by Gregory Ashe
Chapter Five
Joaquim woke the next day to a pounding in his head. The pounding, he was quite sure, was going to tear his skull in two. It took several long moments, along with the realization that he could hear his father’s voice, for him to understand that there were, indeed, two poundings. Somehow they were combined, in an alliance so cruel that only Bel himself could have arranged it, to divide his head in half, and to continue pounding on those two halves until Joaquim died.
Finally he pulled himself from the down pillows, his throbbing head echoing the insistent knocking on his door, and lifted the latch. He collapsed back into bed. “What is it, Father?” he asked.
Even with his eyes closed, Joaquim could picture his father’s disapproving face—tanned from time checking his ships, lined from cares. Hair dark, but only through consistent and liberal use of dye. Eyes warm, but still sharp, somehow. Kind, firm voice.
“Get out of the Bel-taken bed and look at me, boy,” his father said, voice like a whip.
“Oh bloody, bloody Bel,” Joaquim moaned, sitting up in spite of his pounding head. “What do you want, Father?”
Maltinus Dolç looked as though he had not slept. Strands of gray hair that had escaped the dye stood up along his head. Dark stains marred his white shirt, a long tear running through the fine cotton of the left sleeve so that it billowed and exposed his bare elbow when he moved his arm. One smudge of dirt ran down his cheek.
“Do you know where Viane is?” Maltinus asked.
Joaquim shook his head, one hand pressed against his temple, and said, “No, of course not. Why in the world would I? I can’t even get the girl to come to dinner with you and Mother.” He took a deep breath, rubbing sweat from his forehead. “What’s this all about?”
Maltinus let out a sigh. “Thank goodness,” he said. “The Day-Sister smiles on our family, at least.”
“What?” Joaquim asked, trying to clear his mind of sleep. “Bel’s arse, Father, what’s wrong?”
“Viane never came home last night,” Maltinus said. “And her father told me in confidence that someone has taken almost all the money from his strongbox.” He ran one hand across his cheek, smudging the dirt. “Poor man, he doesn’t have any idea what to do. He won’t accuse Viane; I think he suspects her, but he hasn’t told the guards the money is missing.”
Joaquim felt sick, and not just from the after effects of the wine. “Sister of the Day watch over her,” he said in a low voice.
“I always said that girl was odd,” his mother’s voice came from the other room. “The way she never wanted to spend time with you, never would let you take her out around town. I thought a Jaecan had raised her, the way she acted, as though she were a man.”
“Mother,” Joaquim groaned. “That has nothing to do with her disappearing. She might have been kidnapped, the way she was sauntering around down by the docks like she’d grown up in the Gut.”
“When was she down by the docks?” Maltinus asked.
“Last night,” Joaquim said. “I was coming back with her, and then she took off, didn’t even say goodbye.”
“And you didn’t follow her?”
“Bel take me, Father, I didn’t know she was going to disappear. I thought she’d just gotten tired of me, as she always does.”
Maltinus started, noticing the ripped sleeve, and said, “Sister of the Day fend, I have to change and meet with a merchant; I’ve spent half the morning looking through warehouses for that girl. I figured she was somewhere down there; that family has more dock-rat in them than they let on.”
“I told you,” came his mother’s voice.
“Why don’t you get together some of your friends from the Order?” Maltinus said. “It’s about bloody time that all that money pays off somehow; you can head down to the docks and break some heads, see if anyone has seen her.”
“Just wait one moment.” Venias Dolç stuck her head in, chestnut hair in its immaculate waves, eyes wide. “There’s no need for you to go around causing trouble. The Order of Fernan Berart has no call to do that kind of work. We pay the city guard to handle these things.”
“Nonsense,” Maltinus said in his most business-like voice. “The boy’s done nothing but duel and drink since he joined the Order, and I want to see what I spent all that money on, aside from noble friends with little coin and less good grace. This family needs all the friends we can get. A pity about the girl and the money, though; a marriage might be the way out of this mess.” He turned, Joaquim all but forgotten, and ushered Venias out of the room in front of him.
In the other room, Joaquim heard his father say, “A wife is just the thing, my dear. What about Sacha’s daughter? She’s seen fourteen or fifteen Semenças.” Joaquim rolled over and tried to force their voices out of his head. The girl in question was practically a child, with a horse’s face and a thin, wiry body. A gull next to Viane’s kingfisher, but that would not stop his parents from arranging a match with the first girl they could find. Provided her father’s pockets are deep enough. He needed to find Viane and fast. A marriage contract could be drawn up in a day. Joaquim would not have been surprised if his mother had one half-drafted in her bureau already.
In spite of his newfound urgency, Joaquim took his time getting dressed; he washed his face, found a clean blue shirt, the color of summer sky where it touched the horizon, and a cape of a darker hue, ocean water. Last of all, the shining steel band, marked with the falling star of Fernan Berart, around his upper arm. When he was certain his long brown hair was not standing up and looked somewhat presentable, Joaquim made his way into the front room. He dropped the red amber on the table, letting it crack against the wood. His parents stopped their conversation and stared at the stone, and then at him.
“No marriages today,” he said. “That should buy us a few weeks time. Enough for me to find Viane and work this out.”
“Where did you get this?” Maltinus said, his voice hard.
“No marriage,” Venias cried, her smooth white hands going to her hair. “My treasure, these things take time. We must start today, if we’re going to have everything ready—”
“No,” Joaquim said. “And don’t worry about where the stone came from. I earned it, Father. Working. Sell it, today, but discreetly.”
It was a measure of his father’s desperation that Maltinus Dolç closed his hand over the stone, although his eyes remained hard.
“No marriages,” Joaquim repeated. He left the house before his mother could protest.
His home sat a few blocks east of Fisher’s Lane, in a respectable neighborhood that sat far above the Gut. The Gut, the dock district that sagged around the city like a worn-out girdle. Where Viane is curled up with a gang of smugglers. By the time he reached Fisher’s Lane, Joaquim was beginning to doubt his own resolution in finding Viane, but he pushed forward, wiping the sweat from his forehead with one arm and struggling to keep his stomach under control. The summer sun, almost at its peak, told him that Zirolo and Etio would most likely be at the dueling hall—that is, he thought, if Zirolo has recovered from yesterday’s celebration and Etio from his wounded pride. The thought of dueling made Joaquim’s stomach flop, and he prayed neither man decided to press a challenge today. The thought made him nervous enough that he stopped by Katrin’s wine-house to pick up his sword and dueling dagger, and—as it turned out—to pay the bill that they had been left in pawn for.
“A glass of wine?” Katrin asked as he belted on the rapier. “You look like you had a hard night. Where’d you go after you left?”
Joaquim smiled at the slender, middle-aged woman. “That’s like a wife asking her husband where he’s been, Katrin,” he said. “There’s never a good answer.”
“If you won’t tell me,” she said, “at least stay for a drink.”
“Sorry, beautiful lady,” he said. “I’m afraid I have important work to do today.”
“Where are you going?” she asked. “Is another rich merchant’s wife in need of companionship?�
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“Figuring out where I’m going is liable to be the hardest part of the work,” he said with a grin. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”
He left while she was still laughing. Where could Viane be? The question had no logical answer, but then, neither did the events of the previous night. Through his headache, Joaquim tried to reason out events as he wandered the streets. Not money. She had already stolen a great deal from her father, and she had no need of money anyway. And why not return and pretend to know nothing about the missing money? Absence was almost certain evidence of guilt. And where would she go?
He stopped to sit on a low stone wall in front of a house, feeling the stones’ warmth through the thin wool of his trousers. His head pounded and Joaquim feared he would sick up. The crowd of Fisher’s Lane buzzed around him, filling his ears with snatches of conversation, the creak of wagon wheels, the whispered sound of cloth against cloth that, multiplied a thousand times, was like the breathing of some great, invisible beast. Joaquim leaned back, looking down across the city and out into the harbor, where great shards of sunlight floated on the water. Where could she bloody be?
Something caught his eye. A man’s face, bobbing between other people in the crowd. Nothing particularly remarkable about it, but it was familiar. The crowd parted, and Joaquim saw the man’s long, loose trousers. The trousers of a sailor. That meant nothing in itself; Apsia was a city of sailors, and Joaquim saw hundreds of them every day, in all parts of the city. Few sailors changed their clothes simply in order to fit in with the local fashion, but the trousers tugged at his memory. It took Joaquim a moment longer, a series of heartbeats, until he could place the man’s face. The sailor from the ship last night.
Joaquim rose casually after the man had passed him and followed him through the crowd. The sailor was not difficult to follow; he held a steady pace, and did not seem worried about being followed. Most likely going to a bloody whorehouse, Joaquim thought. Although the Night Sister take me if I know why he’s leaving the Gut; maybe he has expensive tastes. With the sack of gold that Viane had handed him last night, the man could probably buy the whorehouse itself.
Up and up the man walked, following Fisher’s Lane straight through the city. Joaquim kept about twenty paces behind the sailor, staying on the far side of the street. Many of the traders moved out of his way when they saw the steel armband, and that brought an ironic smile to his face as he passed them; the Order’s reputation precedes itself, Joaquim thought. For all of the Order’s prestige among the merchants and the nobles as a repository of skilled warriors—even if they were skilled only in the dueling ring—Joaquim knew the Order was far from prestigious in their accomplishments. Unless you count drinking yourself under the table, roughing up people in the Gut, and squandering family money as great achievement, he thought with a grin that turned to envy. That life would end quickly for him, either in poverty or marriage, if he did not act fast himself.
His train of thought broke suddenly. The sailor had turned down a wide boulevard that intersected Fisher’s Lane, and Joaquim turned to follow. He saw with surprise how far they had come; they were on the Tacline, the highest hill in the city, surrounded by vast buildings of marble—the palaces of nobles and merchant-princes mixed with buildings of government, their copper roofs shining like sheeted fire. Houses lined the boulevard, each one surrounded by massive stone walls and with an iron gate large enough for a carriage to pass through.
The sailor stopped at one of the mansions, yanking the cord of a bell. Joaquim hesitated; there was not much traffic on the street, and no stalls or shops where he could pause to hide himself. He slowed his pace, but continued walking, hoping that he could buy himself enough time to see what happened. The sailor turned and gave him a long look as Joaquim passed by on the other side of the street. Joaquim flushed and took a few hurried steps.
A man in the black houppelande of a majordomo appeared at the gate, and the sailor slid a piece of paper through the bars. Joaquim craned his neck to see as he continued past the sailor, but the majordomo disappeared, and the sailor turned, catching Joaquim’s eyes.
Joaquim whipped his head forward and started walking faster. Only when he reached the end of the block did he realize what a fool he had been. Why didn’t I just act naturally? He turned down a side street and turned again down the alley that ran behind the manors. Waste several inches deep, both sewage and garbage, covered the stones of the narrow corridor between the buildings. Bloody Bel, Joaquim thought, this is worse than the Gut. There were laws for the proper disposal of waste, but they were rarely followed in the Gut. And, apparently, on the Tacline as well, he thought with a grimace.
No help for it. The place made him want to visit a bath-house just from looking at it, but he could not go back down that boulevard again, not with a chance of running into that sailor, and he needed to know who lived in that manor. He set one boot down, counting it as ruined the moment the fine, polished leather disappeared beneath the waste with a ripple. The smell that rose to meet him made him dizzy, but he clenched his teeth and took another step. Slowly, accompanied by his own splashes—the brown trousers were a lost article too, by this point—he made his way down the alley, keeping one hand on the rough, unfinished stone of the outer manor wall to keep his footing on the slippery pavement.
A splash alerted him. Joaquim turned, glancing over one shoulder. The sailor stood behind him, a long, narrow-bladed dagger in one hand. The man lunged toward him. Joaquim twisted and lurched forward, moving more out of instinct than any training. The sailor slipped in the sewage, and his lunge went askew. The blade hit the wall with the grate of metal on stone.
Hands shaking, Joaquim drew his dueling dagger and rapier. The sailor was back on his feet. He stabbed again with the dagger. Joaquim parried, barely blocking the thrust. The sailor cursed and drew the knife back to throw it. Joaquim thrust with the rapier.
Resistance, flesh against steel, and then release with sudden tearing. The point slid into the man’s chest, then flashed out again, the dark red blood dripping, invisible, into the sewage below. With a look of surprise the sailor let the knife fall and slid off the rapier into the filthy water of the alley.
Joaquim stood there for a moment, numb. He had never killed a man before. The blade wavered in his hand. Red drops sprinkled the sailor’s face below. Joaquim sheathed both weapons with trembling hands. He could not bring himself to wipe the blood off, to touch the other man, to go any closer to the waste below.
Then he vomited, leaning forward so that it ran down the alley, a clump of it pooling in the space between the dead sailor’s arm and body. Joaquim staggered down the alley, away from the body. He caught a glimpse of the house he had been looking for, the copper roof shining over the edge of the wall. He did not stop to investigate. Fresh air met him as he reached the edge of the alley, along one of the streets than ran parallel to Fisher’s Way, but it did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest.