Her Wet Nurse
WHEN DASHINI came to her mother, Portia had no milk for the child, so she scryed the weft for a suitable run of events until she found an adequate place. Though it seemed bizarre, so did all the other places her spells showed.
Eventually, everywhere seemed bizarre.
There, within a version of the county of her upbringing, was a hill that had been hollowed out, and in it a tribe of strange people lived. Where a person has a human head, these had the heads of cattle, and they were all naked.
Dashini wouldn’t stop crying, so even if there were things that spoke against it, Portia brought this place into the Pyramid.
She was so tired, it didn’t matter that this place was strange and dreamlike. Tiredness makes everything seem like a dream, and every dream is as strange as the last.
She made three doors – one in from the outside world, in case she needed it, one out to the second level, and one she used from the Pyramid stairwell. She took the crying Dashini through this last door.
The baby seemed as if she would cry herself to death before she ever stopped, and was only silent for the brief moments it took for her to drag breath into her red-lipped, red-gummed, distended mouth.
Portia took her to the first cattle-headed woman she saw, who pushed the child away, as did the second, but the third was suckling a cattle-headed infant, her free breast blue-veined and swollen.
Dashini could smell the milk, turned her face urgently from side to side. Her bawling temporarily stopped, and she mouthed for a nipple. The cattle-headed woman – if she had a name, her tongue was inadequate to speak it – latched Portia’s daughter to her, and the near silence Dashini’s suckling made was like beautiful music to the Mistress’s ears. She was so moved by this music that she wept, lying on the dark earth, her nose in the loam, her eyes closed, and, without knowing, she slept.
When she awoke, it was Dashini who was sleeping, her cheeks red with her satisfaction, her belly round.
Portia whispered to the cattle-headed women, ‘This child will be to you as a daughter is, precious and worthy of love. Take her, and care for her, returning her to me after seven days.’
She kissed Dashini on the forehead with exaggerated gentleness, so she wouldn’t wake her, and left the girl there.
Her Pawns
THE ASSASSINS employed by Mr Padge were sitting at a table outside The Commodious Hour, his restaurant, shaded by a green and red striped parasol, sipping at pipes of opium and wetting their dried throats with wines of rare vintage. The atmosphere was heavy with late summer pollen and the drowsy humidity of an endless afternoon. They sat, seven of them, a little slouched, long of limb, alert – though secretly so.
White, poppy-tinged, milky smoke trailed past their parasol up into the thin air, defying the pull of the Earth and drawing the eyes of wealthy diners. These good folk scowled to see reprobates of this type – unwholesome-looking, exquisitely dressed, and possessing none of the deference they ought to have for their supposed betters. The assassins pursed their lips and let their cheekbones cut, and rather than speak circumspectly of their business, they did it loudly, advertising being a necessity in their line of work, and épater les bourgeois, as the old words went, has long been their motto.
One of the assassins, whose name was Anatole, and who was dressed in a suit so tight that every contour of his lithe and sinuous body was clearly and obscenely visible, said to the others, ‘The only thing the contract killer must respect is the contract. What are we without it?’ and while there are no gatherings of assassins that possess absolute accord on any subject, this one came close. In the silence that dominated the aftermath of Anatole’s utterance, more opium gathered in every lung, and some of the seven reached for their smelling salts to bring the semblance of liveliness back to their minds.
Next to Anatole was a pretty-looking person, all ringlets and almond eyes and glistening lips, quiet, shrinking into her chair. On each finger she had rings, and every one had been taken from someone she had killed, all at the direction of Mr Padge, who had recently sequestered himself in his office, having delivered a lunchtime peroration to the gathered that had now concluded.
He had given them the contract to sign, and they would sign it in blood, as was customary. The quiet, pretty assassin was called Sharli – on that day at least – and she cleared her throat to reply to Anatole: ‘We must honour our pledges since our livelihoods depend on them.’
A waiter came with more wine, the tab going to the house, and in turn he filled Anatole’s, Sharli’s, the Druze’s, Montalban’s, Deaf Sam’s, Simon’s, and Mick the Greek’s glasses, each of them nodding to him before the Greek pushed a generous tip across the table from them all. Assassins live or die at the whims of blind contingency, and this makes them both superstitious of mind and very free with any small sums of money that might influence the vagaries of fate, the reciprocal play of which might somehow come to influence matters where luck is involved. Which is to say that they are generous tippers and hope that the world will reward them for it.
Some of the assassins reached for their drinks, jitters to be calmed, others watched the ripples on the surface of their wine, transfixed by the patterns the opium renders so significant-seeming, others still licked their teeth and wondered at the time.
Padge, earlier, had hired them all for insurance.
He had paid the assassins, with promises, to kill, when necessary, whoever it was that should kill him, and the terms of this arrangement were outlined in the contract that rested between the seven of them, curling back into a scroll between the small plates and empty bottles of the long, but dwindling, lunch.
Padge had come and he had said, smiling over a three-storey platter of iced seafood that had since been eaten and cleared away, that he wanted them, for a share of a sum he would outline, to promise him that if he were ever done away with, that they would make it their business to return the favour to his murderer or murderers.
In other company there would have been a polite outcry at the unlikeliness of this eventuality and wishes given for many more years of safe passage about the city – empty flatteries – but assassins are of a different breed, and instead signs were made against the Evil Eye and solemn nods were nodded. White-haired Montalban, seven feet tall, rubbed a tattoo on his elbow and thereby opened and closed the pink beak of the albino falcon that was the emblem of his ancestors’ house in a faraway city he was now unable to name. He said, ‘Consider it done, Mr Padge,’ and though the others might have haggled regarding remuneration, this set the tone of the group’s replies.
Next to the contract, where it then was, lay seven blank pieces of paper. To the other patrons, picking at their quail bones and squaring away their napkins, these might have been seven separate bills, or perhaps copies of a list of specials, turned over so the unwritten-on sides were visible, but an assassin knows magic objects when they are put down in front of them.
This had all taken place, this meal, back before the city had fallen into revolution, before Nathan Treeves’s treachery, before the exodus, before the rising of the Mount, and Padge had said: ‘When I die, these papers will magically provide each of you with the name of my killer, or killers, and there will be a map to where they are. This map will change if they move, and the name will change if they call themselves something new. Your job – your last job for me – will be to locate the people or person on this list and kill them. When that is done, a new message will be written, and it will give you directions to my hidden wealth, which is, as I’m sure you can imagine, considerable.’
An assassin takes on new information with a studied neutrality – there is nothing to be gained from raising an eyebrow or throwing up one’s hands when others speak – but a group of assassins together know from the very smallest reactions what their fellows are thinking. It is a kind of language, this hypersensitivity to posture and flow and nuance, and though no one not fluent in body-speech would have known it, Padge’s words were shocking to the seven.
As custom dictated, it was decided that the group should all visit the Mother of Mordew, and that they would allow her to hold the contract, since all such important trade documents were deposited with her by preference, she being the patron deity of their union.
* * *
The Mother of Mordew – a secret presence in the city to all but a very few – was to be found in an abandoned and collapsed coal and tin mine on the tip of the Northfields. A tumble of rock, a cave entrance, an oily pool, a discarded iron earth mover: these things together do not deserve a name, but they were known by the assassins as the Cave of the Matriarch, and here it was that the Mother resided, trapped, it would seem to the ignorant, behind a mesh of wire, the extent of her prison disappearing off into a dark fault in the mountain.
In this part of the city it was always raining, and Simon – a rat-faced fellow whose unusual ugliness, recently adopted as camouflage, was all the incentive onlookers needed to pass their eye elsewhere – scuttled, collars drawn up on jacket and overcoat, the peak of his cap dripping, between the rusting heaps the miners had left behind once their coal and tin had been exhausted.
The others watched from the shelter of a corrugated iron overhang, the sound of torrents thudding on the rusting metal. Simon did not have a tail, but the end of his whip trailed behind him as if he did, and when he changed direction to skirt around this or that obstacle, he might also have had whiskers, so stiff and thin were his moustaches.
When he reached the allotted spot, his heels digging into the slag at the mine entrance, he stood back and whistled. He made three long notes to a tune he had memorised earlier.
Was the Mother of Mordew magical? It is almost certain that she was, since she had been in that place all the life of the city, and some said she came into being with it when the Master raised it out of nothing, but magic or not, she did not appear instantly, as if summoned. No, the entrance to her place stayed dark, and there was no sign of her candle, nor of her entourage.
After the whistles, there was no movement or indication of anything but the feeblest sorts of dead-life, splashing in the rain, driven here by what temporary and unknowable motivation was in them.
Simon looked back, pawed at his moustaches, shrugged his thin shoulders.
Sharli took tobacco from her pouch and, with a thin liquor-ice paper, rolled herself a cigarette. Her fingers were wet, but she was skilled enough to manipulate even the most rain-soaked of fixings. She clicked and a flame emerged from her palm. ‘You can’t expect the Mother of Mordew to come…’ she said, pausing to draw the flame into the leaf, ‘… running on our say-so.’
Such was the rightness of her words that the others made cigarettes of their own, or tamped their pipes, or took from the folds of their cloaks the devices which provided them with their preferred stimulants, and the assassins thereby collectively salved their addictions, even Simon, who took snuff laced with nerve-fire as he waited in the rain.
* * *
Time passed, as it must, and to alleviate our boredom let us turn to an illustration of what manner of people these assassins were.
Because they were prohibited by order of Mr Padge from assaulting patrons at The Commodious Hour, there are no opportunities to show them at their work there. It is hard to attract customers to a restaurant, even when the food is excellent, if there is an expectation that murder might follow the meal. But, if and when, say, a dismissive eyebrow was raised at, say, Montalban, by, say, a merchant of figs living up in the Pleasaunce who laughed to his new, younger wife and whispered in her ear, making her look back over her shoulder, snigger, cover her mouth, shake her head slightly and cleave closely to him as they went to collect their coats, then while none of the assassins punished the assumed insult on the premises, they did not let the possible slight pass.
No, instead they called over a serving boy and, for the consideration of several brass, had him follow the pair home, then return to report on their address.
Later, when the restaurant closed for the evening and the sting of the moment had passed, but on point of principle – that being that no disrespectful action can be allowed to stand unpunished lest it encourage disrespectful actions in others – they went together to the place the boy had indicated. Sharli knocked at the door, and when the maid answered she was pulled by the arm through the doorway so that she stumbled over the threshold onto her knees. While she was down there, she was very susceptible to a knife through the spine at the base of the skull, and easy then for Sharli and the Druze, coming out of the shadows, to drag back through the doorway into the parlour and out of sight, doors closing behind.
A signal can be made to assassins waiting at a distance by leaving the gaslight on in a front room, and then drawing and undrawing the curtains three times. This is easy to do, works at range, and is much less conspicuous to occupants of the property and passers-by than a loud yell, or something of that sort. The curtain code is what Sharli did as the Druze scoped out the scullery, drawing room, kitchen, stairs and back yard by standing in the hall by the coat stand and looking around.
An elderly housekeeper will die at almost any provocation – her arthritic neck is easy to snap, she can be suffocated silently in a moment, even the shock of finding an assassin in her domain can do it – and a butler isn’t much more trouble. By the time Mick the Greek and Anatole were letting themselves in through the front, the dead of the lower floor were bundled down the cellar stairs and the Druze was indicating that the coast was clear.
Sharli opened the back door for Deaf Sam and Simon, who went upstairs noisily, the mud of their boots staining the runners, the banging waking the previously sleeping children, who then lit candles in their first-floor bedrooms.
Those who are not used to killing might think that children are easy to do, but the opposite is the case. Adults tend to freeze under threat, conveniently remaining in place, but children will run. Because they are little, they’re difficult to catch. They’re also nimble and some are not terribly sensible. Nimble ones will dodge between your legs, swerve past you at the last minute, or wriggle out of your grasp. Not sensible ones will leap out of windows, or fling themselves down stairwells. Deaf Sam and Simon were seasoned, though, and knew how to quickly smother boys and girls with their bedclothes, knees on little wrists, wadded sheets in little mouths.
Sharli had done the maid, the Druze the staff, Deaf Sam and Simon the children, so Mick the Greek and Anatole went up to the second-floor master bedroom, and here were the insulting pair from the restaurant, backed up against the wardrobe in their pyjamas.
The man who had raised his eyebrow had a pistol.
A piece of advice: if you have a pistol and intend to use it, do so without delay. If assassins appear in your doorway don’t shake and shiver and try to bargain them away with threats. Just shoot them.
They may, if you are lucky, not be wearing lead breastplates beneath their shirts. Anatole certainly wasn’t, and if the man had shot him, the assassin might well have been killed. True, Mick the Greek would have used the opportunity to take the weapon, but at least the man would have given as good as he’d got. As it was, he told the two to ‘back off’ and scarcely were the words out of his mouth than Anatole had doused the weapon with water from the jug on the nightstand, wetting its gunpowder and making it unable to fire.
The man tried the trigger a few times, but all it did was click, and while he was standing there, clicking away like a fool, Mick the Greek put a stiletto blade up through the new, young wife’s left nostril, into her brain.
She slumped to the ground, never to rise again, and Anatole dragged the man screaming down the stairs, the other assassins following quietly and casually behind when they’d passed.
Copyright © 2022 by Alex Pheby
