“If he does, he’ll be disabused shortly.”
“You really think the girl will bend to your whims?”
“No,” the Doga said, surprising herself with the truth. “No, I don’t think she will, but she may find the bastards who keep going for my throat.” She left unsaid that either way, the Alhurra girl had a funeral in her future. I need those seats. “I’ve a feeling Ulfren and his kin will have their hands full with Ciris shortly,” she continued. “After the events in the Shattered Coast, war is coming. Even without that, Ciris allowing her mages to provide healing with no strings attached will cut the Dead Gods’ priests deep. That will keep him distracted.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Isn’t that why you’re here, my friend?”
The woman laughed, a sound harsh enough to make the Doga wince.
“Buc was the one you wanted, aye?” the Doga said. For a moment she considered sitting down again, but there was something in the figure opposite her that suggested caution. Gods, I hate caution.
“She was.” The figure shifted, its wide-brimmed, slanting hat turning up slowly until a single, amber-glowing eye was revealed, staring at her. “Remember our agreement, Doga. You’ve made a lot of them today, but ours is the only one that matters. No matter how this plays out, the girl belongs to me!” Her voice rasped as if about to catch fire. “To Sicarii.”
“Of course,” the Doga said, mentally saying a prayer that her voice remained even. “You can have the slip of a girl.”
The other laughed. “She’s a slip that won’t stay slipped, but by the end she’ll find me. It’s not in her nature to fail often, aye, or for long, and that will be her downfall.” She grinned, her eye burning like a coal in the shadows. “You say she’s mine, but if your Secreto had gone straight for the pair of them instead of taking the gondolier out first, she’d have belonged to the fish and I would have been deeply … upset.” The word slipped from her tongue like poison dripping across a hot blade.
Something lurched in the Doga’s chest, sending pins and needles and an overwhelming desire to vomit through her body. She fought it back, tasting bile through clenched teeth she tried to form into a smile, but the other’s twisted lips told her she’d failed. She swallowed hard, unable to find her breath.
“But leave that—as you said, I will have the girl. The Veneficus will be back, Doga,” she said, suddenly changing subjects as she was wont to do. “This is one scrap caught between their teeth that they won’t let go. Can’t let go. Then there’s the Company to consider. Whispers say the Chair is thinking of making an offer that the Empress—who sees war with Normain on the next wave—can’t refuse.”
“You mean that the Company and the Sin Eaters should form a merchant alliance to rule Servenza in the Empress’s name, with the Empress named Doga?” She wanted to laugh at Sicarii’s startled look—it was the first she’d seen the creature discomforted. “Next you’ll tell me that you have heard whispers of the Chair’s infidelity to the Board. That she owns shares in several other companies, including a not insignificant holding in Normain’s newest start-up? That many would name her traitor to the Company, to Servenza, to the Empress herself?” She didn’t bother hiding her smile or the heat in her voice. The mages may be growing weaker, but the Dead Gods provide. Always.
“We may have an arrangement, you and I, but never forget I ruled Servenza before you found your way to our canals and I’ll rule Servenza long after you’re gone.”
“An island surrounded by enemies,” Sicarii said after a moment, but her tone had shifted fractionally, acknowledging the Doga’s victory. “You may want to consider consolidating, begin building your own power so that you—Servenza—can stand on her own, free from Veneficus … or the Empire.”
“Careful,” the Doga hissed. She glanced around, but her guard had mysteriously vanished, just as they had every time Sicarii paid a visit to her private chambers. They’d reappear after Sicarii was long gone, convinced they’d stood by her side the entire time though unable to recall any details. It made her wonder: If Sicarii could find her, alone in the chambers meant to keep her safe, were her family’s secret passages actually secret anymore?
She needed to tread carefully with Sicarii. Sicarii had ideas, ideas that the Doga could use to shape the future of Servenza and her line in ways Grandmama never would have dreamed. If we’re careful. Caution. Again.
“You never know who might be listening and that was close to treason.”
“I know exactly who is listening,” the other countered. “No one.”
She licked her lips. “If I increase the size of the Constabulary or my Secreto, the Empress will become suspicious.”
“You increased it by one just now,” Sicarii said, pointing a gloved hand toward the chair opposite the Doga’s.
“Buc? She wouldn’t accept my offer of muscle, not with that hulking brute she had with her this morning, so I had to give her something … unless you know who is so desperate to see my throat slit?”
“Why wasn’t her man with her now?”
Of course you don’t know who has been trying so damned hard to kill me. Because all you care about are the answers you seek, to questions I can’t ferret out. Yet. But I can’t answer you if I’m dead. So why don’t you see that? A thought slipped through her that perhaps Sicarii did know and simply didn’t care.
Aware that the silence was lengthening, she said, “My eyes and ears indicate they often go their own ways.”
“Find out,” Sicarii said. “I want to know why Eld wasn’t at her side.” She made a noise in her throat.
“She’s a means to an end. And at the end—you’ll have her.”
“I will,” Sicarii growled.
She fell silent again and the Doga felt sweat pooling at the back of her gown where it tightened around her waist. “If there’s a good reason for the recruitment,” Sicarii continued, “she’ll never blink an eye.”
“P-pardon?”
“The Empress,” Sicarii said, as if speaking to a simpleton.
Anger flashed through her. Sicarii often leapt around from topic to topic, then grew irritated when the Doga couldn’t follow her twisted logic. Twisted, but brilliant. She swallowed the retort. “A good reason, you say? Like what?”
“I’ve put my finger to the pulse of the streets and there’s something there,” the figure rasped. “Something that we can use, you and I. War.”
“Between the Gods?”
“No, though that’s coming soon enough.” Sicarii sounded pleased at the thought. “That will distract the Empress, but until then, I was thinking of something beneath her attention but well worth yours. A gang war.”
“Gang wars are to be prevented,” the Doga said. “There would be blood in the streets.”
“Blood has a way of covering all manner of sins, Doga,” Sicarii said. “Something that girl learned a long time ago and something you’d do well to learn now. You told her you understood what she wanted: power. I’ve a feeling you’re kindred spirits, though yours may be more … Imperial.”
Sicarii’s laughter made her skin crawl as if in anticipation of a blade. She knows. But then, she’d known Sicarii knew from the first time the woman had appeared in her bedchamber with an actual blade to her throat and a finger pressed to her lips. Without this creature, her dream would have remained just that, but now, she had possibilities. Servenza had thrived under her rule; surely the Empire deserved that success writ large?
“Blood it is, then.”
“It always is, sooner or late,” Sicarii chuckled. “And Buc’s will be last.”
10
“I don’t remember the streets being like this last time we were here,” Eld said.
“Like what?”
“So … prickly,” he said, sidestepping a woman who gave him a look that would have drawn blood if it had been a blade.
The streets were loud around us; the Quarto was coming to life as the noon sun began to break through the grey storm c
louds of the previous day. I scratched absently at my left hand; the tear-shaped scars there felt as if they should hurt. I was damned if I knew how I came by them. Likely running on streets like these. The Painted Rock Quarto wasn’t the Tip—fewer of the cobblestones were gone and the buildings, though poor and missing plaster in many places, were still standing instead of leaning or fallen over. But it wasn’t that far a run to the Tip, so most of the swirling humanity around us wore patched and ragged clothing. More than one pickpocket gave us a sharp glance before deciding that Eld’s hand on his sword and the open blade I only half concealed against my wrist were more trouble than our purses were worth. In the Tip, any purse was worth the trouble, and trouble there often meant the crimson kind.
“Last you were here was when you ran into me. Almost three years ago, now,” I reminded him.
“Aye, when you went for my purse, as I recall,” he said.
Still, even here, there was a tension that I only recalled feeling once or twice when I’d called this Quarto home. One woman shouted an epithet at another, whose face was smeared with ash from one of the Dead Gods’ rituals. A man in a torn coat shoved the shouting woman, and I caught a glimpse of his ash-streaked face before the crowd swallowed them and their religious argument. The Sin Eaters reaching out to the Dead Gods traditional congregants, the poor, was setting everyone on edge. Servenza had always been full of worshippers of both deities, but there’d been an uneasy alliance amongst the populace, something one didn’t hear of from Normain or other places the Dead Gods’ actual bones rested. Since this summer, that had disappeared.
“You were big and tall and sunburnt as fuck,” I said, smiling at the memory.
“You thought me a rube,” he laughed.
“I did,” I admitted. “But you’d damned fast hands for them being the size of hams.”
“They are not,” he said, glancing down at them. “Few scars, sure, but we’ve all them.”
“True.” I scratched again at mine absently. When had I picked these up?
“These beggars are hard to find,” Eld muttered, pausing on one of the few corners lacking a hawker to get a look down the alleyway that intersected it.
“And harder to buy,” I agreed. We’d tried a few already, who had as much as told us to go fuck ourselves, albeit with a lot of bowing and scraping and knuckling of the forehead. A beggar might try to slit your throat, but they’d be polite doing it, in hopes you’d cough up a coin with your lifeblood. “Damn.”
“Eh?” Eld glanced down.
“I remembered when I’ve felt this feeling before.”
I plucked at my amber jacket, wool despite Salina’s insisting that my clothing should be silk. Eld, who had taken her advice, had been shivering the whole morning. Show me a noble and I’ll show you a fool. A common saying on the streets, though only whispered in the finer Quartos.
“The first time was right before Sister died and the second was after I slit Blood in the Water’s throat,” I said, dropping my voice. There were some who still remembered the old bitch, and no telling if those were fond memories or not. “It’s the feeling of change, when rivalries flair and would-be leaders vie for control.”
“War,” Eld whispered.
“Aye, amongst the gangs.” I remembered the scuffle from a moment before and added, “And the Gods, too.”
He cursed and half drew his blade before letting it slide back into its sheath. “No wonder we’re drawing every eye … everyone’s wondering which side we’re on, which God we bend our knees to—we’d do not to linger. How long did the Doga say we had to find who wants her dead?”
“She didn’t.” Before the Chair forces me to choose between you and my dreams. I shrugged. “I’m assuming we have until whoever it is succeeds? I imagine a corpse would have a hard time honoring her half of the bargain.”
Eld cursed again and blushed when a passing man shunted the girl-child with him—probably his daughter—to his other side with a recriminating look that softened when he took in Eld’s frame. “We’d better be about it, then. If the next attempt is like the last, we may not have that long.”
“Aye,” I grunted. I had felt the phantom heat of the flames spouting from the would-be assassin when she went up. “A few paces closer and she’d have taken the guard and likely caught the Doga’s dress on fire.”
“Ugly, that,” Eld said.
“I saw a lamplighter once, that happened to,” I said. “Plying her trade. A coal fell off her pole and landed in her skirts and she didn’t realize until it was too late.”
“How’d she not see that falling?”
“Just lit the lamp,” I told him. “Night blind and it was a windy night, so when she went, she went fast.”
Two of the Constabulary, dressed in their powder uniforms, strode by us with a grunted, “Citizens,” but not pausing and observably not looking at anything around them, which seemed both disconcerting and wise. Something is definitely afoot.
“That woman went fast, too,” Eld commented.
“Aye, I’d’ve given a pretty coin to have been able to investigate her corpse.” Now it was my turn to curse. “And I could have, if we’d stayed.”
“We didn’t know if the Doga’s guards were going to assume we were part of it,” Eld reminded me.
“After saving her life?”
“There’s an old soldier’s trick,” Eld said, speaking slowly, bright eyes shooting down to study mine, then flicking away. When I didn’t stiffen at his mention of his time in the army, he continued, talking faster. “Let the enemy rout a small number of troops, maybe not even a small number, and set an ambush farther back. Then, when they relax their guard, thinking the battle done and dusted, you hit them hard.”
“Risky,” I whistled. “What if the routing troops don’t stop? Or if they infect your ambush with fear and they all rout?”
“Always a possibility,” he agreed. “But if you’ve veteran troops with nerve and can pull it off, you’re practically assured victory.”
“So probably just as well we didn’t stick around,” I mused. “But I’d still like to know what set her off.”
A newspaper crier called out the big story from around the corner. Deeper into the Quarto, another voice, higher in pitch, took up the cry and farther off, another, like a group of gulls sounding out where the fish had gathered.
“I’d settle for finding someone willing to do more than glare at us,” Eld said. “We should have started closer to the canal.”
“Why?” I asked him. “You want to find that dilapidated flat we called home?” We had lived in half a dozen in the years we’d been friends, most along the canal, where the smells wafting from the edge of the Painted Rock Quarto kept the prices down. The last had been nice, a place I’d fancied we could one day own outright. It would have fit into the drawing room and library of our palazzo. Sometimes I wondered what happened to the girl who was excited about that tiny apartment.
“She didn’t dream big enough,” Sin said.
“She dreamed big enough to capture you,” I reminded him, and he fell silent.
“I didn’t know you were so nostalgic,” I told Eld.
“I’m not, at least not about that,” he said. “Only now I’m remembering why you always kept us on that side of the Rock. We’re beginning to attract the wrong kind of attention, Buc,” he added softly.
“I told you not to wear silk,” I muttered, following his gaze to where three urchins in brown jackets and mismatched trousers stood in an alley. Ostensibly they were tossing bits of driftwood and betting on the cast, but I saw them sneaking glances our way, and their jackets, while rough, were too uniform to be anything but a gang’s colors. One’s eye was blackened and another tossed her driftwood with a limp shoulder, but I could see bulges beneath their ragged jackets that indicated they were armed and clearly ready to fight again.
The newspaper criers sounded once more, and one farther in, where the Painted Rock would turn toward the true Tip of Servenza, caught my ear
. “Lucky for you, I’ve a plan,” I told Eld.
“Does it involve us beating up children?”
“It most certainly does not,” I told him in a mock shocked tone that made him roll his eyes. “At least, it doesn’t if we move.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Where?”
“There.” I pointed toward the Tip.
“But that’s deeper into this mess, Buc,” Eld said, following my finger.
“Aye, but there’s a paper out there calling my name. Unless you’d rather fight?”
“You know I wouldn’t. I just don’t see how we’re best served moving into an even rougher part of the Quarto. We should have come in disguise.”
“I thought you swore off disguises after the Downing incident.”
“I—I’d forgotten that,” Eld admitted. His face darkened again and well it should, as he’d been a thin pair of cotton underpants away from showing half of Frilituo his most private parts. Neither of us had realized Downing wasn’t a doctor but a male prostitute famed for his ability to maintain an erection no matter how distracting the moment … and the lady’s betrothal party had come prepared to distract. Eld saw my face and stiffened and I couldn’t keep the laughter from bubbling up.
“He still cares for you,” Sin said suddenly, his words cutting through my mind.
“Why do you say that?” I felt my laughter catch in my chest.
“He looks at you more often than anything else, including those gang urchins—who are following us, by the way—and I’ve not seen him smile this much in a while.”
I didn’t dare to believe Sin, but he was right that things felt lighter between us than they had in weeks. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if that gang did try us.…
* * *
“I thought it was you.”
“Signorina,” Quenta said, dropping the papers in her hands.
“Surprised to see me?” I asked.
“I-it’s not often those of your station come to this Quarto,” the girl said, falling to her knees to collect the scattered newspapers.
The Justice in Revenge Page 8
