Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “Somebody magical was hiding in there?” Durrel asked, poking his head around the watch-hole door.

  “I don’t think so. It’s — like a residue. Like wet boots from walking through a puddle.” I came onto a landing, where the footprints straightened themselves out, and I could see their shape plainly, though they got dimmer with each step. “This is odd. The left print is easy to make out, but the right one — it’s all scuffed.”

  “Maybe he had a limp,” Durrel suggested.

  “What did you say?” I skittered back up the steps. “A limp? Like from somebody wearing blocks in his shoe?”

  “I guess. Why?”

  I almost felt like smiling. “Karst has boots like that,” I said. “He was here.”

  A slow grin brightened Durrel’s shadowed face. “Oh, you are good. We got him.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t help us much, since I’m the only one who can see them. We’ll need evidence that’s not invisible. . . .” I trailed off, because the wash of moonslight had finally showed up something helpful — a tiny glimmer of natural light in the corner of the watch-hole, in the shape of a curve of glass. I reached for it, and my fingers closed around a little vial, stopperless, that had somehow rolled into the depths of the cupboard. I straightened, then held my hand in the light, slowly uncurling my grip, and knowing with a cold, dead certainty what I would find.

  A tiny brown bottle, bearing a potioner’s seal of twining red snakes and a neatly inked label: TINCTURE OF THE MOON OF MARAU.

  “But —” Durrel said, “they said they found the bottle that had poisoned her.”

  “They found the bottle you bought for Koya,” I said slowly. “So what is this one?” I held the vial up, looking at the moonslight shining through it. It reflected off a single droplet still clinging to the curved glass bottom.

  We were both silent a long time, looking at my find, before Durrel spoke up again, his voice soft and measured. “How do we prove that was Karst’s?”

  “I don’t know.” But at least it was something — something real. I tucked the bottle inside my doublet and we made our way back downstairs, lingering in the bright Round Court. I tried to picture the room with all its furnishings back intact, but no matter how many tapestries I hung on those curved stone walls, no matter how many candles I set burning, this room, this house was still cold, dark, and forbidding.

  “Tell me again what you see here,” Durrel said, crossing the cold marble to stoop a few feet from where I’d pointed out the magical residue. I touched the floor, describing the scattered lines, the swish of somebody’s hem, the spreading stain.

  “What kind of stain, I wonder,” Durrel said, studying the spot almost as if he could see for himself. “Like —” He turned to me. “Could it be a bloodstain?”

  I froze, my fingers bare inches from the floor. I was kneeling right in it, the wavering glow like an eldritch pond at my feet. I scrabbled backward, falling over my boots and landing hard on the floor. By the gods, Durrel was right. That was exactly what it looked like, as though someone had felled a magic user right here, spilling his blood — his magical blood — on the Bal Marse floors. What else could make a stain so bright and large?

  “Hey, you’ve gone white. It was just a thought. It could be anything. Somebody dropped an inkwell or something.”

  I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth, but something still thumped uneasily inside me, a rhythmic throbbing that did not quite keep time with my heartbeat. “Right,” I said gratefully. “Of course you’re right.” But neither of us believed that. I thought hard. “What did Talth keep in the warehouse across the alley?”

  Durrel shook his head. “Was it hers? I never saw her use it.”

  “What about anyone else? Barris? Karst?”

  “The only time I ever saw Karst was at the Keep, when he was disguised as a guard.”

  “Maybe we should check it out anyway,” I suggested. I wasn’t hopeful, but I wanted to get out of here, out of the invisibly bloodstained Round Court, out of Bal Marse altogether with its secrets and memories and its empty vials of poison; and the idea of seeing what lay behind the warehouse doors suddenly seemed urgent.

  “Good,” Durrel said. “Let’s have a look.”

  We left through the kitchen door and had to pass along the dead gardens and through the back gate, crossing the little cobblestone alley behind Bal Marse before we got to the warehouse, and I felt more anxious with every step. There was a murky, swampy smell down here after the rain, like the river was too close, and I heard the rustle of a rat or a cat in the rubbish at the end of the street. Without even waiting for Durrel to catch up, I stopped at the same door Lord Ragn had used and picked the lock.

  “A light would be nice,” Durrel said, coming up behind me. “You’re not hiding some candles and a tinderbox in those clothes, are you?”

  But I didn’t need the light. I knew what I would find inside; it tugged at me like an impatient child until I gave it my attention. I swung the door wide, and the room flashed bright like a lightning strike. I flinched back.

  “What is it?”

  “Magic.” I pushed my way into the warehouse, and I had only to touch my finger to the wall beside the door, and a glow like moonslight spread throughout the space, dotting the floors and windowsills and door frames with the flickering residue. It all lit up at once, and it was like a lute being tuned — the weird thrum inside my chest fell into rhythm with my breath and pulse and disappeared. I took a deep breath and turned through the space.

  It was as empty as Bal Marse, a spacious room with no crates, no furniture, just the cold streak of magic left behind. Inside, a lantern hung on a bracket near the main doors, the tinderbox stashed behind it. Once lit, it gave a depressing sallow light to the space and dulled the brightness from the magic in a way that was an odd relief.

  Durrel followed me in, surveying the room with a look of doubt. “Well,” he said. “I expected a little more, frankly.”

  “Wait,” I said, and handed him the lamp. “Could you — turn that way?” I pointed back toward the door. “And cover up the light? Yes, that’s better.”

  “What are you doing?”

  I rubbed at my chest. The funny little tremor in my breastbone was back, faint and annoying. It turned me toward the back of the empty storeroom, and I saw a trail of blots that might have been footprints leading to a door. I followed them, and heard Durrel keeping pace behind me. The door led to stairs, and the stairs led to a cellar, a cavernous room with stone buttresses in the arched ceiling and a drain in the brick floor.

  “We’re above the sewers,” I said. Last night’s rain hadn’t fully dried away, and there were puddles on the floor that shined the ceiling back at me as Durrel moved the lantern. The strange insistent tug subsided.

  “Celyn, look.” Durrel had crossed the room. He crouched in a corner, a thick chain in one hand, an open shackle in the other. “They’re silver.”

  Alarmed, I glanced into the other corners, and saw matching sets of chains and manacles, all silver. There was a crude, stained mat like a pallet and a couple of threadbare blankets, and in the flickering light from the lamp and the magic, I made out the quick disappearing shadow of a roach, the vile black specks of rodent droppings. I realized I wasn’t breathing.

  “They were holding magic users here,” Durrel said, his voice thick with horror.

  “It’s worse than that,” I said, barely whispering. “Your father was here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The silence in the wake of my words was so cold the very air seemed to stiffen.

  “What did you say?”

  I was committed now. “That first night I spoke to him — he left the party early, so I followed him. He came here.” I made myself look at Durrel, and his expression was so closed it frightened me.

  “I see. My wife, my father. It all makes sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” I caught at his arm. “We don’t know what he was doing here —”

&
nbsp; He wheeled on me. “Really? The chains don’t make it clear for you? If you have some other explanation, I’m dying to hear it.”

  “Karst —”

  He gave a brutal laugh. “Of course, the mysterious Karst with the limp. Your answer for everything.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “We know Karst is a murderer, and we know he’s a Ferryman. And we also know that your father did not bring those Sarists here tonight.”

  Durrel took a shaky breath and nodded grudgingly. “You’re right. Hells, let’s get out of this place.”

  We got out, and fast. But I couldn’t get that picture out of my head — those silver chains, the filth and squalor — all the long walk home. There had been three sets of chains in that dank basement; if they weren’t for the family of Sarists we’d seen Lord Ragn take away earlier, then what?

  As we crossed back to the Temple District, we turned the night’s other discoveries inside out and upside down, until they were all tangled into one great, incomprehensible knot. Some things were confusing, like Lord Ragn’s connection to Ferrymen, and the stains at Bal Marse. And some had meanings all too clear — the chains, the poison bottle, Karst’s footprints leaving Talth’s bedroom. Though we were tantalizingly close to answers, they were more disturbing than I’d imagined, and we still had no way to prove Durrel’s innocence.

  “We have to find something that connects Karst to the murder,” I said. “Something we can show people, I mean. Besides this little bottle, which could have gotten there any number of ways.”

  “We can’t exactly bring the Day Watch to Bal Marse and point out Karst’s invisible, magical footprints,” Durrel agreed, visibly trying to shake off the mood from the cellar. “How did you do all that, anyway? At the warehouse — you looked just like a bloodhound on a scent trail. And you knew which boat they were on, long before you could have picked it out of the traffic on the water. Before I could even see it.”

  “I don’t know.” I looked off into the starlit distance. Durrel was right; somehow I had followed the nagging tug of the magic from the warehouse like a tether reeling me home. I could still feel the sensation, an echo in my breastbone, and I didn’t like it. I rubbed at my chest again.

  “Hey,” Durrel said. “You’re shivering. What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head, but found myself wanting to tell him. “Werne came to see me a few days ago.” The words sounded strained and unreal.

  “Your brother? The Inquisitor.” I had never spoken to Durrel of my connection to the Bloodletter, but everybody knew. Everybody knew that now. “Celyn, what happened?”

  “He —” I rubbed my fingers against my clothes, but they still glinted with magical light. “He wants me to come back to the Celystra and hunt magic users for the Inquisition.”

  “Black Marau,” Durrel swore. “Oh, Celyn. Digger. I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged, but Durrel’s hand fell gently on my shoulder, and his dark eyes were all sympathy. “They had people in chains,” I said. “That’s what he forces them to. To trust their fates to Ferrymen —” I faltered, because I couldn’t go further without touching on Durrel’s father again. What a pair we made. I hunched out of Durrel’s grasp and kept walking, and it was a moment before I heard his footfalls beside mine again. Frowning, I recalled another incident. I had shrugged it off at the time, but now I wondered about it anew. “That evening with Koya — she wanted to know if I could really see magic.”

  That brought Durrel up short. “Why in the hells would she ask you that?” he said.

  I looked into the moonslit sky, and three heavy orbs looked back at me. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Durrel was sober but calm as I left him that night. “You’ll see your father tomorrow,” I said, lingering in the open threshold of the Temple. Lamplight poured into the street where we stood. “I’m sure he’ll be able to explain everything.”

  “I hope so,” he said with a little shrug, and then disappeared into the masked crowd inside. I stood there in the pooling light for a long moment, but he never turned back.

  That night I was still uneasy, and as I undressed for bed, I tried to work out what was bothering me, beyond the disturbing revelations at the river and Bal Marse. I’d set the little bottle near the window, where it glowed amber in the moonlight. I looked at it, my thoughts turning back to Lord Ragn’s servant from the docks, and the way the slim man had moved and stood. He felt — familiar, somehow, but I couldn’t place him. Frowning, I unlaced my oversized doublet, and my hands slowly froze on the ties. That was it. Lord Ragn’s accomplice had seemed familiar not because I knew the man — but because I knew the stance, that posture, that slight difference in bearing under the clothes. I laid the doublet aside, feeling more and more certain. The figure with the pistol had been a woman, dressed in men’s clothes, just like me.

  Exhaustion from the week’s late-night running around kept me in bed late the next morning. When I finally pulled myself together to appear downstairs at the bakery, the hot yeasty scent of bread baking engulfed the whole building — and, apparently, much of the street outside. The common room was as crowded as I’d ever seen it, certainly busier than it had been the last several weeks. Grea was up to her elbows in customers, and even Rat bustled about the kitchen, handing out loaves.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, squeezing between clamoring bodies to get behind the counter. I reached for a stray bun that had rolled into the flames and gotten singed on one side.

  “They heard we had flour,” Grea said.

  “You have flour? How? This I want to see for myself.” Grea nodded toward the back room, the pantry where she kept her supplies. Rat must finally have managed to track down a couple of stray bags that could be diverted from their intended destination. I wondered how much that had cost. Inside the pantry, beside Grea’s sad supply of cheaper barley and millet, sat two huge sacks of white flour tagged with her name and the Bargewater Street address. When I saw them, my appetite shriveled up to nothing, and I set my singed bun down, untasted, on a shelf. The bags were stamped with a symbol of a stalk of wheat against a green circle. Grea might not recognize the emblem, but I knew it immediately. This flour came straight from the Celystra.

  I banged back out into the kitchen and flagged Grea down. “Who brought this to you?” I had to half shout above the noise of the customers and the roar of the ovens.

  “Two workmen just delivered them yesterday,” she said. “Said they were told to bring it direct to me. I have no idea who sent it or why, but I’m not complaining!”

  “What kind of workmen?”

  Grea looked at me quizzically. “Workmen. What’s this about, Digger?”

  I waved her back to work, scowling. There was only one way that Celystra grain would find its way to a tiny bakery in the Seventh Circle, and it left me feeling confused and defeated. Werne was too shrewd. He hadn’t bothered to include a message for me; he hadn’t needed to. I couldn’t even be angry about this. Who was I to begrudge Grea and the hungry people of Seventh their bread?

  That evening, when the moons were low and the traffic on the river was dying down, I fetched Durrel for the meeting with Lord Ragn. Eske had clad him in a fine doublet of gray velvet, much like the one he’d worn habitually before his arrest; and freshly shaved and dressed in black damask trunk hose and soft leather shoes, he looked every inch the nob again. Though I was in my copper satin gown to match, I felt awkward, and hesitated before crossing the Temple common room to meet him, pausing first to leave a message for Berdal at the bar that Cwalo had agreed to arrange a time in the coming days to meet with influential Gersins who might be sympathetic to Prince Wierolf’s cause.

  “We’ll need to be careful tonight,” I said as Durrel made his way toward me. “You look — like yourself.”

  His face was unreadable as he lifted fingers to the brim of his hat. “I don’t feel like myself,” he said softly. “Where are we going, dressed like this?”

  I had enlisted Rat’s aid in arranging th
is rendezvous, as I had more confidence in his ability to select a venue suited to Lord Ragn’s station. Although that station was becoming less and less clear by the hour. “A theater in the Second Circle,” I said. “There’s an opera.” When Rat had given me the tickets, he hadn’t said as much, but I gathered they were meant to have been his and Hobin’s. I owed him one. At least.

  “Master Breem’s?” Durrel asked, and I nodded. “I know it.”

  The theater was a long way from the Temple District, but we took it on foot; it was easier to duck into an alley to avoid a patrol of guards than it was to secure a hiding place from a boat. A pall fell over the walk as we passed through a public circle where one of the gates had been barred off. A uniformed guard of the Watch was tying strips of yellow cloth to the bars, and we slipped deeper into the shadows.

  “Plague flags,” Durrel said when the guard finally passed us by. Fever must have struck that quarter, a crowded, working-class neighborhood, from the looks of it, and the Ruling Council had quarantined them. No one could cross the boundary of the yellow plague flags — in or out — for at least the next four weeks, or until the court physicians declared the risk over. I doubted the court physicians had ever set foot down here, nor the Celystra healers turned their prayers to the unfortunates locked behind those gates. The penalty for trespass was death, either from the fever itself or from the Watch, if you were caught.

  “Talth rented out houses in that neighborhood,” Durrel said grimly as we set off again. “I never saw them, but I can guess what they must be like.”

  I thought of what he’d said the other day during our conversation with Berdal. “What you mentioned before, about Greenmen being killed by Sarists — is that true?”

  He lifted his hands. “Who knows? It could just be rumor — which is plenty of reason they wouldn’t want it spread around. But Raff told me they were cracking down on anyone who might have been involved, either in a real crime or rumormongering.”

  Talk of Greenmen made me uneasy. That afternoon I had asked Rat to look into what had become of Raffin. I was increasingly alarmed by the silence on that front, and I hoped Rat’s connections would have better luck turning up some information.