Chapter 17: The First Execution - Part 1
ULF
Piss and rotting fish. That was the alley across from the Pissing Goat after midnight, and I stood in the deepest part of it with my hood down over my eyes and my shoulders against wet brick.
The smell was useful. Nobody lingers in a street that stinks.
The tavern door swung open and shut all night, throwing yellow light across the cobbles and spilling men who couldn't walk straight. I counted them. Fourteen. None big enough.
Midnight came and went. A dog worked at something in the gutter twenty paces down and I listened to it until it trotted off toward the river.
Then the door opened again and the light behind it went dark around a shape too wide for the frame.
Harren.
He stopped on the threshold. Didn't sway. He turned his head along the street, slow, left to right and back, reading doorways, shutters, the mouths of alleys. Watch habit. When his eyes came across my corner I stopped breathing.
Thirty kilograms.
It never happened fast. Three seconds of concentration, my stomach going out from under me like a missed stair, and then the harbour wind was pushing at me and I had to set my palm flat on the wall to stay put. Light meant silent. Light meant nothing under my boots would grind.
His gaze went over me and kept going. He grunted at something only he found funny and started walking.
I followed.
Twenty meters back. He took the route I'd watched three nights running: narrow lanes, cut-throughs, no main roads, angling toward Fishmonger's Square.
Every fifty paces he looked over his shoulder. Two years out of the gold cloak and he still did it on a count.
I used Soru in short pushes, one burst each time his head came forward again. Twenty meters became fifteen. Fifteen became ten. It cost. Each burst left my calves burning, and I had to stand dead still afterward and let my heart come down before I dared the next.
He turned into the alley off Cobbler's Row. No windows. Walls near enough that I could have touched both at once.
Now.
Full burst. The street smeared. Cold air hit my face like thrown water, and ten meters closed before he finished his second step.
He heard it. Of course he heard it. The Watch hadn't taken his ears when it took his cloak.
He started to turn.
I drove my fingers into his lower back. Shigan.
I'd put that strike through a pork shoulder a dozen times in my room. Meat, then bone, then out the other side, clean every time.
Pork doesn't twist.
Harren twisted. My hand went in high and wide, through the meat of his shoulder instead of the kidney, and came out the front of him with a sound I felt in my teeth. Blood came with it, hot, all down my wrist and into my sleeve.
He roared. There was no hurt in it. It came out of him hot and personal, the sound of something being robbed.
He came around faster than his size had any right to allow, and there was a cleaver in his off hand. Butcher's steel, wide as my palm, honed to a blue line. I had no idea where on his body he'd been carrying it.
The blade came flat at my throat.
Tekkai. Both forearms up, everything locked, muscle drawn so tight my jaw ached.
The cleaver hit and rang. An anvil sound, slapping off both walls and up between the roofs, and the edge skidded off my arm without opening the skin.
Harren looked at his own blade. Then at me.
"What the fuck are you?"
I said nothing.
"You're no Cloak." Blood ran off his fingertips onto the stones and he didn't seem to notice. "Cloaks come in threes and they announce themselves first. So you're bought." He shifted his grip on the cleaver, wet hand, and the leather squeaked. "Whoever's paying you, I'll double it. I've got coin coming. Real coin. Not stag pieces from some fishmonger you slept with."
He was offering me Daemon's gold. He didn't know he was doing it and it still turned my stomach.
"Name your figure," he said. "Go on. You want to stand there dumb, I'll pick one for you. Fifty dragons." He watched my face for it and got nothing. "A hundred. Gold, in your hand, before the moon's down."
I let him talk.
"Say something, you mute bastard. I know every face in Flea Bottom and I don't know yours."
Five hundred kilograms.
That took three seconds too, and he spent them on me. He swung while I stood locked in Tekkai and couldn't move, and the cleaver clanged off my shoulder, my hip, my raised arm. Three blows. Each one rang. Each one took something out of my hold, and grey crept in at the edges of my sight while the cobbles cracked and sank under my boots.
Then I let Tekkai go and put my fist into his ribs.
I felt them go. Not one. A row of them, folding in like barrel staves under a boot heel. The sound went up the alley and came back off the far wall.
Harren dropped to one knee. His breath went out of him wet.
He didn't drop the cleaver.
"Huh," he said. There was blood at the corner of his mouth now, dark in the little light there was. "That's new."
He swung from the knee, low and wild, at my thigh. I stepped back and let it go through empty air. The weight was still on me and my boot came down hard enough to split a cobble in half.
He tried to stand. Got his good hand under himself, got halfway, and the arm gave out.
"Give me the name," he said. The words came out with more blood in them. "Come on. I'm done, I know I'm done. You've done for me. A man's owed the name of the one who did it."
He wanted an enemy he understood. A rival. A debt. A brother of some prisoner he'd beaten to death in a cell.
I crouched where he could see my mouth.
"You took gold for a nursery," I said.
Whatever he'd braced for, it wasn't that. His eyes changed. Not fear. He was working out who could possibly have known, and drowning while he worked.
He'd take that as far as a bed somewhere and no further, if I did this properly.
I straightened. Stiffened my fingers. Base of the skull. Two seconds.
"Wha—what in the Seven Hells—"
A drunk in the mouth of the alley. One hand on the brick, swaying, staring at us with eyes that couldn't hold focus.
Witness.
I ran it fast and cold. Kill him: Soru forward, Shigan through the throat, two seconds, done. But two bodies in one alley in one night isn't two murders, it's a story, and stories travel. Let him go: he talks to the Gold Cloaks. Describes me. Maybe. If he remembers anything through that much ale.
The drunk solved it himself. He bent double and vomited across the stones, hard enough that it splashed my boots from four meters away.
"Demons," he mumbled, wiping his mouth on his forearm. "Fucking demons in the alleys. Seven save me. Seven save me, I never saw a thing."
He ran. Badly, shoulder scraping the wall, and was gone around the corner.
Harren had gone face down in his own blood. Still breathing. Shallow, fast, wrong.
Dying. Not dead.
Boots. More than one pair, striking stone in step, coming up Cobbler's Row.
Gold Cloaks. Early, or the shouting had pulled them off their route.
I got Harren by the collar and hauled him deeper into the alley. Even at my own weight he came like a sack of wet sand, and he left a wide smear behind him in the muck. I dropped him behind a stack of broken crates, triggered Soru, and went up and out.
Three buildings over I put my back to a chimney and let my weight come off. The change went through me and left me shaking against the brick until my head cleared. Below, torchlight came into the alley mouth.
Two of them. They found him inside ten heartbeats.
"Seven Hells."
One went down on his knees in the blood and put two fingers to Harren's throat.
"He's alive. Barely."
"That's Harren." The second one held the torch closer. "He was one of us. Before."
"Look at his chest. Something's caved the whole side of him in."
"Cleaver's still in his hand. Who fights Harren and leaves him holding the cleaver?"
"Nobody I want to meet on a stair."
"There's no blade wound. Look at him. Whatever went through that shoulder went through it like a spit through a bird."
"Then stop counting his holes and get a cart. Run."
One went. The other tore a strip off his own cloak, pressed it into the shoulder wound with both hands, and swore without stopping the whole time he knelt there.
I watched from above with my fists shut.
Alive.
Weeks of driving my fingers through pork until the joints bruised. Three nights learning one man's habits. And Harren was going to wake up in a bed somewhere knowing that someone had come for him.
The cart came. They lifted him onto the boards with the care men give their own, turned north, and moved fast.
First attempt: failed. One witness loose. One target alive and about to be guarded.
I went with the cart across the roofs, three streets, four, until the row opened into a square too wide to cross above, and the torches went off into the dark and left me standing on somebody's tiles.
Failure is only information. I'd been telling myself that since the alley wall.
I climbed down into a lane that smelled of tanning pits and walked back the long way with my hood up, and the knife I hadn't drawn once all night lay cold against my ribs the whole way.