The Sea Peoples(42)
“Well, if someone wants to do away with themselves . . .” Pip murmured dubiously.
“There is ill-wreaking here,” Deor said. “This thing . . . somehow it’s tied to Prince John’s loss. How, I do not yet know, but it is.”
The politician paused, and half-turned to indicate the round columned building behind him. The crowd had been quiet; now the silence in the street was absolute.
“There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek it there.”
Aha, she thought. Painless death . . . but in that later New York, the Eternal Emperor said Lethal Torment Chambers. I suppose this is what they mean by a slippery slope, what?
The speaker turned to one of the uniformed officers on the platform: “I declare the Lethal Chamber open.”
Then to the crowd: “Citizens of New York and of the United States of America, through me the Government declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.”
An officer barked a command, a bugle echoed it—Pip even recognized the sequence of notes—and the hussars fell in behind the carriages that drew up to take the dignitaries and commanders. The lancers wheeled neatly, the tall steel-tipped shafts swaying and reforming like a thicket of reeds bowing to a breeze, and clattered off with an endless rumbling clop of shod hooves on pavement. The crowd began to break up, voices slowly filling the void.
“There,” Deor said quietly, pointing out one nattily-dressed young man. “Him. Follow him.”
“That I can do,” Pip said. “Mummy had the Police chief in Townsville City run me through an urban surveillance course once and gave me pointers herself—said you never knew when that sort of thing would come in handy.”
The man Deor had pointed out wasn’t remarkable. About thirty, medium in stature—an inch or less taller than Pip, who’d inherited much of her father’s height—with reddish-brown hair worn trimmed above the collar and parted in the center and a clipped mustache, and faded green eyes. He was handsome in a slightly wasted way, but slim in a manner that suggested he’d been more active once and with the pallor of someone who spent most of his days indoors. His clothing was black except for a silver-gray waistcoat, and a dark-gray homburg hat, but fitted as if it had been done by a very good tailor.
He was ordinary for this time and place, until you saw his eyes. They skipped over Pip without acknowledging her, then lingered for a moment on Toa as if slightly puzzled. Once you saw those eyes he didn’t look ordinary at all. They seemed to open on vistas, across a sea whose waves were cloud. . . .
Pip fought down a snarl and made herself retract her claws. . . .
Wait a minute. I have claws? she thought, startled. I mean, I literally have claws?
For a moment she thought she did, claws like curved knives that could rip flesh apart with a drive of shoulders stronger than Toa’s.
Pip would have liked to dismiss the idea as a fancy, but she wasn’t fanciful.
And I’m in a place where the usual rules don’t apply. Though after months on Baru Denpasar I was starting to think those are a bit more elastic than I’d always assumed anyway.
The man walked on, walking with the stride of someone who knew where he was going but wasn’t in a hurry.
“Bunch around me,” Pip said quietly. “Talk a bit. You don’t think a group is following you.”
“You don’t?” Thora asked conversationally.
“Not on a city street. One tail is more conspicuous there. It’s completely different from countryside tracking, according to my instructor.”
Thora and Deor closed up, with Toa still bringing up the rear. He was attracting the odd glance, once from what was apparently a mounted policeman, to judge from his cloth-covered bobby-style helmet and long riot-stick, but then the eyes flicked to the folk ahead of him and lost suspicion.
Bet if he was here alone it would be a difficulty, Pip thought. Though more of a difficulty for anyone who tried to accost him!
The man they were tracking moved through the crowds easily. The clump with Pip had a little more difficulty, but she’d noticed before that if you moved without the slightest doubt that people would get out of your way, they usually did. It helped if you were well-dressed, too, and judging from the passers-by the clothes they’d . . . arrived in . . . were the local equivalents of the gentry’s costume.
Pip noted the street signs and memorized them; they crossed one called South Fifth Avenue, and walked along its western side to a Bleecker Street. There was the same mix of older and newer buildings she’d noticed around the Lethal Chamber, and then it was solidly older; five or six story brick buildings divided into apartments and attached shops. The crowds were thicker, and less well-dressed, with many more cloth caps and women in dowdy, tired-looking dresses longer than what she or Thora wore. Now and then the man they were following attracted sullen-hostile glances, or jeers from ragged urchins, and the narrower streets had a number of pushcarts selling anything from sausages she wouldn’t have tried on a bet to old clothes.
Beside one door was a row of signs. The first and largest read:
HAWBERK, ARMOURER
Thora snorted, and Pip spared her a glance and a raised eyebrow: they were both inwardly groaning at the obvious pun, since hauberk was precisely what you called a mail shirt . . . though she thought the term was more common in everyday use in Montival, which from what she’d heard and John confirmed had a taste for terminology culled from history.