Strong Wine

by A. J. Demas

  “Damiskos!” he heard someone shout, as he was speaking to Tio the landlord. It was Ino, standing below the dais and waving urgently.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Tio.

  Ino shoved aside a captain from the Sixth Colonial, who had been waiting to speak to Damiskos.

  “Damiskos! You have to come. Your brother is in trouble.”

  Instantly she had all his attention. “What kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know. Your parents are outside—your mother’s crying. One of Timiskos’s friends came to tell them that something has happened.”

  “Something” could only be that Timiskos’s debt had been called in, and the creditors weren’t taking no for an answer. But Damiskos had given Timiskos a sum of money the day before, and assured him that there was more coming, enough to pay the full amount.

  “Right.” Damiskos nodded. “I’m on my way.”

  He looked over at Varazda on the other side of the dais, still deep in conversation with Eulios.

  Chariton touched his shoulder. “I’ll tell him where you’ve gone,” he said.

  Damiskos retrieved his sword, which he had left with the guards at the entrance to the courtroom, and made his way back out through the back passage to the porch. By the time he got there—most of a day spent on his feet had taken its toll, and he was not moving very fast—Aradne and Nione seemed to have found out what was going on from Ino, and caught up to him.

  “If there is anything we can do to help … ” said Nione.

  “Where did they go?” Varazda asked, rhetorically, as he stood on the empty steps of the Hall of Justice with Chariton and the radical philosopher who was still, for some reason, hanging around.

  “I know only that it was something to do with Damiskos’s brother,” Chariton supplied apologetically. “Perhaps they went to the family home.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know where that is?”

  “Um … roughly.”

  He made an effort to pull himself together. He did know where the Temnons’ apartment was; he had found his way there from Aradne’s house multiple times, once after dark. He didn’t entirely know where the Hall of Justice was in relation to Aradne’s house, but that was not an insurmountable problem. It was just that he was very tired, and, if he was honest, he had been looking forward to falling into Dami’s arms and perhaps being lifted off his feet and swung around in a celebratory embrace.

  Instead, there was another long slog from the agora back up the Goulina Hill, to arrive at the familiar barbershop, shuttered now in the deepening twilight. In front of the door at the side that led to the Temnons’ apartment, several porters were busy piling furniture into a wagon. Varazda recognized one of the wicker chairs from Timiskos’s tasteful seating area, and one of the potted trees was carried down after it.

  “They’re taking the furniture?” Varazda said out loud, puzzled. “But we told Timiskos the money was coming.”

  Chariton looked away, embarrassed. Wealthy Pseuchaians always seemed to think debt was somehow in poor taste.

  Varazda spotted Damiskos’s father sitting with his head in his hands on the barbershop doorstep. Varazda approached.

  Philion Temnon looked up. His face looked empty, forlorn. “Varasdes. Gods. This is all my fault.”

  “What is your fault?” Varazda found he had folded his arms sternly as he stood looking down at Damiskos’s father.

  “They took Timi. I never imagined it would come to this. The debts … these gangsters, they threaten all kinds of things, but I thought they never followed through.”

  Philion dropped his head into his hands again. Dami’s mother came down the stairs from the apartment, followed by her maid, who was in tears.

  “Mistress, all your nice things!”

  “Shh-shh, Gaia, we can always get new things—don’t worry about that. Oh, Varasta! I’m so glad to see you. Damiskos has gone to get a horse … ”

  That was when Dami himself rode up. Varazda had never seen him on a horse before, and couldn’t help admiring the sight even under the circumstances.

  “Darling,” Dami said when he had dismounted, “I’m so glad you caught up with us. I wish I hadn’t had to—” And he broke off to seize Varazda and do the lifting in his arms and swinging around that Varazda had imagined, following it with one of his most devastating kisses. “I’m so proud of you. No, that doesn’t even come close. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real.”

  He set Varazda on his feet and said, in Zashian, “I have to go get Timi. The message we received was confused, but it seems he might have been taken down to the Lower Goulina docks. Do you want to wait here or come with me?”

  “I want to come with you, of course.”

  Dami nodded. He mounted the hired horse again and held out a hand to pull Varazda up behind him.

  They rode fast through the deserted streets and arrived at the river docks in the pitch dark. They could see some shuffling activity and the faint light of a muffled lantern down at one end of the dock.

  “You stay mounted,” Dami whispered, sliding down off the horse.

  Varazda could just make out Dami approaching the end of the pier, and another figure coming up it to meet him. The lantern-light gleamed on the newcomer’s bright red hair, but he had a scarf pulled over the lower half of his face and was otherwise just a dark shape.

  “Stand down,” said Dami evenly. The light caught the edge of his sword blade. “I’ve come for Timiskos.”

  There was a moment’s tense pause. “Just, uh, just a second,” said the redhead nervously.

  Dami cocked his head, lowering his sword a fraction. “Soukios?”

  “Oh gods,” moaned another figure who had come up behind the redhead, “it’s the brother, isn’t it? Soukios, show yourself, you dumbfuck, before he kills us all!”

  Dami had lowered his sword entirely but did not sheathe it. “I’m not currently planning on killing anybody,” he said, “but I’d like to know what’s going on. Where’s Timiskos?”

  The redhead, Soukios, had pulled down his scarf, and the other young man had unmuffled the lantern. They were joined cautiously by a couple of others who had been lurking on the pier.

  “Uh, the thing is, he’s not here,” said Soukios. “We were—it was—the whole plan went sideways.”

  “The plan,” Dami repeated. “Which was?”

  “Just, you know, to scare his—your—parents. You weren’t supposed to show up. You were supposed to be busy being, uh, being tried for murder? That’s why we were going to do it now.”

  “You were staging a kidnapping,” Dami interpreted. He gave an angry sigh. “I know where he got that idea.”

  “Yeah, but then, see,” one of the other young men cut in, “Pandares’s men came to take away your parents’ stuff, and I guess they thought there was a ransom to be had, so they … they took him off us.”

  “So what you’re saying is your pretend kidnapping gave the real gangsters ideas.”

  “Yeah. Basically, yeah.”

  “We didn’t put up much of a fight,” Soukios admitted. “But we were going after them, to, uh … ” He gestured uncertainly.

  “Where have they gone?” Dami prompted.

  “We think they’re at Philo’s. He has a back room that he lets them use—I mean, he doesn’t have much of a choice, with the way things are. But we think they’ve gone there.”

  Dami must have been giving them a sceptical look, because the redhead added hastily, “There’s a river door, we were looking for a boat to get to it, but we’ve had no luck.”

  “Right,” said Dami, turning back toward where Varazda was waiting. He slid his sword back into its sheath. “We’re going in the front door.”

  Philo’s was the wine shop where Damiskos had been drinking with his brother the afternoon before he was arrested. It was quite close; they didn’t really need the horse, but Varazda seemed tired, and Damiskos was glad to be able to let him ride.

  “Not that it wasn’t
a terrible plan,” Varazda said, as they arrived at the lit front of the wine shop, “but it did work. Your parents seemed quite shaken.”

  “They’ll bounce back,” said Damiskos wryly. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Right, we’ll have to play this by ear since we don’t know what we’re going to find in there. I’ll go in first—”

  “Perhaps both of us should go in quietly and order something at the bar to get our bearings,” Varazda suggested.

  “Divine Terza. Yes, of course. And I’m supposed to be the tactician.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Varazda, patting his shoulder, “but I’m the spy.”

  They tied their horse and entered the wine shop casually. They went to the counter and ordered drinks. Damiskos spotted the door to the back room, almost hidden behind a huge guard, who stood leaning against the doorpost, cleaning his nails with the point of a knife. He hadn’t been there the last time Damiskos had visited the wine shop with his brother, and from the looks that the waiters gave him as they had to step around him, his presence was not exactly welcome.

  “Want me to distract him?” Varazda asked, inclining his head minutely toward the guard.

  Damiskos hesitated. “How? I don’t want you to have to do anything you don’t like.”

  Varazda smiled warmly. “Just a bit of light flirting. I like the ‘mistaken identity’ gambit myself—you know, pretend to have taken them for someone you know, and see where it goes from there.”

  Damiskos nodded. “Understood.”

  Varazda picked up his drink and sauntered over to the guard, loosening his hair and shaking it out with a nicely judged nonchalance, as if he might not have been aware of all the eyes in the bar swivelling toward him. Damiskos watched him strike up a conversation with the guard and draw him gradually away from the door, asking some question that required the big man to walk out toward the front of the shop, pointing and gesturing as if giving him directions.

  Damiskos wasted no time in slipping behind the counter and through the door that the man had been guarding. He closed it noiselessly behind him. He was in a narrow, paved passage, with a heavily barred gate onto an alley to his right, and opposite him another door. To his left was a blank wall. He drew his sword and banged on the door with the pommel.

  A skinny, scowling young man in a dirty mariner’s cap opened the door and jumped back with alarm when he saw Damiskos. Behind him three other men stood and sat around a wooden table. Through an arch in the far wall Damiskos could make out other figures. The rooms were dark, with small windows, lit only by a couple of tapers on the walls. He could not immediately spot Timiskos.

  That meant he needed to give Timiskos the opportunity to spot him.

  “I’m here for my brother,” he announced, stepping inside the room, sword up.

  “Damiskos?” There was a scuffle from the back room. “Let me go!”

  “Let him go,” Damiskos agreed.

  “Who’s gonna make us?” asked a deep voice from the other side of the table.

  “Why do you clowns always ask that?” Damiskos growled.

  He strode forward, parrying a knife-strike from a bearded man who emerged from the shadows to his left.

  “Damiskos, don’t!” Timiskos called out. “There are too many of them!” He grunted as someone punched him. Damiskos could see him now through the archway, between a big redhead and another skinny blond sailor, who were both holding onto him.

  The man in front of Damiskos swung an infantry-style short sword. Damiskos dodged, bringing his own blade down on the man’s sword-arm. It wasn’t a severe enough cut to disable him, but it did cause him to lose his grip on his sword. Damiskos caught the hilt and wrenched it out of his hand.

  Fighting in the dark was not ideal, and the numbers were certainly against him. But he had two swords, and they were in an enclosed space—a disadvantage to his opponents, but not to him. He’d had a lot of practice recently fighting in an enclosed space.

  His main problem was that, in the heart of Pheme and freshly acquitted of murder, he could not afford to kill anyone.

  The owner of the deep voice came around from behind the table, casually hefting a small wooden bench as if it were made of wicker. Damiskos avoided a knife-strike from his immediate opponent, flipped both swords in his hands and dealt him a pair of solid blows with the flats of the blades. The man staggered, dazed, and Damiskos smashed the hilt of his borrowed sword into his nose. Deep Voice swung the bench at Damiskos’s head.

  Damiskos caught the edge of the bench on its way down against the blades of his swords, but as he was braced like this, the skinny blond who had opened the door darted in, his knife aimed at Damiskos’s stomach. Damiskos sidestepped neatly so that the bench came down on the knife-wielder’s head. The blond went sprawling, and the man whose nose Damiskos had already broken tripped over him.

  The man with the bench swore in a loud rumble and swung again, but Damiskos had used the confusion to slip past him and duck under the table. Dropping his borrowed sword (it was an inferior weapon, weighted all wrong), he pushed the table up behind him, making a couple of cups slide down to crash on the floor. He gripped one leg of the table and swung it around like a shield to catch another impact from the bench.

  In front of him, Timiskos had wrenched free from one of his captors and was reaching for the man’s sword.

  “Guda!” someone shouted at a very young man standing frozen in the corner facing Damiskos. “What in the name of Nepharos are you doing? Attack him!”

  Guda, who was well illuminated because he was standing under one of the tapers, looked sick. Damiskos looked him in the eye and shook his head firmly. The young man stayed where he was.

  Timiskos had secured the sword, but his other captor had got him firmly by the upper arms now, so all he could do was wave the blade in short, ineffectual arcs. Damiskos manoeuvred his table to block a knife-strike in one direction and another swing of the wooden bench in the other. Then he pushed back, smashing the table into the bench-wielder with his whole weight against it. The man went down—barely—with a crash and a startled bellow. Damiskos just managed to catch his balance and right himself while hanging onto the table-leg.

  The red-haired man holding Timiskos had got him to drop the sword, and from somewhere in the room behind them a new figure emerged: a well-groomed man in a clean mantle, whose face Damiskos could not see clearly.

  In a ringing voice, but sounding slightly bored, he said, “Just kill him.”

  The man whose sword Timiskos had taken glanced at his boss and then shrugged. He reached down to pick up the dropped sword. Damiskos was still several paces away, with Timiskos and the man holding him blocking his way, and the terrified Guda edging out of his corner, knife in hand.

  “My brother will kill you!” Timiskos yelled in defiance as the sailor raised his weapon.

  A cold, wet breeze blew through from the back room. The door to the river had opened at some point, while everyone had been distracted.

  The man in the mantle gave a choking grunt and grabbed at his neck. There was a rope around it, and behind him, streaming water and pulling the garrotte tight against his throat, was Varazda.

  His eye makeup made dark streaks down his face, his wet hair was plastered to his bare shoulders, and his tunic clung to him in sodden folds. In the flickering light of the tapers, he looked like an angry river-nymph risen up to claim her prey. That may have been what flashed through the mind of the man about to stab Timiskos, because he let out a shriek, stumbled backward into the outer room, and crashed into Guda.

  Damiskos leapt forward, knocking the red-bearded man holding Timiskos on the side of the head. He staggered and loosed his hold, and Damiskos grabbed his brother’s arm.

  The bench-swinging giant was on his feet by this time, and had seized Damiskos’s abandoned table in both hands. He hefted it over his head as if he intended to throw it. The man Varazda was strangling gave an indignant gurgle. Damiskos had time to wonder whether Varazda had ever actually stra
ngled anyone before—he was doing a pretty good job. Then Varazda heaved the man up and out the doorway, into the river.

  One of the underlings laughed in a sputtering guffaw. Someone was yelling at the giant to put down the table, for the love of Nepharos; someone else tried to take the table away from him, and got it dropped on his foot instead. Their boss, flailing in the water below the doorstep, was shouting, “Get—me—out—of this—you sons of goat-fuckers!”

  Damiskos reached for Varazda’s hand, and herding Timiskos between them they made for the outer door, unbarred the gate in the passage, and emerged on the street in front of the wine shop.

  “Where did you—how did you—gods, I’m so sorry,” Timiskos was gasping as they hurried away.

  Damiskos unfastened his cloak and slung it around Varazda’s shoulders.

  “Got to get you warm,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said Varazda, who was visibly shivering.

  “It’s not really the weather for swimming.”

  Not to mention that Varazda must have spent much of the day running around the city finding evidence for Damiskos’s trial, and he’d been exhausted before he ended up in the river. Damiskos had seen men die under similar circumstances if they didn’t warm up quickly enough.

  “Didn’t mean to go swimming,” Varazda admitted. “Was creeping along a ledge—back of the building—fell in.”

  Timiskos was still trying to ask how they had found him or why they had come for him, and apologizing over and over. Damiskos shushed him. There were footsteps behind them, and shouting voices. They were being followed.

  “Like your cloak,” said Varazda, tugging the thick fabric up under his chin. “Always wanted to be wrapped up in one of these.”

  “Who’s that?” Timiskos asked suddenly, pointing.

  A couple of figures were coming purposefully down a flight of steps from a street above, heading toward them.

  “Damiskos?” one of the figures called, just as someone else arrived at the top of the steps with a lantern. “Pharastes? Is that you?”