The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [63]
Elijah Beckett supposed he was both foolish and desperate. There was no chance that he could find a coach, so he tromped through the snowbanks and hoped his boots would hold out. They were good boots, stiff and lined with wool, so he was optimistic. The fact was, he had little time. As soon as it was safe, Wyndham-Vie and his men would be out and scouring the streets, trying to arrest Beckett and his coroners and trying to eliminate the last remaining leads that remained.
During his enforced stay at the hospice, Beckett had puzzled out where he had left to go. He suspected that Valentine had found nothing at the house on Corimander Street; whatever Wyndham-Vie had taken, he’d probably gotten away with it. Beckett had missed his chance to find out who Wyndham-Vie was working for. Zindel and his family were dead, and there was no sure way of finding out who killed them.
That only left one lead: someone had tried to throw him off by making the murders look like they’d been done by sharpsies. As near as Beckett could figure, that meant one of two things: either they’d had some kind of tool that could mimic a sharpsie bite—in which case there wasn’t a lot he could do to find them—or someone had hired actual sharpsies to do it. And if Beckett wanted to find sharpsies, that meant going to Mudside.
The sharpsie ghetto was south of Red Lanes, and about half an hour’s walk in the bitter cold. Beckett was protected only by his boots, his heavy coat, and the dose of veneine that the trolljrman had given him before he left. The drug was warm in his limbs, and steadfastly kept the cold at bay. It was entirely possible that a man could freeze to death while on veneine, and never notice it.
Mudside spread out by the south bend of the Stark. The river rolled out of the mountains in which Trowth nestled, and had cut a long channel through the impenetrable bedrock on which the city had been built. By the south bend, thick, oozing mud and sediment were thrown up by the swiftly flowing river, leaving a layer of shifting, unstable soil in a smooth fan by the riverside. This unsteady foundation made the construction of any kind of substantial buildings cost-prohibitive, and so Mudside was routinely overlooked in the Architecture War. It had historically been the habitat of the dirty and destitute; land there was cheap, because no one of any importance wanted it. The neighborhood had been a natural home for sharpsie communities.
For a moment, as Beckett looked out at the sharpsie shantytown, he was daunted by the task, and the old despair took a moment to rear its ugly head. The population of Mudside numbered in the thousands, and he couldn’t even speak their language. Still, he didn’t have a lot of options. Beckett muttered to himself as he trudged down the snow hill into Mudside. When all this was over, he was going to Stitch and demanding more changes in the way the coroners was run. From now on, they were going to see every murder, every theft, every breaking and entering first, and no one else was going to touch anything until Beckett himself said that he was satisfied.
Beckett found a trolljrman shoveling snow from in front of his shop at the lower end of Red Lanes. It would be a risk, bringing him into Mudside, but the coroner found himself hard put for choice.
“You, trolljr,” Beckett called to him. “You speak sharpish?”
The trolljrman flexed the feathered crest on his head straight up, and rumbled something incomprehensible in trolljr.
Beckett showed his bronze shield to the trolljrman, and offered him ten crowns if he’d help the coroner in Mudside.
The trolljrman cocked his head to the side, then rumbled, “Yes. Speaks sharpish.” He pronounced it “shaduhpish.” He set down his shovel and crunched through the snow towards Beckett. “Twenty crowns, and I will help.”
Beckett agreed, and he and the trolljrman set off into Mudside. The sharpsie hovels, completely