Liar's Moon

by Elizabeth C. Bunce

  “Did you ever do business with her?”

  “Some.”

  “What kind?”

  A quirk of a smile. “The conventional kind.”

  “And if it were anything else, you wouldn’t tell me.” That wasn’t a question.

  “I would not tell you,” he agreed, “but I would be very circumspect in my denials, and I would devise an excuse to slip out of this office and leave you here alone for a few moments. No, my girl, if Mistress Ceid was dealing in anything unconventional, she was doing it through other avenues.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “Are you sure? This isn’t something to poke at lightly, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s important. If it can help Durrel —”

  “Of course. I don’t suppose there’s any use telling you to be careful?” When I didn’t answer, Cwalo looked resigned. “I understand. Come to dinner? Mirelle would never forgive me for not asking. Besides, Piral can’t stop talking about you.”

  “You brought them to Gerse?”

  “My dear, surely you know by now, nobody brings Mirelle Cwalo anywhere. She came to see you. Just in case you stopped by. I wish you had stayed,” he added.

  I felt my heart give a little squeeze. “You know why I left,” I said. Werne’s first letter had come to Cwalo’s house, and I’d gotten new lodgings — well across town — the next day. They had urged me to stay, but I think Mirelle was secretly relieved, no matter what her husband said. She still had children at home, after all, and two boys fighting for Wierolf. She didn’t need me adding to her concerns.

  Cwalo just gave the ghost of a sigh. “Come up to the house, now. She worries.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Armed with Cwalo’s information, I set off on a circuit of the dockside warehouses leased or owned by Talth and her family. It was tricky going; I was ridiculously out of place here, a girl alone, wandering the docks, strolling in and out of warehouses. I ought to have brought Cwalo along, but of course I never think of these things until it’s too late. Still, I did my best to look like a servant on business for her masters, straightening my cap and hitching my basket to my shoulder and trying to act imperious.

  Also, I had the knife in my boot.

  The first warehouse was nearly empty, not a soul in sight and not a dust mote, sparkling or otherwise, out of place. It was all a little too clean, in fact — Bal Marse clean, as if someone had gone to great effort to tidy up after . . . something. The few crates stacked in neat rows at the back of the storeroom were empty, their Talancan and Vareni labels plainly announcing their contents and sources, their royal customs and tax stamps frustratingly authentic. I studied the stamps briefly; if it was some kind of smuggling operation, there was no way to tell. That kind of business had too many facets to discern from a quick peek around an empty warehouse. It would require stamps, bribes, falsified manifests and bills of lading, not to mention needing some idea of what was being smuggled. I couldn’t begin to guess from a handful of empty boxes stacked in a very, very clean Ceid storeroom. But someone was dead, and there was a reason for it.

  And there was a reason a perfectly good warehouse stood empty in the middle of the busy shipping season.

  Like the gates at Bal Marse, the warehouse office had been left unlocked. Inside, the two neat desks — one tall and angled for writing, the other an ordinary work desk — were likewise bare, as if waiting for their masters to return from a long, foreign holiday. A lamp, an inkwell, a brazier below a window, and nothing else even remotely useful. There was a faint odor of old smoke and ash mingled with the dusty, dry-crate smell of the place, as if someone had had a fire burning in the brazier.

  In the height of midsummer.

  I slipped my knife from its sheath and poked through the ash in the brazier — people always forget to clean out the ash — and was rewarded with a half-burnt scrap of paper, singed and curling at the corners, that had escaped the pyre. I pierced it through and lifted it to the light; it seemed to have been part of a ledger or records book, but it was so badly damaged it was hard to tell. Light of something, it said, and elsewhere, something that might have been part of a name — Caltu — , or Catho — I couldn’t make it out. And a list of sums. Fifteen thousand crowns here, another ten thousand on another line. There was a lot of money changing hands here, somewhere. I just couldn’t tell over what.

  I knew little about business, but a lot about deception and covering up secrets, and it was a safe bet which category torching your records fell into. I felt my pulse quicken; here was my first real, tangible clue, charred though it was. I gently blew away the blackened edges of the page and tucked it carefully into my basket, below the false bottom I had fitted out for just such an occasion. With nothing more to be found, in or out of the ash, I moved on.

  The second warehouse was downriver and across Market Bridge, on a busier dock closer to the castle and the Keep. They were open for business, and looked more like what I’d expected of a Ceid operation, with workers and dockhands bustling about the yard and storehouses, all loaded up with crates and casks and sacks of goods either coming or going. A white stucco building like a small fortress, yellow-and-green House of Ceid flags flying from its mock towers, signaled the heart of the family’s business in the city. They evidently weren’t accustomed to visitors, however. Down on the docks, workers cut me a wide swath as I passed by, scurrying out of my way as if I had the stench of contagion about me, and when I stopped to ask one closed-faced workman an innocent question (where the master was), he looked first to the office building before deciding not to answer.

  This was getting me nowhere. In the hot afternoon sun, I pulled off my cap and let it hang down my back, loosened the button of my smock to let the river air tease my neck. Did one of those tall ships carry some secret cargo that had gotten Talth killed? Or had her business, whatever it was, died with her?

  “Oi, there. Can I help you?”

  I turned. A dockhand in a work-stained leather jerkin ambled toward me across the docks, a roll of papers under one arm. I held my hand up to block the sun; he had a friendly, open look about him, unlike his fellows. I don’t know, maybe he liked short and surly.

  “Oranges,” I said abruptly.

  “How’s that?” Dockhand said.

  Well, I was in it now. I tugged at my bodice, not that there was anything more to reveal. “My mistress sent me to see what was holding up her oranges. From Talanca? And here you are, and here the crates are, but I don’t see any oranges.” I sounded completely witless. “If you’ve sold them to someone else —” He eyed me a moment, and I fingered my bruised cheek, for effect.

  “Well, let’s see here,” he said, unrolling his papers. “I’ve got ships from Talanca, but it don’t look like we’ve had any fruit on ’em.” He flipped through the documents, which looked like shipping manifests, listing the goods and the levies, and the ships they came in on and were scheduled to go out on again. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; typical Ceid bookkeeping that pinned down every last seed and nail to move through this place. “Maybe we can find your oranges inside.” And, as if Tiboran himself had delivered this fellow to me as a gift, he turned and led me straight into the Ceid warehouse.

  “What a lot of — things,” I said as we weaved through the crowded storeroom, looking for my imaginary oranges. “What is it all?”

  “This cargo here is all supplies for His Majesty’s troops in the field,” he said, but confidentially, as if it were a secret. Waving me past a row of grain sacks, he cracked the lid on one crate, showing me the clean, sawdust-cushioned blades of a shipment of swords stamped with Bardolph’s royal crest. I thought it was too bad there wasn’t some salt water at hand to dribble onto the blades, so His Majesty’s troops would find them rusty and dull when they arrived. Royal approval would make for ideal cover for a shipment of contraband, but my ignorant eyes couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary about this merchandise, and
nothing unusual happened when I stroked my fingers across the goods. Was there something here worth murdering someone for? I had the sudden, fabulous idea that perhaps there was some magic in these items destined for Bardolph’s troops, to give his soldiers the same mystical advantage that Prince Wierolf wielded. That would certainly cause a scandal of Ceid proportions, but when I leaned in to tap the blades of the neatly packed weapons, I was disappointed. The swords were just swords.

  “Where does it all come from?” I asked. “You can’t get that kind of grain in Gerse.” Not lately, anyway.

  “All over,” the dockhand said. “Gelnir, Yeris. Tratua, a lot of it. Like me.” He waved a hand toward the other men working on the docks. “A lot of us boys hail from down there.”

  Tratua? I looked up sharply from my examination of a barrel labeled GRISSE Á VOLANDE, whatever that was. Why hire dockhands from half the country away when the rivers were swarming with them right here? “Master Ceid must think highly of your work, to bring you all the way out here, then.”

  A shrug. “I wouldn’t know about any Ceid. I was just hired to watch this cargo until the Belprisa comes through at the end of the week.”

  “Belprisa?”

  “Some Talancan ship. Due in a few days.” He fanned the manifests, as if searching for a name.

  Standing on tiptoe, I peeked in. “And they’ll have my oranges?” And what else, I wondered.

  He snapped the papers shut. “I don’t know,” Friendly Dockhand said, his voice gone suddenly curt. “Why don’t you come back after she’s docked?”

  “Maybe Master Ceid will know?” I said sweetly, wondering at the abrupt change in tone. “I’m not leaving until —”

  “All right! Fine. Maybe they got delivered already. I’ll see if I can’t get somebody to show you.” He turned toward the back of the open storage space, where a woman leaned on a crate, writing something. “Hey, Geirt!”

  The girl turned, and I felt a sudden little rush. Geirt! Talth’s Geirt, the chambermaid who put Durrel with Talth before the murder? As she crossed toward us, details filled in, matching Durrel’s description: young, plump, long red hair coiled into braids pinned up on her head.

  “Maybe she can help me,” I said, and slipped away from the dockhand. I met the girl and said, “I have some questions. Can you help?”

  “I can try,” she said in a bored voice. “What do you need? I heard you say something about oranges? We never have fresh produce here; the masters are too cheap.”

  “Not about that,” I said, my voice low. “About Lord Durrel.”

  “Durrel!” Her eyes flew wide, and she clamped a hand over her pretty mouth. I’d seen firsthand the effect Lord Durrel had on the female servants in his employ, and I guessed that this Geirt was not immune. “Quick, come over here.” She drew me outside, away from the warehouse building. “Who are you?”

  “A friend. You told the Night Watch that you saw Lord Durrel leave your mistress’s bedroom after midnight. Are you absolutely sure it was him?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Oh, aye. I remember specifically, because I thought it was so odd.”

  “Why odd?”

  She leaned in. “Because of the row they’d had earlier that night. I thought my lady — Marau keep her — had finally pushed Lord Durrel too far, and I’d have been less surprised to see him light out for the street, his bags on his back, than to find him in Lady Talth’s bedroom again!” She sobered. “I guess I was right about one thing. She must have gone too far that time.”

  “What was the quarrel about?”

  “I couldn’t hear. Just a lot of yelling, but louder and longer than usual. My mistress was a hard woman, Marau —”

  “Keep her. Right. And you’re sure it wasn’t anyone else?”

  Her eyebrows pulled together. “Who else could it have been? It was past midnight. Besides, I’ve seen milord walk about the house in the dark often enough; I knew him immediately, you know that gray doublet he always wears? I thought —” Her cheeks tinged pink. “I thought he’d gone there to, you know, make up with the mistress?”

  I couldn’t help cringing. That was a thought that didn’t bear imagining. But something about Geirt seemed . . . off, somehow. She was pretty and friendly and she sounded like she believed her own story, so what was wrong?

  Standing beside her, I had the strongest urge to touch her. Frowning, I stepped closer, laid a hand gently on her arm. “And you’re not lying to protect somebody?” I said, looking her in the face but thinking about my hand on her sleeve. “Another servant, perhaps? Or maybe Talth had another gentleman?”

  She jerked her hand away. “Why are you asking all these questions?” she said, suddenly sounding defiant. “The Watch caught him. He had the poison. What else is there to know?”

  Well, to start, I wanted to know why I’d expected Geirt’s arm to flash with light when I touched it. But she wore no silver that I could see, no jewelry at all. There was no reason to suspect she might have magic, and she’d passed the only test I knew as emphatically not magical, and yet . . . Pox.

  “Maybe you had a motive?” I suggested, just to see what she did.

  Her eyes grew cold. “I was a lady’s maid in a fine house in Gerse,” she said. “With fine clothes and food and a soft bed to myself. And now I’m working on the docks, like some city mudskimmer, thanks to Milord Durrel.”

  “Hey!” I heard a voice like a door banging open, and Geirt started and pulled away from me. Coming out of the wide warehouse doors like a storm rolling in was Barris Ceid. “Geirt! Come away from her. You — what do you want?” He covered the distance between us in a few long strides and grabbed Geirt by the arm. “What did you say to her?” He gave her a brutal shake.

  “Nothing!” she cried. “Honestly — she said she was here about oranges!” Tears sprang up in her huge green eyes.

  “I don’t pay you to gossip. Get back inside.” Geirt freed herself and fled back into the warehouse.

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” Barris demanded.

  “You said you welcomed my questions,” I said, trying to keep my voice reasonable.

  “Yes, into Durrel Decath. Not harassing my employees.”

  “Your employees who don’t know anything about you?” I inclined my head toward Dockhand, who lingered curiously at the open front of the warehouse.

  Barris’s face relaxed some. “Yes, well. Loyalty has always been a trait prized by the Ceid.”

  “Then you’ll be pleased with Geirt,” I said. “She didn’t have anything to tell me.”

  “And she won’t,” Barris said. “Now I’ll thank you to leave my property before I call the guards on you.”

  “Those private guards?” I asked, looking pointedly at a couple of heavies who’d followed Barris out here, now hanging at the warehouse doors and apparently watching him for a signal. “Doesn’t the harbormaster provide security here?”

  “We have royal cargo. We can’t be too careful protecting His Majesty’s interests.”

  “Right,” I said. “Did your mother have any dealings in magic?” If I was hoping to surprise him, by saying it quick and random like that, I was disappointed.

  “Of course not,” Barris said scornfully. “Now remove yourself before I lose my patience.”

  “I’m gone,” I said, turning to leave.

  My thoughts were buzzing, full of wool and weapons, Talancan ships, private security (another curiosity shared by the Ceid and Lord Ragn), chambermaids, and magic. Pox. Would any of these pieces ever make sense?

  At least I had the shipping manifests, I thought, trying to cheer myself on the way home. I’d swiped them from the dockhand when he’d turned to call for Geirt. If there was anything suspicious about the Ceid’s cargo or the Ceid’s ships, I’d figure it out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Rumor skittering through the Seventh Circle had stirred new dirt into the air the next morning. There had been more arrests. A chandler and his grown sons had been harboring Sarist refugees
in a crawl space beneath their waxworks. The chandler was dragged into the street where Greenmen had executed him on the spot, but the sons and the half-starved, terrified Sarists — one of them a five-year-old girl, someone said — had been taken. Taken. That’s all anybody needed to say. We all knew what it meant.

  “Where was this?” I asked a customer waiting near the bakery counter.

  “Turning Street,” he replied, taking his bread and frowning at it. “This looks like it’s half rye! Damn grain shortages.”

  Aunt Grea just smiled and shrugged, and the grumbling customer went on his way.

  “They’re getting closer,” I murmured, not even aware I was speaking.

  “Closer to what?” Grea said.

  “To me.”

  “No, Digger-girl, you can’t think like that.” But I shook my head and pushed through the line of bread buyers. I knew it wasn’t rational; arrests were up all over the city, panicking neighbors pointing crazed fingers at each other and bodies stacking up from the Oss to Pilgrims’ Gate, and it didn’t have anything to do with anybody special, but I couldn’t help it. It felt like it was my fault, somehow. If I’d stayed out of the city, if I’d answered Werne’s letters, if I’d kept my big mouth shut when he’d said, Do I know you, child at Bryn Shaer . . .

  Outside in the hot morning air, I shook myself out of my stupor. I was heading off to the Keep to visit Durrel again, and the last thing he needed was my good mood infecting the cheery atmosphere of his prison cell. Particularly since I was actually bringing good tidings for once: I had a full purse, thanks to Lord Ragn; I’d talked to a witness; and I had a stack of documents to study. Along with my basket of meat pies and a bottle of local Gerse small beer, it would almost be a party.

  . . . Except for the prison bit.

  Downriver, visible from the Keep landing, the royal residence of Hanivard Palace gleamed white and stark in the morning light, green banners flying from every window, roofline, and tower until it was hard to see the building itself under all that waving heraldry. Bardolph was ill; a summer fever, the royal physicians claimed noncommittally, and urged the people of Gerse to pray for Celys’s most beloved son and our faithful leader. I didn’t know what everyone else was praying for, but my entreaties to the gods certainly didn’t include a swift return to health for the man who’d butchered thousands of Llyvrins whose only crime was looking to the wrong moon. The same fever was striking neighborhoods in the Sixth and Seventh Circles; who was praying for those people?