CHAPTER III

Jona and Tripoli dragged in three men stoned and naked in mid-morning from the middle of the street. Real pinkers didn’t move much when they hit the pipes, but eaters

didn’t get strong enough hits to fall so far. They were just chewing on leaves, not smoking the old, dried dung-like balls of the weed heavy with the pink stain from the flowers. These three eaters were still naked. When they came down from bliss in the prison cell, they’d think about how to get home unashamed.

Tripoli led the three pinkers with their hands tied to the same long rope towards the interrogation room.

Calipari jumped up and grabbed the rope between two naked eaters. “Nope,” said Calipari, “Just toss them in the tank. The king doesn’t need to know why they’re are naked. We already know. Third cell’s open.”

“Aye, sir,” said Tripoli.

Jona stuck his thumb out at the closed door. “Got anything good, Sergeant?”

Calipari sat back down. He looked at the report he was writing. “Ugliest bird you ever saw in your life,” he said, “Tougher than you boys, too.”

Jona laughed. “Tougher than us? Who’s tougher than us? This is the Pens,” said Jona. He puffed out his chest. “We scare blood monkeys. Night King shivers from us.”

Calipari salted his page. He pushed the paper aside, and grabbed a clean sheet. “Night King’s just street talk,” said Calipari. “Real trouble coming when the Chief Engineer gets here to dig up everything. Don’t even know what he’s doing down here. Got a letter say he’s coming here to work. What I want to know is why now? What’s he planning? People like that don’t come here for real. Lord Sabachthani don’t come visiting, what’s this fellow like him doing? Troublesome stuff, that’s what.”

Jona reached over to a scrivener’s hand and swiped a quill straight from the scribbling fingers. Jona handed the inked and ready goose-feather to Calipari. The scrivener shouted at Jona for the theft.

Jona ignored the scrivener. “Who you got in the room?”

Calipari shushed the scrivener with one look. “Thanks,” he said. He scratched numbers on his page.

Jona leaned over the desk to see what precisely Nicola wrote, but all Jona saw were numbers.

“Well?” said Jona.

Calipari harrumphed. “Right,” he said. “Big Jess bounces down in this dive with a bunch of the sailor and slaughterhouse girls,” said Calipari. “Whores hear all kinds of stuff. So, Jess hears it. She’s no flower, our Jess. She’s a fighter, big as an ox.”

“My kind of girl,” said Jona, “What’s she singing?”

“You hear about a porter name of Umberti?”

“I heard he was running pinks for that Dunnlander on the side. What’s that Dunnlander’s name? He’s more gangly than ganger. Too pink to last long.”

“Turco,” said Calipari. “Turns out Umberti is pulling a little off the top of someone else’s stuff, and slipping it out on the side, and Big Jess heard about it from one of her girls who heard it from a stevedore who works it with Umberti. Word spreads quick on a skimmer, true or not. If we don’t pull Umberti soon, he’ll roll with no help from us, and we won’t get our hands on the Dunnlander fast enough to hang him.”

“We’re just rolling him to the noose for smuggling, right?”

Calipari shrugged. “Find Umberti before his bosses figure it out, and maybe we get some push. Nothing makes a good bird like the king’s shield. If he’s too tough, we’ll roll him to the noose with Turco beside him. If he’s smart, he’ll give us the foreigner.”

Jona cracked his neck. He looked over at the closed door behind which Big Jess and Geek talked about the streets. “Do I get to meet the contact?” he asked. Jona had a goofy smile on his face like begging.

Calipari rolled his eyes. “No, you don’t get to meet Big Jess. This is Geek’s show. You got that of-demon girl for Sabachthani and the Anchorites. That’s the stuff you need for the fleur-delis, Lieutenant Lord Joni. Geek just wants Sergeant stripes, and he needs this stuff for it. Foreign gangers hang for Sergeants, and no one cares but us.” A piece of paper moved from one side of the Sergeant’s desk to the other, full of numbers. “I want you and Jaime to hit Bone ’n Cleaver and the Dead Goat, for sure. Ask around for Umberti and Turco for Geek.”

“Dead Goat?” said Jona. He shook his head. “That’s no porter pub,” said Jona, “That’s deep in the pink. Too deep. You want riot bells, you send us in there alone.”

Calipari brushed off Jona’s words with a wave of his hand. “Jaime knows a fellow who’ll let you in back,” said Calipari, “as long as you promise only one guy and only talk. Talk Umberti—or Turco—to leave alone with our protection. Guilty or not, the word’s out. They’re both safer here than at the Dead Goat.”

“I’ll do it,” said Jona, “but I’m carrying two bells in case one gets palmed.”

Calipari nodded. “Hurry up, then.” He scribbled at his papers, and scribbled at his papers, and scribbled at his papers, and he didn’t say one more word. Jona heard laughter through the walls. It wasn’t a woman laughing. It was a man, in there, with a hard laugh. It wasn’t Geek. It wasn’t some woman from a brothel. The laugh was familiar, too. It could have been the carpenter. Sergeant Calipari was lying about the person in that room.

Jaime grabbed Jona’s sleeve. “Come on, let’s go. I ain’t going down there alone.”

Calipari wouldn’t lie without a reason. Jona looked over at Calipari, looking at him hard, trying to read him. Calipari shook his head. He pointed to the door with his quill before going back to writing, and shook his head. Don’t. Jaime was already halfway outside.

Jona and Jaime went out again looking for Turco and Umberti, but the Bone ’n Cleaver was empty during the day when porters and killers were working for their ale money at the Pens’ abattoir. At the Dead Goat—named for the dead goat on a pike rotting over the broken door, replaced weekly—the fellow Jaime used to know had been dropped bleeding into the river a week ago. The folks at the Dead Goat’s back door looked ready to pull teeth at uniforms asking after the dead.

Jona and Jaime backed off. Instead, they walked about the Pens asking people they knew about Umberti and Turco. Nobody heard a thing. They never did.

Then, a fight broke out beside a brothel. Then, this noble’s seneschal got lost looking for a particular warehouse and the two king’s men helped him find his way.

And that’s the rest of the king’s men’s day.

Most days were just a fuzz of faces passing through the streets. No one looked a king’s man in the eye. Everyone lied with their eyes, saying that they weren’t there with their averted faces. Jona stared them in the face, like he wanted them to look away. He was lying with his eyes, too.

The way Jona figured it, something was up with Jaime, or Nicola had heard about the things Jona had been doing for the Night King.

Jona had placed an unsigned form in the pile. It said only that the Night King was real, and hiding in an accounting ledger. Enclosed with the unsigned note was the ledger sheets from the desk of a dead man that Jona had killed because a carpenter told him to do it, and that carpenter was working for the King of the Night. All those people dropped into the canals and rivers, and none of the deaths made any sense to Jona. He had only wanted Calipari to make sense of all those deaths. Calipari was good at looking into books. That’s all Jona had wanted.