The 19th of Dentis, 2719
Not that there was a ‘best part’. The uniform she had been pressed into wearing had been made for a stouter woman and it bunched in places she’d rather not have any bunching. That was anywhere at all. Under the arms and by the belt were the worst. How could a garment be both too loose and too restrictive? Playing dress-up and soldiers was pointless. What good did it do? Everyone parted for them. They disrupted the life of the streets. Passers-by and citizens on their evening business moved and parted like curtains. A costermonger and a garland girl stared at them as they passed. They said nothing. She could not read their faces. She could not read this place. Two months here and it was still alien. The smells were wrong, the hills too broad. She had though them gentle at first, but a climb up Ro Hill has disabused that. Cities should be hilly. It was at least one small virtue of the place.
Still, the life of the streets, the rhythm of the place, eluded her. The uniforms, the reputation did not help. Hardheads and enforcers, that was the reputation the green uniforms projected. How did that server? Who did that aid? Who would trust the Seventen to sort out their legal matters, to look into their stolen property or missing sisters? Who would take the care to root out corruption, or act as the eyes and ears of the magistrates?
There was no hope of blending in, of just passing on private business. She was a Prefect, not a damned policeman, and Prefects did not patrol. Yet here she was, doing just that. One more separation from home. One more indignity.
Her assignment was with the Investigative Division, but some idiot regulation required her to spend time on patrol. Time wearing too-heavy boots. She could not get a feel for the streets in the shining leather clod-hoppers. She’d freeze in her sandals on nights like this, but even numb feet were better than the suffocating stiffness of the boots. Tomorrow she would go out, and walk the streets as was proper. She’d done it every day she could. She had too few opportunities.
Being saddled with a partner had not helped. This was a new thing, and like everything here, made no sense. When had she ever worked with a partner? She should have been glad to be saddled with another Mug, another Prefect even. Somehow it seemed an insult, a dismissal. A relegation to the second class. She did not like having a minder. Even if they were a fellow Prefect. Nkemi, all bright eyes and cheerful smiles, had rather different notions of the ‘joys’ of patrol. She was younger, more open to the coarseness of the Seventen. The Good God preserve her, but she even seemed to have an affection for the swagger of it all. Probably for the best, all things considered. Genet was too much a woman of Thul’Ka, too much a creature of the courts and the magistrates of Three-Flowers. She was made to lurk in porticos and arcades, to hover in the offices of magistrates waiting for the authorizing order to untangle some abstruse matter or track down some criminal.
She had failed at that, and not for lack of trying. Everything had unraveled, but she still had a handful of threads. One had pulled her all the way to Vienda. And then she lost it somewhere in a warehouse on the river, in the rookery they called Saddlery Hill. Across the river, too far from her lodgings, too far to go on those days when she had some hours to herself. Too far from the law courts and the dismal buildings that housed the Seventen. There were watchouses out there, on the other side of the river. Sad, understaffed things. Tomorrow. She would go tomorrow. She would need an excuse. Some official matter that she could follow up, some dismal patrol that would earn her blisters and discomfort. Some patrol that might give her enough time to pick up that vanished thread.
At some street whose name she could not recall, but which she had seen any number of times, she knew by the way the patrol turned, that she was in for a long and painful night. Her cheerful partner seemed to neither notice nor care. Either provincial were hardier than she had thought, or else Nkemi really was enjoying herself. “You ever go on the march with the mercs?” She tried to crack a smile, tried to hide her contempt for the mercs. It was probably no good. “Only, you seem to be holding up better than me. I’m not used to this. Well, not in these boots.” She should be sitting in some dive bar, some local equivalent of the Drowned Man back home, soaking up rumors and gossip. “We’re not on patrol tomorrow, blessings be on the Good God. I was thinking of heading north of the river. Doing a little tour of the watchouses.” Doing proper Prefect work, or as near as one could in this place. “You been up that way, or have they kept you strolling painfully about Uptown every night?”
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