The Justice in Revenge

by Ryan Van Loan

  “It’s what the man the Doga tortured said, at the end,” I explained. “Another beggar…”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” the maestro said, backing up into the center of his cage. “The walls have mouths and the walls told me true. They water us twice a day when it’s storming out. When it rains they open the drains, so it comes from the very top on down, cell by cell, until it gets to solitary.” He grinned, baring crooked yellow teeth. “Filth for the filth, aye? No need to haul buckets in then.”

  “What did you refuse, maestro?” I asked. “And when? If not for you, then tell us for your people, the ones still living. Tell us!”

  “If you know—” Eld began.

  “I know,” the maestro said, as gears began to turn, followed by the sound of cascading water, like a river pouring over falls, “that the drowned rise. And I know what I refused. I refused, and all who do are doomed.” His eyes widened and bored through my own. “Doomed.”

  “Cut the theatrics,” I growled. “Who are they?”

  As the maestro opened his mouth, his lips beginning to form a word, the water crashed over him in a roaring whoosh of grey-streaked foam that made Eld curse and step back. The wave slapped against the tall, metal lip welded across the bottom of the bars and rebounded. As the water ran over him, a greasy haze followed. No, not haze. Smoke.

  The maestro erupted into a column of fire that leapt up straight up into the hole the water had fallen from a moment before. Bright, greedy, orange tendrils soared above as he writhed in a hotter blue that covered him from head to foot. A groaning, growling moan escaped his clenched teeth, skin bubbling and sloughing off. The inferno grew brighter and hotter and he became a human torch. His scream shattered the silence.

  “S-S-Sicarii!”

  He collapsed in a blazing heap, his mat exploding into flames and the heat sending Eld and me stumbling back, Eld beating at a few embers that had landed on his coat.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I told him when I caught my breath. He stopped beating his arm with his tricorne and shot me a look. “You’re still partially damp from the trip across the wall, remember?”

  “Aye, and water just made that man combust!” Eld snapped.

  “Fair point,” I admitted, backing up until I felt the wall behind me, and then sliding down to sit. Eld joined me after a moment, both of us watching the guttering flames that had transformed the holding cell into execution chamber.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting,” I said finally, “but it wasn’t that.”

  “Me neither.” Eld ran a hand over his forehead, brushing his usual few stray locks back. “That’s, what … the third time someone’s ignited into an inferno after coming into contact with water?”

  “Aye, I think your math is right.”

  “I’ve never seen that before,” Eld said. “You?”

  I shook my head.

  “Read about it?”

  I shook my head again, unable to take my eyes from the fiery heap. My nose wrinkled at the smell. “Fuck me, is this some new form of magic?”

  “Sin?”

  “It’s not Sin Eater magic,” he said after a moment. “Her truth, I don’t recall ever learning of the Dead Gods doing something like this, either. Blood magic, sure, but how would water be involved and why now and how did any earlier shower not set him off?”

  “Good questions,” I muttered. “Think on it.”

  “I will,” he said. “Buc?”

  “Aye?”

  “Whoever … whatever this Sicarii is—they’ve knowledge I don’t.”

  “Well, you can’t know everything.”

  “No, think, Buc. I’ve existed for millennia. As long as Ciris has. Sicarii knows things a Goddess does not.”

  “I don’t think it’s magic,” I told Eld, trying and failing to hide the shiver that ran through me as the import of Sin’s words struck home. “But whatever it is, it’s an unknown.”

  “Sicarii,” Eld whispered.

  “Aye.” I nodded, watching as the last of the flames died out in a sibilant, smoky hiss that carried the perverse smell of well-spiced meat, and darkness returned.

  “Who’s going to tell the guards about this?” Eld asked.

  “You,” I said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because everyone trusts you. And that?” I motioned toward the cell. “I saw it with my own eyes and I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “Me neither,” Eld said. “Me neither.”

  28

  You told me you’d be back with word after meeting with Ciris’s lot, yet you never returned last night. It has been past a week, Midwinter approaches, and we demand answers. You shall have them by the time of Masquerade, when the Doga will invite you and the rest of the Company to her Palacio. They keep saying you’re a smart one, so wear something scandalous … and come with answers. I’ll find you there.

  Your friend,

  S

  P.S. Fail and you may find the tune that’s played is not to your liking.

  P.P.S. The new scullery maid is an ear for the Chair.

  P.P.P.S. She’s also been pocketing your spare coppers and hiding them in a sack of flour in the kitchen. The one with the tasseled strings. Do with this as you will.

  P.P.P.P.S. Fail and the instruments played won’t be strings or brass or drums. They’ll be of steel.

  “Good help is hard to find,” Sin said.

  “Apparently.”

  I read the scrap of parchment a third time, stepping back into my bedroom and pressing the false-backed brick absently. The fireplace moved back into place with a low, grinding growl that turned to a squeak that made me wince. Need to oil that. The S was embossed into a small circle of wax, a twin image to the Secreto sigil the Doga had given me. Clearly her captain had paid me a visit yesterday, before I went to meet with the Sin Eaters. But I was damned if I could remember; the morning was still blank. I frowned, making my eyes feel tighter than they already did, and held back a yawn as I let the scrap slip from my fingers. It wafted into the fireplace, where the flames eagerly licked it up.

  “Lucky I thought to check that.”

  “Aye,” Sin agreed. “But maybe … somehow we knew? Subconsciously?”

  “Buried deep, then,” I muttered thickly. My tongue felt too large in my mouth after drinking so much last night. The walls have mouths. The Mosquitoes maestro’s words echoed in my mind and I winced again. It was too early for squeaks and echoes.

  “I only checked because Salina’s coming over and after everything that happened at the Castello, I wanted to know if we were being spied on.”

  “Still could be,” Sin said. “That map the Doga gave you shows two other entrances into the palazzo from the tunnels below.”

  “Two, not counting the other you surmised must be there as well,” I reminded him. Was that what the man meant by “mouths”—secret passageways? I’d no way of knowing—the copy of a copy of the Castello I’d seen didn’t show any. “The Doga did own that it was a partial map.”

  I sighed and stretched, pulling my bronze shirtsleeves back to reveal my dark forearms and those few pink scars along my left hand that I couldn’t stop from scratching. Just like the maestro—I forced my hand away as I walked to the bed, weaving around stacks of books nearly as tall as I was, and half leapt, half fell onto the mattress. I sprawled on my back on the white sheets and studied the marks. Gods’ blood, when did I pick up those? It hadn’t been from drinking last night, though without Sin I would have fallen a few times navigating the stairs back to my bedroom.

  “Well, the Doga wants answers, I’ve a few for her.”

  “But not the one she’ll want most,” Sin said.

  “I can tell her who is trying to kill her.”

  “What—not who. If our old flame, the maestro, is to be believed.”

  “Aye.”

  I licked my lips, staring at the white-plastered ceiling. In places I could see the fresco that lay beneath peeking through. I’d been told it was some sort
of blasphemous scene that the family who had owned the place before Eld and me had had painted over when the heir found religion. I was curious about the image, but somehow there hadn’t been time in all these months to uncover it. I figured I’d have that time, eventually. We’d bought the palazzo after the heir’s gondola sank and his fancy-arsed clothes filled with seawater and pulled him to the bottom of the Crescent. Imagine living on an island and not being able to swim.

  “Didn’t Eld teach you to swim?” Sin asked, interrupting that line of thought.

  “You have an inconvenient memory.”

  “Apologies,” Sin said, his tone anything but sorry. “I thought we were trying to avoid thinking about the What.”

  I pushed myself up and winced as my head spasmed with pain. “You know, for having all this power, this hangover doesn’t feel very magical.”

  “Trust me, after what you did last night, or was it this morning, if you didn’t have me, you wouldn’t be out of bed,” Sin said. “The other two must be wishing they were dead.”

  “Small favors,” I muttered. “Okay, the What. There’s a mysterious figure”—I pronounced the word as Salina would, and smiled—“or figures pretending to be one single person. Said mystery has a name that means ‘blade’ in the tongue of the Cordoban Confederacy and seems damned bent on upholding it,” I said, holding up two fingers.

  “But they aren’t above using pistoles and crossbows and fire,” Sin said. I held up another finger. “And they have access to something we don’t, the knowledge of this mysterious arsonry, which suggests … what?”

  “That they have ancestry or money or power,” I said, holding up a fourth finger.

  “Don’t those usually go together?” Sin asked.

  “Sure, but not always. I started with none of those and look where I ended up.”

  “Hmm. Point.”

  “They could be trying to usurp the Doga, pretending to be a revolt by the commons, or they could be an outside power trying to do the same or an assassin or just batshit crazy, or this could all be a feint to disguise something else or—”

  “Or a million other things.” Sin sighed. “I’m happy to use my magic to let you consider them all in a few blinks of your eyes, but at the end of all of this…”

  “We don’t have a clue what the motive is,” I said, raising my final finger. “We need more information.”

  “We need more information,” he agreed. “And the Masquerade is less than a week in the offing.”

  “We’ve enough to put the Doga off for a bit,” I said, hoping I was right. “The real question is, can we find the answers before the Chair follows through on her promise and forces me to choose between the Board or exile in the north?”

  “We’ll just tell her to get fucked,” he said with a mental shrug.

  “Sin, just because we’ve the powers of a God doesn’t mean we have the followers to go with it. Eld and I nearly died last summer to win the chance to wield the power of the Kanados Trading Company. If I undermine that power I’ll never get to wield it, or worse, by the time I do I’ll find it has no strength left at all.”

  “Being a mortal is so frustrating,” he said. “Imagine what you could do with Ciris—”

  “Not going to happen,” I cut him off.

  “Signora Salina is here!” Glori’s voice echoed, followed by the faint tinkling of a bell strung on gilded wire in my room.

  “She’s a crow’s-nest lookout’s lungs,” I muttered. “Coming!” I called. “Why she bothers with the bell, I don’t fathom.”

  “It’s comforting to know,” Sin said, “that humans are as unfathomable to one another as they are to me at times.”

  “Not humans,” I corrected him. I sat up and tugged my boots on, jamming my dark trousers down inside so that the gilt boot tops showed. “Women. We’re unfathomable.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, remind me to handle that”—I nodded toward the fireplace—“after we’re done figuring out this ball business with Salina.”

  “What? To leave a reply for the Secreto captain or to do something about that scullery maid or—”

  “All of it. I want the captain to know we haven’t been lying on a pleasure barge in the Crescent this whole time.”

  “In this weather?” Sin snarked.

  I chuckled. “I also want that maid out on her arse without a reference and perhaps the Constabulary to answer to, as well, unless she speaks the words I want the Chair to hear. And those alone.”

  “And Sicarii?”

  His question pulled me up short. I glanced at the open tome on one of the book piles. Servenzan Antiquity and Architecture, 387. It wasn’t the blueprints I’d been looking for, but it had been written by a contemporary of the Doga’s great-great-whatever and had far more diagrams than most of my usual reading. Still, it hadn’t shown any secret tunnels in the Castello either. Had the man gone insane after a few weeks in solitary? I remembered the maestro’s scream and my flesh crawled. “That’s the ten-thousand-lire question, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  “Glori’s in a tiff,” Salina said. Her tone was concerned but her eyes told a truer tale—amusement.

  Her lips twitched as she took a sip from her wineglass; the steam rising lazily from the goblet carried a heavy smell of alcohol and spices that made my stomach flip. I took the chair opposite her, sinking down into crimson cushions with my back to the marbled fireplace, and propped my feet up on the thin, wooden table trimmed with gilt between us. She adjusted her jacket so that the roses that ran up her lapels were straight above her tight, white trousers.

  “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that?” she continued.

  “How could I? This is the first I’ve been out of bed, let alone my room, all morning.” I chuckled.

  “You do realize it’s well into afternoon?”

  “Ah, well. As to that.” I shrugged and sat up slightly. “Eld and I got soaking wet in last night’s storm and Joffers—our gondolier—said he knew of a bar that mulled not just wine, but rum and other spirits as well.”

  I squinted, remembering the hazy evening that was really more of an early morning by that point. “I think we drank all of it?”

  “Gods, so that’s what I smell,” Salina said, lifting her glass practically to her nose and inhaling. “How are you even up and moving?”

  “I’m an enigma,” I said.

  “You’re a Sin Eater,” Sin said.

  “Not until I let you take me to your precious Goddess, I’m not,” I growled mentally.

  “What time did you lot stumble in?”

  “Stumble, is right,” I muttered. “It was after the storm broke, but I want to say it was before dawn’s first light, if just. All I remember is Joffers trying to teach Eld one of the dockworkers’ songs and Eld turning so red I thought he was going to explode from embarrassment.” I giggled. “Or perhaps it was just the alcohol that got to him.”

  “You came home pickled drunk with two men—one a servant—after you’d spent the night out together?” Salina asked. She shook her braids, using her free hand to make sure they all fell down her left shoulder, and grinned. “I can imagine that might ruffle a feather or two amongst the staff. And Glori is a traditionalist.…”

  “I suppose, but setting Joffers aside—he already has a husband,” I said, sitting all the way up and putting my feet back on the wood-paneled floor, “Salina, I’ve spent scores of nights out with Eld before. Not getting drunk, true…”

  Now that I thought of it, he’d always been careful around alcohol and me and kept me from drinking more than a watered-down glass here or there. Last night I’d taken the change as a recognition that I was a woman now, but what if it was lack of caring? Godsdamn it. The past week had felt more like old times, the two of us with our backs together, surrounded by bayonets, but it hadn’t done anything to fill that gaping hole between us.

  “Aye, but that was before you began to feel something more than friendship, wasn’t it?” Salina
said, setting her glass down on the knee-high table with a wink. “No one minds a stallion for being a stallion, but when a woman looks to gelding things can get awkward.”

  “Now there’s a thought,” I murmured. “Eld with his balls chopped off.”

  “And hanging in a purse around your neck.”

  I snorted and Salina laughed but my realization of the extent of the gulf between Eld and me must have shown on my face somehow, because the other woman made a show of filling her glass from the porcelain carafe on the table. She settled back into her chair and crossed her legs.

  “What’d you find that sent you running to alcohol, anyway?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I told her. “I wish I didn’t.”

  “Bullshit, you love knowing everything.”

  “True, but this?” I closed my eyes and was back in the Castello, fire erupting from the maestro’s body, watching his skin bubbling up along his cheek, then charring before sloughing off and revealing bright bone and blood that boiled before the inferno truly consumed him. “I could have done with reading about it.”

  “The streets are growing rough in ways they haven’t for years,” Salina agreed. “One of my men was in the Painted Rock, looking for a cheesemonger I’d heard of, and got caught in some turf war over a different monger’s wares. He’ll live, but I had to pay two physikers to patch up his lung and nearly sent for one of those Dead Gods healers.” She wrinkled her nose at the thought.

  “There’s some would say he’s lucky, these days,” I said.

  “Luckier than those children.”

  “Children?” I frowned. Quenta loomed in my mind. “Which ones?”

  “Every time I think I know the game you’re playing, you deal different cards.” Salina studied me over the top of her glass for a long moment. “Children are always the first to feel the lash, Buc. It’s the nature of thugs to lean on the weak, and who is weaker than a child?”

  “You’d be surprised,” I told her. “Since when did you care about street urchins?”

  “I could say I don’t, but I thought you did,” she shot back. “And that’s part of it. The rest is…”