The Justice in Revenge

by Ryan Van Loan

  “Tell me again. From the beginning.”

  “The paper lass lost her nerve. Gave us away, savvy? We was in the alley where you told us to be, already half-lost to the night what with the buildings there…”

  Sicarii listened with half an ear—he was telling the same story after all, so he’d live to beg for his coin. Nothing was a surprise; it would have been pure luck if that lot had managed to kill Buc and Eld. But who knows the value of pure luck better than I? She reached without thought, tapping the glowing stone she’d fashioned into a makeshift eye. No, killing them today would have been too easy, though an injury or a wound wouldn’t have been an unwelcome outcome. Does that fool think I don’t know Quenta never held a pistole? He probably pissed himself and pulled the trigger early. But then, he’d paid for it if he had, along with the rest.

  Quenta had been eager for more coin, though surprisingly less eager to do what had been asked of her. That Buc girl had a way with people, when she wasn’t driving them to distraction or killing them. Laughter bubbled up in Sicarii’s chest … she knew she wasn’t entirely sane, but no sane person would attempt what she was doing. As long as I don’t lose myself like I did when—Her mind went blank for a moment, then refocused on what mattered: revenge. Perhaps Buc hadn’t taken a physical wound, but she’d murdered Quenta and that would eat at the girl as much as Quenta’s betrayal.

  “Whom do you trust, when you can’t trust anyone?”

  She began to laugh, a horrible sound even to her own ears, but she was unable to stop, even as she drowned out the rest of the man’s story. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. All that mattered was the pain Buc was feeling now. It was but a taste of what was to come. Sicarii’s throat burned with laughter as tears flowed from her single real eye. It was all too perfect. By the time Sicarii was through with Buc, the girl wouldn’t be able to trust anyone.

  Not even a corpse.

  * * *

  “When will you move against the girl and her brute?”

  Ulfren watched his Eldest, but her ebon-marbled visage gave nothing away. She stood still as a corpse, her silver braids motionless, though the creature opposite them made his skin crawl. I wonder if she made Sicarii meet us here in the crypts to balance the scales? Unlike his own pale skin, which made his robes seem blacker than midnight, the Eldest’s skin nearly matched the shadows in hue. With her dark robes, it would have been difficult to discern discomfort—if she had any. He had plenty.

  “I told you where they would be twice now, helped lead them right into the seat of your power on the island, and yet they still draw breath?” Sicarii’s growl echoed through the chamber. The figure opposite them blended into the shadows nearly as well as the Eldest, save for the fiery orb peering at them from beneath the broad-brimmed hat that was pulled low to hide her features. In the dark the orb should have illuminated Sicarii’s face, but it almost seemed to eat the blackness around it instead. “Small wonder Ciris is taking your territory by the armful if a small girl and a washed-up sellsword give you pause,” Sicarii added.

  “Blood and bone,” Ulfren snapped, meeting Sicarii’s growl with one of his own. The flaming eye turned toward him and he hissed and reached for the pouch that hung from his belt before he realized his hands had moved. Not yet. Aborting the gesture, he crossed his arms instead of grasping one of the glass vials that held holy blood and the hairs of a wolf, goat, and saber cat—rare, that one—and saw his Eldest’s thin lips crease in a smile. “You are the one that stands within our power now, Sicarii.”

  “But I’m no little girl,” the woman said, her harsh voice purring as if she was that saber cat, and he felt a chill run through him.

  “No, you are not,” his Eldest said; her breathy voice sounded like a dying woman’s final gasp.

  She tapped the bone-white pillar beside her that supported the latticework ceiling above them, carved to look like the bones of their Gods, which lay in Normain. “So you should know this war is still being fought by proxy. To move against her in our true forms would be to invite the notice of the Kanados Trading Company, and we all know whose proxy they are.”

  “The mind witch,” Ulfren snarled, clenching his hands, his filed nails bit into the flesh of his arms hard enough to draw blood. “Ciris.”

  “We have begun to draw her in,” his Eldest continued. “She came to us because the dross from the gutter she’s been paying for their large ears have been turning up in those same gutters with their throats slit.”

  “Blood calls to blood,” Ulfren whispered.

  “It does and it has,” she agreed beside him. “Soon this Buc and Eld will realize the mind witch’s mages do not protect them.”

  “But perhaps you can?” Sicarii’s chuckle sounded like logs crackling in a fire. “Veneficus, did that girl strike you as one who wanted protecting?” When the Eldest said nothing Sicarii’s eye bobbed in acknowledgment. “She’s a lone shark, sharp teeth, aye, but only hers and that brute of hers to bite with. Though it seems like they’ve done a lot of biting, haven’t they? Was what happened this summer by proxy?”

  The Eldest shifted. “Do you know what happened beyond the islands of the Shattered Coast?” Her tone hardened like the grating of bone against bone. “What happened to our brother?”

  “Ah, your blood calling to you?” Sicarii asked. “Did Sambuciña Alhurra”—her voice burned like liquid flame—“ever tell you how is it that she and her partner returned when the most powerful pirate in the Shattered Coast and a Dead Walker of the Gods did not?”

  Ulfren leapt forward, one hand reaching for a vial, the other for the cord that would set his cloak free as Transformation took him, but his Eldest caught him in midstride. Her midnight-black arms were like whipcords, suffused with the pure blood of their Gods, and far stronger than his own. He jerked to a stop as something in his wrist broke; the pain distracted him long enough to get his bloodlust under control. If I change it will be the saber and my fangs will spear that creature through her eyes, flames or no flames. I will feel her skull in my jaws. I will—

  His Eldest shook him hard, slamming his heels against the floor and snapping his mouth shut with a click of his teeth. Perhaps he wasn’t as in control as he thought. The Ghost Captain had been their best chance of assassinating Ciris, channeling all of their resources into one surgical thrust that would have severed the magical brain stem of her priesthood and left their corpses to molder. Now Ciris turns our own practices against us, feigning to care for the masses when she was ever a creature of the elite, and the blind fall into line. It couldn’t continue. It couldn’t be allowed to continue. And if this creature knew …

  “You’re angry,” Sicarii said. “I understand. Anger is what fuels us to do what we must, despite the cost. Still, the girl may not cost as much as your spies would have you believe.”

  “Say on,” the Eldest said after a moment, only the slight rise of her eyebrows betraying her interest.

  “The Kanados Trading Company has no love for Sambuciña Alhurra or Eldritch Nelson Rawlings,” Sicarii said. “Why would they? The girl is from the gutter, same as the ones you’ve been throat-slitting, and the Company has always prided itself on its exclusivity. The Sin Eaters seem to love her, true enough, and again you must ask yourselves why that is.… But,” she continued, despite Ulfren’s growl, which was loud enough to cover the one from his Eldest, “this is a war of proxy, as you said. The mind witch and her mages may not wish to see the girl dead, but the Company does, so should she find herself faceup in an alley one morn, throat opened ear to ear, they won’t be the ones appealing to Ciris, and Ciris won’t be able to do much more than snarl about it.”

  “Perhaps it is as you say,” the Eldest said. She cleared her throat, a sound like a sarcophagus’s lid sliding open. “But if the child is dear to the mind witch, we would need to take care. This couldn’t be traced back to us. The methods by which we’d use to obtain the answers to the questions we need to ask of her would be … mortal.”

 
“I understand,” Sicarii said. “She has been taking risks of late, traveling to the seedier parts of Servenza.”

  “We hear,” Ulfren said, forcing the anger from his voice, “of gangs fighting with one another in the Tip and beyond. Should one of these battles erupt while she is there, I don’t think we could be blamed,” he suggested.

  “Gangs?” Sicarii chuckled. “I may be able to help with that.”

  Sicarii’s laughter intertwined with Ulfren’s and the Eldest’s until the crypt echoed with the grating, fiery sound that would be, Gods willing, the last thing Sambuciña Alhurra and her partner would ever hear.

  18

  “We’ve arrived, signorina,” Joffers said in his gravelly voice.

  “Arrived?” I asked, suddenly aware that what had broken my concentration was the vibration of the gondola against the dock.

  “Aye,” the old man said, skillfully tying a line to the iron cleat jutting out from the stone dock. “Home, as you asked.”

  As I asked? My mind was a blank canvas with not even a sketch of a memory to be found. I could remember the night before, trying to tease that old skinflint of a dancing maestro before he gave me the rough side of his tongue and threatened the lash. After that, well, we’d come to an accord of sorts. I think by the end, I’d surprised him with my footwork.

  “We surprised him,” Sin added.

  “Aye, but what came next?”

  “Sleep,” he said slowly.

  “Aye, and then?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Is aught amiss, signorina?” Joffers’s long braided mustachios, bright white against his dark-tanned leathery skin, jiggled with the twisting of his head. He began shrugging out of his oilskin cloak. “Are you cold? You don’t look well.”

  “That’s what a night of dancing will do for you, Joffers,” I told him, forcing a smile. If Salina was right, and I’d no reason to doubt her, any of my number of servants could be spies. I couldn’t afford to let them pass on tales of my absentmindedness, or worse, weakness. “Best beware.”

  “I’ve no fear there, signorina,” he said with a laugh, letting his cloak settle back around his shoulders. “My dancing days are behind me, and my husband, Longinous, was never one for parties. And that was even before the war.”

  “Which?”

  “Which what?”

  “Which war?” I asked him.

  “Oh, they all blend together after a while,” he said, smile slipping from his lips. “This was decades ago, probably the one with the Free Cities?”

  “Mmm.” I’d been hoping he might have been an avenue into Eld’s past, but old as Eld was, that war probably happened before he was more than a suspicion in his mother’s eye. Who was his mother? “Make sure you breakfast well. I don’t know when I’ll be needing you again today.”

  “Breakfast? It’s nearly time for lunch.” I followed his gaze up to where the sun was partially hidden behind a sullen wall of grey. “But I will grab a bite,” he said, bowing his head slightly. My stomach growled. “And mayhap you would be wise to do the same?”

  “Mayhap, Joffers,” I said as I jumped up onto the dock and realized I was wearing the same bloody, torn clothes as yesterday. “Mayhap.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with me?” I asked Sin as we walked down the dock, shivering in the winter winds that pulled at my torn jacket.

  “You know,” he said absently, “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen Joffers laugh.”

  “Well, bully for Joffers,” I growled mentally. “I don’t see anything to laugh about here, showing up places with moldering holes in my memory. Our memory.”

  “No, me neither,” he said, his voice grown tight. “Possession would fix this, you know. Ciris would be able to give us the right magic within moments of becoming aware of us.”

  “Being able to do something and actually doing it are two different things,” I reminded him.

  “Aye, I know you won’t do it, Buc. Her name, I wish you would. Until then I’m trying, but it’s like catching smoke.” There was a note to his voice that hadn’t been there before, something desperate and almost … frightened?

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know that made two of us. Then again, he was inside my head, so he already knew. A shiver ran down my back that had nothing to do with the wind as I mounted the steps that led up to the garden and the rear of our palazzo.

  * * *

  My mind was clearer by the time the kitchen maid heard my knock and let me in. I gave her a smile and a kind word, but it must not have been kind enough, because she practically ran away from me as I entered. I glanced down at my sleeve, nearly black with dried blood up to my elbow. Quenta’s blood. Maybe the maid had her reasons.

  “So much for keeping up appearances,” I muttered sourly.

  “Signorina Buc!”

  “Marin!” I said as I turned around. She had a book tucked under one arm, a feather duster under the other. She looked resplendent enough that if not for the color of her servant’s uniform, a bystander might have mistaken who was owner and who was servant. I glanced at the book and remembered my promise to give her a reading lesson. Not now, though.

  “How is your day going?”

  “Well enough,” Marin said. “Sirrah Eld left early this morning and with you being out of the house, Glori gave me the afternoon off.”

  “He left already?” I asked.

  Marin nodded, her black braids swinging behind her. “You know, if you don’t stop making all those faces, you’ll have wrinkles before you’re twenty. Leastwise that’s what Glori says.”

  “I’ll worry about that when twenty arrives,” I said. With Sin’s magic, wrinkles were an impossibility. “Did you see which direction the maid ran off to? I’m starving.”

  “I will send her up right away, signorina.” Her nose wrinkled. “You may want to bathe first? I could have another draw hot water. To help with the blood and all.”

  “None of it mine, fortunately,” I said, picking at my sleeve. “Still, it wouldn’t do for Glori to see me in this state.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Marin agreed. “She’s already been in a fit over Sirrah Eld coming home bloody all the time.”

  “What do you mean?” I frowned.

  “Well, he came home last night looking like he’d been to the wars.”

  “And it wasn’t the first time?”

  “No, last week he had a streak of blood across his cheek and didn’t even realize it until I said something.”

  “If someone cut him, he realized it,” I assured her.

  “It wasn’t his blood.”

  “Sin, can you remember what happened last week? Any holes there?”

  “None. And”—he leapt ahead with my thoughts—“every time we were with Eld, he was fine and there was no, uh, excitement like the past few days. But we were only with him thrice.”

  “Likely a footpad that wouldn’t take no for an answer,” I told Marin.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Well, then, that’s solved, aye?” Marin opened her mouth and I held out a hand. “I appreciate the concern, Marin,” I lied. I liked Marin, but her concern was an annoyance. I glanced at the book tucked beneath her arm. “I’m not going to have time for a lesson today. In fact,” I added as if the thought just occurred to me, “I think I may hire a tutor for you.”

  “A tutor?” She frowned. “I enjoy our lessons, signorina. You’re a fine teacher.”

  “And you’re a better liar,” I told her with a false smile in an effort to take the sting from my words. “But if you wait for me, you’ll be the one with wrinkles before you learn to read.” I moved past her. “Let’s both of us think on it, aye? For now, how about that bath?” I heard her mumble an assent, and I added, “And send that kitchen maid along with a bite as well?”

  * * *

  “I don’t understand you humans,” Sin said.

  “Of course you don’t,” I told him, sinking down into the bathwater so that
only my nose and eyes were above the surface. Its heat was slowly leaching the tension from my muscles. “You’re a shard of a Goddess, how could you?” I ducked my head under and came up dripping. “What don’t you understand?”

  “The falling-out you’ve had with Eld. Over me. It’s causing you pain, Buc. Why try to fight it? Why keep him close if it’s like a knife in your ribs?”

  “Pain? There’s pain and then there’s pain.” I nodded slowly. “Aye, I understand pain. I understand the gnawing hunger of the streets, the constant edge in your mind that knows if it doesn’t keep itself razor sharp you’ll awaken one morning choking on your lifeblood, the blade already drawn across your throat for the crust of bread or scrap of copper in your pocket. Eld saved me from that.

  “And I know what it’s like to see him tied up and tortured and near death, where every blow is as painful to me as it is to him … knowing that the next blow could well land on me. We saved ourselves from that.

  “I know what it’s like to see every woman and man jack of them that laid fingers on us dead and buried at sea or lost in bloodred sands. To fight and kill to reach him, to sacrifice my life, my very soul, to see him live another day. I saved Eld from that.”

  Tears burned the back of my throat. “I saved him because he saved me, aye, but after so many times you give up counting and then it becomes about something more. There’s a new pain, now.”

  “You expected better from him? After all of that,” Sin suggested, “why wouldn’t you? If he but asked you could tell him.” I felt a pressure in my chest, knew it was Sin. “His face, his voice, his soul lives there, but you’ve never told him that. He’s never asked.”