Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Deliveries?” Durrel frowned, looking down at Raffin. It was hours later, night; Raffin had recovered enough to sit up in bed and recount his tale as if it had been a heroic adventure. Rat had fetched Durrel back to the bakery, and his relief at seeing Raffin almost equaled his performance at my sickbed earlier in the week. After a brief reunion and a simple meal, I had Raffin repeat what he’d told me.

  “He means people,” I said, my voice harsh. “Karst is selling out his Sarist clients to the Inquisition!”

  “How many of these ‘deliveries’ did you witness?” Durrel asked.

  “Only the one. I was on duty at that gate just once, but the things I’ve heard — there were probably others.” Raffin’s face was expressionless, and I felt my guilt at him losing his post slipping away.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “The Inquisition doesn’t pay bounties on heretics. They consider informing on your neighbor to be a devout Celyst’s moral duty.”

  “I told you,” Raffin said, “something rotten is going on up there. If you’re getting closer to figuring out whatever it is, be careful. Or, well.” He gestured weakly at his own injured body.

  “He’s right,” I said to Durrel. “We’ve been much too visible lately. We need to get you back to the Temple. The bakery isn’t safe.” Not with Barris and the Watch lurking about, and the Lord High Inquisitor popping in for a friendly fraternal chat anytime he felt like it. I wanted to leave, with a Greenman in my bed and the taint of the Inquisition downstairs.

  Durrel didn’t budge. He was still watching Raffin, the same cold expression on his face, jaw set. “Was my wife involved in this?” The words were thin, forced through his lips with effort.

  “Brother, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “Was my wife involved in this!” Durrel’s hands had curled into fists, and he was scaring me a little.

  Raffin met his friend’s gaze evenly. “I heard her name —”

  Durrel made a cry of rage and rammed his fist into the wall, hard enough to shed plaster. He turned on his heel, grabbed a bottle of wine from the makeshift kitchen, and stalked toward the stairs.

  I ran after him. “Where are you going?”

  He wheeled on me. “Don’t worry, Celyn. I’m not going to do anything stupid,” he said savagely, and slammed the apartment door in my face. I grabbed the handle and yanked it open again.

  “Peach.” I turned back. Raffin was watching the door, looking pale and weary. “Let him go,” he said.

  “But —”

  “Sometimes a man has to be on his own,” he said. “He won’t welcome you, not in that mood.”

  Everything in me screamed at me to go with Durrel, but Raffin’s voice, so tired and reasonable, held me back. Scowling deeply, I shut the door, planted myself back on the floor beside his bed, and said, “Tell me exactly what you know.”

  It wasn’t much, in the end. Just what he’d told us already, that he’d seen Karst turn over two people, both women, to guards at the Celystra, in exchange for payment in banknotes. The women were chained in silver, and they’d been taken to a plain cell on the main level, before being fetched away again by Confessors the next day, to disappear into the clutches of the Inquisition like so many others.

  “We were ordered not to touch them, not to let any harm come to them,” Raffin said.

  “Strange orders for Greenmen. And you don’t know what became of them? You never saw another exchange like that again?”

  He shook his head. “It was only my first week there, before they assigned my street patrol. But I heard about other cases like it. Not many, just once or twice more while I was there.”

  I nodded, thinking this through. “And what did you hear of Talth Ceid?”

  Raffin’s bruised face twisted. “Nothing specific. I think they mostly dealt with your Karst, or men like him. But I saw her name once in a record book; you know how they love their records at the Celystra. And when I tried to ask about her — just casual curiosity about my friend’s wife, mind you — they dropped the discussion like a hot pot and reassigned me to another post.”

  It was something, at least. Finally, a tangible link between Talth, her killer, and “rotten” doings at the Celystra.

  “One more thing, peach. I don’t know if it’s important, but —”

  “What is it?” I was trying to figure out how to get my hands on those Celystra records — or a matching set of Karst’s, perhaps.

  “That hands-off order they gave for those girls he sold us? It reminded me of the one they set for you.”

  A chill washed through me. My last conversation with Werne echoed in my brain, when he’d said the Celystra had work for me. I didn’t like the sound of whatever arrangement Raffin had seen, and it made me even more suspicious of my brother’s motives. He might claim his only desire was to renew our family ties, but I’d known him long before he was the Inquisitor, and he knew how to get what he wanted, by any means necessary, not always by force. It had been the same when I was a child at the Celystra, and it hadn’t changed in all this time. Werne wanted me to hunt magic, to use my skills to supplement the methods of his Confessors. Only once had I made the mistake of pointing out a magic user to my brother, and I would never be able to make up for that.

  When Raffin was finally asleep, I tracked Rat down in the bakery. He was closing a low storeroom door partially concealed behind the pantry shelves.

  “Did they get anything?” I asked. Though we never spoke of it, I knew Rat kept some of his merchandise down there, in the bakery’s unused beer cellar. The last I’d seen of our counterfeit Grisel had been Rat toting a crate down through that little door.

  “Nothing important,” he said, and passed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle into my hands. “Kept safe, as promised.”

  I unwrapped the object, knowing from its slight weight in my hands exactly what it was: a tiny velvet-bound book, its dark plush cover worn away almost to nothing from centuries of hands touching the edges. Reynart’s chronicle on magic. I closed my eyes, my fingers curling around the little volume, feeling a ridiculous urge to kiss the thing.

  “Rat, they could have —” I didn’t finish the thought. Something was wrong. I stroked the binding, ran my finger around the uneven pages.

  “Digger? What is it?”

  The book cradled in one hand, I fanned it open, touching page after page; flicked my fingernail beneath the endpapers; lifted it to my face and blew into the spine. And nothing happened.

  There wasn’t really all that much magic of its own right in the book — it was mostly about magic, not actually magical — but usually enough power sparked to life from all the magical hands that had handled it through the years to make it a challenge for me to read. But now — I squeezed the book tight, but no spark of glitter, no swirl of shimmering dust motes, no invisible light to brighten the pages awoke to my touch. I took a sharp breath. Maybe the magical residue had finally run out or worn off.

  But I knew better. It wasn’t the book that had changed.

  It was me.

  And all in that one moment, I finally remembered what I’d figured out about the Tincture of the Moon. That it dampened magic — from the inside.

  “Digger?”

  I slammed the little book shut and tucked it inside my bodice. “Thank you,” I said. “I have to go.”

  Turning to leave, I felt Rat’s hand brush my shoulder. He was looking at the roll of clothes I’d stuffed under my arm. “You’re not coming back, are you?”

  “Time to move on,” I said, then softened. “At least until this thing with Durrel is settled.”

  There was a quirk to his lip at that. “You’ll have to find somebody else to bail you out of gaol,” he said.

  I gave his shoulder a companionable punch. “So will you.”

  I had to see Koya. I hopped a boat for Cartouche; if she wasn’t there, at least I could lose myself for a while in the crowds, and not have to think about what I�
�d done to myself.

  During the sail, my thoughts flitted wildly. I finally understood about the poison, and what Koya was using it for. Essentially I’d drunk a silver cocktail; what had I thought it was going to do to me? I gave a flick of my fingers, watching sparks not fly, and felt curiously bereft. I’d spent most of my life hiding my magic, not even recognizing it for what it was, an extraordinary power, unique to me. A year ago I might have been glad to be rid of it — but now? I was just learning about it, about myself, what it might be. What I might be. I wasn’t ready to give it up, but it seemed I might have thrown it away.

  I found Koya in her usual spot, surrounded by her retinue. Her long hair was looped and braided elaborately, and she wore the blue gown she’d had on when I’d first met her. A long-handled mask rested gently in the crook of one arm. I recognized the costume now. She took one look at me, barreling through the crowd, and waved her friends away with a sleepy hand.

  “Why, Celyn, what a surprise!” she said just a little too loudly. I wasn’t fooled anymore, and I just squeezed in next to her.

  “You might have just told me.”

  Koya glanced past me briefly, then led me away from the bar to a more private space back near the stage. “It isn’t permanent,” she said gently. “I should have warned you, but I never expected you to do anything so . . . insane.” She had an expression on her face that might almost have been admiration. “Durrel thinks you’re marvelous, by the way. He’d never admit it, but he’s completely smitten with the way you charge straight into things.”

  “He ought to get to know you, then.”

  Koya gave a short, sharp laugh, but sobered quickly. “I couldn’t tell him,” she said, but wouldn’t elaborate.

  “The potion — it was for you, then?”

  “Gods, no. I don’t have magic.”

  I looked hard at her, searching, but — “I can’t tell now. How can I be certain?”

  “Well, for one thing, you can be certain my mother would have found a way to make a profit from it,” she said bitterly.

  She was probably right about that. “How long?” I said. How long do the effects of the tincture last? I meant. How long until I get my magic back?

  She watched me carefully. “It depends. Not long; a couple of weeks, usually. Long enough to get safely out of the country.”

  Everything was starting to line up: Koya, Lord Ragn, the poison, and their mysterious midnight shipments at the docks. “Explain.”

  Koya spoke quietly. “We discovered it a few months ago. A passenger brought it; he’d been using it on his daughter. I saw instantly how valuable it could be to our work, but Ragn was skeptical. He didn’t want to risk it. You saw how dangerous it is, how tricky to get the dosage just right.” She looked uneasy. “But I went ahead.”

  “And had Durrel get it for you.”

  “Yes, after the original batch our passenger brought with him was gone. As you saw, it doesn’t take much at all to work effectively. I hardly thought someone would use it to murder my mother!” she said. “That was just a horrible coincidence.”

  But I wondered. Talth being murdered with the very same elixir that Ragn and Koya were using to strip their refugees of their incriminating magic . . . that was too much coincidence for even one of Tiboran’s devotees to swallow. I pulled up a seat next to Koya’s. “Walk me through your — operation. How does it work, what you and Lord Ragn do?”

  She gave a wan smile. “Thinking of taking a trip?” When I didn’t dignify that with an answer, she went on. “How it did work was just like I told you — people would come to us, quietly, and Lord Ragn would just as quietly send them on their way again. But it’s expensive — all the little details that have to be taken care of, the new passports and lodgings and transportation, not to mention the bribes for officials to look the other way. Demand for our services went up when the war started and the Celystra started cracking down even harder on suspected Sarists. Ragn needed money.”

  “Your mother’s?”

  She nodded. “At first it seemed like a perfect plan. The Ceid are discreet, after all, and they can afford a little risk. I think Mother even liked the adventure, although her main interest was obviously financial, not humanitarian.” She took a sip of her drink, loops of gold hair swaying gently around her face. “Things were going well. And then Durrel entered the picture, and after that, everything got very complicated.”

  “How does Karst fit in?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He was just one of Mother’s employees. Sometimes he went along to guard the shipments. But you think he killed her?”

  “When did you learn they were involved with Ferrymen?”

  “Not until after she died!” Koya looked so distressed there that I believed her. “We heard that Karst had been hassling some of the passengers, leaning on them for extra money, but Ragn told me Mother promised to take care of it. Maybe she didn’t get a chance,” she said. “They quarreled, and Karst killed her.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said, and explained what Raffin had told me, about Karst selling some of his Sarists to the Celystra. Karst clearly had ambitions of his own, and maybe Talth had wanted a piece of that little side business with the Inquisition. Or maybe she’d merely been in Karst’s way. From everything I’d been told, killing Talth did seem the only way to budge her.

  “What are you thinking?” Koya asked, her voice tentative.

  I frowned at my lightless fingertips. “That this almost makes sense. And almost means something is wrong.”

  I probably should have stayed at Cartouche, and Koya suggested it, but I wasn’t ready to sit still yet. There were too many jumbled thoughts buzzing around in my head, and I needed time and movement to sort through them. I was dodging curfew, but tonight it didn’t seem to matter. As I crossed through Markettown, there were people abroad like I hadn’t seen in months. A cluster of townsfolk with jugs and laundry baskets gathered by a neighborhood fountain, chatting into the night; people argued outside a closed stall in Market Circle . . . It was all so bustling and odd I wanted to stop and ask someone what was going on, but I spotted a patrol of the Night Watch in the crowd, and ducked into the shadows.

  In the Temple District, it was just as lively. Before I was in sight of the tavern or the churches, I heard shouts and banging, the whinny of an alarmed horse.

  A gunshot.

  Somebody smart would have taken off in the other direction, but I ran into the circle, where a knot of men in military uniforms hassled a wagoner. His cart was overturned, and in the light from the Temple’s open doors, I made out its cargo of casks of wine or ale, no doubt destined for Eske’s customers. Two of the soldiers had the wagoner by his collar, while the others raided the barrels, hoisting them aloft or tapping them in the street. One knelt on the ground, lapping up spilled wine like a stray dog.

  Another gunshot broke the night, followed by a sharp, clear shout in a voice I recognized, and this time the soldiers heeded it. Eske stood in the Temple threshold with a musket, her dark mask and wild hair making her look more like the Nameless One, delivering the swift, fiery justice of the gods, than our ever-jovial high priestess.

  “Halt!” she cried, and her voice alone was enough to stop the soldiers short. “That man is a servant of the gods on sacred business of Tiboran, and you will unhand him now or suffer the Masked God’s wrath.” She lowered the barrel of the musket straight at the soldier holding the wagoner. He dropped the man’s collar so quickly the wagoner stumbled.

  But these were king’s men, trained soldiers in the Green Army, and it was a hot summer night in Gerse, and they were angry. I heard the whisk of a sword drawing, saw an arm flick in Eske’s direction —

  “You don’t want to do that, friend,” said a low, even voice, and another masked Temple worker melted out of the shadows, a long, steel blade leveled at the armed soldier’s head. “Come back into the Temple and let this man get about his work.”

  “But that’s our wine,” somebody grous
ed.

  “And you’re welcome to it,” Eske said smoothly. “But it leaves the Temple in your bellies, not on your backs. I have no say in the new rations, but the taps at the Temple are always ready, and we’ve never turned away a man yet.”

  Amid this, the wagoner had slinked away, and Eske’s man had easily circled around the back of the crowd. Finally the armed soldier lowered his own weapon, and the group broke up, still grumbling. Most of them crawled back into the Temple, but a handful left across the circle, while at least one paused to help right the wagon and rescue the stock. Eske stood in the doorway, shaking her head.

  Her frown intensified when she saw me. “I understand this plan of yours,” she said. “But all I can say is, it had better work fast. You’ve put us right in the middle of the fight, and I’m not sure that’s where we want to be. And you, young lord,” Eske said severely, then beamed. The masked barman with the sword had stepped up to us and was sheathing his blade. “I should kiss you, but I doubt our girl here would approve.”

  I spun around. Durrel — of course that level voice and blade had been Durrel’s. He gave me a crooked half smile. “I’d better make sure they’re not in there causing trouble,” he said, and jogged easily up the short stairs.

  Eske smiled, but there was a shadow across her face as we watched Durrel move through the bar. “I like him,” she said. “And we’re happy to keep him here as long as necessary, but that boy is not meant to be one of Tiboran’s. He belongs to Zet, and the sooner you get him back in his rightful place, the better.”

  I understood what she was saying; Zet was the patron of nobility, and as much as Tiboran liked things topsy-turvy, the world had its proper order, and it was dangerous to defy that order for too long. “I’m working on it.” I sighed, and followed her inside.

  Durrel had found a table upstairs and doffed his mask. He looked hot and disheveled, his eyes rimmed in red, and I remembered that the last time I’d seen him he’d been heading off to get drunk. He linked his fingers together on the table, the knuckles of his left hand raw and bloody.