by Lane Robins
“Open your mouth, Gilly,” Maledicte said, sitting on the arm of Gilly’s chair. “I’ll feed you.” Distantly, he trusted Gilly would play along, but Ani spread Her wings and the feeling of imminent bloodshed was so pleasurable, he smiled.
Gilly raised his head, parted his lips, and Maledicte tipped the oyster down. “Good?”
“Yes,” Gilly said, swallowing, lips pale.
Maledicte kissed his forehead, and as he did so, the solicitor said, “Not content with one man? You are a wanton creature—”
The quick, slicing kiss of the ragged oyster shell across his neck shocked him into silence, into groping for the trigger. The wound was not deep; the breadth of Gilly’s body and the chair robbed Maledicte of a killing blow. The solicitor shoved his seat back, a hand covering the bloody line. Maledicte swung again before the solicitor could bring the pistol to bear, and the second blow was messier, deeper, and quite fatal.
Maledicte slammed the shell into the solicitor’s gasping mouth, silencing any attempt at an outcry, and then shoved him over the back of his chair.
“Gilly, get the doors,” Maledicte said.
Gilly started out of his shock and darted to the doors, locking them. Janus seized the pistol from the solicitor’s thrashing hands. “Mind the trigger,” Maledicte warned. They stepped back; the man convulsed in silence, boots kicking at the overturned chair until Janus righted it.
Gilly’s hands were at his mouth, shaking. He picked up Maledicte’s wineglass, and drained its contents. Still, his hands trembled.
Maledicte joined him, reached out for his hands; Gilly drew back, his eyes on Maledicte’s bloody fingers. “Go then. Flee if you must. But it had to be done.” Maledicte toed the corpse; the solicitor made a spasming gasp. Maledicte wrinkled his nose in distaste. Gilly paled and fled.
Janus settled back into his seat and began picking through his cooling dinner. “I must do something about Roach. I should have done it when he told me I’d killed you. But I’ll do it before I go. The solicitor was right about that. Roach does love his coin.”
“Roach was my friend.” Maledicte picked up a cloth, wet it in the finger bowl, and started washing his hands.
“Roach’s tongue is a danger. Those letters are a danger.” Janus’s voice soothed and coaxed.
“Roach’s probably lost them already,” Maledicte said. “Or drunk away the coin meant to frank them. But if you worry so, go find him and bring him back here.”
“Then there’d be two who knew your identity and soon after, multitudes, when Roach slips your secret to Gilly, to the maids, to the gossips on the street.”
“We could warn him not to talk.”
But Maledicte knew that Roach’s discretion was not to be relied upon. Even as a child, he let information slip at the worst moments. Might as well expect Ella to learn modesty. “We could send him away?”
“Where?” Janus said. “He can barely manage the skills of a Relict rat.”
Maledicte closed his eyes, his heart pounding. Janus could have been killed. Or Gilly, if the pistol had misfired. “We haven’t time to hunt him down. Not now. We have to dispose of the solicitor tonight.”
“The timing is unfortunate,” Janus agreed. “But inescapable. Intercepting the letters before they’re sent, taking them from Roach, is feasible. Intercepting them after they’re sent is not. The solicitor gave us no word on the recipients. Dantalion, Aris, Echo, Last? Who knows how many? But Roach is easy; you could lure Roach out.”
“Go back to the Relicts and chance being recognized? How many men do you want to see dead tonight? I’ve killed one man already.” And night in the Relicts meant Ella would be trolling. What if she saw him, recognized him—would she see Vornatti lingering on his skin, know what he had become? “If you must go after Roach, you’ll do it on your own.”
The doors opened and Gilly returned, pale-faced but steady. “I sent the butler on an errand.” His mouth twisted. “I blamed your eccentric desire for some absente and never mind about the hour. We’ll have to get the body out the door—” Gilly blanched again, and Maledicte went around the table to see what had disturbed him.
Janus peered over the table and swore.
“What a mess. Indoor bloodlettings are so unforgiving without the earth to soak up the fluids.” Janus joined them, and looked down at the corpse. “Still, dead is dead. That’s the crux of it. Gilly, get the floor cleaned before the blood sets. Mal, get his feet—no, wait.” Janus cleared the table, then yanked the tablecloth free and laid it out on the floor. “Now.”
Janus and Maledicte levered the body onto the cloth; Janus went through the solicitor’s pocket with quick, agile fingers, sorting coin and rubbish, before allowing Maledicte to wind the cloth tight. He handed the mixed pile of currency to Gilly, who looked at it with horror before dumping it onto the table.
“Where to?” Maledicte said. “The docks and the sea beyond?”
“No,” Gilly said, his voice ragged. “Too many eyes.”
“Loath as I am to agree with Gilly, he’s right,” Janus said. “The docks rarely sleep, or the Relicts. Wrap him tight and I will take him courting with me.”
Gilly asked, “Will you really do that?”
“What else is there to do? Bury him out back? His ghost will not haunt me, I assure you.” Janus bent, checked for seepage.
“Gilly, go confine the maids to their quarters so we can fetch water from the laundry,” Maledicte said.
With the servants out of the way, the cleaning went faster; Gilly brought water and soap and removed the blood from the carpet, while Maledicte and Janus practiced winding cloths. When they had finished, they headed to the attic to locate a suitable trunk.
Alone in the room, Gilly was aware of his hands shaking again, pale red to the wrists. He kept tasting the sweet firmness of the oyster in his throat, followed by the sound of the solicitor’s blood-soaked gasp. Gilly swore off blackmail on the spot.
Janus’s casual appropriation of the solicitor’s purse and pistol lingered with him, the absentminded way he wiped the smeared gore on his fingers on the man’s shirt. He contrasted it to Maledicte’s hungry stillness and sudden violence and wondered, not for the first time, which of them was more dangerous.
The slam of the trunk hitting the exposed floorboards jarred him from his thoughts.
“There,” Janus said, hefting the body up across his shoulders with deceptive ease. “Not a leak to be sprung.” He forced the body into the trunk and snapped the lid closed. Bending, he picked up the trunk itself and carried it out toward the carriage house.
Gilly scrubbed at the carpet; the wet cloth, pink-tinged now, shredded.
“Gilly, it’s enough,” Maledicte said, kneeling beside him.
“I just don’t want to be able to see the stain.”
“A new rug is in order,” Maledicte said. “I find I no longer like the looks of it myself. But it could have been Janus’s blood spilled there, or yours, or mine. The fact that he underestimated me made him no less of a danger. I acted as I had to. Forgive me for involving you?”
Wadding up the cloth in his hands, Gilly nodded.
“Will you do one thing more for me tonight?”
“Yes,” Gilly said, hearing Lizette in his mind—why love him?—and he could not answer it now either, sick to his stomach and frightened, yet he met Maledicte’s dark eyes, and the tallies began: freedom, friendship, money, and the strange workings that created desire where there should be none.
“Three deaths to my hand now, and I am no closer to killing the earl of Last than I was three years ago,” Maledicte said, quietly. “But I tell you, Gilly, no matter the outcome of this marriage, I will have Last dead within the cold season. But I must have my chance at him; Janus feels there is another danger. Will you go with him tonight? Aid him as you can?”
Maledicte’s eyes were glossy; Gilly could not tell if they were wet with unshed tears, or with anticipation. But, bloody rags in hand, he swore again to aid Maledicte.
>
GILLY LOOKED OVER HIS SHOULDER, eliciting an exasperated sigh from Janus. “What are you expecting to see? The solicitor climbing free from the trunk? You’ll have us off the road.”
“Why did we bring it along?” Gilly said.
“Do you think Mal wanted it underfoot?” Janus said. “We’ll start with the docks. I wager Roach has his roots there. When I saw him, he was cleaning salt from his clothes. He’s a skinny thing and dark, taller than Mal, but not nearly so pretty.”
“I met a boy with that name some months ago,” Gilly said. “A would-be thief working in a tavern called the Horned Bull.”
Janus’s hands tensed so tightly around the edge of the seat that they seemed carved of alabaster. “You spoke to him?” His voice, as quietly knotted as his hands, made Gilly nervous.
“Not much,” Gilly said, trying to make that unaccountable anger disappear, feeling out his words in increments of Janus’s stiffening or loosening hands. “He offered to housebreak at DeGuerre’s for a fee. I turned him down.”
“Nothing else?”
“He mentioned you. Said you taught him to read. He doesn’t like you. Said you’d killed his girl. How are you going to get him to come to you?” Gilly said, clopping his tongue at the horses as they shied from a drunk staggering down the cobblestone streets.
Janus sighed. “He’s greedy and lazy and undoubtedly in need of coin. I expect he’s whoring somewhere, passing time and waiting for the solicitor to return.”
“You think him a whore?” Gilly could not reconcile the feral, defiant boy in the street outside the tavern with a pliant whore. “He seemed too thin for that.”
“They’re not all like your pretty one,” Janus said, “put in gilded rooms where they eat sweets and wait for their men. The Relict whores are so different you might not even recognize them as human. They’re not.” The bitter edge to Janus’s voice kept Gilly silent.
“Mal fell ill once when we were children; I thought he would die. He couldn’t stop coughing and shivered so violently that I could barely hold him. Ella dosed him with enough Laudable to damn near drown him because his moaning and shaking was scaring away her customers, who couldn’t tell Relict fever from plague. I spent the night with him in my arms, curled beneath the bed, wondering if he was going to wake, and Ella spent the night fucking above us. One sailor after another. That was before she realized Mal was going to be beautiful. Then she cared. But I cared first, and Mal is mine.”
The whole speech was a near rasp, so choked with rage that Gilly felt it was Maledicte telling him this slice of nightmare. He drove on wordlessly; he barely knew how to soothe Maledicte; Janus was a mystery still.
Beside him, Janus’s ragged breathing steadied, but he didn’t speak again until they were at the Horned Bull. “Go see if Roach still works there.”
Gilly clambered off the bench and went inside. He nodded at the taverner and slipped into the kitchens.
“What do you want?” A heavyset woman looked up from the hearth where she was stirring a fish stew so old and salty Gilly could smell it across the room.
“Looking for Roach,” Gilly said.
“He don’t work here anymore. Not that he ever did more than rob our customers when they got too castaway to notice. Lift your purse, did he?”
“Something like that,” Gilly said.
“Try down by the cheap brothels. He’s like to be trying his hand at robbing drunken sailors. Sooner or later, he’ll try the wrong man, get hisself killed. If Echo’s Particulars don’t catch him first. Stupid rat.”
Gilly nodded his thanks, and continued out the back door, circling around the building, checking the shadows. A black-haired young man in cheap clothing stepped out of an expensive carriage, drawing Gilly’s attention. The boy tossed a luna from palm to palm, and blew a kiss after the retreating coach. “Mal—” Gilly breathed, but even as he did so, he realized his error. The boy vamped at him, all painted lips and eyes, and headed into the tavern.
“Another Itarusine sailor’s get, I’d imagine,” Janus said, his voice velvet and sudden in Gilly’s ear. “But a startling resemblance, nonetheless.”
Gilly jumped. “Yes,” he said.
Janus flashed a quick, malicious smile. “Though if I were you, I’d not tell Mal you mistook a rented boy for him.”
“I’m not a fool,” Gilly said.
Janus raised a brow. “What did they say, within?”
“That he had turned to robbing brothel customers.” He climbed up onto the bench. Janus joined him and took up the reins.
“I bet he’s not even stripping them of their boots,” Janus said, urging the horses into a bone-jarring trot across the cobbles. “Let’s finish this and go home. I shudder to think what Maledicte has done to the house this time.”
“He has no regrets over the solicitor’s death, and he’s past the worst part of accepting your marriage. What is there to upset him?”
“With Maledicte, sometimes I think it’s the shifting of the wind.”
Gilly turned his head as they came onto Sybarite Street, smiled at the sight of the familiar door painted with the sailing ship.
“Thinking of your girl?” Janus said. “What’s her name?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gilly said, leery of Janus’s interest.
Janus drove, avoiding the whores advertising in the street, avoiding the clusters of young men daring each other to bravery in the fields of love, the hired whisperers who haunted the street, murmuring of places where one could go to buy smuggled Itarusine whiskey or other illicit imports, and as the street grew darker and less well-kept, avoiding the rubble they could barely see. “Gilly, get down. Look for him. If you find him, don’t waste time chatting, but bring him back. I’d do it, but I think you would not like being left with the trunk.”
“No,” Gilly agreed, dropping from the side of the carriage, and wandering into the dark alone, hunting for a half-remembered pickpocket. Abstraction lent an air of drunkenness he hadn’t intended, and the first he knew of Roach’s presence was the skinny wrist reaching for his purse, even as the stick missed Gilly’s head entirely. “Stop that,” Gilly said, grabbing the stick, the thin-boned wrist with practiced quickness.
“I remember you. What do you want?” Roach rubbed his wrist ruefully. “Caught me just as quick this time.”
“Information. I’ll pay,” Gilly said. He closed his fist, opened it, and a silver luna caught the light, a strayed bit of starshine.
“All right then,” Roach said, snatching the coin. “What do you want to know?”
“Not me, a friend. He’s a poet, wants to write verses about the Relicts, wants it to be romantic.” Gilly was surprised he even bothered to lie. The hunger in Roach’s eyes, the lack of caution, spoke volumes. Roach didn’t care for anything but the sight of silver.
“Verses about the Relicts? Is he touched?” Roach frowned. “Going to write about rats and boots and fever, is he?”
“No, he’s another one who wants to write about Black-Winged Ani bringing down the Relicts for love,” Gilly said, thinking he had been too long exposed to the court, finding it all too easy to envision his imaginary poet. He took Roach’s arm in his hand.
“How much is he gonna pay?” Roach said.
“He’s a poet without a patron. Not much. Maybe two lunas.” More and even Roach might find suspicion, but Gilly had given him coin before, easy earnings, and this looked the same.
“Can’t take too long. I’m meeting someone,” Roach said, even as he followed in Gilly’s wake.
“Ain’t that a fancy rig?” Roach said as they approached the carriage. “And your man ain’t got more coins than that?”
“Paper’s expensive, as are quills,” Gilly said.
“I bet they are,” Roach said, turning over new thoughts. “Where’s your fancy man?”
“He was here,” Gilly said.
The reins were weighted with a cobble; the carriage door hung off the latch. Gilly wondered what had happened, a soundl
ess struggle? Or had Janus simply grown bored with waiting?
Roach opened the carriage door and peered inside. “Ain’t that fine.”
Gilly picked up the reins and looked up to see Janus come out of a shadow, the knife aimed for Roach’s nape. Gilly gasped, but Roach was already crumpling forward. Janus bent in the same quick economy of motion and shoved the body into the carriage, closing the door.
“Don’t gape, get on the bench, and let’s go.” Janus swung himself up, setting the carriage to rocking, and held down his hand. “Gilly! Let’s not attract more notice than the carriage will have already. Get up, or I leave you here.”
Gilly saw the temper flaring in Janus’s pinched nostrils, in the swelling blueness of his eyes, but he could not respond. He remembered Roach’s desperate insouciance, the thinness of his arm beneath his hand, and his awe of the carriage, all snuffed out in one moment.
Janus snapped the reins and turned the carriage. “Last chance, Gilly. There is still some night left and I don’t mean to spend it haranguing you when I could spend it in Mal’s arms. No? Fine.” The carriage wheels spattered loose bits of sand and gravel over Gilly’s boots. He watched it go, and only then started the long walk home.
It was nearer dawn than midnight when he opened the doors and crept through dark halls. As he approached the stairs, a light flared and smoked, setting shadows to dancing in the narrow stairwell. “Do you realize you always use the servants’ stairs when you’re upset?”
Maledicte was still dressed as he had been for dinner; dark splotches remained where the blood stained his cuffs.
“Did you know he was going to kill him when you sent me?” Gilly asked. His voice shook. He took a seat on the riser below Maledicte when the tremble in his voice reached his legs.
“Yes,” Maledicte said, looking away.
“Why?” Gilly cried. “He was just a boy. The solicitor I understand, Kritos, even Vornatti, but this boy…”
“He knew things Janus thought best left unsaid, a gossip as deadly as Mirabile,” Maledicte said, setting the lamp on the stairs above his head, haloing them both.