Page 87 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Really…” Arpix stammered. “I couldn’t—”

A second guard whipped the cloth from the cage. Rather than the single skeer that Arpix had dreaded, three figures stood inside. Kerrol, Yute, and the child Arpix now knew to be Yute’s daughter.

Oanold waved Arpix forward. “Kill them for me.”

Eons of biological evolution have shaped us to protect children. Their innocence, ignorance, and helplessness in the face of the world’s dangerous complexity call to our protective instincts. But the truth is that we’re all children in the grip of the callous indifference existence shows us.

Grimdark, Grimdarker, Grimdarkest, by Michael R. Baked

Chapter 38

Evar

“Oldo’s an idiot, but I don’t think he’s kidnapping children,” Starval said.

“An idiot?” Evar had quite liked the landlord of the Stained Page.

Starval nodded. “A blowhard, a bit of a bully on occasion, a boaster, a fool, in short: an ass.”

“You got all that from him delivering two helpings of stew and two plates of ribs?”

“I listen, and I ask questions.” Starval shrugged. “While you were out hunting for the latrine, I was chatting with my boys Gothon and Abra.”

“Huh.” Evar blinked and followed Starval down the street. The mists had all but gone and it wouldn’t be long before dawn started to nudge the horizon. He supposed that Oldo, like many people, could present different faces to the world depending on who he thought his audience was. Whatever he’d got hidden in those barrels would reveal yet another face. “Kids? I told you about a sneeze. I didn’t say anything about kids.”

“You obviously don’t have a very good handle on how large humans are.” Starval snorted. “The ale barrels I’ve seen here haven’t been big enough for an adult, not even a small human one. If he’s transporting something that can sneeze in them, and it’s not some sort of animal, then it’s children. What his interest in children is…I couldn’t say. But if it’s the most common one in cases like this then I’ll stab him myself, no charge. And thistime if the first blow doesn’t kill him, it really will be because I want to hurt him.”

The Stained Pagelooked very different, the lights within extinguished. The undercurrent of chatter no longer bubbled through its small windows. Its façade seemed like the face of a friend’s fresh corpse: very little changed from when life had animated it, but even so, you could instantly tell that something vital had gone missing.

“Curious,” Starval muttered as he led Evar beneath the hanging sign and on past the door they had entered by the previous day.

“What was?”

“Someone forced entry. You didn’t see the repairs?”

Evar hadn’t. He’d been too wrapped in his musings.

Starval circled around to the rear of the tavern, missing the next alley and taking a longer-than-necessary route down the street after it. When they reached the back wall, he vaulted over it in one fluid motion, finding a foothold halfway up where Evar saw none, and clearing the broken glass on top by a finger’s width.

“Come on!” Hissed from the far side.

Evar walked on several more strides, binding a strap of book-leather around his palm several times for protection. With more effort and less grace than his brother he too scrambled over, dropping in perilously close to the latrine huts, and in the other half of the yard to that which Starval had landed in.

Starval opened the door in the wall that separated the patrons’ toilet area from the unloading docks and leaned through. “Come on.” He beckoned. “Idiot.”

Evar hurried to join his brother and came to stand by what he took to be the hatch down which incoming carts unloaded their barrels. With only Attamast’s crescent and scattered starlight to illuminate the scene, the place was hard to make sense of. “Locked,” he whispered, taking hold of the padlock that secured the heavy chain binding the two handles of the hatch doors.

“It is.” Starval nodded. He’d squatted on his haunches, examining a pile of rags by the tavern wall.

“So pick it.” Evar’s irritation rose. Starval had defeated the lock on the door between the two sections of the yard so quickly that Evar half suspected it had been left open. “Let’s get down there and see what we can find.”

“Not much, I’m thinking,” Starval said. “This place has been raided. My guess is that any barrels we find down there are going to be empty, or full of ale.”

“Still worth trying!” Evar worked the largest of his picks from the pocket of his leathers, all made from metal fittings recovered from books. Unlike Starval, he’d never had the chance to practise in the Mechanism, only on locked books in the library. Still, nothing was more likely to motivate Starval to open the padlock than Evar’s inexpert fumbling.

“Or we could just ask Gothon here.” Starval slipped an arm under the pile of rags. “I don’t think he’s quite as dead as he’s pretending to be.”

The figure groaned as Starval lifted it into a sitting position, confirming the assassin’s diagnosis. Evar could make out the tangled mass of the canith’s hair now, still with the thicket of wooden pegs decorating the many individual locks.

---