Chapter 3
They called him the Bully Beggar and though some might know his true name as Armston none of them knew his story. The streets of Renstown ran with a dozen tales of how he lost his leg. A bear in the Red Pine forest, a man trap on Duke Lundley's estate, a grievous wound taken in the Small Lords' War ... many others. All lies. He had been nine, a big lad even then, always climbing trees. The splinter hadn't been the largest he ever got and it came out easily enough. But the puncture site had turned red, started to leak puss, then the flesh had soured. What had been truly remarkable was that he survived the butcher who took his leg, and the nightmare of four further butcheries over the years as he grew and the bone tried to emerge.
"What sort of idiot flashes silver in the river-runs?" Armston could hear the anger in his own voice. "What sort of idiot?" The idiot's money was in his pocket now and he was washing the idiot's blood from his hands, but even so he was angry. He wasn't a murderer. He collected the Rope's cut from Renstown's beggars. He'd twist arms, break noses. And yes sometimes a beggar would die. They were none of them healthy to start with. But he never set out to murder. The Rope had people for that. Benam, who stood beside him waiting for his share, had a taste for killing sure enough. Maybe one day the Rope would give him the long knife and set him loose. Armston didn't think so. Benam might have a taste for it but one eye wasn't enough for the long knife. One eye made him a bad beggar rather than a good killer. Still, Benam enjoyed taking a life and Armston didn't. Which was why he felt angry that the idiot had put him in such a position. Obviously that much silver couldn't be allowed to stagger out of the river-runs in the pocket of a man who didn't look as if he would last another day. That wound in his side had looked as if it should have killed him long before.
"So." Benam stared at the dirty palm he'd held out between them.
"So, damn well wait." Armston leaned on his crutch, took his hands from the bowl and shook the water from them. A single candle lit the hut and it stood over by the back wall where the roof didn't leak. His wet hands still looked bloody but the feeble light played all manner of tricks on the eye.
"Don't want to still be waiting when they find the body." Benam kept his hand out. "I'll be over on the east side drinking in the tinker taverns, not standing here with the Beggar Bully and blood on my hands." His eyes flitted to Armston's fingers.
"God below. It's me with his blood all over. Should have been you though." Armston wiped both hands on his shirt where it strained across his belly. "Shit on it." He fished into his pocket and tried to find a crown by touch but the coins were of all sizes. "He brought out a copper then a silver. "Looks Sverlander to me." He tossed it to Benam. "Don't get taken for a raider!"
Benam fumbled the coin to the floor, swearing. One-eyed men make poor catches. "I'll be back in a few days when I've turned this into fun and used it up." He shouldered his way through the door, back out into the night and the rain.
Armston stood a moment, leaning on his crutch. He felt out of sorts, still angry but with the anger having slipped its moorings and no longer attached to the dead man lying in the alley behind Dannat's place. He went to the back of the hut and held his hands out to the candle. A scarlet stain had spread across both palms and down the fingers. The blood had washed away but his skin remained marked. It was hardly evidence but he didn't want to be around the area come daylight either. The body would bring the marshal's lads and if their suspicion fell on him then paying them off would halve his profit.
Benam's plan didn't sound too bad. Still rubbing at his hands Armston pushed out into the street. "All yours." The family waiting in the rain began to file back in behind him. Ugly Mary was one of the more successful beggars along the river-runs, never late giving over the Rope's share to Armston and yet what she kept of her takings managed to put a roof over her head. It even managed to put some food in the bellies of the three scrawny kids who crowded back into the hut behind her.
Armston went up the main street toward the town proper, setting his crutch with care before swinging his peg. The rain had made a fool of him before. He spat and grumbled and wondered why the riches in his pocket weren't putting a spring in his step. His missing leg hurt, worse than normal, aching down around the ankle, cramps in the toes. Sometimes he had to touch the wooden peg to convince himself that his flesh and bone were really gone.
"Damn kids." For some reason the pinched faces of Ugly Mary's children haunted him down the road, together with his unfocussed anger. And with them, for reasons wholly beyond Armston's comprehension ... the image of a ribbon fluttering in the breeze.
Armston took some bedding and slept in the communal room at the back of Ravvin's. He could afford better than to slum it in a tinker tavern but if he spent too freely someone in the Rope would see and Gostle would summon him. Or if he were really unlucky it would be someone dangerous from one of the larger towns like Ghennet or Durnsport who would come to assess him for the Rope's cut of his profit. That wasn't a meeting he was eager to have for several reasons and losing the coin was the least of those reasons. The Rope reached all the way back through the borders of Alitha and into the emperor's capital itself. Many men found themselves dangling on it, and if they broke trust it would be their necks they hung by soon enough.
He kicked a sleeping traveller out of the corner spot and took it for himself. Armston lived in a delicate balance, a king to the beggars of a small town, little more than a beggar himself to those he worked for. And in truth he had spent years begging before he discovered that demanding was more lucrative than asking.
Armston lowered himself to the ground, feeling his years as his bones creaked and each joint made its protest. He unbound his wooden leg and set it to one side. Murder would be the least worry of anyone foolish enough to steal it.
He laid his head down and strange dreams took him almost immediately. He fell into them headlong, too swiftly even to cry out.
The Beggar Bully woke late in the morning finding all but one old soak gone from the room. He uncurled, groaned, and drew out his money pouch on its thong. Years of sleeping among thieves had trained him to caution. He rolled to a crack where the daylight streamed in through the wall and examined each of the coins. He curled his lip at the sight of Sverland kings of yesteryear set in silver. His left hand clenched into a fist and he found his heart racing though he couldn't say why. He felt unmoored. He wanted a woman, but not to lie with. He could make no sense of it.
Armston decided he should go and find Janna. He'd been sweet on her for years and with money in his pocket she would take him in. She would close her rooms to other men, and show him the life he imagined behind the well-fitting doors of the streets around the marshal's manor. She would fill a tub with hot water, shave him, have her girl mend his clothes, and when enough of the alleys had been rubbed away or hidden she would take him to her bed. He didn't feel himself this morning, not at all, as if he were just a painting of Armston Smithson stretched across something larger, that was rising from beneath. Janna would sort him out. She would know what to do.
Armston tried to stand, eager to reach his sweetheart's chamber ... and collapsed. He cursed, realising that for the first time in memory he had forgotten to attach his leg. A short while later he emerged into the street, shivering. He squinted up at a too-bright sky. The night's rain had been shuffled to the south leaving the heavens a pale wash. Armston winced. A sharp pain threatened to divide his head. He bit down against it and hurried off, drawn by thoughts of the comfort he would find in soft arms.
"What's this?" The Beggar Bully stopped at the corner where Old Karn sold pies, allegedly containing meat. Two figures had drawn his eye, huddled in the doorway across the street. He stood staring. A woman and a girl, arms about each other for warmth, peasant folk by the look of it. Beggars! In his town. Sitting without his permission, without payment, without respect! An old anger that was all his own boiled through him and the ache in his head retreated. He stomped across the street, planting his crutch heavily and swinging forward.
He drew up before them and the girl raised her face before he could speak. She was a pretty thing, marred only by a bright red birthmark spreading across her cheek like the fingers of a hand.
"...of a hand." Armston looked down at his own hands and found them clean, free of the stain that couldn't be washed away the night before. Gone entirely as if it has sunk into his flesh and vanished from view. He looked back at the girl.
"Rula?" The name spoke itself from his lips.
The woman beside the girl looked up sharply, full of fear.
"Gaia," he said.
Both mother and daughter pressed themselves back against the door. "How ... how do you know us?" Gaia drew her daughter to her.
"I don't..." It seemed to Armston that he were suddenly too tall, a hundred yards high, with the world rotating about him. "I don't know." He was no longer sure of his own name, but he knew this woman.
"Where's Catalin? And Baya?" He saw their faces in his mind's eye as he named them and a fear surged in him, so large it took his breath and allowed no more questions.
"The raiders took them- How do you- Did ... did someone send you?"
He didn't know where the names came from or if someone had sent him, only that nothing was more important to him than the faces behind those names. Something was clawing its way through from deep places he never knew existed and all that was Armston Smithson was breaking like ice on a lake, being pushed to the shores, discarded in pieces.
"Take this." He pulled out his coin purse, careless of who might be watching, and thrust it into Gaia's hands. "Don't stay here. Buy what you need from Eli on the river road but don't show him silver. Go home. Rebuild."
With that he turned and hurried away, awkward with his crutch, hardly seeing the street.
The man with the peg-leg, greying hair, and sagging belly walked and walked, lost in the chaos of his thoughts.
"I'm Armston. This is my town. I run the beggars." He stared at his hands from time to time. They seemed strange to him. Wrong. "My name is Armston." He stopped and stared at the clouds streaking heaven's vault. "I'm real." A challenge to the God Above, but it lacked conviction and his voice shook. He walked on, head down, muttering.
Finally he fetched up against someone with enough force to send both of them reeling.
"Here! Who in hell do you think you are?" A tall man of middling years, wrapped in a leather coat.
"I... I don't kn-" A pause. "Jac... I'm Jacob Summer!"
The man straightened his coat and frowned. "Are you drunk?" A silence stretched between them, some passer-bys pausing to watch. A cart clattered over cobbles. "Well, drunk or not you should know your place. Do you see any beggars here?" He swept out an arm to encompass the street.
Jac looked around, or Armston did. He could hear echoes of the Beggar Bully all around him. The houses to either side of the street were stone built and tall. Jac had forgotten that buildings so grand existed a day's travel from his door. Fragments of Armston's memories crowded in and Jac reached for the nearest. This was the North Street leading to the marshal's manor and the grand square. He had no business here. The man before him was one of the deputies that kept order for the marshal. His name hovered beyond reach.
"Do you hear me, fool?" The man raised his voice and stepped in closer. He matched Armston in height.
"Sorry," Jac mumbled the word and turned to go, awkward on his crutch, almost slipping. A young woman smirked and the girl at her side tittered. "Sorry." And he was off, stumping along on his wooden peg, afloat on a sea of confusion.
Jac tried to retrace his steps while extracting his thoughts and memories from the wreckage of Armston Smithson, the Beggar Bully. He felt soiled by the man's memories. The echoes of Smithson's thoughts haunted his own, whispering facts about the buildings and the people passing by. Jac tried to find something about himself in the man's past. It was like reaching into a cesspit and feeling with blind fingers for something familiar. He sifted and dredged but all that would come up was the image of his own pale face in the rain. Suddenly the memory of dragging that serrated knife across his throat rose up to seize him. The unsettling feel of it, the resistance from a blade too dull for the work, then the hot flood of blood. He retched and staggered on, wiping at his mouth.
He found a quiet spot behind the stables on the west road and settled to the ground, clumsy, and besieged by unfamiliar aches.
"I'm Jacob Summer." It helped to hear the words out loud. He raised his hands before him, large, thick veined, but not calloused like those of a man used to hard work. "I'm Jacob Summer. But this ... is not my body. God Above and God Below, this is not my body." He shook his head. "I'm the man who murdered me. I'm in him. It makes no sense."
A couple passed by, arm in arm, glanced his way and moved on.
Jac wondered if this was a hell the God Below had fashioned for him or if the God Who Walks Among Us was playing tricks again as in the old sagas. Renstown had a triple church and as he fished its location from Armston's memory Jac resolved to go there to seek his answers. He started to stand, leaning on the wall for support. Before he straightened Catalin and Baya surged back into his mind. Whatever he was, wherever he was, they still needed him.
"Gaia! I have to find Gaia!" He hurried away along the street, aiming for Eli's general store down among the shacks of the river-runs. He had told them to go to Eli's and they should still be there if he hurried. Armston's natural caution tried to slow him. The town was full of eyes and a hurrying man drew their gaze almost as fast as the flash of silver. Few secrets stayed secret long in Renstown and nothing he'd done today had been well-judged. Giving that fool Benam a crown in place of coppers had been a mistake to start with...
Jac ignored the ghost in his head and went as fast as he could, nearly slipping at two corners. He turned onto the broadness of Red Field Road that led down to the river and picked up the pace still further. Fifty yards on he passed a man standing square in the middle of the street and staring at him most strangely.
"Armston." Something in the way the man spoke the name brought Jac to a reluctant halt. They turned to face each other. "You have somewhere you're eager to be?"
Jac, breathing heavily, sifted through the pieces of the Beggar Bully's memory before answering. The man before him was Rennor Crow, a killer in service to the Rope. His was the lowest tier of the Long Knives but still it would be difficult to find a more deadly man in Renstown.
"I have urgent business," Jac said. "I could meet you later..."
"Gostle wants to see you," Rennor replied.
"I just need-"
Rennor looked puzzled. He had a narrow face, a sharp nose, dark, speculative eyes. He was neither tall nor broad but Jac knew he was fast. "You need to come with me." He seemed unused to explaining himself.
An image of Gostle in a smoky den rose from Armston's memory, tinged with fear. Gostle held the Rope in Renstown. Others may hold his rope in turn, but in Renstown Gostle ran things. The marshal would disagree with that assessment, especially if Lord Abervan were listening, but Armston knew it to be true.
"But..." Jac scowled. If he ignored Rennor the man wouldn't leave if for later, his reputation would demand something sharp and immediate. If he were fit and healthy Jac would still have few options. Fat, aging, and with one leg he had none. "I'll come."
Rennor shook his head, frowning, and led off. He kept to a brisk walk and made no concession to Jac's difficulty at the corners.
Gostle lived in the comfortable heart of Renstown, not on the grand square. That would raise too many questions, but close. On the face of it he was a merchant who dealt in wool. Occasionally he would visit the sheep market for the look of things, and his trips to Falstar were said to be to visit the exchange where other merchants dealt in the shipping of raw wool and of woollens in bulk. Such visits were of course to report to the Rope's top agent in the region who held the leashes of a dozen like Gostle in towns from Durnsport to Dunfenning.
A hefty doorman admitted them. Ten years earlier the man had been champion of the fight ring at every local market for miles and had even gone to Falstar himself to challenge more famous brawlers. Jac followed Rennor, aware of the doorman's silent scrutiny.
They went into a chamber close to the main door, a bare room, the windows shuttered, not at all what might be expected in such a grand house. The Killing Room. The name surfaced out of Armston's memories. A place where murder might be done beneath Gostle's roof but without creating an expensive mess. Jac tensed but a push moved him forward. The doorman had come in behind them and closed the door. Armston would have been very frightened but he would also have known that sometimes the purpose of the room was to terrify. Jac only felt the fear that his chance to find Catalin and Baya might slip away. The rest seemed too unreal for him to wholly believe it, even though he felt the aches of the aging body he wore and spoke with another man's voice.
"Is Gostle coming? Will he be long?"
"Eager, aren't you?" Rennor turned and raised a brow. "Hand over your steel."
Jac pulled from his belt the pitted blade that had cut his throat only the day before. The dark metal showed no sign of his blood. He handed it over.
"And the rest."
Jac remembered the short knife in his boot and gave that over too. He remembered a skewer hidden in his wooden leg. That he kept.
Rennor tossed the weapons into the far corner and went to knock on the opposite door. Two of Gostle's men came through pushing one-eyed Benam between them, his hands bound behind his back. Gostle followed, a short man, wide around the middle, his jacket a velvety moleskin, his greying hair held up with goose grease like the whores by the northgate wore theirs. Apparently the great and good of Falstar were wearing it in such a manner. In Renstown it looked foolish but nobody was laughing.
"Our friend Benam was flashing strange silver in one of my establishments." Gostle had a soft voice, lingering on his words as if he liked to hear himself speak.
At the back of Jac's mind hovered a memory of giving the man a Sverland coin. Also an upwelling of outrage that the man could be so stupid as to draw attention and then so false as to implicate him. Beneath the outrage Armston knew the fault lay with him for entrusting silver to the man, but he had been out of sorts at the time, his judgement skewed.
"I'm told our visitor had considerably more than one piece of antique silver on his person. Most unusual for a peasant farmer. I can appreciate the temptation. But still..." Gostle nodded toward his hulking footman. "If you could give the rest to Mallar here."
Mallar held out a blunt hand whose over-large knuckles had broken many faces.
"I gave it away," Jac said.
"You'll forgive me if I find that hard to believe." Gostle waved Mallar forward and the man began an ungentle search, wrinkling his nose as if Jac stunk. Which, as Jac remembered, Armston did.
After an uncomfortable examination Mallar stood and shook his head. "Nothing, not even pennies."
Gostle raised an eyebrow. "Well, we will need to discover where you hid the rest. It's the principle of the thing. Also, I assume it was a substantial sum given that you felt generous enough to bestow six silvers and assorted lesser coins upon a peasant woman in the street." He met Jac's gaze. "Oh yes, I get reports too. You're not the only one the beggars tell tales to, Armston."
"There was no other money I gave it all to-"
"A peasant and her brat. Yes, I know." Gostle nodded to Mallar and he went to the door through which Benam had been brought. A few moments later he returned and behind him a man dragged Gaia into the room. She had her hands bound behind her, dark bruises on her face, and looked terrified.
"What have you done with Rula?" Jac shouted. He started toward Gaia but Rennor caught his shoulder and set the blade of a long knife to the side of his neck. The man had killed a dozen men and more for the Rope. Slicing away one more would mean even less to him than Jac's murder had meant to Armston.
"Well," Gostle said. "I can see I was wise to keep them both. I would never have suspected that the Beggar Bully of Renstown had a secret family. Rennor here said why not kill the girl and be done. Said she wouldn't be any use even on Cheap Street, not with her face marked like that. But I thought to myself that while she might make a bad whore she could make a half decent beggar. And that set me wondering if the Beggar Bully hadn't bred his own little beggar."
"If you hurt her-" The knife bit deep enough to make Jac hold his tongue.
"Excellent!" Gostle clapped his small, soft hands. "I thought you had a modicum of intelligence Armston, a certain low animal cunning... But here you are telling me just how right I was. The woman and the child are important to you. If we took a knife to you it might be a tediously slow business slicing out the truth from the lies. But something tells me that if I hold a skewer to the eye of this young woman here, or that little girl in the other room, you'll tell me where the rest of the money is soon enough." He folded his hands behind his back and began to pace. "And when the accountancy is taken care of we can consider what punishment the Rope demands in such cases."
Jac could see how it would play out. They would never believe that a man like Armston would give away all or even the majority of what he had taken. Even to his own wife and child. And they would be right not to, because Jac knew Armston Smithson, blood to bone, and the man never would do that. Jac knew that Gostle would have Gaia and then Rula tortured before him, then killed. After that he would torture then kill Jac. Of course Gostle didn't imagine any of that would be necessary. He thought Jac would produce the remaining money stolen from the injured stranger who limped into town on the previous night. After that some bloody retribution would be in order. Perhaps Gaia's face would be cut and Armston would lose a few fingers. It was possible Gostle might kill him but Armston would have guessed himself too much of an effort to replace unless Gostle was having a bad day.
"Proceed." Gostle waved a hand. One of the men who had hold of Gaia twisted her arm cruelly behind her and she cried out in desperate pain.
It was because everyone there who knew the Beggar Bully expected him to produce the money and take his punishment that they had not secured him. The anger that rose in Jac wasn't all his own, nor did he own the cunning that suggested a solution. Armston's fury was quicker to build and more reckless, but sometimes such emotion is necessary. It seemed to Jac that in his rebirth the new Jac, held and would continue to hold, a small shard of Armston. Even though Jac had scattered the man who killed him and taken his body, some element of the Beggar Bully would always taint him. There were lessons here and he could learn them if he chose.
Gostle's man tugged Gaia's arm higher behind her and her screaming lifted an octave. They would hear it in the street. And walk by.
Although Armston wasn't tied Rennor of course had a blade at his neck. Rennor might not be the most skilled or highest ranked of the Long Knives in service to the Rope but he was certainly not slack enough to let Armston, or Jac, get the better of him. Still, there was one way out of this...
With a roar Jac turned, leaning into the knife. He'd had his throat cut in Renstown once already and knew that it was an ugly business. But as much as no part of him wanted to do it again he wanted still less to watch Gaia suffer.
Jac clung to Rennor, lifeblood spraying, clinging on even as the man dragged his knife back and stabbed it into his chest. He tried to drive the surprised killer back into the wall but his peg-leg skittered on the bare floor and all strength left him. The knife blow had found his heart and Jac slid to the floor. His conscious shrunk into a small blind knot, aware only of distant shouts and the hot trail of his own blood running from Rennor's shoulder to the buckle of his belt, soaking into the dark cloth of his shirt.
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