Heroes at Risk

by Moore, Moira J.

  “You’re the Source what’s been healing people,” she said.

  So much for them keeping that quiet. I’d known that was too much to ask.

  “Actually, I haven’t been. I can’t heal people.”

  “Healed Kafar, didn’t you?”

  “No, actually, I didn’t. I believe he got better because he moved away from the riverfront.”

  I suddenly wondered if it was the best idea in the world to imply that the place in which she lived was somehow causing the illness.

  But she didn’t seem to leap to that conclusion. “So you’re not going to heal any more of us?”

  How many times did he have to say it? He couldn’t heal people of this illness. At least, he didn’t think so. I still wasn’t sure.

  He chose not to answer that question. “Have you noticed anything unusual about? Something other than the illness itself?”

  She positively cackled with laughter. “Everything about the riverfront is unusual.”

  Aye, she was going to be a lot of help.

  But Taro gave it one more try. “There’s nothing you’ve seen that you can tell me?”

  “What are you, a Runner?”

  “Have Runners been here?”

  “Runners never come here.”

  “Really?” I said. That surprised me.

  “Nothing here they think is worth protecting.”

  How odd.

  We worked our way down the riverbank, stopping to talk to whoever looked open to conversation. No one knew of anything strange happening. A few of them asked Taro to heal them, and were quite bitter when Taro said no. I was glad I didn’t have to convince him to refuse. I could just imagine everyone in the riverfront hearing that he was there and the two of us getting mired in a futile attempt to see to everyone.

  A little boy, about eight, I guessed, ran up to us. He was too skinny, he was barefoot, and his clothes were too tight. “You a Source?” he demanded of Taro.

  “Aye, I am.”

  “I want to be a Source,” the boy announced. “What do I have to do?”

  “I’m sorry, son. You have to be born a Source. There’s nothing you can do to make yourself a Source.”

  The boy scowled.

  He was only eight. In theory, he could be a Source, and no one had figured it out yet. Taro had been eleven before his family realized he was a Source. We couldn’t know whether this boy was a Source unless we spent more time with him. It was usually the families who discovered it.

  “You been asking all sorts of questions,” the boy said. “I can answer them, if you take me with you and make me a Source.”

  “We can’t take you with us, and we can’t make you a Source,” Taro told him. “But I can give you this.” He took the emerald stud out of his ear and held it out for the boy’s inspection.

  I thought he was being careless to offer a bribe, of any kind. The boy could easily make something up, and we wouldn’t know the difference. I didn’t know how to communicate that to Taro without outright calling the boy a liar to his face.

  The boy grabbed for the earring. Taro held it out of reach. “What have you got to say?”

  “A woman comes at night sometimes. Real late. She’s dressed too nice to be someone from around here.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “I don’t know. She wears a hood, and it’s dark.”

  “What does she do?”

  The boy shrugged. “Don’t know. But she does it at the hub.”

  “What’s the hub?”

  The boy snickered. He thought the question stupid. “Where the rivers cross.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know. A week, maybe.”

  Taro gave him the earring. “Thank you.”

  The boy crowed in delight and dashed off.

  “A woman who comes in the middle of the night,” I said. “That could be for anything. And would he even be up that late?”

  “No harm in looking around the hub, though.”

  “No, if you want to.”

  There were bridges all over the city, spanning the rivers at various points. The bridge spanning where the rivers met was massive, wide enough to allow two wagons to cross at a time. The bridge was made of wood, and there were chunks rotted out of it.

  Walls about shoulder high were built along the rivers, for about twenty cubits each way. Open drains were built low into the walls to allow some of the water to escape for residential use. The grass in the area was beaten down and dead.

  And I felt jittery. It reminded me forcibly of how I’d felt in the ash grove. “Ashes.”

  “What?”

  “I think someone’s been using ashes here. I think I have a reaction against human ashes.”

  “That seems odd. Why would you have a reaction?”

  “I react to niyacin powder. That’s not common.”

  “That’s true. So you’re saying someone was trying to cast spells here.”

  “Or dumping something in the water. At the drains, not the rivers themselves, which is why only some people are getting ill.”

  “You’re saying someone is making them ill on purpose.”

  As soon as he said that, I wanted to scramble away from the idea. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a side effect. Because why would anyone want to make a bunch of strangers ill?”

  Taro nodded, though he didn’t look entirely convinced. “You know what the next logical step is.”

  “Tell the Runners.”

  “No.” Now he looked impatient. “We come back tonight and see if the woman comes.”

  I sighed. “Really, why are you so enthusiastic about this?”

  “I told you. We have nothing else to do. Why don’t you want to do this?”

  “Because I’m really bad at this sort of thing. I’ll make a fool of myself.”

  “You just don’t want to go through the discomfort of waiting around here all night.”

  There was a kernel of truth to that, but Taro was right. I had nothing better to do.

  “We need to get long black cloaks. We want to stay hidden.”

  That meant shopping.

  So we found nice long black cloaks, and then we went back to the residence for a nap. Luckily our watches at the Stall had gotten us used to strange sleeping patterns. Once the sun was down, we headed out with our melodramatic black cloaks draped over our arms.

  The riverfront was quieter at night, which surprised me. I was ashamed to realize I had expected people to be walking around drunk and fighting and causing chaos. Simply because they were poor and lived in a grim environment. What was wrong with me?

  We put on our cloaks, though really, who were we kidding? If a lone woman had been noticed simply because she was dressed too nicely, we would stand out by a league. But I pulled the hood as far over my face as I could and held my hands within the sleeves. We huddled into the shadowed corner of the walls, and we waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  If spending a watch in the Stall was boring, crouching in silence all night was brutal. Despite my nap, I found myself nodding off, my eyes heavy and blurred.

  This was so stupid. If someone did come, what were we going to do? Stop her or merely watch? Go back with the news to the Runners? The latter was the smart thing, but while Risa didn’t seem disturbed by my previous foray into the responsibilities of Runners, it seemed to annoy the others. They probably wouldn’t take us seriously.

  But it turned out that I needn’t have worried about that. No one showed up, and when the sun started to rise we stood with stiff joints. “That was horrible,” I complained.

  “Aye, and unfortunately, we’ll have to do it again.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We didn’t catch her.”

  “How long do you expect to do this?”

  “Until we do catch her.”

  I suppressed a groan. There was nothing I could reasonably do but follow along. But in all th
e rumors I had heard about Lord Shintaro Karish before I met him, no one mentioned an insane dedication to the duties of others.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  To my surprise, the location of Williams’s home was in the Upper Eastern Quad. It was a good enough area in High Scape, home to midlevel merchants and minor politicians. It was not, however, where I would expect someone as successful as Williams to live. Though perhaps it was an unreasonable assumption, on my part, to think a man who owned bordellos would live in the same area as a merchant as successful as Fines.

  The house was nice enough, large, made of a decent wood, with a lot of windows. It was hidden from the road with trees and hedges. The driveway didn’t take us to the front of the house, as most driveways did, but instead curved around to the back. We didn’t exit the carriage right away, unsure as to whether being delivered to the back of the house wasn’t a mistake.

  “Are you getting out or what?” a voice demanded from above us. The carriage driver, sounding irritable. So we left the carriage, which was jolted into movement as soon as we cleared it.

  Not getting paid for services could certainly put people in a sour mood.

  The door in the back of the house opened and a young man stepped out, smiling in greeting. He was extremely handsome, slim with a strong jaw, golden blond hair and bright blue eyes. He was dressed in blue, a strange style of clothing that was loose in cut but of a material that seemed to cling to his very attractive form.

  “Source Karish? Shield Mallorough?” he asked, his voice deep and smooth. He probably had a gorgeous singing voice.

  “Yes,” Taro answered.

  “My name is Akira,” he said. “Please come in. The others are waiting.”

  He gestured at the back door. We were actually expected to enter the house through the back door. Had anyone asked me whether I’d be offended to enter a residence through the back, I would have said no, of course not, I wasn’t so petty as to be disturbed by such things. But I was. I was ashamed of myself. It was ridiculous. Yet to be asked to enter through the back was bizarre.

  I was surprised, upon stepping through the door, to be greeted by a huge foyer, with a grand staircase curving up to the second floor. To my knowledge, the back entrances to residences were usually small and utilitarian, as guests never saw them. There seemed to be a lot of furniture scattered about, lots of comfortable-looking chairs and settees. There were chaise lounges, which I could never recall seeing in the public areas of a residence before. And up against the wall, was that a stage? What would anyone want with a stage in their home?

  Akira relieved us of our wraps and, shockingly enough, our footwear. While I had been required to remove my footwear while indoors on Flatwell, it had never stopped feeling unnatural and I’d never heard of anyone doing it anywhere else. For a moment, I wondered if Akira was playing a game with us, but then he removed his own footwear. So I guessed it was just a weird custom of the house.

  It was odd to see a grown man in a formal situation with bare feet. He had nice feet.

  I did not have a great deal of familiarity with private homes. I wasn’t sure whether there were rules as to how a house should be organized. But something about the huge space, with the furniture that merely lined the walls and created no conversation areas, struck me as unhomelike.

  The smell of perfume was overwhelming. And if I found it so, poor Taro had to be almost gagging.

  We were taken to the largest and strangest dining room I’d ever seen. The table with its chairs was set up on one side of the room, by the windows, which were covered by heavy drapes. The other half of the room was left virtually empty except for more chairs and settees and chaise lounges pushed against the wall.

  The other guests were identical to those when we had dined at Fines’s, and again, there were no spouses or other partners. Williams was serving drinks, as there were no servants in the room. “How strange you should arrive at just this time,” Fines said once Taro and I were settled. “We were just wondering what our dear Prince Gifford has been doing to show his authority over the Triple S.”

  I felt that question came out of nowhere, and I was a little confused by it. I looked to Taro, who grinned. “Our beloved monarch is causing some difficulty, is he?”

  Gamut snorted. “It has been suggested to my theater manager that it might be in the best interests of the community if our program were examined by some government agent before being performed for the public.”

  “I thought that was happening already,” I said. “Some plays are outlawed.”

  “Aye, and I agree with some of their choices. Some pieces are nothing but excrement from curtain rise to curtain fall, with no technical merit whatsoever. What the Prince seems to be proposing now is different. Everything we would seek to put onstage would first need the approval of the Emperor’s agent, and that is insulting. To us and the audience. Not to mention tiresome, unnecessary and expensive.”

  “Why would it be expensive?” I asked.

  “We’d need to give the agent coin to get the plays approved, of course.”

  I frowned. “Surely the agent would be paid by the government, not private citizens.”

  Healer Cree managed to convey, with her placid expression and unfathomable eyes, her belief that I was an idiot. “He is speaking of bribes, Dunleavy.”

  “Bribes,” I echoed, because sometimes I was an idiot.

  “One needs bribes to encourage government agents to act in one’s favor.”

  “You mean you need to give extra coin to get these people to do their jobs?” I demanded, appalled. Sometimes I really just didn’t want to learn anything more about people. Or the world. It was so often disappointing.

  Gamut chuckled. “She’s so cute.”

  I was not cute.

  “She has no reason to know such things, Dean,” Ahmad chided him before she addressed me. “Whenever the services of a government agent are needed, it is expected that the agent will receive a gift. That is the way things are done.”

  “And this is legal?”

  “Oh, no. Quite the opposite. But there would be no point in attempting to fight it. After all, the only people to report it to are other government agents.”

  “Everyone’s in on it,” Williams added. “Including anyone who enforces the laws. The Runners. The judges.”

  “Not the Runners,” I objected. Not Risa. Nothing could make me believe that she required bribes to do her job. She was an honorable person.

  “How about you, Grace?” Fines asked. “Has the Crown Prince pulled any of his stunts with you?”

  There was a curious tone to his voice, and something seemed forced about the question. I felt I was missing something.

  Ahmad snorted. “It has been suggested that all members of the guild should hire services and buy supplies only from sources approved by a government overseer.”

  “That doesn’t seem wholly unreasonable,” said Fines. “Especially when you’re doing work on government projects.”

  “None of it’s reasonable,” she snapped. “But yes, it would be tolerable if it were limited to such circumstances. However, I understand the plan is to restrict us in this way for all works performed by the guild.”

  “At least they don’t plan on eliminating your guild altogether.” Williams poked at a chunk of fruit floating in his wine, then licked the wine off his finger. “There have been rumors of plans to close down all bordellos and make them illegal. Which is pure stupidity. Without the protection of the bordellos, the prostitutes are in more physical danger from their clients and the patrons are at greater risk of becoming diseased.”

  “Why in the world would he outlaw bordellos?” Taro asked.

  “Apparently His Royal Highness finds the practice of prostitution distasteful.”

  “He can’t seriously believe,” Taro said, “it’s equitable to destroy the livelihoods of so many just because he finds it distasteful?”

  “Ah, but he will be the Emperor, and what he considers distastefu
l is well within his power to change. And he will.”

  Well, aye, that was disturbing, that the Prince would have the ability to destroy something so harmless for no good reason. What would be the point beyond demonstrating his power merely for the sake of it? Not that the Empress hadn’t thrown her weight around just because she could, but I’d had more respect for her judgment. The Prince had yet to do a single thing that I hadn’t thought was stupid.

  “Ayana?” Fines prompted, and it did feel like a prompt.

  Cree shrugged. “There has been a suggestion there should be regular inspections of my medications and accounts. The justification is to make sure my methods are sound and my rates are fair.”

  To be honest, I didn’t think that was a horrible idea. The idea of healers being able to sell and do anything without being accountable to anyone was chilling. Those crazy elixirs could do a lot of damage, and the idea of someone without competence setting bones and cutting into delicate tissue made me squirm.

  “And I am to be told who I may employ and who I may not,” said Fines. “If any of my people are not considered appropriate according to age and training, I will be fined.”

  I wondered if my family were facing similar restrictions. They hadn’t written to me about it. They didn’t tend to get into that level of detail with me when it came to trade.

  “Many are already suffering new restrictions or fines at the hands of the Prince,” Fines added.

  “But the Prince hasn’t the authority to do those things yet,” I said. It took time to make all the preparations needed to have a title change hands, and even more time when it involved the throne.

  “He will when he ascends the throne, and he’ll remember those who have opposed him. It would be idiotic for anyone to refuse his edicts merely because he temporarily lacks the authority to make them.”

  I wondered what that would mean for Taro’s cousin and her refusal to pay additional taxes.

  “Have you not received any such regulations from the Prince?” Williams asked.

  Of course not. That was a stupid question. “The Triple S is a self-regulating institution, and it always has been. The monarch has no authority over us.”

  “And what will the Triple S do should a monarch choose to exercise some authority?”