The Duchess of the Shallows (23 page)

Just then her fingers touched cloth, and she seized the wrapped dagger and pulled it close. Only when she clutched it to her chest did she realize that it, too, was cold, even through the swaddling cheese cloth. Colder even than the new tunnel's air, or the water it had fallen into. It was as if the blade itself were generating a chill. Had the thing always been this cold? She held it up to the air flowing from the archway, and only then realized that she knew this feeling. She'd lived with it and feared it all her life.

The fog.

Her heart fluttered in her chest; the fog had found her, even here deep under the city, and now the words of the Domae woman echoed in her mind. Steel had laughed then at the silly girl who believed any story she was told, who feared the fogs when there were so many
real
things to be afraid of in Rodaas, but Silk knew what lay at the end of the dark road that sloped down, down into the darkness.

He Who Devours.

She drew a trembling breath. The woman had said his mark was upon her, and she had spoken more truly than she knew. For the coin in her pocket was surely His mark, and it had put her on the path that led here, to this tunnel. She knew why the dagger was so cold she could feel it through the cloth; He Who Devours had sent her to fetch it, and now He was calling it home. The fog was His herald and His messenger, and now they both awaited her, below.

A madness overtook her, and hardly able to believe it she leaned towards the opening, her eyes and ears straining in that wet darkness for the gray figure she had seen in her dreams. It knew her name, and not Duchess or Silk or Steel. It knew Marina Kell, and they'd met on that long-ago day when she'd first seen the mist rising to envelop the city. She slid towards the opening in a daze of horror, ready to move through the archway and into His arms.

Anassa had said the dagger had ruined greater than she. A prophecy, then, and one about to come true.

And in that moment she remembered her father. Her father who had seen the fog and pulled her away from it. "Let us go in; the fog is rising," he'd said. She heard the words as clearly as if he were beside her, and they broke the spell. She scrambled to her feet and ran away from the dreadful arch, through tunnels built by the dead and the forgotten, splashing numbly through water as cold as any fog. There was no more pain from her knee or her torn fingernail, and she ran as if all the demons of myth that had crowded Eusbius' halls were behind her.

She ran until her side ached and her lungs blazed, and she finally collapsed against the tunnel wall, breathless and wobbly-legged. That strange chill was behind her, and the dagger in its wrappings was once more just a stolen knife.

Fog did not come from inside the earth but off the harbor, she told herself. That archway was just another tunnel, perhaps built by the long-departed Domae. And as for who had planned this little enterprise...it was Hector, and not some Domae legend that had sent her after the blade. Steel said all these things, but Silk whispered that she'd passed some kind of test, and somehow that thought comforted her.

She ran wet fingers through wet hair and shuddered a few breaths to calm herself. At least the stink had faded; either that or she'd simply gotten used to it. It was strange to think she'd started at a home in the higher districts, had moved to the Shallows, and now found herself half-drowned amongst rats in the sewers beneath the city. At least it was unlikely that she could fall any
lower
.

She smiled wearily and resumed her progress along the tunnel.

* * *

She thought the dark might go on forever, so when she first made out the shape of bricks beneath her feet she thought it only the trickery of tired eyes. But no, the tunnels she stood in were now dimly lit, and she looked up to see a narrow rectangular opening in the tunnel roof that showed a slice of night sky. Looking ahead, she could see another such slit, and realized that she’d seen these openings from the other side; they drained water from the streets after a rain, and were used by commoner and noble alike to dispose of waste. They were too small for her, true, but they admitted a tumble of moonlight to show the way. She blessed Sar under her breath, imagining him with Lysander’s golden curls. She was sure now that the stink of the sewers had lessened somewhat; she must be going the right way. And so she stumbled through the dark with only her hands and brief moonlight to guide her.

That errant thought of Lysander had been a mistake, for now the floodgates of her memory opened again and there he was before her. He'd thought she was crazy to use the cold house to escape House Eusbius, and a part of her wondered if he'd been right. "That's one big risk," he'd pointed out when she'd shared her plans. "You don't know that the water under that cold house
goes
anywhere. It could just be a pool of water that's cold just because it's underground. Cellars are cold, too, you know."

She'd shaken her head. "Not like a cold house. It's the water
running
under the cold house that chills it, I'm sure of it. If the water comes from somewhere it must go somewhere. And there has to be a lot of water, so the tunnel would have to be fairly deep."

"But how do you
know
? I've never seen a cold house from the inside, and neither have you." She wasn't sure how to answer that; by rights, few who lived in the Shallows had heard of cold houses, much less seen one. Fortunately for Duchess he pressed on. "And even if you're right, what if those tunnels just end somewhere, with no way out?"

"They can't just end, Lysander," she soothed him, although she could have used some soothing herself. "All that water has to go
somewhere
. You've seen the pipes at the harbor, right? And the water that spills out of them? That's the water from up the hill, running down into the harbor. Well, where the water can go, I can follow."

He ran his hands through his hair. "OK…let's say there
are
tunnels that go all the way down the hill. Who can say they're all wide enough for
you? Water can go where you can't. You could get stuck and drown!" Panic edged his voice, and she felt a stab of guilt. He was almost frantic with worry and she couldn't even be honest about why her knowledge of cold houses surpassed what a Shallows girl should know. In the end she'd convinced him only by sheer force of personality and the trust he had in her, which left her feeling shamed and a little ill. She longed to share her secret with him, but Noam's training held hard.

Or was it Noam's training? She'd spent a good deal of her life evading and, where she dared, outright defying the old baker's rules. Why had she treated his warning about her past differently? Did she think Lysander couldn't be trusted?

The weight of the lies she'd told over the years seemed as heavy as the city above her. She gasped another sob as she crept along in the darkness, and in that instant she wanted nothing more than to see him: her clever, bright and beautiful Lysander. She stumbled to a halt once more, one hand against the tunnel wall to keep from falling. Of all the people she'd met in the Shallows, Lysander had always taken care of her best. He was always at hand to share a meal or a choice bit of gossip, to drink with her at the
Merry Widow
, or just to sit in companionable silence. He had first seen the silk in her, and the steel.

He was her first, and would always be. The day had been as cloudy and foggy as any other spring day, but Lysander had had no clients and Duchess no chores so they'd conducted a long tour of every dice game in the Shallows. Lysander knew them all, and although his luck wasn't always the best, on that day he had been on fire. The table, the rules, the opponents...none of it mattered. The dice seemed a part of his body, and not the canniest sailor or oiliest trickster could withstand him. She had been fascinated by the way his clever fingers had held the dice, the wrinkle of his brow as he considered the odds, and the musical peal of his laughter when luck went his way again and again. He had seemed almost like a young god, matchless and untouchable.

By fourth bell he had a purse full of pennies, half-pennies and sou, a small fortune by their standards, and so that night had been full of wine and victory. They'd stumbled back to the garret, Lysander half-blind from drink, but Duchess remembered every moment. The silky smoothness of his skin, the aching blue of his eyes, the memory of it now a sweet pain that she knew no other man could inflict upon her.

How could she have left him to the Brutes?

If she could only find her way back to him she would never tell him another lie, she vowed to herself in the dark, wiping away tears. And
if Malleus and Kakios had hurt him she would go back to House Eusbius, this time not to take a dagger but to deliver one.

Chapter Fourteen:
A harsh mistress

Whatever gods watched over bread girls were with her, because after a time she began to sense more light ahead.
She moved more quickly, eager to put the sewers, and the memories, behind her. The tunnel had twisted and turned, but thankfully there had been no further openings along the way. Soon she smelled brackish water, the unmistakable odor of the harbor, and her heart sang. The wharves had never smelled so good, she thought with a smile as she emerged from the tunnel into the moonlit night. She stepped out onto slippery rocks washed by the bay and looked around. The Wharves rose behind her, with lights here and there and the faint sounds of voices and music. She moved away from the tunnel opening towards the water and eased herself into a sitting position on one of the rocks. She had done it. She had fooled a baron, stolen a one-of-a-kind artifact, and escaped like a thief in the stories, and neither the Brutes nor the sewers had been able to stop her. She burst into laughter and paddled her feet in the water like a child, savoring her victory.

After awhile she became aware of how filthy and cold she was. She could do something about one of them, so she slipped off her soaked and tattered dress and rinsed herself in the bay. She normally wouldn't consider bay water clean, and it was certainly cold, but it was a world better than the cistern. She hoped no one was around to see the dirty naked woman swimming near the sewer outlet, but in truth she was too elated for concern. The docks seemed quiet at this hour, the sailors no doubt off drinking or whoring, and either no one saw her or no one cared.

After her bath she donned the torn and dirty dress once more, secured the dagger in her bodice as best she could, and clambered carefully over the bay-washed stones to the wooden walks that lined the harbor. Climbing up, she looked carefully about, but for the moment the area was quiet and empty, and she was hopeful that no one had seen her. It was time to make her way back towards the Shallows and safety, but she was uncertain which way to go. It was hardly her first time in this district, but when pushing the bread cart she generally followed Dock Street from the Shallows directly to the wharves and back again. If she followed the harbor far enough she'd eventually run into Dock Street, but she was wary of running into the sailors who often roamed the docks. During the day these men were good customers, but at night...well, she'd heard dreadful stories of the liberties such men took with women alone, and she'd had quite enough adventure for the evening. She decided it was safer to move through the streets, keeping to the shadows and away from the docks. Even if she never found Dock Street, if she climbed the hill long enough she'd eventually reach the Shallows. She was glad the evening fog had receded; she was nervous enough as it was.

Beyond the docks were warehouses where incoming ships stored their cargo, but they were all closed and dark, awaiting the morning and the arrival of the wool and grain factors, ready for another day of counting the wealth that moved from the bay through Rodaas. Mercenaries armed with clubs and daggers guarded many of these, and since she wasn't sure if they were any more trustworthy than the sailors, she took care not to let them see her. Despite her squelching shoes she managed to slip by unnoticed. She weaved her way through alleys and narrow lanes, always on her guard, and at one point she slid around a corner to find a skinny dog worrying what looked like a cat it had no doubt killed. The dog growled at her and advanced menacingly, but it was not the first time Duchess had faced a canine threat; there were some Shallows dogs large enough to steal her entire bread cart and ferocious enough to dare. She slipped off a shoe and hurled it with a practiced hand, striking the dog square on the nose. The animal yelped and leapt back, and when she put her remaining shoe into throwing position it decided that the dead cat was not worth the trouble and slunk away. She replaced her left shoe, retrieved her right, and went on her way, feeling bolder. Still, the threats she most feared were those that went on two legs, and who would not likely be dissuaded by thrown footwear.

She rounded a corner and found herself on a wide, cobblestoned street. To her right she could see all the way down the hill to the harbor, and to her left were lights, sounds and people. Her chest loosened a bit; at last she had found Dock Street, the main thoroughfare of the district, which would lead her directly into the Shallows. That would of course mean passing through the heart of the Foreign Quarter, where there were thousands of eyes to note her passage and as many tongues to tell the tale. She would have do her best to remain unnoticed.

She needn't have worried. The Foreign Quarter was filled with such a wide variety of folk that one drenched girl was barely worth a second look. By day this area was filled with people who hurried along with wary eyes and no time for strangers, but at night the Foreign Quarter came alive. She stepped around crowds of Ahé, olive-skinned with dark, hooded eyes and hair that was either milky white or blue-black. She gave way to a gaggle of Domae girls her own age, who seemed clad in nothing but cleverly wrapped bright silk. Ulari sailors, hairless and ebon-skinned, and almost too drunk to stay on their feet, hailed her in languages she couldn't begin to understand. None of them seemed unfriendly, however, and she found herself intrigued by their baggy silk shirts and strange trousers of many colors. She watched a group of women play a game that involved flipping wooden tokens from their elbows into their palms and back again, and when one of the women sent her pieces flying the entire group burst into raucous laughter. She'd seen the same thing at the baron's party and wondered idly if the game had made its way down the hill from Temple or up the hill from Wharves. She was fascinated by a young Domae man, his slick brown body naked to the waist, who danced languidly while holding two lit torches that he whirled and tossed with amazing agility. He was dark, slender and exquisitely handsome, and Duchess found herself unable to look away. She had never seen a man move so seductively. He was surrounded by a crowd of women, hooting, clapping and occasionally tossing a penny into a nearby kettle. When he caught her eye and smiled mischievously her heart jumped; certainly Lysander had never looked at her that way. Flushed and flustered, but strangely flattered, she hurried on. He probably flirted with all of the women, she told herself, and would never have bothered if he'd known she had nothing to throw into his kettle.