He had found La Saciadería a pleasant, familiar place on that first fateful evening. And it was doubly so in the daytime, the plush furnishings and antique décor a positive oasis for a discerning traveler too long deprived of civilized comforts. Now, as Sil settled back into the great overstuffed chair in the parlor, he reveled in serenity and solitude and quiet, refined splendor. No, it wasn’t quite home – but it was damned good.
And just when he thought the day couldn’t get any better, the immaculately-shined black dress-shoes descending the stairs conspired to prove otherwise.
“Bien-día, good afternoon,” Faro began, winding a fine silver pocket-watch on his way in –
– and dropping it at his first full glimpse of Sil. It dangled from its waistcoat chain like a gaudy pendulum.
And then the world had no joy, no savor greater than the look on that blanching, stammering, pomaded pale face. “Why – why, Master Halfwick, how pleasant it is to see you again...”
Sil imagined that he must look a right galling sight: the very picture of glowing youth and health, dressed in bloodied, tattered rags, sitting with a noose coiled lightly in his lap.
So he reassured his visitor with a smile worthy of the dandy himself. “Faro – just the man I wanted to see! Smashing to be back again, really it is. I was wondering, old chap: could I trouble you for a favor?”
Faro looked as if he’d like to trouble Sil for a fainting-couch – but he’d played the game too long to buckle that easily. He returned a nervous copy of Sil’s smile, and a stiff two-inches’ tip of his head. “Why – of course. I’m ever at your service...!”
Sil remained comfortably seated, and laced his hands together across the arms of the chair. “Splendid! It’s like this, you see: you remember how I’d won those pearls from you when we played at cards? Well, I’m red to my ears to realize that I’ve misplaced them somehow – really, I’m just sick at the thought. You haven’t seen them here by chance, have you?”
You stole them. You dropped a noose around my neck and shoved me off a balcony and stole them, you conniving, murderous loon.
Sil caught a flicker of movement from the doorway behind Faro, but kept his eyes on the dandy and his smile guilelessly bright.
Faro swallowed. A tic tugged at his lip; his gaze flicked involuntarily to the rope in Sil’s lap. “Why, I’m – I haven’t, but I can... I’ll just check your room, shall I?” He gestured back at the stairs, turned to go…
… and flinched back as two pairs of smoldering black eyes opened on either side of the doorway. Two camouflaged bodies stalked toward him: one a little taller, bolder in its stride, the other terribly thin, its concealment marred by dry gray patches. But they advanced on Faro with merciless purpose, as bloody single-minded as a pair of avenging fraternal twins.
“Brilliant,” Sil said, rising smoothly to his feet. “Do let me know what you find – I’m positively at the end of my rope.”
By then Faro was turning back towards Sil, his mouth already open to call for help.
But not a peep emerged as Sil tossed the noose over his head and yanked hard enough to bring the dandy crashing to the floor like a hooked trout, strangling to get a sound out.
Elim would be so proud.
The conspirators wasted no time after that: Sil handed the rope off to his new friends, pausing just long enough to liberate Faro’s keys from his waistcoat before he cleared his partners to haul their kinsman away. His last view of the three mereaux was the sight of Faro’s expensive heels drumming a frantic, muffled tattoo on the richly carpeted floor, his blue-white hands clawing at the rope around his neck as he was dragged down the hallway and out through the front door.
The manor-house returned to quiet after that, its peaceful afternoon stillness marked only by the ticking of the grandfather clock. When night fell, it would come alive again, filling with noise and people and every sort of merry debauchery. For now, the silence was broken only by the jingle of the keys as Sil set off in search of lost property.
IT HAD BEEN a shitty week. A shitty month, if Twoblood were speaking frankly.
First all the mess with Halfwick and that half-man of his, and everything with the a’Krah and Dulei, and that was before Twoblood had had to take a screaming chambermaid at her word, and go find Brant’s headless body bleeding through his bedsheets. Then Día going missing, Fours falling apart, weeks of sending search parties out – all for the little cowbird to come waltzing back into town today, as casually as if she were stopping in for lunch. It had been a trial of a pain of a nightmare of a farce, and it wasn’t even over yet. It wouldn’t end until the Azahi had returned and booted those two good-for-nothing-foreigners back over the border.
But as Twoblood sat there in her house, awaiting the next inevitable shit-burst of an imposition, the view from her barred window treated her to a spectacular novelty.
Two naked fishmen were marching down the street in broad daylight, dragging the madam’s clerk on a rope behind them. For a moment, Twoblood feared that he was dead, and that she would have to step in.
But no, actually: as his captors reached the promenade on the other side of the street and set about tying him between the posts, the clerk began to struggle – for all the good that did.
So as the fishmen tied him up and commenced tearing his fancy clothes off, Twoblood judiciously declined to intervene. Instead, she opted for a more conservative, supervisory approach: namely, propping her boots up on the table and leaning back to watch the spectacle.
It was going to be a good day after all.
THE AZAHI RETURNED without fanfare or forewarning. That was expected.
But after Island Town had received him again, there was just enough time for Fours to go upstairs and complete his costume – wig, ears, eyebrows, the works – before the inevitable summons arrived.
Well, almost enough time.
But there was no time to mourn the missing piece, nor even to compose himself while he tapped on the door – because the door was already open, and the Azahi was already waiting.
So Fours bowed there in the entryway, and made the best of a bad situation. “You wanted to speak with me, First?”
“Sit.”
Fours admitted himself into the Azahi’s lush, richly-decorated home, and seated himself on the opposite side of the little round floor-table as if he’d only been invited in for tea – as if he weren’t in the deepest kind of blackwater trouble.
The man sitting across from him harbored no such illusions. His traveling-clothes were rumpled and dirty, the glittering marks of his office hanging heavy around his neck and forehead, and his uncommonly smooth middle-aged features were as hard as sandblasted stone. “Where are your glasses, Fours?”
Fours had been mentally preparing for this since he agreed to Shea’s mad plan... but that didn’t make it any easier to meet that molten golden-eyed stare. “I don’t know, First. I had them yesterday.”
And both those things were technically true.
The rainbow beads curtaining the Azahi’s pinned hair clicked as he lifted his chin. “Well, then,” he said, his voice perfectly measured, “what have you been doing today?”
Fours could not begin to match the intensity of the other man’s gaze, but he had no energy left to flinch from it. “Oh, quite a lot,” he said. “I woke up. Drank. Thought of killing myself, but couldn’t find the laudanum. Then Día came back – has anyone told you that yet? – and we had lunch, tidied up a bit... oh, and my sister and I decided to hang Faro.”
Well, that wasn’t strictly true. “Actually, it was more of a pillorying,” Fours added. He was walking a thin, dangerous line between honesty and insolence – a double rarity for anyone who knew him.
So perhaps the Azahi hadn’t quite decided how to react: the soft, clean contours of his face remained a blank. “And why did you do that?”
As if that weren’t obvious. They’d stripped him right there in the middle of the street, ripping his wig off and exposing his gill-plumes i
n full view of everyone. Opéra could rage and fume all she liked, but Faro was finished in Island Town: his cover had been blown.
Fours dipped his head. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
If he were interviewing with Twoblood, this would have been the moment where she leapt across the table and throttled him.
Instead, the edge in the Azahi’s voice reminded Fours to be grateful that he was not Twoblood. “And the fire? Did that seem like a good idea too?”
This was more dangerous territory – the point where their little coup had gone beyond mere humiliation. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Fours demurred.
A flick of the Azahi’s wrist sent a pair of charred, twisted spectacles skittering across the table, their blackened hexagonal lenses staring up at Fours in wordless accusation.
“I may have dropped them in the confusion –”
The table jolted with the force of the Azahi’s exasperated slap. “Damn it, Fours, we’ve been out there begging YOUR mother to help us find YOUR daughter, and this is how you thank us? By trying to kill her best man?”
It sounded awful when he put it that way, and Fours hastened to clarify. “No, sir. If I’d meant to kill him, I would have done it.” And he hoped his expression conveyed just how easy it would have been – as simple as sprinkling a little rat poison on Faro’s damp, thirsty flesh. He wouldn’t have even needed to swallow.
But as tempting as it was to positively guarantee that Faro would never come back for vengeance, that would have made Fours a murderer... or at least, more of one than he already was. “Instead, I decided that I would just go and fetch my spectacles, and set them down just-so by the pile of clothes at his feet, and then I would leave him alone. Whatever happened after that, whatever transpired between the sun and the glass and the fabric – I left that for the gods to decide.” Never overburdened with faith even in the best of times, Fours had thought this a beautiful, even inspiring solution.
The Azahi did not seem to agree. “And they decided to burn him alive.”
“Why, not at all, sir,” Fours hastily reassured him. “They saved his life. They saw fit to have Twoblood on watch just then, and she cut him down and promptly returned him to the water, where I have no doubt that he will heal... after a fashion.” Fours absently pinched the cauterized, webless flesh between his fingers. “Of course, all that smoke will have ruined his lungs. I doubt he’ll ever be able to live on land again. Certainly he won’t be in any shape to threaten my Día.”
Fours must have looked a little too serenely satisfied as he said that, because the Azahi’s face was fast dissolving into a mask of horror. “You did this for HER? You... if you thought he was going to... you could have...” The beads clicked again as he shook his head, speechless with disgust. “You’re despicable.”
Fours tried for an apologetic shrug. “I’m a parent.”
There was no other way to explain it. The past two weeks had been the worst of his life – and yet it had also been strangely liberating. Día was gone, Shea was gone, and Fours genuinely hadn’t cared whether he lived or died – so there was nothing left to be afraid of. There was nothing Faro or anyone else could do to him. For the first time in his life, he had been free.
And now that Día was safely home again, the idea of going back to that caustic status quo – the thought of flinching and jumping and cringing at Faro’s every whim, terrified that the least defiance would end in an invisible knife at his daughter’s neck... God, who could ever bear it? Easy enough to go along with Shea’s madcap scheming when literally any ending was preferable to that old, hideous continuation.
Fours didn’t volunteer any of that, and the Azahi didn’t ask. The First Man of Island Town only drew back from the table and jerked his head at the door. “Go. Get out. And send her here directly.”
Fours rose to leave, wishing for enough sincerity to apologize with. “Yes, First. Though I should mention, just so you aren’t surprised...”
The Azahi looked up at him with the dead-eyed certainty of a man who had lost his capacity for astonishment.
“... she knows about the slaves.”
And as it turned out, the master of Island Town still knew how to blink. The mask cracked; he stared up at Fours with a slower, more intellectual fear – the look of a man who was just then realizing his ruin. “You told her?”
Fours shook his head, almost offended. “The a’Krah had none of their own messengers left to send back – so they decided to place their next order through Día.”
The Azahi slumped forward, beads clicking as he cupped his forehead in stunned, hopeless passivity. “You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.”
Comedy had never been Fours’ strong suit.
“What are we going to do? We might have all of three hours before the Dog Lady comes storming in here to reclaim her island, and you’re telling me that my ambassador – that our ambassador has probably already filled the great lady’s head with peerless tales of our depravity. What are we supposed to do?”
Fours had already been dismissed, of course. He did not care to imagine how low he’d sunk in the Azahi’s estimation. But it was a terrible thing to see the First Man of Island Town so afflicted – to hear ‘me’ breaking through the polished golden mirror of ‘we’. No, Día wouldn’t understand the kind of unfortunate compromises that went into running a city, or just how exhausting it was to lead a double life. But Fours was all too familiar.
So he sat back down, wishing he had some way to mark himself as a friend this time, and made an effort a consolation. “Fix a parade,” he said.
The Azahi looked up. “What?”
Fours swept his hand out at the late afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window. “Welcome her, Hara! Rejoice, throw a party, be seen to celebrate. Island Town will host a living goddess – so take advantage of it! Yes, technically we’re all squatting on her land, but it isn’t as if she’s bringing an Ara-Naure legion here to evict you with. Let her be your figurehead leader, if she wants to stay, or your patron deity, if she doesn’t. Either way, it all serves you in the end: why should you have to keep bowing and scraping for Mother Opéra when you can have a great mother of your own?”
That was wisdom not lost on the First Man, and some of it he might have already considered. “Yes, but what reason does she have to tolerate us? We don’t... wait. We do still have her son, don’t we?”
Fours nodded, but not with conviction. “Yes, First. He’s still asleep. And I wouldn’t – before you think it, I wouldn’t trot him out with a bow. He was terribly keen to leave this morning, and from what Día’s told me, that’s a family mess we’d do well not to step in.”
Apparently that didn’t help. “Then what shall we say? And how? She doesn’t – the earthly gods have no tongues, and we’ll need someone who already knows her mind. Día was our perfect choice, our ambassador and apparently the Dog Lady’s newest favorite, but now...” The Azahi shook his head, his gold-flecked skin pale in the light.
Fours felt bad for him. No-one could lead a city as fractious as Island Town without getting his hands dirty from time to time – and the Azahi had never hesitated to dirty or dishevel himself when Fours needed him. He had been a heroic constant in searching for Día over this last sleepless eternity – and while Fours couldn’t restore her innocence or demand her goodwill, he might yet be able to conjure a suitable substitute.
“Ask Shea.”
At the Azahi’s first perplexed look, Fours elaborated. “She was your ambassador too, once upon a time. It was kind of you to take in the three of us remainders – and she won’t have forgotten. Ask her back into service. She knows the Dog Lady better than anyone.”
That, and after today’s little stunt, Shea would do well to stay clear of Opéra’s clutches.
The Azahi let out a slow breath, his attention resting on an indeterminate point between them. “And you?” he said at last. “What do I do with you?”
Fours looked down. “Wh
atever you want.”
“What do you mean?” The concern in the Azahi’s voice was flattering.
“Just what I said,” Fours replied. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Even if Opéra doesn’t kill me, she won’t trust me for anything, and Día...” Fours gave a rueful smile as he meditated on the charred glasses between them. “... you know, Hara, I think she doesn’t need me anymore. Not the way she used to. I’m sorry about that – I miss the days when she would come to me for everything – but she’s grown so much since then, and more just in the time she’s been away, and now... now I feel like I’m just marking time.”
Yes, that was the heart of it. Fours could go on being her papá, and the Azahi’s ambassador, and a peddler of secondhand goods, and maybe he was just being overly fatalistic here at the end of a soul-wrenching ordeal – but his wonderful newfound indifference had also bleached some of the color from the world, and it was hard to know whether that would ever come back.
The Azahi lifted his brows and sat back, somehow managing to look supremely unbothered about the world that had so recently consumed his attention. “Well, what would you want to do, if you had your choice?”
Now there was a savory hypothetical. Fours considered it for a long minute. If he somehow became the architect of his own life – if he could declare his own place in the world – what would he choose? “I think I’d like to be a doctor again,” he said at last. “I enjoyed that.” All those teas and poultices, the little remedies and clever divinations that robbed suffering and cheated pain... it had been an uncommonly satisfying work.
The Azahi smiled. “You’ll get more business if you stop stringing people up in the streets.”
Fours returned the humor. “I’ll take that under advisement, First.”
The Azahi glanced out the window again, his expression keenly aware of the sinking sun. “And in the meantime... how are you with parade-fixing?”
Dreams of the Eaten Page 45
