by A. J. Demas
Ino swallowed hard but said nothing. She held onto Varazda’s earring, and he didn’t ask for it back.
“Breakfast is, um … ” said Gaia, gesturing vaguely.
“Splendid,” said Myrto, standing up. “Varastes, I think it’s lovely that Damiskos is attached to such a … such an interesting person. Do please come into the winter dining room with me and tell me about that fascinating paint on your hands. It isn’t tattoos, is it, like they do in Kargania?”
Almost as soon as they had decamped to the dining room, Olympios, the reason they had all been up early, arrived and invited himself to breakfast.
“So good to see you again,” said Korinna, waving him into the room as if she were the mistress of the house.
The dining room was small, and the couches could only accommodate six people reclining, which was how the Temnons insisted on taking all their meals. Early in his stay at the apartment, Damiskos had brought in a stool from the atrium, and it was a toss-up at each meal whether he or his brother would use it—it depended on who got into the dining room first and how much glaring the older generation did.
This time, Ino had contrived to get into the dining room first, and sat on the stool. Timiskos, after staring around in confusion for a moment, had gone back out to get another stool for himself. So when Olympios came in, Timiskos and Ino were perched on stools near the door, and Damiskos was sharing a couch with Varazda.
“Now,” said Korinna with obvious relish, “where can we get you to sit? Oh, Damiskos, perhaps you can make room.”
Myrto wasn’t as good as Korinna at poisonous looks, but she was giving it her best shot.
Damiskos slid back off the couch without comment, and Varazda came too, with his usual grace, and so they were standing together behind the couch when Olympios noticed Varazda.
“Blessed Soukos!” He gave Varazda an exaggerated up-and-down look and let out a shocked laugh. “Oh, no no no, this won’t do.” He leaned forward to help himself to a handful of dates. “Let me be frank with you, Old Blade, as I always am with my clients. She”—jabbing a finger at Varazda—“has to go. She’s a liability. Oh, yes. I’ve seen it before. I once defended a fellow with an impeccable character otherwise, but there was this bizarre girlfriend—”
“She’s a ‘he,’” said Myrto.
“—foreign, dressed funny, probably a perfectly nice girl in her way, but a liability. I couldn’t get him off. He was guilty, actually—funny story about that. He was accused of staging his own kidnapping, and he’d actually done it.”
“Not my idea of an impeccable character,” Myrto remarked. “And I don’t think you heard me. Varastes is a ‘he,’ not a ‘she.’ I mean—oh, he is, isn’t he, darling? Not that it matters in the least either way.”
Olympios looked at Myrto, taking that in, spat out a date pit, then looked back at Varazda.
“If it would help,” said Varazda, deadpan, “I’d be happy to pose as a bizarre girlfriend. I didn’t bring any of my gowns with me, but I can always get something ready-made in the market.”
Ino gave a little yelp of laughter, and Myrto clapped her hands delightedly.
“Unnatural,” Simonides muttered.
“Oh, no no no,” the advocate said again. He was actually beginning to go pale now. “Did anyone see him come in?” He rounded on Damiskos. “What were you thinking? Are you trying to ruin my reputation?”
“Immortal gods, Olympios,” said Philion irritably, “this isn’t about your reputation.”
“It is for me,” Olympios retorted. “I’m certainly not expecting to get rich off of this case. Everyone knows you’re broke.”
Philion recoiled. “Bringing my finances into it? Have you no shame?”
“It’s all right,” said Korinna soothingly. “Damiskos and Ino will announce their engagement, and that will make everything much better. Reputations and finances.” She looked around with a triumphant smile. “Once his innocence is established, there will be nothing standing in the way of his political career. We all expect great things.”
Damiskos was aware that he had gone still, but Varazda, beside him, had not. He had already known. Shit. He had already known. Timiskos had told him, probably, in some ham-fisted way, and of course Varazda would not exactly have believed it, but he would be worried. Anyone would be.
“The thing is,” Damiskos said, putting an arm casually around Varazda’s shoulders, “we’re not going to do that. Sorry, Ino.”
“That’s all right,” said Ino comfortably. “Varazda, here is your other earring.”
“No no no, I’m out.” Olympios grabbed another handful of dates. “I’m out unless she—he—i—”
“You know where the door is,” Damiskos said.
“Does he, though?” Myrto mused.
“Nonsense, nonsense!” Philion turned placating, looking sick. “Of course we’ll be guided by you, Olympios, old friend. We’ve no desire for anyone to lose his reputation.” He laughed weakly.
“My brother told you about the fertilizer business?” Damiskos said quietly to Varazda, while Olypios and Philion bellowed over one another.
“Incoherently, but yes. I assumed it was what you were going to tell me the other night, before we were interrupted. And it helped to make sense of what I overheard outside the window. Nione was able to fill me in on some of the history.”
“Mm. It’s a mess.”
“I had better go, love, before they come to blows here. Besides, I have things to do. Send Timiskos to tell me when it’s safe for me to return, will you? Perhaps some time when your father and his legal friend are out. In the meantime, I have to go give Helenos’s old neighbourhood a look. Do you think I could borrow your sword?”
Chapter 9
Varazda was in a reckless mood when he finally set off for the Skalina. He went straight across the river in his Zashian finery, as he had planned. He strode into the narrow, foul-smelling streets of the slum looking like a foreign prince—gilt earrings or no—immediately drawing the eyes of shopkeepers and passersby and loungers in doorways. He didn’t care. He had his knife with him, he had Dami’s sword in its Pseuchaian sheath, the belt cinched tight around his waist, and even if he did not look it, he could defend himself.
He was also, in a way that he did not much want to analyze, deeply unhappy. He hadn’t heard the beginning of that novel the other day. Was Eudoxia a disarmingly nice young woman with peculiar interests, trapped in a horrific home with controlling parents and needing the hero’s help to escape? Had Doris been right to give him up?
That lawyer would probably have characterized Doris as a “bizarre girlfriend.” But at least she wasn’t something even worse.
Aradne had drawn Varazda a map to Helenos’s lodging, based on what Dami had told him the other night. It was a very basic map, because she didn’t know the neighbourhood well (Nione had never been there in her life), and at a certain point it failed him. The road dead-ended at what looked like a demolition site, and there was no obvious way forward. Varazda accepted the necessity of asking for directions.
By this time he had developed a small entourage, though they were following at a wary distance, composed of dirty children and dogs that might or might not have belonged to them. He stopped on the middle of the street and turned in a way that made his coat swing out around him, tossed back his hair, and flourished Aradne’s map.
“Does one of you know the way to this place?” he demanded, pitching his voice to carry to the group of children and laying on the thickest accent that he thought was compatible with being understood.
The oldest member of the group was a thin girl with red hair and a younger sibling—or perhaps her own child—riding on her back in a sling. She came forward, eyeing Varazda’s map sceptically.
“What’s it say?” she asked.
“It says I am to follow this street until I come to a flight of steps beside a fountain. I am to go up the steps, and at the top find a wine shop with a sign of a crow. My destination lies ac
ross the street.”
“Yeah?” The girl looked intrigued. “I know the sign of the crow.”
“It is urgently important that I find it. My beloved’s life may depend upon it.”
Her mouth fell open. The baby on her back gurgled and kicked its feet. “I can take you there. Your map’s wrong now, since last Month of Peace, when that apartment block fell down.” She gestured to the pile of rubble behind him.
Varazda glanced over his shoulder at the remains of the building. He’d heard that this sort of thing happened in Pheme: unscrupulous landlords built blocks of apartments so tall and so flimsy that they would collapse. There were laws to prevent it happening in Boukos.
After he offered the girl a flowery thanks and a copper coin, he followed her down the narrowest street he had encountered yet, overhung by rickety wooden balconies projecting from the upper stories of the buildings on either side, lines of washing hanging between them. The other children and the dogs followed, closer now, and they picked up a couple of adults: a stocky, red-cheeked young man and a small, bustling woman who seemed to be his guardian.
True to her word, the red-haired girl led Varazda around the collapsed building to the flight of stairs, which he thought he might have missed because the thing that Aradne’s map called a “fountain” was a dingy yellow wall with water trickling out of a pipe into a muddy basin, choked with the fallen leaves of the only tree he had seen since crossing the river. The procession mounted the steps, picking up a trio of young women at the top who had been sitting outside the house with the tree, and whom Varazda judged to be members of a branch of Kallisto’s trade. The girl with the baby seemed to be friends with them.
“He’s looking for something that could save his lover’s life,” she informed them.
“Ooh, sounds fun!” said one of the prostitutes. She sidled up to Varazda. “What is it, handsome?”
“He hasn’t said,” the red-haired girl cut in officiously. “It may be a secret.”
Varazda remained sternly silent. Whenever he needed to make a display of being a man, it wasn’t to any of the courtiers he had known at Gudul or the diplomats in the embassy that he turned for inspiration. He could act like a Pseuchaian man at home, and often did, but when he needed to be a Zashian man, he reached back, by some instinct, to the men of his childhood on the Deshan Coast: his father and elder brothers and innumerable uncles and cousins. They were above all proud, carrying themselves as if they were always on their guard, by turns taciturn and eloquent, quick to either laughter or violence. It would have been a hard kind of man to be, but there was something satisfying about being able to imitate one, at least well enough to impress the residents of a Phemian slum.
“Here’s the sign of the crow,” the red-haired girl told Varazda, pointing. Again he was glad for her guidance, since the thing painted on the outside of the wine shop could to his eyes have been anything from a dog to an elephant.
“Are you going to thump One-Eyed Dolon?” one of the other children asked eagerly.
Varazda made a show of considering the question before saying gravely, “No. My business lies elsewhere.” He scanned the other side of the street, looking for the door that matched Dami’s description. Spotting it, he pointed. “There. Do you know who lives behind that grey door?” he asked the assembled group.
“That’s Big Tio’s place,” one of the women said after a moment.
Of course it is, Varazda thought. He waited for someone to tell him, “You don’t want to mess with Big Tio,” but surprisingly no one did.
Instead, the bustling woman came forward to say, “We live there. Are you here about the young gentleman who was killed?”
“I seen who did it,” said the young man with her, smiling broadly up at Varazda.
“Shh, Straton,” said the woman. “He tells stories,” she added apologetically to Varazda. “He can’t help it. He’s a good boy, though. My sister’s boy. We all live in Big Tio’s place. If there’s anything we can do … ”
“I am here about the man who was killed,” said Varazda.
“He wasn’t your lover?” one of the prostitutes asked, in a tone that suggested she had met Helenos and was ready to be unimpressed with Varazda’s taste.
“No no,” the red-haired girl corrected her before Varazda could speak. “He said he was here to save his lover, not avenge him.” She looked anxiously up at Varazda. “Right?”
Varazda nodded sternly. “Yes. It is vital that I find the murderer.”
“Oh, because your lover has been accused of the crime!” the girl guessed.
Varazda gave an even sterner nod, and it was not altogether put on.
He was treated to a flood of information from his followers, most of it quite superfluous. The prostitutes had seen Helenos often in the street and drinking at the wine shop with the badly painted crow. They couldn’t say exactly when he’d arrived in the neighbourhood. They hadn’t known his name. He’d never given any of them the time of day, and they hadn’t thought much of that.
The children had all heard about the murder and had different accounts, each one more lurid and improbable than the last, of how the body had been found. The red-haired girl pursed her lips and propped her baby on her hip and shook her head gravely at Varazda after every new account.
Finally the young man Straton could stand it no longer, and he tugged at Varazda’s sleeve.
“I seen who done it,” he said again. “I seen Ruta going up the stairs.”
“Ruta from our house?” said one of the prostitutes. She shook her head. “Straton, she doesn’t live here any more. Maybe it was a woman who looked a little like Ruta.”
Straton looked sadly at the ground. “I know Ruta,” he murmured. “I seen her going up the stairs.”
“Thank you,” said Varazda seriously. “I will remember that.”
“My sister may be able to tell you more,” said Straton’s aunt. “She spoke with Ora, who found the poor fellow’s body.”
“Would your sister be so kind as to receive me?” Varazda asked, remembering his appropriately foreign manners.
In due course he had been introduced to Straton’s mother, in the ill-lit set of rooms shared by her extended family. The red-haired girl and some of her friends crammed in. The baby began to fuss, and the girl passed it off to another woman, who sat on a bed and began nursing it. One of the prostitutes tossed her a shawl to cover herself, lest she offend the Sasian’s sensibilities. Varazda, who had seen plenty of babies nursed in the women’s quarters at Gudul, said nothing.
He distributed more coins and heard all about the lame soldier who had quarrelled with Helenos in the street and brought him back to his room on the day he had died. Straton’s mother had seen it all from her window. She tried helpfully to remember the name Helenos had called him. One-Eyed Dolon would know, someone said, as they had been outside his shop. Varazda thanked them gravely.
One-Eyed Dolon, or someone else, had obviously talked to Kontios Diophoros’s men when they came to get Helenos’s body, leading to Dami’s arrest. Varazda considered admitting that he was there on Dami’s behalf, so that they would not continue to fixate on Dami as a suspect. He decided against it because he wanted to hear as honest an account as possible of what had happened.
“And did he have any other visitors?” Varazda asked.
“No,” said Straton’s mother, “not that I saw.”
“Yes, there was!” a boy spoke up. “A man with a beard and—” He gestured wildly around his head. “—crazy hair. Grey, like. I was throwing out slops first thing in the morning when I seen him, talking with the fellow who died, and they went inside together.”
“First thing in the morning, Tono?” said the red-haired girl. “That’s no help. He wasn’t killed first thing in the morning.”
“I know, he just said was there any other visitors, and there was. So.” The boy looked sulky.
“Thank you,” said Varazda, digging out another coin. “I must know of every detail, no mat
ter how small.”
This had the effect of opening the floodgates, and he heard about incidents days earlier, minute details of Dami’s clothes and sword and exactly how he had thrown Helenos into the front of the wine shop, and a full description of the removal of Helenos’s body, which was mostly an account of how difficult it was to manoeuvre a stretcher down the house’s narrow staircase. Straton reiterated his story about seeing the woman named Ruta go up the stairs—“wearing her different-coloured cloak”—and it was intimated, kindly, that Straton had a fondness for Ruta and had been missing her since she went away. Someone remembered what Helenos had said to make Dami knock him down.
“It was something about a Sasian—‘your Sasian whore,’ or something like that.”
The red-haired girl looked up sharply and met Varazda’s eye with a look of dawning realization.
“What about the grey-haired man, though?” she interrupted. “Tono, are you sure he was here first thing in the morning?”
Tono, when pressed, wasn’t sure. He could only connect the incident with his throwing out of the slops, and he didn’t know whether that had been before or after the soldier passed by. He couldn’t remember whether Helenos had had a swollen lip or a black eye or any other sign of having been roughed up in the street when he was speaking with the grey-haired man. He became truculent and inclined to take the whole thing back.
“You should speak to Ora, upstairs,” said Straton’s mother finally. “She found the young man’s body.”
No one wanted to accompany Varazda upstairs to speak to Ora. He gathered this was because no one very much wanted to speak to Ora. He climbed the steep stairs to the top floor of the building, noting with alarm the way that the steps sloped to one side. Was that the beginning of the building’s collapse, or was it securely enough propped against the structure next door not to fall down?
There were three doors opening off the dirty landing where the stairs ended. He had been told that Ora’s was the one opposite the head of the stairs, so he knocked at it. He heard muttering from inside.
