The bright but flickering light and the faint unnatural whine helped me to remember. Somewhere with Builder-globes. I made to sit up and found myself tied to a table. “Help!” A little louder. Panicked, I tested my strength against the ropes and found no give in them. “Help!”
“Best save your breath!” The voice came from the shadows by the door. I squinted. A thickset ruffian leaned against the wall, looking back at me.
“I’m Prince Jalan! I’ll have your fucking head for this! Untie these ropes.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” He leaned forwards, chewing something, the flickering light gleaming on his baldness.
“I’m Prince Jalan! Don’t you recognize me?”
“Like I know what the princes look like. I don’t even know the princes’ names! Far as I’m concerned you’re some toff who got juiced up and went swimming in a sewer. Just your bad luck to end up here. Horace, though, he did seem to know you from somewhere. Told me to keep you here and off he went. ‘Keep an eye on that one, Daveet,’ he said. ‘Keep a good watch.’ You must be some kind of important or you’d be floating down the river by now with your throat cut.”
“Kill me and my grandmother will raze this quarter to the ground.” A blatant lie, but, spoken with conviction, it made me feel better. “I’m a rich man. Let me go and I’ll see you’re fixed up for life.” I’ll admit I have a gift for lying. I sound least convincing when I tell the truth.
“Money’s nice an’ all,” the man said. He took a step away from the wall and let the flickers illuminate the brutality of his face. “But if I let you go without Horace’s say-so then I wouldn’t have no fingers to count it all with. And if it turned out you really were a prince and we let you go without the boss’s say-so, well me and Horace would think having our fingers taken was the easy part.” He bared his teeth at me—more gaps than teeth, truth be told—and settled back into the shadow.
I lay back, moaning from time to time, and asking questions that he ignored. At least the strange compulsion that had me running headlong into this mess in the first place had now faded. I still had that sense of direction, but the need to pursue it had lessened and I felt more my old self. Which in this instance meant terrified. Even in my terror, though, I noticed that the direction that nagged at me was changing, swinging round, the urge to pursue it growing more faint by the minute.
I drew a deep breath and took stock of my surroundings. A smallish room, not one of those long galleries. They’d been growing plants there? That made no sense. No plants in here, though. The broken light probably meant it wasn’t suitable. Just a table and me tied to it.
“Why—” The door juddered open and cut through my nineteenth question.
“Good lord, it stinks in here!” A calm and depressingly familiar voice. “Stand our guest up, why don’t you, and let’s see if you can’t sluice some of that filth off him.”
Men loomed to either side, strong hands grasped the table, and the world turned through a right angle, leaving the table standing on end, and me standing too, still bound to it. A bucket of cold water took my breath and vision before I had a chance to look around. Another followed in quick succession. I stood gasping, trying to get a breath—no mean task with your nose clogged with blood and water everywhere—whilst a fragrant brown pool began to spread around my feet.
“Well, bless me. There seems to be a prince hidden under all this unpleasantness. A diamond in the muck, as they say. Albeit a very low-carat one.”
I shook the wet hair from my eyes, and there he stood, Maeres Allus, dressed in his finest as if bound for high company . . . and an opera perhaps?
“Ah, Maeres! I was hoping to see you. Had a little something to hand over towards our arrangement.” I never called it my debt. Our arrangement sounded better. A little more as if it was both our problems, not just mine.
“You were?” Just the slightest smile mocking at the corners of his mouth. He’d worn that same smile when one of his heavies snapped my index finger. The ache of it still ran through me on cold mornings when I reached for the flagon of small beer they put by my bed. It ran through that same finger now, secured at my side.
“Yes.” I didn’t even stutter. “Had it with me at the opera.” By my reckoning the business with Snorri had bought me in the region of six months’ grace, but it never hurts to sound willing. Besides, the main thing when tied to tables by criminals is to remind them how much more valuable you are to them when not tied to a table. “The gold was right in my pocket. I think I must have lost it in the panic.”