Wild Card

by Lisa Shearin

  “How can I be of assistance, Lady Kaharit?” I asked in Goblin.

  “I speak the common kingdom language, Mistress Benares.”

  Of course, she did. I felt embarrassed and mildly stupid.

  “Though your effort is much appreciated,” she added.

  “Good.” I leaned against my desk since Ocnus had broken my chair. “Because my vocabulary is limited.” At least my polite vocabulary was. If you needed to do any quality swearing, Goblin was the way to go. I could cuss a blue streak.

  “I need your help retrieving a piece of jewelry that has been taken from me. A ring belonging to my grandmother.”

  Lady Kaharit was direct and to the point. Good.

  “Do you have any idea who may have taken it?” I asked.

  Her expression hardened. “I know precisely who stole it. The same individual who has stolen all of my finer pieces. My husband.”

  And the awkwardness just kept coming.

  “Uh, I don't handle domestic disputes, Lady Kaharit.”

  “That is all well and good, as I do not require assistance handling my domestic situation. I will be resolving that issue myself. Very soon.”

  It sounded like she had a permanent solution in mind. Goblins were nice enough people, but if they married and got on each other’s bad sides. . . well, divorce was rare, but death—suspicious and otherwise—was all too common. Black was a good color for goblins. She was already beautiful, so I had no doubt that Lady Kaharit would make a stunning widow.

  “My husband has a gambling problem,” she continued. “When we were first married, I thought it more of a harmless dalliance. I recently discovered that jewelry which I brought with me when I married had been altered. The gems have been removed and replaced with counterfeits.”

  I gave a silent whistle. Oh yeah, this guy was about to be pushing up daisies.

  Her dark eyes glittered. “Two nights ago, he stole my grandmother’s ring.”

  Cancel the daisies. His Lordship would be bog-beetle food in the Daith Swamp before the week was out.

  “The ring has more sentimental than monetary value. The stone is not of the highest quality, which tells me that my husband has become increasingly desperate in funding his addiction. A fact proven by the unsavory individuals who have been seen near our home. I believe my husband has gotten in over his head.” She paused. “There have been threats.”

  “Against you?”

  Her eyes flicked over to the elderly man, one who was obviously fond of and close to his mistress. “And my servants.”

  That crossed all of my lines. You didn’t threaten old people or children, and you sure as hell better not hurt them.

  “Sir, don’t take this the wrong way,” I began as diplomatically as I could. “I’m sure you’re capable with that blade you’re carrying.” Or at least you were forty years ago, I left unsaid. “But I’ve seen the handiwork of the local debt collectors. Honor’s not a concept they’re familiar with—and dirty’s the only way they know how to fight.”

  That last part also applied to me, but when most of the opponents I encountered were taller and bigger than I was, I tossed any notion of fair play right out the nearest window. Strike first, strike hard, and make it count. If I’d done it the way I’d been taught, they wouldn’t be getting back up. And I didn’t know if what I had was called honor, but it pissed me off when innocent people were threatened. More than once it had me sticking my nose or fists into other people’s business, but some things I simply refused to tolerate.

  “Do you have any children?” I asked Lady Kaharit.

  “Fortunately, no. Sethis and I have been married only a year and a half.”

  The name didn’t ring a bell. “Sethis Kaharit isn’t a name I’ve heard. Maybe he—”

  “Kaharit is my family name. I was afraid you’d refuse to see me if I gave you my married name.” Her dark eyes went flat and hard. “And after the thefts, it is the name I will be using from now on. My husband is Sethis Mortsani.”

  I briefly considered going for a second hit on the brandy.

  “That name I’ve heard.”

  The goblin gave me a small, apologetic smile. “I thought you might have. The marriage was arranged when we were children, the dowry was accepted. . .”

  Meaning she’d been bought and paid for. Sheesh. Made me glad I wasn’t a blue blood. He had the name and rank; she had the money. Well, at least she used to have the money.

  The goblin lady drew herself up proudly. “I sense your hesitation. I will understand if my husband’s reputation makes you reconsider.”

  It wasn’t his reputation as much as the ickyness factor. Okay, maybe it was at least half due to his reputation.

  Sethis Mortsani was a nachtmagus. Anyone who worked with dead people made the skin of most living people crawl. Undertakers worked with dead people, but their intent wasn’t to bring them back to life, or undeadness, or whatever the end result qualified as.

  Many who called themselves nachtmagi limited their work to communicating with the dead. Other nachtmagi assisted the dying to the other side, to prevent their souls from getting lost and being trapped here or somewhere in between.

  Sethis Mortsani wasn’t either kind of nachtmagus.

  A cottage industry had sprung up around the contesting of wills. If you were an heir who’d been written out of one, the death of the will’s signer didn’t mean the end of your chances to cash in. Rather than simply contest the existing will, it helped your case if you could produce one written and signed at a later date. When it came to wills, all the power was in the signature. Literally.

  All wills were written on specially bespelled parchment. If someone other than the legal owner of the will tried to sign the document, the parchment would reject the ink. Getting your hands on bespelled parchment had gotten to be easy. Forging a signature on it was impossible.

  That was where unscrupulous nachtmagi like Sethis Mortsani came in. Their job was to resurrect the dearly departed and get that signature. Spirits that got pulled back into their bodies were confused and easily manipulated by a talented nachtmagus. All the body physically needed was enough muscle left on the bone to hold a pen and sign their name. Apparently the parchment didn’t care if the signer was alive or dead. I didn’t even begin to understand how that worked. In return for their services, the nachtmagus was offered a cut of the inheritance.

  Lord Mortsani’s wife was a brave woman. Even if she succeeded in putting a permanent stop to his pilfering—and his life—well, I’d heard of nachtmagi coming back more than once from the great beyond.

  Lady Kaharit took a leather pouch from beneath her cloak and dropped it on the desk between us. It landed with a thud—an impressive thud.

  A hundred half kugarats. Goblin imperial gold.

  Yeah, I knew exactly how much was in that bag. My regular fee, times ten. It was a family talent. Certain traits had bred into the Benares line. Knowing what and how much was in a purse when it was handed over was one of those traits. When you were a thief, pirate, highwayman, or any criminal variation thereof, you rarely had time to stand around and count your ill-gotten booty.

  “That’s way more than my usual fee,” I told her. “I can’t take any more of your money that what I’m due for—”

  The goblin smiled fully. “He stole my jewels; I stole his winnings.”

  I returned her smile and reached out and took the purse. With Sethis Mortsani as my target, I’d be earning every bit of it. Heck, this might even cover my hazard pay.

  I tossed the purse in my hand. “So, where does His Lordship like to gamble?”

  *

  When mages retired, regardless of their age, they wanted to enjoy themselves. As a result, Mermeia had evolved over the past couple hundred years from a handful of soggy islands on the edge of a swamp to the gambling and entertainment capital of the seven kingdoms.

  When you’ve faced down one demon too many and felt Lady Luck was about to give you the ultimate cold shoulder, plent
y of mages figured it was time to stop gambling with their lives and pick up a pair of dice. Risk was an addiction they didn’t want to kick, and now that their lives weren’t on the line, their money was.

  More than one mage had made a tidy fortune at the gaming tables. Yes, the casinos employed mages of their own to detect patrons using magic to favor their wagers. Mages survived out in the world by being smarter and more resourceful than who or whatever they were being paid to go up against. For men and women like these, coming up with new ways to cheat the system was so easy even an apprentice could do it.

  Seeing that part of my job was finding stolen goods, the city’s pawnshops and casinos were the first places I looked. Yes, seeking involved magic, but a lot of the time, it was talking to people and legwork that got the job done and the property returned.

  After my meeting with Lady Kaharit, I started with the pawnshops that dealt in high-end jewelry. The ones that bought and sold stones like those Lord Sethis Mortsani had stolen from his wife didn’t have storefronts. Being a Benares helped me know where to look, but earning the trust of the proprietors got me the truth—or at least their version of it. Over the years, I’d become adept at reading between the lines. Most fences wouldn’t touch blazing-hot goods. They didn’t want trouble; they just wanted to make a living, albeit a mostly dishonest one. They trusted me not to rat them out to the city watch; I trusted them to be upfront with me. Most of my clients could afford to pay to have their goods returned, and the majority of the time, the reward they offered was more than the fence had paid the thief. My clients got their valuables back, and the fence made some money. Everybody was happy.

  That being said, occasionally I had a difficult time persuading my contacts to be forthcoming with information. When the thief in question was a disreputable nachtmagi, talking too much went way the hell beyond risky. I could understand their reluctance, since a nachtmagus could kill you, bring you back, kill you again, and keep right on going in that happy little cycle of life and death until they got bored and let you die for good.

  A man known for resurrecting dead people and swindling them didn’t have many, if any, moral lines he wouldn’t cross to begin with. I imagine that anyone who made the poor choice of pissing him off was in for a whole new level of vengeance.

  Lucky for me, no one was reluctant to talk. Though that probably had everything to do with none of my contacts having either the ring or the big jewels Mortsani had stolen.

  Lady Kaharit had brought a small bracelet with her to my office that had also belonged to her grandmother. The stones were tiny and the gold was not the highest quality, so her husband hadn’t taken it. The nuts and bolts of seeking worked the same regardless of whether I was looking for a person or an object. If I was looking for a missing person, I needed one of their valued possessions or a favorite article of clothing. The closer the person was to that possession, the better. If someone had been kidnapped and a scrap of cloth from their clothing had been found at the scene, I could use that to see exactly what had happened to them, very often experiencing the crime through their eyes. Not fun by any stretch of the imagination, but then it hadn’t been me that’d been snatched off the street, or from wherever the victim had been taken. And if they had been injured, blood was the best linking medium there was for a seeker. Again, bad for the victim, great for me. Not only could I become an eyewitness to the crime, I could use that blood like a two-legged, psychic bloodhound to track where they’d been taken.

  To find a missing object, I needed another object that had been kept in close proximity to or worn by the same person. Not only had the bracelet been owned and worn by Lady Kaharit’s grandmother, it had been kept in the same box as the ring and the stolen jewelry. It was all about imprinting. Objects that had spent time in contact with one another came to have the same psychic imprint. Basically, like called to like. Having one object, more often than not, meant I could find the other.

  After Lady Kaharit and her retainer had left my office, I’d spent the rest of the day checking in with every pawn shop owner and fence who might have received a visit from Sethis Mortsani, or whoever he had moving the stones for him. On my third stop, I’d found where the smaller stones had ended up. Mortsani had had one of his servants bring them in and sell them. Not surprisingly, those stones were long gone. No one had seen the ring, and surprisingly, no one had bought, been offered, or even seen the larger jewels. And what I sensed matched what I was being told. The big jewels hadn’t been anywhere I’d been today. Either Lord Mortsani had sold the stones to a buyer who wasn’t local, or the goblin nachtmagus still had the jewels. I wasn’t going to hold my breath on the latter, but it’d sure be nice to recover what remained of Lady Kaharit’s property.

  Now that it was well into the evening, I was gearing up for the main event.

  Find Sethis Mortsani himself—and if Lady Luck was in a generous mood tonight, fleece the bastard.

  Lady Kaharit had told me her husband gambled at Sirens.

  I wasn’t surprised.

  When it came to finding missing valuables, more often than not, they ended up on the bad side of a bet. As a result, more than once I’d ended up at Sirens.

  Sirens was a high-class establishment. Unless you had a small fortune to risk on any given night, you took your gambling urges elsewhere. I didn’t have that kind of money; if I did, I sure wouldn’t be gambling it away. However, for my cousin Phaelan, gambling was his second favorite pastime. His primary entertainment when in any port involved ladies of the evening variety. And as a successful pirate—excuse me, seafaring businessman—he had plenty of gold to spend on games and girls.

  Phaelan would be going with me this evening. Not because I had a problem going anywhere in Mermeia by myself. I knew my way around a pair of dice, but cards—especially the high-stakes kind—wasn’t my thing. Phaelan not only loved playing cards, he was one of the best I’d ever seen, even when he wasn’t cheating. Lady Kaharit said her husband’s greatest weakness was cards. The higher the stakes, the better. To get my hands on that ring, I needed someone at the table I could trust to run up the pot and ensure His Lordship had to dip into his stash of ill-gotten jewelry to stay in the game.

  You might think that women didn’t go to Mermeia’s gambling houses by themselves. Up to a point, you’d be right. As has always been the case, a woman out at night by herself tended to attract the kind of man who thought that a woman on her own simply hadn’t met him yet.

  I’d taken a page from my Uncle Ryn’s book and provided a few well-publicized examples. He’d told me that there was always a suicidal dumbass in every pirate crew—at least one man who felt the need to push his luck when it came to getting along with his fellow crewmen. When that happened, Uncle Ryn usually let the men work things out on their own. Occasionally that involved chucking the offending brother buccaneer over the side of the ship into less-than-friendly waters—be they infested with the ships of a competitor or one really large, hungry shark.

  But generally they only needed to make one example per voyage. Any other new crewman who was starting to get on his shipmates’ collective nerves suddenly experienced a behavioral epiphany.

  As a result of making some examples of my own, I now had a reputation for not taking any crap and dealing swiftly and creatively with any offenders. However, I remained perpetually alert for the inevitable future suicidal dumbass.

  Sirens was a favorite casino with Mermeia’s wealthy women for a similar reason. While there were still men who considered any woman there alone to be longing for their companionship, if the “gentleman” in question had a problem understanding a lady’s refusal, Sirens’ staff was always close by to quickly step in and resolve the situation—to the lady’s satisfaction. Most men wisely backed off at the first warning; a few were obnoxiously persistent—or ignorant of Sirens’ policy of tossing the offender into the canal behind the casino for a midnight swim. Any subsequent incidents resulted in the man being banned. Word got around that chivalry was ali
ve and well at Sirens, and as a result, it was a big hit with women of means.

  The fact that the goblin owner, Tamnais Nathrach, was the embodiment of sin itself didn’t hurt. How much those women enjoyed gambling probably paled in comparison to how badly they wanted to “play a couple of hands” with Sirens’ proprietor.

  There was a knock at my door.

  I looked out through the peephole. Surprisingly, Phaelan was right on time. His punctuality probably had everything to do with what I’d told him was on the schedule for tonight—fleecing a thieving husband at one of Sirens’ high-stakes card tables. That’d be my cousin’s idea of a fun night out. Heck, Phaelan had probably been here early and had been pacing in the street, killing what time was left until he was supposed to pick me up.

  I opened the door to a vision in emerald. My cousin liked to be noticed.

  “Ready for some fun and games?” he asked with a rakish grin.

  Phaelan’s doublet and matching breeches were emerald buckskin, with the sleeves slashed to reveal an ivory linen shirt—all of the above a perfect complement to his dark hair and eyes. His high boots were tooled black leather, and at his side was his favorite rapier.

  I nodded toward it. “You know you’re going to have to give that up once we get to Sirens.”

  “I know.” Phaelan said it, but he clearly didn’t like it.

  For obvious reasons, Nathrach didn’t permit weapons in his casino. High-stakes gambling meant flaring tempers. He had a fortune in carpets on the floors, and blood was a bitch to clean.

  The instant he saw what I was wearing, Phaelan’s grin was gone. “Nice dress.”

  “Nice try.” I turned to get my cloak from a nearby chair. “I don’t want to be noticed or annoyed by anyone. Tonight I’m a highly observant wallflower.”

  While my cousin liked to be noticed, my goal tonight was to blend in. I could hardly wear my usual leathers—doublet, breeches, and boots—in a fancy casino like Sirens; but unlike many of the women at its gaming tables, I had no desire to compete with a tropical bird.