Staked (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #8)(105)

“Well, I’ll be damned…” he whispered, stepping back.

“Yes,” said a woman’s voice behind him, cold and quiet as a cutthroat razor slicing through silk. “Oh yes. I rather expect you will.”





CHAPTER 2


A WOMAN IN BLACK AND THE MAN IN MIDNIGHT


She stood at the other end of the room, a shadow made flesh in a long tight-bodiced dress buttoned to the neck and wrists. Her arms were folded and black leather gloves covered her hands. The dress had a dull sheen like oiled silk, and she was so straight-backed and slender – and yet also so finely muscled – that she looked in some ways like a rather dangerous umbrella leaning against the wood panelling.

The only relief from the blackness was her face, two gold rings she wore on top of the gloves and her white hair, startlingly out of kilter with her otherwise youthful appearance, which she wore pulled back in a tight pigtail that curled over her shoulder like an albino snake.

She hadn’t been there when Ketch entered the room, and she couldn’t have entered by the door which had been on the edge of his vision throughout, but that wasn’t what most disturbed him: what really unsettled him was her eyes, or rather the fact he couldn’t see them, hidden as they were behind the two small circular lenses of smoked glass that made up her spectacles.

“Who—?” began Ketch.

She held up a finger. Somehow that was enough to stop him talking.

“What do you want?”

Ketch gulped, tasting his own fear like rising bile at the back of his throat.

“I want to speak to the Jew.”

“Why?”

He saw she carried a ring of keys at her belt like a jailer. Despite the fact she looked too young for the job he decided that she must be the Jew’s housekeeper. He used this thought as a stick to steady himself on: he’d just been unnerved by her sudden appearance, that was all. There must be a hidden door behind her. Easy enough to hide its edges in the tongue and groove. He wasn’t going to be bullied by a housekeeper. Not when he had business with her master.

“I got something for him.”

“What?”

“A screaming girl.”

She looked at the long sack lying on the floor.

“You have a girl in this sack?”

Somehow the way she asked this carried a lot of threat.

“I want to speak to the Jew,” repeated Ketch.

The woman turned her head to one side and rapped on the wooden wall behind her. She spoke into a small circular brass grille.

“Mr Sharp? A moment of your time, please.”

The dark lenses turned to look at him again. The silence was unbearable. He had to fill it.

“Man in The Three Cripples said as how the Jew would pay for screaming girls.”

The gold ring caught the lamplight as the black gloves flexed open and then clenched tight again, as if she were containing something.

“So you’ve come to sell a girl?”

“At the right price.”

Her smile was tight and showed no teeth. Her voice remained icily polite.

“There are those who would say any price is the wrong one. The good Mr Wilberforce’s bill abolished slavery nearly forty years ago, did it not?”

Ketch had set out on a simple errand: he had something to sell and had heard of a likely buyer. True, he’d felt a little like a Resurrection Man skulking through the fog with a girl on his shoulder, but she was no corpse and he was no body-snatcher. And now this woman was asking questions that were confusing that simple thing. When life was straightforward, Bill Ketch sailed through it on smooth waters. When it became complicated he became confused, and when he became confused, anger blew in like a storm, and when he became angry, fists and boots flew until the world was stomped flat and simple again.

“I don’t know nothing about a Wilberforce. I want to speak to the Jew,” he grunted.

“And why do you think the Jew wants a girl? By which I mean: what do you think the Jew wants to do with her?” she asked, the words as taut and measured as her smile.

“What he does is none of my business.”

He shrugged and hid his own bunched fists deep in the pockets of his coat.

Her words cracked sharply across the table like a whiplash.

“But what you think you are doing by selling this girl is mine. Answer the question!”

This abrupt change of tone stung him and made him bang the table and lurch towards her, face like a thundercloud.

“No man tells Bill Ketch what to do, and sure as hell’s hinges no damn woman does neither! I want to see the bloody Jew and by God—”

The wall next to her seemed to blur open and shut and a man burst through, slicing across the room so fast that he outpaced Ketch’s eyes, leaving a smear of midnight blue and flashing steel as he came straight over the table in a swirl of coat-tails that ended in a sudden and dangerous pricking sensation against his Adam’s apple.

The eyes that had added him up through the judas hole now stared into him across a gap bridged by eighteen inches of razor-sharp steel. The long blade was held at exactly the right pressure to stop him doing anything life-threatening, like moving. Indeed, just swallowing would seem to be an act of suicide.

“By any god, you shall not take one step further forward, Mr…”

The eyes swept over his face, searching, reading it.