Change that some people didn’t want heard.
The road climbed once more and their horses slowed. Cora couldn’t blame them. They’d travelled many miles since leaving Fenest. She’d not spent much time in Perlanse before now – just the occasional visit to make enquiries in a case. She hadn’t seen much of the Union beyond Fenest, truth be told. But all the realms came to the capital so was there any need to go out and find them?
She had to admit, the countryside of East Perlanse wasn’t such a bad place to visit. Their journey to the inn had been in darkness as they rode through the night, but now, in the late afternoon spring sunshine, the woodlands and the bright rivers, the humped bridges and fancy market towns had a kind of charm. What would it mean to stop here, to not go back? To ignore the hunt for Tennworth, who was likely a Chambers?
The road rose and sloped and rose again – she lost count of the number of hills. They stopped once, for Cora to smoke and Jenkins to dismount and get the blood moving in her feet. The final climb gave a welcome sight from the top of the hill.
‘Ah – there it is,’ Cora said. ‘Still standing, then.’
Far below them, Fenest sprawled across the plains. Cora pulled her horse to a halt and Jenkins followed suit.
‘Don’t get much chance to see it from a distance,’ Cora said.
‘It looks… bigger, somehow.’
‘Because you’re not jammed in some alleyway with a cutpurse at your throat,’ Cora said. ‘That can feel very cramped.’
Jenkins laughed. ‘It’s not all like that, Detective.’
‘My part is.’
But that hadn’t always been her part of the city, Cora thought. She shook that idea away, not wanting to think about the past, about her parents. About Ruth. That was over and done with a long time ago, and good riddance. She made herself look at the city, her city, in all its messy glory.
In the Casker election story, the main character, the Sanga, had described Fenest as a bloodstain, first time he saw it. That was seeing it from the River Cask though. From here, on a hill in Perlanse, Cora thought the city was like a giant spider, with more legs than was usual. Each leg a street, and from each of them sprouted alleys, cut-throughs, crooked lanes. The whole place crammed with people, the wealthy and the poor, the innocent and the whores, the chequers and their customers, the pennysheet sellers and their readers. The spider that was Fenest twitched with life.
And at the centre were the spider’s twin beating hearts: the Wheelhouse, where the Commission was based, and the Assembly building, where the Chambers sat. Both were so huge that she could see them from here. The Wheelhouse was anything but round – a squat, square sandstone building covered in tiny windows. Close by, the Assembly building was easy to spot. Its glass dome caught the early evening sun.
‘You all right, Detective?’ Jenkins was frowning at her.
‘Once we get back there, we’ll be investigating the Chambers – the most powerful people in the Union. It’s going to be… difficult. Dangerous.’
‘I didn’t join the police because it was easy,’ Jenkins said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t either.’
‘True. We’d better get moving then, hadn’t we, Constable?’
Cora gave her horse a gentle nudge and headed down the hill. They were still hours away, but now that home was in sight, she knew she’d keep riding towards it. And towards the case.
*
It was late by the time they returned the horses to the coaching inn on the outskirts of the city. Jenkins was all for going to the station and starting work straight away, but Cora told her to get some rest. The constable made some half-hearted noises of protest, but she was too tired to really fight Cora’s order.
‘Tomorrow, the real work begins,’ Cora said. ‘We need to work out who Tennworth is.’
Jenkins took her leave and headed into the maze of streets to wherever it was she lived. Cora realised she didn’t know. Likely for the best.
Cora was never one to follow her own advice: a catch-up with Sergeant Hearst would be helpful. Might as well confirm, sooner rather than later, the suspicions both had shared when news had come that the prisoner transport was in trouble.
The steps of Bernswick station were quiet, the lamps at the main doors lit to ward off the dusk. She’d be glad for their warmth inside, too; the spring evenings still had a bite and the station was known for its draughts as well as its many leaks. The Perlish-controlled Assembly hadn’t spent anything to improve things for the police in the last five years. Would this election make any difference? Cora pulled the whore’s coat tighter and headed inside.
The desk sergeant, Lester, barely looked up from his pennysheet. He was around her age and had been there for as long as she could remember.
‘What tales has The Spoke for us?’ Cora asked.
‘That the world isn’t ending quite yet.’ Lester scratched his days-old stubble with a loud rasp.
‘Black Jefferey had its fill, has it?’
‘Seems so. Commission are keeping Burlington Palace as a hospital for the time being, but they’ve re-opened the roads around it.’ Lester shook his head. ‘What the Commission should be doing is keeping people out of the city.’
‘Hard to do that in an election year,’ Cora said.
‘Hard to do it any time, the way people are coming up from the south these days. Why they can’t just stay in their own homes, I don’t know.’
He wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t heard before. A few of the pennysheet titles took the same view and spouted their anti-southern talk often enough, so people spread the same story. More regularly since Black Jefferey had arrived in Fenest. A plague carried by an election story, some said. By a southern Casker story.
‘People wouldn’t be coming to Fenest unless they had to,’ Cora told Lester.
But Lester wasn’t listening, his gaze firmly on the pennysheet. ‘Some funny business with the Caskers, they’re saying here.’
‘At Burlington?’ Cora had seen plenty of bargemen and women when she’d gone to see the trouble at the make-shift plague hospital.
‘No, at Bordair,’ Lester said, and peered closer at the ’sheet as if to make more sense of the story, as if that was likely with The Spoke. ‘Saying they’re drowning themselves.’
Bordair was the inland lake the Caskers called home, the place they sailed back to when they weren’t travelling up and down the rivers of the Union.
‘Says they’re strapping stones to themselves before they jump into the water.’ Lester shook his head. ‘It’s all rubbish. I don’t know why I bother reading it.’
‘That the latest edition?’
The desk sergeant nodded.
So news of Finnuc’s death hadn’t reached the city yet. That would be Cora’s story to share.
‘The girl dropped it off,’ Lester said. ‘The one with the loud voice, and the funny name.’
‘Marcus.’
‘That’s it! Said she’d be telling the Bailiff about me if I didn’t pay her quicker for the ’sheets. Where did you find that one, Detective?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
She made for the briefing room: the heart of the station, not least because that was where the coffee was. It was also where the constables spent their days, when they weren’t out in the streets. Spent their night shifts, too, bedding down in the corners, and ate their breakfast there when Sergeant Hearst roused them in the morning. The long room was all but empty now. A few constables were playing cards at the back, and she fought the urge to join them. Another was lying on a bench, her blue jacket rolled as a pillow and her snores breaking into the low chat of the card game. The election meant that most constables were doing double shifts, dealing with the inevitable rise in cutpurse attacks as well as managing the election story sites. She’d be pleased when it was all over.