Beautiful Blood by Lucius Shepard Page B

in the streets below. “I have things to take care of at the vats. Have you been up on the dragon recently?”
    “Not for years…and then only to the edge of the mouth.”
    Cattanay stepped into the basket of the elevator attached to the side of the tower and prepared to lower himself. “You ought to take a walk up there when you have a chance. It can be inspiring. You never know what you might encounter.”
     

     
    After puttering in his laboratory the rest of the morning and into late afternoon, unable to come to grips with the scientific elements of the issue that confronted him, Rosacher heeded Cattanay’s advice and climbed the scaffolding to the vats and then walked out onto the dragon’s back, following a meandering track through dry-leaved thickets until he came to Hangtown. The settlement had grown from a handful of shacks surrounding a polluted puddle of rainwater half an acre in circumference to a village of perhaps two hundred souls housed in fifty or sixty shanties, the largest of these serving as a tavern and marked by a neatly hand-lettered sign that read:
     
    MARTITA’S HOME IN THE SKY
     
    It was a relatively new structure with windows that were not merely square holes in the walls, but had panes of warped, opaque glass, and its wood was still a roach-brown, not faded to gray like the majority of the shanties; yet it was equally as ramshackle, with a slumping roofed porch and a partial second floor that appeared to be in the process of sliding off. A man—a scalehunter judging by his profusion of green and gold tattoos—sprawled unconscious in a chair on the front porch, an advertisement for the effectiveness of the establishment’s spirits. Having experienced neither exhilaration nor inspiration during his walk, Rosacher entered the spacious common room and its atmosphere of gloom and fried onions, thinking a pint would help fuel his descent to Morningshade. Behind the bar (boards laid across a half-dozen barrels), a robust, round-faced woman of thirty or thereabouts, unprepossessing in aspect, her brown hair in long braids, dressed in cloth breeches (a style favored by Hangtown’s female population—skirts tended to catch on twigs and thorns) and a low-cut blouse, busied herself with polishing mugs. An elderly white-haired man with a scarred face and a man young enough to be his grandson played cards at a bench by the window. They eyed him indifferently and the woman came bustling over to Rosacher, who had taken a seat at the rear.
    “We’ve a good blond ale from Port Chantay,” she said. “Otherwise it’s homebrew. Quite nice, it is, and very strong, if that’s your pleasure.”
    Rosacher opted for the ale and cast an eye about the room. Basically unadorned, it had here and there a feminine touch: gillyflowers in a vase; a print showing Griaule against a mass of clouds; a framed needlepoint homily with letters so crooked that he was unable to read them. The woman returned with the ale, she hovered beside the table, and after he had paid her she continued to hover. He had a sip and said, “This will do,” thinking she wanted him to approve the ale, yet she remained standing by the table, beaming at him. Finally she said, “You don’t remember me, do you? Truly, there’s no reason you should. You didn’t take much notice of my face.” She winked broadly. “You were mainly interested in my backside.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Martita.” She tapped her ample bosom, dislodging a silver locket that had been half-concealed in her cleavage, the image of a dragon scratched on the casing as if by her own hand. “Martita Doans. I was a maid in your house. The night the assassin came, it were me what was sent to bandage you.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “We made love.”
    The term “made love” befuddled him for a moment and, once he had sorted it out, feeling embarrassed, shamed, yet not wishing to admit to anything, he said weakly, “Of course. Uh, I…How’ve you