The Justice in Revenge

by Ryan Van Loan

Dusk was a muted purple as the sun slipped below the buildings when I crossed back into the Blossoms Quarto. I glanced over my shoulder, but I’d lost the two tails I was sure of in the Kneeling Quarto when services let out. Hopefully not so lost that they didn’t find the clues I left behind. With night approaching the streets weren’t quite barren, but the swirling wind promised that the storm was finally arriving, so only a few were about. I stepped around a light pole just before I ran into it, as if I hadn’t realized it was there, then ducked into the nearby alley.

  “Buc?”

  “It’s me, little one,” I told the girl, moving deeper into the shadows afforded by the palazzo walls on either side.

  “I thought you forgot.”

  “Never,” I told her, dropping to a knee. “You’ve got another patch on your dress.”

  “Fell playing,” she said, her pale skin bright in the dim light. “Mama was upset, after you’d just bought it for me.”

  “She bought it for you,” I said.

  “You gave her the coin.”

  “Think of it as your wages for work well done,” I said. I stood up. “Speaking of … do you have it?”

  “I hid it back here,” the girl said, turning and moving deeper into the alley. She pointed at a long, thin, cloth-wrapped bundle leaning upright against the wall. “It was heavy.”

  “Was it?” I unwrapped the hilt, and drew a few fingers’ length of steel from the sheath. “They weren’t lying,” I muttered.

  “Who wasn’t?”

  “The person who made this,” I said. “Folks will say a lot of things, little one. Especially if they think it’s what you want to hear and they stand to gain. Sometimes they’ll do it on purpose, but often it’s by accident.”

  “My mama says it’s wrong to lie.”

  “It’s wrong to lie to your mama,” I told her. I brushed her thickly braided blond hair back over her shoulder. “It’s not always wrong to lie to others.” I let the blade slide home and rewrapped the cloth around the hilt. “You should listen to what folks have to say … and then make sure you see it with your own eyes That’s how you know who is telling you the truth. Who can be trusted.”

  “I trust you.”

  “You should,” I said, making a coin appear in my hand as if by magic. “I do what I say I will.” I handed her the coin and offered her the bundle. “I know this is heavy, but would you be able to carry it a little farther yet?”

  “You want me to take it in by the kitchens?”

  “Too damned clever,” I told her, smiling. “I do. Nan may have something set aside for you, if you’re lucky.”

  “Stone fruit?”

  “In winter?” I asked.

  “You’re rich. Rich have stone fruit all the time. Mama says you eat all the fruit so we have to have porridge and fish heads.”

  “I can’t argue with that logic,” I said, my smile slipping. “But if I’m rich today, it’s so that you will be tomorrow. Do you believe me, little one?”

  The girl looked up at me, and nodded slowly, clasping the bundle closely to her chest with both hands. “I trust you,” she repeated. “Even if Mama says you’re an arsehole.”

  I laughed, shaking the unshed tears from my eyes. “She’s no liar. Run along now, little one, or Nan will eat all your peaches and leave you with a crying tummy.”

  “She won’t!” the little girl said, turning and running away from me. “She said she won’t ever hurt me!”

  “She won’t,” I agreed, speaking to myself. “I won’t either.”

  56

  “Are you staying in for the night?” Glori asked, shutting the door behind me. She’d aged a dozen years in the days since Marin’s death and she’d looked old enough to be a grandmother before her granddaughter had been murdered. Not that she knew the details; like everyone else, she thought Marin had tripped and broken her fool neck—I’d made sure only the girl’s face was visible beneath the shroud. Glori had cursed Marin’s name when I told her, crying even as she said it. Now she looked like the shell of the woman who used to have no trouble giving me the rough side of her tongue when I showed up with my clothes muddied. Her tanned skin had faded until it nearly matched the color of the ribbon tied around her arm.

  “I am,” I replied, unbuttoning my jacket and handing it to her. I waited for her to comment on the soup stain, but her gaze passed over it without noticing it. “Did I receive any letters?” She shook her head and I bit back a curse. I was right and I’d wished I’d been wrong. Repeating my trick with the street rats and appropriating Sicarii’s runners had been a way to test what the Veneficus had let slip, but it seemed they were taking their orders from her as well. Of course, I’d planned for that possibility, but it still didn’t make things any easier.

  “Thanks, Glori,” I told the older woman. “No need to wait up.”

  “What if sirrah comes home?”

  “I told you—” I took a deep breath, swallowing the scalding anger on my tongue. Her granddaughter died because of you. For a moment I thought Sin had managed to wriggle free from the mental restraints I’d put in place, but no, the thought was my own. She died because she didn’t listen. Marin’s mistake had been one I could almost forgive: love. A year ago I’d have called it a weakness, but there was a certain sort of dumb, brute strength in love. Like all mindless muscle, it got you killed, but sometimes it did good before you drew your last breath.

  “I told you, Glori,” I began again, “Eld isn’t coming back. Ever.”

  “Signorina, if this is because of Marin”—Glori’s voice fell to a whisper—“then—”

  “It’s nothing at all to do with Marin,” I lied. “Sometimes friends grow apart, that’s all. Just shit timing,” I added with a smile I didn’t feel. Turns out mixing a lie with the truth does little to dull its bite.

  “Signorina?” My eyes flashed and Glori inclined her head. “As you say, signorina. I hope he returns, all the same.”

  I nodded and strode away before she could see my expression, the echoes of my bootheels chasing after me.

  “Hope is the hidden blade against your throat that you never realize is there until it cuts,” I whispered. It’d cut me deep enough that if it were real I’d have choked on my own blood. A part of me still wondered if that wouldn’t have been the greater mercy. First, justice. But that wasn’t right. Justice would come, but first: revenge.

  First, Sicarii.

  * * *

  There was a mustiness in the air of my bedroom that hadn’t been there when I left, accompanied by a whiff of something sharp and metallic. Gunpowder. I let the blade strapped to my wrist beneath my shirtsleeves slide into the palm of my hand as I studied the organized chaos of my room. Books in random piles; plywood boxes with exploding skulls burned into the sides; match cord wound in tight bundles here, cut into pieces there; scattered everywhere, ropes and pulleys lay in coils and tangles. Nothing out of place and yet …

  As I walked nonchalantly across the room, complaining out loud about the lack of a fire in the middle of winter, I noticed ash stains on the marble floor. I opened the secret passageway to find the Secreto captain lying in a heap, a puzzled look on the half of her face that hadn’t taken both barrels of the sawed-off blunderbuss I’d rigged days earlier. The other half was a mess of blood and brains, with a white shard of bone jutting out of the vermillion puddle. Gunpowder hung in the air, stinging my nose and nearly overpowering the sickly sweet, almost rotten stench of brain fluid. The double-barreled ’buss, I saw, was still wedged firmly in place, still hidden from casual inspection

  Slipping my blade back into its sheath, I stepped into the passageway and touched the dead woman’s outstretched hand. Cool, but not cold. She had known I was coming and meant to wait for me, but she hadn’t been following me herself. Lucky she came alone. I stood up and something caught my eye. A scrap of paper, a few paces from her body, just outside the congealed pool of blood.

  Her Grace doesn’t go where you will … you come to her. Do not go to the
Lighthouse. Present yourself and the proof you claim to have of Sicarii to her at the Palacio. You have until morning.

  P.S. Lose the bells and wire, our eyes see what Her Grace wills, our ears hear what she wills. Traps and tricks won’t stop us.

  The sigil of the Secreto was half-pressed into the page, the rest smeared across it as if the hand doing the pressing had been suddenly ripped away.

  The hammers of the blunderbuss had been tied back, along with the trigger … tied with an impossibly thin line to the trip wire that led to the bell. Cut the wire, and the hammers dropped. Boom.

  “There are traps and then there are traps,” I muttered.

  I slid the fireplace back into the wall, realizing for the first time that there was a dinner tray on my nightstand. One of the servants must have been sent up with it while I was still giving Glori my things downstairs. I wasn’t hungry. My breasts ached against my gown, and that, combined with the strange unease I felt, had me suspecting my time of the month was coming. Another pleasantry Sin had saved me from. Damnable timing. Then again, it might be that little extra bit of pain and rage I needed to make everything I dreamed reality.

  My mind raced with the dozen plans and plots I’d set in motion today; I dug around in my pocket for some kan to ward off an impending headache. I pulled out two rolled papers, felt for more, and bit back a curse. I’d been smoking the stuff practically day and night—it was the only way I’d been able to bring all the disparate bolts of lightning flashing through my mind together into the scheme that I was, Gods be damned, close to pulling off. Now I was almost out.

  “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to need your strength,” I whispered.

  Setting the kan aside, I sat on the edge of my bed and took the cover off the bowl on the tray, revealing Nan’s fish-bone stew. A hunk of bread sat beside it. I ate mechanically, spoon in one hand, the other tapping out a beat on the side of my leg. Why am I on a knife’s edge? Everything had gone according to plan. Almost everything. I hadn’t counted on the Dead Gods and Sin Eaters refusing to leave their sanctuaries. The letters I’d sent in Sicarii’s name should see to that. I hoped.

  So what had me wanting to stab everything around me and run for the first hole I could find? Beyond my impending period, of course.

  “Eld?” I tasted his name on my lips, all bitter with no sweet to chase it. The sharp, stabbing pain I’d felt when I realized the full extent of his betrayal had settled deep into my chest, becoming a dull throb that pulsed with my heart. Hope had fled when I sent him out the door. I was not one for half measures and I think, over the years, I’d converted Eld to the same. When he left, I knew, deep down, that he wasn’t coming back. If he tried, I wouldn’t let him. So it wasn’t Eld.

  Sicarii.

  I felt a shiver run down my spine. She knew so much about me, almost like she’d crawled inside my head. Somehow she anticipated every move I made and lay in wait. Ambush after ambush, and when I’d finally gone after her and sniffed out her lair, it’d turned out she’d let me win that particular battle so she could make a stab at ending the war.

  How?

  I set the soup aside and used a candle to puff alight one of the cigarillos. My lungs burned with kan and my thoughts slowed and settled so I could consider what was gold and what was dross. Sicarii knows me. Knew me before all this started. The Artificer had told me as much.

  “She wants you to suffer, Buc.”

  I took a drag of kan and blew out a ragged smoke ring, watched it form, then drift apart, my mind plucking at the strands of a tapestry I could just barely make out. She wanted me to suffer, but she had tried to murder me several times over. How hard did she try, really? I grunted. At the time, in the moment, they’d seemed like avid fucking attempts and yet—how close had I really come to dying?

  “If Sicarii knows me, then she took that into account,” I whispered. “What would I do, if I were trying to kill me?” The first attempt would have to be overwhelming, while my guard wasn’t as high. I nodded, sucking down the last of the cigarillo and coughing out a stream of smoke. She wanted me to suffer. “Which means,” I said out loud, “that she didn’t intend to kill me. Just wound. Or distract?” I ground out the cigarillo.

  Only after I’d fended off repeated attempts, tried to chase her down at the Masquerade, and followed up by searching her out had Sicarii changed tactics. She went after Eld through Govanti, and by going after Eld, she went for the heart. My heart. That’s the key to it. Somehow, Sicarii knew how I felt about Eld and that meant she either knew us before—unlikely—or was fed information by the Chair or the Doga. Or Salina. Given what I’d learned in the last day or so, I was leaning toward the Doga.

  Whatever Sicarii wanted, I was only a piece of it. The rest had to tie into the Artificer and the assassination attempts on the Doga—feigned or otherwise—and the unification of the Servenzan underworld. All of that screamed something larger than hurting Sambuciña “Buc” Alhurra.

  I knew I was missing something, could see the blank space on the tapestry I’d woven in my mind, but I was damned if I could find it. It was that uncertainty, the unknown that scared me. That’s it. Fear. Only, the feeling, tight in my chest, wasn’t quite fear, it was too swift, too fleeting, here one moment and gone the next, but promising to return. Panic. I’d felt fear before, sure, I was no fool, but that fear had been muted by the arrogance of youth. I’d never worried about dying, not really, not when I knew my strengths and saw everyone else’s weaknesses. Chan Sha had nearly caught me out on her ship last summer, aye. The Ghost Captain had come closer still, several times over. I’d felt fear there, real fear, but not this sense of impending doom. This heavy, sunken feeling deep within me that pulsed with terror.

  “What the fuck are you afraid of losing?”

  The question caught me off guard and I slumped back into my chair, considering. I’d lost the children in the factory. I raised a finger. I’d lost the Board, for all intents and purposes. Another finger. Eld and Sin, done in by their own betrayal. Third and fourth. Then … that was it. Everything I’d had going for me when we returned from finishing off the Ghost Captain—in two seasons I’d managed to lose it all. Aye, my dream was still there, my promise to Marin and Govanti and the rest, but if I lost my life, those promises might as well have never been made. Which meant …

  “Nothing.” I whispered the word and felt something other than pain or panic shoot through me. “I’ve got nothing left to lose.”

  I’d been dancing to Sicarii’s tune, letting her call the steps. Now, after everything I’d put into motion, we were playing a new game. One of my choosing, and most deliciously of all: Sicarii had no fucking clue. She thought she was still the composer, still the one with the cards up her sleeves. I chuckled. That was exactly what I wanted her to think. You want to win? Let a person believe you’re going to play one game, then play another. Change the rules. Better yet, create them.

  I laughed hoarsely.

  “Tonight, I deal the cards.”

  I reached for the last rolled kan paper and hesitated, let it lay there. I didn’t need it. I couldn’t see everything, but I could see enough.

  “And I’m dealing off the bottom.”

  57

  “Signorina, a box was just delivered for you,” Glori said, backing into the room. She glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, I thought you were staying in tonight, signorina.”

  “I am,” I lied, studying my reflection in the mirror. “I’ve an important meeting in the morning and I want to make sure I look my best, so I’m giving a few outfits a try. What do you think?”

  “Crimson is very becoming on you,” Glori said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I buttoned the single button that held the tight-fitting top of the jacket in place; the bottom flared at the waist.

  “I worry it’s too loose for your frame,” Glori added after a moment.

  “Wants tailoring,” I agreed. It did want tailoring if I was going to walk about like a normal lady. Lucki
ly I’d never been normal and had no intention of starting now. If anything, I hoped it was loose enough for what I needed. “You said there was a package?”

  “A rather large box, signorina.”

  “Where from?”

  “The messenger said the stamp was of Normain, signorina.”

  “Ah, bring it in, then,” I said. “I like presents.”

  Glori glanced around the clutter in my room and sniffed. “I’m not sure where to tell them to put it.”

  “Beside the bed works,” I said, turning back to the mirror and adjusting the stiletto tucked behind my black belt so the hilt was out of sight. “I can use it as a stepping ladder if I need to.”

  “As you say,” Glori said, some of the old fire returning to her voice. Without turning from the mirror, I watched her gesture two of the younger servants into the room; they were carrying a box the size of an armchair. “Place it there,” she said, indicating an open spot beside the bed, nearly the last place in the room where one could still see the floor. “Carefully, mind!”

  The box still made a dull thump when they set it down. Dust shot from its sides and both men coughed, beating at their jackets as they left.

  “Thanks, Glori.” I grinned in the mirror. “You can have the night, then, but before you go do you know where my—”

  “Knives and slingshot are from your outfit today?” The old woman nodded. “I’ll have them sent in, signorina, though I must confess that I don’t quite grasp their meaning.”

  “You don’t understand what a stiletto is used for?”

  “I don’t know why you’d take one to a meeting, is all.”

  “Oh.” I chuckled. “Sometimes I let on it’s to make men nervous, other times to intimidate women, but the truth is, Glori”—I turned away from the mirror—“I carry them to remind me that my mind is a blade that can draw blood if I want it to. In the meetings I’ve been in of late, that’s been worth remembering.”

  “I … see.” Glori ran a hand through her thinning grey hair and inclined her head to hide the confused look on her face. “If that’s all, signorina, I will leave you to open your present.”