Page 69 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“You think Oanold’s dropped it?” Carlotte looked doubtful.

“I don’t know.” Livira felt suddenly uneasy, not wanting to talk about her book and the damage it seemed to be wreaking. “Let’s keep going.”

They pressed onthrough the streets, Carlotte and her hunger leading the way. Her appetite appeared to be too lazy to climb the slope on which the city had been built, instead following the gradient at each opportunity like spilled milk. Rather than thinning, the mist thickened about them, something Livira hadn’t thought possible. People who passed close by were never more than shadows in the surrounding greyness.

“We could ask someone where we are,” Livira suggested. They were definitely in a city.

“They might toss us in jail.” Carlotte led the way down a flight of worn stairs between two tall, grimy buildings. “As foreign spies or some such. I want to eat…Godsdammit, does this murky piece-of-shit city only have one damn tavern for the entire populace? I’ve half a mind to turn round and go back to…what was it? The Stained Page?”

Reaching the last step, she followed the nearest wall, sniffing as though by relying on her nose she might hunt out the meal she was so desperate for.

“We should be looking for Yolanda and Leetar,” Livira complained.

“We’re as likely to find them at a table eating a good meal as wandering blind in this stuff.” Livira picked up the pace. “More likely, if they’ve any sense.”

Without warning, a full-grown canith loomed at them out of the fog. Livira let out a yelp of surprise, but that was as nothing compared to Carlotte’s reaction. She took to her heels, shrieking as loudly as she would if she’d been grabbed and bitten.

Livira set off after her, not wanting to lose her in the mist.

“I do beg your pardon…” The canith’s parting words, at once apologetic and somewhat startled, chased her as she ran.

Livira followed the sound of running feet and shouted for Carlotte to stop. After about a hundred yards she did, though Livira couldn’t say whether it was her shouts that had brought her to a halt, or the hanging sign and the warm light spilling through puddle-glass windows challenging the weather.

“Heaven’s Gate.” Livira read from the greying board above them. The faded illustration might have been a fist clutching a tankard, or two frogs fighting. “It doesn’t look very heavenly.” One of the windowpanes had been replaced with a piece of wood, and the drinkers hunched over the tables inside did not look to be in paradise. “Maybe it’s called that because people say they’d die before they ate here.”

“If I don’t eat something immediately, I’ll die right now.” Carlotte shoved the door open and went in.

Livira followed her, muttering, “Out-of-towners coming through, please rob us…”

The tavern resembleda cave, being low-ceilinged and dimly lit. The patrons seemed mainly to be labourers, perhaps a market stall keeper or two, ruffians who hustled a mean existence out on the streets, and by the stink of a shabby hulk near the door, a night-soil man. There were canith too, sharing the squalor: by the empty fireplace an older female, bone-thin, sucking on a pipe whose smoke competed with the fellow by the entrance for the title of stinkiest thing in the place.

Carlotte, who on any of the non-ghost days that Livira had known her, would have turned on a heel and walked back into the street retching, ploughed on, making for the bar. Livira followed. It was the sort of place her people would have come to, exhausted after a day of whatever Crath City had demanded of them. She could imagine Acmar and Benth here, bent over a table, nursing an ale, Acmar smeared with the dirt from whatever road he’d been digging, Benth’s leathers scorched from the blazing iron in the foundry that had claimed his life so long ago.

“Two bowls of something hot. And bread. And butter.” Carlotte had reached the bar and slapped down several coins that she must have kept through the years since she’d fled her burning city. “And then two morebowls of the same stuff and some more bread. And more butter. And if it gets to my table really fast, I’ll pay double.” She lifted a silver crown. “How many beers will one of these pay for?”

The red-faced barman took the coin and squinted at it, eyes widening. Livira would have been surprised if the man hadn’t been surprised. However far away he imagined the silver piece to have come from, its true journey was much much longer and stranger. “About fifty.” He paused then added, “Ma’am.”

Some of Chertal’s imperial ways had rubbed off on Carlotte. “Free drinks for everyone until it runs out!”

The resulting rush solved the problem of securing a table. The meal arrived at breakneck speed, and although basic, the magic of an empty stomach worked its culinary wonders. For quite some time Carlotte and Livira ignored everything around them, including each other, and concentrated on eating. When Livira did eventually surface from her second bowl of stew, it wasn’t any of the more animated chatter around her that caught her attention. Instead, as the sounds of her own slurping began to diminish, a rhythmic banging drew her eyes towards the low ceiling. “What’s that?”

“Mmmm?” Carlotte did not look up from the task of cleaning her bowl with the last of the bread.

“It sounds like…”

“They don’t call it a knocking shop for nothing, dear.” A hefty woman in a shapeless, colourless dress grinned from the next table.

“Oh.” Livira had realised, too late to shut her mouth, that the sound was probably that of a bed’s headboard smacking against a wall. Or, if beds were too fancy for such an inn, perhaps just the thump of flesh on floorboards. Whichever it was, the participants seemed to have plenty of stamina.

Carlotte finally looked up, wiped her mouth, and pushed her bowl away. She patted her belly and gave a loud, satisfied belch. “Excuse me.”

Their neighbour in the tentlike dress laughed at that. “And here I was thinking you were a princess who was down on her luck.”

“A queen actually.” Carlotte frowned at the faded blue tatters of her gown. “And I’ve a feeling my luck’s turned for the better. Where would I get some decent clothes? Something warm?”

The woman drained her tankard and wiped the foam from her upper lip. She looked about forty but could be in her thirties or fifties. She had passed into that zone where Livira lost the ability to make good guesses.

“I’m Carlotte, by the way.”

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