A Conjuring of Assassins, page 21
“Aye. We’ll tell you all.”
“Would everyone stop talking about me as if I weren’t here!” I snapped.
Papa snorted. “You’re not. Exactly. One of you’d best give my daughter a hand, if you know what I mean.”
I edged closer to the jogging chair and squeezed words through my teeth. “Who are they?”
“Bodyguards,” he said. “Let me breathe a bit. Don’t know which is going to have the better of me, the rib or a damnable woman who gets into the game so deep she frights the piss out of me.”
I couldn’t believe he would speak about our game in front of these two disreputable-looking bodyguards. They were filthy—all dust and torn clothes, what looked like cobwebs in their hair, and their sewer stink would have rats chasing us any moment.
“Excuse me, damizella,” said the older man, coming up beside me. He held out his hand in a friendly way. “Name’s Dumond.”
My hands unavailable due to the needle bag and needle pricks that stung like knife cuts, I just shrugged. “My name is—”
He touched my wrist gently. “Romy, I believe.”
As if a whirlwind lifted my hair and skin, Monette returned whence she came. Every sight, sound, and understanding of the morning was now visible through my own eyes. Romy’s eyes.
“Gracious Spirits!” The shock near laid me flat.
“There’s an alehouse off Swagger Alley in the Asylum Ring,” said Placidio. “We can get a pitcher or two and a bite before I eat this damnable hat, and privacy enough to have a word. We’ve a deal to talk about and one journey of the sun till we have to be back.”
17
ONE DAY UNTIL THE PRISONER TRANSFER
LATE MORNING
Nearing midday, the watery sun had transformed the busy streets and alleys of the Asylum Ring into a sultry stew. Though yet shivering from shedding magic and Monette, my chemise was damp under my layered garments. Antone’s and Vargo’s backs were sodden as they lowered Placidio’s chair to the ground in a weedy, rubbled yard between two blocks of tenements.
“Tell Vashti’s men to wait here, Dumond.” Placidio eased himself out of the kieyu. “We’ll send them food and drink. The way ahead’s too narrow for the chair. And though Pix will see to our privacy, we must see to hers.”
His hair hung in wet ringlets as he tossed his plumed hat into the kieyu and pointed the brass-headed cane farther down the dirt lane. Neri and I followed him in the direction he specified. Dumond followed after relaying Placidio’s order in an approximation of the Invidian dialect.
We soon turned into the mouth of a narrow alley.
“Pix?” Neri asked the question sitting on the tip of my tongue. I was glad, for if I spoke a single word, everything stuffed in my head would come gushing out.
Placidio, walking with better ease than I expected, stepped gingerly across a puddle of sewage. “First person I met when I came to Cantagna. Runs an alehouse called the Limping Bull.”
We turned into a narrower alley. The chair would not have fit.
Down and around the corner we entered a squeeze between a stone wall and a shingled wall. A few dozen paces in, Placidio reached under a shingle set between a scraped oak door and one of two shuttered windows and pulled out an iron key. Buried in such a maze, the Limping Bull must not rely on customers just wandering in. Not even a painted name identified the place a public tavern.
Once we stepped inside, I understood. We’d either come in the back way, or a side way, or this wasn’t a tavern at all.
“Get the shutters, lad.”
Neri obediently unlatched shutters covering the empty windows and threw them open. Dusty light from the alley illuminated a high-ceilinged room that smelled of ale and baking. A single long table surrounded by a dozen stools and two small corner tables with two sides of benches each were the entire furnishing. The walls to right and left were covered floor to ceiling with scrawled names, words, and drawings, most of them less than skilled. I’d no wit to decipher their meaning.
Placidio sagged heavily to a corner bench. “Now put the key back where I got it. And Dumond, if you would, step through that door and have one of the lads tell Pix that … uh … Groaner needs the back room for an hour. And we’d like refreshments sent to our porters out on Gamble Row.”
The age- and grease-darkened door Placidio indicated shared a wall that was half paintless shingles and half grimy brick. The low iron door in the brick and the black soot traces on the beaten earth floor suggested the wall was the former outer wall of the house, the brick column the back of a hearth.
“Groaner?” Dumond’s skeptical question was not accompanied by a snicker, but it was a near thing.
“Pix insists on these names…”
Neri squeezed past me and back into the alley to replace the key. Desperately clinging to every word and image of the morning, I didn’t join in the talk. I didn’t want to forget anything.
Dumond pulled open the inner door. Lively piping, a rattling of tabors, and an avalanche of laughter and conversation spilled into the room, instantly silent again as he pulled the door closed behind himself.
Placidio sighed. “Sit, lady scribe. We’re safe here. Pix helps people in trouble, as I was when I ended up here the first time. One can sleep quite well on one of these benches.”
I sat on the other bench at his corner table. Numb. Shivering. Clutching my bundled needles and my punctured hand. Trying to arrange everything I’d learned into a cohesive whole.
The door banged open, bringing Dumond with his hands full of brimming ale mugs. The person who followed him in was a blaze of lightning disguised as a substantial woman of indeterminate age. Her bounty of tight black curls billowed in every direction at once, her dangling earrings jingled, and her ample form shot across the room to Placidio with a grace and quickness that no twig-like dancer making a grand leap could have matched.
“Groaner! Too long it’s been.” She grabbed his sweat-soaked hair and jiggled his head affectionately. “You look terrible. Fat brandy for you. And your friend—”
In a whirlwind of plum-colored pantaloons, she spun around to me and laid a gentle finger on the bloody linen. “Ouch. You are Thorn, I think.”
“No, my name is—”
But she had already yanked open the door and stuck her head into the noise. When she retracted it again, she slammed the door and spun back to me. “Fat brandy coming for Groaner. Basin, bandages, and salve coming for you, Thorn. A friend so delectable … has Groaner had his way with you? Mmm, I think not. Thorns puncture his armor, so he doesn’t allow it. I’ll guess you know that. And who is this?”
Pix looked back and forth between me and Neri, who looked half a month from finding his tongue. “I see a part of who you are at least, Sapling, you and Thorn. And you four together make a heady puzzle—which I care nothing about.”
Her closed fingers snapped open beside her ears as if to ward away secrets. “Your friend juggling ale can only be Anvil.”
She leaned close to the startled Dumond and sniffed. “The sturdy scent will always give you away, though you and Sapling are wearing a costume of stink that makes me think my establishment should offer baths to all comers. Hmm…”
She retreated to the inner door. “One of my boys is taking refreshment to your porters, so enjoy your hour, Groaner, Thorn, Anvil, and Sapling. My back room is a place of respite. Whilst you bide, none shall enter but my boys. Groaner, tell whoever made your fine suit that I want pantaloons of the same glorious color—and do not be a stranger to the Bull. It’s been too long. Apologies to the rest of you; you’re not welcome there.”
She vanished back through the door, just as three young men in belted tunics popped through. One, with a braid of startling white hair, deposited a tray of four filled soup bowls and a pitcher of wine on the long table. The other, with a well-trimmed scuff of black beard, set a green stone basin, a roll of bandage, and a crock filled with a gray substance that smelled of honey and onions on the small table beside me. The third, a slight youth with russet curls and merry eyes, set a large gray mug, steaming with the fragrance of brandy, almonds,… and butter?… on the table beside Placidio. Fat brandy?
“Knock if you need more,” said the merry, russet-haired youth. “I’ll wait on the other side of the door for your hour.” Only in the puff of air as the door closed behind the three did I notice that the merry fellow had only one arm and that all three belted tunics were made entirely of ribbons.
Placidio took a long, grateful swallow of the steaming posset and set it back with a thump that signaled business.
“So,” he said, “seems we’ve hooked our fish. But I’ve a notion Egerik di Sinterolla is no fat, slow codfish, but a spike-toothed shark grabbed onto our line and dragging us into the deeps. What say, Romy? You saw something going on before we even met him or his man Cei. And, by the by, that Cei gave me the cold shudders just like when I wake with the knowing that a match is going to the rough. What was it you saw?”
“Egerik is the monster who devours the sharks,” I said. “He doesn’t care who sees it, because he believes he’s more intelligent than any of the other fish.…”
While Neri relieved me of the bundled needles, and Dumond’s sure fingers unwrapped my pricked ones and bathed them with the warm water in Pix’s basin, I poured out the story of the morning. Interweaving what we’d learned from Lawyer Mantegna’s report, I described Egerik’s dawn light artwork, and how it provoked the startling reversal of my estimate of the ambassador. “He is intelligent, arrogant, and supremely confident … every bit Rossi’s equal. If they are playing each other, I’d not know which to back. If they’re together, I’ve no idea where this goes.”
“You wanted him to collect you?” Neri blurted, horrified. “And you made yourself look so—glowing, sort of. Before you changed back, you were not my sister. I never really believed what Placidio said about your magic. At Bawds Field you looked more like you’d eaten a lot of biscuits and gone rolling in Dumond’s paint pots.”
“I wasn’t happy about jumping in so deep,” I said after Dumond and Placidio had finished their chortling. “But it came clear right away that Egerik is only impressed by perfection. Monette had to sincerely believe in her power, in her closeness to Lady Fortune, elsewise he would have seen right through her as easily as he saw through our cloth of gold. I decided that if he deemed her beautiful, maybe even came to believe she could fit into this very particular world he makes for himself, then he was more likely to overlook her shady origins. He caught on to Baldassaar’s game early on…”
Maybe as early as his jibe about the yellow garments, now I looked back.
“And you were successful with the divination?” Dumond dabbed Pix’s onion salve on the nine punctures on my hand, and wrapped the clean linen strip around it.
“She was masterful.” Placidio set his empty cup on the well-scrubbed pine. “He could not take his eyes off her or her needles. Every word of the saying meant something to him, too, though the creeping spider wouldn’t yield a spit about why. The casting, the blood … don’t know how you did it, smith, but you’d set the needles exactly right. You had me believing the Lady’s own hand set them to poke her.”
Dumond signaled Neri to cut the bandage and tucked the freed end into the wrapping. “A sponge in the bottom of the bag held them steady and spread out while she sliced the bag.”
“It was perfect. Monette believed it was the Lady’s hand guiding her,” I said. “The constant repetitions in practice made it feel natural. Leaving chaos beside spirit was sheerest luck. I was able to make Monette—myself—take advantage of it, but, divine graces, skulls were not meant to hold two minds at once.” Yet Monette’s crowding had been far less terrifying than Druda’s existence as a splinter floating in a void.
Neri shoved my bowl of soup at me—some delectable mix of beans and garlic, stewed in a little pork fat. The others had already emptied theirs. Astonishing to realize that I was hungry.
“You surprised me when you started talking about the angry spirit,” said Placidio. “I don’t recall us even thinking about that.”
“It was the natalés started it,” I said once I’d downed a few spoonfuls. “It’s one thing to hang ghiris in the windows, dig the biggest threshold sleugh I’ve ever seen, and require guests to wash with lemon peel. Cleanliness is one of his priorities, obviously, but he had sea lavender wreathed around every lamp and candle in his chamber—”
“Protection against the angry dead!” Neri, the superstitious, pounced.
“And demons,” I added. “Placidio pointed out a natalé under the washing table, and then I noticed them everywhere—twenty of them at least in that single room, though I’ve heard nothing about a child’s tender soul involved in all of this. Perhaps he just sees them as additional protection for his own soul.”
Neri again. “Maybe he and those nobs in Argento killed somebody. You said he was the only one left alive, so maybe he had the others assassinated so they wouldn’t tell what wicked things they did there!”
“Mantegna said that the men implicated in the scandal all died after Egerik left Argento,” I said. “But Egerik bit on the chaotic spirit part of the divination so hard, I thought he was going to bite me! He’s the one called it malignant. So there’s something there. Maybe we’ll find out more soon; I sent a message to the woman I know at Cuarona’s wool commission here in the city. If she’ll see me, I’ll ask her about diplomatic scandals in her city in the year Egerik left his post.”
Dumond sat astride his stool as if intending to ride it to war. “Sounds certain he’s feared of the dead.”
Neri opened his mouth, but Dumond laid a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get our turn. Let her get out what she saw, while it’s fresh.”
I appreciated that, even as I gulped half a mug of Pix’s ale.
“What did you see through the brass screen?” asked Placidio. “I thought I caught a glimmer behind it.”
“It’s definitely a squint. Someone could sit back there to watch and listen. It must be open to some other place, as I felt a wafting air. For years I would sit behind a screen and listen to il Padroné’s petitioners…”
A wave of hurt drowned the moment. When I glanced up, all three had their eyes fixed on me, waiting for more as if I were finally going to rip open the past. I rarely spoke of those days, and wasn’t about to start now.
“That’s all I noticed.”
Neri was still fidgeting, but Dumond’s grip checked him again. “Any clue as to whether Cinque is Egerik’s friend or foe?”
I shook my head. “I can’t even guess as yet. But the arriving visitor, the dangers from those he’s linked to by fealty or oath-swearing or conspiracy—and he said himself that it was more than one person—and the knowledge of crimes or dangerous secrets … all touched him, just as Placidio said. The malignant spirit most of all. Rossi may be in for a harsher welcome than he expects.”
“This Rossi doesn’t care if his Assassins List causes a war,” said Dumond, with a kind of horrible indifference. “If your words throw the two of them off kilter then it’s good.”
“So what’s next?” said Placidio. “We’ve only an hour in this room. Egerik wants Monette back two hours past noon tomorrow, ready to cast again.”
“I believe I’ve planted the uncertainties we wanted in Egerik’s head,” I said. “That the prisoner is part of a something bigger—some kind of conspiracy that threatens his life. Maybe it’s Vizio that worries him, maybe it’s Rossi, maybe it’s both.”
“And he wants you back,” said Dumond. “Just what we wanted.”
“Indeed. The problem with auguring generalities is that we can glean only generalities in turn. But if he believes an angry dead person behind it all, that could help us, too. What I need now is more information. I’ve practiced needle casting until my fingers are raw … and pricked now, too. I’m confident I can get Monette to create whatever casting layout I want. But I need some new meat to shape my interpretation.”
“Figure out whose ghost scares him, and we can use the tunnels to put a fright into him,” said Neri.
“We mustn’t forget we’re after the Assassins List,” said Placidio, “not solving the riddle of Egerik and the spy, nor creating false divinations to fool him. Our mission is to ensure that the list Cinque’s got stashed away never gets back to Vizio. Straight and simple.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s not so important even to know whether Egerik and Rossi are allies or enemies; it could be either. We’re trying to disrupt their plans—get them to make a mistake or reveal themselves. That’s why I spoke to him of oath swearing and secrets and how it could be one or more people who are the danger to him. If we’re there, and we know to watch, we can play them to our best advantage to learn about the list and get to it. So as for what else we do next, I think … uneasy as Egerik is … some malevolent spirit activity might shake him even more.”
“So something shows up where it oughtn’t?” said Neri, glancing at Dumond. “With all those natalés … a string ball, maybe?”
Placidio looked as confused as I was.
Dumond, though, seemed to grasp the meaning. “I could probably come up with a straw doll. Got a leather ball, a thorn rattle, and knucklebones. Sit behind that screen they were talking of, and toss the knucklebones and that’ll shake him.”
“Children’s playthings!” I said. “A fine idea. Start with one and we’ll observe his reaction. I could bring one in my waist pocket.”
“Needs to be there before you go,” said Neri. “You describe a place, I’ll take one in. Move it. Put a second, if there’s time. And yes, yes, I’ll be careful. So where?”
The answer seemed obvious. “Beside the cloisonné box where he keeps the lock of hair and the ruby ring. Even if those are not his wife’s, they’re a remembrance of someone. So, a quick in and out?”
