The Fall of Ventaris

by Neil McGarry

  And so she told him. The night of the fire, and the hurried trip with Nurse Gelda to the Shallows and Noam’s bakery. The years of silence as she learned to be not Marina Kell but Duchess. The mysterious letter and the coin. The realization, spurred by Minette, that Marcus Kell had not been killed by the Deeps gangs he’d unleashed on the city but by his own hand. And, finally, about the whispers of the old Domae woman on the Godswalk of He Who Devours and that moment in the tunnels when she was certain He’d found her. By the time she was finished the candles had burned down to pools of wax, and the windows were pale with dawn.

  Lysander was silent through it all, drinking in every detail and not interrupting with questions. When she was done he sat quietly for a long time, looking into the empty hearth as though seeing her tale there, played out by mummers only he could see. Finally, he smiled. “We’ve stayed up all night before, but this is the first time I didn’t greet the morning by vomiting on my shoes.” Duchess giggled and threw her arms around him, and when he returned the embrace her laughter dissolved into tears.

  “In a way, I fell in love with you that day,” he said, against her hair. A tremor ran through his body. “With all of you. The part of you that left me on the stairs included.” He gently disengaged from her grasp. “And now I know Steel better, and Duchess too. And now Marina, I guess.” He smiled. “You have more names than Iris Davari, and that woman’s been married and widowed twice.” She giggled again, feeling as though a great weight had fallen away, and her heart sang. He did know her better, and if that meant understanding certain hard truths, so be it. They were not children any more, and she was not his keeper, nor was he hers.

  They sat in companionable silence for a long time, while dawn stole in through the dirty windows and the Shallows came to life outside. “Your father’s city house burned,” he said, out of nowhere, “but you said he had a country estate, right?”

  She nodded, uncertain where this question had come from. “We spent every summer there, regular as fog. It was called...the Freehold, I think.” How long had it been since she’d thought of that?

  “Well, what happened to the Freehold? That never burned, and if it’s still there, it should belong to you now.” He looked sheepish, evidently realizing what he had implied. “I mean, you never heard anything about your brother or sister claiming it...”

  She waved away the apology, considering. She hadn’t thought of her father’s wealth in a long time, much less considered the matter of inheritance. Truth be told, with two older siblings she’d never thought to inherit much. Even if Justin or Marguerite were still alive, she’d heard nothing about a long-lost Kell claiming the country estate. “I guess it would be mine. I wouldn’t even know how to begin asking about it.” But that wasn’t quite true, was it? The very night she’d stolen that dagger she had a dream about Ahmed. He had always looked faintly familiar, but only then did she recall he had been one of her father’s servants. Ahmed had not been there the night of the fire. He never accompanied the family into the city. He would either know what had happened to her father’s country house or could point her to someone who did.

  Lysander was watching her. “You’re thinking about something,” he accused.

  She laughed ruefully. “Guilty.” So strange. Only this morning she’d been so certain she’d left all of these memories behind when she had taken up the mantle of Duchess and the Grey. Yet not ten bells later the old ache was back, and with it musings of what might have been, and what might yet be. She shook her head. “But let’s talk about inheritances later...I’m starving.”

  His lips curved into a grin. “Well, you can start spending all that money by buying me some breakfast,” he told her. She smiled at his smile, feeling better than she had in weeks. “Assuming there’s anything clean to wear in all this.” After some searching, they found a shirt and pants that weren’t too badly stained, and then they were off to see what the market had to offer.

  The Shallows were busy under the gray dawn sky, and they had to wait while a crowd of beggars passed on their way to Bell Plaza. It was never wise to walk amongst a crowd of beggars, half of whom were expert pickpockets and the other half amateurs who were willing to try anyway.

  “Last night, at the Bier, we were talking about sellswords...” she ventured, eager to talk about anything other than House Kell.

  “Oh great gods...are you still on about that?” he laughed. “You’re looking for someone good with a blade who will have no qualms about working for a member of the Grey but one who also has a code of honor that will keep him from betraying you. That kind of man doesn’t just climb out of the harbor.”

  “Not out of the harbor, no,” she replied quietly.

  Lysander knew that tone, and he moved to block her way, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You’re not thinking...”

  “Thinking what?” Innocence never sat well on her face, but she thought she’d try it anyway.

  “All those questions about Pollux...” He shook his head. “You truly are mad. You realize that, right?”

  “But just think of it!” She said, leaping from innocence to excitement. “All the honor and fighting ability of a White, combined with the willingness to break the law when necessary...it’s perfect. You said yourself the court would like this problem to go away. In a way, I’d be doing the empress a favor.”

  “I doubt Violana would see it that way. Or the imperial headsman, for that matter.” He cocked an ear at the sky as if listening. “What’s that? Yes, I know. You’re absolutely right, no question.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listening to the gods. They’re telling me you’re crazy and that I should hide in the Deeps until you come to your senses.” He stared at her with mock severity until her giggles got to him and they both collapsed with laughter in the middle of the street drawing irritated looks from the usual morning parade of beggars, tradesmen, washerwomen and other Shallows folk who had to step around them. It seemed like years since they’d shared that kind of moment, and it was like gold.

  Lysander recovered first, wiping tears from his eyes. “You are completely mad, but that’s what I like about you.” He pulled her to her feet. “So what’s this plan of yours, Madam Lunatic? The blackarms aren’t just going to hand you the keys to Pollux’s cell. How are you going to break him out?”

  She grinned as they resumed their walk. “If the only way everyone will be satisfied is if he’s dead...well, I suppose I’ll have to kill him.”

  Chapter Three: At the end of her rope

  “Making friends as usual I see,” Tyford remarked as Duchess entered his “office.” She grimaced. Midwife Marna had helped her with the worst of the damage she’d received in the Deeps the previous day, but the bruises had nonetheless turned the most lovely shade of purple. “Funny how you’ve got that way with people.”

  “I must be picking up your charm,” she replied, her voice echoing throughout the vast warehouse where Tyford made his home. One of many low-district properties the old thief owned, if she’d fruned it true, although she doubted any cargo had been stored here in years. These days Tyford ran a different sort of business.

  “Glad to hear you’re picking up something.” He was short and bowlegged, with wispy gray hair and icy blue eyes. From the Nerrlands, she guessed upon first meeting him, a land far beyond the plains the Domae roamed, in an area most commonly referred to as the Southern Duchies. She’d remembered once asking her father if Rodaasi and Nerrish looked so much alike, what was the difference? “Eight hundred years of history,” he’d replied. “The Nerrish are clannish, not given to living in large groups...much like Rodaasi before we came to the great hill.”

  “Oh, I’ve learned plenty from you, my dear Tyford,” she replied smartly, removing her cloak, folding it and placing it on a nearby table. “Most particularly, I’ve learned how much of my silver can vanish while you drink bad wine and make worse jokes.” Sniping aside, Duchess knew she had been lucky to retain the services of the crotche
ty old thief. By all accounts, Tyford had once been a highly ranked member of the Grey, but that had been years and years ago, before he’d scored a major coup by stealing a wagon full of newly minted florin right from under the noses of the Whites. After that he’d settled into a life of quiet retirement, investing in rental properties and selling the benefit of his experience to those with the silver to buy it. He hadn’t had a student in years, she knew. What she didn’t know was why he’d agreed to take her on.

  “That so?” He led her into the warehouse proper, where their lessons were held. The place was laid out like a classroom for thieves. One wall was outfitted with ledges, loops and other handholds, and along another was a series of wooden cabinets, each with its own lock. There were forms like one might find in a tailor’s shop, dressed in cloaks and tunics and other apparel and hung with small metal bells. Ropes hung in a line from the rafters, five to ten feet between each, some knotted along their length, others hanging smoothly. He gestured to one. “Well, here’s a joke for you. Try getting up one of those in less time than it takes me to finish a cup of my bad wine and maybe I won’t make you climb them all.”

  Unlikely, she thought, as she rubbed her hands together and began to climb. Tyford was as merciful as he was kindly, so she suspected that no matter how quickly she climbed, this rope would not be her last. She’d always considered herself fairly healthy — tough and light and quick on her feet — but these lessons had convinced her she was a pathetic weakling, a notion Tyford was always ready to reinforce. “You’ll spend a good deal of time on those ropes,” Tyford had assured her at their first meeting. “Or, more likely, falling from them, unless those chicken arms are stronger than they look.” He plucked disdainfully at her sleeve. “But it’s your silver.” It was, and she kept handing it over in return for their nighttime lessons.

  “Up, up,” Tyford chided from below. “If you were climbing a wall in Garden you’d have already been caught by the Whites.” Duchess gritted her teeth and pulled herself up as quickly as she could.

  It’s not like the man hadn’t warned her when they’d started.

  “Don’t make any mistake about what we’re doing here, girlie,” he’d told her over a cup of wine. He’d poured none for her. “I’m not tutoring you in the harp or the bells. I’m teaching you how to fucking steal, and the blackarms take that kind of thing very seriously. Most thieves get caught, and when it happens to you, you don’t know me. You don’t know my name, or where I live, or why they’re asking about me.” His eyes narrowed. “The whole Highway knows you’ve been asking after me, just like they’ll know if you give me up to the ‘arms. The day that happens you lose your reputation and your cloak, and shortly after, your life. Get it?”

  “Yes, yes,” Duchess had said impatiently. “I’m not new at this, you know.” At the time she’d worn the cloak for only a few weeks, but she disliked being threatened by this annoying man. “Do you want a mark?”

  Tyford had snorted. “What part of retired from the Grey don’t you get, girl?” He laughed. “Your mark is probably worth shit to the Highway, and even less to me. Your coin’ll do. Now let’s get started before I change my mind.”

  The long rope was made fast to a ceiling beam, and with a scream of muscles she pulled herself to the top. She swore that beam got farther from the warehouse floor every time she climbed to it. She’d barely had a chance to rest when Tyford called up from below, “Before you get too comfortable, Contessa, or whatever you call yourself, get back on that rope and swing over to the next.”

  Not exactly a new exercise, but she’d only done it once or twice. It was also a nervous business, swinging around twenty-five feet from the floor, and Tyford didn’t put down straw to break a fall either. “You think the blackarms are going to spread out some nice silk pillows below that window you’re trying to climb to?” he’d asked when she suggested it. “You fall here and you just break something. Fall out there and you break something and wind up in jail.” All of Tyford’s warnings ended that way. “Then you fall and wind up in jail” or “Then you get backstabbed and wind up in jail” or “Then you trip over those pails you call feet and wind up in jail.” She lowered herself back to the rope — fortunately this one was knotted — and began to reach for the next.

  Tyford had a thousand little exercises. One day she’d be picking her way across a carpet of crushed walnut shells, with Tyford mocking her each time he heard a crunch. (“Sometimes it’s so dark you won’t be able to see those gods-awful big feet of yours,” he remarked, cracking another walnut and tossing the shell in with the others. “Be thankful you’ve got a light for this.”) Or she might dangle by her arms from one of the climbing ropes, hanging on so long that her muscles trembled with exhaustion. (Tyford gave her discomfort no heed. “Some day, when some guard on patrol pauses longer than he should, it’ll be your endurance against his ability to chop off your fool head when you lose your grip.”) Or she might be edging her way along a narrow ledge he’d had built fifteen feet above the floor, with a cup of water in each hand. (“I see one drop fall,” he warned her sternly from his comfortable perch below, “and I’ll send it back up to you on a stone.”)

  Even the cranky old thief had to admit her lockpicking skills were passable, no surprise since she’d learned from Lysander. If the golden ganymede was adept, however, Tyford was a master, handling the wires and other tools as if they were parts of his own body. He had promised to teach her about unusual locks as well, such as those that required more than one key, or locks that opened only when a certain combination of panels, levers and knobs were turned or twisted. Puzzle locks, he called them, but he’d said those were for later. “When you don’t handle those picks like meat-axes.”

  “You know,” he remarked casually, as if she weren’t scrambling from rope to rope a heart-stopping height over a very hard floor, “posing as a servant to get inside a house is one of the oldest tricks in the world.” He was always engaging her in conversation in the middle of an exercise, trying to trip her up. Usually he was critiquing her work inside the manor house of Ivan Eusbius. Retired from the Grey he might be, but he’d heard the story. “You’re lucky that the house steward didn’t have the wits the gods gave a pile of manure or it never would have worked.”

  “Yes, I was...very lucky,” she grunted, catching hold of the next rope. Years of working in Noam’s kitchens had firmed up her arms, but these exercises reminded her there were muscles she’d never known existed. She paused for a long moment, hands on one rope, feet lodged against the knot on the other, and when she was sure her grip was solid, she let go with her legs. The rope swung back and forth and the floor below spun as she scrabbled for a hold with her feet, finally finding one.

  Tyford grinned up at her, exposing a mouthful of crooked teeth. “So how’d you know where in the house you’d find the dagger?”

  She hung until the rope began to settle. Tyford told her over and over again that thievery was all about patience and the wait, so she would wait. “I got some...inside information,” she replied without looking down. Best not to mention Brenn’s name here, and even if she had she doubted that Tyford would be impressed that most of her inside information came from a ganymede.

  “Had a map, did you?”

  She shifted, the rope digging into her legs and side. She still had marks from the last time she’d tried this. “Not exactly,” she managed, “but I knew the third floor was the place to look.”

  “Anywhere on the third floor? How much time’d you waste going from room to room? You check them all?”

  “No,” she snapped, reaching for the next rope. “Once I got up there I found the art gallery pretty easily. Big wooden doors with columns on either side are...” she snagged the cord and pulled it over “...hard to miss.”

  He chuckled. “And all this wandering around didn’t bring any guards? Or did you just go invisible like Naria of the Dark?”

  She swung over to the next rope, finding her hold more smoothly this time. “M
y accomplice,” she grunted between reaches, “distracted the guards.”

  “Accomplice?” Tyford barked derisive laughter. “If I had a sou for every accomplice who’s turned on his boss, I wouldn’t need to dip into your purse.” Duchess said nothing, concentrating on reaching the far wall one rope-grip at a time. “Lesson number one,” Tyford proclaimed from the ground, “a distraction shouldn’t be able to talk. You throw a stone to make a guard look the other way, or roll some marbles, loose a mouse, but nothing that can turn you in.”

  She swung to the next rope, irked at his smug certainty but refusing to show it. The old thief had to know what he was talking about, or else he wouldn’t be an old thief. Besides, she couldn’t risk offending him, not today. Her offhand intention to make Pollux dead was easier said than done. She’d no idea of how she might pull it off. Hells, first she’d actually have to get to him. Takkis’ hold in Temple was well guarded, and infiltrating it would be far more difficult than entering Eusbius’ manor. Tyford would have forgotten more about getting into forbidden places than most people ever learned, and he must know something that could help her.

  Finally, she reached the far wall and lowered herself slowly down the last rope to the floor. Duchess shook out arms that felt as loose and floppy as a stuffed toy’s. “Then maybe you have some wisdom about how to get into places you don’t belong. Since I did such a bad job and all.”

  Tyford squinted at her. “So you want a story, eh? Well, I’ll give you one. You rest those chicken arms and I’ll pour some wine.” She blinked. The crotchety old man rarely offered her even a sip, but she followed him back to the table where he handed her a cup. “I’ll give you one about a fine old break-out. Those are always more interesting.”