by Carol A Park
“Very well,” she said to Llyr, left without another word.
How closely was Elidor watching her? Did he know, for instance, that at that moment she was breaking into his safe and stealing from him?
“Stealing” was a strong word, of course. If he were here, he would have given her what she needed. Bribes weren’t cheap, after all. But he wasn’t here, and she had heard or seen nothing of him since she had confronted him two days ago.
Three days ago, now. It had slipped past midnight during the time she had spent with Llyr and traveling back to Elidor’s. Ordinarily, she would have left this until the following night, giving herself a little more time to think and plan on a full night’s sleep. But she didn’t have time.
Elidor’s meticulous attention to detail was useful in this case. He had stacked four shallow wooden boxes on top of one another inside the safe, each containing an equal amount, with coins sorted by denomination. It made it easy to count out what she thought she would need, and then add a little extra to be on the safe side.
She dumped the coins into two coin purses, secured them to her belt, relocked the safe, and headed back out into the night.
The door of The Drunken Rabbit slammed shut behind Ivana, shutting out the stench of the garbage rotting in the alley and closing in the smell of unwashed bodies and ale.
She had only been here twice before, both times with Elidor, long ago. She had never come back by herself; of all of their sources, this one tended to demand the most for the least information, and the environment made it less than pleasant to deal with him.
However, when he had information to give, it had always been good. She didn’t have time to waste on false leads.
The place hadn’t changed. Same stench, same filth, same seedy-looking customers, half of them half-drunk, the other half all the way drunk.
And despite the fact that it was just after two in the morning—it had taken her almost two hours to wind her way through the city and to the tavern situated on the outskirts of the slums that spilled outside the northern wall—the place was packed.
Her arrival didn’t go unnoticed, but people were used to minding their own business here.
Most of the time.
She pulled the hood of her cloak down, sauntered to the bar, and set six silver selmas on the top.
A middle-aged man wearing a dirty apron appeared almost instantly to claim her coins.
She jerked her head toward the cauldron being kept warm over coals in the center of the room. “Mug for some velca,” she said.
“One mug’s only three selmas,” he said, looking her over dubiously.
How honest, she thought drily.
She looked pointedly toward the sign above the bar, on which was scrawled the day’s special: bottomless mug of velca for the price of two. “That not today’s special?”
He looked her over again, grunted, and shoved a mug her way.
She wiped it out on the hem of her cloak, grimacing internally, and went to the cauldron to scoop herself out a mugful of the wretched stuff before taking it back to the bar and finding a seat. She had no intention of drinking the entirety of even the mug she had taken, let alone more than two, but she had to shatter the perception that she was more helpless—and therefore gullible—for being female before she would get anything out of him.
Unfortunately, that was an area where Elidor had it easier than her.
Not that she was the only woman in the place. Aside from a server and the two leaning on a burly man throwing dice in the corner, a tall, lithe woman sat alone at a table with her feet up, glaring at anyone who came close to her, and another woman sat at a table of men, downing velca like it was water.
But they’d already earned their places.
The barkeep helped two other customers and then started wiping down the counter behind the bar lined with bottles of varying shades of amber, red, and brown liquids—for all the good it did since he was using a rag already mottled brown with who-knew-how-many spills he’d cleaned up. The surface even sported a blot of what looked suspiciously like dried blood.
She sat, nursed her mug, and waited.
The barkeep was keeping an eye on her in what he probably thought was a discreet way, but he didn’t come over again.
Eventually, some half-drunk, misguided male sat next to her, as she had counted on.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, draping one arm around her shoulders. “Can I buy you somethin’ better than that piss-water?”
In response, she feigned taking a long draw on the mug, and said without turning to face him, “No, thank you, but you can remove your arm from my shoulder.”
He laughed. “Hey, hey. Just an offer. Don’t have to get all hoity-toity about it.” He pounded his free fist onto the bar, as if he amused himself. “We got a reg’lar little lady here,” he said to the man next to him.
That one glanced his way, grimaced—no doubt at the stench on his breath—and moved a stool down.
“I note,” she said calmly, “that your arm is still on my shoulder, and I’ve asked you to remove it. Not to mention,” she added, as if it had just occurred to her, “you stink.”
His smile evaporated, to be replaced with a half-smirk, half-sneer. “What right you think you have to be talkin’ to me that way, eh? Just tryin’ to be nice.”
She was baiting him on purpose. It didn’t take much with his type—especially drunk. The barkeep had taken notice of their quiet disagreement and had drifted closer.
“I’m going to ask you one last time to remove your arm from my shoulder,” Ivana said.
“Or what?” he sneered, pressing his hand flat to the table. “You think you’re somethin’? Lemme tell you, bitch—”
It was glorious how rapidly he went from beating his chest to yelping like a kicked puppy. All it took was a quick sleight of the hand, a flash of silver, and a little blood, and his entire attitude changed.
His arm did drop from her shoulder, then, to tug at the boot knife she had just driven between his index finger and middle finger and into the wooden bar beneath, nicking the webbing between them.
“Filthy bitch!” he screamed at her. “Barkeep, you see that?” He finally managed to wrench the knife out of the wood, and before he could turn it on her, she had her dagger pointed at him and her other hand out.
His nostrils flared, and he gripped the hilt of her knife as though considering returning the favor. In the end, however, he turned it and slapped the knife hilt-first into her palm.
“I’ll ask you to quit vandalizing my bar like that, Da,” the barkeep said, tossing his filthy rag to the man.
“There,” she told the man, who was dabbing his wound with the rag. “I knew I could give you a good reason to do as I asked.”
He glared at her, shoved his stool back so hard that it fell over, and went back to the table where his companions were slapping their knees and guffawing.
The man, on the other hand, was watching her with dark, dangerous eyes, his upper lip curled in a permanent snarl.
She sighed. She’d have to deal with him later. That one wasn’t letting it go.
“All right,” the barkeep said, “you’ve made your point. Do it again and I’ll kick you out.”
Ivana sheathed both blades and inclined her head. “My apologies, Dal.” She produced a setan. “Will this cover the damage?” It was ludicrous, of course. The bar top was so beat up that she had already lost track of which notch was hers.
He snatched the setan up anyway. “What do you want?”
“I was hoping you might have heard some things I might be interested in.”
He grunted. “What sort of things?”
“They say there’s a killer on the loose in the city,” she said. “Someone might pay quite a bit for some information on that.”
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no killer,” the barkeep said, sliding curiously into street inflection he hadn’t been using a moment ago.
“That’s funny,” she said.
“You usually know something about everything.”
“Don’ know where you’d get that idea,” he said.
“Burning skies, man,” she said, sighing heavily for emphasis. “Do I need to trot out the tired-out lines?”
His brow creased, but he didn’t say anything.
“Here’s one to get us started.” She leaned over. “I can make it worth your while.”
“Sure you can,” he said, and in response, she set another setan on the bar top.
He snorted. “You’re gonna have to do better than that,” he said, except this time, she repeated the line out loud right along with him.
His mouth opened, as if to speak again, and then closed.
She gave him a broad smile. “It’s like we both read the same script, isn’t it?”
He stared at her.
Temoth, this was tedious. “Can we skip to the part where you tell me what I want to know, I give you copious amounts of gold”—she put an entire purse on the counter; it wasn’t her money anyway, she had another one, and she knew where to get more—“and we both go away satisfied with the transaction?”
“All right, all right. Just…” He held up one hand in placation and pocketed the pouch with the other. “Look, there isn’t much to tell. But your killer—the one who likes Fereharian girls?”
Close enough. She nodded.
“There’s some chatter that a shadow’s been slinking about round the warehouses down by the docks.”
She cast him a dubious look. “That could mean anything.”
He held up a hand. “That same shadow’s been seen talking to slavers who sometimes sell out of an abandoned warehouse down there. If you ask the slavers, they’ll say it was asking about Fereharian women.”
Slavers. So his next victim would represent her sister. She could have deduced that, but it was good to have confirmation—and a location.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Nope.” With that, he turned away to find a new dirty rag to wipe his counters with.
Ivana left her mostly-full mug of piss-water on the bar and left The Drunken Rabbit feeling both invigorated and annoyed.
Invigorated because that had been mildly entertaining on all fronts; she clearly didn’t have enough human interaction.
Annoyed that the only way to be accepted by a bunch of arrogant assholes was to stoop to their level.
The drunken man followed her for a block before he tried to assail her. She put him where he belonged: laid out in a garbage heap.
Something was different. She knew it the moment she stepped through the front door at Elidor’s.
A light was coming from Elidor’s study door down the hall, which was cracked, and she had neither left the door open nor a lantern burning.
She eased the front door shut, keeping the handle turned until it shut all the way so the latch didn’t make its quiet snick when it caught.
And then she drew her dagger and flattened herself against the wall.
She stood there in complete silence for a moment, holding even her breath so it wouldn’t interfere with anything she might hear around her.
Nothing. She exhaled silently.
Elidor hadn’t attacked her when he had that first opportunity. Instead, he had chosen to flee. Ten days had passed since then, and still she had seen or heard nothing of him.
But he was either here now, or he had been here.
She crept down the hall one soft, silent step at a time, stopping every few steps to listen once again.
Finally, she reached the study door and peered through the crack. She saw nothing from her vantage point, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in there. Again, she listened.
Again, nothing.
She tapped her dagger gently against her thigh. What if the study were merely a trap, a way of luring her into a dead end?
But why go to all that trouble when he could have more easily murdered her while she slept?
No. His next target would be a Fereharian slave meant to represent her sister, and she felt fairly confident that that meant he didn’t intend on coming after her—yet.
Still, she kept her dagger drawn as she opened the study door and moved into the study.
She halted inside the door, taken aback. The painting on Elidor’s study wall—The Execution of the Last Aife—hung in tatters. It had been slashed, not once, not twice, but multiple times, as if someone had taken out their anger on the inanimate object.
After a cautious glance around at the empty room, she approached the painting. She pushed one ribbon of the painting back up into place, pairing it with its match. A portion of the horrified faces of the crowd stared back at her.
She let the scrap fall back down. Anger at the inanimate object, or what it represented?
He had always been fascinated with that painting, and she had never understood why.
As she had never fully understood Elidor himself. She had become more like him in many ways—in the ways she had wanted—but they were like jars of glass and clay that were painted on the outside to look identical. Someway, somehow, their innate substance was still different.
And that knowledge didn’t help her now.
She popped her head into his safe room to be sure he wasn’t hiding down there, and then came back to his study to open his safe and deposit her remaining bag of coins back in it.
To her surprise, the safe was unlocked.
To her even greater surprise, it was empty, save a single rose lying on the bottom of the safe. The stem still had its thorns, and a strip of paper had been pierced through and stuck to the rose stem with it.
She reached for the rose and then hesitated. Could he have poisoned the thorns, hoping she would prick herself?
She tugged on her gloves as an extra layer of protection, gingerly removed the rose from the safe, laid it on his desk, and pulled off the curl of paper.
One line was written on it in his bold script: What is a chain to one.
She laid the slip of paper back down on the desk, baffled. It was the first half of a well-known axiom, the full saying being, What is a chain to one may be freedom to another. Parents liked to trot it out when their children were complaining about doing chores or schoolwork or some other “burden” of childhood, to remind them that some children would be grateful to have chores and schoolwork to do. She remembered her own father and mother using it on multiple occasions.
But in this context, it made no sense. Was he trying to give her his own clue that the next victim would be a slave?
Still, what good did that do her? It didn’t tell her where to find him—or his next victim—before he struck again in exactly four days.
Or did it?
She opened Elidor’s drawer, found a sheet of paper and a pen, and scribbled a note to Xathal on it. She glanced at the clock on Elidor’s desk. It was half-past four; she would walk it to the first district precinct herself at dawn. She knew how she could use him.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Dal! We have him!”
Ivana stopped pacing and turned to face the Watchman who had burst into the small office at the back of a third district warehouse. Ivana recognized him as Lann, a member of one of the teams of three they had scattered around the area.
Xathal shot off his chair and onto his feet.
“Where?” he demanded. “In custody?”
“No, no.” Lann stopped to take a few gasps for air. “But Judoc saw someone with the right height and build entering one of the warehouses down by the docks, one of the ones with all the chains, like you said—”
“And, and? Nothing remarkable about that,” Xathal cut in, impatient to hear the rest.
“And he was carrying something big on his shoulder. It looked like a big rug—or something wrapped in a big rug. Judoc sent me to get you, and he sent Marwyn to get the next closest team. Judoc went in after him.”
Xathal swore and grabbed his hat off the desk. “How long ago? No, never mind. Just go! Now!”
; Lann was already out the door, Ivana close on his heels.
They quickly lost Xathal, who wasn’t of an age or condition to keep up with a young, fit Watchman and an assassin pelting through the twilight.
Lann stopped at an intersection three blocks over and flung his arm toward a warehouse kitty-corner to them. “There!”
Ivana gave him a sharp nod. The aforementioned Judoc, if he had followed Elidor into that warehouse, was almost certainly dead. It was better she go in first.
“Wait for Xathal.” She trotted up to the warehouse and pulled up short right outside the door. It would do no good to burst in if he was waiting for her just inside, but the warehouse had no windows except far above her, so one way or the other, she’d be going in blind. At least the sun hadn’t fully set yet.
Conscious of Xathal finally limping toward them far down the street, she drew her dagger and pushed the door open.
Across the warehouse, a cloaked figure knelt next to a young woman chained to the wall. The body of a man lay nearby, uniformed and bearing Watch insignia.
The warehouse had only one other door, and it was closer to Elidor than her.
She didn’t wait for him to look up. She would recognize that profile anywhere.
She had the advantage of surprise. Elidor wasted a few precious seconds in looking up, taking stock of the situation, and making a decision about where to go. Meanwhile, she darted toward him, but with a slight trajectory toward the other door.
They collided and crashed to the ground in a tangle of cloak and arms and legs. His dagger hit the stone floor next to her head with a hard clank first, and then bit into her upper arm next. She thrashed her legs, trying to land a blow near his groin, but his greater strength won out. He shoved her away, sprang to his feet, and turned back toward the door in one movement. But as he did, he stepped on the hem of his own cloak, and fell back down hard on one knee. She drew her blade and lunged at his back, but he curled in on himself at the last moment and she went over him instead. She rolled, but her hand smacked against the ground, and her dagger went skittering across the floor. She drew her boot knife as she rose to a crouch.
