by Paula Guran
She stood with a very superfluous pair of men-at-arms gripping her wrists so tightly that the blood left her hands and the bones were about to snap, and the king’s bastard—and sole surviving son—fingered the pouch they had found in their search of her.
“Courier,” he said.
They were not alone with the guards, he and she. A brocaded troop of courtiers and dandies loitered near, amongst the porphyry columns and on the steps of the higher floor. He dismissed them with a wave of his hand; several seemed to feel privileged and stayed.
“For whom,” the prince asked, “are you a courier?”
“Couriers bring messages,” she said. “I decided on my own to bring you this one. I thought you should have it.”
“Who are you?”
“A freelance assassin,” she said, promoting herself, and setting Prince Osric back a pace. The guards nearly crushed her wrists; they went beyond pain.
“Jisan,” Osric said.
One of the three who had stayed walked forward, and Gillian’s spine crawled; she knew the look of trouble, suspected the touch of another brotherhood, more disciplined than her own. “I was ambitious,” she said at once. “I exaggerate.”
“She is none of ours,” said the Assassin. A dark man he was, unlike Osric, who was white-blond and thin; this Jisan was from southern climes and not at all flash, a drab shadow in brown and black beside Osric’s glitter.
“Your name,” said Osric.
“Gillian,” she said; and recalling better manners and where she was: “—majesty.”
“And how come by this?”
“A cut-purse . . . found this worthless. It fell in the street. But it’s some lord’s seal.”
“No lord’s seal. Do you read, guttersnipe?”
“Read, I?” The name rankled; she kept her face calm. “No, lord.”
He whisked out a dagger and cut the cords, unfurled the parchment. A frown came at once to his face, deepened, and his pale eyes came suddenly up to hers. “Suppose that someone read it to you.”
She sucked a thoughtful breath, weighed her life, and Jensy’s. “A drunk clerk read it—for a kiss; said it was something he didn’t want to know; and I think then—some great lord might want to know it; but which lord, think I? One lord might make good use and another bad, one be grateful and another not—might make rightest use of something dangerous—might be glad it came here in good loyal hands, and not where it was supposed to go; might take notice of a stir in the lowtown, bully boys looking for that cut-purse to cut throats, armed men and some of them not belonging hereabouts. King’s wall’s too high, majesty, so I came here.”
“Whose bravos?” Jisan asked.
She blinked. “Wish I knew that; I’d like to know.”
“You’re that cut-purse,” he said.
“If I were, would I say yes, and if I weren’t, would I say yes? But I know that thing’s better not in my hands and maybe better here than in the River. A trifle of reward, majesty, and there’s no one closer mouthed than I am; a trifle more, majesty, and you’ve all my talents at hire: no one can outbid a prince, not for the likes of me; I know I’m safest to be bribed once and never again.”
Osric’s white-blue eyes rested on her a very long, very calculating moment. “You’re easy to kill. Who would miss you?”
“No one, majesty. No one. But I’m eyes and ears and Korianthine—” Her eyes slid to the Assassin. “And I go places where he won’t.”
The Assassin smiled. His eyes did not. Guild man. He worked by hire and public license.
And sometimes without.
Osric applied his knife to the lead cylinder to gently cut it. “No,” Gillian said nervously. And when he looked up, alarmed: “I would not,” she said. “I have been advised—the thing has some ill luck attached.”
“Disis,” Osric called softly, and handed the cylinder into the hands of an older man, a scholarly man, whose courtier’s dress was long out of mode. The man’s long, lined face contracted at the touch of it in his hand.
“Well advised,” that one said. “Silver and lead—a confining. I would be most careful of that seal, majesty; I would indeed.”
The prince took the cylinder back, looked at it with a troubled mien, passed it back again. Carefully then he took the purse from his own belt, from beside his dagger. “Your home?” he asked of Gillian.
“Dockside,” she said.
“All of it?”
She bit her lip. “Ask at the Anchor,” she said, betraying a sometime haunt, but not Sophonisba’s, not the Rose either. “All the Sink knows Gillian.” And that was true.
“Let her go,” Osric bade his guards. Gillian’s arms dropped, relief and agony at once. He tossed the purse at her feet, while she was absorbed in her pain. “Come to the garden gate next time. Bring me word—and names.”
She bent, gathered the purse with a swollen hand, stood again and gave a shy bow, her heart pounding with the swing of her fortunes. She received a disgusted wave of dismissal, and the guards at her right jerked her elbow and brought her down the hall, the whole troop of them to escort her to the door.
“My knives,” she reminded them with a touch of smugness. They returned them and hastened her down the stairs. She did not gape at the splendors about her, but she saw them, every detail. In such a place twenty thousand in gold might be swallowed up. Gillian might be swallowed up, here and now or in the Sink, later. She knew. She reckoned it.
They took her through the garden, past handlers and quivering dogs the size of men, and there at the garden gate they let her go without the mauling she had expected. Princes’ favor had power even out of princes’ sight, then; from what she had heard of Osric, that was wise of them.
They pitched the little bundle of her skirt at her feet, undone. She snatched that up and flung it jauntily over her shoulder, and stalked off into the alleys that were her element.
She had a touch of conscience for Sophonisba. Likely Sophonisba had disentangled herself by now, having lied her way with some small skill out of whatever predicament she had come to, appearing in the high town: forgive me, lord; this lord he brought me here, he did, and turned me out, he did, and I’m lost, truly, sir . . . Sophonisba would wait till safe daylight and find her way home again, to nurse a grudge that money would heal. And she . . .
Gillian was shaking when she finally stopped to assess herself. Her wrists felt maimed, the joints of her hands swollen. She crouched and slipped the knives back where they belonged, earnestly wishing she had had the cheek to ask for food as well. She rolled the skirt and tied it in the accustomed bundle at her belt. Lastly—for fear, lastly—she spilled the sack into her cupped hand, spilled it back again quickly, for the delight and the terror of the flood of gold that glinted in the dim light. She thrust it down her blouse, at once terrified to possess such a thing and anxious until she could find herself in the Sink again, where she had ratholes in plenty. This was not a thing to walk the alleys with.
She sprang up and started moving, alone and free again, and casting furtive and careful glances all directions, most especially behind.
Priests and spells and temple business. Of a sudden it began to sink into her mind precisely what services she had agreed to, to turn spy; Triptis’s priests bought whores’ babes, or any else that could be stolen. That was a thief’s trade beneath contempt; a trade the brotherhood stamped out where it found it obvious: grieving mothers were a noise, and a desperate one, bad for business. It was that kind of enemy she dealt with.
Find me names, the lord Osric had said, with an Assassin standing on one side and a magician on the other. Suddenly she knew who the old magicker had been: Disis, the prince had called him; Aldisis, more than dabbler in magics—part and parcel of the prince’s entourage of discontents, waiting for the mad king to pass the dark gates elsewhere. The prince had had brothers and a sister, and now he had none; now he had only to wait.
Aldisis the opener of paths. His ilk of lesser station sold ill wishes down by the
Fish, and some of those worked; Aldisis had skills, it was whispered.
And Jisan cared for those Aldisis missed.
Find me names.
And what might my lord prince do with them? Gillian wondered, without much wondering; and with a sudden: What but lives are worth twenty thousand gold? And what but high-born lives?
She had agreed with no such intention; she had priest troubles and hunters on her trail, and she did not need to know their names, not from a great enough distance from Korianth. One desperate chance—to sell the deadly information and gamble it was not Osric himself, to gamble with the highest power she could reach and hope she reached above the plague spot in Korianth . . . for gold, to get her and Jensy out of reach and out of the city until the danger was past. Dangerous thoughts nibbled at her resolve, the chance she had been looking for, three years on the street with Jensy—a chance not only of one purse of gold . . . but of others. She swore at herself for thinking of it, reminded herself what she was; but there was also what she might be. Double such a purse could support Jensy in a genteel order: learning and fine clothes and fine manners; freedom for herself, to eel herself back dockside and vanish into her own darknesses, gather money, and power . . . No strange cities for her, nothing but Korianth, where she knew her way, all the low and tangled ways that took a lifetime of living to learn of a city—no starting over elsewhere, to play whore and teach Jensy the like, to get their throats cut in Amisent or Kesirn, trespassing in another territory and another brotherhood.
She skipped along, the strength flooding back into her, the breath hissing regularly between her teeth. She found herself again in familiar territory, known alleys; found one of her narrowest boltholes and rid herself of the prince’s purse, all but one coin, itself a bit of recklessness. After that she ran and paused, ran and paused, slick with sweat and light-headed with fortune and danger and hunger.
The Bowel took her in, and Blindman’s—home territory indeed; her sore, slippered feet pattered over familiar cobbles; she loosed her skirt and whipped it about her, mopped her face with her scarf and knotted that about her waist, leaving her curls free. The door to the Rose was before her. She pushed it open.
And froze to the heart.
5
All the Rose was a shambles, the tables broken, a few survivors or gawkers milling about in a forlorn knot near the street-side door. There was chill in the air, a palpable chill, like a breath of ice. Fat Jochen lay stark on the floor by the counter, with all his skin gone gray and his clothes . . . faded, as if cobweb composed them.
“Gods,” Gillian breathed, clutching at the luck piece she bore, easygoing Agdalia’s. And in the next breath: “Jensy,” she murmured, and ran for the stairs.
The door at the end of the narrow hall stood open, moonlight streaming into a darkened room from the open window. She stopped, drew her knife—clutched the tawdry charm, sick with dread. From her vantage point she saw the cot disheveled, the movement of a shadow within, like a lich robed in cobwebs.
“Jensy!” she shouted into that dark.
The wraith came into the doorway, staggered out, reached.
Nessim. She held her hand in time, only just, turned the blade and with hilt in hand gripped the old man’s sticklike arms, seized him with both hands, heedless of hurts. He stammered something. There was a silken crumbling in the cloth she held, like something moldered, centuries old. The skin on Nessim’s poor face peeled in strips like a sun-baked hinterlander’s.
“Gillian,” he murmured. “They wanted you.”
“Where’s Jensy?”
He tried to tell her, pawed at the amulet he had worn; it was a crystal, cracked now, in a peeling hand. He waved the hand helplessly. “Took Jensy,” he said. He was bald, even to the eyebrows.
“I saved myself—saved myself—had no strength for mousekin. Gillian, run away.”
“Who, blast you, Nessim!”
“Don’t know. Don’t know. But Triptis. Triptis’s priests . . . ah, go, go, Gillian.” Tears made tracks down his seared cheeks. She thrust him back, anger and pity confounded in her. The advice was sound; they were without power, without patrons. Young girls disappeared often enough in the Sink without a ripple.
Rules changed. She thrust past him to the window and out it, onto the creaking shingles, to the eaves and down the edge to Blindman’s. She hit the cobbles in a crouch and straightened. They were looking for her. For her, not Jensy. And Nessim had survived to give her that message.
Triptis.
She slipped the knife into her belt and turned to go, stopped suddenly at the apparition that faced her in the alley.
“Gillian,” the shadow said, unfolding upward out of the debris by Goat’s Alley. Her hand slipped behind her to the dagger; she set her back against solid brick and flicked a glance at shadows . . . others, at the crossing of Sparrow’s. More around the corner, it was likely.
“Where is it?” the same chill voice asked.
“I sell things,” she said. “Do you want it back? You have something I want.”
“You can’t get it back,” the whisper said. “Now what shall we do?” Her blood went colder still. They knew where she had been. She was followed; and no one slipped up on Gillian, no one.
Seals and seals, Nessim had said.
“Name your price,” she said.
“You gained access to a prince,” said the whisper. “You can do it again.”
Osric, she thought. Her heart settled into a leaden, hurting rhythm. It was Osric it was aimed at.
“We also,” said the whisper, “sell things. You want the child Jensy. The god has many children. He can spare one.”
Triptis; it was beyond doubt; the serpent-god, swallowing the moon once monthly; the snake and the mouse. Jensy!
“I am reasonable,” she said.
There was silence. If the shadow smiled, it was invisible. A hand extended, open, bearing a tiny silver circlet. “A gift you mustn’t lose,” the whisper said.
She took the chill ring, a serpent shape, slipped it onto her thumb, for that was all it would fit. The metal did not warm to her flesh but chilled the flesh about it.
A second shadow stepped forward, proffered another small object, a knife the twin of her own.
“The blade will kill at a scratch,” the second voice said. “Have care of it.”
“Don’t take off the ring,” the first whispered.
“You could hire assassins,” she said.
“We have,” the whisper returned.
She stared at them. “Jensy comes back alive,” she said. “To this door. No cheating.”
“On either side.”
“You’ve bid higher,” she said. “What proof do you want?”
“Events will prove. Kill him.”
Her lips trembled. “I haven’t eaten in two days; I haven’t slept—”
“Eat and sleep,” the shadow hissed, “in what leisure you think you have. We trust you.” They melted backward, shadow into shadow, on all sides. The metal remained cold upon her finger. She carried it to her lips, unconscious reflex, thought with cold panic of poison, spat onto the cobbles again and again. She was shaking.
She turned, walked into the inn of the Rose past Jochen’s body, past Nessim, who sat huddled on the bottom of the steps. She poured wine from the tap, gave a cup to Nessim, drank another herself, grimacing at the flavor. Bread on the sideboard had gone hard; she soaked it in the wine, but it had the flavor of ashes; cheeses had molded: she sliced off the rind with a knife from the board and ate. Jochen lay staring at the ceiling. Passers-by thrust in their heads and gaped at a madwoman who ate such tainted things; another, hungrier than the rest, came in to join the pillage, and an old woman followed.
“Go, run,” Nessim muttered, rising with great difficulty to tug at her arm, and the others shied from him in horror; it was a look of leprosy.
“Too late,” she said. “Go away yourself, old man. Find a hole to hide in. I’ll get Jensy back.”
It h
urt the old man; she had not meant it so. He shook his head and walked away, muttering sorrowfully of Jensy. She left, then, by the alleyway, which was more familiar to her than the street. She had food in her belly, however tainted; she had eaten worse. She walked, stripped the skirt aside and limped along, feeling the cobbles through the holes that had worn now in her slippers. She tucked the skirt in a seam of itself, hung it about her shoulder, walked with more persistence than strength down Blindman’s.
Something stirred behind her; she spun, surprised nothing, her nape prickling. A rat, perhaps; the alleys were infested this close to the docks. Perhaps it was not. She went, hearing that something behind her from time to time and never able to surprise it
She began to run, took to the straight ways, the ways that no thief liked to use, broke into the streets and raced breathlessly toward the Serpentine, that great canal along which all the streets of the city had their beginnings. Breath failed her finally and she slowed, dodged late walkers and kept going. If one of the walkers was that one who followed her . . . she could not tell.
The midtown gave way to the high; she retraced ways she had passed twice this night, with faltering steps, her breath loud in her own ears. It was late, even for prowlers. She met few but stumbled across one drunk or dead in the way, leapt the fallen form and fled with the short-range speed of one of the city’s wary cats, dodged to this course and that and came out again in the same alley from which she and Sophonisba had spied out the palace.
The garden gate, Prince Osric had instructed her. The ring burned cold upon her finger. She walked into the open, to the very guards who had let her out not so very long before.
6
The prince was abed. The fact afforded his guards no little consternation—the suspicion of a message urgent enough to make waking him advisable; the suspicion of dangerous wrath if it was not. Gillian, for her part, sat still, wool-hosed ankles crossed, hands folded, a vast fear churning at her belly. They had taken the ring. It had parted from her against all the advice of him who had given it to her; and it was not pleasing them that concerned her, but Jensy.
They had handled it and had it now, but if it was cold to them, they had not said, had not reacted. She suspected it was not. It was hers, for her.
