A Fool of Sorts

by Taylor O'Connell

  Dominik turned his hands, palm up.

  “I want to know who else is involved in the smuggling,” Sal said. “The Scarvini Family had partners, and I want to know who they were.”

  Dominik chuckled darkly. “Dead men, far as I can tell,” said Dominik. “Though, that’s the problem with hydras, isn’t it? Cut off one head, and two more grow right back. Scarvini will find more help, have no doubts. This will only end with the death of Don Scarvini. So long as the man lives, we will have changed nothing.”

  “They’re all dead? All of his associates? Everyone who was involved with the smuggling outside the Scarvini Family? There were no, say, monks of Knöldrus Abbey involved?”

  Dominik gave him a penetrating look. “Far as I know, there is someone from the Abbey making sure things are handled with customs. Might be they’re involved on the distribution end as well.

  Sal nodded. His heart was hammering in his chest.

  “Got to warn you though, I looked into it meself. Seems they already rooted the snake out. The boy’s dead, some fella they called Brother Philip. It’s only, the monk’s supposed to have died some days past, but if that’s so, I can’t figure why the shipments never slowed.”

  Sal smiled. “I think I have an idea why. Alzbetta, any chance you’d be willing to make me a tracer?”

  26

  The Monk

  The rain was more a mist than a proper rain. It seemed to hang in the air, waiting for him to come to it rather than simply falling.

  The abbey gates were closed for the night, and Sal was entirely out of skeev, but he knew of other ways to penetrate the walls of Knöldrus. He walked riverward beside the great stone wall until he reached the lonely guard tower, abandoned and neglected into disrepair, yet the spiral stair of the tower remained structurally sound and mostly intact.

  Sal encountered the first snag when he stood atop the parapet and looked down upon the abbey grounds below. He’d neglected to bring either rope or ladder and cursed himself once more for not buying more skeev. In the end, he found himself scaling the slick stone face, jamming his fingertips and toes into the mortared crevices and crannies as he descended at a slow, steady pace.

  When his feet hit soggy ground, boots sinking into soft mud, Sal pulled the hood of his cloak up over his head and stuck tight to the shadows.

  He would go to the abbot the moment he had proof of Leobald’s involvement. All he would need is a shipping manifest with the monk’s name on it or some of the Scarvini Family’s trade goods, supposing Leobald had been paid off in goods for his services. Might be the greedy charlatan had stolen something for himself. Either way, once Sal wrung a confession from the dear prior, there would be no denying his involvement. Sal meant to conduct himself in the manner of the old inquisition, willing to get Leobald’s signature at the threat of blade and flame if that’s what it took.

  The locket was cold to the touch, and the energy it emitted sent a shiver through him. The thing would be no use to him, not here and now, not after he’d used the last of his skeev cap earlier that night. He would simply need to do without it.

  First, he would needs make his way to the prior’s quarters. He’d never been, but from his time spent within Knöldrus, he’d learned the thirteen Masters of the Enlightened Council slept apart from the rest of their order. Each was given a room of his own between the two cloister-like structures.

  The most difficult part would be finding a way inside without waking any of the monks. He didn’t know where it was that Leobald slept. With twelve rooms divided between the two structures, it would have been nigh on impossible to discern which room belonged to the prior, had Sal not come prepared.

  He pulled a sodden swatch of cloth from his pocket and felt a warm tingle emanating from the tracer. A feeling similar to that of the locket, but nowhere nearly so powerful. The tracer seemed to take control of his feet as he began to walk with no inkling of where he was going but confident that if he moved one foot after the other, the tracer would do the rest.

  There was no sign of a single soul out of bed as Sal crossed the abbey yard through the misting rain until he came upon two structures, each about twice as large as the abbey guesthouse. The tracer seemed to provide the inkling that he should enter the south building. He circled the buildings at a distance, looking for a point of entry. There was only one door in or out, and Sal had to assume it would be locked until he could check. All the windows were closed. Though, that didn’t mean they were latched. There were seven windows in all, one for each room, and another that led into the central hallway.

  With a prayer for the Lady’s luck, Sal closed the distance to the south building, keeping low and sticking to the shadows when possible, he moved to the door. The iron handle budged only slightly. It was locked from within. After a moment of examining the lock tumblers, he decided he would have no luck with his picks and rounded his way to the backside of the building. Sal slipped his pigsticker from his boot, wedged the blade into the window, and pried. To his great astonishment, the window was unlatched and swung open with little resistance.

  Sal slunk through the window, like a polecat sliding over a log on its belly, and hunkered low once within the dim, moonlit corridor. It was good to be somewhere dry, yet, his heart beat all the faster, his palms grew clammy, and his bowels tightened. His task was far from accomplished.

  Slowly, he crept along the corridor, allowing the tracer to be his guide. When he reached the third room on the right, Sal knew he had the right door. He felt a faint urge to kick the door down, but as better sense took hold, he thought it would be best to check if the door was locked.

  For the second time that night, it seemed the Lady had answered his prayers as the doorknob turned and the door opened. The hinges creaked, and Sal flinched, holding his breath as he listened for any signs that the monks were stirring.

  When he heard nothing more than a bit of snoring from a room across the hall, he continued to open the door and slowly creep into the room, his pigsticker in hand.

  He could make out the sleeping form of the monk clearly, laying rather stiffly upon his bed.

  Sal would need to be swift as running water. Getting Leobald out of the building and into the guesthouse would be impossible without the monk’s cooperation. And yet, Sal was confident Leobald would cooperate with a knife to the throat.

  He closed the door as quietly as possible, then practically ran to the bed, clapped his free hand over the monk’s mouth and put the point of the pigsticker upon the apple of his throat.

  Leobald did not stir.

  The monk felt stiff and cold, and for an instant, Sal was at a loss. When the realization hit him, Sal scrambled back in revulsion, dropping his pigsticker and tripping onto his backside.

  He took a deep breath to center himself and stood to reexamine the corpse.

  The moon was his only source of light, and still, Sal could make out Leobald rather clearly. His face slightly contorted, as though he remained in agony. The usually pale flesh of his neck was dark and blotchy, as though horrifically bruised. His hands were stained with dried blood, and yet, Sal could see no visible wounds on the prior’s person.

  Sick to his stomach, confused by the incident, Sal backed away from the dead man and wondered what forces of the cosmos had aligned to subject him to such malevolence. It was the fourth time in the past year he had stumbled upon someone who’d been murdered. He was beginning to see a pattern. A pattern that had begun with the heist on the High Keep. The night he had stolen the locket for Anton. Sal touched the cold metal of the locket. He pulled it from his neck, ran his finger over the three simple lines engraved into locket’s face, the two outer marks now blood red. The mark of three, the mark of beasts, an unlucky thing, Nabu had told him. How true that was proving to be.

  Even still, there was more to it, much more. Somehow, Sal had a feeling it was all connected, though he couldn’t for the life of him tell how. He decided it would be in his best interest to get out of the prior’s qua
rters as quickly as possible, before he was discovered and subsequently blamed.

  Going out the way he’d come in, Sal wondered who could have possibly killed Leobald and why. He didn’t doubt the man had enemies within the Vespian Order. Leobald’s pompous manner had likely rubbed plenty a monk in the wrong way, and it had been a monk who’d killed the initiate Dennis beneath the pardimon tree. Although, Sal had thought the monk who’d killed Dennis had been Philip, yet now it seemed that may not have been the case.

  Then again, it could have been a Commission assassin, someone sent by Don Scarvini to tie up loose ends. Scarvini might have gotten cold feet after the death of Philip and his son Giuseppe, and Leobald’s death was merely a side effect of the symptom.

  Regardless of who it was and why they’d done it, Sal needed to get to the one man who could help him.

  He slipped out the window once more, closing it quietly behind. The mud sucked at his boots as he crossed the abbey grounds through the misting rains.

  Smoke rose from the chimney of the abbot’s house, as the windows glowed with warm light. The hour was late, but it seemed luck had joined his side once more. The abbot looked to be awake.

  Sal knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Feeling somewhat panicked, he knocked again, louder and all the more insistent, and still, he heard no response from within. Deeming the matter more urgent than the abbot’s privacy, Sal checked to see if the door was unlocked, found it so, and burst through the threshold.

  What he saw in the abbot’s home chilled his blood and froze him to the very spot.

  Abbot Jacques was seated in a chair wearing naught but his small clothes. He was in the act of wrapping a bandage about his abdomen. Near his ribs, a blossom of blood had begun to soak through the linen bandage.

  “Ah,” said Jacques, pain apparent in his voice. “But it seems you will not be delayed. Come in, my son. Take a seat.”

  Sal stared, too stunned to move his mud-caked boots. “What happened?”

  “I confronted Leobald,” said Jacques as he resumed wrapping his bandage. “The things you told me. Your suspicions of the man, they were true. That man was the reason for the death of Philip. He was the true killer of Brother Dennis. It was Leobald all along.”

  “Leobald?” Sal said. “You believe he was the man responsible?”

  “I know he was. He said as much before stabbing me with this.” Jacques picked up a blood sheathed dagger, brandishing it in the air before using it to cut the bandage.

  “He stabbed you?” Sal said, eyes flitting to the blossom of red on the abbot’s side.

  The abbot flashed a gentle smile. “The evidence of that is apparent, is it not?” said Jacques. “Come now, take a seat.”

  Sal thought on his encounter with the dead Leobald and all that had happened since he’d scaled the abbey walls. Suddenly, something came to him. The door to the Master’s Quarters had been locked, yet the door to Leobald’s room and the window had been unlocked, but why?

  “You went to his room to speak with him?” Sal asked.

  Jacques nodded.

  “You went alone, in the middle of the night, to confront a man you knew to be a criminal and suspected to be a murderer?”

  “What are you suggesting?” said Jacques, his brow wrinkling.

  “I only wonder as to why you should make such a visit in the night, climbing in and out of windows like some kind of common sneak thief.”

  “I see,” said Jacques. “Strange, really, I knew he sent you the first time. Only reason I bothered to keep you alive as long as I did. But I never thought he would send you for this.”

  “Sent me?” Sal asked, suddenly feeling out of his depth. Until that moment, things were finally seeming to make sense. “Don Scarvini, you mean?”

  “Don Scarvini?” said Jacques. “Is that who sent you?”

  “Who did you think had done?” Sal asked.

  “I was told the Scarvini warehouse had been hit,” Jacques said, his eyes searching Sal for some kind of cue. “But he wouldn’t dare. And you, why would Scarvini send you? You’re not one of his.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “No, no one? No one has sent you, you’ve truly come all your own?”

  Sal was feeling sick to his stomach, his head spinning. By the Lady’s sake, what was Jacques suggesting? Who was it the abbot thought had sent Sal? If not Don Scarvinni, who else was involved that the abbot could fear?

  “Misfortune, it seems, has befallen you, my son,” said Jacques as he stood and shook his head slowly, the dagger still in his hand.

  Jacques was a big man. His teeth gritted as he stood, the wound in his side blooming red through the bandages. Yet it seemed he, the abbot, possessed reserves of energy and an abnormally high tolerance for pain.

  Sal reminded himself that Jacques had served among men of the sword before he’d become a man of the cloth.

  Sword. The word sounded in his head, and his gaze fell on the shield and swords hanging upon the wall.

  As the abbot moved toward him, Sal ran toward the table and threw a chair in Jacques’s path.

  He reached, wrapped his hands about the sword’s hilt, tore it from the wall, and swung as he turned.

  There was a hard thud. A jarring reverberation rattled through his arms as the blade sank into the skull of the abbot.

  Jacques made a gurgling sound in his throat and brandished the dagger as though he meant to stab Sal. He took a step forward, determination plastered across his face as blood streamed down his brow.

  The monk stopped moving, dropped to his knees, convulsed, and slumped the rest of the way to the floor, dead as the dawn was certain.

  27

  The Lady White

  INTERLUDE, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  “How did you live?” Bartley asked, shaking his head, his expression one of incredulity.

  It was a fair question; one Sal was not quite certain he knew the answer too. He and Bartley had broken the Code of the Commission. They’d robbed one of the Five Families and Sal had been caught in the act. Yet, somehow, he had come away alive.

  Surely, this was a miracle.

  Sal shrugged. “I suppose Don Moretti liked what I had to say.”

  Bartley laughed. “I hope you weren’t coerced into a payment of flesh.”

  Sal shoved the Yahdrish kid and laughed. “No, nothing of the sort. Though, if I’d have stuck around the Underway much longer, I fear that Alonzo Amato might have tried to have his way with me.”

  “I still can’t believe your uncle turned you over to Moretti. What happened to blood being thicker than water and all?”

  Sal shrugged. “Suppose where Stefano is concerned, my blood’s been watered down a bit.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know,” Sal said, shrugging, “bastard-born and all.”

  Bartley nudged him with an elbow. “Chin up, mate. I never knew my da’ neither, and look how I turned out. There’s hope for you yet.”

  Sal smiled. “Suppose there is at that.”

  “Still, you should have told me your uncle was an underboss of the Svoboda Family.”

  “I didn’t think it much mattered.”

  “Yeah well, I’ve never had any family worth bragging about,” Bartley said. “Never had much of any family, that is.”

  Sal grinned. “So how are you really certain that you’re Yahdrish?”

  “What do you mean?

  “I mean that you piss and moan like a Yahdrish mother, but if you never knew your da’, how do you know you’re Yahdrish?”

  “The Yahdrish are of the chosen. They are the Pure, just as I am. The blood of the First Empire. It was we Yahdrish who were given the Way.”

  Sal laughed. “I’ve heard of the Pure, in the same myths that tell of magickers who can move mountains and raise the dead.”

  “The Pure are still around,” Bartley said defiantly. “The royal line of Pargeche is said to be a remnant of the First Empire.”

  “I’ve always been t
old I look a bit of a royal myself,” Sal said with a wink. “Might be I’m one of these Pure.”

  Bartley shook his head. “How is it you know you’re even Pairgu?”

  “I knew my mother,” Sal said. “She was Pairgu, full blood, just like my bastard of an uncle.”

  “And your father?” Bartley asked. “Your mother ever tell you what he was?”

  “She always told me she would tell me about my father when I was ready, though it seems she never did get around to it.”

  They walked up Beggar’s Lane, quiet for a time before Bartley brought them back around to the beginning of the conversation, a somewhat annoying habit of his. “So, what was it you told Don Moretti? How in Sacrull’s hell did you get out of there alive?

  “I told him I would be the boss one day.”

  Bartley laughed. “Now you know that’s a lie. You’ll be my underboss. It’s me that’ll be running things.”

  Sal smiled. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  A pair of grubby urchins put out their hands and begged for food. Bartley sneered and swatted the hands aside, but Sal pulled out an iron dingé from his pocket and flicked it their way.

  “What’d you go wasting coin on the likes of them for?” the Yahdrish asked.

  Sal shrugged.

  “So, what about your uncle?”

  “What about him?”

  “How did he take to you breaking the Code? Aside from turning you over to Don Moretti and all.”

  “You know what, bugger my uncle,” Sal said as they neared the Low Town bridge façade. They passed beneath the façade when Sal saw her. The limestone statue of the Lady White, the very goddess the bridge was named for. Something occurred to Sal, a feeling that this was a sign of some kind.

  Sal put a hand on the hem of the Lady’s dress, and Bartley’s eyes went wide.

  “You’d take the Lady White as your patron goddess?” Bartley asked.

  “She’s the patron goddess of the unwanted, isn’t she?”