Blood Ties

by Lindsay Buroker

  “No,” Danja said blandly. “Anything of interest with the Water Order?” She looked at Zenia but didn’t direct any questions to her. Her expression seemed dismissive.

  Zenia held back a frown, not sure if the monk recognized her or not. If so, she wondered if she was now considered an outcast among all the Orders. Could word have traveled so quickly about her parting from the Water Order?

  “Nothing at all,” Rhi responded with an edged smile.

  They bowed to each other again before turning away.

  Outside, Zenia squinted at the bright sunlight.

  “I need to get to the temple so I can trail Marlyna—don’t even think of calling her Marly for short—around the city,” Rhi said. “I’ll leave you to your new investigation.” She paused, looking like she wanted to say something else.

  “Will you be all right?” Zenia asked. “I know Marlyna isn’t as warm and chatty as I am—”

  Rhi snorted.

  “—but she’s good at her job and gets sent out on a lot of missions.” Zenia kept herself from saying Marlyna was brusque and sometimes cruel and that she would love a chance to pummel the inquisitor on the wrestling mat after what she’d done to Jev. “At least you won’t be bored.”

  “Boredom isn’t what I was worried about. And that’s the question I was thinking of asking you.”

  “If I’ll be all right?”

  “Yes. You may have noticed—” Rhi tipped her bo toward the shop door, “—that the archmage hasn’t been quiet about you being kicked out of the Order. She made it clear she’s irked with you and that you’re not to be trusted. Also that you may be sympathetic to elves.”

  “Ah.” Zenia knew she’d earned Sazshen’s wrath, but she hadn’t expected the archmage, a woman in her late sixties, to be vindictive or hold a grudge. The knowledge stung. They had worked together for so many years. But it had only been a few days since Zenia had done what she believed was the right thing. Perhaps in time, Sazshen would mellow and realize that giving that artifact back to its rightful owners would not likely result in the world ending.

  “I think she wanted to make sure you wouldn’t easily gain employment with any of the other Orders,” Rhi said. “Probably because you know a lot of the Water Order’s secrets—I assume that’s the case, since lowly monks aren’t told any secrets—and she wouldn’t want that information being shared with the other Orders.”

  “There’s something to that, I suppose, though it’s not like I would have gossiped.”

  “Your employment in the king’s service was unexpected.” Rhi grinned. “People in the temple were flabbergasted. Even Sazshen.”

  “Are you supposed to be sharing all this gossip with me?”

  “Oh, absolutely not. I’ve been forbidden from talking to you.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yup. You’re just lucky Marlyna is so odious and humorless and that I felt the need to seek you out.”

  “Don’t get in trouble—or worse—because of me, please.” Zenia felt bad enough about her own ruined career. She did not want Rhi to lose hers simply for associating with her.

  “If I do, do you think the king has a position open for a monk?”

  “Uhm, I don’t know. He’s got a bunch of dour-faced guards that trail him around the castle. I don’t know what training they had before being added to the staff.”

  “I can be dour. Let me know if you hear of a position.” Rhi waved her bo. “I’m off to see if I can requisition one of those orc ears for free. A donation for the temple, if you will. Maybe if I offer the vendor a fortune and the favor of the Blue Dragon founder, he’ll be eager to share with me.”

  “Monks aren’t allowed to tell fortunes.”

  “Yes, but those who are only vaguely religious rarely know all the rules.” Rhi winked and trotted off up the street.

  Zenia blew out a slow breath, worried that her friend would get in trouble, worried that she would be ineffective at her job without a dragon tear, and worried that she was now considered an outcast by every member of the four Orders in the city. Aside from the personal implications, that status might make people less likely to cooperate with her when she did work on the king’s behalf.

  “This day is off to a good start,” she mumbled as she headed off to meet Jev.

  2

  Jev climbed up the fire-escape ladder, heading to the rooftop of a three-story building across the alley from a row of backyards belonging to elegant stone townhouses. Soft clinks sounded on the rungs below him as Cutter followed, his hook doing as well on the ladder as his right hand once would have.

  “When I said I’d come with you because we were going the same way,” Cutter huffed from below, “I didn’t expect you to take a detour.”

  “It was a whim.” Jev touched the folded paper in his pocket, a single address written upon it. Not that much of a whim, he admitted silently.

  Cutter grunted something indecipherable even to someone who spoke numerous languages, including Preskabroton Dwarf.

  “You didn’t need to come up. I said you could wait down there.” Jev pulled himself over the lip of the building and onto the flat roof. A fishy breeze wafted up from the Anchor Sea as he headed to the far side. The harbor and the mouth of the Jade River Delta were visible from the lofty perch. As well as those backyards….

  “How would that assuage my curiosity about what you’re up to?” Cutter followed him across the rooftop.

  Jev knelt at the edge, looking out over the alley and into a particular yard. A mix of brick pavers and neatly trimmed grass, it was empty of life aside from a few seagulls plucking at a trashcan lid. He’d hoped to catch a glimpse of more.

  It was the middle of the morning, he told himself. She might not be home. She might be caring for the children inside. Or she might be having wild passionate sex with her husband.

  Jev rolled his eyes at himself, disgusted that his mind traveled down that road. He didn’t care about that. Or he shouldn’t. He just wanted to know if she was doing all right. If she was healthy and well. With him.

  “Are we looking for someone?” Cutter crouched beside him, his long red beard brushing the textured roof at their feet.

  Jev hesitated, reluctant to explain even though he’d shared his past with Cutter before. He felt a little embarrassed about this diversion and wished he didn’t have a witness for it. His meeting with Targyon had ended early, and it so happened that the address he’d been carrying in his pocket for three days was near the doctor he planned to visit next.

  The doctor he planned to visit next with Zenia. What would she think if she knew he was checking up on the woman he would have married if he hadn’t been ordered off to war?

  “Naysha,” he finally told Cutter.

  “That the woman who didn’t wait for you?”

  Jev grimaced. “Yes.”

  “Huh. A dwarf woman would have waited, but ten years isn’t that long for a dwarf. I hear it’s different with humans.”

  “It’s a long time for humans,” Jev agreed. “I don’t blame her for not waiting. I just…” Wish she’d waited more than six months before starting to see someone else, he finished silently.

  But he didn’t want to go into more detail. He hadn’t noticed that Cutter was a romantic in any sense. As far as Jev could tell, Cutter’s quasi-crush on the bearded female Arkura Grindmor had more to do with what she could teach him in the gem-working shop than any notions of bedroom frolicking.

  “She’s not expecting you, eh?” Cutter waved to indicate their rooftop perch.

  “No.”

  Jev had thought about walking up and knocking on her door, but he didn’t want to intrude on her life or assume she would want to see him after all this time.

  “Is this what humans call stalking, then?”

  “It’s not stalking if you work for the king.”

  “Oh? Did he ask you to peep into her backyard?”

  “No.”

  Cutter arched his bushy red eyebrows.

 
“Don’t you have a master gem cutter to meet up with?” Jev asked a touch grumpily.

  “At noon, yes. She doesn’t rise early—dwarves aren’t much for abiding the workings of the sun—as I found out when I showed up at dawn and she yelled at me through a window.”

  “You would think if she wanted to find her special diamond tools, she’d be amenable to being up at all hours.” Jev felt guilty that he had foisted the job of assisting Arkura with her search on Cutter. His friend had asked for an introduction to the master cutter, not a quest. Still, Cutter seemed pleased by the chance to prove himself to the legendary dwarf.

  “She’s a master and in high demand,” Cutter said. “She must be used to picking whatever hours she wishes to be awake.”

  Before Jev could respond, the back door of the townhouse opened. He crouched lower, held his breath, and gripped the lip of the rooftop.

  Naysha, the woman he hadn’t seen in ten years, walked out accompanied by three children, their ages varying from four to eight. He knew that from letters his cousin Wyleria had sent over the years. She had been the one to report that Naysha had married someone else, and she’d updated him when the children had come along. She kept tabs on a lot of the zyndar families the Dharrows interacted with. He had always flinched away from the gossip on Naysha, not wanting to know about her new life, but at the same time, he hadn’t been able to stop reading those letters. It had always stung that Naysha herself had never written, instead leaving his cousin to send along the news.

  “She doesn’t look very healthy,” Cutter observed. “Too skinny. No beard.”

  Jev slanted an oblique look at his comrade. Naysha had always been beautiful, and she still was. Her figure was fuller, less wispy than it had been when they’d been in their early twenties, but that was to be expected. She was a mother now.

  The breeze played with her long hair as she led the children to the back gate. They skipped and laughed, and she smiled gently.

  Jev swallowed, remembering how much he had adored that smile once. When he had been younger, he’d thought she would be the only one he would ever love. And for a time, she’d led him to believe she felt the same.

  As the family opened the gate and headed into the alley, off to the children’s school perhaps, Jev leaned back so Naysha wouldn’t see him if she looked up. And because he felt like a heel for spying like this.

  “You going down to talk to her?” Cutter asked.

  “No.” He’d seen that she was healthy and well, that she lived in a nice home and that her new husband—what was his name? Zyndar Grift Myloron—was presumably taking good care of her. That was all he needed to know.

  “Then this is definitely stalking.”

  “No, it’s not. Because we’re done.” Jev backed away before rising to his full height and heading to the ladder.

  He didn’t know if he was glad or not that he hadn’t seen the husband. He vaguely remembered Myloron as handsome and overly blessed with muscles and athleticism. If that was still true, Jev didn’t want to know about it. He also wouldn’t have wanted to witness them kissing before the man headed off for whatever business he attended to daily.

  “Good. You don’t even need to care for her anymore, right? You’ve got the equally un-bearded Zenia.”

  “Hm.” Jev couldn’t truly say that he had Zenia.

  “Hm? I heard you two were lip wrestling in your castle the other night. That’s how humans profess love, isn’t it?”

  “It’s how they profess mutual interest and attraction. Love sometimes comes later.”

  Jev definitely wouldn’t mind further exploring the possibility of mutual interest and attraction with Zenia, but he didn’t know if he had it in him to experience true love again, the fiery passion bordering on obsession that had consumed him in his youth. He also didn’t know how much interest Zenia truly had in him. That night in the castle, she had been injured and had her guard down when he kissed her. She didn’t let her guard down often, so he didn’t know if he could expect that event to repeat itself.

  He glanced at Cutter. “How do dwarves profess love? My languages tutor failed to mention that.”

  “Usually by making things for each other. I made the first dwarf maiden I fell in love with a spice rack. She likes to bake, you see.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Sweet? It was manly and virile. It weighed twenty pounds, and I carved it out of stone.”

  “Did she make you something in return?”

  “Yes, frosted rock thumpers.”

  “Those are kind of like our cupcakes, right?” Jev, for all the traveling he’d done in the army and all the languages he’d learned, had never been into one of the great underground cities the dwarves had carved deep into the mountains around the world.

  “Ten-pound cupcakes that fill your gut like a good borscht.”

  “Is weight an important element in all dwarven gifts?” Jev asked as they climbed down to the alley.

  He headed in a direction that would take them to the doctor’s establishment without crossing Naysha’s path. The last thing Jev wanted was for her to know he’d been checking up on—but definitely not stalking—her. If she was curious about how he was doing these days, she could come out to Dharrow Castle to ask. He wouldn’t inflict himself on her in her new life.

  “Nothing says you care like heft,” Cutter said. “You should buy something hefty for Zenia. Or even better make her something.”

  Jev looked down at his hands. His father could make something out of wood, and he had cousins that were artists, but Jev didn’t have a knack for craftiness. As numerous lopsided building projects from his youth attested. He blamed his colorblindness. He felt he was doing well if he could match his clothes, something that had been easier when he’d been in the army and expected to wear the same uniform every day.

  “I should probably ask her on a date first,” Jev said.

  “If you made her something she liked, it would be easier to ask. Making leads to acceptances.”

  “I don’t know how to make anything.”

  They turned at an intersection and entered a more peopled part of town with tenement buildings on one side of the street and law, bookkeeping, and apothecary offices lining the other.

  “That’s moderately pathetic,” Cutter said.

  “When you grow up zyndar, nobody expects you to do anything except lead your people into battle and manage the estate for the family. There’s the office. Dr. Bandigor.”

  “Looks like he does well for himself,” Cutter said. “That’s Kandoorish marble, imported more than two thousand miles from the mountain jungles of Izstara. And those are gold and diamond door pulls. I think that’s the work of Master Craftsman Borgis the Melder out of Frumtar, one of my people’s largest cities.”

  “He was the king’s personal doctor.” It amused but did not surprise Jev that Cutter could name all the architectural elements of the building. “I imagine that pays well.”

  Jev climbed the steps and knocked on a door made from thick teak carved with ornate safari scenes of people riding elephants while orcs and lions peered at them from the grasses.

  “We’re going right in?” Cutter asked. “You don’t want to stalk him before talking to him?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

  When nobody answered, Jev tried the fancy pull. The door opened easily.

  A wide, shadowy hallway led inside, the marble floor swept clean, no dust dulling any of the busts resting on pedestals lining one side. And yet, the place felt abandoned. Not a sound came from any of the rooms off the hallway.

  Had the doctor fled town after the princes’ deaths? Or maybe he was simply taking off for the last day of the holidays following the coronation.

  “Jev?” a familiar voice called from somewhere in the interior.

  “Zenia?”

  “Back here.”

  He strode down the hallway, regretting that he’d made her wait because of his unplanned stop. She had, he recal
led, wanted to start their new assignment as soon as the sun came up. Or possibly much sooner.

  “We have a problem,” Zenia added in a quieter tone.

  “Already? We just started.”

  “She probably knows you haven’t made her anything,” Cutter said.

  “Ssh.”

  They passed a couple of waiting and examining rooms. The last door on the right stood open, and Jev peeked inside.

  “Uh.” He expected to see Zenia, but instead, his gaze locked on a man lying face-up on the floor. A dead man.

  There was no mistaking the pool of blood on the marble tiles or the hole in the side of the gray-haired man’s skull. An intricately inlaid gold pistol lay next to him, inches from his open hand. Glassy eyes stared up at the ceiling beams.

  Zenia stood a few feet away, her chin propped on her fist as she gazed down at the corpse.

  Jev hurried to her side, lifting an arm in case she needed support. He had the urge to pull her into a hug and turn her face from the grisly sight.

  “I’ve examined the body as much as possible without disturbing it,” she stated matter-of-factly. “I believe the time of death was very early this morning or possibly late last night.”

  She looked at his extended arm and lifted her eyebrows.

  “Ah.” Jev lowered his hand, feeling silly.

  After ten years as an inquisitor, she must have seen a few dead bodies. He didn’t think the religious Orders’ law enforcers were assigned murder cases frequently, but he supposed it happened.

  “It’s definitely Dr. Bandigor,” Zenia added. “I’m familiar with him.”

  “Ah,” Jev said again for lack of a better response. He wouldn’t have been. After ten years out of the kingdom, he wasn’t familiar with many people in the capital anymore.

  “He shoot himself?” Cutter asked from the doorway.

  “It looks that way, but…” Zenia lifted a palm toward the ceiling.

  “You don’t think so?” Jev asked.

  “Oh, it’s possible. I imagine he’s been under pressure and scrutiny since he was known to be the royal family’s doctor and the princes all died in the same month. It’s possible he felt intense guilt at not knowing the cause or being able to save them. Or maybe he did know the cause and, for some reason, he chose not to save them. Then when he heard we were starting an investigation, he worried we would find out the truth, and he would be financially ruined if not hanged.” She lifted a shoulder. “That’s mere fanciful speculation, mind you, and nothing to truly be considered unless we find evidence to support it. It’s also possible someone else shot him and tried to make it look like he committed suicide.”