“Tell me about this drop,” Lore said, eager to change the subject.
“It’s simple.” Val’s eyes flicked away from Lore’s. “Normally, I wouldn’t bother you with it. But the client requested that the boxes be left at the catacombs entrance in the Northwest Ward’s market square.”
“So you need me to watch it and make sure no one comes near before the client can pick it up.” Vagrants often used the outer tunnels of the catacombs to move around Dellaire. Leaving anything in them was a risk.
“Shouldn’t take long,” Val said. “If you leave now and cut by the dock roads, you should get there by the time the guard is changing. It’ll be chaos, since it’s the day before a royal Consecration. Jean-Paul is bringing the contraband to the square, and if he arrives during the changeover, he should be able to slip through without getting searched. Then you can help him unload.”
Get to the square, unload the drop, watch the poison until it gets picked up. Clients didn’t like to leave their contraband sitting for long, so she shouldn’t have to be there for more than an hour. Then she could go back to Michal’s row house, jump in the rusty claw-foot tub to wash off the itchy feeling of being near the catacombs, and decide which of her lies she was going to use to break whatever they’d built between them.
She gave Val a decisive nod. “I’ll head that way, then.”
The old poison runner watched her for a moment, expression unreadable. Then she pulled her forward again, a crushing hug that made Lore nearly yelp in surprise.
“We love you like our own daughter,” she murmured into Lore’s hair. “Mari and I do. You know that, right?”
Bewildered, Lore nodded, though she couldn’t move her head much. “Of course I do.”
“And whatever we do, we do it because we have to.” Val stepped back, keeping her hands on Lore’s shoulders, her green eyes uncharacteristically soft. “I’m sorry to make you leave him, mouse.”
Lore jerked another nod, swallowing past the curious tightness in her throat.
One more squeeze of her shoulders, then Val let her go. “Now get on with you,” she said. “Don’t want to be late.” She turned and started walking back the way she’d come.
Lore closed her eyes. Sighed, the sound of it shaking only slightly. Then she turned and headed in the opposite direction, toward the dock roads.
The dock roads were a mistake. Lore had barely gone a mile before she caught a glimpse of gilt on the horizon, and at a mile and a half, it became clear that preparations for the Sun Prince’s Consecration had overtaken nearly all of the street space between here and the Northwest Ward. Colorful stalls lined the usually deserted paths, hawking figurines of the Bleeding God and greenish-copper replicas of the Sainted King’s sun-rayed crown. Bloodcoats in their crimson jackets milled around the growing crowd with shining bayonets, and Lore even saw one or two Presque Mort, clothed head-to-toe in oppressive black.
“Stupid,” she hissed beneath her breath. “Gods-damned stupid to do a drop right before a Consecration.”
She could probably weave through the crowd, but it’d take time to work around the traffic, and that would leave the contraband sitting unattended. With a string of curses, Lore turned around and started jogging back toward the building where she’d met Val.
If she couldn’t go overland, the only way to get to the drop site on time was to go through the catacombs.
Shit.
The dagger at her hip was a comforting weight as Lore ducked cautiously beneath the sagging door’s lintel, keeping an eye out for revenants. Revenants weren’t really a threat, made slow by the physical effects of too much poison and too-long lives, but Lore still wasn’t keen on meeting one. They tended to congregate around entrances to the catacombs, and her inconvenient talent only told her if someone was actually inside the tunnels.
There was always the risk of encountering leaking Mortem around catacomb entrances, too, which made going near them at best unpleasant, at worst dangerous. Unchanneled Mortem could eat straight through a body, and at the rate it leaked from the Buried Goddess’s corpse beneath the Citadel, sometimes there was too much for the Church to handle, even with the Presque Mort.
Thinking of the Mort made Lore’s mouth tighten. The elite cadre of Mortem-using monks had been created specifically to channel all the leaking Mortem and keep it from overwhelming Dellaire, but sometimes there was simply too much. And then there was the problem of what to do with it. Presque Mort usually channeled Mortem back into stone, since it was already dead matter, but it opened sinkholes all over the roads. Dellaire’s dead goddess issue was hell on infrastructure.