Текст книги "Hold The Dark"

Автор книги: Frank Tuttle

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Frank Tuttle
Hold The Dark

Prologue

Rain fell like an ocean upended. A frigid ice-rimed polar ocean, full of ghostly white whales and blue-veined icebergs; I pulled my raincoat tight at my neck and put my chin down on my chest and offered up a pair of unkind words to the cold gushing sky.

Beyond my narrow trash-strewn alley, out on Regent Street, nothing moved. Or, more precisely, if it moved I couldn’t see it through the whipping sheets of rain. The lone pair of streetlamps had been extinguished by the storm an hour ago, and I’d been reduced to watching the three candlelit street-side windows of Innigot’s Alehouse to see if anyone walked in front of them.

No one had. The halfdead, the Curfew and the Watch combined can’t clear Rannit’s streets after dark, most nights. But let a spring storm blow in from the south and sprout a few tornados and suddenly everyone stays tucked in bed and indoors ’til sunrise.

“Nobody out here but ogres and Markhats,” I muttered.

Thunder grumbled distant reply. I pulled my hat down lower against the spray and the splash, jammed my hands deep in my pockets and pondered just going home. The man I was looking for could stroll past wearing a clown-suit and banging a drum, and I might see him, and I might not.

All you’re doing is getting wet, said a snide little voice in my head. Getting wet for nothing. Darla Tomas, she of the soft brown eyes and jet black hair and the quick easy smile, is laid out on a slab at the crematorium, dead or worse than dead. Martha Hoobin is still missing. And the best you can do, said the voice, is hide in this alley and drip with rain.

In my right-hand raincoat pocket, the huldra stirred, brushed my fingertips. I yanked my hand away, pulled it out of my pocket entirely when the huldra jerked as if to follow.

At that moment, a shape darted past the first of Innigot’s three windows. A single shadow, one hand holding down its hat, tall but hunkered down against the gale.

I froze. Sheets of rain twisted.

The shadow crossed in front of the second window. I started counting. Innigot’s door was between the second and third windows. If the silhouette passed before the third window, I’d merely seen a vampire or a lunatic or any other of a dozen unsavory types, heading for trouble out in the rain. But, if someone went into Innigot’s…

There, in the dark, a door-sized slice of weak yellow light appeared, widened, vanished.

“Got you,” I said. I watched the street for a moment longer. No one moved. No shadow crossed Innigot’s third window. No other shadows followed in his wake. My mystery man had taken the bait, braved the storm and made his entrance.

I stepped out of my hiding place against the alley wall. Rain beat down on me so hard the spray went in my mouth, and I tasted Rannit’s sky-sooty, bitter and foul. I spit it out, shut my mouth and started walking.

At the end of the alley, I stopped, reached into my right-hand raincoat pocket, and found the wax-sealed terrapin shell Mama called a huldra. It was warm in my hand, and it quivered, as if it were packed tight with angry hornets. Crumpled below it was Mama’s hex. I pulled the hex out, took it in both hands and ripped the paper in half.

The paper screamed a tiny scream as it tore.

Now Mama knew I’d found our tall thin man. I had promised Mama Hog I’d wait. I’d promised her I would tear the hex and watch Innigot’s and wait for the lads from the Narrows.

There’d be fifty or more of them, all armed, all ready to back me up when I faced down the man who’d killed Darla, taken Martha, taken who knew how many others. Fifty strong, silent Hoobins and Olafs and Benks and Rowheins. A vengeful, furious army, well fit for the night’s dark work.

I’d promised Mama I would wait. I’d promised Darla I would keep her safe.

Promises. Such fragile things.

I dropped Mama’s spent hex, let the whimpering scraps wash away spinning into a flooded rushing gutter.

I reached again into my pocket and closed my bare hand tight about the huldra and marched out into the empty street. The huldra shook, went hot in my hand. Mama had warned me never, ever to touch the thing with bare skin.

I gripped the huldra tighter, heard mad laughter in the sky.

“Martha Hoobin,” I said. “It’s time to come home.”

Chapter One

I hadn’t known Martha Hoobin’s name, the day I returned to Rannit after a long kidney-bruising stage ride from the south. No, that day had been sunny and bright, even if the last feeble ghost of winter still managed to breathe a hint of chill in the air.

But I wasn’t bothered. I’d found a mother’s son, found him alive and well and running a hotel in Weeson, halfway to the sea. He-and about six thousand others-had been left there when the War ended, with nothing but their boots and a cheerful admonition that Rannit was a two-hundred-and-fifty day walk north, and good luck.

The son had, wisely, looked for work instead. And he’d been lucky and found it, and he’d been smart and kept it. Now he was running the place.

He’d been sending letters home, too, he said, confused that a finder all the way from Rannit had sought him out. Hadn’t Mother received his letters?

Hadn’t Mother gotten the money he’d been sending, on the first day of each month?

I assured him that while Mother had not, someone certainly had.

You’d think that surviving the War would teach a man certain things-don’t volunteer, don’t go first, don’t put wads of cash in paper envelopes and ask a mob of strangers to take it cross-country-but you’d be wrong.

I shook my head, and counted out the coins on my desk. The kid had paid me, and then some, so I’d been able to let his mother keep her meager stack. And while I hadn’t enjoyed the long stage ride to Weeson and back, it was, surprisingly, good to be home.

Three-leg Cat rubbed against my calf and purred from under the desk. He was fat and midnight glossy. Mama Hog had spoiled him in my absence.

I opened a drawer, hid the money and leaned back in my chair and at that very moment someone came a-knocking at my door.

It wasn’t Mama Hog’s knock, which is always accompanied by a gruff yell of “Boy, you in there?” and a turn of the latch. No, this was a man’s slow knock-one-two-three-four-that came from three-quarters of the way up the door.

I swung my feet off my desk and rose. No rest for the wicked.

“Come on in,” I said, shooing Three-leg Cat into the room behind my office. “We’re open.”

My door opened and in came the Brothers Hoobin.

I nearly bolted.

The Hoobins, to a man, are large men. The least of the brothers, young Borod, stood a full head, and then some, over me, and I’m not a dwarf. Add to that their well-fed foundry-toned musculature, their silent, direct gazes, and by the time the fourth and largest Hoobin piled wordlessly into my tiny ten-by-ten office, I had decided someone had purchased, just for me, a first-class beating.

Then I smelled the bread. Saw it, too, wrapped in a clean white cloth and gripped tight in the calloused sooty fingers of the largest of the giants.

I relaxed. I know scores of people who might send me a thrashing, but none who’d bake bread just to celebrate the event.

I nodded at the largest, who sidled between his siblings-I’d decided they were brothers from the shape of their wide-set blue eyes and the identical widow’s peaks in their short-cropped ink-black hair-coughed nervously, and spoke.

“I hight Ethel,” he said, his voice a bass profundo that sounded more Troll than human. He pronounced his name et-hell. “These be my brothers. Lowrel. Disel. Borod.”

As he spoke the names, each brother nodded, once and quickly.

Then he was silent.

“I am Markhat. I’m a finder by trade. I assume that’s why you’ve come to see me.”

Lowrel poked Ethel in the side, and the bigger man placed the bread carefully down on my desk.

“Missus Hog said you could help us.” He rummaged in his pocket, withdrew a black cloth bag that bulged with coin. “Missus Hog said to tell you our need is great.”

I sighed. Mama Hog would say that all right.

“Then let’s talk.” I motioned toward the single chair that sat before my desk. “Sit, if you will. Ask your brothers to make themselves comfortable too. Sorry there aren’t seats for you all.”

Ethel sat. His brothers lined themselves up against my walls and crossed their hands in front of their waists. I could almost see their mama teaching them their manners.

I sat and met Ethel’s sky-blue gaze. His eyes looked out of a face that, despite a thorough rag-wash, still bore signs of coal soot and a dozen tiny round burns. His enormous hands were calloused, his fingernails stained black with burnt coal at the ends and the edges. Even his clothes, I realized, showed evidence of tiny burns, all over. That and the ox-size muscles-a foundry, I decided. He works down on Iron Row, hammering out boiler plates, pulley-wheels and bridge-bolts ten hours a day, two jerks an hour.

The loaf of bread between us gave off heat and a heavenly scent, but I pushed it gently aside.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

Ethel nodded, and began to speak.

It was good bread. No, it was excellent bread, better than I’d tasted in years. Just like Mom used to bake, I told Ethel, and I meant every word.

The Hoobins were gone, and Three-leg Cat and I were left to nibble at crumbs and ponder their tale.

I’d placed the Hoobins not long after Ethel began to speak. They were New People, dubbed so by the Regent, just after the War. Shining, bold examples of the prosperous times to come, the first of an endless wave of farmers, shepherds and trappers come to the cities to find wealth and a new way of life.

Truth is, of course, that during the War the Regency flooded the farmlands south of Rannit to build a reservoir. These New People, then, had come home from fighting Trolls to find their homes beneath a lake, and their families huddled in miserable shanty-towns downwind of the stockyards.

The War had very nearly resumed, sansTrolls.

The Regent, panicked, had given the New People a half dozen streets right in the heart of Rannit. From Newkeep to Drestle and all the way over to the Old Marches, became the property of the flooded veterans.

I’d not come home yet. I hear the New People took one look at the tumbledown wrecks the Regent had cleared for them and threatened to take up their arms against the High House.

Threatened, that is. In the end they’d put down their swords and set about making a life for themselves, and I hadn’t heard much about them since.

But now I’d met the brothers Hoobin. I knew a few things. I knew the Hoobins owned an entire building, halfway down Newkeep, on the north side. I knew their father was dead, their mother was elf-struck and bedridden, and that Ethel was in charge.

And I knew about their sister. Martha-pronounced Mart-ha-had left for work a week ago that day, and never returned home.

Three-leg Cat leapt from my desk to my lap and began to knead his claws against my leg. He purred, and I scratched his ugly head.

I’d run through the usual questions. Martha had no gentlemen friend, hadn’t given any gentlemen friend the boot recently, hadn’t ever expressed the slightest interest in leaving the house on Newkeep. She was entirely devoted to her mother and family, preferring to cook and clean and change Mama Hoobin’s bed over all lesser forms of amusement.

The interview produced only a single nasty shock, and it’s probably a good thing I was addled and sore from the stagecoach ride. I was a few words behind Ethel, so when he told me where Martha worked I failed to lift my right eyebrow and produce a sly grin.

“She sews at the Velvet,” said Ethel. “Sews, she does. For good wage.”

The Velvet is, of course, south-side Rannit’s premier house of negotiable affection. Fancy place. Columns at the door. Ogres on the stoop. Doesn’t allow the likes of me inside unless it’s to collect the trash-bins.

“She sews,” I repeated, keeping a careful eye on the massive, suddenly clenched fists of the brothers Hoobin.

“She sews,” repeated Ethel. “Martha a master seamstress. One day she open her own shop, sew for ladies of distinction.” He waited for me to say anything less than complimentary.

Mama Markhat didn’t raise any fools. I let the moment pass. Maybe Martha really was a seamstress.

I hear the Velvet is full of seamstresses.

“She is the daughter of our mother, of our father,” said Ethel, as if that would explain the unimpeachable purity of Martha’s soul. “She sews. She does not leave home, without word, without warning. Martha does not do this thing.”

I might have asked a smaller man about the diameter and luminous intensity of his sister’s halo. But I considered the restrained rural nature of the Hoobin sense of humor and merely nodded.

“Martha did not go, of her own will and wish,” intoned Ethel. His brothers nodded in solemn unison. “She is not that person.”

You get that a lot, as a finder. The people you’re asked to find, according to those who’ve lost them, would never ever have just run away. Why would they? They love us here at home.

And yet, half the time, that’s just what I find.

I didn’t tell the Hoobins that. I took a handful of coin as a retainer against expenses. I sent them home with an assurance I would start a search, and nothing more.

I shooed Three-leg out of my lap, stood and stretched. The week-long stagecoach ride was taking its toll. I needed to walk, there was still plenty of daylight before Curfew and the coins hidden in my desk meant I had a client who deserved a bit of attention.

“Time to go downtown,” I said to Three-leg, who merely arched his back and gave me a hurt look. “Got to earn my pay. I am my father’s daughter, after all.”

Three-leg turned his gaze upon my door and glided airily away.

Chapter Two

Halfway to the Velvet, ten blocks from home, I realized I should have taken a cab.

My legs ached. My feet burned in my boots. The small of my back was shot with stabbing pains each time I took a step.

A week in a stage does that to you.

I darted across the street to find some shade, dodging the ever-present ogres and their manure carts, all headed for the foundries and the tanneries along the river. Out in the country, I’d managed to forget what Rannit’s sooty air smelled like these days. But huffing and puffing my way uptown, I was reminded with each step.

There were crowds on every sidewalk, carriages and wagons on every street. I even saw a blue-suited Watchman upright, awake and peering from a stoop with an expression that mimicked concerned vigilance. I nearly walked up to him to convince myself it wasn’t a wax mannequin erected in my absence by that scheming Regent.

Of course, I was a long way from home. While heading ten blocks north from my place doesn’t actually qualify you to claim you’re in the good part of town, the nature of the streets does change once you pass the cutlery shops that line Argen.

People meet your gaze head-on, like they’ve got nothing to hide. Shabby men don’t leap out of doorways, waving so-called whammy papers in your face and demanding a pair of jerks to remove the awful scribbled curse. You’re not likely to be followed, should you take a short-cut down the wrong narrow alley, and even less likely to be picked up by the dead wagon the next morning, as the Watch filled their wide beds with luckless Curfew-breakers bound for the hungry crematoriums that line the Brown River.

No, you’ll see none of that. But you will see unbroken glass in the shop-front windows, and smiling bankers doffing tall black stovepipe hats to the hoop-skirted ladies. And if you’re accosted at all, it’s likely to be by a soft-spoken haberdasher who’ll step calmly from his door as you pass and offer to fit you for a new jacket. “I have one perfect for sir,” I was told. “Roomy at the shoulders, tight at the waist. Won’t you have a look?”

I would not, and he merely nodded and withdrew.

Now that’s civilization.

I set my jaw and counted streets, urging my aching feet onward. I crossed Sellidge and Vanth and Remorse and Bathways.

I dodged a pair of hairless, gauze-wrapped Reformist street preachers on Fingel and hit Broadway. Broadway is lined with blood-oaks older than Rannit. All the oaks bear axe-scars on their trunks, where it is said that mobs of desperate townsfolk tried and failed to fell the behemoths for firewood during the harsh winter and ill-timed coal miner’s strike of sixty-nine.

I eased my pace and counted monstrous trees. I passed beneath sixteen scarred blood-oaks before reaching the intersection of Broadway and Hent. And there, at the corner, loomed the Velvet-three slate-roofed, glass-windowed, brass-worked, brick-walled stories of steamy adolescent fantasies come absolutely positively true.

The big oak front doors faced south, toward me. The Velvet was set back from the street a stone's throw, surrounded by lush meadow-grass, bubbling fountains and knee-high beds of fireflowers. A flight of wide, shallow marble stairs led from the cobblestone walkway to the brass-worked oaken doors. A single bored ogre leaned against the door, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes ahead and unblinking.

You seldom see ogres dressed in anything more than a sarong and sandals. The Velvet's doorman, though, wore a long-cut red tail-coat, black dress pants, black boots and white silk shirt with ruffles at the sleeves. All specially made and generously cut, of course, to accommodate his bulging ogre muscles and furry ogre frame.

I emerged from the shade of the last blood-oak and marched toward the Velvet. The ogre's wet brown gaze picked me up as I darted across Hent, and he watched me every step of the way after.

I eased onto the cobblestone walk, took a deep breath. The air smelled of fireflowers and a faint gentle perfume, and it was cooler there than even in the blood-oak’s shade.

I ambled through the flower-beds, halted at the foot of the stair. The ogre hadn’t moved.

I nodded and lowered my gaze briefly in greeting. Which may have been a mistake. I doubted that the Velvet’s clients were terribly concerned with matters of ogreish etiquette. But it never hurts to make friends.

He didn’t blink, or return my eye-dip.

I shrugged. “May I enter?”

He let my words hang for a moment. Then, with a great show of elaborate grace, he doffed his three-cornered, feathered hat, stepped out of my path, and motioned me to the doors with a grand, easy sweep of his clawed four-fingered hand.

“Enner, ’ordship,” he growled, grinning around his tusks. “Enner.”

The doors opened as I hit the top step, and then I was inside, leaving sarcastic ogres and the clatter and rumble of downtown Rannit behind.

The doors shut. You know the Velvet doors are shut because all the street noise stops. You take a breath and the scent of the beds of fireflowers is gone, but something sweeter and more subtle rides the air.

My jaw dropped. I’d been inside the High House, right after the War, but the Velvet put the Regent’s digs to shame.

I was alone for perhaps ten heartbeats. I breathed the sweet air, gawked at the gleaming marble tiles, the dark rich walnut paneled walls and the general glowing opulence of the place.

The gold-plated coat-hooks by the door were probably worth more than my entire building, fifteen blocks away.

One of the three tall white doors on the far side of the foyer opened, and a woman entered. It was then I realized the Velvet kept a sorcerer in its hire.

He or she knew the business. The woman that approached was absolutely the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen, human, Elvish or otherwise.

She glided to stand before me. She was blonde and tall and had eyes the color of the high noon sky in the country.

“How may we serve you, sir?”

I mopped sweat off my brow, and I had to clear my throat twice before words would come.

“You could turn down the charm a few notches. I’m not here as a client. I’m a finder, looking for one of your associates. Her name is Martha Hoobin. I’m told she was a seamstress here.”

The room tilted and I jerked, as though the floor had dropped an inch or two.

When I looked back up, she was still there, still beautiful, but I wasn’t mentally counting my life savings and wondering if all of it would buy me an hour.

“Hooga,” she called out, not to me. “Wait here.”

The twin to the ogre at the door came thump-thumpingfrom behind an alcove concealed by thick red drapes. He moved to stand at my side.

The woman turned and retreated, gliding through her door without a glance or word of farewell.

My heart broke. I took a deep breath, mopped more sweat away and turned toward the well-dressed ogre.

“Greetings, Hooga,” I said, dipping my gaze. “I am Markhat. How do you stand that mojo, all the time?”

Hooga didn’t reply, but he did dip his gaze and grin.

Maybe I’d made a friend after all.

The doors at the far end of the room opened again, and another woman stepped out.

The blonde lady had floated in, all promise and lace and gauze. This new arrival was a brunette, clad in a high-necked brown shirt and comfortable-looking black pants. She was tall and thin, and she was not smiling.

The mojo lingered, though, and it did its best to turn my thoughts from purity, which meant it was reduced to the arcane equivalent of whispering things like “see how she wears that pencil seductively behind her right ear” and “those pants are rather tight, in a loose sort of way, are they not?”

She crossed the foyer, her sensible black shoes tap-tapping a quick cadence on the marble floor. She got within a pace of me, halted, smiled and stuck out her hand-not flat, palm down for milord to kiss, but held out to shake.

“Hello,” she said, in a good strong voice. “I’m Darla. I keep the books here. Wendy tells me you’re asking questions about Martha Hoobin.”

I took her hand and shook it.

“I am. My name is Markhat. I’m a finder. Martha’s brothers hired me.”

“They waited long enough.” She freed my hand. “Shall we talk in my office?”

I nodded, and she looked at Hooga and dipped her gaze. “Thank you, Hooga,” she said. “I don’t think Mister Markhat will need a beating today. I’ll call out if he changes his mind.”

Hooga snuffled a chuckle and shuffled off to his post. Darla turned her big brown gaze back to me and motioned toward the leftmost door.

“If you’ll come this way.”

“Gladly,” I replied. My mouth was still nearly too dry to talk. She smiled at me and set off, leading the way.

The white door opened after she tapped out a complicated knock and mouthed a long harsh word. No one was on the other side.

The door shut itself behind us, and I heard it click as the spell locked it down.

“You’ve got more spells here than the High House,” I said. Our steps fell quiet on thick red carpet. We walked not quite shoulder to shoulder in a long and narrow hall.

“They cost a fortune, but so does trouble,” she replied, as we ambled along. The hall was high-ceilinged, lit only by lamps set every ten paces or so along the wall. Doors showed here and there, and moving light at bottoms of some, but absolutely not a sound. “You’re not exactly being held in thrall though. Most men couldn’t resist Wendy and the conjure at once.”

She wasn’t looking at me, so I mopped sweat and wiped my hand on my pant leg.

“I was in the Army for eight years. I’ve had more hexes cast on me than the Court Stone. They don’t stick very well anymore.”

Darla laughed. “I’ll have to tell Wendy. She was nearly in tears when she found me. No one has ever noticed the conjure. She thinks she’s losing her touch.”

I shook my head. “Not at all,” I said. “Tell her that my priestly vows forbade me to view her in other than a pure and sisterly light.”

She halted at a door, turned, put her hand on the plain brass knob. “Do come in, Father. Don’t mind the clutter.”

She went, and I followed.

Darla’s office was small-about, in fact, the size of mine. She had a battered oak desk that showed scorch marks on one side, a rolling leather-backed chair that squeaked when she moved it, a cracked crystal flower vase for holding pencils and a dented brass spittoon set to the right of the desk for a wastebasket. A magelamp hung from the ceiling on a plain steel chain, the walls were lined with bookshelves and the bookshelves were lined with ledgers. Each ledger bore a neat handwritten label-a string of nonsense numbers and a date, written out in a neat, precise hand that I knew immediately was Darla’s.

Her desk was covered with ledger sheets and a pile of ragged-edged store receipts and one of those newfangled adding dinguses that the Army introduced a few years back-colored beads on wires in a square wood frame.

A second chair faced Darla’s desk. Like the one in my office, it lacked wheels, and was probably intended to provide a seat without making its occupant so comfortable that they overstayed their welcome.

Other than a new black coat on a hook on the back of her door, that was it.

Darla smiled, moved behind her desk, sat and motioned for me to do the same. “I’ll help however I can. Ask away.”

I sat. “You know Martha Hoobin.” I knew she did. She’d even pronounced her name correctly-Mart-ha, not Martha-out in the foyer.

“She’s our best seamstress,” replied Darla.

“Seamstress,” I said, with no particular emphasis. Darla laughed. The magelamp’s warm gold light flashed in her eyes.

“Martha had a gift for sewing, and an eye for clothes. The outfit Wendy was wearing-that was one of Martha’s. An early one, in fact. She’s improved since then.”

“How long has she been with the Velvet?”

“Six years. We were friends,” she added. “I’ll miss her.”

I nodded. “So you don’t think she’s coming back?”

“Would you be here, if she were just away on holiday? Would she have left her brothers without a word if she ever meant to return?”

“I don’t know her, but from what I’ve heard, probably not.”

Darla shrugged, and the twinkle went out of her eyes. “She left without collecting her pay. Do you find that unusual?”

“I do.” I meant it. The Hoobins hadn’t mentioned that. And while I have seen people walk away from money, I’ve only seen them do it when they’re terrified. Finding that terror. That’s the tricky part.

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “You’re her friend. So tell me. Who is she? Who is Martha Hoobin?”

Darla leaned forward. She took the pencil from behind her ear and began to doodle on a scrap of green ledger-paper, and I doubt she even realized she was doing it.

“Martha.” She frowned as she scribbled. “Martha, well, Martha is a Hoobin.”

I laughed.

“You’ve met her brothers?”

“All ten tons of them,” I replied. “Stalwart lads, each one. You could cut the air of their rural stability with a knife.”

Darla nodded. “That’s a big part of Martha. Work hard, never complain, be polite-”

“Whoa,” I said, gently. “I got all that from the brothers. What I want to know from you are the things they didn’t know, or wouldn’t tell.”

“The deep dark secrets all us girls share you mean?”

“The very ones.”

Darla frowned. “Damn.”

“Oh no. Surely you don’t mean there aren’t any.”

She shrugged. “Martha was a saint.” She noticed the pencil for the first time, and put it down on the desk, neatly aligned beside the ledger. “She didn’t drink. She didn’t carouse. She sewed, she fed birds in the Park at lunch, she loved violin music and all the girls liked her.” Darla spread her hands. “Hooga and Hooga brought her ogre hash every Armistice Day,” she said. “You know anybody ogres actually like?”

I didn’t. I nodded no.

“She ate it, Markhat. If it tasted like it smelled, it was awful. But Hooga and Hooga were standing there watching, and she thanked them and tore off a chunk and ate it right there. Ate Gods know what just so she wouldn’t hurt an ogre’s feelings.” She sighed. “That’s Martha Hoobin. Good to the bone. Now where does a person like that run away to?”

“I don’t know. Yet. And it’s entirely possible she didn’t leave of her own volition.”

“True. But Martha wasn’t stupid. You wouldn’t catch her roaming the streets after Curfew, or counting her pay out on the street. Don’t think she was some kind of wide-eyed New People bumpkin, finder. She hadn’t been in Rannit long, but she knew the lay of the land.”

I leaned forward. The mojo still whispered suggestively in my ears, and I caught myself breathing in her faint, subtle perfume and admiring the way her face moved when she spoke.

“Let’s talk about men. Did Martha have any I should know about?”

Darla laughed, showed her teeth. “Aside from the Hoogas, no, she had none. The Hoobins are Balptists. Ever heard of that?”

“Balptists? Nope. I assume it’s a faith?”

“It is. The New People brought it with them. Balptists marry Balptists, or not at all. Martha was opting for ‘not at all’.”

I lifted an eyebrow, kept my mouth shut.

“It wasn’t men Martha had a problem with,” said Darla. “Just husbands. I think a lifetime of picking up after her brothers left the thought of doing the same for a husband less than appealing.”

“I gather Martha pretty much ran the Hoobin household.”

“She cooked, she cleaned, she handled the money,” replied Darla. “And I suspect she handled it well. Have you ever been inside the Hoobin house?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ll be surprised. They’ve done well. The Regent may have done them a favor, flooding their farms.”

“That’s the kind of favor the Regent is best at.”

“You’re a cynic,” she replied. “I like that.” She picked up her pencil and twirled it around. “Tell you what. I’ve already asked around, but no one knew anything about Martha. But I’ll ask again. And I’ll see if I can round up any of her things that might still be in the sewing room.”

“That would be helpful. I’ll come back around in a day or so.”

“Don’t bother. The Hoogas will be told not to let you back in.” She lifted a hand before I could speak. “I don’t run the place, finder. The management won’t admit pesky finders who set Wendy to crying and leave without spending a fortune. You’re a waste of good conjure, you are. Don’t know rare beauty when you see it.” She smiled when she said it, leaned forward and batted those big brown eyes. The lingering charm gave me one last good flush, and a fresh layer of sweat. Darla leaned back in her chair and laughed again.