The Banshee's Walk Read Online Free

new clothes.”
    Darla nodded and took my hand and squeezed it. The twinkle in her eye said “And then she needs to burn all her old ones.”
    “You know, I believe we have some casual day-wear that would fit without much alteration,” she said. She eyed Miss Gertriss critically, walking around her, while Gertriss blushed even deeper.
    Darla didn’t start out as a dressmaker. But since she lost her job at the Velvet—my fault, I’m afraid—and was now co-owner of the dress shop with Martha Hoobin, she’d become quite a competent seamstress in her own right, as well as the book-keeper and general money manager.
    “I’m thinking three new outfits, one new nightgown, two pairs of shoes, one pair of slippers, a bathrobe, a dressing gown, two pairs of lady’s trousers, four blouses, two hats and a coat,” said Darla, as she walked. “I’ll just add all that to your account, shall I, Mister Markhat?”
    She grinned, full of sudden mischief.
    I sighed. “Make it three hats,” I said. “No one’s ever accused me of being cheap.”
    Darla laughed. “Three it is, then,” she said. “Now, Mister Markhat, if you’ll excuse us, I need to take some measurements, and we won’t need your services for that. Why don’t you go pester some vampires or tug at ogre beards for, say, two hours? Then you and I have a lunch date, if you’ll recall.”
    I didn’t recall, but being a quick-thinking street-wise finder I merely nodded quickly.
    “Back in two hours, then,” I said.
    Darla stood on her tiptoes and planted an ambush kiss on my lips. Her perfume enveloped me, and I scandalized Gertriss by wrapping Darla up in my arms and kissing her back, maybe longer than propriety demanded.
    “Not a minute longer than two hours,” she said, when she stepped back.
    I nodded, breathed in more perfume, and headed out the door.

Chapter Three
    I had two hours to kill. Ordinarily, I’d have headed to Eddie’s for a beer, but that day, I decided to immerse myself in the heady, erudite world of Rannit’s burgeoning art community.
    My previous experience with art was limited to sneering at outdoor statues of War Hero This or General That, and cheering on the pigeons that managed to sum up my opinion of them perfectly, day after day.
    My mother once found a case of mostly-empty paint jars and a pair of camelhair brushes, and she painted a surprisingly good portrait of my father with it, and even though she ran out of black before finishing his moustache and his right eye was a darker blue than his left, her painting hung above out mantel for all my childhood. That was the only fine art the Markhats had ever owned.
    It’s never a good idea to head into the heart of a mess that may well center around some walk of life you know nothing about. That worried me about the well-dressed Lady Werewilk’s situation. I might be staring right at the obvious lynchpin of the whole thing, but because I don’t know my red paints from my antebellum surrealists, I might not ever see it.
    So I told the cabbie to head for Mount Cloud and ignored his snort of derision.
    Mount Cloud isn’t a street. It’s a neighborhood, one I’d only passed through a few times. It’s where the Regent’s Museum had stood, until the fire in the opening years of the War had gutted it. Reconstruction had only just begun, and although the surviving pieces of Rannit’s thousand-year art history were still safely tucked away somewhere in a deep, secret Regency subbasement, the neighborhood itself was lousy with galleries and art sellers of every description.
    We clopped along. I tried to recall what little I’d ever known about art—it was once taught, here and there, before the War brought such frivolity to a halt—and decided I remembered only two things.
    One was that bad old King Throfold had outlawed the depiction of bare-chested ladies in 1276. The other was that the worth of such paintings had tripled or quadrupled immediately thereafter, which resulted in a