A Torch to Fire the Earth

This third man hung back as they made down the alley, perhaps thinking this was a robbery in the making. Clearly not suspecting that his master's cane-running business had finally snagged the attention of his betters. A little fish wriggling on a much larger hook. When Cat took the merchant hard up against the wall, he turned rather than watch them paw at each other, which is why he missed it when she opened his charge's throat with a palmed razor. To be fair, I missed it too (that girl is fast) and, to the second man's credit, he didn't. Of course, he'd been paying close attention, so he had a bit of an advantage in this regard. He also had one hand down his pants, which turned out to be a significant disadvantage in the very short knife-fight that followed.

By this time the last man had caught on to the threat and turned himself round to face it, and though Cat almost certainly would have won in a fight (I am, it turns out, a very good teacher) I was starting to feel like a cart with no horse, so I shot out his spine for cheer. She glared up at me in my tower (good eye!) and I remembered I hadn't told her I would be there.

Tough shit, kiddo. I'm not out of the game yet.

Later we shared a celebratory on-the-house bottle of brandy at the Whale Who Once Drank the Sea (which was a thinly veiled reference to the establishment's owner, an iconically peg-legged once-famous pirate whom Cat had once fucked but I hadn't) while we awaited Dougat with impatience.

Cat berated me, but her voice was warm with more than liquor. I toasted her kills, and she gave me a genuine smile. She'd taken well to the work. Humans are easy to kill, as it turns out. You could turn right now to the person sitting next to you and snuff them right out with one hand. Most people wouldn't even be able to figure out how to stop you (presuming you knew what you were doing) until it was much too late to matter. Murder is less a physical act than it is an act of the will, though the best of us are good at both. Cat was an artist in ice.

When Dougat finally showed, we were well on our way to drunk, though acting it more than we felt it. That's a key skill in virtually every line of work. She sat at our table, shrouded in a cloak with a comically deep hood as if anyone there didn't know her.

"I trust the job is complete?" She asked.

"Of course," Cat and I replied in an unexpected chorus that set us both to giggling. Dougat look back and forth between us as though we'd sprouted horns.

"What is wrong with you two? Are you drunk? I thought you wanted to talk business."

Cat and I started at the same time again, but I stopped and I nodded her on.

"We think," she began, "That you could be aiming higher." I nodded again, this time at Dougat.

"We've seen some of your operation and we saw most of Lenoir's while we were scoping him out for the job. Once you wrap up his holdings, you'll control more than half of the cane passing through the Black Straights. You'll basically be the richest smuggler in the world."

"I prefer 'transport facilitator.' Anyway, what's your proposal?"

It should be noted, at this juncture, that the Whale Who Once Drank the Sea and, indeed, all of its patrons (ourselves included, at least in her own lofty estimation) were owned by Dougat, and we'd been slopping more than our share of complimentary fig brandy down the fronts of our shirts precisely because of her prudence. She was kind of stupid, but not that stupid. What she hadn't yet realized, at that particular juncture, was that she didn't, in fact, own us at all, and that the Shaitan's marshals already had the building surrounded. Crastipole was, somewhat ironically, both home to some of the world's greatest criminal enterprises and very uptight about its laws. The magistrates wouldn't move without ironclad testimony, and the cartel bosses figured anyone incompetent enough to be testified against was probably better off out of the business anyway-which they would be because, when the magistrates moved, they did so with weight like the sea.

So there we were, and there was Dougat, and all that remained was to see how big a crime she'd hook herself on. We were hoping for treason, because that meant the biggest paycheck for us, but murder and racketeering weren't peanuts either, and we already had her on that.

So, you know. Either way.

Cat soldiered on, gamely dangling the bait.

"We think you could be the Inspector. He's old. We could do it up clean, and you have the cash and enough up-street cred to put down a bid on the office."

It was bold. It was daring. It had never been done (and for good fucking reason) but Dougat seemed like the sort of overachiever who might want to try playing her hand from both sides at once.

"Now that," she said, "is indeed an interesting thought."

We spent the next hour working over the details, and we laid out the plan we'd come up with. When we finally shook (over a price so low she should have known something was up-we'd never have agreed if we'd planned to go through with it) I closed my eyes, pulled her out of her seat, and twisted her arm until it locked against the table and I could get a palmed knife to her throat. Cat tossed a sharper onto the floor and the sound-

That sound cannot be properly described.

I'd never used one indoors before. I don't think I ever will again. Sometimes I hear it in my dreams.

Cat had had wax in her ears the whole time, because apparently she's not an idiot, and though the light was so bright it punched right through our eyelids and left spots even after the fact, she'd memorized the lay of the room - two thugs at the table near the door, one in a chair by the fire, two playing dice on the bar with the owner - well enough that she hit a couple with darts without looking.

We weren't supposed to kill them, to the extent we could manage. Public sentences are a rare and treasured day of commerce for the people of Crastipole, and these fine budding criminals had just become accessories to something they'd probably never even had the guts to imagine.

So, the darts and the thin wooden lancets, because the capillaries in the wood soak up the alchemical venom (that'd we'd paid for ourselves, because the marshals expected us to carefully punch every single one of those fuckers in the head until they passed out or some such bullshit, apparently) better than steel.

I shouldn't complain, though. I got to use a knife, and all I had to do was hold it to the throat of a thirty year old woman who probably couldn't beat her kids in a game of paddy cake. Poor kids. Your souls chose the wrong eggs this time.

Cat completed the rest of the work well, taking out all but one by the door, who the marshals got to first and killed (because of course they fucking did) thereby reducing our bonus by a sixth. (The owner, it turned out, was more loyal than your average ale-puller. Cat was crushed.)

We collected our fee and signed our affidavits, and we got out of town, because even if everyone agrees you've done well, you're better of giving them time to forget you, but when we went to pick up Bella and Fritz (Fritz being the son of original Fritz, who'd been killed by bandits on the road out of Cort; Bella had refused to go anywhere else until we tracked those fuckers down and she chewed on some heads, which she seemed to consider a fitting memorial) we were accosted by a postal carrier who had something for me.

Cat tried to rubberneck, but I only get letters from one person, and they're almost always private. This one, however, was not. When I finished, I turned to her and asked,

"What do babies like, anyway?"

"Tits and sleep, I think," she said. "In that regard, they're a lot like you. Why do you ask?"

"The Queen of Alaska has finally spawned. And I think it's about time that you met her."