Kudshayn doesn’t know his way around Falchester, so he only nodded. “What is along that street? Next to the river?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “We have to go find out. It isn’t far from here.”
He caught my arm before I could set off. “By ourselves?” he said. “Audrey—you just saw Hallman’s body. We could be in a great deal of danger.”
I yanked at his grip, but however scholarly Kudshayn may be, he is still a good deal bigger than I am. I wasn’t going anywhere until he released me or I used jujutsu on him. “The tablets could be in danger.”
“I don’t care about the tablets!” Kudshayn’s wings mantled in his distress. “Whatever they may say is not more important to me than your life.”
That stopped me. I suppose I should not include this part, because I’m supposed to be writing my statement and personal affairs do not enter into that . . . but Kudshayn’s words took all the breath out of me. We’ve been so focused on this epic for months and months, all the implications it may have for history and my career and the future of the Draconeans, that I had fallen into thinking that it mattered more than anything. That was why I ran into the annex, and why I was about to run to Fibula Street.
But just because I’ve decided a thing is important to me doesn’t mean that I have to throw self-preservation entirely out the window. Given a moment to think—forced to stop for a moment and think, I should say—I managed to scrape together a few shreds of common sense. “We’ll tell Corran,” I said, and started back in the direction of Cressy Street and the morgue.
When we got there, though, the doctor was locking up. “Constable Corran left just after you did,” he said.
He had far too much of a head start for us to chase him. “Let me use your telephone, then,” I said. “I’ve just figured out something vital.”
I rang the Western New Central station, but of course Corran wasn’t back there yet. I told the constable on duty what Kudshayn and I had figured out about the poem, and that we were going to investigate Fibula Street; we would be obliged to the constable for heading there at his first opportunity. That was my compromise for safety—and I won’t pretend it was really adequate, but it was all I was willing to concede at the time.
“He’ll meet us there,” I told Kudshayn when I came back. Which implied something more like coordinated timing than was strictly true, but he doesn’t have a very good sense of distances in the city, so he didn’t argue.
Then we set off for Fibula Street on foot. It was not all that far away—but as we walked, I realized that it was upriver, and a chill went down my spine. Quite a lot of the city is upriver from Cressy Street, of course; Hallman’s body could have been dumped anywhere. Still, it made me nervous.
It didn’t help that we attracted a lot of stares as we went along. By then it was well after ten, and there isn’t a lot of nightlife along that part of the river, so not many people were on the streets—but every single one of them stopped when they saw us. We’ve gone everywhere in the city via cabs since Kudshayn came here, precisely because of this (and because I have never learned how to drive), so this was the first time Kudshayn had really been out and about in Falchester. Nobody approached us, though—and after a little while I was glad of it. Upper Fibula Street is respectable, but the lower part is not, and a Draconean looks just menacing enough to the uninitiated that men who might have challenged a strange man or accosted a strange woman decided they could content themselves with threatening scowls.
We followed Fibula Street down toward the river. At the last intersection before the water, where Rope Lane crossed our path, it was my turn to catch Kudshayn by the arm. Wordlessly, I pointed at the rusted sign that arches over the entrance to the last block of Fibula Street: Crown Wharf.
“The Crown of the Abyss,” he said quietly.
The last of my doubts vanished. I had correctly parsed Aaron’s message; whatever he was sending me toward lay in the dark alley ahead. That is the oldest part of the city, where the streets are still built to cramped medieval dimensions; what used to be a royal wharf, centuries ago, is now packed with warehouses. Treasure-houses, one might say . . . filled with “all the glories of the past.”
“Dorak,” I said. “I will bet you ten guineas that he has a warehouse at the bottom of Fibula Street.” One that he owns under some false name or other deception, so that the police never find his smuggled antiquities when they raid.
“Why would Mornett hide the tablets there?”
“I don’t think he would. I think he is offering up Dorak.” As compensation for the wrongs he had done to me—or revenge against the people who wanted not simply to lie about the past, but to destroy it. Perhaps a little of both.
Kudshayn shifted uncertainly, looking around. Rope Lane and Fibula Street were both deserted. “I don’t see the constable.”
“I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” I said, though I wasn’t sure of anything of the sort. “In the meanwhile, I’m going to go take a look.”
I was off and across Rope Lane before Kudshayn could catch me. He didn’t shout, probably for fear of drawing attention, so by the time he caught up I was halfway to the river. The alley was the next best thing to pitch black, but the moon cast enough light on the surface of the Twisel to silhouette the weather-beaten sign hanging from the side of the left-hand warehouse: a pair of wings.
“Aaron?” I whispered hesitantly. But I will stand alone, outside the shelter of her wings . . . It might have meant he was waiting out there. But no answer came, so I advanced another few steps—then stumbled over an unseen box and lurched against the door, which proved to be slightly ajar.
I caught hold of it too late to keep the hinges from creaking, but since the winged sign kept creaking on its own hinges, I hoped the sound would pass unremarked. Kudshayn, who has much better night vision than I do, made it to my side without stumbling over anything, and I breathed, “Listen.”
There were voices inside the warehouse.
Too muffled for me to make anything out, but unmistakably coming from inside, not somewhere along the wharf. I put one hand on Kudshayn’s arm, not quite daring to say anything more, for fear we’d be overheard. We stood like that for a long moment, and I willed him to understand what I couldn’t say: that he needed to go back out to Rope Lane and wait for Constable Corran, while I went inside. And that it had to be that way, not vice versa, because a lone woman standing in a dark street in this part of Falchester would possibly be in even more danger than a lone woman creeping into a smuggler’s warehouse.
His weight moved, and then I felt the pad of his thumb against my forehead, heard a whisper almost too quiet to even reach my ears. It was a Draconean blessing: if this had been a proper ritual, he would have placed a “sun mark” on my forehead in yellow pollen, and the words were a prayer that, just as the sun descends into an abyssal cave every night before re-emerging the next morning, I would come through this trial safely.
Then he was gone, moving silently up the street, and I slipped into the warehouse.
I had to move slowly, lest I trip over or slam into anything else. The warehouse had some high clerestory windows, which admitted just enough light to let me make out where the aisles were, nothing more; the crates next to me could have been filled with all the treasures of the Watchers’ Heart and I would never have been able to identify them. But that wasn’t what mattered just then. I inched my way toward the voices, which were coming from closer to the water. The air grew brighter as I approached, and I realized the river doors were open, where lighters would ordinarily bring in goods from ships moored farther out.