ever.
At that time I had only had ten years to me and there had been three boys, and all of them old enough to shave, but Da hadn’t stirred himself while Kurt chased them away. I had told Anne that Old Kurt and me weren’t friends and that was true enough, but I would always have time for him, for that.
He took his chair by the fireplace and waved us to a pair of rickety stools.
Kurt must have had almost eighty years to him, by my reckoning, but he still looked the same as I remembered him from when I had been a boy. He was a narrow, spare man, his pointed face and whiskered chin making him look much like the rat nailed to his door. His thin white hair was short but dirty, pushed up in all directions by his darting, ratty hands.
“Show me your silver and tell me your troubles, Tomas,” Kurt said.
I looked at Bloody Anne.
“This is your question, not mine,” I said to her. “It’ll be your silver that buys an answer to it.”
She took a mark out of her pouch and put it in Old Kurt’s grubby outstretched hand. He looked down at the coin, back at Anne, and grinned.
“Fine silver from a fine lady,” he said with a leer. “I’m a lucky boy, ain’t I?”
She cleared her throat. She looked uncomfortable, did Bloody Anne, and I noticed her eyes kept wandering to the skull on the windowsill, the bound herbs that hung in bunches from the ceiling, the thick dusty books that were scattered around the room. Some of the books had rat shit on them, I saw.
“There’s this boy,” she started. “He—”
“A boy, is it?” Kurt interrupted. “Might have known you’d be wasting my time, Piety. I don’t do love spells, nor potions neither.”
I said nothing and let Anne speak for herself. The lesson of the boardinghouse was still fresh in my mind, and I don’t believe in making the same mistake twice.
“I don’t want a fucking love spell,” Bloody Anne snarled at him. “I’ve paid you silver for wisdom, so you’ll have the good grace to shut up and listen to the fucking question without interrupting me again or I’ll nail you to your door with your fucking rat, you understand me?”
Old Kurt stared at her for a moment, then laughed his thin, reedy old man’s laugh.
“That’s me told, ain’t it,” he said. “I’ll listen, my fine lady. I’ll listen to you.”
He was quiet then, but something in his eyes and the way he was looking at Anne made me wary. You didn’t cross Bloody Anne, not if you knew what was good for you, but you didn’t cross Old Kurt either.
No, you didn’t do that.
“This boy,” Anne started again. “He’s an orphan, with twelve years to him. We found him near Messia, after the sack. In the war, this was, way down in the south. A strange boy, but he wanted to join up and the regiment took him and any others they could get. He’s touched by the goddess.”
“Which one?” Kurt asked. “And who says so?”
“Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows. Tomas is her priest, and he says so.”
Old Kurt turned a stare on me. I wasn’t wearing my robes that day, and this was obviously the first he’d heard of it.
“A priest, is it?”
“It is,” I said. “This boy, Billy. He’s a confessor and a seer. The goddess speaks to him, or through him. I don’t know which.”
“Well and good,” Kurt said, “if a priest says so.”
He smirked when he said it, though, and I remembered why Old Kurt and me weren’t friends.
“One of our crew was wounded,” Anne went on. “He nearly died from all the blood he lost. Should have died, to my mind, but he didn’t. He didn’t because Billy sat up all night floating in the air and staring at him, doing magic at him. Now he’s awake and alive and eating for six men, and I want to know if we have a witch in our crew.”
Her scar tightened and twisted when she said witch, I noticed.
“Witches now, is it?” Old Kurt said. “Messia, is it? Well, what could that mean?”
“You tell us,” I said. “You’re the cunning man.”
Old Kurt thought on it for a moment, then got up and went over to a big chest by the back wall. He rummaged inside for a moment, then straightened up and handed Anne a long iron nail.
“You put this under where the boy sleeps at night,” he said, “and we’ll see.”
“What is it?” Anne asked.
“A nail,” I said.
“It’s a witchspike, you ignorant thug,” Old Kurt snapped. “Priest my hairy arse, or you’d know what it was. That there’s a witchspike, and if he’s what you fear he’ll feel it. Put that under his blankets and wait. If he wakes screaming in the night then he’s a witch, and you can deal with that as you see fit. If he doesn’t, though, then you bring him here. You bring him to see Old Kurt and I’ll have a look at him. Is that a deal, my fine lady?”
Anne nodded and slipped the nail into her pouch.
“Deal,” she said.