by Neil McGarry
“Best not.”
“I figured you’d say that.” She couldn’t help wondering where the boy had been that morning, and where he might be tomorrow, and she couldn’t stop thinking of herself as a child, dropped off at Noam’s door like a package. Was she Nurse Gelda, disposing of a duty in the form of a child, all for a brass coin marked with a P? And now we’re quits.
“What if you left him here?” she said suddenly, unable to believe what she was saying. She had a scholar to meet and rumors to stop—the last thing she needed was a child to take care of.
Castor watched her for a long moment. “Why would you do this?” he asked at last.
A good question. “Whoever you’re hiding him from isn’t in the lower city or else you’d never have come to me, right?” He nodded reluctantly. “Then where better to hide Far? There are thousands of boys his age in the Shallows.” She wondered if the owner of Gelda’s coin had thought the same thing about a little girl, so long ago. “He’d be lost in the crowd.”
Castor held her gaze. “And people wouldn’t talk about the new boy living with Duchess?”
“Of course they’ll talk; they talked about you too, once. It’s not that Shallows folk talk but who they talk to. They don’t talk to outsiders who ask nosy questions, and I’ll likely hear about anyone poking around after Far long before there’s any danger.” She could count on the Grey for that much, she hoped. “Hiding Far in plain sight sounds like a better plan than dragging him from place to place, always looking over your shoulder. Leave him here until you know where you’re going.”
Castor stared silently at the floor for a long moment. Then he looked up. “And me?”
She shrugged and tried on a smile. “I’m sure we could find something for you to do while you sort out your situation. My knifeplay’s gotten rusty since you’ve gone.” She’d missed him since the Fall, but she wouldn’t embarrass either of them by saying so. “Just so you don’t feel useless.”
Castor was silent, and she held her breath. Then he nodded. “All right,” he said, sounding more tired than she’d ever heard him. “We’ll hide Far in plain sight, as you say.”
“Good,” she said, turning towards the stair. “You two can share the third floor—”
“No,” he said, and she turned towards him in surprise. “I’m a danger if I remain, both to Far and to you.” He paused. “But I’ll be able to visit.”
He said the last with no change in tone, but she could sense the pain behind it. Castor had risked everything to stay with Far. She nodded. “Let’s go up and see your boy.”
They were halfway up the stairs to the third story when they heard the voices. Castor placed a hand on her shoulder and a finger to his lips and they stopped, listening.
“Is she really a duchess?” the boy was saying.
“No,” Lysander replied. “That’s just her name.”
“It’s a strange name.”
“So is Far. Hells, so is Lysander.”
A pause. “Is Duchess your wife?”
Lysander laughed long and loud, but without mockery. “Oh gods no. Duchess is not my wife.” She frowned, wondering what that meant.
“Is she your sister?”
“Not exactly, no.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “But that’s closer.”
“Do you live with her?”
“No.”
“But you were at her house today.”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Why were you there?” Duchess shook her head. Lysander had not only weathered the barrage of questions but had turned it neatly back on the boy.
“Because my—” She sensed Far biting his lip. “Because I was brought.”
“Brought from where?”
There was a long pause and when Far replied, his voice was quiet. “I’m not supposed to talk about that.” She could just imagine his face closing up, like his father’s.
“Why not?”
“I—I’m just not.”
There was another pause. “There are a lot of things you’re not to speak of, aren’t there?” Far didn’t reply. “No, it’s fine. I understand.” His sigh echoed down the stairwell. “Lots of people have secrets,” he said, without reproach, “but if you go around asking after theirs, you’ll find them asking after yours.” He chuckled. “It’s fine to have secrets, just be careful with them.”
“I hate being careful,” was Far’s reply, so low as to be barely audible.
Duchess glanced over at Castor, but his eyes were far away.
“Sounds like you have to be,” Lysander replied gently. There was another pause. “Don’t blame him. He means well.”
“I hate this city and I hate being careful and I hate hi—” Far broke off. “I hate everything, I mean.”
She glanced at Castor. He was as impassive as ever, but he looked sick around the eyes. He turned and went back down the stairs, and she followed, groping for words.
“Children say things—” she managed, but he held up a hand to stop her. He moved to the door, opened it and peered around carefully before stepping outside.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, and vanished into the dark.
She sat up long after he had gone, sitting next to the oil lamp and waiting for Lysander to come back down. She thought about her youth and her own nights of anger, lying in a bed in the attic over Noam’s bakery. She knew too well what it meant to hate everything.
Chapter Three: Hat in hand
“You’re going to just ask Minette?” Lysander muttered, incredulous, as they made their way along Dock Street.
She sighed. “You don’t just ask Minette anything. She’ll tell me what she wants to tell me, but what choice do I have? At this point I’m sure she knows more than either of us.” Minette, though she’d never say it aloud, was as Grey as anyone Duchess had ever met, and highly-placed to boot. If there was anyone who knew what was going on, it would be Minette.
Duchess hoped she was right, for her position on the Grey was becoming more precarious by the day. The signs were everywhere. When she’d gone to Market Square to buy last night’s dinner, the wineseller’s wife had given her a dark look, the butcher had done his best to avoid meeting her gaze, and the boy who ran deliveries for the cobbler had skittered away from her as if she were on fire. Worse, the normal flood of requests for favors had dried up like a creek in summer.
She could scarcely blame them, for dark rumors were fluttering around the Highway like bats in a closed room. In some tales, she’d slain a servant of the Atropi’s in revenge for some slight; in others, she’d murdered two blackarms for asking too many questions. The most outrageous was the tale of her stabbing a Ulari sailor and feeding his corpse to deathwatch beetles.
Lysander stepped aside for a fishwife heading down towards the harbor. “What have you managed to learn on your own?”
“Almost nothing, if I’m honest, although I don’t think Julius is to blame.” Julius had no love for her, not since she’d tricked out of him both Antony’s ring and the news that Preceptor Amabilis had helped send the Brutes after Jana’s looms. “He’s angry at me, sure, but he doesn’t have the status to cause this much trouble. Besides, if he were trashing my reputation he’d want me to know it.”
“How about that old thief, Tyford?”
She could scarcely forget about her mentor in all things larcenous, whom she’d blackmailed into signing over the building that now housed Jana’s shop. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Tyford’s not even—” she glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot “—of the color anymore.” She shook her head. “These tales seem to be coming from nowhere; everyone knows them, but no one knows who heard them first. That tells me someone with a lot of pull is behind this.”
They were just entering Bell Plaza, which was its usual mid-morning parade. Burrell stood guard at Beggar’s Gate, where the usual cluster of girls stood about waiting for hire by someone from the upper districts. Duchess herself had stood i
n that line not so long ago, on the day she’d stolen the strange dagger from Baron Eusbius. The beggars had already moved into Temple District, but folks of all kinds still bustled about: men with wheelbarrows and women with laundry baskets, sailors and laborers and craftsmen of all trades, busy with the start of another day.
As they reached the center of the Plaza, Lysander frowned. “If it’s as bad as you say, going to Minette just seems...unwise. Why would she speak to you at all?”
“What other choice do I have? The longer I wait, the worse things seem to get. I need some idea of where this started.” She took a deep breath and prepared to walk towards Minette’s abode: the Vermillion brothel.
Lysander placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “If you’re going to do this, do it the right way.” He gestured upwards as the bells pealed down from the palace dome. “Minette’s mood is hardly going to be improved by you showing up this early.”
She saw the wisdom in it. “I guess I’ll just wait here, then.”
He chuckled. “Oh yes, wearing a path in the cobbles in front of the Vermillion will do wonders for your nerves, I’m certain.” He gestured towards Beggar’s Gate. “Let’s take a walk up into Temple.”
She followed him without complaint, glad not to have to think of what lay before her—at least for a little while.
It was easy to fall into the rhythm of the early-morning Plaza. It seemed she’d spent half her life here, wheeling the bread cart towards Market to help Noam set up the stall, or towards the Wharves to sell the baker’s bread, tarts and muffins to anyone with the coin and the hunger. It had been a hard but simple life and right now it seemed like it had happened to someone else. When had she last seen Noam, or the girls that had been her sisters?
Following that old, familiar pace, she and Lysander slipped through the crowd at Beggar’s Gate. Burrell and his fellow blackarm were still busy picking out workers from the cluster of girls and they managed to avoid the man’s usual, awful jokes. Burrell’s jokes were not as bad as his temper, although he was not bad for one who wore a black arm band. The blackarms and their commanders, the sheriffs, policed the parts of the city that anyone of importance cared about, and they varied as much as their commanders. Temple District was overseen by Sheriff Takkis, a man of unimpeachable reputation, and his men, known as the Saints. The Wharves were the dominion of Sheriff Galeon, the only Ahé in the city to hold official rank, and his Wharf Rats. The Shallows were left to the tender mercies of Sheriff Ophion, who was well known to have an open hand for anyone willing to cross it with silver. Ophion’s men were sometimes known as the Brutes, although the appellation was usually reserved for Malleus and Kakios, the absolute worst of the low-district blackarms. Duchess had tangled with them when they tried to smash Jana’s looms, and once before on the night she had stolen into House Eusbius to steal the baron’s prized dagger. They’d come within an inch of torturing Lysander that evening, she recalled with a shudder, and she tried to banish the memory from her mind.
They moved through Temple District towards the Godswalk, with Lysander entertaining her with the gossip of his fellow ganymedes, the boys who sold the warmth of their bodies for a handful of sou, all without the protection of someone like Minette. She’d not gone drinking with ‘the girls’ in weeks, not since before the Fall of Ventaris, and she wondered that another part of her old life had seemingly fallen away.
They reached the Godswalk itself and as they stood at the edge of the great circle, she realized that something was very, very wrong. Lysander had been half-way through a particularly funny story about Deneys and Poor Gabe when he realized that she’d suddenly fallen silent. He leaned in close. “What is it?” he whispered.
At first glance, everything seemed the same. The temples of the three imperial cults—Anassa, Mayu and Ventaris—were the same, each with its own statue, standing on the outside of the path that encircled a wide, grassy lawn. The usual crowd of supplicants stood before the Sanctum of Wisdom, where no one but the facets were admitted, and there was a steady trickle of worshipers into the Halls of Dawn and the Gardens of Mayu, as she would expect. The path was full of merchants, scholars, acolytes and other passersby, and the lawn crowded with the priests of a hundred lesser gods, along with the beggars who had come all the way up from the Deeps to plead for their daily alms. The Old Mater was notable among them, with the most recent of her endless parade of children. None of them were of her body, but they attached themselves to her nonetheless, and every morning saw a new one at her side.
But Duchess had been on the Godswalk often enough to know that something had changed, for those who ambled along the Walk completely ignored even the most skilled and persuasive entreaties of those who stood alongside it. Where normally one might normally see a thousand small coins change hands, a thousand brief words of comfort, a thousand whispered thanks, there was was nothing. None of the passersby so much as twitched a hand towards their purses, nor took any notice of the beggars. It was as if those on the inside of the Walk had become invisible.
“A bad day for beggars,” she observed uneasily. She’d never seen anything like it. How long had this been going on?
“This is more than just a bad day,” Lysander muttered, his blue eyes troubled. “I think this is the first sign of the Evangelism.”
She blinked. “Gods. With no one faith in ascendance, no one knows whom to impress. And if there’s no one to impress...”
“...then why bother giving to the beggars at all?” Lysander shook his head. “Feeding the starving isn’t a good enough reason, it seems.” The more they watched, the more convinced she became that Lysander was right, for as long as they stood there not so much as a penny was tendered to a single beggar who lined the Godswalk.
Finally, Lysander turned back to her. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, his jaw tight. “The Vermillion will be open soon enough, and there’s no time to worry about the beggars’ woes. You’ve enough of your own.”
* * *
Instinctively, she entered the Vermillion by the back door. It was probably for the best.
Lorelei, lovely, buxom and blonde, seemed surprised at Duchess’ appearance, but her embrace was as warm and perfumed as always. With all that had happened in the last day or so, it was good to know what some things hadn’t changed. Duchess wanted to say so, but instead settled for hugging back, hard.
“She’s in the wine cellar,” Lorelei said when Duchess deigned to let her go. There was no need to explain who she was. “Which means she’ll be either sweeter or more sour than usual, depending on how far through the collection she’s managed to get.”
“Looks like I’m about to find out,” Duchess replied, hoping it was the former. “Pray for me.”
“Mind the steps!” Lorelei called after her.
She appreciated the warning. The cellar stairwell was narrow, and each step creaked painfully beneath her, as if it might finally give up and snap into kindling. The stairs held, thankfully, and she made her way into the cool dark. Around the corner, she made out the light of a lantern and the sound of a voice speaking softly.
A Domae boy stepped into view, a year or two older than she, tall and lanky, with delicate features and hair so black it was nearly blue. His eyes were dusky and deep and reminded her fleetingly of Jana’s. He held in long-fingered hands a bottle he was dusting on his rich purple tunic.
“We’re not alone,” he called around the corner behind him, his Rodaasi only slightly accented.
“Are we ever?” called Minette’s voice in response. “Well, don’t just stand there gaping, Mikkos. Show our guest in.”
Mikkos gestured with the bottle and Duchess slipped past him and around the corner to find Minette, seated at a small table with a slate in one hand and a glass in the other. She’d apparently coordinated her coloring with that of the boy; her dress shimmered in the lamplight like lavender water. There was a broad smile on her powdered face, and Duchess felt her chest loosen. More sweet than sour, it seemed.
&nb
sp; “You’re just in time.” Minette gestured to a second chair with the piece of chalk in her hand. “Sit. I could use an untutored tongue.”
Duchess blinked, unsure if that was a compliment, but took a seat all the same. Minette’s gloved hand skimmed over the writing on the slate, and without looking up she said, “Pass that to Duchess and fetch the next, please.”
Duchess accepted the bottle from Mikkos, thinking that he must be the Domae boy Lorelei had once mentioned, the one who was so good at tiles. It still seemed so strange to see a male employee of Minette’s, even though the wily madam kept a few boys on hand for gentlemen with more adventurous tastes. Duchess’ fingers brushed against his as she grasped the bottle and he smiled sweetly, almost seductively. She suddenly realized what the customers must see in him. His smile lit up his whole face, most particularly his dark eyes. She looked away, hoping Minette hadn’t noticed, as Mikkos moved off to the wine racks.
“Not your usual vintage, is he?” Minette remarked innocently. “I always thought you preferred blonds.”
Did she mean Lysander, or had she heard about her several encounters with young Dorian Eusbius? She made no reply—always a safe choice, with Minette—and instead examined the bottle Mikkos had handed her. “Let's see,” she said, tipping the bottle towards the light so she could read the label. "Fire wine from...Avarrum? I suppose that makes it foreign."
“A Ularan wine,” Minette replied, making a mark on the slate. In the dim light her powdered face was an even greater contrast to her dark eyes and hair. Duchess reflected that even while doing common chores Minette managed to seem elegant. She glanced again at the purple velvet of the woman’s gown, and couldn't imagine the full-figured mistress of the Vermillion in mere cotton, much less the leather and roughspun Duchess herself often sported. “And, yes, the last time I checked, Ulari were foreigners. That’s the sixth of six, then.” She raised one hand, gesturing imperiously and Mikkos appeared once more, replacing the bottle in Duchess’ hands with another.