Beka Cooper: The Hunt Records Read online

  Them as got merderd, Beka says.

  Pijins ar the Blak Gods mesingers, Granny says. They gathr souls to tayk to the Peesful Relms, but som wont go. They hold to the bird until they see whats becom ov them. And they talk. Som ov what they say is useful, Beka. Thats why you must lern how to heer theyr voyses. Hav you herd othr voyses, Beka? On street corners mayhap?

  I dont no, says Beka.

  Lets go see, says Granny.

  We finishd the buttr ferst bekaus it dont wait. Then Granny took us to a street corner but to bloks frum her house. A dust spyner was ther, spyning leevs and dirt arond and abowt lyk a smal wirlwind.

  Yore fathr namd it Hasfush, Granny says. Or told us his name is Hasfush. Hes one ov the dust spynrs that nevur goes away. Step in and lissen, Beka.

  Beka nevr argus with Granny Fern. Onli with me. Into the spynr she wakd.

  What if she choaks? I askd.

  She wont, says Granny. She haz the Ayr Gift.

  The dust spynr got smal. Beka cam owt a mess.

  I hav to wash her, I says. My ladee will hav a fit.

  Beka lookd at Granny. Hasfush is alive. He told me evrything he hurd. Then he got happi.

  Next tyme bring him dirt frum othr parts ov the citee, Granny says. Yer fathr sayd he lyked that. Ilony, send her to me in the afturnoon. I wil teech Beka how to heer the ghoasts and the dust spynrs. Its writ down in a book ov the famlee.

  She can taym it. The listning. She isnt mad.

  I was so afeerd for my Beka. I no I wil dy frum this rot in my chest. My childrun must mayk theyr own way then. Beka wil hav the hardist tyme. She was in the Lowur Cytee for to long. Magik wil help. Evun frends that ar birds and street wind and durt wil help.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF MATTHIAS TUNSTALL, PROVOST’S GUARDSMAN, RESIDENT OF ROWAN’S LODGINGS, BOTT STREET, PATTEN DISTRICT, CORUS, THE REALM OF TORTALL

  Tonight my lord Gershom took Clary and me to supper at Naxen’s Fancy. It was his way of thanking us for bringing down Bloody Jock. (I would have done more than hobble him and bring him for a court to sentence. The scummer would rob a couple, killing the man and kissing the woman while her man was lying there.)

  It was our third supper at Naxen’s Fancy. Me and Clary could never afford the place on our own, but when we wind up big cases, we get a fine dinner there with my lord. So the wine was flowing well, and there was brandy after supper. We were all feeling good, and Clary asks the thing we both always wanted to know: how did my lord manage to hobble the Bold Brass gang six years back? Seemed for a year they roamed Prettybone, Highfields, and Unicorn Districts, helping themselves to the treasures of folk who pay the Rogue not to be burgled. There was even talk that His Majesty was looking for a new Lord Provost. Then suddenly there was the whole gang in chains, my lord with new estates awarded by the King, and the Vice Provost transferred to a command on the Scanran border.

  “What stories did you hear?” my lord asks with that little smile, like he knows a very good joke.

  We tell the ones we heard most. One of Bold Brass’s women caught her man with someone else. A palace mage lowered himself to Dog work to get revenge on the gang for robbing him. The gang had killed a horse some duke loved and he paid for the mages himself.

  My lord starts a-laughing. “None of those are right,” he says. “It was a little girl, only eight years old.”

  I look at my glass of brandy. “This stuff is better than the swill I’m used to,” I say. “I could’ve swore you said the Bold Brass gang got took down by an eight-year-old.”

  My lord nodded and says, “She took against one of them. He was living with her mama. When he found out her mama had lung rot, he beat her up and took all she had of value. The girl Dogged him. Dogged him like you two would do it, kept out of his sight. If she lost him, she just found him later at his favorite places.”

  “How’d she know he’d be worth all that work?” Clary wants to know. “Why not just stick a knife in him?”

  My lord says, “The piece of pig turd gave her mama jewelry he couldn’t have come by honest, then took it back when he left.”

  “Yeah,” Clary says, “she’s got to be from the Cesspool. Those Cesspool little ones know what kind of baubles belong down there and what don’t.”

  My lord goes on. “So Beka—that’s her name, Rebakah Cooper—finally Dogs him all the way back to where he met up with his mates. She spies on them and knows she has the den of the Bold Brass gang. Then she goes to her nearest Dog, only this Dog don’t believe her.”

  Clary mutters, “Probably Day Watch.” My partner thinks the only Dogs worth bothering with work the Evening Watch like us.

  My lord says, “So Beka goes to her kennel, but they laugh at her. She even tries to tell my Vice Provost. He has her tossed in the street. He thought she was trying to witch him. Beka’s no mage, but she has these light blue-gray eyes. When she’s angry, it’s like looking into a well of ice. She was angry by then. It’s unnerving in a little girl, but she can’t help her eyes. So one day I’m riding through the Daymarket and this mite of a child grabs my Oso by the bridle. You know Oso—he doesn’t like surprises. I almost drew steel on her before I saw she was a child and how Oso calmed down when she talked to him. She was telling me if I wanted the Bold Brass gang, I’d best listen to her. My Vice Provost’s ready to take a whip to the girl. Meantime, I feel like I’m looking into the eyes of a thousand-year-old ghost. Unlike my Vice Provost, I’m not spooked. I listen to her. And she does it. She gives me the Bold Brass gang. Then she thinks she can disappear, but I know a trick or two of my own. I find her home and her family. The Coopers are living in my household now.”

  “Meaning no disrespect, my lord, but why?” I ask. “A handful of gold shows you’re grateful.”

  He shakes his head. “A mother with lung rot, and my healers say she can’t be helped. It’s too far along. Five bright, promising little ones—Beka is the oldest. All in some Mutt Piddle Lane midden. The mother’s an herbalist on her good days, but those are going to run out. I’d an idea Beka was already learning to steal. His Majesty was about to find a new Provost. I owed that ice-eyed mite. Beka Cooper saved me from disgrace. I think she’ll make a good Dog when she’s old enough. Her brothers and sisters will do well in the world, given a chance. And her mother will die in comfort. I believe in thanking the gods for saving my position.” My lord raises his glass. “I love being Lord Provost.”

  We raise ours. “We’re glad to have you,” Clary says. “Who else takes notice of the Dogs who do the work?”

  Now I can’t get that story out of my head. Dogging a cove like that when she was only eight. I hope if she does go for the Provost’s Guard that she doesn’t think she knows all there is to what we do. She’ll quit soon enough if she does. I hope my lord doesn’t build her up that way. She’ll die of boredom and wash out before she’s been in the work for a month. Or she’ll think because she did it once, and did it young, that she knows it all. Then she’ll just get herself killed, and maybe any other Dogs who are with her, too.

  Written on the morning of my first day of duty.

  I have this journal that I mean to use as a record of my days in the Provost’s Guard. Should I survive my first year as a Puppy, it will give me good practice for writing reports when I am a proper Dog. By setting down as much as I can remember word by word, especially in talk with folk about the city, I will keep my memory exercises sharp. Our trainers told us we must always try to memorize as much as we can exactly as we can. Your memory is your record when your hands are too busy. That is one of our training sayings.

  For my own details, to make a proper start, I own to five feet and eight inches in height. I have good shoulders, though I am a bit on the slender side. My build is muscled for a mot. I have worked curst hard to make it so, in the training yard and on my own. My peaches are well enough. Doubtless they would be larger if I put on more pounds, but as I have no sweetheart and am not wishful of one for now, my peaches are fine as they are.

  I am told I am pretty in my face, though my sister Diona says when my fine nose and cheekbones have been broken flat several times that will no longer be so. (My sisters do not want me to be a Dog.) My eyes are light blue-gray in color. Some like them. Others hold them to be unsettling. I like them, because they work for me. My teeth are good. My hair is a dark blond. Folk can see my brows and lashes without my troubling to darken them, not that I would. I wear my hair long as my one vanity. I know it offers an opponent a grip, but I have learned to tight-braid it from the crown of my head. I also have a spiked strap to braid into it, so that any who seize my braid will regret it.

  I am so eager for five o’clock and my first watch to begin that my writing on this page is shaky, not neat as I have been taught. It is hard to think quietly. I must be sure to write every bit of this first week of my first year above all. For eight long year I have waited for this time to come. Now it has. I want a record of my first seeking, my training Dogs, my every bit of work. I will be made a Dog sooner than any Puppy has ever been. I will prove I know more than any Puppy my very first week.

  It is not vanity. I lived in the Cesspool for eight year. I stole. I studied with the Lord Provost for eight more year. Three year of that eight I ran messages for the Provost’s Dogs, before I went into training. I know the Lower City better than I know the faces of my sisters and brothers, better than I knew my mother’s face. I will learn the rest quicker than any other Puppy. I even live in the Lower City again, on Nipcopper Close. None of the others assigned to the Jane Street kennel do. (They will regret it when they must walk all the way home at the end of their watch!)

  Pounce says I count my fish before they’re hooked. I t
ell Pounce that if I must be saddled with a purple-eyed talking cat, why must it be a sour one? He is to stay home this week. I will not be distracted by this strange creature who has been my friend these last four years. And I will not have my Dogs distracted by him. They will ask all manner of questions about him, for one—questions I cannot answer and he will not.

  My greatest fear is my shyness. It has grown so much worse since I began to put up my hair and let down my skirts. I was the best of all our training class in combat, yet earned a weekly switching because I could not declaim in rhetoric. Somehow I must find the courage to tell a stranger he is under arrest for crimes against the King’s peace, and detail those crimes. Or I must get a partner who likes to talk.

  I am assigned to the Jane Street kennel. The Watch Commander in this year of 246 is Acton of Fenrigh. I doubt I will ever have anything to do with him. Most Dogs don’t. Our Watch Sergeant is Kebibi Ahuda, my training master in combat and the fiercest mot I have ever met. We have six Corporals on our watch and twenty-five Senior Guards. That’s not counting the cage Dogs and the Dogs who handle the scent hounds. We also have a mage on duty, Fulk. Fulk the Nosepicker, we mots call him. I plan to have nothing to do with him, either. The next time he puts a hand on me I will break it, mage or not.

  There is the sum of it. All that remains is my training Dogs. I will write of them, and describe them properly, when I know who they are.

  Written at day’s end.

  As the sun touched the rim of the city wall, I walked into the Jane Street kennel. For our first day, we had no training before duty. I could enter in a fresh, clean uniform. I had gotten mine from the old clothes room at my Lord Provost’s house. I wore the summer black tunic with short sleeves, black breeches, and black boots. I had a leather belt with purse, whistle, paired daggers, a proper baton, water flask, and rawhide cords for prisoner taking. I was kitted up like a proper Dog and ready to bag me some Rats.

  Some of the other Lower City trainees were already there. Like me, they wore a Puppy’s white trim at the hems of sleeves and tunic. None of us know if the white is to mark us out so Rats will spare us or so they will kill us first. None of our teachers will say, either.

  I sat with the other Puppies. They greeted me with gloom. None of them wanted to be here, but each district gets its allotment of the year’s trainees. My companions felt they drew the short straw. There is curst little glory here. Unless you are a veteran Dog or a friend of the Rogue, the pickings are coppers at best. And the Lower City is rough. Everyone knows that of the Puppies who start their training year in the Lower City, half give up or are killed in the first four months.

  I tried to look as glum as the others to keep them company. They are cross that I wanted to come to Jane Street.

  Ahuda took her place at the tall Sergeants’ desk. We all sat up. We’d feared her in training. She is a stocky black woman with some freckles and hair she has straightened and cut just below her ears. Her family is from Carthak, far in the south. They say she treats trainees the way she does in vengeance for how the Carthakis treated her family as slaves. All I know is that she made fast fighters of us.

  She nodded to the Evening Watch Dogs as they came on duty, already in pairs or meeting up in the waiting room. Some looked at our bench and grinned. Some nudged each other and laughed. My classmates hunkered down and looked miserable.

  “They’ll eat us alive,” my friend Ersken whispered in my ear. He was the kindest of us, not the best trait for a Dog-to-be. “I think they sharpen their teeth.”

  “Going to sea wouldn’ta been so bad.” Verene had come in after me and sat on my other side. “Go on, Beka—give ’em one of them ice-eye glares of yours.”

  I looked down. Though I am comfortable with my fellow Puppies, I wasn’t easy with the Dogs or the folk who came in with business in the kennel. “You get seasick,” I told Verene. “That’s why you went for a Dog. And leave my glares out of it.”

  Since Ahuda was at her desk, the Watch Commander was already in his office. He’d be going over the assignments, choosing the Dog partners who would get a Puppy or just agreeing to Ahuda’s choices. I asked the Goddess to give Ersken someone who’d understand his kindness never meant he was weak. Verene needed Dogs that would talk to her straight. And me?

  Goddess, Mithros, let them be good at their work, I begged.

  Who would I get? I know who I wanted. There were three sets of partners who were famous for their work. I kissed the half moon at the base of my thumbnail for luck.

  Outside, the market bells chimed the fifth hour of the afternoon—the end of the Day Watch and the beginning of the Evening Watch. Dogs going off duty lined up before Ahuda’s desk, their Puppies at their backs, to muster out. When Ahuda dismissed them, they were done for the day. Their Puppies, six of our classmates, sighed with relief and headed out the door. Before they left, they told us what we were in for, each in their own fashion. Some gave us a thumbs-up. A couple mimed a hanging with a weary grin. I just looked away. What was so hard for them? They’d had Day Watch. Everyone knew that Evening Watch got the worst of it in the Lower City.

  With the Day Watch gone, Ahuda called out the names of a pair of Dogs. They’d been lounging on one of the benches. When they looked at her, she jerked her thumb at the Commander’s door. They settled their shoulders, checked each other’s uniforms, then went inside. I knew them. My lord Gershom had commended them twice.

  Once the door closed behind them, Ahuda looked at us. “Puppy Ersken Westover. You’re assigned to those two Dogs for training. Step up here.”

  Ersken gulped, then stood to whistles and applause from the veteran Dogs. I straightened his clothes. Verene kissed him, and our fellow trainees clapped him on the back or shook his hand. Then Ersken tried to walk across that room like he was confident he could do the job, in front of about twenty ordinary folk and the Dogs of the Evening Watch.

  Hilyard elbowed me. “You coulda given him a kiss, Beka, to brighten his last hours.”

  I elbowed him some harder. Hilyard was always trying to cook up mischief.

  “My kisses ain’t good enough?” Verene demanded of him. She punched his shoulder. “See what sweetenin’ you get when they call you.”

  Ersken came to attention before Ahuda’s desk. She looked down her short nose at him. “Stop that. Relax. The Commander’s giving them the speech, about how they’re not to break you or dent you or toss you down the sewer without getting permission from me first.”

  The Dogs laughed. One of them called, “Don’t sweat it, lad. We’re all just workin’ Dogs down here.”

  “They keep the honor and glory and pretty girls for Unicorn District.” That Dog was a woman whose face was marked crossways by a scar.

  One of them said, “Up there, the fountains run rose water. Here they run—”

  “—piss!” cried the Dogs. It was an old joke in the Lower City.

  The Commander’s door opened. Out came the two Dogs. They looked resigned. The heavyset one beckoned to Ersken. “Heel, Puppy. Let’s get our glorious partnership rolling. You don’t say nothin’, see? We talk, you listen.” He clamped a thick hand on Ersken’s shoulder and steered him to the door.

  Ahuda called, “Remember, tomorrow you Puppies report an hour early for combat training before your watch. No more easy starts like today!” Ersken’s Dogs let the door close. Ahuda then called for a new Dog pair to see the Commander and for the next of us to wait for his training Dogs. It was Hilyard’s turn. Just as she’d threatened, Verene gave him no kiss.

  While we waited for the Dogs to collect Hilyard, a citywoman called, “Sarge? Be there word of who left old Crookshank’s great-grandbaby dead in the gutter?” We looked at her. She was here to visit a man in the Rat cages out back, mayhap. She had five little ones with her. She must have feared there was some killer out there and refused to leave them at home.

  Ahuda shook her head. “There is no news, mistress. If you’re scared for your own, I’d counsel you to let go your fear. Crookshank is the evilest pinchpenny scale and landlord in the Lower City. He buys for coppers what’s valued in gold. If one of his firetraps burns with a mother in it, he sells the orphans for slaves. He’s got more’n enough enemies. Any of them could have strangled that poor little one.”