Artus looked at Tyvian. “I thought you were just making up that ‘greatest duelist’ stuff. Is that real?”
Andolon chuckled. “When Tyv here was sixteen, he bested three men at once when he not only got in a duel, but managed to insult both his opponents and his own second to the point where they decided to have a go at him. Never seen such a thing. Gods, I still have the scar where you stuck me!”
“You were one of them?” Artus’s mouth dropped open.
Andolon jerked his head in the direction of Artus. “Who’s the scrub?”
“My assistant,” Tyvian said. “What he lacks in grace he makes up for in enthusiasm. Artus, what you fail to realize is that most duels are not to the death. First blood is sufficient, and in this case I managed to stick Gethrey in the calf before he ran me through.”
Andolon shrugged. “That’s what I get for defending the honor of a lady.”
Tyvian laughed. “Just because she agrees to top you for no less than a crown and four, that doesn’t make her a lady. Didn’t she wind up bedding Squire Fundreth’s famulus that very night?”
Andolon nodded, chuckling. “Ah, the madness of youth.”
“Tell me,” Tyvian said, “what brings you down here? Still slumming with Claudia’s ladies? Would’ve figured you for married by now.”
Artus had been wondering the same question. He had noted a few fops and dandies—the kind of young gentlemen that he and some other boys had occasionally picked clean while they were drunk in some Ayventry bar, but this fellow was Tyvian’s age.
Andolon shrugged. “No woman would have me, what with that hideous calf-scar.” He laughed. He had a face that looked like he laughed a lot. Artus found himself liking him, even if he was a bit of a dandy. “Honestly, I only come down here once in a while, mostly to maintain my ‘dangerous’ reputation at the club.” Andolon yawned, stretched. “It’s so good to see you, Tyv, but I’ve had a long night. Look, come by the club when you can—would be a treat, seeing you there again. Be good for you to get away from this rabble for a bit and reacquaint yourself with persons of quality. What say?”
Tyvian nodded and shook Andolon’s outstretched hand. “Certainly. I look forward to it.”
Andolon nodded and adjusted the jaunty angle of his hat. “See you soon, then. Ta.”
Artus watched his blue-haired head bob out the door with a wave to Maude and turned to Tyvian. “He seems nice.”
Tyvian’s lips were pursed. “Yes, he seems it, doesn’t he? Did you notice he had blood on his ring?” He held up his hand—there was a streak of red on his palm.
Artus frowned. “What’s that mean?”
Tyvian grimaced. “It means you and Brana are going to follow him. Right now.”
Artus felt the fatigue of their journey hit him all at once. “Now? It’s the middle of the night!”
“I am well aware of the time, Artus—go. Now.”
Artus dragged himself to his feet, scowling. “I need my machete from my pack.”
“No. No weapons. No fighting—go.”
Artus looked around for support from Hool or Brana. Hool was glaring at him—no help there. Brana was already standing and wiggling his arse as though wagging his tail, save that the tail was currently invisible. Artus found himself back to Tyvian, whose expression hadn’t changed. All Artus could come up with was, “This ain’t fair!”
Tyvian threw up his hands. “Fair isn’t part of this conversation, Artus. Do what I ask—you can sleep when you grow up. I need your eyes open tonight. Our welcome at this place is rapidly eroding, and if you don’t want to wind up like that fine young arsonist we met earlier, you will get your arse into the street and follow him!”
Artus went, purposely dragging his feet as he walked out of the Cauldron. Maybe, if he took his time, he’d lose Andolon before he even began. Then he could come back, sit down, and sip his weak beer and sleep on a bench in a cozy corner of the taproom.
When he got to the street, though, there was no such luck—there was Andolon, strutting down the shadowy street, twirling a cane as he went, as conspicuous as a gods-damned drum major in a parade. Artus looked over at Brana. “Can you believe this?”
Brana wasn’t listening, though. Brana was too busy lapping water out of a rain barrel. Artus sighed. It looked like another bang-up evening of excitement for him, Tyvian Reldamar’s favorite stooge.
CHAPTER 9
NOBODY’S HERO, NOBODY’S FOOL
Claudia Fensron was Maude’s co-owner of the Cauldron. Where Maude was large, she was petite. Where Maude was angular, Claudia was curvy. For those who bothered to compare the two, it went on like this for some time; they were like a pair out of a storybook. For Tyvian, though, the most important point of comparison was this: where Maude Telversham was kindly and caring, Claudia Fensron wasn’t. Tyvian would have bet a substantial sum that Claudia was the brains behind the sale of the Cauldron to the Prophets, but he guessed nobody would take such a bet.
In her youth Claudia could have turned heads in the dark. She had midnight black hair, alabaster skin, and lips that could make the kind of smile that made men bleed. Now, well over a decade since Tyvian had last seen her, Claudia’s age had become apparent in her eyes. Light brown to the point of being gold, the wide-eyed faux-innocence she had used to part men from their money for decades had been replaced by a flint-hard squint designed to scathe more than entice. These eyes were ringed with the wrinkles and shadows; one of them was black and near swollen-shut, a livid cut resting just above the brow and only partially cleaned up. Claudia looked at Tyvian as though she knew this change in herself, and as though she knew he knew. “You actually came back.”
Determined to be pleasant, Tyvian put on his most genuine smile. “Why Claudia, no kiss?”
Claudia didn’t need to frown, as she was already, but she made it deepen a bit. “I see you brought that wit with you. Just what this place was missing.”
The upper floors of the Cauldron were a mixture of different rooms for lease. Some rooms contained pliant and morally suspect women, while others were simply empty; the former were leased by the hour, the latter by the night. The locks were high-quality mechanical types and the walls were thick and insulated. What happened inside the rooms of the Cauldron was the business of the occupants and the occupants alone. At least, Tyvian mused, that had been the case before. With the Prophets owning the place, he suspected that may have changed.
Claudia led them to a room on the third floor. She gave Hool an appraising glance but made no comment and didn’t address her, which to Tyvian was an encouraging sign that at least Claudia wasn’t apt to pry into his business without being asked to do so. “Here is your key. I assume you settled up with Maude?”
Tyvian shrugged. “You won’t believe me if I tell you, so why don’t you just go and ask Maude.”
“You plan on stabbing anybody tonight?”
Tyvian made a show of thinking it over. “Hmmm . . . well, not just now.”
Claudia looked about as amused as a tar shingle might be by a mime. “Anything else?”
“Yes—who hit you tonight, and why hasn’t Maude killed them yet?”
Claudia didn’t answer. Giving him a hard glare, she slapped the iron key into Tyvian’s hand and left with the candle.
This left Hool and Tyvian alone in the near-blackness of the Cauldron’s main corridor. Hool sniffed the air. “I smell blood.”
Tyvian fumbled with the lock in the dark. “What kind?”
“The blood of a new mother.”
Tyvian could have asked for clarification of what this meant but decided to take it in its most positive sense. Prior to the ring being affixed to him, the inherent morally suspect realm in which the whorehouse existed had never bothered him in the least. Now, just standing in these halls was making his hand throb with that kind of low-grade ac
he that told him he ought to be more proactive in his goodie-goodie behavior. He desperately hoped to avoid asking questions that might lead to answers that would necessitate any kind of drastic action.
The room inside was furnished with a single large four-poster featherbed, a scuffed but solidly build armoire, and the kind of crimson wallpaper that made a person think of warm lovers cuddled together in warm places. Turning up the small oil lamp, he saw Hool pluck off her shroud and throw it on the bed. The transformation was instantaneous and truly jarring, as he had grown used to tall, svelte redheaded Hool over hulking, golden-furred monster Hool. In the blink of an eye the gnoll suddenly occupied almost twice the space as before. When she stretched, Tyvian watched as her arms reached almost far enough to touch both walls of the room. She then seized one end of the bed and pushed the entire thing over so there was more room in front of the small fireplace, wherein were smoldering a few embers. “There. Good night.” The big gnoll curled up on the floor in the manner of a giant dog.
Tyvian nodded. After a moment he decided to add, “You don’t have anything to ask me?”
Hool’s ears perked up and she looked at him steadily. “If I ask you questions, will you lie to me?”
Tyvian thought about it. “That depends on the questions you ask.”
Hool’s ears went back. “Sometimes there is no point in talking to you.”
Tyvian shrugged. “I’m doing you a favor, believe me.”
Hool snorted. “Your mother is a sorceress?”
“Yes. A very powerful sorceress.”
“More powerful than Sahand?”
“By several orders of magnitude, yes.”
“Are we going to kill her?”
Tyvian blinked. “What? No. Of course not.”
Hool stared at him for a few moments, her copper eyes glittering in the dim lamplight. “Why does she want to trap you?”
Tyvian sighed. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“Then will we save Myreon?”
“I told you, we are not saving Myreon. She wouldn’t want me to and it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Hool cocked her head. “But you love her.”
Tyvian snorted out a laugh. “Of all the ridiculous—”
Hool snorted once to demonstrate her opinion of that comment, turned around a few times and then buried her head in her own fur and fell asleep immediately. How the gnoll could do that was beyond Tyvian; of all the various ways in which Hool was physically superior to him, that was the skill he envied the most. If he could fall asleep in under a minute and wake up at the drop of a hat, he would be a much better rested criminal.
Tyvian stripped to his drawers and slipped under the quilts, Chance under his pillow, and lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Above him, he could hear the telltale rhythmic creaking of a prostitute earning her keep. He found himself wondering how the girl came to be in this place and why. He knew Claudia wasn’t the kind to be overtly cruel or abusive to her girls, but she was hardly a loving or caring employer. Claudia tossed girls out on the street for myriad reasons, and she would look the other way if a man was rough so long as he paid for the medical fees. Tyvian had never liked that, not even when he was a spoiled, disaffected youth. He had fought at least five duels with young nobles who had roughed up a whore. He had stopped fighting such duels, though. They had never made anything better.
“The world isn’t that simple,” Tyvian grumbled to himself, fiddling with the ring on his hand. “Good and bad aren’t as easy as up and down. Damsels aren’t so easily rescued. Say I did save all the women in here. Say I stuck a sword through whatever lout the Mute Prophets have supervising this place and carried the women out on my back, showering them with gold? What would that get me, exactly? What would that get them? I bet you more than half of them would wind up in another whorehouse before the day was out, and the rest would get themselves killed, raped, kidnapped, or married to some arse of a cooper with big fists and a mean drinking habit.”
Tyvian was holding the ring up in front of his face, hissing at it in the dark. He knew it was ridiculous, but he kept doing it anyway. “It’s like Draketower all over again. I did what you wanted, didn’t I? I freed them, I killed the man who had abused and enslaved them, I showered them with riches—what goddamned good did it do? It ended with a poor girl drowned and left for the wolves in the wilderness. Some goddamned hero I am.”
Hool stirred. “Shut up. Stop whining about everything. You are keeping me awake.”
Tyvian jumped at the sound of her voice. “Sorry. I got carried away there.”
“Stop thinking so much. Do what is right when it is time to do it, and everything else will be fine.”
Tyvian frowned at this but didn’t answer. Hool couldn’t be expected to understand; Hool was a creature of the moment, a champion improviser and one who thought and acted in straight lines. She didn’t see the complexity in the world because it was too much for her to comprehend. Tyvian knew this made what she said easily confused with wisdom, but he was too old a hand at the confidence game to be taken in by it. For every simple man the world produced, it had to come up with a dozen complex ways to keep him alive and happy, lest all the simple men of the world fall upon one another with whatever crude clubs and pieces of masonry they could find and cover the ground with a thick layer of their simple, simple brains.
Hool grumbled and shifted her position. “You think I’m stupid, but I’m not. Go to sleep.”
Tyvian scowled and rolled away from Hool. On his hand the ring throbbed slowly—a gradual build of pressure, just short of pain, and then a sudden release, like the ponderous beating of a massive heart. It had been doing that for weeks; he had grown so accustomed to its petty tortures, he only seemed to notice while in bed. This was, he imagined, just as it was intended to be.
It was prodding him over Myreon. Myreon, who he knew was innocent with every fiber of his being, but whom he had promised himself he would not save. That was why he had left off telling Artus and Hool and Brana about her for so long—they wouldn’t understand. Rescuing Myreon wouldn’t do anything other than put himself and her in more danger than they already were. She’d also hate him for it. Hell, once made whole again, she’d probably just turn him into the authorities. That was Myreon’s style, after all: stubborn, loyal, and utterly incorruptible.
If not Myreon, then what was he doing here? The smart thing to do about a trap was walk away, but here he was—summoned as effectively as if he’d had a leash and someone had yanked. His reasoning back in Derby—buoyed by hot-blooded anger and indignation—seemed foggy to him now. What had brought him here?
The kiss.
The memory—Myreon’s cold lips beneath the mountains, suddenly blooming with a fire created by his kiss—flared up, making him catch his breath for a moment. He pushed the memory away. Sentimental garbage, the whole lot of it. As though there were any possible way to steal her Rite of Release and rescue Myreon from a penitentiary garden without winding up there himself! What the hell had he been thinking anyway? Slowly, cursing himself and the world and everything else, he fell into a restless sleep.
In his dreams he sat on a throne of glass, his right hand burning with unholy fire, and a darkened sky overhead. Before him marched an array of the weak, the powerless, and the aggrieved. They howled at him, but he said nothing. He had no idea what they wanted him to say.
CHAPTER 10
ALL SLEEP AND NO PAY . . .
Artus wiped the sleep out of his eyes and bent back just far enough to work the crick out of his lower spine. Three hours following some blue-haired friend of Tyvian’s as he wandered about New Crosstown was not what he had been looking forward to that evening. Were he not in the middle of one of the more interesting things he’d gotten to do in the past month, he might have just told Tyvian where to stick it and crawled into a haystack in some stable somewh
ere to sleep.
“He moves. Let’s go!” Brana grunted, slapping Artus on the shoulder and then darting out of the alley on all fours. He was wearing his shroud, but it wasn’t making much of a difference. A giant dog running around wouldn’t have attracted more attention than a young man in gentleman’s clothing jumping around like an animal in the middle of a slum. Fortunately, those wandering the streets just before dawn looked to be various kinds of clerks, couriers, and porters running errands and making early deliveries, and therefore most had their bleary eyes too firmly affixed to the cobblestones in front of them to care much.
Artus ducked out of the alley, pulling the hood of his traveling cloak far up over his head, and walked casually in the direction Brana had darted. There was no sign of the gnoll-boy at the moment, but their target was clearly visible. Andolon came out of what Artus had originally assumed was a defunct barbershop but turned out to be still functional, just only if you knew the proper knock. When he went in, he was swinging his cane and whistling, and when came out he was doing the same thing. His hair, Artus noted, looked exactly the same, and Andolon didn’t look like the kind of guy to need back-alley surgery. Artus didn’t know what he had done there—or any of a half dozen other places he had visited—but whatever it was didn’t seem to dampen his mood any.
Artus didn’t really see the need for as much stealth as he was using, but Tyvian’s words floated up at him from the depths of his memory: Just because the man you’re tailing doesn’t see you, that doesn’t mean the other person tailing doesn’t. Always assume you’re being watched, always assume you’re being listened to, and you can’t go far wrong.
It was good advice, obviously, but Artus felt irked by it nonetheless. He was actively mad at himself for stopping every dozen paces or so and looking behind him. His time with Tyvian had made him paranoid and joyless. He could scarcely remember the last time he’d had fun, and he thought that a damned shame, given how much money he sometimes had at his disposal. He wasn’t sure what he’d do for fun, really, but anything was probably better than being Tyvian Reldamar’s human donkey.
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