The streets were narrow and dimly lit, and getting worse the closer I got to the water, and then I came out from between two warehouses and the Catonian Sea was spread out in front of me, black and vast, slapping at the pilings, and the lower docks spread along it, a low tangle of wharves and storehouses and lit windows where men were drinking.
That was where I would find the next clue.
I found a dockside tavern that had only a few patrons gracing its stools. I bought a drink and nursed it while said patrons took my measure. After a few seconds, they were done examining the newcomer and went back to their conversations and their tankards.
"I can't sleep, I tell you," the man sitting on the stool right next to mine complained to his companion. "I lay awake and stare at the ceiling and nothing. Night after night. I have no energy to work and the super is on my case for being too slow."
I waited until he was done complaining and his friend was done making suggestions that ranged from warm tea before bedtime to a smoke of tobacco mixed with something I was not familiar with. The last suggestion was a vigorous tumble in bed with the wife.
"Have you seen my wife?" the complainer asked.
"Yeah." His friend lifted his tankard and took a swallow. "A vigorous tumble might break the bed. Maybe something a little less vigorous then?"
The two men laughed and clinked their tankards.
I leaned over. "I couldn't help but overhear your problem with sleeping. I heard that there is a grey sort of help to be had, if you know what I mean. Something that's good for calming restless minds."
"Oh, yeah?" The complainer turned to me. "What do you know about the grey stuff?"
"Only that it can help with troubled minds, and mine is troubled. If you know where I can find it, I'd gladly pay to be pointed to it. I'm at the end of my rope."
The guy exchanged a look with his friend, then turned to me again. "Buy us drinks, and we'll see what we can do for you."
What they could do was point me to the next tavern and a name, and when I got there, the story repeated itself, each man passing me along to another, none of them knowing more than the next link in the chain.
Two hours of that and I was half drunk myself from all the tankards I'd consumed. The good part was that it numbed me to the lying. I should have been used to that after sneaking into Elucia under false pretenses and then keeping up the charade for months. But lying by omission was easier to excuse than complete fabrications. I'd settled on saying as little as I could. A brother, I said, when I had to say anything. Caught in an attack on the road, a convoy set on by bandits. Lived through it and came home not right in the head. The details were lies, but the fundamentals were true, and saying the true parts let me say the false parts without choking on them.
I was following a boy down a narrow lane between two storehouses toward someone who could 'sort me proper' whentwo men came out of a doorway fast, and the boy ran off, which told me he'd been paid to lead me there.
One had a cudgel and the other a short blade.
"Purse," the one with the blade said, almost bored. "And the coat. Quick, now, and you keep your teeth."
They were dockside muscle, used to soft marks who froze, and I was neither soft nor frozen. I moved before the bored one finished his sentence. Going inside the cudgel's swing instead of away from it, I took the arm and turned it until the man folded with a scream, and I pushed him, stumbling, into his friend. Then I had the boot dagger in my hand and assumed a fighting stance.
"I have had a very bad month and taking it out on you two would give me great pleasure, but I don't want to soil my nice coat, so run now, before I change my mind and decide that I'm willing to sacrifice the coat for the pleasure of killing you."
I hadn't pulled out my gun, but my coat was open now from the struggle, and they could see the barrel. The fact that I was holding the dagger instead of reaching for the gun communicated exactly what I wanted them to believe, that I would relish killing them up close and personal.
It was a bluff, but it worked.
They decided I was more trouble than my purse was worth, and they did the smart thing and ran.
After a visit to yet another tavern, I finally found someone who knew who I should see about the grey stuff.
"The one you want is named Sivon," the guy said, and he gave me a direction and a warning in the same breath, which was more honesty than I'd bought from anyone else that night.
The address took me off down the last of the lit streets and toward the water, into the part of the docks where the freight warehouses stood shoulder to shoulder and blocked out what little there was of the sky. The street lamps became moreinfrequent and then quit altogether, and the only light came from a few grimy bulbs burning over loading doors and the cold spill of a floodlight somewhere out over the container yards. Everything down here was steel and concrete gone soft with salt, corrugated walls streaked with rust, chain-link sagging between the lots.
The smell got worse the closer I came to the water. Salt and diesel and tar, the low chemical stink of fuel oil, and under it all the sweet rot of fish and cargo that had sat too long in the heat. The pavement was slick with runoff and grease that caught the light. Somewhere a generator droned. Somewhere else a bottle broke, and a man laughed, and both sounded ominous.
I kept to the middle of the road, away from the black mouths of the alleys between the warehouses, my coat open and my hand never far from the gun. There were men in the shadows of the loading bays, still as posts, only the glow of their smokes betraying their locations. I walked without rushing, with a swagger that projected confidence and, hopefully, the men watching me would decide that I was too dangerous to be worth their trouble.
The place, when I found it, was a freight office wedged between two warehouses, a low concrete building with a single lit window and a metal door gone orange with rust.
I knocked loudly, as if I was expected. Something scraped back from the other side, a bolt or a bar, and the door opened on a man who filled most of the frame.
He was big, taller than me by a full head, shoulders that filled the doorway, and the kind of face that even a mother would be scared to look at. He gave me a thorough once-over, from my boots to my face and back down to the coat, lingering where it bulged over the gun, and said nothing.
