“I’ll see him back where he belongs,” Jopze volunteered. His hand fell heavily on the Nighter’s shoulder and spun him effortlessly toward the door.
“No, we owe him—” Bezul rubbed his brow. He’d acquired a headache between Stink Street and home. “We owe him a ‘lucky.’ ” He turned to Chersey. “That chest of my father’s. The one with the glass bulbs Ayse loves to play with, it’s—?”
“In the woodshed behind the annex, under the porphyry urn we’re holding for Lady Kuklos. The key’s in the flowerpot.”
Bezul leaned forward to kiss his wife on the cheek.
She whispered, “I knew Perrez was lying about something, but I couldn’t get him to say what. That’s why I wouldn’t give him three shaboozh—I’d guessed he wanted it for wine. I never thought—”
“Who could?” Bezul replied in the same tone. “There’ll be a reckoning this time, I swear it. The children are getting old enough to notice.”
“What about that one? The Nighter… the boy.”
“We’ll give him a ‘lucky’ and send him back to the swamp.” Bezul sighed. “I don’t know which I find harder to believe: that my brother stole crab-trap bait or that he promised to take that poor, frog-eating bastard on as a partner.”
Chersey put an arm’s length between herself and her husband. “Could you be wrong about the bait?”
“I could be wrong about everything, Chersey. Why?”
“It’s just—”
She twisted the moonstone ring and revealed an oval patch of reddened skin on her finger. Bezul gasped. The ring had been in his family since their goldsmithing days. It had kept them safe—almost—from the Hand and even in the face of Retribution himself, Dyareela’s right hand in Sanctuary, the ring hadn’t harmed the slender finger that wore it.
“I was suspicious,” Chersey confessed. “So I kenned him—Perrez. I didn’t see the aura—no malice—but, it hurt, Bez, and, afterward, all I could think about was the pouch hanging from his belt. That’s how I knew… how I knew it wasn’t anything to do with the tournament.”
She blushed and Bezul tried to reassure her while asking, “Did you see which way he headed?”
“Out, that’s all. We’ve been busy all morning. Maybe Jopze saw something. He was near the door, but I doubt it.”
Bezul’s headache was getting worse by the heartbeat.
“I’ll go down to the tavern after we’re done with Dace—the Nigh-ter. I’ll talk to him, get to the bottom of this.”
He left his wife smiling and went outside to the woodshed where the dusty air aggravated his headache and the big urn was at least twice as heavy as he remembered. Bezul had his arms full and his cheek pressed against the porphyry when he heard footfalls behind him.
“Give me a hand, here,” he said, expecting that Chersey had sent Jopze or Ammen out to help, but the arms that slid around the polished stone were Gedozia’s.
His mother was a strong woman, despite her gray hair and missing teeth. Between them, they got the urn to the ground without crushing anyone’s toes. Bezul brushed his sleeves and waited for her to start the conversation because, sure as the sun rose in the east, Gedozia hadn’t shown up by accident or to help with manual labor.
“You won’t find your brother in any tavern around here.”
Bezul raised his arm—in anger or sheer frustration, he couldn’t have said which. After a moment, it dropped to his side again. “You knew,” he accused her. “This morning, I asked you where he’d gone and you said you didn’t know.”
“And I didn’t!” Gedozia insisted. “Oh, Bezul, this has nothing to do with that Nighter stinking up the front room. Perrez found something—”
“A bulb of red glass!”
“Some glass bulb,” Gedozia retorted, “if there’s an Ilsigi trader willing to pay
seventy
royals for it.”
Bezul blanched at the sum, though, surely, if something were worth seventy golden royals in Sanctuary, it would be worth seven hundred in the king’s city.
“Perrez came by to tell me this morning. Seventy royals! He’s been working with this trader all winter. Yesterday the trader finally got serious and offered some earnest money. Today Perrez said he was turning it over—the red glass—and getting the full seventy royals. Seventy! He was so excited. He swore me to secrecy because he wanted to tell you himself, Bezul, to show you what he’s made of. But you were already gone—chasing that Nighter—and he had to meet the Ilsigi at midday. Think of it:
seventy royals
! I told your father, ‘Bezulshash, it’s not enough, not what he deserves, but it’s a start.’ I went to market to buy food for a feast—tried to, the city’s up to here with people who think they’re going to win more than seventy royals tomorrow and are spending their winnings today!
“Your father came to me at the fishmonger’s: ‘Gedozia,’ he says. ‘Gedozia, he can’t be trusted!—’ ”
“Praise Ils! It’s about time—”
Gedozia seized Bezul sharply by the wrists. “Not your brother, the Ilsigi! The Ilsigi means to cheat Perrez out of the seventy royals! He’s too sweet-natured, my Perrez. He’ll never suspect a thing, until it’s too late. Find him, Bezul. He’s your brother. It’s up to you to do what his father would have done. Bezulshash would have beaten this Ilsigi with a stick.”
Bezulshash would have done no such thing and Bezul would have dismissed everything his mother had said, if it hadn’t made a sour sort of sense when compared with the tale Dace had told.
Bezul broke free of Gedozia’s grasp. “Hard to cheat a thief, Mother. He tricked that glass from the Nighter. Good as stole it—”
“The Nighter’s a halfwit—and who’s to say where he got it, eh? If he got it. If it’s even what the Ilsigi trader wanted to buy. You’re the one talking about
glass
. I thought it was a manuscript.”
“You—” Bezul caught himself. The sun rose and set on Perrez, always had, always would, and telling Gedozia anything else was a waste of time. Best to go back to the beginning, to what
she
wanted. “You said I wouldn’t find Perrez around here. Where will I find him?”
“Uptown… in the Maze. The Unicorn.”
Just when Bezul had thought he’d heard the worst, Gedozia astonished him. But if she knew the Vulgar Unicorn’s reputation as a den of thieves and ne’er-do-wells, she kept it hidden. Bezul shook an iron key out of a painted flower pot, unlocked his father’s chest, and sorted through its contents until he’d found a bulb of blood-red glass as big as his fist.
“You can’t be serious,” Gedozia complained. “That’s irreplaceable. It’s worth four shaboozh, three at least—”
Bezul locked the chest. He tucked the key inside his jacket and left the urn where it was. “Don’t say another word,” he warned the woman who’d birthed him. “After I’ve settled with the Nighter, I’ll go uptown, looking for Perrez. Don’t convince me otherwise.”
“You—” Gedozia began, but Bezul’s darkest stare convinced her not to finish.
He returned to the front room where Lesimar was sitting in Am-men’s lap and Chersey tended a desperate-looking woman trying to exchange an apron of windfall apples for three fishhooks. Had Bezul been the one behind the counter, he would have given the woman a single metal hook for the brown, wrinkled fruit that even the geese wouldn’t eat. Chersey parted with two and a length of light silken thread pulled invisibly from the hem of a lady’s dress left in the shop on consignment. Their eyes met as the woman departed.
“Has the Nighter gone?” Bezul asked, saying nothing—wisely— about his wife’s generosity.
“The kitchen,” she replied, meaning that she’d decided to feed him.
Dace sat on the floor beside the hearth, ignoring the chairs and table. He cradled a smallish bread loaf and a bowl of whey in his lap. By the looks of the whey as he dipped a morsel of bread in it, Chersey had fortified the weak milk with an egg. Thanks to their flock of night-watchmen, the changing house always had extra eggs. Four-year-old Ayse sat cross-legged in one of the chairs, her wide eyes not missing a thing as the Nighter ate with his fingers—something she was no longer permitted to do.
The young man wiped his hands on his breeches before taking the glass bulb Bezul offered. He seemed pleased, though a bit overwhelmed. Bezul’s gift was bigger, he stammered, redder, and heavier—solid where the missing bulb had been hollow, but it was Ayse who got to the heart of matter:
“Is it lucky, Poppa? It’s got to be lucky, doesn’t it?”
Bezul answered with hope, not honesty, and got out of the kitchen.
Despite Gedozia’s statements, Bezul didn’t strike out for the Vulgar Unicorn. He clung to the hope that Perrez wasn’t
that
foolish until he’d finished poking his head into every tavern and wine shop in the Shambles without meeting anyone who’d seen his brother recently. With his hope exhausted, and feeling quite foolish himself, Bezul plunged into Sanctuary’s most infamous quarter.
It had been a year, easily, since Bezul’s last encounter with the tangled, narrow alleys that passed for streets in the Maze. He’d nearly convinced himself that he’d missed a critical turn and would have to start over (getting in and out of the Maze wasn’t nearly as difficult, by daylight, as finding a particular place) when he caught sight of the Unicorn’s signboard. The sign was to Bezul’s left, not his right, where he’d been expecting it, so he had missed a turn or two, or perhaps the gossips were correct and, in the Maze, all paths led to the Vulgar Unicorn.
The Unicorn’s shutters were open, not that it made a difference. The air in the commons was as thick and stale as the shadows. Bezul leaned against a wooden upright, looking for Perrez, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the haze. A woman hailed him by name—
“Bezulshash! Bezul the Changer!”
The woman coming toward Bezul was taller than him by a hand-span, heavier by at least a stone. Her red hair fairly glowed in the twilight and her bodice was cut so snug and low that her breasts jounced above her corset like fresh fish on a trawl line. She came to the changing house every month or so to change a sackful of padpols into fewer, better coins. Bezul knew her name; he might even remember it, if he concentrated on her face.
“Frog all, Bezulshash, what’s brought you to the Unicorn?”
They were considerably less than an arm’s length apart. Bezul would have retreated, but he had a post at his back. Clearing his throat, he stammered, then said, “I’m looking for my brother, Per-rez.”
That name meant nothing to her (and Bezul hadn’t remembered hers… It was Mimmi, Minzie, something like that), but his description of Perrez’s scrupulously clean clothes, neatly trimmed hair, and his love of someone else’s largesse rang a bell.
“You froggin’ missed him, Bezulshash. He was here when I came downstairs—talking with the aromacist.”
“The what?”
She shrugged, a very distracting gesture. Bezul missed her first words. “—of winter. Set himself up off the Processional. Froggin’ fancy place: fancy bottles, colored oils, silks and tassels hanging from the walls.”
“A perfumer?”
She shook her head and everything else. ” ‘Aromas’ he called them, better than perfume. Said no man could resist his ‘aroma’ of passion. Frog all, Bezulshash—do
I
look like I need help attracting men? He never fit inside the Unicorn; a little like you, Bezulshash: You don’t belong here. But he came by, every few days, late morning or early afternoon, when it was slow and quiet. He’d take one of the side tables, buy a whole ewer of ale, leave it, too—unless he got company—your brother, a handful of others. Come to think of it— they left together. First time, I think, for that; first time I noticed:
Your brother, he was tipsy, noisy. Don’t think he’d’ve made it outside by himself—”
“A fancy shop off the Processional?” Bezul asked and tried to keep the rest out of his thoughts for a few moments longer. He was ready to leave, but found his way blocked. In his concern—his anger—he’d forgotten something more important than her name. “Stop by the changing house,” he urged. “There’s a pair of earrings tucked away with your name on them.”
She grinned and let him depart.
The Processional between the harbor and the palace was neither the longest nor the widest street in Sanctuary. With the tight-fisted Irrune in the palace, it wasn’t even the busiest street. Mansions, some of them still abandoned after the Troubles, lined both sides of the street. When the residents left their homes, they traveled in clumps. A solitary man was marked as a visitor and ignored.
Lord Kuklos—a bearded magnate with an oversized cloak, a bright-red hat, and a flock of aides—rushed past Bezul without a by-your-leave. Probably on their way to the tournament. A slower clutch of nursemaids and guards surrounding a pair of children stopped when the better-dressed boy threw himself into a tantrum. Probably wanted to go to the tournament.
As Bezul wove around them—stepping carefully over one of the two gutters running from the palace to the harbor—he took note that the second child, equally winsome but less lavishly dressed— received the thrashing his companion deserved.
The third procession bore down rapidly on Bezul from behind. A man with a clanging bell and a loud voice ordered him out of the way. Prudence, rather than obedience, launched Bezul up on a curbstone. He clung to a pedestal that had long since lost its commemorative statue while a woman wrapped in a sea-green mantle and seated in an open chair charged toward the harbor. A whiskery dog with jewels in its ears yapped at Bezul from the lady’s lap. The rest of her retinue—a brace of underdressed porters that might have been twins, three breathless maids clutching their skirts with one hand, their mantles with the other; five guards whose legs were taking a beating from their scabbards, and the lead man with the bell— spared him not a single glance.
Watching them sweep around the corner that was his own goal, Bezul offered a quick prayer to any nearby god that the lady’s final destination not be the aromacist’s shop. Someone listened. The lady and her retinue were rounding the next corner when Bezul turned off the Processional. Perhaps the lady knew something the corseted wench at the Unicorn had not: The aromacist’s shop—its business proclaimed in both Ilsigi and Rankan script on a bright signboard— was shuttered tight from the inside.
“Perrez,” Bezul called, giving the handle a firm shake. “If you’re in there, open the door!”