Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 9

‘My friend!’ Partnis turned with arms wide, a broad smile, and no attempt at Argus’s name. ‘I’m here for my girl.’

‘Your girl?’ Argus frowned. ‘Didn’t know you were a family man.’

‘Indentured. A worker.’ Partnis waved the matter aside. ‘Open the door, will you, good fellow. She’s down to drop today and I’m late enough as it is.’ He frowned, as if remembering some sequence of irritating delays.

Argus lifted the key from his pocket, a heavy piece of ironwork. ‘Probably missed her already, Partnis. Sun’s a-setting. Old Herber and his cart will be creaking down the alleys, ready for his take.’

‘Both of them creaking, eh? Herber and his cart,’ Dava put in. Always quick with a joke, never funny.

‘I sent a runner,’ Partnis said, ‘with instructions that the Caltess girls shouldn’t be dropped before—’

‘Instructions?’ Argus paused, key in the lock.

‘Suggestions, then. Suggestions wrapped around a silver coin.’

‘Ah.’ Argus turned the key and led him inside. He took his visitor by the quickest route, through the guard station, along the short corridor where the day’s arrivals watched from the narrow windows in their cell doors, and out into the courtyard where the public scaffold sat below the warden’s window.

The main gates had already opened, ready to admit the graveman’s cart. A small figure waited close to the scaffold steps, a single guardsman beside her, John Fallon by the look of it.

‘Just in time!’ Argus said.

‘Good.’ Partnis started forward, then faltered. ‘Isn’t that …’ he trailed off, lips curling into a snarl of frustration.

Following the tall man’s gaze, Argus spotted the source of his distress. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy came striding through the small crowd of onlookers before the warden’s steps. At this distance she could be anyone’s mother, a shortish, plumpish figure swathed in black cloth, but her crozier announced her.

‘Dear heavens, that awful old witch has come to steal from me yet again.’ Partnis both lengthened and quickened his stride, forcing Argus into an undignified jog to keep pace. Dava, on the man’s other side, had to run.