Evening on the 18th of Intas, 2720
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looding hell and tocks, but it was starting to come down out there. There was something mystifying about it, much as he’d never liked it – even just now, glimpsed through the squat window, already starting to haze with the cold and glinting with the low lamplight inside Ivan’s. The street turning hazy and white, snow settling on the coats and hats of passersby. Carriage-wheels kicking up white dust.Risha could still feel them. The scars, aching.
He was beginning to get used to it, this, in a way he thought he never would; he could just about hold a fork without his hands shaking, could just about look the old Incumbent in the eye in the mirror and not startle when he blinked with him or when his lips moved, or when another man’s deep voice came out of his throat. He was even getting used to the way it felt, now, being weak and small, having the long, graceful fingers of an aristocrat instead of the toughened knuckles of a fighting man.
And he couldn’t think of the last time he’d called himself Tom in his head; it wasn’t, he supposed, his name anymore. The one he wore tonight, warm and ready as a chord on an oud, the one the Cause knew him for, was much closer to his heart, new as it was.
But the scars, the scars he could still feel, especially on days like this one. If he’d shut his eyes, he might’ve imagined he still had them. He could’ve traced them by the stinging, twinging pain: up his lip, winding through his brow; along his forearms, all down his back, on his leg where that dog had got him in its jaws as a lad. That was the one thing that still startled him, touching those places and feeling nothing but freckled skin underneath his fingertips.
Well, there were other aches and pains, too. Didn’t seem fair, that, but it was what it was, he supposed. To get those phantom scars, and all Anatole Vauquelin’s aching hip and stiff-cold fingers, too. Floods, but he hated the winter any lifetime, he thought, young or old, natt or golly.
He was huddled at the bar, hands still in his gloves and still wrapped in his long dark coat, smoking – with an untouched Gioran whiskey, neat, on the polished dark wood. He was itching for it, but he had work to do yet; he wouldn’t take a godsdamned taste ‘til Slipper, whoever the kov was, showed up.
Ivan’s wasn’t top of the spice rack, but it wasn’t at the bottom either. It was still the sort of place where you could look its namesake in the face across the bar. It took all sorts, sitting at the edge of Kingsway as it was; it wasn’t unusual to see a golly, but not the Ro Hill sort, and most of its clientele were professional natt and tsat looking for a quiet drink. It was clean, if worn and small and creaky with every breeze; a cheery hearth by the narrow staircase kept it good and warm.
Not, Risha thought wryly, warm enough for the dead. But then, very seldom was any place warm enough for the dead. Or perhaps he was just a testy bastard of a ghost.
Old Ivan, a mild-mannered tsat, was chatting with a natt as looked the secretary type some ways down the bar. The burble of conversation was low, except for the occasional burst of laughter.
If Ivan’d raised his bushy brows at his clairvoyantist’s field, or given his lean, haughty face and shock of greying red hair a lingering look, it hadn’t been a suspicious one. He was dressed down; he looked more a city lawyer than a King’s councilman.
He had the message tucked in the pocket of his coat, still. All he knew was that he was supposed to be meeting a kov – or a chip, he supposed – named Slipper here; it could’ve been anyone, but he tried not to look around too much, to look suspicious. He was sitting in the right place, and he thought Slipper would’ve been warned – with any luck – it was a golly he was meeting, anyway.
He’d brought Apút pezre Dzakuta’s Green Poems with him today, and the volume was open in his lap; he was reading, gold-rim spectacles perched on his nose, trying to look occupied. All there was now, he thought, was to wait. Seemed like half this business was waiting. That, and not knowing what the fuck you were doing, and not asking any questions.
