Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [32]
Crake wasn’t sinking to that level. “I’ll be back later,” he said stiffly, and left.
“We’ll be here!” Frey called after him.
“You great big ponce!” Pinn added, to raucous howls of laughter from his companions.
Crake pushed his way out of the tavern, cheeks burning. The cold, clear air off the sea soothed him. He stood outside Old One-Eye’s, collecting himself. Even after several months on board the Ketty Jay, he wasn’t used to being mocked quite so crudely. It took him a short while before he felt calm enough to forgive the crew. Not Pinn, though. That was just one more score against him. Ponce, indeed. That moron didn’t know how to love a woman.
He buttoned up his greatcoat, pulled on a pair of gloves, and began to walk.
Tarlock Cove at dusk was rather picturesque, he thought. A fraction more civilized than the dives he’d become accustomed to, anyway. With the Hookhollows rising steeply at the back of the town and the wild Poleward Sea before it, there was a dramatic vista at every corner. It was built into the mountainside and straggled around the encircling arms of the bay, connected by steep stairs and winding gravel paths. Houses were narrow, wooden, and generally well kept once you got away from either of the two docks. Vessels of both air and sea made port here, as Tarlock Cove was built on fishing. The ships trawled the shoals and sold their catch to the aircraft crews for distribution.
It was, in fact, the reason they’d come here. Having been burned by their last endeavor, Frey decided to play it safe with some nice, legal work that wasn’t liable to get them all killed. He’d all but emptied the Ketty Jay’s coffers to buy a cargo of smoked bloodfish, which he planned to sell inland for a profit. Apparently, it was “easy work” and “nothing could go wrong,” both phrases Crake had learned to mistrust of late.
He headed up railed stone stairways and along curving lanes. The houses pressed close to a waist-high barrier wall, which separated pedestrians from the sheer cliffs on the other side. Lamplighters were making their way along the cobbled streets, leaving a dotted line of hazily glowing lampposts in their wake.
As Crake climbed higher, he could see the lighthouse at the mouth of the bay, and he was pleased when he noticed it brighten and begin to turn. Such things, signs of a well-run and orderly world, gave him a sense of enormous satisfaction at times.
Orderliness was one of the reasons he’d liked Tarlock Cove on his previous visits. It was overseen by the family whose name it bore, and the Tarlocks ensured their little town wasn’t left to ruin. Houses were well painted, streets swept clean, and the Ducal Militia made certain that the ragamuffin traders who passed through were kept from bothering the respectable folk higher up the mountainside.
Dominating it all from the highest point of the town was the Tarlock manse. It was unassuming in its grandeur, a wide, stout building with many windows, benevolently overlooking the bay. A classically understated design, Crake thought: the picture of aristocratic modesty. He’d visited with the Tarlocks once and found them delightful company.
But it wasn’t the Tarlocks he planned to see tonight. He went instead down a winding lamplit lane and knocked at the door of a thin three-story house sandwiched between other houses of a similar design.
The door was opened by a rotund man in his sixties wearing a pince-nez. The top of his head was bald, but stringy gray hair fell around his neck and over the collar of his brown-and-gold jacket.
He took one look at his visitor and the color drained from his face.
“Good evening, Plome,” Crake said.
“Good evening?” Plome spluttered. He looked both ways up the alley, then seized Crake by the arm and pulled him over the threshold. “Get off the street, you fool!” He shut the door the moment Crake was inside.
The hallway within was shadowy at this hour: the lamps hadn’t yet been lit. Gold-framed portraits and a floor-to-ceiling mirror hung on paneled walls of dark wood. As Crake began to unbutton his greatcoat, he