‘Off Main Street,’ said Moira, grinning. ‘And it seems our Mr Lashkari has left something of himself behind. Ran right into a wall and broke his nose, silly thing. His blood’s still drying on the brick.’
Moira dropped the eyeball and wiped her hands against her skirt. A whimper came. The owner of that eyeball lay in the bloodieddirt beside her feet, his remaining eye staring up at her, horrified. The man had been a recreational mountain climber. Perhaps forty. Perhaps a parent. He began to sob.
Moira placed one foot on his shoulder and kicked him from the cliff.
A strangled scream rang out as he tumbled down the rock face and landed against the sharp stone below. After a moment, he dragged himself to his feet and, clutching at his face, scurried away. He should have known better than to wander alone when the witches of Acanthi were in need of an amplifier.
‘The eye-plucking was hardly necessary, was it?’ asked Agytha. ‘Seemed a sweetheart to me.’
Moira’s eyes narrowed. At seventy-four, she was the eldest of the three women. Her dust-coloured hair trailed against the dirt, and a collection of jars gleamed at her waist. ‘A sweetheart?’
‘Don’t start,’ said Cate, winding red yarn between her fingers. She was almost sixty, and growing more bitter with each passing moon. She tied a knot in her threads, flipped them around, tied another. Her threads were also an amplifier of magic. One which she leaned on with increasing desperation as the years leaped past her.
‘I simply assert,’ said Agytha, ‘that you could have used a kinder magic to find our Lio.’ She was the youngest at fifty-two, with pretty hands and two round spots of rouge against her cheeks.
‘Blood and body’s the most powerful,’ said Moira.
‘I knowthat,’said Agytha. ‘But what about a peeper charm? A scrying? Moira, dear, if you leave a gouged man in every town we visit, people will eventually notice.’
‘I wanted to kill the mountain climber,’ said Moira. ‘Burn the body. Hide it. But you two would have gotten cross.’
‘Of course we would have,’ cried Agytha.
‘I don’t see why,’ said Moira. ‘He wasn’t important.’
‘How would you know? Say he was some monarch’s nephew, then quite suddenly we’ve got a regiment of Grand Magicians after the coven—’
‘Quiet,’ snapped Cate, and the two women silenced. ‘I care not for nephews or the outcomes of blood magic or whatever incessant thing you are about to bicker over next. None of that has any consequence to me. Not if we can’t findherbefore Lio does.’
CHAPTERTHREE
The city tram sailed through the hilly metropolis, up and down the cobbles like a ship coursing over great tidal waves. It was a mechanical beast of pumping gears and whirring pistons, creaking and wheezing, and when it docked at Ravensport, at Blackford, at Pultney Park and beyond, it spewed forth its passengers, swallowed up more, and shot off again without even checking if the doors had shut.
It was late spring in the city of Alliaster, and the jacarandas were in bloom. The colossal trees, planted in the previous century, lined the boulevard. This vista – of lavender petals sprinkling over motor cars, trams, hawkers and street performers – was so favoured by the country’s outdoor oil colourists that one could find postcards of the famous scene even in the smallest grocers in the furthest corners of Calléum.
The sky, visible in snatches through the purple petals and streetlamps, darkened like wet paper soaking in ink. Viewing this from behind the tram’s grime-coated windows was an old woman smoking a pipe, a girl in a camel-coloured beret, a mountain spirit whose wide, grey body took up two seats and glittered like stone under morning sun, and Dot.
She sat at the back, clasping the handles of her carpet bag with nail-bitten fingers. The walk from the cottage to the station hadbeen long, the train boarded before dawn. She had travelled fourteen or so hours thus far, watching the sun rise over the wide expanse of the sea, the mountains and farmland and sparse villages and quaint towns. At last, as the daylight had begun to fade, she saw the capital city, Alliaster.
Dot had promptly transferred from the train at Grand Central Station to the city tram, which was where she now sweated under the weight of her wool coat. She had needed the garment to fend off Seafarthing’s south polar winds but now, a whole day north, she felt quite stupid beneath the oppressive, itchy fabric. If she removed it, the other passengers would surely see the pools of perspiration across her back.
Dot readjusted her hat. Her hair stuck in strands to her neck. The women of the city, she had quickly noticed, wore their hair bobbed. Dot watched them from the window, walking along the pavement in suede heels, clasping cigarette holders and leashed terriers, their lips reddened and oiled. How darling they looked. How glamorous and bright.
The tram halted, then lurched and set off again up another cobbled hill. The passengers, reading their novels and drumming their fingers, glanced now and then, glumly, toward the deepening night-time. Now, with its interior lamps on, the tram contained its passengers like an aquarium contains its fish: illuminated from within, each forlorn creature peering out at the dark and intangible world beyond the glass.
Dot checked her watch. It was half past seven. She opened her carpet bag just a fraction, pulled out a little phial of her tonic and took a sip. Prickly warmth gushed through her. She placed the phial back and closed her bag, reopened it again to double check she had stoppered the lid properly, closed the bag, and opened it one last time just to triple check, lest the sea-green medicine leak out and stain her blouses forever.
She inspected the contents of her coin purse and took out the little notebook where she tracked her expenses.
Total train fare – 26 silvers, 45 coppers
Egg sandwich at Kolp Station – 95 coppers
Black tea on the special express to Alliaster – 52 coppers
Tram ticket from Grand Central Station to Lecustre Square – 1 silver, 50 coppers
Almost a whole week’s wages spent in a single day. Dot leaned her head against the thrumming glass and was transfixed as she watched the thickets of spirits weaving along the footpaths. Never before had Dot seen so many; they burst from every crevice of the city, large and small, opaque and translucent, animal-like, or monstrous, or tiny, each darting hither and thither like a great reef of colourful fish.
