by Lynn Abbey
More to the froggin’ point, the six black birds huddled on a single branch signboard were visible from where Cauvin stood.
The Inn of Six Ravens was a quiet place where a rich man could lodge his wife, daughter, or favorite mistress. It had its own stable, a fountain courtyard, and a closed iron gate. A man in green livery sat inside the gate. He wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t going to let Cauvin inside. He wasn’t even going to stand up until Cauvin mentioned Soldt’s name.
“Master Soldt told you to come here?” the guard asked on his way to the gate.
“He told me the laundress named Galya lives here … works here. He said she’d make me a shirt—” Cauvin shrugged a naked shoulder. “I need a shirt.”
“She’s around back. Follow the path around the stable.”
As easy as that, Cauvin was through the gate and on his way to meet a laundress whose visitors were admitted if they mentioned an assassin’s name. He tried to be ready for anything at the back end of the stone-paved path but he wasn’t ready for the inn’s cramped, rear courtyard: A huge wooden tub dominated the yard with a short, stocky woman standing on a stool beside it.
The laundress sang up a storm as she pounded the tub’s contents with a beater that looked a lot like the shaft of a stone-smashing mallet. Galya’s face was smooth and pale for a Wrigglie. Wisps of coppery hair stuck out from her kerchief. Cauvin guessed she was Mina’s age, but might be wrong either way.
Galya’s senses were sharp. She spotted Cauvin before he’d cleared the shadows between the path and the yard. An instant later, the loudest sounds were birds chirping in the eaves.
“Galya—” Cauvin began, then remembered his manners. “Mistress Galya? I’m Cauvin. Soldt said I should come here. He said you could fit me with a white-linen shirt. I need a shirt.”
“I can see that, lad.” She beckoned him closer. “You could do with a bath, too, a haircut, and some bitter-root paste before that nose swells. Looks like you lost a fight, lad. Against whom, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Anyone else had asked that question and there’d have been another fight, but Galya disarmed Cauvin before with a grin.
He grinned back as he answered: “The city guard—but it took three of them.”
“You bloody any of them?”
“Mashed a man’s nose and split his upper lip.”
“Well then, you’re a mighty brawler, aren’t you. No wonder that shirt’s done for. You’ve given it a hard life.” The laundress climbed down from her stool. “Follow me.”
The top of Galya’s head didn’t clear the paps on Cauvin’s chest, but her arms, after a lifetime of pounding dirt out of cloth, were nearly as thick as his. Cauvin followed her into a room where jugladen shelves hid the walls, and every beam or rafter was hung with damp linens. Ignoring the linen maze, Galya pointed Cauvin toward the wooden box, while she rummaged among the shelves.
“How do you know Soldt?” she asked with her back to Cauvin.
He sat on the box and thought a moment before answering. “An old, old man sent me to him to learn how to fight.”
“Looks to me as though you’d be better served learning how not to fight!” The laundress found what she was looking for and advanced on Cauvin clutching lengths of frayed, knotted string. “Stand up, lad. Stand tall and strip off what’s left. You can’t expect me to measure you with you slumped over and hung with rags.”
Cauvin went shirtless when he worked, and he’d long since discovered that a few women enjoyed watching him build a wall or smash it down, but they didn’t look at him the way Galya did. She circled him like a cat hunting mice, then hopped up on the box. Her stubby fingers pressed one string end into the base of his neck. She ran her thumb and the string down Cauvin’s spine, clicking her tongue as she went past his waist. He was too surprised to dodge or protest when she knotted in another piece of string and circled it around his hips.
“If your arms were just a little shorter,” Galya said when she was finished knotting, “or your shoulders narrower, then we could do the job simply with four ells of cloth, but you see where skimping’s gotten you.” She lifted the knotwork over Cauvin’s head and pointed at his discarded shirt. “No, you’ll need five lengths, at least. I’ve got the cloth and nothing better to do with my time. I’ll have a shirt for you this time tomorrow, but—sorry, lad—I’ll have to charge you a whole soldat.”
“I hoped—I need—”
“Ah! You’ve somewhere to go before then,” Galya guessed with a grin. “Someone to see? Someone important? Someone beautiful? Well, you might be in luck.” She beckoned Cauvin to follow her through the linen maze at the center of the drying room. “All manner of things get left behind at an inn, you know. Most of ’em wind up down here. I bundle it up now and again and send it down to the Shambles, but it’s been a while—”
They came to a doorway and dim room cluttered with waisthigh—for Galya—heaps of cloth. Cauvin took it for a storage room until he spotted a neatly made bed in one corner. The bed, Cauvin noted, was a marriage bed, big enough for two. His mind began to wander, and he looked for traces of a husband—or maybe a lover—who favored black clothing while Galya attacked the heaps.
“Here,” she said, flinging a wad of pale cloth his way without looking up. “And here.” A wad of dark cloth followed. “Let’s see how you look in those.”
Cauvin shook out the linen shirt and pulled it on. He had no intention of stripping off his breeches in Galya’s bedchamber.
He thought he’d put an end to conversation by asking, “Does Soldt send a lot a of men here?”
Galya laughed as she said: “Not at all, Cauvin. You’re the first. The Sweet Mother knows what he was thinking. Now, put on those breeches. They might be short; and I’m not sending a man out with his knees showing.”
She left the room, and Cauvin did as he’d been told. Far from being too short, the finely woven breeches were long enough to tuck into the tops of his boots. Cauvin thought himself quite improved until he caught sight of Galya scowling.
“It’s a start, but starting’s never enough, is it? You’ll be wanting new boots—I can’t help you there—but you’re wanting that hair neatened more. Who’s been cutting it for you, lad? Not Nerisis on the Wideway?”
“I cut it myself, when it gets in my eyes.”
“Take off that shirt and sit,” Galya ordered, and went to the shelves. She returned with a set of shears. “If you don’t tell, I won’t either.”
Cauvin grimaced. He didn’t care that there was a law against women cutting men’s hair. What worried him was sharp metal close to his head but not in his hands. He flinched each time the blades ground against each other. Clumps of hair as long as his thumb lay in his lap and on the floor. Shorter wisps clung to his skin. They itched mercilessly and worse after Galya flicked at them with a rag.
“Go, jump in the tub and scrub yourself off.”
He met Galya’s eyes and realized she was serious.
“I’ve raised two sons to manhood, lad, and buried their fathers along the way.”
“But—”
“Go on with you. I’ll stay in here folding linen.”
After exchanging his boots and belt for a knot of soapweed, Cauvin carefully closed the drying room door on the laundress, stripped, and climbed into the laundry tub.
There was a bathhouse in the Tween, not far from the stoneyard. For three padpols a man could scrub himself with soapweed, then rinse down beneath a hand-cranked waterwheel. The cost went down to two padpols if he took a turn or two cranking the wheel before he soaped up. If he forked over ten padpols, he could stand neck deep in a steaming pool next to anyone else who’d paid for the privilege—provided he was male. Women had their own bathhouses, run by the Sisters of Eshi and absolutely forbidden to men.
Come winter, Grabar would pay for the pool a couple times a week; he said it was cheaper than an apothecary’s powder for his aching joints and just as soothing. Cauvin’s first few winters on Pyrtanis Street,
he’d gone to the bathhouse with his foster father, even earned a few padpols cranking the wheel. But once Bec was old enough to walk that had changed. Bec went with his father, and Cauvin kept himself clean at the stoneyard trough.
It had been years since he’d sunk himself into water—even the shallow, lukewarm water of a tub filled with unfinished laundry. He’d forgotten how good it felt to be clean everywhere at once and lingered until his fingertips were wrinkled like raisins. By then gray clouds had spread across the last patch of blue sky over the Inn of Six Ravens. Cauvin wrapped a strip of linen around his waist and returned to the drying room carrying his new clothes.
“We’re headed for a storm,” he explained. “I’d better wear my own clothes out of here. I wouldn’t want to ruin these.”
“Is that the way you ask if I’ve got a woolen cloak stashed away?”
“No—”
Before Cauvin could finish, Galya offered him folded layers of wool.
“I can’t afford that,” he whispered, though it was likely that Galya knew how much money he was carrying—he’d left Mioklas’s cloth-bound payment looped around his belt and laid across the box.
“And I’m not selling it. The man who last wore it, didn’t take it with him when he left the Ravens. I told you, lad, what guests leave, comes to me.”
Cauvin set the shirt and breeches down. He shook out the cloak. It wasn’t new; close up he could see several places where the cloth had been rewoven. There was a generous hood attached to the collar and a leather martingale dangling from the back seam. A loop for holding an assassin’s sword? Cauvin could imagine Soldt wearing this cloak—if the black-leather one were unavailable.
“Why me?” he asked, scarcely aware he’d spoken aloud.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have answers. Because I don’t even know where to look for answers. Because the—” Cauvin caught himself before he slipped and mentioned the Torch by name. “Because if I’m what they’re looking for, then it can’t be very important, or they don’t really care.”
“Who are they?”
Cauvin hesitated, then said, “Soldt.”
The laundress blinked but said nothing.
“Tell me, Mistress Galya—what does Soldt want with me?”
“Get dressed, Cauvin.”
He did, quickly and relying on the maze of drying linen to shield him. The laundress was pouring thick blue liquid from one of the jars into one of the basins when he confronted her again.
“Do I get an answer?”
Galya corked the jug. “Why ask me what Soldt wants? Ask him yourself. He’ll tell you—if it suits him.”
“He must have told you something. You said I was the first he’d sent here. What does an assassin want with a sheep-shite stone-smasher like me?”
“Duelist,” Galya corrected.
“Assassin. Duelist. No froggin’ difference.” Cauvin shot back—though there was some difference, if the tavern stories were true and not that one was a villain and the other a hero. An assassin killed without warning and not necessarily with a sword. A duelist made his intentions known and gave his victims a chance—whatever chance an ordinary man could manage against a master like Soldt. “What does a froggin’ duelist want from me?”
“Your attention, I imagine.” Galya folded her arms beneath her breasts. “He’s been hired to do a job: teach you to fight, that’s what you said, isn’t it? He won’t be happy to hear that you tangled with the guards … and lost.”
“Will you tell him?”
“No, you will—if you’re clever. Aren’t you going to ask me who hired him?”
“Do you know?”
She shook her head. “But whoever it was didn’t tell him to send you to the Ravens, lad. That’s what I meant when I said you’re the first. You must be very important—to Soldt, and not only the man who hired him.”
A twinge of guilt crawled down Cauvin’s back. “You can give Soldt a message?”
The laundress didn’t answer.
“Tell him—Tell him I went to look at a wall today on the Processional—a perfume-garden wall. Tell him that while I was there the man who owns the garden seemed to know things he shouldn’t know about the death of a man who isn’t dead. He’ll understand.”
Galya closed her eyes as she nodded. “And should I tell him where you’re running off to?”
“I’m not running off.”
“Of course not. A what—a sheep-shite stone-smasher?—always carries a sackful of silver tied to his belt while he’s losing a fight with the guards on the Wideway.”
Cauvin studied the floor, feeling very much the sheep-shite stone-smasher.
“It’s no concern to me, but a knotted cloth’s no way to carry silver in Sanctuary. There’s a broker’s baldric there on the box. Wear it under your shirt.”
He picked it up. The leather was thick but supple, and there was a substantial pouch where the ends overlapped. Galya restrained Cauvin’s wrist as he reached for the flap.
“Let me show you how—”
The broker who had made or owned the baldric didn’t want to share his wealth accidentally. The flap was edged with quills that might not pierce a pickpocket’s fingertips but would almost certainly throw him off stride. They’d give an unwary owner a nasty surprise, too, until he learned where to grasp the leather safely. It would take some getting used to, but Galya was right: A knotted cloth was no way to carry forty-two shaboozh through Sanctuary. Less than forty-two shaboozh.
“How much do I owe you?” Cauvin paid his debts … at least he froggin’ tried to … usually.
“A soldat for the shirt tomorrow, when you come for it. The rest is mine to give.”
He didn’t argue, but left the small courtyard behind the Inn of Six Ravens under a cloud of guilt as vast and dark as the clouds over Sanctuary. If Galya passed the message along to Soldt, Cauvin told himself, that would be payment enough … in the long run … maybe.
Gusty winds were clearing the streets of Sanctuary. Half the shops and stalls had pulled their shutters, and the rest would be closed soon. Three decades after the first great storms tore through the city, the people of Sanctuary recognized a bad storm while it was still on the water. Nobody, though, not even the best of Sanctuary’s priests, regardless of their devotion, could accurately predict how bad “bad” would be. Cauvin went to the nearly empty Wideway to make his own prediction.
Every ship in the harbor was bobbing to its own rhythm. If there were oarsmen chained on board the Ilsigi galley, they were wishing their mothers had never screwed their fathers. The open waves were rough and whitecapped but they were breaking well below the wharf, and the tide was coming on high. Storms were worst on an incoming tide. The sky to the south and west was a horizon-to-horizon expanse of dirty, seething gray, but it was darkest to the south, while the wind blew mostly from the west. The worst storms were darkest on the east, and their winds came straight up from the south.
Cauvin’s prediction, with gusty winds lifting his new cloak aloft, was that “bad” would be miserable, but short of disastrous. He returned to the dilemma he’d dodged all day: go to the ruins or avoid them. The Torch had hired Soldt—that seemed a reasonable conclusion after meeting Galya. Soldt would take good care of the man who’d hired him. Cauvin could go to the Unicorn, maybe spend the whole night there. If they were going to leave with the first tide after the storm, then surely it was time to jump the broom with Leorin.
How much of the doubts eating his mind were true suspicion and how much the growth of willful frustration? Shite for sure, caution had been the right choice, but he wanted Leorin so much it hurt each time he left the Unicorn. Leorin wanted him just as bad, though she didn’t sleep alone in a drafty loft. The only reason the two of them hadn’t had each other in the pits was lack of opportunity. In a general way, the Hand encouraged screwing; the Mother of Chaos loved nothing better than newborn blood. The girls got better treatment, usually, until they delivered, and the lads got
what lads had always wanted.
The worst fights in the pits had nothing to do with the Hand.
Leorin, though, had that Imperial beauty. No beardless kisses for her. The Hand fought amongst themselves for the privilege of taking Leorin to their beds. The wonder wasn’t that she was different from other women, the wonder was that Leorin had any use for men at all. Tonight all that would change. He and Leorin would make their vows, with or without a broom lying on the floor in front of them, and while the gale broke around them, they’d start a new life together.
Cauvin headed west down the Wideway, wind swirling the dark cloak around him as though he were Soldt, the duelist, the assassin.
Chapter Fifteen
Rain began as Cauvin entered the Maze, pebble-sized drops that stung bare skin and left craters in the muck when they hit the streets. Growing up beside the sea, Cauvin knew the worst was yet to come. He ran along the Serpentine and reached the Unicorn’s doorway a heartbeat before the sky ripped open with deafening thunder and sheets of rain as dark as night.
The Unicorn’s signboard had been lowered and its door pulled shut against the weather, but the tavern was open for business. There were empty tables along the walls, but Cauvin ignored them. Even if he’d visited the place more often, he had the wrong attitude for a shadowed table, an east-side attitude, a Pyrtanis Street attitude, where men sweated when they worked. The Vulgar Unicorn regulars were rogues and schemers for whom breaking a sweat was the greatest sin of all. They might give Cauvin a glance as he came through the door, but not a second—he wasn’t rich enough to rob, nor tough enough to recruit.
But this night was different. Despite rain drumming the walls, Cauvin heard the commons fall quiet around him and watched heads turn his way. Hardened eyes asked silent questions. He held off a stare or two, because he’d learned the price of weakness before the Hand caught him. Once Cauvin had backed a regular down, though, there was no way in Hecath’s hells that he could sit at a community table. He chose the nearest empty wall-side table and settled into a chair that gave him a good view of both the door and the other patrons, even though that also gave them a better view of him.
