The Eyes of a Doll (The World of Shijuren Book 2)

by Howell, Rob

  After most of the sparring partners had returned to their tasks for the day, whichever of Sebastijan’s people had joined us would come to my table and report the details from the previous day of watching and listening. Maja and I shook off cramp after cramp, broke many a pen, and spent a fortune in ink, paper, and drying powder recording these details.

  Then Sebastijan or his man would slide out the door and return to work. Despite my concerns, none of them were attacked during those months. I suspect their safety owed more to their skill than any hesitation from my shadowed opponent, because several of Vukasin’s people were discovered and attacked.

  They were not always slain, but the first time one of them was killed, Piri spent the night holding me while I wept, curled up in shame in my room. She was wise enough to keep me from weapons during that next morning’s practice and instead beat sense into me with her wrestling skills. Finally, after bouncing off of a wall one too many times, I acknowledged that his death was not my fault.

  Most days, after Sebastijan’s people reported to me, Maja and I would try to make sense of the news and look for connections to previous reports. Ludmilja often joined us—to Soraya’s horror.

  Soon, I started teaching her to read, which horrified Soraya even more, but the process made me happier about remaining cooped up in the Faerie. Also, by using the reports as the teaching material, I was forced to focus on the details while instructing Ludmilja.

  It probably added extra time to the process, but I soon treasured the hour or so Ludmilja’s attention span allowed her to work with me. Besides, I had more than enough hours in the day.

  After lunch, Maja and I spent the heat of the day napping. I suppose I got more and more used to the heat as the sun beat down on us with only the occasional respite of an afternoon storm. If I did get more acclimated, though, I never consciously noticed.

  When we returned to the taproom from our naps, Maja and I would review the morning’s notes and then spend two or three hours again trying to connect bits and pieces of information to each other. We looked for places multiple people visited, acquaintances that were shared, or anything else we could think of.

  We spent the evenings relaxing, listening to the various scops that came through the Faerie, and generally chatting with the regulars and whoever happened to join us.

  One night, late in Simmermoanne, Gabrijela came to eat dinner with me. She smelled of lavender and wore a dress plain in design but extremely well-made, with intricate card-woven trim that highlighted her curves and eyes.

  She and I ate in one of Ragnar’s private dining rooms, at her request, and Zoe served us personally. She seemed very happy to put gulyas and bread before us. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed that the gulyas had more of the painful red spice.

  “She doesn’t like me,” said Gabrijela.

  “I suspect that’s less the problem than her wanting to protect her dear friend.”

  Gabrijela raised her eyebrows at that. “She thinks you’re in danger from me?”

  I shook my head. “I meant Piri. We’ve had a few dinners here together.”

  “You’re courting her?”

  “She does not want to be courted. She wants a friend, and sometimes she wants to bed that friend. She’s a Pathfinder hecatontarch first and foremost. The thought of her ending up as a housewife or even what Zoe has become is mind-boggling.”

  “I had hoped you were not courting anyone.”

  I managed to fumble out an answer. I filtered through my emotions to see if I could feel her shifting them, but my desire felt normal and clean.

  We spent the evening chatting of inconsequential things. I already knew that her past and childhood had not been happy, but she did tell me she had been raised in the Great City before coming here in her teens. I told her some of my past and also my plans to join the Imperial Guard.

  She left soon after dinner, but not before kissing me firmly. Awkwardly, I escorted her to the door, where her guards joined her and walked her home.

  Of course, the regulars hooted at me after she left, though both Zoe and Karah sniffed.

  “Ach, not to be worryin’ over what me lass and lovely daughter are to be thinkin’. Now the lass I’d be worryin’ over would be Piri, for I know yer to be mighty swift with that there steel a’yours, but I’m to be thinkin’ yer not her match, though I’m thinkin’ it might be fun to see the two a’you all intent with steel. But yer to be fine if ya’ve spoken to Piri as I’m to be thinkin’ she’s not so jealous but she’s all about them as is honest with her…”

  “Ragnar! Breathe!”

  “What, why I’ve been breathin’…”

  “Piri and I talked about this weeks ago. I am not so stupid as not to talk to her.”

  “Why, then, why were you lettin’ me be goin’ on like that…”

  I let him go on like that as he strolled away because halting his torrential speech twice in a night was miracle enough, much less three times.

  He must have told Zoe, though, for she came up later. “I’m sorry, Edward. I should not have been so angry earlier.”

  “I care for Piri, too. I’m happy she has friends like you.”

  “And you as well.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve gotten her Pathfinders mixed up in so much and she’s had to bury a dozen or so on account of me.”

  Zoe raised an eyebrow angrily and stared at me.

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “No, all you did was expose Pal. He’s the one who killed her men.”

  “But…”

  “Now I’m really going to get angry with you!”

  I sighed and shrugged.

  “Someday, Edward, you are going to have to learn you can’t protect everyone.”

  “I suppose.”

  “In any case, I’ll be nice to Gabrijela next time. There will be a next time, won’t there?”

  “I hope so. She didn’t say.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “Uh… no.”

  Zoe threw up her hands in disgust. “Men!”

  “Wait. You were mad at me for having dinner with her, and now you’re mad that I didn’t invite her back?”

  She patted my cheek. “I’m an old married wife of an innkeeper. I get to be mad at both things.”

  We laughed.

  It turned out there were many next times. Gabrijela started coming for dinner every few days. Then one night she calmly asked Ragnar, who was waiting on us that evening, to provide lodging for her guards. Ragnar smiled broadly but, wonder of wonders, started a rambling speech only as he was walking out the door to make those arrangements.

  A number of women had graced my bed with their presence, but none fit so comfortably right from the start. There was little of the normal fumbling as partners experimented and discovered what their lovers preferred. Each experiment seemed to be successful, and we fell asleep drenched in each other’s sweat on the sweltering night.

  We woke at dawn for more experiments. As she left, I fumbled for what to say. “Gabrijela…”

  “Hush, I’ll be back next week,” and she kissed me with a smile.

  I stumbled down for sparring practice to find everyone had started without me, and I was greeted with all sorts of ribbing and chafing.

  Piri laughed harder than the rest, as we both discovered that I simply could not focus on my technique. She gleefully took advantage of mistakes I had outgrown while Desimir had been training me and gave me bruise after bruise.

  Gabrijela became the final, most enjoyable, part of my routine during those months, arriving each Selenemera for dinner and to spend the night.

  I do not know when she took my heart for her own, but somewhere I realized I had fallen deeply in love with her.

  Unfortunately, Sebastijan had long since ensured she was trailed and tabs kept upon her. Each tidbit of information about her made me feel uncomfortable, but Piri, Sebastijan, and Maja made sure we kept including her in our investigations. She might not be the one behi
nd what had happened, but she might lead us to a clue, after all.

  Not that Maja and I had great success finding actual clues sifting through the information Sebastijan and Vukasin’s people brought to us.

  Chapter 42

  Simmermoanne and Heamoanne, 1712 MG

  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect about gathering information was that though we received a goodly number of notes and details each day, they were spread out amongst eight people. Andreas and Gibroz, in particular, were difficult to track, because they left their respective offices so infrequently.

  As I had expected, Kapric and Zvono were not able to help us spy on Andreas. Vukasin passed on tidbits from the communication he intercepted between the governor and the Emperor, but few were relevant to my needs.

  Bit by bit, though, we built up a list of details about each of our targets. We also discovered far more about their sex lives than any of us wanted to know.

  Andreas’s wife cut a wide swath through the upper crust of Achrida, spending the bribery money with great abandon. Andreas and his assistant, a scion of a senatorial family from Basilopolis, were lovers.

  Andreas routinely hosted parties and balls. Vukasin told us that Andreas used those balls and parties as the opportunity to collect the bribes and negotiate new business arrangements.

  Vukasin made sure we had people of sufficient class, breeding, and fashion to attend these events. We never noticed any contact between him and any of Gibroz’s people at these events. Every person of note we saw with him was simply part of his normal corruption.

  None of them looked to have the kind of control necessary to convince Andreas to ignore Vukasin or Vesela.

  We discovered Gibroz had a daughter whom he kept separate from his work. We never found out who her mother was, and if she was at the house with the daughter, none of Vukasin’s people ever saw her.

  He was not romantically involved with any one person in particular. A variety of women probably employed by Katarina periodically arrived at his gambling den and went up to the second floor. We never knew for sure who they saw, but Gibroz seemed the most likely candidate.

  I thought it was odd of Gibroz to employ prostitutes, given the risk that Katarina might use one of her people to murder him. For that matter, I would not have been completely surprised had Katarina been one of the women visiting him. It would definitely have appealed to her whimsy to have had her primary rival completely under her thumb, so to speak.

  We could, by virtue of Anzhelko and the gamblers, get some idea of Gibroz’s temper. I took some pleasure hearing about his frustration as he occasionally shook the timbers of his gambling den in wrath at his inability to figure out who in his kral was working against him.

  Other than that, we did not learn much about Gibroz. He rarely left his den. Occasionally he would roam around the Stracara with his thugs, usually to visit with Isidora.

  I thought about asking Gabrijela about Gibroz, but Piri convinced me that was a stupid idea. “If you’re going to be dallying with the lass, don’t be confusing things with your work.”

  In any case, Gabrijela, too, spent most of her time in the den. When she did leave, usually she had an escort, either one of Gibroz’s four thugs or a pair of guards.

  Rarely did she visit the same place twice, other than the Faerie to have dinner with me, with one notable exception. About every other week she would visit Ruzica, the blind seamstress who made time with Svetislav whenever she could. Her lack of sight in no way hindered her ability to make wonderful clothes, meaning Gabrijela nearly always walked out with a bundle under her arm.

  However, Ruzica was also the niece of Davorin, who despite his disturbing demeanor was a member of the Gropa Council. Ruzica had helped arrange a meeting between him and me previously, so undoubtedly she could arrange one between him and Gabrijela.

  I spent a number of restless nights wondering how or why Gabrijela might be working with Davorin or the Enchelei. Unfortunately, neither Piri nor Sebastijan had any suggestions either. I did ask Kapric if he had any thoughts about Davorin working with Gibroz, but while he agreed it was possible, he never found anything concrete.

  As far as we could determine, she simply liked Ruzica’s clothes, which I had to agree with since the maroon tunic she made for me fit perfectly. Ruzica understood how to make clothes for Gabrijela as well, something I greatly enjoyed discovering.

  Andreyev liked to gamble, but he did not enjoy games of dice and chance, preferring instead to bet on sports. Whenever there was a night of wrestling, cockfighting, or ratfighting, he was there. Many afternoons he spent at the Achridan Hippodrome betting on horses.

  Most of the time a tall, slim, dark-skinned woman wearing garish makeup joined him. She had a high-pitched squealing laugh that nearly everyone found awful, but which Andreyev seemed to enjoy.

  She looked at first glance like a shallow piece of trash, but we saw some hints that she might have been much more than that. We found no proof that she was a capable operator playing such a role, nor could we connect her to the Dassaretae, Enchelei, either kral, or any other faction we knew of. By the end of Heamoanne, though, Sebastijan had added her to the list of people we were tracking.

  Outside of gambling and his girlfriend, Andreyev spent his time beating up people, threatening to beat up people, or standing ready to beat up people on particular corners in the Stracara. He certainly took pride in his work.

  I wanted Markov to be the target, so when we started getting hints that he was hiding something I got enthused. However, what he was hiding was the fact that his thuggish exterior was probably a front.

  We trailed him across Achrida, for in his role as Gibroz’s treasurer he was often out of the den. Unfortunately, we never saw him actively threatening anyone. If anyone needed intimidating, he simply had one of his two ever-present guards do the dirty work.

  Worse yet, from my perspective, was the simple fact that he returned home every night to his grandmother. She apparently clucked over him like Zoe clucked over her family, and me for that matter.

  Once we made that connection, we started trailing the grandmother, too, because I had run into her before. She was the cook at the Plucked Owl, a coincidence too striking for us not to investigate. The most interesting thing we learned about her was the fact that everyone in the neighborhood loved her revithia, a chickpea soup common in the Great City.

  We found out the other two thugs were named Suzana and Vladan. We rarely saw Suzana leave the den, as apparently she served Gibroz in two ways. One, she was the primary manager for the gambling den, and had a head for percentages.

  More importantly, she enjoyed killing people. Throwing people in the lake was the job for others, but she happily sliced, garroted, or stabbed them as Gibroz directed. She preferred quick, clean deaths, so we knew she was not cruel, simply a slayer. Gamblers in Achrida knew her reputation, and if someone got out of hand in the gambling parlor, she would ostentatiously stand near the offender. That usually solved the problem, though there were times when someone ignored the warning and were never seen again. She kept his den peaceful, or at least as peaceful as anything got in the Stracara.

  Vladan had been the toughest of the porters and dockworkers until Gibroz hired him to run his smuggling, shipping, and dock operations. Many times Vladan’s loud and profane cursing carried over all the others on the dock.

  He had his own reputation for settling his problems with a knife, and since our spies saw him kill two people during the two months we watched him, he apparently earned that reputation honestly, so to speak.

  He was the only person we found working routinely with Imperial officials, but we doubted any connection to Andreas. Those Imperial officials were supposed to keep track of the ships and cargos that docked in Achrida, and Vladan made sure they kept track only of the ships and cargos that Gibroz wanted them to.

  Every once in a while a Lakewarden would notice the corruption, but each time Vladan called to an Imperial official and the official flexe
d his warrant, informing the Lakewardens that these cargoes were of no interest. Few of the Lakewardens approved, but this was Achrida and corruption was a fact of life.

  Vladan used his position to provide himself with every luxury and comfort. He lived in a small loft above a warehouse overlooking the docks. The loft apparently held expensive furniture, foreign art, and silk hangings.

  His servant strode around the Stracara, arrogant in his position. His arrogance was apparently justified, as every shopkeeper and passerby bowed and scraped to him. We heard rumors that the servant was also his lover, but we never managed to prove or disprove any of them.

  Pherenike, in many ways, was the most interesting person we trailed. She lived in the Imperial building, and we saw her parading and practicing with the Imperial Guard, but she spent most evenings and afternoons out of uniform, prowling around the city.

  Rarely did we see her meet anyone. Most of the time she simply wandered and watched. Sometimes she would stay in a tavern for a while. Sometimes she roamed through various shops. Except for the Stracara there was no neighborhood that she did not darken at one point or another.

  Given that she looked like a trained spy in her own right, Veselko detailed a full ten of his dozen to watch her. Sebastijan explained to me that switching people in and out routinely made it less likely she would notice she was being followed. Nevertheless, she clearly realized we were there at some point, and three times she managed to evade the watch of all ten of Veselko’s men.

  Except for those nights, though, we found no connection between Pherenike and anyone else who might be capable of telling Andreas what to do.

  We spent two months, essentially, to gather this information. Two tedious months, except for the nights where I was falling in love with Gabrijela.

  At least I was moving as smoothly with my weapons as ever, and I even learned enough of Piri’s wrestling skills to best her two or three times out of ten.

  Still, bored and restless, I waited for something to happen.