The Fire Cage

by Scott Hungerford

  “Here,” she said, suddenly distracted, taking one her husband’s hats from its peg on the wall. “Put this on. It’s Mr. Mercher’s best hat and matches your jacket, and nobody will look at you twice.” He did so, noting that the soft merchant’s hat was just a little bit too big for him. Mr. Mercher was a large man, a butcher down at River, with a body as big as an ox. But with the hat’s brim pulled down over his eyes, the hat would hide his face which was better than being bare-headed in the market square filled with Guards that had chased him in and out for years.

  “Thank you,” Davin said. “I can’t thank you enough. If I’d walked right in there…”

  “Then you’d be down at the Judges’ evidence table faster than my husband can crack a bone for marrow. Or worse yet, the strangler would know you’re still up and around.”

  “But I still don’t know who would want to do this,” Davin protested, even as he adjusted the oversized hat. “I don’t know who would want me dead.”

  “Me neither, dearie,” she said. “But whoever it is, I don’t think they’ll keep from trying again if they know you’re still alive. Now, I’ll shoo you out the back, and don’t you disturb a pigeon. You keep right quiet and head for the water.”

  “Umm…” he stammered as she pushed him towards the back door, watching over her shoulder for any sign of the Guard breaking down her door. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank an old dog like me. Just keep from the strangler and stay in the shadows, and come back to me if you need a few pennies or a change of clothes. It’s the least I can do.”

  Leading him through her house, around wicker baskets piled up with folded shirts, trousers and linens, Mrs. Mercher put him out the back door into the weedy ruin of her shade garden, a patch of dirt between four houses that probably got sunlight ten days a year. “Right between those buildings there you’ll find a covered alley that leads down behind Clockers.”

  “I know where I am,” Davin said, even as he stood trying to measure the enormity of the hole in his heart. “But I just don’t know where I’m going,” he said to thin air, even as Mrs. Mercher closed and locked the door behind him with a single turn of the key.

  Chapter Three

  It was nearly nightfall when the doors to the Fates opened and a flood of gamblers poured out the doors and down the marble steps like a river of top-hats and velvet. Pulling on coats, slapping each other’s backs and shaking hands, the group marked another successful session, promising one another to return next week for a new turn of Fortune’s wheel.

  At the back of the pack, Rajon and Veronn stepped out into the evening night air side by side, with Veronn’s sad, exhausted face showing the final outcome of nearly thirty-six hours of play. As Rajon pulled on his white gentleman’s gloves, Veronn buttoned up his expensive gray wool coat against the coming evening chill.

  Watching from under the awning of a closed-up smoke-shop, Davin watched as the pair came down the steps and headed uptown, towards the plazas, parks, and rose gardens that marked the heart of the Marble district. Having walked around town all day, torn between grief and anger at the events that had come to pass, he’d come back to Marble to confront Rajon, and to put a set of motions in play that still might give him a win in the end. He doubted that either his mother or Yori would approve, but with no one else in the city for him now, Davin had nowhere else to turn. Making sure that he didn’t draw the attention of the Knives who were still standing vigilantly at the door of the gambling hall, he stepped out from beneath the shadows of the awning and followed Rajon up towards the crest of the hill.

  Davin’s hands were shaking with nerves, but his knife was still in its pocket, where it belonged. Keeping his borrowed hat pulled down, he kept a close eye on the pair he was following, noting as the other Bankers, Lawyers, and Solicitors turned down their own streets to their homes, drunk with spirits and good pleasure. Within a few blocks the three of them were the only ones on the darkening boulevard, with Davin a good fifty paces behind.

  Keeping to the shadows, he watched as the two gamblers eventually turned in beneath a sculpted marble wisteria trellis into one of the statue gardens that marked the top of the hill, by Agora’s high western wall. Knowing the place well, Davin took his time following them inside. He took a moment by the front gate to offer a quick blessing to a statue of gentle Rosella, the Saint of mercy and small favors, and dropped one of his pennies in her water basin in offering.

  Once inside the park, he saw that Veronn was already sitting alone on a marble bench overlooking a rectangular reflecting pool, a place where Davin had spent much time pondering the turn of life’s cards. Much to his irritation, Rajon was nowhere to be seen. Looking around carefully, scanning the shadows cast throughout the crowded yard of carved marbles by the rising full three-quarter moon, he could see no trace of the gambler, but he knew he had to be close.

  For a little while, Davin just stood safe within the shadow of a statue of a centuries-dead warrior king, watching to see when Rajon was going to return. Once he was finally satisfied that Rajon wasn’t coming back, he was about to make his move, to go talk to Veronn, when he felt the cold, stinging sheen of sharp steel graze along the inside of his neck.

  “I thought I sensed a nightingale,” Rajon said quietly behind him, keeping his sword-hand steady. “Move. Over to the bench.”

  “You wouldn’t dare kill me,” Davin insisted.

  “No,” Rajon said, as his free hand subtly lifted Davin’s sharp knife from within the folds of his inner breast pocket. “But I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to do anything foolish.” Davin heard his knife go whickering off into the grass behind him, well beyond his reach until dawn’s first light.

  As quickly the sword had come to rest against his throat, the blade was withdrawn and placed point-first in the small of Davin’s back. Left with no option, Davin headed over to the bench, with Rajon poking him with the sharpened sword-tip whenever he walked too slowly for his liking. Veronn, seeing the two gentlemen coming up, stood up himself with an amused look on his face.

  “I was hoping to make your acquaintance,” Veronn said with gentility. “You played brilliantly.” He extended his hand to Davin for a shake of gentleman’s friendship, but Davin refused.

  “Sorry to be rude,” Davin said, “but I’m here on other business, and being the pig on the spit makes me irritable.” Behind him, the point of the sword ceased its threatening pressure on his spine, and Davin heard Rajon snick the weapon back into its cane sheath.

  “Remember that you’re here because I’m allowing you to be here,” Rajon said to Davin, as he circled around to the boy’s left side, keeping a careful eye on his hands. “You obviously have something to say, as killing me wasn’t paramount on your mind.”

  Turning slowly, Davin looked up at Rajon, right in the eyes. “I have a business proposition for you.”

  “Oh, really,” the vulture laughed, a deep, ironic laugh. “Go on.”

  Davin swallowed nervously. “You and I, tonight. We play a round of Thrush with a fair dealer with five hundred chips each. If I win, you give me one thousand nobles.”

  Rajon chuckled. “But I already have a protégé. A number of them, in fact. You forfeited that opportunity with your outburst in the Fates, Davin. In my line of work, there are very few second chances.”

  “I don’t want to be your protégé,” Davin said, bullying through, hoping Rajon would accept his gamble. “If you win, you keep your nobles, and I become your silent manservant for the rest of my life.”

  Veronn gasped. “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s an interesting offer,” Rajon said, smoothing his beard with his fingertips as he pondered the opportunity. “But before I agree, you’re going to have to tell me one thing — why.”

  “I don’t — ”

  “Before I agree to anything,” Rajon stated forcefully, “you’re going to tell me everything. Why you would risk arrest to play in a gentleman’s tournament? Why would you choose the Fat
es, where I am renowned as a player of skill, when there are a half-dozen other clubs within a few block’s walk? I won’t even begin to consider your challenge until I know the reason why you need a nobleman’s fortune in the first place.”

  “He’s turning eighteen day after tomorrow,” Veronn offered, as if trying to puzzle out Davin’s mystery for himself.

  “That’s true,” Davin said, trying not to let his emotions get the best of him. Everything depended on him keeping his composure, and his temper. “In two days I turn eighteen and will be freed from the contract I signed with Florin’s. At the same time, the opportunity to purchase my father’s family name expires, and the Fates had the only purse large enough to purchase my future. I’m ready to do anything to claim that title, even if it means beating you to get it.”

  “So, how long did it take you to save the five nobles? Or did you steal it?”

  “I earned it fair and square at Florin’s,” Davin stated righteously. “Stealing a few coppers from a street-lift is one thing, but taking a machinist’s savings is wrong. I’m not that kind of man.”

  “So,” Rajon said, after taking a few seconds to think. “Even if you had won the noble prize tonight — which would have taken care of you comfortably for the rest of your life — you would have turned it all in for a title, and assumedly, an inheritance?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I know from my own experience, as the man publically vilified for your father’s death, that your father was a desperate, penniless man when he died. Vincent zan DeLorenzo, the sole heir to your grandfather, Mercuri zan DeLorenzo, sadly gambled away the entire family fortune through the course of his all too-short life.”

  Veronn gasped at the revelation. “He’s the grandson of the famous inventor?”

  “He’s the one and the same,” Rajon answered. “I’m right that you know about all this? That you know about your grandfather, and who he was?”

  “I do,” Veronn interrupted. “Mercuri was one of the men responsible for the creation of the ether-tube technologies. The Empire’s Brass Renaissance lies largely as his legacy.”

  “You read a lot, don’t you,” Davin asked him.

  “Less than I’d like,” he replied with a cheeky smirk.

  “But there has to be something for you to gain,” Rajon said to Davin. “There has to be something at risk, to give up a working-man’s fortune for a worthless title to an estate worth less than the clothes on your back.”

  “The title means a lot to me,” Davin said, “and especially the legitimacy of my place in Mercuri’s family line.” Davin knew he had to be careful now, to lay just enough of a hook in front of Rajon to gain his assistance, without putting himself in a position where he would become trapped within the Vulture’s scheming.

  “But you suspect there is an inheritance,” Rajon postulated, drawing him on. “An inheritance big enough that it warrants the expenditure of a thousand nobles?”

  “Yes, I do believe there is,” Davin confessed, hoping that the gambler would take the hook. “When I checked with the Hall of Records a few weeks ago to check my lineage certificate, to see if there was any inheritance, the records-keeper confirmed everything that you already know. That my father died penniless. That Vincent had gambled away the estate and all of my grandfather’s holdings throughout the last years of his life. That after my grandfather’s wife died in childbirth giving birth to a stillborn second child, Vincent was left as Mercuri’s sole heir.”

  “Did you ever meet him before he died?” Veronn asked, a little breathlessly. “The man was a genius.”

  “No, sadly,” Davin replied. “He died before I was born. I would have liked to.”

  “Now, go on,” Rajon said, seeming a little more relaxed now, maybe too relaxed for Davin’s liking, like a cat about to pounce the mouse. “What about this plan of yours?”

  Davin swallowed up his courage. It was all or nothing now, on a single turn of the cards. “While my father died penniless, there is a handwritten notation at the bottom of the record that his last personal effects were placed in care of Saints Abbey. From when I was a boy, during the few times that he visited me and my…” Davin faltered, trying to keep the tears from his eyes. “When he visited me my mother and I, Vincent always had a secret vest-pocket filled with old folded parchment notes that he would take out and show me from time to time. They were blueprints and diagrams showing the inner workings of some kind of marvelous machine. He eventually wanted to win enough money to buy back Mercuri’s holdings, open his own factory, and create his own legacy of wonders for the Empire.”

  Rajon stood silently for a moment, pondering the young man’s words. “You think those blueprints still remain within his personal effects?” Rajon asked. “That’s where you think your fortune lies?”

  “Yes,” Davin answered honestly. “And redemption, too, for me, and for my family. Vincent wasn’t an evil man. But he could have been better, and stronger, I’m sure of it.”

  “But why are you talking to me?” Rajon asked through a toothy smile. “After all, I’m the one that drove your father to suicide and a pauper’s grave.”

  Davin gave him a wary look and it took all his will not just to turn and walk away. He had to hook Rajon with a single, flattering lie, to keep the game going. “I initially played at the Fates because of you, because of your stature and station amongst the nobility. I figured if I could beat you at the final table, it would earn me enough reputation with your enemies to earn additional funding or investment in a factory.”

  “Brilliant thinking,” Rajon praised, obviously not buying a word of the flattery. “And then?” he asked, trying to draw the real answer out of the lad. “After I would have destroyed your fledgling influence for interfering with my business, then what was your plan?”

  Davin crumbled, left with nothing but the stark truth. “All right.” He took in a deep breath, trying to get a grip on his words, so they wouldn’t all tumble out at once. “After I lost to Veronn this morning, when I returned home, I learned that my mother had been murdered, strangled in broad daylight by an unknown assassin.” Veronn made a startled, gasping sound.

  “Oh, dear,” Rajon said, strangely startled at the news. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Did you know her?” Davin said, puzzled at his reaction.

  “Just by acquaintance,” Rajon said, regaining his composure.

  “Somebody also tried to kill me as well,” Davin continued, earning another gasp of shock from Veronn. “I paid a friend of mine to sit in my seat at Florin’s today, to cover for me while I was playing at the Fates. Somebody went out of their way to kill him as well, thinking that he was me.”

  “You suspect that these murders all are a result of your visit to the Hall of Records?” Rajon asked, the timber of his voice tinged with a touch of righteous anger.

  “I do,” Davin said. “I suspect that because I tried to investigate my past, to see what I’m entitled to, someone figured out what I was up to and has gone to great lengths to stop me. In two days, when I turn eighteen, my legitimate claim as a bastard to my family title becomes invalid and my father’s last personal effects will either be destroyed or sold off in a secret auction, depending on the whim of the Abbey.”

  “Well,” Rajon said, “this is indeed interesting.” He stepped away from Davin, thinking furiously about the ramifications of the news.

  “I’m so sorry about your mother,” Veronn said, standing up from the bench. “And your friend. I lost my mother at a young age, and if it wasn’t for Rajon, I would have ended up in the streets.”

  Davin nodded. “What relation are you to Rajon?”

  “I won her in a game of Thrush,” Rajon said, even as he continued to stare off into the marbles, pondering his actions.

  Davin blinked. “Her?”

  Veronn smiled, then untied her tail, letting a curtain of curly brown hair fall around her face. “Convincing, isn’t it?”

  Davin swallowed, feeling suddenly uneasy,
as if he had lost any semblance of stable footing. “Quite. You realize that the Fates is a gentleman’s club?”

  “The deception makes it even all the more delicious,” Rajon said. “But we can talk about that later. Davin, meet Verona. Verona, Davin.”

  Verona curtsied, something that Davin had never seen anyone do in gentleman’s clothes. “It’s fun to play a role. But boy clothes make me itch, and I’ll be glad to get out of this set.”

  “So, we’re playing for my future, then?” Davin said, pulling his eyes off the girl, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  “No.” Rajon said. “We’re not.”

  Davin sighed, crestfallen. “But I’m offering a lifetime of service —”

  “Which is of little use to me,” Rajon said. “But your background does interest me, and your plan to regain your title is a sound one. And I have something else to add to your pot of knowledge, for whatever it soothes you.”

  “Which is?” Davin asked.

  “I was part of the drunken mob that found your father’s body the night that he died. Afterwards, I paid for the Church burial he wanted. I have to admit, out of selfish interest, I initially made a claim to Father Guiseppe for your father’s personal effects, some to pawn off, and some to keep as trinkets of the famed inventor’s family line. But Father Guiseppe refused me, saying that a man’s final possessions were sacred property, and that he would not allow such a ‘vulture’ as myself to purchase the last dregs of Mercuri’s estate for pennies.”

  “That was you?” Davin said. “You paid for his plot at the Abbey?”

  “A gambler has to have some small amount of respect for a fallen foe,” Rajon said. “While I was only one of a small number of gamblers who earned a year’s keep off of your father, I would like to think Vincent would have done the same for me, if he found me dead and penniless in a lowbrow crib.”

  “So, you knew about the blueprints?” Davin asked.