The Black Lung Captain - By Chris Wooding Page 0,149

you, sir, are racing to prevent it?'

'I was,' he said. 'Dunno how I ended up here.'

'Perhaps you were inclined to a have a drink to steel your nerve?' suggested the bartender, who'd begun cleaning glasses.

'Yeah.'

'And after several drinks . . . Why, a man alone in a place like this, he has needs, doesn't he? Needs a woman can't understand. Perhaps you took a fancy to one of the local doxies?'

'More than one,' Pinn grunted. He swigged his rum to clear the taste of previous rums out of his mouth.

'You must possess a surfeit of manly desire, sir.'

Pinn wasn't sure what that meant, but he liked the sound of it so he agreed. 'Damn right.'

'Perhaps you gambled a little, too?'

'Got to do a bit of gambling after you've done a whore,' said Pinn. 'That's the time to hit the tables. A man thinks best when his pods are empty. '

'And, if I may venture to extrapolate from your recent attempt to solicit refreshments, perhaps you've been here several days, spent all the money you have and now find yourself stranded, without a shillie to your name, and many kloms still to go to your sweetheart?'

'That's it,' said Pinn. 'Exactly.'

The bartender sighed dramatically. 'You have my sympathy, sir. Fortune is cruel to romantics.'

Pinn raised his mug of rum to that. This bartender was one wordy son of a bitch, but he was wise. He understood. You couldn't blame a man for cutting loose once in a while.

It had been a hard month, after all. Worrying about Lisinda, trying to work out what he should do. Suffering that bitch Dracken for the Cap'n's sake. Even after she peeled off the ghoul mask and it turned out she was hot underneath, he still hated her. Not enough that he'd have said no, but you didn't have to like a woman to sleep with them. It was simply a matter of letting the pressure off. A man had to let the pressure off every so often. Otherwise, he was apt to do all kinds of stupid things. That was just nature.

So the first thing Pinn did when he got out on his own was to let the pressure off. There was nobody giving him orders, nobody to stop him. nobody to make him drink coffee and sober up. It took him two days to spend all the money he had in the world.

It w as only now, in the cold light of impending poverty, that he remembered why he'd stopped at Kingspire in the first place. In his haste to reach Lisinda he'd been pushing the afterburners hard, and they'd eaten up all his fuel. He was running on fumes when he touched down in Kingspire and. unless some kind of miracle had occurred in the meantime, that was still the case.

The bartender was right It was like the world was conspiring against him. Trying to thwart his attempts to reach his sweetheart. If there really was an Allsoul, it certainly seemed to have a grudge against Pinn.

Miserably, he assembled a roll-up. He considered offering one to the bartender - it would be good to befriend him, since Pinn would be tapping him up for drinks later - but his tobacco was low and he wanted it for himself. He was just licking the paper when someone eased on to the bar stool next to him, arriving in a wave of strong perfume.

'Got one of those for me, stranger?' she asked.

She was plump, heavily rouged, and showing a terrifying amount of cleavage. Red hair spilled in curls over a mole-pocked expanse of white flesh. One of her front teeth slightly overlapped the other. She was at least twenty years older than him, but she dressed like a woman half her age.

He handed over his roll-up, as if in a daze, and lit it for her with a match. She took a drag and smiled at him. It might have been the booze, but Pinn thought she was the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.

'Strange and mysterious, the paths our hearts take us,' said the bartender sagely. But nobody was listening to him, so he drifted off to the other side of the bar, where there was another drunken soul in need of a sympathetic ear.

Thirty-Two

Plome's Confession —

Conversations In The Sanctum — An Ending, Of Sorts

Summer had got hold of Tarlock Cove, and Jez was glad to feel the sun on her face. After all that time in the arctic north it was a pleasure