The daughter, it turned out, didn’t care for men and was working her way through the bawdy house’s skirts. Eld had gotten suspiciously ill beforehand, which had forced my decision to infiltrate the place, but now I realized he’d never set foot in a brothel, even before we’d met. Sometimes I wondered how he managed to make it in the military, but then I remembered he hadn’t.
Despite being in virgin territory, Eld tried to help, and accidentally asked one of the courtesans to ply her tongue in a place he’d likely never touched before. It took a few coins to pay the lass off. After that, Eld’s face matched my jacket and even I was beginning to feel a little … warm.
It was worth it for the stories we heard, over and over again. The nobles were just beginning to hear rumors of something that had started a season ago, but the strong always target the weak and vulnerable. The violence—the murders and infighting—had started here, in the brothels. Again and again we heard of prostitutes found in back alleys, clothing and bodies torn to shreds as if a dozen blades had found them all at once. The brutality, more than the murders themselves, had them all afraid, but it’d gone on long enough that fear was giving way to anger. The maestras running the bordellos were willing to bargain with any who promised to find the killers of their slain daughters and sons.
I didn’t even have to dig in my pocket for coin before their suspicious glares softened and a different sort of tear shone in their eyes. Eventually, the stories commingled, centering on a layabout constable around the corner who was likely on the dole from half a dozen gangs but knew the criminal underbelly well enough to have our answers.
I laughed mentally as we left the last bordello, Eld trying not to stare at the sultry dark woman who led us out, her jacket open and nothing beneath it. Despite his skepticism, as ever, I’d been right.
“How’s that?” Sin asked.
“Honesty is shortsighted. And overrated.”
“You’re not going to find their killer?”
“Perhaps, but I’ve my eyes on saving the world, Sin, not avenging prostitutes who chose to let the wrong client in their skirts.”
“So let the powerless die, so long as you save the rest that’s left breathing in the end?”
“If that’s what it takes … aye.”
Sin’s silence was loud in my mind.
21
“Why didn’t you just say you were Secreto?” the constable asked. His bicorne was crooked, revealing a shock of dark hair already turning grey; stubble dotted his narrow, vulpine cheeks. A few stains on his faded uniform, its color giving the constables their nickname of the blues, made for an unkempt appearance, but I noticed his cudgel was oiled and looked well used and the pistole tucked into his boot looked similarly cared for. Those were the only reasons I hadn’t treated him like the drunk his breath smelled like and put a knife to his throat. That, and the kanhouse we were in had enough patrons that threatening one of the blues might have led to some of his compatriots showing up. Someone always wants to play the bloody hero.
“Because mayhap the Doga doesn’t want it known she’s asking questions.” I tucked the sigil I’d shown him back into my jacket and shrugged. “And mayhap I didn’t know you’d be such a pain in the arse.”
“Then you don’t know Rafiro,” he said with a grin that revealed crooked but sharp, kan-whitened teeth even brighter than my own. He sat up in his seat and indicated the chairs around the small corner table he occupied. “Sit, you. We’ll have a round of kan!” he hollered at the short man with a stained apron and a harried look on his face behind the counter. The man rolled his eyes, but turned around quick enough that the few wisps of hair on his head flew up like tendrils of smoke. Rafiro chuckled. “They hate a blue, but they can’t do nothing about it.” His smile slipped. “And these days, there’s worse to hate than us.”
“What’s that mean?” Eld asked, setting his tricorne on the table. He pulled back a chair and sat on the edge, making it tip dangerously. A glance told me he was trying—and partially failing—to avoid a large stain across the bleached wood. “What’s going on?”
“Lot of questions yer asking,” Rafiro said. “What’s happened to the Mosquitoes, where are the Gnats, what’s going on in the streets? Which one you want first?”
“All of them,” I said, resting my forearms on the table. I wasn’t intimidating, like Eld—I couldn’t loom—but something in my eyes made him flinch. “The Doga requires all of them.”
“If you’ve any sense at all you know what’s on in the streets,” Rafiro grumbled. He took off his bicorne and ran a shaky hand through his dark locks. “Can smell the bodies left in the back alleys, those that were too far off to be tossed into the canals. And we’re pulling out the ones that were tossed by the hour now,” he added. His dark eyes shot up, caught my glance, and looked away. “Can hear the clickety-clackety of the clubs against the lampposts calling the gangs to rumble every other night, it seems.”
“A gang war,” Eld said.
“Wars,” Rafiro corrected him. “Started a fortnight or so ago?” He shook his head. “Blues didn’t think much of it at the time, seemed like the regular infighting that happens every so often. Began with the Cobblestone Corners.”
“Corners?”
“It’s a knock-and-grab strategy,” I explained. “Have a lookout following a target, they signal to another waiting around a sharp corner, and when the target turns, they’re blindsided by something like a club or a stick … or a cobblestone,” I said dryly. “Then you search their pockets and run before they wake up. If they ever do,” I added.
“Lovely,” Eld muttered.
“She’s got it exactly,” Rafiro said. “The Corners used cobblestones ’cause they got their start as lads an’ lasses without a cuparo to their name, but as they grew up their numbers did, too, and they’d begun to move their trade into some of the finer Quartos. Anyways, their leader was a lad turned man name of Jek Longshaft—”
“Bet he was a popular one with the ladies,” I joked.
“Lads,” Rafiro corrected. “He was; the moniker wasn’t just for his hand with a cudgel, if ye take my meaning. Though he had a Godsdamned temper when drunk, which he was more often than not. Was that lack of judgment that led him to take them out of the Tip.” He cleared his throat. “One night, Jek went out drinking in the Mercarto Quarto with a few of his top cronies and was found torn apart the next day. I didn’t see it myself, but they said it looked like someone had taken a dozen cleavers to him—the others were just shot through the head.”
“Execution?”
“Looked like,” he agreed. “Then what was left of the Corners got it into their heads that the Sharp Eagles was the ones that did the murdering and went seeking revenge.”
“Card sharps and backstabbers,” I told Eld.
“Eloquent names, these gangs have,” he said, shaking his head. “Should be poets.”
“There’s a poetry to the streets.” I snorted. “Just not the kind most have an ear for.”
“After that,” Rafiro continued, shooting us both looks as if we’d interrupted one of the great tales told by bards in taverns across the world, “the whole lid came off. Mosquitoes were overrun by the Gnats, as you know, and then someone began taking out the leaders ’cross gangs all over the island. Krakens and Blackened Blades have always been at one another’s throats, but both lost their entire ruling lines and splintered into half a dozen small factions,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers. “The Poisoned Eels were hit last night and that’s going to be the blow that will shatter any semblance of peace. Today’s the quiet before the storm. Tomorrow the streets are going to run red.”
“Why’s that?” Eld asked.
“The Eels were the overgang that came up after Blood in the Water passed,” I said slowly. That had been right before I tried to pickpocket Eld, so my connections to what happened after that were essentially nonexistent.
“The Eels ran all the rest,” Rafiro confirmed. “’Bout Godsdamned time,”
he growled when the short man appeared with three mugs of steamy kan and set them on the table with a bare hint at a bow before dashing back behind the counter. Rafiro blew foam off the top of one and took a long draught of what surely must have been a scalding hot brew. Kan was a funny plant, capable of slowing down or speeding up thought depending on if it was smoked or drunk, but I’d noticed the drinkers had a harder time letting it go than the smokers, and Rafiro’s shakes made sense now. If the man wasn’t a full-blown addict already, he would be soon.
“The gangs are a necessary evil. Without them, we’d have a thousand different thieves doing all sorts of Gods know what ’cross the city,” he explained, taking another gulp from his mug. He belched, sending a noxious wind of kan and booze our way, and Eld choked. “With them, we can keep them confined to the lower Quartos, know where to go looking if one of them steps too far, an’ they en’t half-bad at policing their own. Without them—”
“Chaos,” I muttered. “Worse than that,” I added, glancing at Eld. “Gangs are all about turf, but the larger ones control factories, stores, hawkers, and the like. If that gets upended, it’s going to be felt beyond the Tip.”
“What the Doga, beggaring Her Grace’s pardon, and her lot don’t understand,” Rafiro said, “is that you grab a man by his tip and squeeze and the whole body’s going to feel that kinda pain.” He reached down below the table and winced. “Too right, they will.”
“More poetry from the streets?” Eld asked dryly.
“So that’s what is happening out there,” I said, sharing a look with Eld and fighting to keep from laughing. It wasn’t funny, Rafiro was right, but the idea of Servenza being one big dick was too rich a joke not to laugh at. “What about the Mosquitoes?”
“What about them?” Rafiro shrugged. “Listen, I’ve been keeping my head down, my eyes forward, and my ears closed.”
“Bullshit.”
“Listen, I—”
“Bullshit,” I repeated.
Rafiro slammed his now-empty mug on the table and leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “You lot don’t know what you’re asking after. Haven’t the faintest. I told you folks were scared, but not because of the gangs. Unless you’re unlucky to be in the wrong back alley at the wrong time, so long’s you’re paid up on your dues, you’re fine.”
His voice dropped to a whisper and he licked his lips, gaze darting past us. Eld and I both followed his glance, but there was nothing to see. The rest of the kanhouse’s patrons were on the far side of the space, doing their best to avoid the blue and his company. We leaned in at Rafiro’s gesture.
“It’s not just gang leaders that have shown up murdered. Couple of shopkeeps, a merchant here and there, and more prostitutes besides. My leftenant tried to get to the bottom of what happened to the Corners once she realized that was where things first got their sails crossed.”
“What’d she find out?”
“No one knows. A lamplighter found her in the gutter with her throat slit and her body carved apart with strange little cuts so that her uniform hung off her like bloody ribbons. Bianca, one of the Gilded Lilies, were found the next morning. She likely died the same night as my boss, from the way her corpse smelled.” He grinned mirthlessly. “I guess whores take longer to find than constables.” His grin faded. “She’d been cut up the same way, same as my leftenant, same as those gang leaders, and same as those others I told you about.”
Bianca. I had stiffened at the name, but Rafiro missed it, his eyes on the table. One of the names given to us earlier by a maestra who had more anger than grief in her eyes when telling us the tale of her murdered girl. I reached out and touched Eld’s knee. Maybe I wasn’t lying to the maestras after all. If Bianca was somehow connected to everything else going on in the Tip, and if that was connected to the attempts on the Doga’s life? A lot of ifs. “Why, though? Why cut up a courtesan like that?”
“Didn’t I say?” He shook his head. “Bianca had been informing for my leftenant. They were together the night they died, but Bianca’s body wasn’t in this Quarto or the Tip.”
“Where was she found?” Eld asked.
“The Blossoms Quarto.”
“Oh, I remember that now,” I said. “Or I remember reading about it, but it was just a line that a woman had been found dead at the bottom of some steps leading to the canal docks.” I frowned. “The article implied it was an accident.”
Rafiro snorted. “Only if she fell down a flight of razor blades.” He sat back and pulled his jacket straight, the brass buttons reflecting the noon sun’s light from the window. “She wasn’t the first to die, signorina, and she wasn’t the last, nor are the rich Quartos being spared.”
“You mean the robberies?” I asked, remembering that Salina had mentioned a palazzo had been tossed.
“Robberies and some killed, like the whore that tripped into those razor blades. The people are scared an’ that’s why they’re more willing to tolerate a blue like me around these days.” He tapped his club and nodded at the pistole in his boot. “We don’t carry razors.”
I nodded slowly. It was all beginning to make sense, not clear enough that I had a fully formed painting to consider, but the horizon was taking shape, the background filling in. The center was still blank canvas: Why? What purpose? Fear could be useful, but the fear I’d felt in the streets wasn’t the kind that came from being taken over, exchanging one would-be tough for another. What kind is it, then? And who’s carving people up into ribbons?
If I couldn’t see clearly, I could still infer, and it was impossible that what was going on here wasn’t in some way connected to the attempts on the Doga’s life. It strained credulity to believe the attempts on our own lives weren’t interwoven as well. Someone was making a power move here, even if what that move entailed was still hidden deep in the shadows. It all amounted to one giant fucking knot. And us at the center.
“Ask him about the beggar,” Sin suggested.
“Good call,” I said.
“Don’t sound surprised,” he muttered.
“Hey, you’ve been quiet of late.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on with our memory,” he said. “And you’ve been doing fine, I’ve been watching.”
“I’m beginning to forget what life was like without a dead voice inside my head.”
“Boring,” he said. “And I’m not dead.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rafiro, let me ask you something.” I waited for his gaze to meet my own so I—Sin—could see any lies that might be there. “Does the phrase ‘the drowned rise’ mean anything to you?”
“No,” he said immediately, and Sin confirmed he was holding something back. Rafiro hesitated, then shrugged. “Fuck it.” He glanced around for the dozenth time. “Sicarii.”
“Bless you,” Eld said.
“You don’t recognize it?” Rafiro asked. His eyes shifted between us. “Really?”
“Sicarii,” I mouthed the word, and something whispered in my mind, but I couldn’t quite hear it. I shook my head and he bit back a curse.
“I think you’re leading me on, signorina.” He stood up abruptly, knocking his chair against the wall loudly, then leaned over the table. “Everyone says they don’t recognize the name, but they’re all liars.” His booze breath washed over us. “But I’ll tell you a truth, just the same. You keep asking these questions, signorina, and you’ll recognize it, sure enough.”
He lowered his voice and whispered, “Sicarii,” then turned away, calling loudly over his shoulder, “Thanks for the drinks, Secreto!”
For a moment both of us sat there silent, then Eld made a motion, and I realized that the rest of the patrons were staring at us and the short man behind the bar had reached beneath the counter in the way that barkeeps have when they feel they’re going to need to break out the blunderbuss. The blues might not carry blades, but the Secreto did … all manner of them. Rafiro’s parting gift. “Past time for us to be gone,” I whispered.
�
�Aye.” Eld dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of silver soldi that more than paid for our drinks. He made a show of counting them out and stacking them on the table. As he did so, the kanhouse relaxed by degrees and the owner’s hands came back up from behind the bar—empty. We quickly made our exit.
“It’s a damned thing to nearly get caught up in a brawl over being the Doga’s own,” I told Eld as we walked down the street, “especially since we’re not technically Secreto.”
“Aye, but Rafiro thought we were, when you flashed that sigil she gave you, and I think he was hoping we’d solve his riddle for him,” Eld said. “Took his revenge when we didn’t.”
“By outing us,” I muttered.
He adjusted his tricorne and shrugged, rolling his shoulders in his powder-blue jacket in a way I recognized, getting the feel for where his pistoles were placed. I’d done the same with my blades before we’d stepped into the street. There was something comforting about the way the hilt of a stiletto feels in your hand. “I’ve never heard the name before, have you?”
“Which one?” I asked, my mind turning over Rafiro’s words.
“Sicarii.”
“No,” I told him, “but it sounds the way it feels.”
“And what way’s that?”
“Sharp.”
Like a razor blade.
22
We took a meandering walk through the finer buildings of the Painted Rock Quarto on our way back to the canal and Joffers. Though these would-be palazzos could never match up to the house of the Gilded Lilies, fresh plaster and stucco made them stand out against the faded and cracked buildings that made up the majority of the Quarto. Foot traffic was slow but steady, and I felt the tension between my shoulder blades ease. It didn’t feel off, like it had the other day, before we were ambushed in the Tip.
I should have been planning our next move; Rafiro had given us a lot of gossip and rumor, but fuck all about the Gnats. Instead: Sicarii. The name kept skipping across my mind like a smooth rock over the Crescent on a calm day and Sin wasn’t being helpful.
The Justice in Revenge Page 15