"Underlord's smothering ballsack!"
Yudith hurls her cloak in the vague direction of the chaise, kicks off her boots, and gnaws on her knuckle. She's been holding in invective all the way back from her latest meeting with The Mink, but she can't risk yelling her frustrations freely — if there's the slightest suspicion on the wind that she is, in fact, a deep cover agent of Gloamcat Division, then by sunup she'll be face-down in the river. Quite apart from her life, that'd be four years of infiltration effort down the drain.
The Gorley brothers rule the criminal trades from Bleakdown up to Singwinter Street; theft and violence and sleaze and rackets and fiddles and all. It's larger than the three of them, of course, a wide-crept web of filth on the unseen side of the mirror-polished City of Song, and the Division haven't managed to get anyone into the inner circle. But The Mink is close, so close, a gateway to cracking everything wide, so tantalising that Yudith can taste it.
She's been in too deep for at least two years. She knows this. But the first time she dripped enchanted water on a mirror and fed a coded slip of paper into a candle-flame with The Mink's codeword on it, she knew and her boss knew that they were riding this all the way to doom or glory, no matter what. The Mink!
Before this, they hadn't even had a physical description of the legendary fence. Not that Yudith has seen her, really, not that Yudith's been trusted with that, not quite, but they've sat in the same room, Yudith's heart hammering, not a single magical protection obscuring either from the other, only simple darkness, and The Mink spoke to her — spoke to her! — voice undisguised.
A woman, Yudith's training said dryly, likely fifty or sixty. Tall. Clearly physically fit, well-kept, excellent posture. Hands—
They'd stood close enough to reach out and murder one another, hand-to-hand, walked to the exit of the blacked-out room together. Slower than strictly necessary. The Mink reached out, on the far side of the doorway, before they walked separate ways; touched Yudith — touched her! — fingertips to her elbow. Hesitated, as if to say something, Yudith burning and dying on the inside, dizzily breathing her wintry perfume; then after that eternal pause, cleared her throat softly and departed, steps measured.
—Hands indicate no regular labour of a physical character.
And then today. Yudith's face schooled, wearing a shirt that flatters her particularly well — no reason; no reason at all, just another day, just another meeting, just doing her job and her secret job both, no reason to be dressed up more than usual even by a fraction, no reason to have thought about dressing up, no reason to have thrilled, with her heart in her throat, about it. No reason to have popped just the subtlest dab of scent behind her ears.
And The Mink has deployed a new go-between. No word, no warning, just — some man instead, some random intermediary.
She shouldn't be feeling the slightest thing. It's routine. The Mink has stayed the free menace she is to law and order by paranoia, by exactly this kind of random change. This is just another of many such setbacks to weather through patience. Diligent undercover work. Poker-face apparent indifference.
No reason to feel kicked in the chest. Schoolgirl dejected. Lip-wobblingly tantrum-prone.
After I wore this shirt, Yudith wants to wail, knowing it's childish and that she's in way over her head and that she stopped caring some time ago and that's bad, really it is, but it doesn't feel nearly as bad.
She should make a report.
She flings herself onto her bed instead and breathes through the feeling of being spurned.
