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Something for Yew

Halfway through the twenty-first century," Detective-Inspector Ingmar Rutherston said, his breath showing as white puffs in the raw, chill air.

It was the fifteenth of January in this year of Grace 2050 a.d., and a thin drizzle drifted down from a dark-gray sky to bead on the oilskin outer layer of their anoraks.

"Hurrah. Sir." replied Detective-Constable Joseph Bramble, with a distinct pause between the words. "'Alfway through? I can't wait to get out the other side, if the rest of it's going to be like this."

They looked out from the entrance of the railway station over the rain-slick docks of Portsmouth amid the smells of silt and fish and wet cobbles and smoke, horse manure and pumped-out bilges. The bowsprits of scores of ships tied up at the quays speared into the dimness overhead, and masts and spars reached up into the mist like a spiky, leafless winter forest amid the tracery of rigging. Behind them the other passengers were scattering in a flurry of umbrellas, and the streamlined light-metal pedalcar they'd arrived on from Winchester was hitched to a team of British Rail Percherons and drawn away in a crunch of hooves on gravel.

Gaslights glowed through the increasing murk of the winter's early evening, blurred into smears of light by the wet, and nobody paid two more travelers much attention. The two detectives were in plain clothes. Rutherston had six feet of lean height, with a narrow, clean-shaven beaky face and yellow hair worn rather short, and level gray eyes. Bramble was the same height but stocky and with a longbowman's thick shoulders; he was also very dark for an Englishman, blunt tan features and a mop of curly black hair.

That might have made him stand out anywhere but a polyglot seaport like this . . . or in the Buckinghamshire parish he came from, where everyone knew the Brambles of Jamaica Farm who'd been there since the resettlement.

"Detective-Inspector Rutherston?"

Rutherston turned. A woman in blue police uniform stood there, with a rain-cloak around her shoulders. She was four inches shorter than him, somewhat older than his thirty-two, and had that look of bone-deep tiredness that took at least a week of inadequate sleep combined with hard work.

"For my sins," he answered, nodding. "Superintendent Arnarsson?" he asked, and went on to introduce Bramble.

"Correct. Mary Arnarsson—"

She pronounced it Arnson, changing the Icelandic patronymic into an English family name as many did. The process was often helped along by the second and third generations' desire to fit in; from the slight emphasis she put on it he thought that was the case here, and adjusted his mental file. She went on:

"—general dogsbody and chief lion-tamer to this tide-water zoo, for my sins."

They shook hands all 'round; Rutherston offered the superintendent his cigarette case; she accepted one of the Embiricos cigarillos and he lit for both of them.

"Partial to rum, I see," she said, looking at the product of Barbados with respect; the tobacco was flavored with it.

"Just doing my bit to support the resettlement program over there," Rutherston said.

The local went on: "Let's get you out of the wet. What'll it be first, the Scottish corpse or dinner with a garnish of paperwork? Our medical examiner should be along to the murder site soon—delayed by his other hat as a GP."

"Alas, duty calls," Rutherston said.

"Like a crying brat you can't ignore," Bramble sighed. "I could fancy a bite, right now."

The pedalcar was the fastest form of land transport in the world, but British Rail charged extra if you didn't do your share of the pumping at the pedals, and Chief Constable Tillbury in Winchester was notoriously unreasonable about travel-chits which showed you'd gotten your feet up for the trip. That was thirty-four miles of hard labor, and combined with the weather it was enough to give anyone an appetite. Rutherston's lips moved in a quirk of agreement.

Arnson gave a quick nod of approval at their choice, whistled sharply for a porter to carry their bags off to the hostelry, and led the way towards the scene of the crime. The rain was still drizzling down, and it was just cold enough to make cobblestones and paving blocks slippery with a thin film of half-ice. They walked as quickly as they could, the hobnails of their boots grating and their left hands on their sword-hilts, but they still had to be careful. It wasn't very late yet—not more than seven—but winter's early night had fallen hard, with cloud hiding moon and stars.

The gaslights cast enormous flickering shadows on the upper stories of the buildings, and left the masts of the docked vessels to vanish into the misty darkness above; shipyards and workshops and the little factories and foundries had closed, and most of the retail trades, but the taverns and pubs and "pubs" with a suspicious excess of scantily clad barmaids were still doing a roaring business.

"What was that?" Rutherston said quickly, stopping and turning on one heel.

Bramble turned too, and a handspan of steel showed as his right hand closed on the hilt of his blade in the reflex of a soldier, which was what he'd been until last summer.

"Didn't catch it, sir," he said quietly, his dark eyes scanning the alleyway to their right.

"What are you going on about?" Arnson called over her shoulder.

"Thought I saw something," Rutherston said.

He didn't add that what he thought he'd seen was someone leaping across the gap between two roofs. That was impossible, in this weather.

"It's a busy part of town," Arnson said as they went forward again.

"I didn't see anything," Bramble said. "But I've got that nasty someone-is-watching feeling, roit enough."

Rutherston nodded. Though it was busy; dockers were still at work, too, a fresh shift coming off the horse-drawn tramcars, and carts rumbling to and from the warehouses. Portsmouth's trade had been expanding fast of late, faster than piers could be refurbished and modernized. That meant berths were too expensive to sit idle merely because it was dark and dangerous to work; the navigation lanterns of ships waiting their turn glittered dimly from out on the surface of the Portsmouth Water.

"Times like this, I wish I'd taken me mustering-out grant in land. Down Bordeaux way, or Provence, or in Spain, like those lucky sods," Bramble said.

He nodded at the colonists walking up the gangplank of an emigrant ship carrying bundles and children and leading toddlers by the hand. The brig had Cadiz Merchant on its stern, and sailors were chanting at the capstan as cargo-nets went by overhead.

"Didn't you say you took me up on joining the police because being a farmer was far too much like hard work?" Rutherston said.

"Roit, sir, but those bastards will get to do it with orange trees an' olive groves."

He grinned as he went on: "And I could tan better than the lot of 'em together, thanks to my granddad Rasta Bob. They'll be sorry they can't, when they're digging and reaping and sizzling and roasting up-country from Lisbon or Cadiz or Casablanca come July, the poor pink buggers."

"True enough," Rutherston said; they both knew the power of the unmerciful southern sun from their Army days.

Rutherston noted the awe on the fresh country faces of the emigrants as they gazed about at their first and last glimpse of Portsmouth.

Probably they've never been out of sight of the steeple of their parish churches before, he thought.

"Meanwhile, here comes another shipload of them," Bramble went on, in a half-serious grumble.

He nodded towards the Prinsessan Birgitta. The banner that dripped at her stern was yellow with a horizontal red cross, the flag of the friendly and civilized realm of Norland; probably out of the Åland Isles in the Gulf of Bothnia. The people coming down the ramp were fair enough, but not Scandinavians. Sheepskin coats and caps and baggy black trousers, calf-high felt boots or wrapped leggings, kerchiefs on the women's heads and a general pungent odor of damp wool, garlic and old sweat—Poles, at a guess, they'd been trickling in for twenty years or more to take up hard-and-dirty jobs.

"They do jobs in coal mines and clearing squads that Englishmen won't, Constable," Rutherston said, looking at the immigrants charitably; his mother's parents had been immigrants, though that had been in the great influx from Iceland and fifty-one years ago. "And it's not as if we're crowded."

"Easy enough for you to say, Inspector," Arnson said, coming out of her brown study. "They make half my work, even when it's just getting homesick and drinking that vile potato gin and knifing each other. Or they break windows and heads over having to use Anglican Rite churches, as if they were more Catholic than the Holy Father. Not to mention every sodding other type of foreigner we get, all with something that gets them hot, bothered and bloody. Thank God they don't let Moors settle here to live, and damn the . . . other party!"

Bramble grinned and Rutherston hid a smile. Officially the police were neutral in politics; in fact, not many were Whigs, even in seaports where the current Opposition's anything-for-the-sake-of-trade platform usually got a lot of votes.

They turned into a narrow road lined by warehouses, dodging loaded carts pulled by damp, discouraged-looking horses, and handcarts and a long line of men wrestling with a huge roll of canvas from a sail-loft. There was a uniformed policeman standing outside the third building in line, and he was leaning on the haft of a billhook—a rarity for the police, issued to signal the gravity of the crime within. The broad steel head glittered wetly above his head in the gaslight, a chopping rectangle drawn out to a spike at the top and a cruel hook at the rear.

On the wall over the doors was a sign: Vadalà And Sons, Wholesale Merchants.

"And Sons?" Rutherston enquired. "One of the sons, in charge of their branch here? The report mentioned he was Italian."

Arnson nodded: "Well-established firm, and profitable—we check the books of foreign merchants regularly. No trouble on taxes."

"Superintendent," the man on guard said, straightening up and rapping the butt of his polearm on the pavement in salute.

"How is he, Angus?" she replied.

"Still dead, ma'am, if you mean the kiltie. But Vadalà showed up just a minute ago, and his secretary, and Jock."

"What a happy chance." To the two detectives: "Vadalà's the owner; he lives two streets north, him and his family and clerks and so forth. The secretary actually found the body. We took the initial statements and asked them to drop by later for you. Jock McTavish is our medic, and doubles for forensics work."

They dropped the stubs of their cigarillos, ground them out and went in through one of the great wagon-sized double doors that was open slightly. The interior didn't have gaslight, but the Portsmouth police had lit some of the big alcohol lanterns that hung from rope-and-pulley arrangements on the ceiling. That was high up, iron support beams resting on concrete pillars shaped like giant golf tees, both left over from the old days and reused here.

The isles between the pillars were crowded; there were bundles of carpets, and a rip in the burlap sacking showed they were colorful frazzate, done in geometric shapes. There were bundles of rawhides too, but under the odor of the uncured leather were hints of a dozen other things from boxes and bales and sacks stacked high in the gloom and from pyramids of barrels; pickled tuna and artichoke hearts and olives, sweet Marsala wine, brandy, raisins, dried figs and apricots, Deglet Noor dates, flowers of sulfur . . .

"Don't tell me; Signor Vadalà is from the Kingdom of Sicily," Rutherston murmured.

"Nose like a fox, Inspector Rutherston has," Bramble said.

"Trapani," Arnson said. At their blank looks: "Port on the west coast of Sicily; that's where he comes from. His firm does a lot of business here in the Empire."

They moved over to the open space in the middle of the building; there was a square hole fifteen feet on a side in the ceiling above, with a cargo-hook and pulley system hanging down through it and a geared windlass bolted to the floor. The body lay face-down in the center of the clear space, in the unlovely sprawl they all recognized. Rutherston leaned forward. The dead man was certainly wearing a kilt, the genuine pleated article though the tartan wasn't one the detective knew, a russet jacket with pewter buttons, a saffron-colored shirt of some rough fabric, and buckled shoes and knee-socks.

There was a young red-haired man bent over the corpse. An older, shorter, portly, black-haired one with a tuft of chin-beard and mustachios waxed to points stood at a discreet distance—too far away to eavesdrop—looking anxious and fingering a hideously lurid purple silk cravat. Standing next to him was a younger woman with long dark hair and carrying an attaché case, wearing a smart outfit of dark skirt and jacket and a hat with a slightly damp ostrich feather; at a guess, a secretary or accountant, possibly a mistress as well. Rutherston dismissed them for a moment, focusing on the corpse.

"Now," Bramble said, "did ee jump, or was ee pushed?"

"Neither," the red-haired man said, looking up; he was in his twenties, with a pale, freckled face . . . and, right now, rubber gloves on his hands. "Stabbed in the back, and then fell."

He straightened. "Artie McTavish, at your service, Detective-Inspector. I'd shake hands, but . . ."

"But everyone calls you Jock, Jock," one of the uniformed police said.

The young man sighed. "One of my grandparents moved south, along with nine-tenths of the folk in the Hebrides. I'm a dead-average Englishman! Why does it have to be me who gets called Jock?"

"Because you don't hit them often enough?" Bramble said, grinning and holding up a great knobby fist.

"We call you Jock because you moan about it," Arnson said. "And because you're a cheap bastard and have those carrot-shavings on your head. Now, tell us a story, Jock."

Rutherston and Bramble crouched by the body. The dead man had brown hair, worn rather long, shoulder-length, and a mustache that was also long enough to fall past his mouth on either side. There was a pool of slowly congealing blood beneath the corpse, but not as much as might have been expected. Rutherston looked at the face; bleeding from the nose and mouth too, of course, and with a day's stubble or better, and the blotches of postmortem lividity. The staring eyes were a rather pale blue.

"About thirty?" he said, guessing at the dead man's age.

"About that, or a bit younger. He was an outdoor worker," the doctor said.

Which aged the skin. Rutherston went on: "Time of death?"

"He died sometime between nine o'clock and noon today," McTavish said. "Rigor mortis is just setting in—his face is stiff, but the joints are only now losing mobility. The low temperatures would delay onset, of course, but it would also depend on how physically active he was just before death."

"Signor Vadalà's secretary opened up at noon to load cargo for transfer to the railway," Arnson amplified. "She sent for him—we have confirmation on that from the laborers who were with her—he ran to us, and we signaled Winchester over the semaphore when we couldn't identify the dead man. It's not a local killing, or just some ruff-scruff off a tramp freighter."

The origins of the body had been why they'd called in New New Scotland Yard. The thin scattering who'd stayed up in the Hebrides and Shetland and Orkney when the rest of the survivors moved south had done well enough in the generations since, in an oatmeal-potatoes-and-whiskey way. Certainly they'd multiplied energetically. But though formally part of Greater Britain and the Empire of the West they were very out of the way, and largely self-governing.

Meaning, Winchester ignores them and vice versa, Rutherston thought. Except when one of them gets knocked over the head down here. Wouldn't do to offend some powerful clan.

"Cause of death was a bit puzzling at first glance, Inspector," McTavish said. "But it's this puncture wound, sure enough."

He drew a scalpel from his black bag and widened a slit in a section of blood-soaked cloth on the dead man's back. "See, here—" he used the blade as a pointer. "Just a tiny little pinprick, but I'll wager anything you care to name, it went up under the ribs and across to the heart. I'll know for sure when I've done the autopsy, of course. The entry wound is very neat, completely circular. Certainly not a knife with an edged blade. Stiletto, I'd say."

"Or a piece of sharpened wire spoke in a bit of doweling," Bramble said. "I've seen that. Either way, someone knew how to do it."

The medic grunted, Arnson nodded, and Rutherston made a just-so gesture of agreement. Killing a man instantly with a single thrust like that was not easy. Even a sword through the body usually took longer and involved some thrashing about.

"Then he toppled forward—see the abrasions on the shins—and fell fourteen feet to the floor here. Fractured skull; broke his neck, shoulder and ribs too. All that was postmortem, or nearly, though."

Bramble got up and began quartering the area, then grabbed the rope and swarmed up to the second story arm-over-arm. Rutherston stayed crouched on his hams, sketching the body and its position in his notebook; then he drew rubber gloves of his own, put them on and bent forward.

The dead man was about his own height or Bramble's, six feet. A little over the average for someone of North European descent, which he probably was. Lanky but muscular in a lean fashion, like a man who'd eaten well but worked hard all his life, which was normal enough for someone from a civilized country. Naturally fair-skinned, but not so much so that he couldn't tan—and he was tanned, hardly winter-pale at all, and no paler under the shirt, but the upper thigh where the kilt was disarranged was much lighter.

Outdoor worker and in the habit of doing his job stripped to the waist, and quite recently in a place with strong sun.

He felt the palms. Both were covered from fingertips to the heel of his hands with heavy callus, of the sort you got from handling ropes a good deal. A seaman's hands; the pattern was quite distinctive.

"It's nei more summer up in Scotland than it is here—rather less so, in fact—but this man was exposed to a good deal of sun lately," Rutherston said. "We can't be certain that he's Scottish, but he definitely was a sailor and fresh from the tropics."

"Mmm, but he's certainly dressed like a Scot," Arnson pointed out.

Besides the kilt, he was wearing a plaid, a blanketlike swath of tartan fabric across the torso and pinned at one shoulder with a silver brooch; a small knife was tucked into the top of one knee-stocking—a sgian dhu, with a hilt of black bone carved in knotwork—and a double-edged dirk with a ten-inch blade at his belt. There was similar curling interleaved work tooled into the leather of the belt and worked on the bronze buckle. The oddest feature was a narrow ring of twisted gold around the man's neck, ending in two knobs over the throat, graved with an interlaced design of elongated gripping beasts.

Two of the uniformed policemen brought a stretcher forward and rolled the body onto it, pressing until he lay straight, then set the ends of the poles on barrels to leave the corpse at just above waist-height.

"He's not really dressed very like a Scotsman," Rutherston said thoughtfully. "Or rather, too much so. Orkneymen and Shetlanders wear trousers, of course, but I've met visiting lairds from the Hebrides and the new mainland settlements dressed very much like this for visits at Court."

"Are they as dour a lot as rumor has it, Inspector?" McTavish asked curiously.

"Ah . . . let's put it this way; it's not hard to tell the difference between a man from North Uist and a ray of sunshine. But more to the point, while they do wear kilts up there as ordinary wear . . . at least in the Western Isles . . . they're not always dressed up in the rest of it, not most of the time. When they do, it's for swank and in the best they have. This is a plain man's working clothes—the fabric was never anything fancy, and it's worn; see the fraying here, and how the elbows are shiny."

"And that thing around the neck?" Arnson asked.

"I've never seen anything like that except in books and the New British Museum. It's a torc; the ancient Celts wore them. Contemporary Scots most certainly do not."

The detective turned the battered face to the light with an impersonal gentleness. "Do you have a mirrored probe?"

"Here it is, Inspector."

It was the kind dentists used. Rutherston put pressure on the jaw with his left hand and slid it into the open mouth with the right.

"Ah-ha! Take a look."

"Good teeth," the doctor said. "Portsmouth people eat too bloody many sweets . . . wait a bit, that crown looks odd."

"It's not gold; some sort of porcelain, I think. The Scots use the same sort of dentistry as we . . . only they've a good deal less of it."

Rutherston laid down the probe, drew the little "black knife" from the dead man's sock and balanced it on his palm. "And this isn't a toy for ceremony. It's a working blade."

"It is," Arnson said, taking it from him for a moment. "My family's in the metal trade. This is layer-forged—beautiful work. It would set you back a pound at least."

That was most of a week's wage for a laboring man; two days for an inspector.

"Hmmm. There's a crescent moon tattooed at the base of his throat," Rutherston said.

"Or a strung bow, Inspector," the doctor pointed out.

"Perhaps. But I've never seen this particular mark on a knife before," Rutherston continued. "And it's definitely the moon, in three phases."

There was a symbol inlaid in silver on the hilt, a circle flanked by two outward-pointing crescents. There was another on the dirk, and . . .

He turned over the left hand. The same mark was tattooed on the inside of the wrist.

"Well, well, well," he said softly.

"Why do you say it's definitely the moon?" Arnson said sharply. "It could be, but—"

"It's Hecate's Moon," Rutherston said. "Waxing, full and waning. I've run into it before, during an investigation near the New Forest. There are some of them in the villages there. Quite a few, in fact."

At their blank looks, he went on: "It's the witch-mark. The Old Religion."

The blankness turned to wide-eyed surprise. Arnson crossed herself, and the others followed. By law Greater Britain had freedom of religion, but even in a polyglot seaport town like this the Anglican Rite Catholics were overwhelmingly dominant; the minority of Dissenters tended to be Lutheran or Anti-Reunionist Evangelical or Presbyterian. Outright non-Christians were very rare.

"There really are witches there?" she said. "I thought that was a fairy-story."

"Most certainly; a quiet and inoffensive lot for the most part. But they don't, to my knowledge, wear kilts!"

Bramble slid down the rope; he had a length of wood in his hand roughly the size and shape of a quarterstaff.

"Odd you should say that, sir," he said.

Then he extended the baulk of wood. It was yew, heavy and hard, roughly triangular and split from a single tree-trunk; about seven and a half feet long and four inches through. Good yew, at that, straight and free from knots, and mostly the deep orange-brown of heartwood, with a thinner, paler band of sapwood on one side. And tapped into the wood with a punch near one end was the same triple-moon symbol.

"Most of them had the stamp shaved off—looks like someone overlooked this one," Bramble said with satisfaction.

"And our witches don't usually deal in yew, either," Rutherston said meditatively. "They're mostly farmers or craftsmen or charcoal-burners. Is there much up there, Constable?"

"Four or five tons of it, sir. All about this quality."

Bramble took the baulk and put it across his shoulders, bending it with the orange core in and the paler side out as it would be in a finished weapon and grunting a little with the effort. Yew was a natural laminate, the heartwood strong in compression and the sapwood when it was stretched, which made it the finest of all timber for bows.

"Not 'alf bad," he said. "Well-seasoned. And not from Blighty, either."

Rutherston nodded. Yew flourished in England and you could use it for bows—but the climate was really too mild and wet for the best quality bowyer's wood, and English yew tended to be crooked and knotty as well. Straight, dense slow-growth timber from cold mountains or drier country was much better; the lands around the Mediterranean were the traditional source for high-quality staves. The government of Greater Britain had big yew plantations in Iberia and the Maghreb, planted and guarded at considerable expense.

The problem is that slow growth is  . . . very slow, Rutherston thought. It takes at least a century for a good tree to be ready to harvest. Two or three centuries are better. And we only really started the plantations about the time I was born.

And in the meantime, the Empire needed bowstaves. By law, everyone not blind or crippled started archery training when they turned six and enrolled in school. Adults under sixty had to keep a bow and quiver at home as part of their muster-kit for the militia and practice with it every Sunday. Regular soldiers and the navy and Royal Marines used them far more often, of course. A bow in active service didn't last more than a few years at most. The load up in the loft would make at least five or six thousand of the great six-foot mankillers, allowing for wastage when they were trimmed to shape.

"Signor Vadalà?" Rutherston called politely.

The portly Italian merchant came over, fiddling a little with his cravat and followed by his secretary. She looked foreign too, even darker than the Sicilian and subtly different in general appearance, though very pretty in a slim, hawk-featured fashion, with flashing eyes so black the pupils vanished in the iris. The detective judged her age to be somewhere in the mid to late twenties; a small golden crucifix hung from a chain around her neck, vivid against the indigo linen of her high-necked blouse.

"I presume this stack of yew is yours, Signor?" Rutherston said.

"Yes, Detective-Inspector," the man said, in very good English—Portsmouth dialect, to be precise—but with a very un-English bow. "Antonio Vadalà, at your service."

The detective shook hands, then turned to the woman.

"Miss Llesenia Vargas, Inspector," she said, giving him a firm shake.

She pronounced the first name as Yesenia, in the Hispanic style; he'd had some contact with the language in his Army days, and he mentally filled in the double-l.

"Gibraltar, Miss Vargas?" he said; he didn't think she was South American.

She smiled, showing very white teeth against a skin as dark as Bramble's, but with a strong olive tint.

"Sí. From the Rock itself. So many of you Anglos moving south, I thought there would be plenty of room here if I would come north."

Gibraltarian was what he'd have guessed, anyway. Her English was very fluent, but it had a rapid accent, soft for the most part yet occasionally guttural. Most of the original population of Gibraltar had spoken a Spanish dialect before the Change. In the city itself some still did, though those who'd joined in the resettlement of the empty land to the north and south had mostly been swallowed up in the northern influx.

And she has the look, Rutherston thought. Might even be Rom, or partly, she's so dark.

"You discovered the body?" he said, poising his fountain-pen over his notebook.

"Sí. At—" she touched a pocket of her jacket, which had the gold links of a watch-chain "—about eleven-thirty. I was here from the office—"

"That is also my home," Vadalà said. "About ten minutes' walk from here."

Rutherston nodded; living over the shop was common, and most merchants kept as close as they could to the docks without actually setting up among the sailors' dosshouses and slop-shops.

"—to oversee the loading of the Marsala." Vargas nodded towards one of the pyramids of wine-barrels. "The body was there but I did not notice it until after I had done the inventory; it was you see, dark inside. When the laborers came with the cart, I saw the body and called to them. The blood was still flowing. I stayed here with the team, and sent one immediately for Signor Vadalà."

"Thank you, Miss Vargas," he said.

That agreed with the initial report . . . which was a little odd, since witness statements were usually chaotic and contradictory, particularly under stress, and finding a body was fairly stressful for a civilian. On the other hand, Miss Vargas was apparently a very cool customer and not given to the vapors. That she'd left home and ended up working here argued for wit, nerve and experience beyond the usual.

"Signor?" he said.

Her Italian employer went on: "Fifteen years I have been resident for my firm in Portsmouth, always paying my taxes in full and—"

Rutherston cleared his throat and poised his notebook. "I'm sure you're a most valued resident," he said.

What I'm mainly sure of is that you're smarter than you would like me to believe, he thought. The gesticulating-fat-man performance is supposed to make me or Englishmen in general take you less seriously, I think.

"Importing yew is a major part of your business, Signor Vadalà?"

The merchant looked a little surprised; his shrug was far more accented than his command of the spoken language.

"No, but it's very useful, for the customs. You see, the tariffs on other items are reduced if yew staves are included in the shipment. The price of the yew, that does not produce much profit—even in the Kingdom of Sicily, or the Umbrian League, it is not cheap, you see? There is finding the trees, cutting, transport, taxes—all expensive. But the tariff reduction, it makes the difference. Also sometimes I buy a great many yew staves when I have the opportunity, and I trade them to other importers, from the Italies, and from Cyprus. Then they can get the reductions. The Crown gets the yew, everyone is happy."

It was policy to encourage yew imports from other countries to give the plantations time to mature. Of course, it was also policy to give preference to the wine and brandy and olive oil and fruit and so forth produced in the Empire's continental colonies; they were becoming more important as settlement spread out from the first posts along the Gironde and Loire and Rhone and north and south from Gibraltar. Hence the tariffs on the foreign equivalents . . . which were partly remitted if a shipment included the valuable bow-wood.

Rutherston showed him the mark at the end of the stave. Vadalà shrugged again, smiled and spread his hands.

"I simply take it on consignment. My dear, what ship did this lot come on?"

The woman put her briefcase on a stack of crates marked Fichi secchi di Trapani, riffled through the documents inside and handed Rutherston a bill of lading.

He inclined the paper to catch the lamplight. Part of it was in Italian, but simple enough to follow if you had a smattering of Spanish and some Latin: four-point-five tons (it actually used the eccentric metric measurements) of seasoned yew staves purchased in Trapani, ultimate origin "the Adriatic," then shipped from Sicily to Portsmouth on the ship Bella Fortuna. He checked the dates with disgusted foreknowledge. The Sicilian vessel had cleared Portsmouth Water with the morning tide, bound for Trapani with a cargo of British woolens, Irish linens, miscellaneous hardware, weapons and armor, Zanzibari cloves, Tanga sisal, Hinduraj printed cottons, Sri Lankan quinine and South American coffee, a typical mixture of exports and re-exports.

"The Bella Fortuna is owned by Vadalà and Sons?" he asked, returning the document.

Vadalà spread his hands apologetically. "Yes, Inspector. Our other two ships, they are for now on the direct run from Sicily to West Africa, mostly the Ashanti ports or Abidjan, sometimes as far south as the Congo mouth."

His voice took on a caressing note, and his hands made unconsciously voluptuous gestures: "For peppers, cocoa, palm oil, rare woods, coffee, ivory . . ."

"Are you aware of what this stamp means?" the detective said.

Again the apologetic spreading of hands. "I am sorry. Perhaps some tribal mark? Much yew comes from the mountains behind Trieste and the Dalmatian coast, and there they are very savage. They are Croats," he added, as if that was all the explanation needed. "Or still worse, they are Serbs, or Albanians, the worst in the world, as bad as saraceni."

"It's the mark of Hecate's Moon," Rutherston said, and dredged a translation out of his memory. "Of La Vecchia Religione."

"Stregheria!" Vadalà blurted, signing himself and then bringing out his crucifix to kiss. "No, I did not think even the Croats were so fallen away from civilization as that."

"Thank you, Signor. I will be in contact with you over the next few days."

"I am always at the service of the King-Emperor of Greater Britain, the Defender of the Faith and right hand of the Holy Father, the Emperor of the West, Detective-Inspector," Vadalà said fervently.

He may even mean it, Rutherston thought, when he and Bramble were preparing to leave. But then again, he may not.

"Odd thing, sir," Bramble said. "Maybe it's nothing, but . . ."

"Yes?"

"When the little dago got all upset about the witches . . . his secretary didn't cross 'erself. Made a sort of sign with her hand instead."

"I think we should look into both of them," Rutherston said thoughtfully. "In the morning, we'll start by taking statements from everyone who deals with Vadalà and Sons. I want to know where that yew came from. I suspect it wasn't the Adriatic. There's something . . . I can't remember it but I know that I should."

He looked up. Across the big dimly lit room Vargas was staring at him intently. She nodded and turned away when she felt his gaze.

Bramble shrugged and yawned enormously. "We'll be thinking straighter in the morning, sir."

"We're putting you up at the Anchor," Arnson said. "I eat there myself when I can't get home, which is too damned often. When I do manage a flying visit, my girls say: Has the strange lady with the truncheon come to arrest you, Daddy? I'll join you now—no rest for me anyway until the paperwork's finished and the stiff is stowed."

Rutherston and Bramble followed her back towards the railway station; nearby was a three-story, slate-roofed brick building that occupied a wedge-shaped plot between two converging stretches of cobblestones. The Anchor was either quite old or built in the modern style after the fires; here in Portsmouth Old Town all the impractical concrete-and-steel structures from just before the end had been torn down, for the room and the salvage metal and for rubble fill to extend the piers.

A real anchor stood by the entrance, beneath the sign with a painted one; pleasant yellow light showed through the windows, and a blast of noise and warmth and cooking-smells and tobacco-smoke came through when they opened the door. Someone was playing an accordion, and someone else a fiddle; a chorus of voices roared out:

 
Get a move-on, Johnny Bowline
If you mean to come away—
For the tide is at the flood
And the anchor's off the mud
And they are trampin' round the capstan
In the darkness and the rain—"

Which was natural enough; if you wanted song, you sang—unless you could afford one of the rare, expensive and rather scratchy and tinny-sounding wind-up gramophones. The crowd within gave the three a cursory glance as they wiped their feet on the mat, then went back to singing, or eating or drinking or the game of darts going on down at the other end of the long irregular rectangle.

Mary Arnson led them through to a booth not far from a cheerful coal fire in the hearth, returning friendly nods and greetings as they threaded their way through the crowd. A few off-duty police waved, but it was obvious from the close-trimmed beards, ruddy weatherbeaten faces, pipes, roll-necked sweaters, and an odor of warming sea-boots and drying wool that this was a sailor's inn. The walls had an appropriate clutter of model ships, crossed harpoons, photographs of distant places and glass net-floats.

The three police officers hung up their dripping outerwear on hooks by the booth, and their sword-belts. All of them had steel infantry bucklers clipped to their scabbards, and Arnson's belt had the handcuffs, metal-cored ashwood truncheon and straight-bladed cutlass with knuckle-duster guard and lead-ball pommel that the local force favored. In Winchester the uniform branch only carried long blades on special occasions, but while Portsmouth wasn't what you'd call a lawless town, it was a rough one. That went with being a seaport, even if it was also only thirty-odd miles from Winchester Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, New New Scotland Yard and the court of King-Emperor Charles IV.

"Here's the preliminaries," Arnson said as they slid into the benches; she took the one across from the two men. "Jock will have the details on the autopsy tomorrow."

The two CID men began reading files and passing them to each other; semaphore telegraph was too expensive to use for more than sending the bare-bones and a summons to Winchester.

The waitress arrived as they did; Rutherston looked up to see a comfortable-looking carrot-haired woman of about forty in sweater and cord trousers. She put a basket with a two-pound loaf and a small crock of butter down on the table between them, unhooked the slate that hung from her belt and poised a stick of chalk to write orders.

"Working at dinner again? Y' look loik the dockside cat dragged you out o' the harbor, luv," she said to Mary Arnson, with an ease that showed the policewoman was a regular. "An' then threw y' back."

"I feel like it, Hofi," she said. "Let's be extravagant today. Hot cocoa. Then the usual."

"Anything stronger than cream in the brew?"

"Nei, not in uniform. And I'll just go to sleep if I do."

"You should; you work too hard. And ye, veinar?" she said to Bramble. "We've a fine mulled cider."

"Ah, m'dear?" Bramble enquired with interest, absently smacking his lips.

"Best on the coast," she replied. "We gets it from this orchard in Devon my cousins has and make it roit, plenty of spice and a red-hot poker. Then there's roast o' pork with spuds, carrots and raudkal, if ye'd loik; Auntie Rose has it just ready now."

"That'll do me fine."

"And fer you, sir?"

"Hot buttered rum, if you would," Rutherston said.

"Roit you are, sir," she said. "And to eat?"

"Something local, I think. Surprise me."

"I will that, sir."

Interesting, he thought, as she turned away.

He prided himself on having a keener ear for accent than most and being a quicker judge of personal detail, but the waitress had placed both the visitors with an effortless ease he could only admire. Bramble as a farmer's son (hence a lad and ye), and she'd anticipated that a conservative man from an inland shire would prefer honest meat and potatoes. She'd also spotted Rutherston as a younger-son gentry sprig, Winchester College and Sandhurst (hence sir, and the more formal you), despite him barely opening his mouth.

Her own voice had an interesting tang to it; the inevitable Hampshire—England had been resettled from the Isle of Wight Refuge, after all—but overlain with a crisp treatment of the vowels not at all like the slower Winchester accent or the thick burr of a villager. The superintendent had much the same sound, modified by a bit of old-fashioned middle-class bookishness.

And our little ménage here makes things just a little touchy. Superintendent Arnson is senior in rank, age and local experience, I in social background, which isn't supposed to matter, but does, and Bramble and I are both down from the capital, and are CID to boot—which isn't supposed to give us a leg up either, but rather does. Remember, Ingmar . . . Manners Makyth Man.

The tray with their drinks came quickly. Arnson warmed her hands on hers before she raised it to her lips, and Rutherston wasn't ashamed to follow her example. Weather like this got into your bones, worse than a hard freeze. When he drank he could feel the warmth and buttery richness all the way down to his mostly empty stomach, and the cloves and nutmeg added an agreeable tang to the smooth burnished taste of the hot Barbados rum. It made him feel much better, which in turn made him realize how ferociously hungry he was.

"Where's Jack?" Arnson asked as Rutherston closed the last folder and leaned back. "He usually handles things like this for us."

"Jack Drummond? He's over in Bristol. Nasty case; a clerk in one of the import-export firms there was informing on ship movements for a gang of pirates, and someone slit his throat to shut his mouth when the net was about to close."

She nodded grimly. "Dead men tell nei tales. So Jack's there working with the RN people? Pity the pirates, then; he's a real bulldog when he gets his teeth into a case."

"Just so. And Arnfinnur broke his leg last week on his own front step—sleet that day. So here we are. Detective-Constable Bramble here is new to the force and the Criminal Investigation Department—lateral transfer from the Army."

Which was common enough; first call on vacancies in the police was a perk for veterans who didn't fancy settling on the land. Arnson ran her hands through her damp and rather short ash-blonde hair; the fingernails were chewed short, he noticed, and she had a wedding band.

The food arrived just then, and there was a hiatus in conversation. All three of them crossed themselves and bowed their heads and murmured:

"Bless us, O Lord, and these Your gifts, which we are about to receive from Your bounty. Through Christ our Saviour."

The Amen from the two men was enthusiastic and they propped the documents up against the salt-cellar and the bread-basket, their jaws working as steadily as their eyes.

Bramble tucked into his meat and veg; Arnson methodically plowed her way through grilled whiting with a side of fried oysters, and sprouts and chips. Rutherston found that his "surprise" was a dish of baked cod with lemon sauce, fish landed fresh today—the stocks on this coast had come back nicely—with buttered parsnips and potatoes roasted in the skin, cut open and doused with butter and sharp cheese. The firm flaky flesh of the cod went down well, enhanced by the citrus tang, and parsley and thyme added a nice touch to the bland roots. Really fresh seafood was expensive in Winchester; Fridays could be rather a bore, with the eternal smoked salmon or kippers.

"I suspect that our case may be related to Jack's, anyway," Rutherston said when he'd taken the first edge off. "A man killed to stop his mouth."

Arnson sat up straighter. "Pirates here?" she said dubiously. "Portsmouth's Royal Navy HQ!"

"It's also our other main trading port," Rutherston said. "Not necessarily the same set of pirates as the ones over in Bristol. This is where most of the African and East Asian trade is based; Bristol deals more with the New World. But pirates always need intelligence on shipping movements—it's a big ocean otherwise."

"The Moorish corsairs?" Arnson said sharply. "The Emir getting above himself again?"

The Emirate of Dakar was on the West African coast where Senegal had once been; there had been trouble with them off-and-on for fifty years. The Emir Jawara ruled a considerable power, much smaller in area than Greater Britain but currently boasting at least three times as many people. Africa south of the deserts hadn't been wrecked quite so completely as the lands further north, not being quite so dependent on the high-energy technologies that stopped functioning the night of the Change.

And those numerous people include an appalling bulk of enthusiastic young men with spears and other sharp and pointy objects, Rutherston thought.

He offered Arnson another cigarillo, lit it, and then his own. He'd been stationed in Morocco with the Blues and Royals, and as an officer had had to acquaint himself with the politics.

"It's not quite as simple as that," he said. "Emir Jawara loves us not, of course. And he would love to push up into the southern provinces of the Empire; our settlers are still very thin on the ground there. Let them get a foothold and it would be hard work to stop them south of Gibraltar, if there. The Berbers up in the Atlas range would help them."

"Too much desert between the Senegal valley and our base in Marrakech to go overland, though," Bramble said; he'd been in the same area as an NCO, and a very intelligent one.

"And the RN are in the way at sea, and he knows it," Rutherston agreed. "Jawara's no fool. He won't provoke us directly, in my opinion."

"He doesn't do damn-all about the corsairs, though," Arnson said. "And they're provoking enough! Murdering someone next to the RN dockyards . . . that goes beyond provoking to downright insolence. The ministry we've got now won't stand for it."

"No, he doesn't try to rein them in. They pay him to look the other way."

The swampy inlets of the Saloum delta and the Casamance coast were their nest; they were native Senegalese, mixed with the Moors proper, from the lands along the north bank of the Senegal river. William the Great had driven them there long ago in the First Moorish War. They harried shipping in those latitudes, and then their sleek little galleys vanished into the labyrinthine mangrove swamps to escape the avenging RN frigates, with ugly little scrimmages in the tangled creeks between them and the landing parties.

"But he doesn't rule the corsairs, not really; he finds them to be overmighty subjects, not to mention their influence at his court. The Marabouts, you see; the Mourides. I'd be surprised if they didn't have agents here in Portsmouth, and they'd account it a good deal to annoy us to any degree necessary. If it provoked war between Greater Britain and the Emirate . . . so much the better. They really do not like us."

"Mourides? What's that?" Bramble said curiously; he didn't have Rutherston's education, but he picked up facts with magpie voracity. "I've 'eard the name, sir, but what does it mean?"

"Mouride? Murîdiyya, in Arabic. One who desires, literally. Supposedly one who desires union with God, and it may have been true once. Religious brotherhoods, rather like a monastic order except that they aren't celibate; they've always been powerful in that part of Africa. In practice, these days, it means one who desires to kill and rob unbelievers; and so you get a lot of them in the crews of the corsairs, often as leaders. Their chiefs are the Marabouts—murabatin—and they've one of the factions at the court in Dakar. One that Jawara is a little fearful of."

Arnson looked baffled. "What's that got to do with our dead Jock?"

"Ah, well, he isn't necessarily a Jock. Something's been teasing at my mind since I saw him, and now I remember. Do you remember an expedition to Nantucket, a generation ago?"

"The Count of Azay's expedition?" Arnson said, looking upward and frowning in concentration. "Well before my time; I was about ten."

"It was hush-hush at the time and hushed up more later," Rutherston said. "My father had something to do with it, back about thirty years ago. To make a long story short, he—they—had contact with some people from . . . Orey-something."

He snapped his fingers. "Oregon! It's on the west coast of North America. In any case, I do remember two aspects of it; that yew is common as dirt in the mountains there . . . and that a group of them revived a lot of Scottish . . . Celtic . . . customs after the Change. They also practiced the Old Religion, like our witches in the Old Forest."

Arnson sat up; so did Bramble. "Aha!"

"Precisely," the detective said.

"But—" Arnson frowned. "How does that tie in with the corsairs?"

"That I don't know. But I suspect that it does, and I intend to look into it. Perhaps if there's another around besides the dead man, we can flush or tempt him into the open before the pirates kill him too!"

He sighed and stubbed out his cigarillo; another was tempting, but it would turn his tongue to leather. "I do wish I had a better feel for the local details," he added.

Arnson nodded. "We need our own bloody CID," she said. "There are what, over a million and a quarter people in England alone now—"

"Million and a half, nearly," Rutherston said. "We'll be back to the Domesday Book level soon."

"And having the entire detective branch working out of the Yard in Winchester doesn't make sense anymore. It takes too long to bring an outsider up to speed . . . nei offense."

"None taken, I assure you. It's quite true."

She made a half-spitting sound of frustration. "I can have a few constables put onto watching Vadalà in their own clothes—"

"Please do, and immediately, if you would."

"I will. But it's not their proper job. We need trained plainclothesmen. This is Portsmouth, not some village in deepest Buggritshire where a black eye or a pregnant ewe is news."

If only I could tell you what happened in Eddsford last summer, Rutherston thought. But that wouldn't do, not while the Special Branch is still tidying up the tag-ends.

Aloud he went on: "I quite agree, Superintendent . . . and just between thee and me, there will be a bill to that effect before Parliament at the next session. In the meantime . . ."

Bramble grunted; his own home was close enough for government work to being exactly the sort of place Inspector Arnson had meant. The most urban thing in Buckinghamshire was the forest covering the ashes, ruins and bones that had been Milton Keynes. Unless you counted Newport Pagnell, a vibrant metropolis which had all of a thousand people now.

When they'd finished the dessert of plum duff with red currant jelly Arnson groaned her way to her feet.

"And now I've another hour or two of typing before I can go home . . . or at least it's the place I keep my spare underthings. See you in the morning, Inspector, Constable."

"I'll turn in now too, I think," Rutherston said, yawning.

"Think you can sleep, sir, with that lot enjoying themselves?"

The crowd inside was thicker if anything, but the group of merchant-service men were still singing with enthusiasm:

 
"When I was young and in me prime
I'd take those flash girls two at a time
Now I'm old and turning gray
Rum's my sweetheart every day . . ."

"Right now, I could sleep through the flash girls themselves, much less a song about them."

Rutherston's room in the Anchor was small, under the eaves, with only a dormer window looking out over the harbor and another over the street to one side. The hissing of the rain on the slates of the roof overhead made a haze of white noise that hid everything but the occasional clunk of something heavy being set down by a cargo-sling on the docks a block away. There was a good lantern, though; the bluish alcohol flame fell on the table before him, with his own notebook and a tattered old copy of Tournaments Illuminated and a sheaf of writing-paper.

Bramble had stayed behind in the common room when Rutherston left . . . but now he'd turned in next door—though from the sounds, not alone.

"Fast work," the detective smiled wryly to himself, dipped his pen in the ink and finished his letter to Janice:

" . . . and so, my dearest, I am confronted with a Scot who may not be a Scot but is probably a veritable witch and is most certainly a murder victim, a Sicilian who is also not all he seems, and a lady from Gibraltar who may be a Gypsy sorceress or a reincarnated Egyptian princess for all I know. All my love to you, and to our little Beatrice. I hope to see you before this letter arrives, but if I do not, I am thinking of you always and remember me in your prayers as I do the two of you. Yours forever, my dearest, Ingmar.

"Damnation, but that sounds lame," he said to himself. "Well, that's what you get for marrying a poet, Ingmar. Your words will always pale by comparison."

Then he turned back to his notebook, staring at it with his chin propped on thumb and forefinger as if sheer concentration could force a solution out of it. One of the last entries caught his eye: Vadalà and Sons ships on African run?

That was a profitable trade, but also a dangerous one—right past the haunts of the Moorish corsairs.

Could he be bent? Rutherston thought. Intimidated, bought off, an active collaborator? Hmm. He would be a very valuable agent for the pirates—and would stand to make a very large amount of money. But then he wouldn't have called the police right away when his secretary found the body; he'd have worked with her to hide it. There are at least two contending parties here; the man from the west, the corsairs . . . and possibly others, or divisions within the ranks of the pirates.

Then he yawned. "No point in trying to think with sand in the gears," he said. "I need more data anyway."

He turned down the lamp, and knelt by the bed, clasped his hands around his crucifix and murmured:

"Lord, I beg you to visit my house and banish from it all the deadly power of the Enemy. May Your holy angels dwell there to keep my family in peace, and may Your blessing be upon us always. I ask this through Christ our Lord. And if you could help me find the murderer or murderers, Lord, I would be truly thankful, because there's at least one villain loose in this town who badly needs catching. Amen."

Then he stripped and slid into the bed; he always felt a little better after giving God His marching-orders when a difficult case was in hand. The hot-water bottle the maid had left had gone lukewarm at best, but it had also taken the curse off the linen, and the quilt above was thick with goose-down. His head hit the pillow, and he was asleep before he had time to breathe three times.

The cold air woke him, and a spray of rain, and the hard wet twack of an arrow striking flesh, and then the sharper tock of one driving into wood. He blinked his eyes open, just in time to see a dark figure by his bedside—dark save for the long curved knife raised over his head, glinting dully in the faint gaslight from the street below.

Rutherston had been a policeman in a fairly peaceful land for a long time. But that hadn't been his only calling . . . or this the only time he'd woken to naked steel in darkness.

"Turn out!" he shouted, automatically and from the bottom of his lungs. "Infiltrators! Turn out!"

And dodged with a wordless yell as the blade came down, struggling with the quilt and sheets even as the dagger plunged into the pillow by his neck and released a blizzard of goose-down. That gave him the instant he needed to punch at the man's veiled face.

Beneath the black cloth a nose squashed with an intensely satisfying crumbling feeling, and the dagger-man stumbled back, flailing his arms to keep his balance. Rutherston jackknifed out of bed and made a snatch at his swordbelt. The assassin recovered with a cat's reflexes; the only thing the Englishman had time to do was grab the foot-wide buckler from its snap-fastening on the scabbard of his sword.

That saved his life slightly less than a second later, as he whirled and caught a thrust on its surface. The point of blade grated across the buckler's steel with a tooth-hurting squeal, scoring the blue paint. Then they faced each other, circling in the cramped confines of the darkened room, with the knife-blade the only bright thing in it.

When I was twenty, single and stupid, this sort of thing was unpleasant enough. As an intelligent husband and father in my thirties it's worse, some remote corner of Rutherston's mind thought.

Everything else narrowed down to a point of concentration like the diamond at the working-end of a drill-press. There were noises elsewhere in the inn; all he had to do was stay unpunctured for a few moments longer. The other man knew it as well; he feinted twice with blinding speed, spun the weapon from his left hand to his right and struck like a viper, slashing forehand and backhand—the best way to kill quickly and surely with a knife. Rutherston felt a thin line of cold across his stomach, and then the knife-wrist smacked into his hand. The man in black blocked Rutherston's smashing blow with the side of his buckler, hacking at the arm that held it with the edge of his free hand.

The steel circle spun free and clanged off the wall; Rutherston forced his numbed fingers to grab for the other's free wrist. For an instant the two men were face-to-face, straining against each other; the assassin seemed to be made of India-rubber and spring steel, twisting and writhing. His knee came up, but Rutherston caught it on his thigh. At the same instant the detective whipped his head forward; the butt made chill white light flash through his head, but the other man gave a stifled shriek as the Englishman's forehead smacked into the already-damaged fabric of his nose.

Then the door opened, and the dim light of the corridor night-lamps seemed almost blinding-bright. Steel flickered, and the dark eyes above the veil went wide for an instant; Rutherston could feel the impact through the other's wrists even as he heard the wet crack of parting bone. The detective released him, and the man fell to the threadbare carpet.

Bramble stood panting, his sword in his hand. He was also stark naked. A girl wearing not much more scurried by behind him, her golden hair fluttering as she sped downstairs giving little shrieks and holding her dress in front of her face. Then others began crowding in up the narrow stairs.

"You there!" Rutherston snapped.

It was the Anchor's landlord, a grizzled RN veteran with a steel hook in place of his left hand, and a businesslike cutlass in his right; both clashed with the pajamas he was wearing, which were blue and printed with small pink rabbits.

"Get these people out of the way and send immediately for Superintendent Arnson; tell her that there's been an attack by foreign agents! The same to the duke's palace."

"Aye-Aye, sor!" the man said, and began enthusiastically carrying out the order, with the assistance of several younger men who were probably his sons.

Bramble was looking around his superior. Rutherston turned, stepping aside to keep his bare feet out of the pool of blood. There was a second figure in the same nondescript dark clothing lying slumped in an ungainly pile three-quarters through the window, with his feet still up on the sill. And a clothyard arrow buried to the feathers in his back; the pile-shaped head had smashed out through the thickness of his breastbone in a brutal exclamation point.

"Good God," Rutherston said. "How could I not have noticed that?"

"You were just a little busy, sir," Bramble said, as he stepped up to the window and looked downward.

Rutherston swallowed and joined him. "There!"

A dark figure darted into the little alley across from the Anchor. Rutherston's eyes went a little wider as the shadowed form ran at a brick wall, ran up it for four paces with a cloak fluttering behind, turned and bounced to a windowsill on the opposite side, bounced back across, zigzagging its way up the narrow space between buildings until it crouched on a ledge only one brick wide, leapt to grab the guttering and swung up onto the roof.

The whole process had taken no more time than running the same distance on level ground, and then the stranger disappeared across the slick dark slates and over the ridgeline.

"I take it back, sir," Bramble said, with a long whistle. "Someone was following us to the ware'ouse. And 'e'd be a proper delight to my old gymnastics sergeant-instructor at 'bars and rings,' he would. Maybe it's an ape?"

Rutherston nodded, a little dazed. None of it had been strictly impossible . . . but he wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. And it was quite certain that raising an alarm would be entirely futile. Anyone who could do that could travel across Portsmouth's rooftops faster than constables could comb the streets. He snorted as he suppressed a burst of semi-hysterical laughter at an image of Superintendent Arson's coppers plunging to the pavement as they tried to follow his benefactor in their hobnailed boots.

"Someone is very determined to cut my investigation short, by cutting me short," he said. "Someone else is trying to stop them . . . and saved my life, without a doubt."

"From that angle . . . tricky shot, four stories . . . whoever did it knows how to use a bow, too, and nei mistake," Bramble said. "Ah, and there's another!"

He turned and pointed at a second shaft, with its head buried in a black oak rafter just left of the door.

"That one would have been aimed at your little friend with the curved knife, but it missed." Then he looked at Rutherston: "You're hurt, Inspector!"

The detective turned up the lamp and looked down, seeing with slight surprise that he had a bleeding cut across his stomach, from left hip-bone nearly six inches upward and across.

"Just barely broke the skin," he said, with an inward shudder; that had come about one inch or a tenth of a second from gutting him. "Unpleasantly sharp knife, though. Thank you for interrupting the process of disembowelment."

"You're welcome, sir. Wish I could have kept him alive for a while to talk, but . . ."

"But that might have left me dead for a good long while."

While Bramble dressed, Rutherston applied stinging aloe vera from his traveling kit, bandaged himself and pulled on his own clothes—working in a pair of cotton drawers wasn't really practical, and boots and trousers were an aid to thought. Then he laid out the bodies and pulled down the veils that were also the tails of the turbans both men wore, and turned up the lamp.

"Well, they're not Scottish either, that's for certain," Bramble said, returning to look them over.

The man Rutherston had fought and Bramble killed was coal-black, with parallel rows of ritual scars on his face. The one with the arrow in his back was light-brown but had a broad stain of indigo-blue across the face from his aquiline nose downwards, and a straight dagger with a broad double-edged blade strapped to his left forearm with a leather band. Rutherston pushed back the sleeves of his knitted jersey; there was a silver armlet on one wrist, set with polished stones.

"He came a long way from home to die," Rutherston said. "Tuareg—the Veiled Men; they get that stain from the dye in the cloth. And an imajeghen at that, aristocrat from a noble clan; they're camel nomads, in the sand-seas of the deep Sahara. There's a long story there that won't be told."

Both men had their hair in a medusa's tangle of thin tight braids; the detective flipped one, then held up an arm to show another amulet, this one of thick leather.

"More importantly," he said, "they're both Baye Fall. Who are the Brute Squad for the Mouride Brotherhood. Or, if you believe Emir Jawara, they're just peaceful, spiritual groundnut cultivators who've never set foot on the deck of a River Saloum rover, and there aren't really any pirates there anyway, it's all in our imaginations."

"And I'm the Duke of Portsmouth, if you're in the mood to believe things," Bramble grunted. "Speaking of which, sir, good thing you sent to notify him, eh? Getting definitely political, this is. We don't want Military Intelligence rapping our knuckles."

"Too right," Rutherston said agreeably. "But I want to get to the bottom of it myself, as well. We'll have to arrange a quiet arrest for Signor Vadalà, too, before he does a flit."

"As long as we don't get our own arse in a crack, sir," Bramble said. "Which has 'appened, just now."

He went over to the door, gripped the arrow embedded in the rafter between thumb and forefinger and drew it out with a grunt and a back-and-forth motion, offering the slender piece of wood for Rutherston's examination.

"Hmm," the detective said, as he took out his magnifying glass and looked it over carefully. "The shaft was split from a billet and then turned on a lathe, just the way we do it; the grain is vertical along the long axis. But it's some sort of heavy reddish softwood. Cedar, not ash. And that's a bodkin head. Just like the one in our dead friend, minus the blood of course. Whatever it is, it certainly isn't Senegalese or Moorish."

The arrowhead was the armor-piercing military style, shaped in a narrow pyramid tapering to a point like a metalsmith's punch.

"Not one of ours, though, either," Bramble said thoughtfully. "Machine-made like the Winchester Armoury model, but three-sided, see? And the shank's longer. Thirty-inch shaft and goosefeather fletching. Horn nock—good 'un, but not done quite our style; the feathers are hog-backed, too."

"Bring it over by the lamp, please, Constable. Let's see if there's a maker's stamp."

Rutherston peered more closely with the glass, turning aside from time to time to sketch what he saw in his notebook.

"Not ours, you're right about that, Bramble. Nor any of our neighbors."

Greater Britain's mark was a Cross of St. George and a crown. Norland used a horizontal cross, the Umbrian League put the Keys of St. Peter on the heads of their crossbow bolts; the Kingdom of Sicily had a three-armed triskelion. This was . . .

"More witch-marks, sir?"

"Not this time. It's . . . let's see . . . I think it's a little tree, or possibly a squid dancing on its head, with seven stars around it."

"Never heard of it."

Rutherston frowned; something was teasing at his memory. Then a thunder of feet on the stairs interrupted them. The door burst open, and Superintendent Arnson shoved through.

"Oh, bloody hell," she said, taking in the scene at a glance. "And I hoped it wasn't as bad as the message said."

Ten minutes later the two bodies were carried out the front entrance of the Anchor on stretchers by the Portsmouth constables. The innkeeper came around with mugs of coffee, brewed snarling-strong in the style the RN used to keep watch-standers alert. Rutherston tamed his with cream and sugar, sipped, then looked at the clock ticking over the main hearth as the caffeine hit his stomach and nerves; five o'clock, and several hours to dawn this time of year. A rhythmic clash of boots and metal sounded outside, and a volley of harsh orders.

Bramble muttered under his breath: "For lo, it was established from the Ages that when-so-ever the bloody 'orse hath gone, even so shall they then and only then locketh the stable door."

His father had been a deacon in the parish church. Bramble had also spent years in the Regulars, and he went on:

"Bet those lads are roit 'appy they've been turned out of their nice warm barracks to stand around doing sod-all in aid to the civil power at five o'clock of a fine January morning."

A company of archers and billmen was deploying in the street, no doubt as overjoyed at being in the wet cold murk as Bramble thought. Two men-at-arms armed cap-a-pied in plate came through the door, looking like living statues of green steel with their visors down and beads of rain and melting sleet trickling down the enameled metal; another man followed them.

He was in uniform as well, a gold-frogged scarlet jacket with an entirely unceremonial sword at his belt, and a rain-cape thrown over his shoulders. Rutherston noted that the trousers were non-regulation too, and might well be pajama bottoms; he'd probably just grabbed whatever was to hand.

"Your Grace," Superintendent Arnson said, bowing.

Everyone else but the soldiers followed suit. Colonel His Grace, Duke of Portsmouth, George Caruthers—and holder of a bundle of other titles military and civil—nodded curtly in reply.

He was a compact muscular man in his mid-forties, with a close-trimmed light-brown mustache shot with gray and cold hazel-green eyes. They hadn't met personally before, but the files in Rutherston's mind filled in the details: Caruthers had been retired from the Active list as a battalion commander, and given a Reserve commission as a colonel. He would have been in line for promotion and the Imperial General Staff if he hadn't inherited the title after the death of his father and elder brother, and been translated to the House of Lords.

He'd been Undersecretary of War for three years now, since the Tories came in after the last general election, on a take-no-nonsense-from-the-damned-foreigners platform. They'd been quite frustrated at the upsurge in corsair attacks, to put it very mildly, and looking for an excuse to thump someone.

"Quite right to roust me out," he said to Arnson, patting his pockets absently. "This is more than a murder investigation now."

Rutherston offered one of his own cigarillos and snapped his lighter. The duke accepted, and puffed with silent ferocity for an instant. Outland suns had baked his complexion a permanent red. It flushed a little more now, and his eyes narrowed. Rutherston would not have cared to be on the receiving end of that glare. The quiet flat deadliness in his voice was even more disturbing, in its way:

"In fact, a preliminary report is on its way to GHQ and the PM in Winchester. It's a good thing that these Moorish chappies were bloody stupid and tipped their hands."

"Only because of our unknown helper, my lord," Rutherston said, shivering a little inwardly at how close it had been even so. "I doubt they intended to use my blood to write: Death to all pig-eating unbelieving faranj dogs! Signed, Emir Jawara and the Mouride Brotherhood on the wall. If both of them had gotten into the room intact before I woke, it would just be a mystery when I was found stabbed to death in the morning."

"And dead men tell nei tales," Arnson repeated.

Caruthers snorted a laugh. "How did they get in?"

"Up the wall, my lord. It's brick, and easy enough to climb if you're strong and active."

His mind's eye saw the figure of his rescuer bounding from wall to wall, upward in that weird display of free-running gymnastics. They hadn't been as active as that, probably.

Aloud he went on: "They left a rope and grapnel, probably intended to aid their escape. This is a cosmopolitan town—there are probably several hundred Africans here, from Ashanti and the Cape Republic and other friendly powers, not to mention South Americans of similar appearance; nobody would remark them on the street, once they took off their turbans and veils."

"Good man," the nobleman grunted, and turned back to Arnson. "Now, Superintendent, give me a complete briefing from the beginning. Witchy Scots and foreign arrow-marks . . . quite a tangle. But our Moorish friends are another matter; they're all too familiar. Some people are going to learn that our forbearance has limits. Limits far smaller than our supply of warships, arrows, or the available store of shot and incendiary bombs for our catapults."

Bramble and Rutherston looked at each other. Ships would sail because of this; south of the Tropic line men would die and villages would burn. To the senior detective's surprise the former NCO quoted softly under his breath:

 
"They called us out of the barrack-yard
To God-knows-where from Gosport 'ard . . ."
 

Rutherston nodded soberly. The attempt to hush things up had backfired badly on whoever made it . . .

"God-dammit but I'm an idiot!" he burst out suddenly, as pieces suddenly slid into place in his mind. "They won't stop with me!"

The duke and the superintendent stopped and looked at him. He went on, his voice clipped:

"Your Grace, there's no time to explain: I need your men, now."

"You have them. Captain Smythe! On the inspector's orders!"

Smythe was in his twenties, but he was still puffing a bit when the party arrived at the office-cum-dwelling place of Vadalà And Sons. Rutherston found that vaguely reassuring—the effects of sitting at a desk were a minor background worry of his life, even if he still had the same belt-size as the year he'd graduated from Sandhurst.

But then, I'm not running while wearing seventy pounds of plate armor, he thought.

Arnson was puffing as they came up, but she had breath enough to swear lividly when she saw the sprawled body of the man she'd had watching the merchant's house, lying staring with a long knife in his side. The building was a solid plain house, four stories of salvage brick and blue-painted windowframes and shutters. The flames behind the upstairs windows became visible just as they arrived, and that only because of the solid dark outside; this was a side-street, and the city didn't have enough methane to light everything. The sleet-rain had turned to wet snow, and it was falling more heavily every instant.

"Saunders, run and fetch the fire department! And . . . charge bills!" the officer shouted.

The points of the weapons came down in a ripple, three deep and bristling, with a barking hurrah from the soldiers, sounding loud but muffled by snow that swallowed echoes. The bills pointed inward in a semicircle around the front door, blocking any escape with a wall of edged steel.

"Nock shafts!"

The forty archers behind the billmen reached over their shoulders for arrows, no doubt cursing what the damp would do to their strings and hoping the wax and water-glue would keep them from going slack. It would, at least for a while; a weapon that wouldn't function when it was raining would be of little use in England.

"Oh, this is a friendly-fire incident waiting to 'appen," Bramble said, peering at the growing ruddy flicker from above. "Just what we need, two-score of squaddies behind us shooting in the sodding dark!"

"More constables would be better," Rutherston agreed. "But one works with what one has. You and I will go in first. Captain Smythe, remember that we want living prisoners, if you would—"

The two policemen drew their swords and took their bucklers in their left hands as they walked towards the door; Rutherston knew an instant's sharp nostalgia for the much bigger heater-shaped shield he'd carried as part of a lancer's kit in the Blues. It covered a reassuringly larger part of your body, and so did a full set of plate armor. A scream came from behind the house, and a clash of steel; someone was trying to get out that way, and discovering they had the building surrounded.

Almost at the same instant the big front door burst open and two dark-faced men charged down the steps, shrieking like files on iron. The pair were dressed in unremarkable dark baggy sailor's woolens, but they had long curved swords in their hands, and they attacked without hesitation, leaping like leopards half-seen in the dimness. Rutherston was first in their path, and edged steel flickered at his face.

"Allllaaahu Akbar!" the man screamed.

This time the Englishman had his own blade out. Cring-ting!

The scimitar crashed against his straight longsword and slid down until the guards locked. The man was taller than Rutherston, and stronger; the hilts bent back towards the Englishman's neck, and he could feel his feet skidding on the slick pavement.

"Don't—" Rutherston began.

A billhook thrust at the Moor's face. He ducked, released the detective's sword so quickly that he staggered, and turned to slash at Bramble's back where he fought the other stranger. Rutherston recovered, pivoted and lunged in a savage blur of speed he hadn't been sure was still in him.

"Don't kill him, I meant to say," as he jerked the blade free from the man's lower back.

He sank with a bubbling shriek, kicked, and died on the wet slates. Which was a pity; the military had different regulations—Rutherston carefully thought of them as more robust—concerning interrogation, at least for foreigners who weren't Imperial subjects. They'd have gotten his story out of him.

Some of the billmen were trying to catch the sword of the man fighting Bramble on the hooks at the rear of the blades. Others had reversed their weapons and were smashing the blunt butt-caps at the swordsman, to knock him down or disarm him. But it was crowded and dark and the footing was bad as the snow built up on the pavement, and the man was shrieking and slashing in a heedless berserker frenzy that was probably intended to make them kill him. One of the soldiers staggered and sprawled backward, a long dint in the steel of his breastplate where a cut had landed that would have bisected an unarmored man.

This is where we could use more coppers, Rutherston thought as he poised his blade—his service at least got training in subduing without killing. Now, a thrust to the hamstring . . .

Light suddenly blossomed, lantern-light as the door to the house swung open again. Llesenia Vargas was there, staggering, one side of her face covered in blood. She also had a cocked crossbow cradled in her arms, a powerful Italian military model. Men scattered with a yell as she raised it to her shoulder.

The man with the scimitar turned, eyes and teeth white and wild in his dark face, screaming: "Ana haneji nehawi dine deyemak!"

Which was Arabic, and very rude; he didn't speak the language but he had a working command of its obscenities.

Tunngg!

The steel prod gave a single deep note as she shot. The thick short bolt was invisible in the snowy murk; it disappeared from the weapon and reappeared buried to its vanes in the man's chest. His high-pitched battle scream cut off with startling abruptness; everyone froze as he collapsed, and the steel of his blade rang on the slate of the landing steps. Rutherston darted forward as the woman buckled in turn, caught her before her head struck the stone and passed her on to one of the soldiers.

"Follow me, Bramble!" he shouted, and went in through the opened door.

He stooped as he did, raising the buckler in his left hand, just in case, but no blow descended. The delay for the scrimmage on the steps had let the fire take firmer hold, and it seemed to draw in a breath and then roar at him with dragon-wind. He coughed as his panting sucked in harsh smoke and charged up the stairs. Vadalà was in the hallway on the second story, a rapier in his hand and the remains of a nightshirt on his slashed body; another dead man with a curved blade and the thin braids of the Baye Fall lay dead before him. His wife and children huddled behind him, hacked to pieces. Rutherston made a single attempt to storm up the stairs to the topmost floor, but the heat drove him back. He could just glimpse tumbled office furniture and stacks of papers crisping into black.

"Here, Inspector!" Bramble called.

He had a figure in his arms—a woman dressed in black trousers and jerkin, her long blonde hair trailing. She wore a sword-belt with an empty scabbard, and a quiver over her back; Bramble had a longbow in one hand as well, looking subtly different from the English type. They retreated down the stairs and outside into the snow. The fire-truck had come, its big gray-coated horses snorting as they trotted with a crash of platter-sized hooves on the pavement, and the men jumped down and deployed, dragging their hoses forward and attaching them to the hydrants.

"Any chance of saving the house?" Rutherston asked their chief.

"Nei, it'll burn to ash. We'll be lucky to save the house t' either side, even with the snow. Now get these sojers out of our way!"

Rutherston did. McTavish and two nurses were working on the women. He rose from the stranger's side as the detective approached.

"Miss Vargas will be all right, provided there's no cerebral haematoma," he said. "Blow with the flat of a sword, I'd say."

"Someone trying to put her out?"

"Not intentionally; see how there's a cut along here on the side of the head? A slice, not a pressure-cut. Whoever landed that intended to top her head like a boiled egg but something threw off the stroke. She was very lucky—not really out, even, just very woozy. You can tell the pattern of the blade from the shape of the contusion. A longsword, I'd say."

Rutherston looked down at the stranger's body; the scabbard from her belt was lying nearby, and it was much like his own—intended to house a straight double-edged blade about thirty inches long.

"The other?"

"The stranger? She's a lot worse. Moving her again before we have her stabilized would kill her, with the knife like that. I'm typing her blood and giving her plasma for now; the ambulance should be . . . ah, there it is. Touch and go, but she has a chance. Murdoch at the General Hospital has a lot of experience with this sort of injury. It rather depends what was pierced inside."

"Knife?" Rutherston said.

"Look."

The detective went to one knee. The gaslights and the flames bursting out of Vadalà's house gave good light; the woman was young and tall and strikingly pretty, with golden hair caught in a fighting braid that leaked strands. He could see the rounded hilt of a stiletto under her ribs. There was still a flutter of breath as her leather jerkin rose and fell, but blood leaked out of the corner of her mouth. The wide unseeing eyes were blue, but with an odd striation, silver rims around the iris and veins of silver running inward.

His eyes fell to the jerkin; it had the same device as he'd found stamped on the arrowhead that saved his life, a stylized tree surrounded by an arch of seven stars, and topped by a crown.

Llesenia groaned and sat up, clutching at her head and moaning. The light was uncertain, and the noise heavy; he couldn't be sure what she said, something like sharmuta. Then she looked over at him, and the woman on the other stretcher.

"Is she alive?" the Gibraltarian woman called sharply, sharply enough to make her wince and put a hand to the bandage McTavish had applied.

"Yes," Rutherston said. Then: "Wait! She's saying something!"

He bent and put his ear next to her lips, cupping a hand around it. Then his cold gray eyes flicked to the other woman and he began to rise, implacable purpose in his movements, hand going to the hilt of his sword.

Even half-expecting it, the cobra speed of her response surprised him. She snatched a dagger from the belt of one of the soldiers next to her and threw herself through the air at the other stretcher, leaping with all her body off the ground like a cat. Rutherston spun, grabbing for knife-wrist and body. She cut at him in mid-leap, parting the heavy cloth like paper and slashing the flesh beneath, but he caught her and twisted and threw with trained strength. The slender body pinwheeled through the air and she landed on her back, hard.

"Bramble!" Rutherston barked.

The big man was already moving; he caught the wrist of her knife-hand as she came up with a vicious underarm thrust. Then he tightened his grip. She screamed shrilly as bone broke and hung panting in his grip, shivering uncontrollably when he stopped a movement with a warning twist.

"Emir Jawara must value your services highly, sayyida," Rutherston said, flexing the fingers of his left hand.

The cut was long, but it was shallow and ran with the grain of the muscle. The pain was white and hot, and blood dripped freely as he gripped it with his right.

The woman who'd called herself Llesenia Vargas spat at him.

"The emir! Jawara, that cowardly apostate son of ten fathers, the dog who licks the privates of the kufr kings! It was not for him I lived among infidels and ate the filthy pig. It was for the holy Marabout! But the At-Tarîqat al-Murîdiyya would have forced him to war in the end—he is like that fat pig Vadalà, who sold his own folk for our cargoes—Jawara could not forsake the share we gave him and in the end it would mean he had to fight—"

She stopped. Rutherston prodded: "If that shipment of yew from the far west hadn't started a train of bad luck. God must hate you, eh?"

"It was the witch, and the sorcerer! Only magic could have kept them hidden in the cargo!" Her eyes grew wilder. "You filth must not have a new source of wood for your accursed bows—you swine who kept us from the Maghreb and al-Andalus—who drove us into the swamps where our children die of fevers and you breed like maggots and fill the empty lands God meant for us—"

Her words trailed off into an incoherent scream of sheer rage, and then she stood silent, nursing the broken wrist and glaring at him like a chained hawk. Bramble kept a heavy hand on her shoulder, until two of the billmen took her arms. They lashed her hands together before her and thrust the shaft of a bill between her back and her elbows, keeping a tight grip on the ashwood.

The pain must have been quite agonizing. And my sympathy is underwhelming, he thought.

"Nice piece of work, Inspector," Bramble said. "Now let's get that cut seen to. It's your night to leak, eh?"

McTavish was bandaging Rutherston's wound when the duke and Inspector Arnson arrived; there was nothing else for him to do, with the ambulance on its way to the surgery. The nobleman was fully dressed now, in ordinary field-green uniform and half-armor, breastplate and vambraces and tassets; snow drifted down out of a sky the color of wet cement and clung to the cold steel, sparkling occasionally in the light of the burning building. He stood and listened as Rutherston explained to him:

"—Vadalà was slipping corsairs information on our ships, as well as fencing their loot," he finished. "His family has two ships on the African run; they'd transfer the stolen goods at sea, sell them in Sicily under his own firm's auspices, buy Mediterranean produce and ship it here. Then he'd buy British manufactures the corsairs wanted—weapons made for the African trade, shipbuilding supplies, medicines—and ship them south on his firm's own vessels. They'd meet the rover galleys off the Saloum mouth or the Casamance, and transfer the goods . . . and continue perfectly legitimate voyages to Ashanti or wherever, folding the profits into their ordinary gains."

The duke nodded. "We need tighter controls," he said. "But what about the yew? And the damned Scotsman, and the lady with the bow?"

"That was where the wheels came off the coach for them, my lord. You remember the Count of Azay, how he married a woman from the Far West, about thirty years ago, before he inherited from his father? That business with Nantucket."

"Vaguely," he said. "Quite a fuss at the time. Official Secrets Act, buried deep."

"That was what prompted my memory," Rutherston said, and explained. "We'll get the details if our mysterious guest recovers, but I suspect from what Vargas—the one calling herself Vargas—said, that the rovers took a ship from there . . . one with a cargo of yew. It grows like a weed over there in Oregon, far more of it than anywhere in Europe—and someone must have decided a cargo of it would pay the long voyage to Europe. There's not much else that would."

"And didn't kill all the crew?"

"The dead man we found in the warehouse and the mysterious lady with the starry jerkin must have been on that ship and managed to hide from the corsairs and then from Vadalà's men until it was dropped off here. God alone knows how."

"Why didn't they contact the authorities at once?" the duke said indignantly.

"My lord, all they knew was that a plundered cargo sailed in here on a ship that dealt with the pirates who'd attacked theirs, with no apparent objection. They wouldn't know who to trust—but they did know who and what to follow."

"But it wasn't they who killed Vadalà," Superintendent Arnson pointed out.

"No. Vargas was watching Vadalà for the Mourides—they knew better than to trust a traitor even when he was working for, or with, them. There are Moors who can pass for a European of the darker kind, and obviously our Vargas was one. The Baye Fall would have been in town disguised as ordinary African sailors—or better still, from Maracaibo or Belize or Bahia, one of the South American countries where men of those looks are common. When she needed them, they'd be on hand to act, but with no obvious connection to her."

"Clever," Bramble said, and the Duke of Portsmouth nodded. "Who'd expect that lot to use a female agent?"

"Just so," Rutherston said. "She killed the man in the kilt as he was looking over the yew in the warehouse, but didn't have time to conceal the body—the laborers were on her heels. Instead she very coolly reported it as a murder . . . reporting a crime she'd committed herself! If the mysterious lady who saved my life was watching, the way Vargas was friendly with the police would make her more reluctant still to contact us. But I'm afraid I rather slipped up then. I mentioned that the sight of Hecate's mark and the yew together made me remember something."

"Not so she could hear it," Bramble said. "You were speaking quietly and she was a good fifteen yards away."

"But she was looking at me very carefully; I can read lips myself . . . it's a useful skill for an officer and still more so for a detective. That's when she must have decided to have me silenced too."

"And the merchant?" the duke enquired.

"From the timing, she decided to do a clean sweep and kill Vadalà and his household too when the stranger prevented those Baye Fall from knifing me just a little while ago. She must have realized at once that Vadalà would turn King's evidence to save his skin. From what she said, the Marabouts are interested in putting us and Emir Jawara at loggerheads, as well as simple piracy."

Bramble nodded. "There must have been a pretty little dust-up in that house when our bouncy-bouncy friend arrived. Funny it's a girl, sir." He shook his head. "I'll never forget the way she went up that wall!"

"Just so," Rutherston repeated. "At a guess Vargas planned to disappear afterwards with her Baye Fall hatchetmen. We'd assume she died in the fire, leaving us nothing but some circumstantial evidence that men from the Emirate were responsible. But our blue-eyed lady of mystery back-tracked the assassins sent to kill me, found the massacre underway, and intervened. We owe her a good deal."

"And we'll see that she gets it, if she lives," the nobleman said. "Go on, Inspector."

"Vargas managed to knife her too, not before being clouted across the head, and left her for dead upstairs. She staggered out and shot her own man to prevent him from talking if captured. Doubtless she modified her plan on the spot—she'd be one of the innocent victims, a heroine even. A resourcefully wicked lass."

Rutherston spread his hands ruefully. "All that's ex-post-facto, of course, and pure deduction at this point. I didn't really know for sure until Vargas tried to kill the stranger."

Bramble grunted. "Fortunate the lady could tell you enough to put you on to Vargas, hurt as she was, sir," he said.

"Very fortunate indeed," the duke said. "If Vargas hadn't revealed herself she could have covered her tracks and escaped in the next few days and we'd never have figured out what really happened. Or even carried out her plan to remain as the heroine of the piece, if the stranger dies."

The detective smiled thinly. "The lady didn't say a word; she never recovered consciousness. I simply gave Vargas the . . . ah . . . hairy eyeball . . . and pretended the stranger had whispered something. I wasn't at all sure—but something made me suspect our putative Gibraltarian wasn't what she seemed."

"What?" Arnson said. "The way she was wounded, it must have looked as if the same people who killed Vadalà went after her?"

"No. The wound on her head came from a straight longsword, not a scimitar; and the mysterious lady from the west carried a straight blade. And there was something that happened in the warehouse; Bramble pointed it out. When I mentioned witchcraft, she didn't cross herself . . . which someone pious enough to wear a crucifix of that sort would have done. Those two clues were little enough, but if I could spook her into breaking cover, as it were . . ."

The duke nodded somberly. "Clever, Inspector. Very clever indeed."

He extended a hand, and Rutherston shook it. The detective went on earnestly:

"My lord, I think you'll find that she's not actually an agent for the Emir, only for the Mourides and the corsairs. As I said, it appears the Mourides are trying to provoke hostilities. Doubtless Jawara has been taking a cut of the corsairs' profits, indirectly, but . . . well, he wouldn't be sorry to see the Marabouts of the Brotherhood cut back a bit either, I suspect. He might even help us with a punitive expedition against them, if the alternative was war with the Empire, and then we'd have no reason to attack the Emirate as a whole. It would be a simple punitive expedition writ large, not a proper war."

The duke turned to one of his officers. "Lieutenant, take charge of that woman; we're removing her from civilian jurisdiction under the Defense of the Realm Act. Have her conveyed to the holding cells at the naval station and prepared for interrogation—I'll supervise that myself. If she succeeds in killing herself before she talks, rest assured that you will soon be envying her."

The smile that followed as he turned back to the three police officers was remarkably unpleasant.

"Don't worry, Inspector: we'll get the whole story before she hangs. Oh, yes, every jot and tittle of it."

Bramble and Rutherston and Inspector Arnson nodded, with varying degrees of relief; it was out of their hands now. The nobleman began to draw on his metal-backed gauntlets, cocked an eye at the detective, and went on:

"And if her testimony confirms your . . . theory . . . Inspector Rutherston, you've prevented a war as well as solved a murder. Or at least made it considerably smaller, and saved a good many lives."

Rutherston bowed in return; the soldiers formed up and tramped away, and the policemen left the burning house that shed black smoke into the white-gray blur of the snow-ridden sky. It was a relief to escape from the harsh smoke, full of the smell of things that should not burn.

"And now we can go back home," Rutherston sighed, pulling the coat across his chest where the injured arm rested in a sling. "That was a short investigation, if a remarkably . . . strenuous . . . one."

"You're not going back to Winchester before you write up the reports!" Arnson said. "I'm not putting this lot on paper all by myself."

"Well, at least you could buy us breakfast, then," Bramble grumbled.

"The Anchor has the best kippers on the coast."

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Framed