Beluga Fay (Dragon Bone Hill) Read Online Free Page A

worth.
    Meanwhile, the stranger darted down one alley after the other, periodically turning to see if the old woman was following, or what had come after him in the hold. He was dead, along with the rest of the crew, that much was certain. Certainty, nevertheless, was not proof. He’d learned on the Beluga Fay to deal with certainties—if there weren’t any; don’t assume there were. The consequences of this misjudgment had manifest themselves a couple of times on the vessel. Lesson learned.
    Even as he twisted and turned from side to side, he was looking for that which should not exist—but could well. Up one street and down another—street might have been an overly generous sentiment. These were cobbled alleys fitted on either side with dreary shanty constructions made to no plan, with no goal other than temporary housing that with the generations, had become suspicious dilapidates with more spite than purpose. Certainly, there’d been the occasional implosion or fire, but they clung to life if not ambition.

    “You be needing food.” A grouse of a voice brought the runner up short. Wheeling, he aimed the pipe at the sound and stepped back into a gloaming. “You shouldn’t back into the shadows ‘round here—they’re not always empty.” With a wall against his back, he looked from side to side.
    “How do I get off the docks?”
    “Lost—meet a lot that’s lost down here. But why you want to be leaving—we’ve not been visited in many weeks. Up north you can’t move without making your peace.”
    “My peace?”
    “That’s a nice watch?” The stranger peered into the shadow from which the voice emerged.
    A hem of a long skirt emerged from the deeper darkness and fluttered in a light breeze catching the corner of the last street and twisting, erratically, up the new one. The foot wore a straw sandal and was old and thorny with long, twisted toenails—encrusted with dirt, calluses, and a coral of offal wound about them in a tight embrace. As the moon emerged above them, the woman’s side of the street became illuminated. Beside her was a smoldering brazier with three tubular vegetables on it. They weren’t giving off any smell and didn’t look that good to begin with. There was a little blight on at least one of them. The woman, as his nose crinkled at the food, leaned out of the shadow that still clung to her upper torso and smiled a mostly toothless grin.
    She wasn’t old, maybe forty, but she’d looked to be twice that. Her face was deeply lined and a tawny brown—partly because she was an islander and partly from the years she’d spent in the sun. The skin had a leathery quality because of the latter. The eyes were almost round with black pupils swimming, uncertainly, in a white sea. The nose was broad and flattish—she’d not had any work done there, not like the younger women were supposed to favor. There was a scattering of hair over the jowly meat of the jaw and chin—course black things they were, with a hint of grey. The hair on her head was long and looked soft, but also greasy and peppered with the same grey that was showing on the coarser hair on the face. Her belly, under the ratty shawl, appeared distended—not pregnant. There’d be a lot of this in the city; he knew that much for a certainty.
    Pulling a fist full of bills from his trouser pocket, he stepped into the new light. The woman leaned forward and saw what he was holding. “Pah! Northern money; no good here, but I’ll take the watch.”
    “What else will you give me for it?”
    “Besides directions?”
    He nodded and the woman waggled a tongue at him. Though he’d been aboard the Beluga for over two months, he wasn’t that desperate. Besides, a few of those rotten shards looked as though they could do serious damage—and the woman was starving, or very nearly.
    “How ‘bout that knife?” The woman’s hand tightened around the haft of the short blade she held, so much so the knuckles whitened.
    “Worth