Woolgathering

  ***

  It was raining the next night. Outside the window Ghileswick was a shimmering obsidian mass of shambling profiles and towering buildings. To the north there were tenements and apartments stacked all on top of one another. To the south the rich built their mansions in stories since there wasn't sufficient space even for them to buy their way into a larger foundation. So the city crawled higher and higher, stretching up to the heavens for all its sordid people and transactions, for all its impurities.

  Ulisse remembered Illum better than he would confess to any who asked, but he loved this city most of all. In Illum the ruling, criminal families had such a strangle-hold on business and law that to do his job well would have been impossible, to do it wrong would have been inevitable, and to do it profitably would have been his only consolation. Here, there was yet a sense of pride burning at the heart of the courts, of the legislation, that demanded a certain level of integrity be upheld before their astute people— there was still a place for an assiduous man of the law. And that was what Ulisse was. He loved the justice here, loved the thrill of the chase, grimaced but felt satisfied in the punishments. His whole life was the study of law and its surrounding sciences. His heart and soul were poured out before the altar of right and wrong and their necessary maintenance, their necessary order.

  Which was why he apologized to Farley, his dear apprentice and knave, but tonight he would be on his own as he upheld the most sacred of his passions, as he leaned against the Illumni banker Desi Consentio's hickory doors and let his senses peak, his eyes dart from shadow to shadow and back again at constant attention, in spite of the fact that after a day of preparation those eyes burned with fatigue. This was his element. This was something too intimate to be shared.

  Besides, you never could trust a clever thing like Risk.

  This thought made him frown, rumpled his brow with a turbulence of emotion the likes of which Ulisse knew he couldn't indulge in, and so he ran a hand through his thick dark hair, over the heavy brow and under his regulation deerstalker.

  If he kept this up it would be a very long night, indee—.

  The Investigator nearly leapt out of his skin as there was a prickling in his hindmost pocket, startling him out of his melancholy reverie and pressurizing all his anxiety into a sudden, painful snap to attention. His hands tore to the pocket and, upon brushing something metallic therein with his fingertips, he remarked ponderously:

  "I don't remember putting anything in that—."

  He cut off as a flash of silver greeted his eye, as the medallion with the insignia of the Quattrone family caught the moonlight that fell in shafts through the curtains beside him and his pupils dilated at sight of the winged serpent wound around the barrel of a pistol. He collapsed suddenly on the floor, clutching his head with terse, spasmodic fingers. A convulsion wracked his spine; he choked on something like a cry, and then fell limp.

  It was a full turn of a shadow he lie there, his long, dark figure crumpled in a heap like a discarded cloak, but once that time had passed he seemed to reanimate. The eyes opened, albeit lazily, drooping with a kind of bored, disappointed lustre at the world as though to scold it for complacence. The sinews, loose and powerful, pulled him to his feet gracefully, and there was no stoop to his shoulders, no inhibitions or consideration in the fixed pupils. He was the same creature, but of a more concentrated shade, a finer hue.

  Stretching, he placed the medallion back in his great cloak and turned to the door behind him, laying his hand on its polished brass handle and twisting it delicately so the latch made not a sound as it slid out of its frame. His face didn't move— it was knit in the calculating visage of a professional, of one who knows how to do his job, and does it well. It was silently, coolly that he swung the hickory gates, then closed them behind him, listening to the steady snore of his victim.

  There was a nuance in the air, however, and the finely-tuned assassin was far from missing it as he paused, watching the rustle of the blankets as his target's diaphragm rose and fell. He listened to the snore, the too perfect snore happening in exact time, with precisely three moments between each refrain.

  "You are not Desi Consentio," he spoke, atonically. "Where is he?"

  The blankets stirred, and at length the small figure in the bed rose to face the assassin, lips curling, dimples flashing in challenge as the blanket slid from his great cloak and he adjusted his deerstalker.

  "The real question," Risk Farely replied, "Is where is Investigator Ulisse?"

  He and the assassin drew their weapons simultaneously, their old-issue pistols gleaming in menace at one another as they cocked them in that most grim of rituals.

  "A boy," remarked the assassin, his dark eyes devoid of recognition, his placid features resolved. "You must be Richard Farley. I'd warn you not to lie when you tell me where Consentio is hiding. How you came to be here in the first place and the questions you have that prompted it is of little consequence to me."

  "Ulisse's alter ego is more foolish than I thought if after leaving such an obvious trail of killings he thinks I'll let him escape to make another," Farely smiled thinly, his lip turning up slightly over his canines to ghastly effect.

  "You shall, or you will die," the assassin told him, and might have shrugged, but the next thing Farley knew that finger was pulling the trigger, though there was an almost imperceptible jerk of the professional's wrist that sent the bullet awry. Perhaps this was because at that moment Morrigan Coombes had appeared behind him, and he was twisting too late to avoid the club that cracked him expertly, moderately, over the back of the head. Farley didn't trust his judgment on the matter. All he knew was that the assassin dropped like a log.

  "Excellent work Miss Coombes," he praised his accomplice as he stepped nearer to the Investigator to bind him with cuffs. "I would so have hated to get the rest of the Hangman's Yard involved in this."

  "I never want to hear you complain about having a woman around the house again," she informed him, handing him his club with a sniff. "So Ulisse is two people?"

  "Two personalities," Farley corrected. "So in essence yes."

  "How did that happen?" she demanded. "And how did the other one come to be a murderer?"

  The youth didn't answer as he tried to lift his heavy companion and stumbled, refusing to ask the sturdier elder woman for help, though she could see the strain in the tendons of his bony wrists. She decided to lend it anyway, since her pride had already been reduced to such levels as had allowed Farley to drag her hence.

  "Well?!" she prompted as she lifted Ulisse's carcass off of him. "Do you know?"

  "Not a clue," Farely said matter-of-factly.

  Morrigan scowled. She'd been skeptical when young Risk dragged her off to the Illumni banker's mansion to act as decoys (Consentio had directed them to a secret escape route in his room; clearly the paranoid bastard had been making deals with the Quatronne family long before he refused his latest offer) but now she saw that there was genuine reason to believe that Ulisse might be... diseased. So how was it that Farely was so calm, so droll about all of this?

  "I don't see why you're still grinning," she muttered, sympathetically to the poor Investigator. "He's the only one I know who could put up with you, and God knows what will happen to him now."

  "He will be arrested, and then hanged," Farely informed her.

  "You're heartless, then," she informed him. "Ulisse was so kind to you, too—."

  "Don't speak as though you know him!" Farely blurted, with such ferocity that Miss Coombes recoiled, nearly dropping the Investigator in the doorway to which she and Risk had dragged him. The youth's eyes had flashed, the rusty locks rattling on their chains before settling almost instantaneously to their prior station. He tilted his chin proudly as he dragged Ulisse's left shoulder toward the door and Morrigan was obliged to follow. It took her a moment to realize, in her stunned silence, that the young poet was murmuring:

  "Many are the shades of the mind

  So I truly
do pity the colorblind.

  The most hideous of tinctures are black and white."

  "Ulisse took me," Farely retaliated at last, glaring daggers at Morrigan, "Not out of your virtue of pathos, but because in every profession a partner must be, above all, confidential. Liars are the best secret keepers, Miss Coombes. They couldn't unveil the truth if they wanted to. Now, let us be off to my residence so we can get some answers out of Ulisse before Hangman's Yard catches up with him, shall we?"

  Morrigan couldn't bring herself to do anything else, so she nodded dumbly.

  It took them a while to drag the Investigator outside— longer still for the carriage to arrive so that they could rattle on to 636 Wotcher Street. As a matter of fact, it was in the carriage that Ulisse first began to stir, and Miss Coombes sucked in her breath, but Farley scathingly informed her that when he woke he would be his usual self.

  "How can you know?" she asked as the Investigator's eyelids fluttered and his head tossed in Farely's lap. The youth reached down, ostensibly to feel for a temperature, but his fingers lingered as they smoothed back the dark hair.

  "I know," he replied simply, emotionlessly.

  So with the carriage driver's help they dragged Ulisse into Farley's home and laid him over the couch. It was too short for him— his shins dangled over the end of it even as they folded him a little to elevate his head. Risk ordered Morrigan to fetch a glass of water for when Ulisse woke, and by the time she had returned the Investigator was awake, staring perplexedly at Farley.

  "I don't understand."

  "Miss Coombes clubbed you over the head and we brought you here."

  "Liar."

  "For once I am most pleased to say no, no I'm not."

  Ulisse closed his eyes, that heavy brow furrowing as he massaged his temples; his head certainly attested to having been clubbed, throbbing and tender as it was. "I was guarding Consentio..." he began at last, then suddenly bolted erect on the couch. "What happened to Consentio?! Where is he?!"

  "Seeing as you were his intended assassin, I don't believe it's safe for you to be privvy to that information, my dear Investigator," Farley beamed at him, pushing Ulisse's shoulder steadily to keep him from rising.

  "I what?"

  "You have two identities," the youth informed him.

  "Risk, that's not funny."

  "Don't pretend you think I'm joking— I don't jest, only fib. If you would be so kind as to hand me the contents of your back pocket without looking at them I would appreciate it."

  "I don't keep anything in my—," the Investigator began, and then cut off as his reaching hand and memories caught up with him. He did not pale, however, only closed his eyes and did as Farley had requested. The youth inspected the medallion and seemed satisfied as he tucked it into his own great cloak. "You will recall— oh, and you can open your eyes now— you will recall that I asked you whether you'd been abused or mistreated."

  "You think I have two personalities, and that somehow one of them is a murderer for the Quatronne family. And that this is because my father beat me?" The Investigator raised a brow.

  "I dabble in burgeoning mental theories," Farley told him.

  "Philosophy also toys with theories on multiple human natures," added the recently graduated Coombes from the door. She was finally inviting herself in, it seemed, and she handed the Investigator some water. He downed it gratefully in but a few swallows.

  "There you have it," Farely spoke wryly before flashing her a look that said not to interrupt again. "In any case, I believe that you must have belonged to a couple under the Quatronne family's control. It is then possible you were abused in a controlled fashion to create a personality with that particular medallion as the stimulus for calling out their best assassin, which I find unlikely but intriguing. Another possibility is that you were supposed to be their assassin and crafted a more docile, truer entity out of defense for your immortal soul, and they found out. Both are rather fantastic events, though not for you."

  The Investigator opened his mouth to speak, but the youth was talking over him. "For Miss Nosy's benefit, because I've no doubt she'll write all this down or tell it to a gaggle of filthy orphans, I knew it was you committing the murders because the bullet was yours, of that I had no doubt, I know your signature better than you do, and there was mud on your knees when you came in here, the same mud outside the window. Also, there's no way in hell someone could leave that clean a trail in your patrol area unless they were you yourself."

  "But how would you know I was abused if I said no?" Ulisse mused.

  "Kindred souls can recognize these things," Farley explained, still smiling. "Particularly after spending a night together."

  The Investigator coughed.

  Morrigan colored. That was more than she'd needed to know.

  "So now the question," the youth continued; he was being unusually straightforward, as though rushed, as though he had a pending sense of time running through a sand-glass, "Is what you think we should do."

  "Take me to Hangman's Yard," Ulisse answered.

  Farely wasn't surprised, as Miss Coombes was, but he grinned dangerously.

  "Predictable," he spat.

  "Honor's price is honor's gain

  And from death, indeed, she ne'er refrains."

  "Don't rhyme at me, Risk," the Investigator growled, rising to his feet. "It isn't as though you don't have everything figured out by now. You know why I'm going."

  "No," Farley said, and it was the first time that Morrigan, watching helplessly at his side, had ever seen him use that ugly sneer of his on the Investigator. "I know more than you think, and that is precisely the problem. You couldn't stop being so bloody honest even in the heart of a lie, damn you."

  Ulisse had been walking out, and now he paused, eyes closing as though he'd been dealt a blow. Only Farley heard him swallow, and the youth dared think for a moment that perhaps he would stay, but it seemed his dreams, too, were lies, because soon after the Investigator was walking into the hall.

  Farley stood there a moment, numb. Then he laughed. Laughed and laughed, holding his sides as though hysterical as he sunk into the couch with a chuckled:

  "Oh why do we with wisdom bother?

  Fools will always walk to slaughter!"

  Morrigan stared at him, watched as he drowned himself in his petty faux mirth and flattery, and her fists clenched tighter and tighter until she couldn't stand it any longer. In one, two steps she was at the couch, and her hand struck Farley's cheek so hard his head spun even as his jaw fell in stunned silence.

  "Listen, you damnable brat," she rumbled like thunder, nostrils flaring. "Those who build their walls too high are often crushed by them. When yours do I won't stay to clean up the mess, so you'd best start rethinking those towers of insufferable delusions you keep building."

  She stormed into the kitchen, so she didn't see.

  But Richarda Farley went white as a sheet.

  And but two miles from the youth's house, Inspector Ulisse was ambushed in an ally, pinned from behind and stabbed by the poignant sight of the Quatronne family insignia dangling on a chain before his broken features.

  "No, God," he managed to breathe as the world went black.

  But by then it was too late for prayers.