by Lynn Abbey
There was more that Chersey wasn't saying. Bezul knew that by the way she fussed with her silver-gray moonstone ring. It was a magical ring—not particularly potent, but useful for assessing intentions, useful when you made your living buying and selling. He watched his wife take Dace's measure with a casual gesture, lining the ring up with the Nighter's face as she tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
They needed to talk and if Bezul had been thinking he would have helped Chersey clear their customers out of the shop before they talked further about Perrez's indiscretions. Or perhaps not. Bezul had restrained himself far too long on his brother's account, and his mother's. Suddenly, he no longer cared. Let the gossips spread the tale of how the changer's brother had swindled a crippled Nighter out of a lump of red glass throughout the quarter, throughout Sanctuary. Let Perrez feel their eyes burning his neck and hang his head in shame for a change.
Words spilled out of Bezul, honest and acid, until his belly was empty and he asked, "I don't suppose he left that damned red lucky here?"
Chersey shook her head. Mistress Glary—the greatest snoop in all Sanctuary—slipped out the door, careful not to let the hem of her dress brush against the slack-jawed Nighter. Her departure broke the spell of curiosity. The other customers clamored to complete their business. Bezul joined his wife behind the counter: twenty padpols exchanged for a pair of boots with patched soles, a copper-lined pot exchanged for four shaboozh, one of them a royal shaboozh minted in llsig, not Sanctuary; and a child's fur-lined cloak swapped even for a larger one of boiled wool and a pair of woolen breeches.
Dace blinked often enough, but he didn't move, didn't say a word as the changing house conducted its business. As birds flew, the Prince's gate on the east side of Sanctuary was farther from Wriggle Way than the Swamp of Night Secrets, but Dace might just as well have fallen from the moon for all he seemed to grasp of ordinary trade.
"No, we owe him—" Bezul rubbed his brow. He'd acquired a headache between Stink Street and home. "We owe him a 'lucky.' " He turned to Chersey. "That chest of my father's. The one with the glass bulbs Ayse loves to play with, it's—?"
"In the woodshed behind the annex, under the porphyry urn we're holding for Lady Kuklos. The key's in the flowerpot."
Bezul leaned forward to kiss his wife on the cheek.
She whispered, "I knew Perrez was lying about something, but I couldn't get him to say what. That's why I wouldn't give him three shaboozh—I'd guessed he wanted it for wine. I never thought—"
"Who could?" Bezul replied in the same tone. "There'll be a reckoning this time, I swear it. The children are getting old enough to notice."
"What about that one? The Nighter… the boy."
"We'll give him a 'lucky' and send him back to the swamp." Bezul sighed. "I don't know which I find harder to believe: that my brother stole crab-trap bait or that he promised to take that poor, frog-eating bastard on as a partner."
Chersey put an arm's length between herself and her husband. "Could you be wrong about the bait?"
"I could be wrong about everything, Chersey. Why?"
"It's just—"
She twisted the moonstone ring and revealed an oval patch of reddened skin on her finger. Bezul gasped. The ring had been in his family since their goldsmithing days. It had kept them safe—almost—from the Hand and even in the face of Retribution himself, Dyareela's right hand in Sanctuary, the ring hadn't harmed the slender finger that wore it.
"I was suspicious," Chersey confessed. "So I kenned him—Perrez. I didn't see the aura—no malice—but, it hurt, Bez, and, afterward, all I could think about was the pouch hanging from his belt. That's how I knew… how I knew it wasn't anything to do with the tournament."
She blushed and Bezul tried to reassure her while asking, "Did you see which way he headed?"
"Out, that's all. We've been busy all morning. Maybe Jopze saw something. He was near the door, but I doubt it."
Bezul's headache was getting worse by the heartbeat.
"I'll go down to the tavern after we're done with Dace—the Nigh-ter. I'll talk to him, get to the bottom of this."
He left his wife smiling and went outside to the woodshed where the dusty air aggravated his headache and the big urn was at least twice as heavy as he remembered. Bezul had his arms full and his cheek pressed against the porphyry when he heard footfalls behind him. "Give me a hand, here," he said, expecting that Chersey had sent Jopze or Ammen out to help, but the arms that slid around the polished stone were Gedozia's.
"You won't find your brother in any tavern around here."
Bezul raised his arm—in anger or sheer frustration, he couldn't have said which. After a moment, it dropped to his side again. "You knew," he accused her. "This morning, I asked you where he'd gone and you said you didn't know."
"And I didn't!" Gedozia insisted. "Oh, Bezul, this has nothing to do with that Nighter stinking up the front room. Perrez found something—"
"A bulb of red glass!"
"Some glass bulb," Gedozia retorted, "if there's an Ilsigi trader willing to pay seventy royals for it."
Bezul blanched at the sum, though, surely, if something were worth seventy golden royals in Sanctuary, it would be worth seven hundred in the king's city.
"Perrez came by to tell me this morning. Seventy royals! He's been working with this trader all winter. Yesterday the trader finally got serious and offered some earnest money. Today Perrez said he was turning it over—the red glass—and getting the full seventy royals. Seventy! He was so excited. He swore me to secrecy because he wanted to tell you himself, Bezul, to show you what he's made of. But you were already gone—chasing that Nighter—and he had to meet the Ilsigi at midday. Think of it: seventy royals! I told your father, 'Bezulshash, it's not enough, not what he deserves, but it's a start.' I went to market to buy food for a feast—tried to, the city's up to here with people who think they're going to win more than seventy royals tomorrow and are spending their winnings today!
"Your father came to me at the fishmonger's: 'Gedozia,' he says. 'Gedozia, he can't be trusted!—' "
"Praise Ils! It's about time—"
Gedozia seized Bezul sharply by the wrists. "Not your brother, the Ilsigi! The Ilsigi means to cheat Perrez out of the seventy royals! He's too sweet-natured, my Perrez. He'll never suspect a thing, until it's too late. Find him, Bezul. He's your brother. It's up to you to do what his father would have done. Bezulshash would have beaten this Ilsigi with a stick."
Bezulshash would have done no such thing and Bezul would have dismissed everything his mother had said, if it hadn't made a sour sort of sense when compared with the tale Dace had told.
Bezul broke free of Gedozia's grasp. "Hard to cheat a thief, Mother. He tricked that glass from the Nighter. Good as stole it—"
"The Nighter's a halfwit—and who's to say where he got it, eh? If he got it. If it's even what the Ilsigi trader wanted to buy. You're the one talking about glass. I thought it was a manuscript."
"You—" Bezul caught himself. The sun rose and set on Perrez, always had, always would, and telling Gedozia anything else was a waste of time. Best to go back to the beginning, to what she wanted. "You said I wouldn't find Perrez around here. Where will I find him?" "Uptown… in the Maze. The Unicorn."
"You can't be serious," Gedozia complained. "That's irreplaceable. It's worth four shaboozh, three at least—"
Bezul locked the chest. He tucked the key inside his jacket and left the urn where it was. "Don't say another word," he warned the woman who'd birthed him. "After I've settled with the Nighter, I'll go uptown, looking for Perrez. Don't convince me otherwise."
"You—" Gedozia began, but Bezul's darkest stare convinced her not to finish.
He returned to the front room where Lesimar was sitting in Am-men's lap and Chersey tended a desperate-looking woman trying to exchange an apron of windfall apples for three fishhooks. Had Bezul been the one behind the counter, he would have given the woman a single metal hook for
the brown, wrinkled fruit that even the geese wouldn't eat. Chersey parted with two and a length of light silken thread pulled invisibly from the hem of a lady's dress left in the shop on consignment. Their eyes met as the woman departed.
"Has the Nighter gone?" Bezul asked, saying nothing—wisely— about his wife's generosity.
"The kitchen," she replied, meaning that she'd decided to feed him.
Dace sat on the floor beside the hearth, ignoring the chairs and table. He cradled a smallish bread loaf and a bowl of whey in his lap. By the looks of the whey as he dipped a morsel of bread in it, Chersey had fortified the weak milk with an egg. Thanks to their flock of night-watchmen, the changing house always had extra eggs. Four-year-old Ayse sat cross-legged in one of the chairs, her wide eyes not missing a thing as the Nighter ate with his fingers—something she was no longer permitted to do.
The young man wiped his hands on his breeches before taking the glass bulb Bezul offered. He seemed pleased, though a bit overwhelmed. Bezul's gift was bigger, he stammered, redder, and heavier—solid where the missing bulb had been hollow, but it was Ayse who got to the heart of matter:
"Is it lucky, Poppa? It's got to be lucky, doesn't it?"
Bezul answered with hope, not honesty, and got out of the kitchen.
Despite Gedozia's statements, Bezul didn't strike out for the Vulgar Unicorn. He clung to the hope that Perrez wasn't that foolish until he'd finished poking his head into every tavern and wine shop in the Shambles without meeting anyone who'd seen his brother recently. With his hope exhausted, and feeling quite foolish himself, Bezul plunged into Sanctuary's most infamous quarter.
It had been a year, easily, since Bezul's last encounter with the tangled, narrow alleys that passed for streets in the Maze. He'd nearly convinced himself that he'd missed a critical turn and would have to start over (getting in and out of the Maze wasn't nearly as difficult, by daylight, as finding a particular place) when he caught sight of the Unicorn's signboard. The sign was to Bezul's left, not his right, where he'd been expecting it, so he had missed a turn or two, or perhaps the gossips were correct and, in the Maze, all paths led to the Vulgar Unicorn.
The Unicorn's shutters were open, not that it made a difference. The air in the commons was as thick and stale as the shadows. Bezul leaned against a wooden upright, looking for Perrez, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the haze. A woman hailed him by name—
The woman coming toward Bezul was taller than him by a hand-span, heavier by at least a stone. Her red hair fairly glowed in the twilight and her bodice was cut so snug and low that her breasts jounced above her corset like fresh fish on a trawl line. She came to the changing house every month or so to change a sackful of padpols into fewer, better coins. Bezul knew her name; he might even remember it, if he concentrated on her face.
"Frog all, Bezulshash, what's brought you to the Unicorn?"
They were considerably less than an arm's length apart. Bezul would have retreated, but he had a post at his back. Clearing his throat, he stammered, then said, "I'm looking for my brother, Per-rez."
That name meant nothing to her (and Bezul hadn't remembered hers… It was Mimmi, Minzie, something like that), but his description of Perrez's scrupulously clean clothes, neatly trimmed hair, and his love of someone else's largesse rang a bell.
"You froggin' missed him, Bezulshash. He was here when I came downstairs—talking with the aromacist."
"The what?"
She shrugged, a very distracting gesture. Bezul missed her first words. "—of winter. Set himself up off the Processional. Froggin' fancy place: fancy bottles, colored oils, silks and tassels hanging from the walls."
"A perfumer?"
She shook her head and everything else. " 'Aromas' he called them, better than perfume. Said no man could resist his 'aroma' of passion. Frog all, Bezulshash—do I look like I need help attracting men? He never fit inside the Unicorn; a little like you, Bezulshash: You don't belong here. But he came by, every few days, late morning or early afternoon, when it was slow and quiet. He'd take one of the side tables, buy a whole ewer of ale, leave it, too—unless he got company—your brother, a handful of others. Come to think of it— they left together. First time, I think, for that; first time I noticed:
Your brother, he was tipsy, noisy. Don't think he'd've made it outside by himself—"
"A fancy shop off the Processional?" Bezul asked and tried to keep the rest out of his thoughts for a few moments longer. He was ready to leave, but found his way blocked. In his concern—his anger—he'd forgotten something more important than her name. "Stop by the changing house," he urged. "There's a pair of earrings tucked away with your name on them."
She grinned and let him depart.
The Processional between the harbor and the palace was neither the longest nor the widest street in Sanctuary. With the tight-fisted Irrune in the palace, it wasn't even the busiest street. Mansions, some of them still abandoned after the Troubles, lined both sides of the street. When the residents left their homes, they traveled in clumps. A solitary man was marked as a visitor and ignored.
Lord Kuklos—a bearded magnate with an oversized cloak, a bright-red hat, and a flock of aides—rushed past Bezul without a by-your-leave. Probably on their way to the tournament. A slower clutch of nursemaids and guards surrounding a pair of children stopped when the better-dressed boy threw himself into a tantrum. Probably wanted to go to the tournament.
The third procession bore down rapidly on Bezul from behind. A man with a clanging bell and a loud voice ordered him out of the way. Prudence, rather than obedience, launched Bezul up on a curbstone. He clung to a pedestal that had long since lost its commemorative statue while a woman wrapped in a sea-green mantle and seated in an open chair charged toward the harbor. A whiskery dog with jewels in its ears yapped at Bezul from the lady's lap. The rest of her retinue—a brace of underdressed porters that might have been twins, three breathless maids clutching their skirts with one hand, their mantles with the other; five guards whose legs were taking a beating from their scabbards, and the lead man with the bell— spared him not a single glance.
Watching them sweep around the corner that was his own goal, Bezul offered a quick prayer to any nearby god that the lady's final destination not be the aromacist's shop. Someone listened. The lady and her retinue were rounding the next corner when Bezul turned off the Processional. Perhaps the lady knew something the corseted wench at the Unicorn had not: The aromacist's shop—its business proclaimed in both Ilsigi and Rankan script on a bright signboard— was shuttered tight from the inside.
"Perrez," Bezul called, giving the handle a firm shake. "If you're in there, open the door!"
He shook the handle a second time and kicked the door. When that produced no response, Bezul berated himself for imagining that his quest would end any other way. He should return to the changing house: His own business was suffering and his brother would return. Men like Perrez landed on their feet and on the backs of their families.
Bezul turned away from the shop; and as he did, he noticed that the door beside it—the alleyway door between the shop and its leftside neighbor—was not completely closed. By Ils's thousandth eye, Bezul was a cautious man and, to the extent his profession allowed, an honest man. Undoubtedly, there were objects on the changing house shelves which had not been placed there by their legitimate owners, but Bezulshash, son of Bezulshash, did not knowingly trade for suspect goods. He did not venture into another man's domain uninvited, or he hadn't before. After glances toward the Processional and away from it, Bezul slipped into the alley and pulled the door back into its almost-shut position.
The alley proved to be a tunnel running beneath the upper floors of the aromacist's building. Bezul scuttled as quickly as he dared through the darkness, emerging into a tiny fenced-in square with another door to his right. This door had been properly closed and bolted, but the bolt was on Bezul's side. The aromacist, then, was more concerned about escape than invasion. After listenin
g for sounds of life on the far side, and hearing none, Bezul slid the bolt from its housing. Still gripping the bolt, he lifted the door so its greater weight was in his hands, not on its hinges, then eased it open.
Bezul stuck his head into what looked, at first, to be a long-abandoned garden, strewn with discarded barrels, crates, and overturned furniture. On second glance around, Bezul realized that while the garden was, indeed, abandoned, the other wreckage was more recent. Perhaps very recent: There were puddles in the dirt around a broken barrel. Bezul eased the rest of the way into the garden. He grabbed the nearest chunk of sturdy wreckage and used it to insure that the door remained open.
Bezul was taking his time, assessing everything in sight, when he spotted a broken barrel-stave with a scrap of red-stained cloth caught in its splintered end.
"Perrez?" he asked himself, then, louder: "Perrez?" He heard the sound of a heavy object thudding to the ground. The shop's rear door, Bezul realized, was open and the sound had come from within. He ran across the garden.
Horror, relief, and anger were only three of the emotions that bottled Bezul's voice in his throat. He'd found his younger brother, found him alive, but bloody. Beaten bloody, bound with ropes and rags, gagged, and hung from a roof beam were he swayed like a dripping pendulum, an overturned bench beneath. Not—thank all the gods that ever were—hanged by a noose around his neck, but slant-wise with from a noose that passed under the opposite shoulder. The shoulder-slung noose wouldn't make much difference, if Bezul didn't cut through it quick. Perrez was already wheezing for air.
Bezul righted the bench and went to work with his knife. He freed his brother's wrists with a single slash, then hacked through the hanging rope. Bezul meant to keep hold of the loose end and lower
Perrez gently to the floor, but the rope wasn't long enough. Perrez hit the floor with a moan—but he was breathing easier even then.
"Hold still!" Bezul commanded as he slipped his knife beneath the gag and for, perhaps, the first time in his life, Perrez obeyed.