Do not tempt me, you filthy derelict

“What is that?” Curry asked, as he and I moved over to look.

Anton shook his head and passed him the sheet. “Public house menu.” He knelt and began gathering up the others.

Curry stared at the page, then turned it over and studied it for a moment before holding it out to me. “The Pine Squirrel. Ever heard of it?”

I took it, then shook my head no. On one corner was penciled: Hofpraw? 61 Wn 1376. “It has a date.”

“I noticed that,” Curry said. “What’s Hofgraw?”

“Hofpraw,” Anton corrected him before I could say I had no idea, then straightened back up and handed Curry the papers. “Not a what, a who. Lyda Hofpraw was a girl who disappeared around midwinter, a few weeks before springtide, and then her body was found down by the harbor by some festival vendor looking for a place he could set up without a permit. I supervised a few interviews of her associates, but I don’t think they ever got any traction on her case.”

“Lamb and Ladd didn’t?” Curry asked.

“Not their case. Delp, maybe? Been too many years, I don’t remember anymore.”

Curry began leafing through the stack of papers. “The Moody Pig. Oakey’s. Filmore’s. The Beacon,” he read.

“Isn’t The Beacon in the second ward?” I said. “Close to the harbor? It's the one with that gimmicky giant lantern outside. And Moody’s is in the sixth, right near the fourth ward gate. I don’t know the other two.”

“Warwick’s,” he said, continuing to flip through the pages. “That’s a fourth ward one.”

That wasn't strictly necessary to point out, since Warwick's was our local to begin with. “Is there anything but pub menus in there?” I asked instead of telling him that.

Curry shook his head. “Not that I can see. Chandler’s. City Park. The Black Swan. Botwin Brews. Yelena’s—we know that one,” he said, at the same time that I said, “I love Yelena’s.”

“Do all of them have names written on them?” Anton asked.

“Not all—wait, no, this one does, after all,” Curry said, looking more closely at one page. “He just doodled around it.”

“We didn’t come here to actually do anything other than look around,” I began to Anton, “but—”

“—I don’t mind if you take them,” he said. “If the real **** guards couldn’t be bothered to open up a door to find them, and they’re probably not even important to whatever this was—just take them. Ladd’s not around—I don’t see what difference it would make to Lamb. He’d probably approve of it, if a couple of nosey young upstarts inherited his bizarre stash of pub menus.”

Curry looked up from the papers with a vague frown.

“Why would Lamb hide something like this?” I asked before he could object to us being called upstarts. “Why wouldn’t he want people to know about it, if he was looking into these? That has to mean something, right?”

“Honestly? It probably doesn’t really mean too much,” Anton said gently. “Best bet is he didn’t want other detectives to know he was poking around their cases on the sly. Or he was embarrassed. It’s a cliché for a reason—the detective who thinks he can solve the unsolvable one. Might even be both.”

I wanted to point out that neither of those explained why Lamb would hide something he kept at home, since most people didn’t go about their daily lives assuming the **** guards would be going through their things on short notice. But I didn’t want to annoy the old man, when he’d been so helpful so far. Before I could think of some more diplomatic way to ask, my eyes came to rest on the side of Anton’s door facing Lamb’s apartment. “What’s that?”

“I guess the landlord would call it vandalism,” Anton said in a wry tone, moving aside to let us have a better look. There was a Semprisport map of city lots nailed to the other side of the door, with more nails at different places, and then an inscrutable web of differently colored packaging strings stretched between certain of the nails. “Looks like he was hanging the papers here,” he said, indicating the nail he meant. “They probably didn’t fall down every damn time, if it was the other door being opened.”

“I feel like I ought to copy it down, if I understood what in all the hells it might mean,” Curry said. “I guess the nails must be where some of these pubs are. What do you think the different colors of string mean?” he asked me, and I hunched my shoulders up in confusion.

“I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t disturb it.” I was starting to feel quite odd about this whole thing—we hadn’t found Lamb yet, and this finding felt as mysterious as it did intrusive to him—and gods, had even Ladd known about this stuff? Was she the one he’d been hiding it from? Surely not. I couldn’t imagine partners with a rapport so like mine with Curry hiding something like this from each other.

“We ought to record all of it, and then reconstruct it,” Curry persisted, and I could see this was one of those times he was enough set on something that it would torment him for the next half season if I didn’t go along with it.

“You be my guest, young man,” said Anton, with a nostalgic, indulgent sort of expression that plainly said he was humoring us, probably because our feckless naivete reminded him of his own foolish youth and he didn’t want to be the one to crush it. “There’s paper and pencils in the desk. I’m going to make tea. Care to have some?”

Curry was already so intent on sketching down every detail of Lamb’s crude string diagram that he didn’t even hear the invitation.

“We don’t want to put you to any trouble,” I said lamely, then followed Anton into the kitchen when he motioned for me to come with him.

“Let me guess,” he said quietly as he dropped loose tea into the pot and set a kettle on one of those expensive flameless hotplates that were so popular right now. Nan was against them in principle, but his looked rather nice. “You’re the pragmatist, and your partner is the charismatic dreamer. Is that about right?”

“So I read uncharismatic to you,” I said instead of answering the question, and he laughed.

“Fair enough,” he said cheerily. “Ah, Lamb would have liked you.”

“We only really met him and Ladd the once,” I said, feeling a bit downcast now that it came up, because Lamb had seen right to the center of what was bothering me that day, and by the end of that shift I had thought, he did like me all right. “Really we only knew them just a little bit.”

“Then why are you two so caught up with this?” he asked. “Is that being driven by your partner? Or something else?”

I studied him, trying to work out whether he was the type to run and tell the chief guarder we’d been messing about adjacent to an active investigation, and decided he wasn’t. “We aren’t supposed to tell people or make a thing of it, but I’m going to trust you—Curry and I were supposed to replace him and Ladd on the SCD unit, in a few years when they retired. We were meant to train with them, and all that, and we met them on Thirdday and really liked them, and then after our shift the all-hands happened, and…” I shrugged. “I guess just all of that is why. It sounds stupid to say it aloud, but we felt like we owed them our best try.”

“There isn’t something else that brought you here?” he asked, and when I looked up at him in confusion, he went on. “You know that all verifiers are registered magicians, right?”

I nodded, no longer sure what this discussion really was.

“And I’m absolutely certain you know that anybody above a certain ability threshold has to complete a certain level of training with an accredited school to register as a mage, or stay current on suppressant potions designed to counteract their natural acquisition talents.”

That one wasn’t even a question. I nodded again, wondering why I wasn’t more nervous about where he was probably going with this.

The wallpaper in Anton’s kitchen was an ostentatious, large scale floral damask. It was more irritating than surprising, when in the middle of a conversation I wanted to focus on, a flesh-colored protrusion emerged from the center of one of the medallions. I let out a sigh and looked away.

Anton turned his head to the wall and said severely, “Wilhelm.”

The spectral penis jumped as if in startled surprise, then froze in place like a rabbit trying to conceal its movement from a predator.

“Don’t pretend you aren’t listening,” Anton said. “If you don’t fuck off right this instant and get away from this young lady, I swear on all that is holy I will have one of the Rooks come here and banish you. Remember last time and do not tempt me, you filthy derelict.”

To my delight the penis disappeared immediately.

“You can see him, too?” I gasped in surprise. “How do you put up with it?”

“Oh, gods, no,” Anton said, equally surprised. “You can? Dare I ask—put up with what?”

“He’s been showing me his prick on and off for the last half hour or so.”

He stared at me. “Gods alive. Maybe I actually should have a priest come get rid of him. I thought the worst he had to offer was spewing general homophobic lewdities when I’m in the bath.”

“If you’ve been tolerating even that much, I don’t even know how to reply, other than you are much more forbearing than me,” I said. “That’s what my suppressants are for, usually. Without them the shades mob me like crows on a dead bugbear. But when I’m current on my potions that stops, and I mostly can’t see or hear them unless they’re really new, or unusually determined. And even then mostly I only see them and don’t have to listen if they happen to notice that fact.”

“If you didn’t already know, visual perception of other planes is extremely uncommon,” Anton said, eyeing me with interest. “I can sense his presence, and hear him, but at least I don’t have to see any of it. What’s he… look like?”

“He looks like a guy proudly showing off his unimpressive pecker, which all the same serves its purpose in that its unpleasant nakedness distracts effectively from the still greater unimpressiveness of the person it’s attached to,” I said. “Oh, and he’s one of those people who died trying to **** himself to get off. At least, I surmise that’s why he’s got a leather belt cinched round his neck and his naked prick firmly in hand.”

Anton laughed, in that extremely satisfied way of the guiltily but joyfully scandalized. “I take it the reason you opted for suppressants versus a magician course is the restrictions on registered mages?”

I shrugged. “I wanted to work for the watch. So…”

“So you didn’t have much choice.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. Maybe the city will loosen up those laws someday.”

I doubted that very much, since the whole point of the promised cities and the federation agreeing on such laws was to prevent another gaggle of mage-supremacist fuckos taking things over and starting a second interregnum that set social and industrial progress back by centuries. “When you said, other planes…” I began, then realized I didn’t know what to ask. “What does that mean?”

“Well, if you’re lucky that just means dead people. Generally there’s crossover, if any other extraplanar stuff is about. Typically keeping up on your suppressants makes it a nonissue. But with your abilities, mind you don’t loosey-goosey go off them without proper training, or you could wind up in one of the hells by accident.”

I stared at him, unable to determine if this was a joke or an exaggeration or neither.

“Bersk!” Curry called from the other room.

“Just a second,” I called back.

“I’ll finish the tea,” Anton said. “But you should know, since you no doubt want to keep out of this type of trouble, trained mages can sense it, if an unregistered talent isn’t keeping up on their regimen. There’s a particular signature perceptible, if someone is neither trained nor suppressed. So be careful. Without your suppressants you leak willforce like a sieve. That’s what’s bringing all those shades flocking to you. And I especially don’t recommend ever going off your potions while on duty—too likely to run into some union contractor with an inflexible moral center.”

“Are you—” I began anxiously.

“—I’m not going to mention it to anyone,” he said. “My particular gift is for sensing intent. Your good faith is just as it seems. I don’t have any desire to punish that. But be sensible in future.”

“The night they were killed, when the all-hands was sounded,” I said quickly, because I wasn’t sure if I could get the words out otherwise, “I saw Lamb at the watch house. Except later I found out other people had already found him dead before then. So what I really saw was his shade. I thought, if he was still around, maybe I could find out what happened. We just… wanted to help them. If we could. He was really nice to me,” I said in a foolishly small voice.

Anton gave me a sympathetic look. “Do you want to have a look round his flat? Maybe it’ll give you a better sense where you can find his shade, if he’s still around anywhere.”

“Maybe. Let me see what Curry thinks.”

Anton nodded. “Do either of you hate coconut or jocolat?”

I shook my head no.

“Good. Then you won’t mind if I serve my favorite. Scoot, now. See what your partner wants.” Anton pulled a tray from a shelf and shooed me from the room.