by Lynn Abbey
"Bez…Bez!" the battered man gasped. "Father Ils! Never thought… you'd find…"
"Save your thanks." Bezul had gotten a closer look at his brother. On the ground, it was clear that none of Perrez's wounds was close to mortal and that meant Bezul could vent his anger. "I don't know which is worse: that you cheated the Nighters or that you got cheated by some Ilsigi fly-by-night yourself."
Through the bruises and blood, Perrez protested his innocence.
"I've talked to Mother," Bezul snapped. "I've talked to a wench at the Unicorn who seemed to remember you well enough. And I've done more than talk to that Nighter."
"What Nighter? What are you talking about, Bez?"
"Don't 'Bez' me. You knew he'd come looking when you didn't show up to return his damn lucky so you pointed him at me. What did you expect? That I'd keep him out of your way until you had your seventy royals? Or was that just a number you threw at Mother? Did your aromacist friend make you the same sheep-shite promise you gave the Nighter: Give me what I want and I'll make you my partner? By Lord Ils's thousandth eye, what else have you been doing besides making us the guarantor for every bet in Sanctuary?"
"I'd have split the royals with you, Bez… with you and the frackin' froggin' Nighter!" Perrez studied his torn, stained sleeve before cursing softly and swiping his face with the cloth. He ignored the jibe about his oddsmaking activities. "It was a fair deal, Bez, a good price. That 'lucky' wasn't any ordinary piece of glass. It's an attractor. The fish-folk made them: hollow bulbs filled with their magic. If you want something bad enough it'll bring it to you, or lead you there. Worth their frackin' froggin' weight in gold when the fish-folk made them and ten times that now. Nareel—"
"Your buyer? The aromacist? The man who strung you up?" Perrez hesitated, then nodded. "Nareel will get a thousand for it up in Ilsig… once we'd gotten the crabs out of it. Shalpa! Those Nighters were using a fish-eye attractor as bait in their crab traps! Now, there's a waste, Bez, a true crime. Once we got it focused on gold-"
"What 'we,' Perrez? I should think it would be clear—even to you—that this Nareel has plans that don't involve you."
"I should have come to you," he admitted. "As soon as I realized what the Nighter had baiting his traps, I should have come to you and let you handle everything: getting it away from the Nighter and finding a buyer, too. But it was going so well… I was going to come to you with the seventy royals, Bez, I swear I was. I'd lay them down on the counter and you'd be proud of me. Shalpa, Bez—I don't want to be Nareel's partner. I want to be yours. I want you to trust me with the changing house. You've done so well, and what do I have to show for myself?" From his knees, Perrez reached up to take his elder brother's hand. "Help me, Bez. I know where Nareel's gone, I think. If you confront him, he'll honor his bargain. I'm begging you, Bez. Our honor's at stake, here. You can't let Nareel get away with what he's done."
It was a good speech and it might have melted Bezul's heart, if he hadn't heard similar speeches too many times before. He withdrew his hand. "Nareel's robbed a thief. Where's the honor on either side in that? That glass never belonged to you. No, it's over. The aromacist's made a fool of you, and there it ends. Stand up. We're going home. Be grateful you still have one… and pray you've figured the odds right. What little I hear, it's not going the way anyone expected."
With a whimpering groan, Perrez rose unsteadily. His brother could not tell how much was genuine pain, how much just another part of the act.
"What about Dace?" Perrez asked. "If the attractor wasn't mine, then it belongs to the Nighter, not Nareel. We can't walk away, Bez. We've still got to get it back."
Bezul scarcely believed what he was hearing. "Don't you—" he cut himself short. The aromacist's workroom was no place to continue an argument with Perrez, who would neither listen nor change. "I gave Dace one of Father's glass bulbs to replace his 'red lucky.' "
He returned to the garden. Perrez followed.
"You can't do that, Bez. You can't replace a fish-eye attractor with a bulb of ordinary glass. It's not going to catch crabs. I mean, a few nights, and he's going to know it's not their frackin' froggin' lucky."
"Maybe; maybe not."
"No maybes. The attractor's got pull, froggin' fish-eye sorcery. There's nothing in Father's chest to compare with it, nothing in the whole shop. Dace'll be back… with his relatives. I've seen 'em. The gimp's one of the normal Nighters, Bez. You've got to think they've been screwing rats and trolls—"
Bezul opened the gate. He had the impression of a face and a yell, then he was reeling as something surged past him. The fence kept Bezul upright. Perrez was not so fortunate. He was on his back, bellowing panic and pain, beneath not the mysterious aromacist, but Dace, who attacked him with wild fury. Bezul seized the youth's shoulder, hoping to pull him off Perrez, but he underestimated Dace's determination, not to mention his skills and his strength. The Nighter broke free with an elbow jab between Bezul's ribs.
With greater caution and an eye for self-defense, Bezul tried again and succeeded.
"He can't say that!" Dace growled while struggling to get his fists on Perrez again. "He lied. He stole the lucky." Realizing that he couldn't break free, Dace twisted about and attacked Bezul. Bezul successfully defended his groin and his gut, but lost his grip when Dace stomped his instep. Still, he caught the Nighter before he laid into Perrez.
Perrez, who hadn't actually lost anything that could have been called his in the first place, went through the gate without protest. Not so Dace. The Nighter retreated toward the aromacist's workroom.
"I'm stayin'. That Nareel comes home, I'm gettin' the lucky back. Don't care 'bout no royals."
By that Bezul assumed Dace had overheard his entire conversation with Perrez. "You don't need sorcery to bait crabs, Dace. The lucky's not worth dying for," he told the youth and silently chided himself for caring. He turned around and nearly walked into Perrez.
"We don't have to wait. I know where Nareel's gone—he'd brought a map with him from Ilsig. He was looking for some dead shite's hoard. Fastalen—something like that. The map didn't match with what he found in the quarter. There's not a house up there now that was standing when whoever drew Nareel's map. That's where the attractor came in. He and I were going to use it to find the hoard. Said it had to be today—couldn't wait 'til tomorrow, something about the sun. He's up there now—I swear it—and we don't need an attractor to find a man rooting through rubble."
"We don't need anything," Bezul replied. "We're going home to Wriggle Way." But Bezul stopped short of shoving his brother toward the gate again. He wasn't blind to the allure in Perrez's argument. "Look at yourself," he said in one last attempt to free them all from temptation. "Clothes torn. Face bloodied. And don't tell me you've got full use of your right arm. The aromacist has already beaten you once today, Perrez—"
"Because I wasn't ready. This time, I'll be surprising him… and you'll be with me."
"No."
"Bez—"
"No."
"You're getting old, Bez. Ten years ago, you'd have led the way."
"Not a chance," Bezul said confidently.
Children hadn't changed him, marriage hadn't changed him, even the Troubles hadn't changed him. He'd changed the day his father abandoned their uptown shop for Wriggle Way. Perrez couldn't remember that day; he'd been a toddler, younger than Lesimar; but Bezul had been old enough to see the despair on his parents' faces and it had burnt the wildness out of him forever.
"Let it go, Perrez. Come home. Chersey will bind up your ribs and cuts."
"No. It's the Nighter's lucky and our gold, not Nareel's. Tell Mother I'm coming home rich, or not at all."
Dace—Father Ils bless his limp and his stubbornness—had hobbled out of the workroom to stand beside Perrez, all but announcing that they were partners again. Bezul closed his eyes. He imagined himself returning to Wriggle Way: sober, righteous… alone. Wealth had never tempted him. It still didn't, but the tide had turned regardless.
Between Dace's withered leg and Perrez's bruises, the three men crossed Sanctuary slowly. Bezul considered that their prey might be flown by the time Perrez got them to the right quarter. He kept his thoughts to himself. If they missed the opportunity, then they missed the danger, too.
"Not far now," Perrez assured them as they trudged up one of the steepest streets in the city.
They'd paused for water at a communal well where Perrez had washed the worst of the blood from his face, which only made the bruises more noticeable, and the swollen kink in his nose. Bezul was a grown man with children of his own, but he'd always be the elder brother. He reserved the right to pummel Perrez; he conceded it to no one, especially not an aromacist from Ilsig.
Perrez led them down a treacherous alley to a courtyard that had seen better days, much better days, a generation or more earlier. Patches of fresco murals clung to the weathered walls, none of them large enough to reveal a scene or subject. The windows and doorways were empty, stripped of everything valuable or moveable.
"Where to?" Dace asked.
There was no need for Perrez's answer. They could all hear a man shouting, "Slowly… Slowly, you worms!" with the rounded accent of old Ilsig.
"Nareel!"
Perrez grinned and Bezul had to move quickly to stop his brother from racing to a confrontation.
"Slowly's a damn good idea, Perrez. Slowly and quietly. He's not alone."
"You first," Perrez urged and Bezul obliged.
There was a sameness to the ruins of Sanctuary. After beams burnt and walls fell, it could be difficult to say if the ruins had been a mansion or a hovel. For Bezul, it was enough that there was rubble to hide behind and see around in a deeply shadowed corner not far from the gaping doorway. He motioned to Perrez and Dace and they joined him.
Perrez clapped his brother on the arm and pointed at a tall man with gray-touched hair. His lips shaped the word Nareel. Bezul nodded and wished he could have asked Perrez if the aromacist regularly dressed in long black robes or tied an antique bronze breastplate over his chest—though, judging from the puzzled expression on his brother's face, the answer would have been No.
The "worms" at whom Nareel shouted were a pair of laborers— the ragged unskilled sort who sometimes showed up on Wriggle Way, hoping to exchange their sweat for a few padpols. They'd dug themselves a pit a few paces north of the ruins' center. Beyond them, three sell-swords who, together, wouldn't be a match for either Ammen or Jopze, if Ammen or Jopze weren't still in the Shambles. A sixth man stood east of the pit. Younger than Nareel and possibly his son, the sixth man also wore a long black robe, though without the shiny breastplate. He held a wicker-work triangle between his hands.
A bright-red lump dangled from the triangle's peak. Although the light wasn't good and the angle was worse, Bezul could see that the glass teardrop wasn't hanging straight down, but strained toward the pit, pulled by an invisible hand. Bezul's breath caught. Neither Perrez nor Dace had lied; the red lucky was filled with sorcery and, shite for sure, Nareel wasn't hunting for crabs!
Bezul raised an arm to clout his brother, but before the blow landed, he had worse problems to contend with. The Nighter was up and on the move toward his damned lucky. Without thinking, Bezul lunged and tackled the youth. He'd swear the ground shook when they struck the ground and thunder was not half so loud. Bezul pinched his eyes shut, convinced that when he opened them, he'd be looking up into the face of his death.
"Sorry," Dace said, the merest breath of voice in Bezul's ear. "Can't breathe."
So Bezul moved and there were no sell-swords standing over him, no death awaiting him. He and the Nighter crawled back to Perrez. The reason for their survival was simple enough: Nareel and his men had been moving, making their own noises, at precisely the right moments.
The two diggers had climbed out of the pit. They and the sell-swords now stood together on the opposite side of the pit. The sell-swords had their hands on the hilts of their weapons, but they weren't looking into the shadows where three spies were hiding. They were watching the pit and even at this distance, Bezul could see that they were afraid.
Bezul couldn't fault them. When he looked, there were faint bluish flames rising from the hole and he was frightened, too. The younger man who'd carried the attractor had exchanged it for a plain, bronze disk, polished to a mirror shine, which he held before his face like a shield as he slowly circled the pit against the sun. Nareel had his back to Bezul, but he was also circling and his face would come into view—or rather, his mask, because it was clear that he, too, had a disk in front of his face, tied around his skull rather than held in his hands. Both black-robed men were chanting, not in unison, not in Ilsigi. Bezul didn't recognize the language at all, and he'd heard a good many in the changing house. That added to his fear.
The bluish flames rising from the ground got brighter and sound, like a chorus of cicadas on a hot, summer night, emanated from them. Bezul looked at Perrez; Perrez was already looking at him. They didn't need words: The aromacist hadn't come to Sanctuary to look for gold, he'd come for sorcery and, thanks to Perrez, he'd found it. The world was full of sorcery, but sorcery that put fear in a man's heart wasn't welcome in Sanctuary. It was the one thing everyone agreed upon. Perrez had the decency to hang his head.
That was all Perrez did: He hung his head. He didn't run, he didn't hurl stones, didn't do anything to make the rubble near them shift; but shift it did and this time the noise attracted the sell-swords' attention. They advanced, drawing their weapons. Bezul grabbed his brother and the Nighter.
"Run!" he commanded them and shoved them toward the doorway as he cast a warning—not a prayer—to Father Ils in Paradise: Take care of Chersey; make her strong for the children. Don't blame her for my sins. Then he pulled the fighting knife out of his boot. It wouldn't serve against three swords, but it might give Perrez and Dace time to reach a street where the presence of passersby would protect them.
Bezul saw the sell-swords choose the doorway, not him, and somehow got in front of them, then desperation took control of his mind. He parried for his life—there was no thrusting with a knife against three swords—and parried a second time and a third, because he wasn't dead yet and he wouldn't stop fighting until he was. There were more swords, then fewer swords, screams, and a thunderclap so loud it flung Bezul into the wall.
His head cracked against the plastered brick; he lost consciousness for a heartbeat or two, just long enough for his heels to sink to the ground. A sell-sword charged toward him. Bezul could see his knife, flat across his palm, but his arm belonged to someone else when he tried to clench his hand around the hilt. It didn't matter. The sell-sword wasn't interested in him; he raced through the doorway without stopping to kill a defenseless man. The diggers staggered along behind the sell-sword which left two men standing in the ruins. Neither was a man Bezul had seen before.
Bezul shook his head. With the wall solidly behind him, he pushed himself upright and looked around. One of the sell-swords lay motionless in the rubble. By the angle of his head and the size of the blood pool beneath it, he wouldn't be getting up again. Nareel and his companion were down, too. The other victorious stranger—another man who preferred a one-color wardrobe: black boots, breeches, cloak, and tunic—prodded Nareel with his sword, trying to loosen the mask.
"What drew you here?" the brawler asked.
Bezul spotted the lucky red attractor, apparently unbroken. "That," he said, pointing to it.
The brawler's eyes all but disappeared in his scowl. "You're the Shambles changer, right? What's your tie to the sorcerer or a Beysib attractor?"
"It's a long story," Bezul answered with a weary nod. "I have a troublesome brother—"
A third stranger entered the ruins through the doorway. Short, shapeless and unbearded, Bezul decided the stranger was a man simply because he didn't want to believe that a woman could be so ugly. The new arrival dipped his chin to the brawler and the man in black then, with more agility a
nd speed than Bezul expected, leapt into the pit and out of it again, a deep blue enameled chest clutched like an infant in his arms.
"It's all here," he announced with a eunuch's boyish voice.
"You're froggin' sure?" the brawler asked.
The eunuch patted the chest lovingly. "Have no doubts, Cauvin. We're safe for another day… more than another day."
Cauvin. Bezul knew a Cauvin… knew of one, anyway. The stonemason's son from up on Pyrtanis Street, rescued from the palace after the Irrune slaughtered the Bloody Hand. The gossips said he was good with stone, better with his fists and not at all reluctant to use them.
But, perhaps, there was another Cauvin in Sanctuary.
His prize in hand, the eunuch waddled toward them. "One less problem to worry about, eh? No one stealing the sun, trapping it in a box?"
Cauvin didn't answer, didn't look like he particularly agreed. The eunuch giggled and for an instant his eyes glowed red, then he was gone.
"Wh—?" Bezul began.
"Don't ask," the brawler snarled, leaving Bezul with no doubt that there was only one Cauvin in Sanctuary. "What do you want to do with the bodies?" the black-booted swordsman called from Nareel's side.
The way out of the ruin was clear. A wise man—an ordinary man with a wife, children, and a business waiting for him—would take a few sideways steps and be gone. Bezul even took one of those sideways steps, before choosing against wisdom and striding toward the pit.
"This thing," he said, pointing at the red glass. "It belongs to a young man who lives out in Night Secrets. I'd like to give it back to him. Apparently, it keeps his crab trap full."
Cauvin and the swordsman stared at Bezul then at each other.
"Your call," the swordsman said and, to emphasize the point, busied himself untying the mask from Nareel's corpse. "Make up your mind. I can't stay here. They're expecting me across town. Never should have let you talk me into that one. Goes against my principles and then you tell me I've got to lose."
Cauvin paid no attention to his sarcastic companion. "Froggin' crabs?" he sputtered. "A froggin' Nighter's using a froggin' attractor to trap froggin' crabs?"