Master of restless shado.., p.3
Master of Restless Shadows, page 3
part #1 of Master of Restless Shadows Series
“Do you still want me to watch over Jacinto, as well?” Sabella asked.
Atreau nodded and Sabella made a face as sour as a lemon.
Prince Sevanyo’s fourth son took great pleasure in slumming through the Theater District, but preferred to travel unaccompanied by bodyguards. He felt they made him stand out in the crowds, as if his silken clothes, costly rings and high-handed manner were utterly commonplace. Thus, Jacinto’s protection fell to the small group of eccentrics that the prince patronized and whom Fedeles secretly subsidized.
“He’s a pain in my ass, you know.” Sabella lowered her voice as she added, “And this latest escapade of his, keeping Lady Hylanya housed across the way at the Green Door, is going to get us all killed if someone doesn’t move her damn soon.”
“I know,” Atreau assured her.
Someone at a distant table crowed with delight and several men cheered a lucky throw of dice. Atreau looked the pretty-faced loser over. From the leers of the sailors surrounding the youth, Atreau guessed that the tanned man with the dice in his hand would see his winnings paid out in sloppy lip service in the alley. Such arrangements between men weren’t legal, but in the Theater District they were far from uncommon.
Very briefly, Atreau pondered whether he would throw to win or to lose were he to gamble against such a rough, brawny sailor. There was something about the man’s thick beard and broad shoulders that reminded him ever so slightly of Elezar.
“Is the lady still . . . ill?” Sabella’s question drew his attention back to his own business.
“I wouldn’t describe her as being in any condition to travel across the city,” Atreau answered.
“What we need is a real physician. Not one of those quacks that hang around the bawdyhouses. Someone who could fix her up and keep his trap shut. Why can’t your master retain a single . . .” She trailed off as the serving woman returned their cups to them, Atreau’s filled with a red wine so watered down that it couldn’t have intoxicated a fly and Sabella’s a third full of dregs. Atreau cast a quizzical glance back at Spider and received a teasing grin.
Then a moment later the wiry man himself brought them their real drinks and sent the serving woman away to bestow the pink water and dregs upon the sad sacks at the bar who’d come to beg off paying their gambling debts.
“Well met, little brother.” Spider greeted Atreau with a slap across his shoulder. He nodded curtly to Sabella and then pulled up a chair and seated himself. “Thought you might be interested in something I happened to overhear last night.”
“Always delighted to hear any wisdom you deign to share,” Atreau replied. He dealt four cards to the Spider. Two were grinning jesters.
“There was a man who’s been coming here for a while now. Loses a great deal but doesn’t seem to care.” Spider tossed aside the two jesters and drew different cards from the deck. “He wears Duke Quemanor’s colors. A guard, from the look of him and his blade. His debts are under the name Dommian and I got the impression that he’s not been in the city long. In any case he drank himself nearly legless last night and then when I was throwing him out at closing he started to blubber about not wanting to kill the kiddies, or something like that.”
“Kiddies?” Atreau asked casually. He discarded a grim-faced queen and drew a hazel-eyed page from the deck.
“That’s what he said.” Spider shrugged. “I thought I’d pass that along just in case it means something.”
“Thank you.” Atreau and Spider hadn’t always been on amiable terms. There’d been a decade when they’d not exchanged a single word or even known whether the other was alive or dead. But after surviving the war in Labara, Atreau had been gripped with the need to find Spider and try to salvage something from the wreckage of the childhood they’d shared.
“You wouldn’t happen to know of a discreet physician, would you?” Sabella asked Spider.
“You’ve gotten Atreau with child, have you?” Spider grinned at Sabella. “I always knew he had the makings of a fine little wife. If he could just meet the right man.”
Sabella rolled her eyes and then lay down four kings. Spider folded and glanced to the door. A group of Haldiim performers entered and approached the bar with a youthful excitement that spoke of something done on a dare. Atreau recognized one of the bright-eyed actresses from the Candioro Theater. She was called Yara and possessed the sort of sharp memory that Atreau had found useful on previous occasions. Now he simply offered her a friendly smile and she waved in return. The woman at the bar directed the group to a small table.
Atreau returned his attention to Sabella and Spider.
“Inissa’s not joining you?” Spider asked.
Atreau shook his head and pretended not to notice Spider’s disappointment. He understood the excitement and pleasure that Inissa inspired. But the fact of the matter was that even if Inissa hadn’t been tasked with watching over Lady Hylanya, her safety and livelihood relied entirely upon Prince Jacinto’s favor. She couldn’t risk an affair, not even with a man as caring as Spider.
“She’ll not roam where she wishes. For she is owned by another man’s riches.” Atreau sang the couplet he’d penned long ago for The Rogue’s Folly.
Sabella shook her head, while Spider stood and left them without further comment. Atreau didn’t take offense. That was simply Spider’s manner.
“None of my business, but you might have put that more subtly,” Sabella commented.
“He doesn’t deserve to have his heart broken.” Atreau tasted his wine. Dry and sharp as a rose thorn. “I know too well how poorly a romance with Inissa ends—”
“For you,” Sabella replied.
“For everyone.” Atreau set his wine aside. “Inissa’s survival depends upon Jacinto’s affection. She can’t afford to indulge a lover’s passion or jealousy. It’s not a happy notion, but it’s a truth I’ve learned. If the choice is mine then I’d save Spider the pain of learning the same lesson.”
“Ah.” Sabella smirked at him and then quoted from an old poem of Atreau’s own writing: “Remember this my dear boy. Were there more kindness in my cruelty you’d bleed to death of joy.”
Atreau raised his glass to her in return.
All around them conversations rumbled and dice clattered across tabletops. Elusive as a shadow, luck toyed with men’s fortunes and fled at the turn of a card. Atreau considered his own hand. A hazel-eyed page gazed out from the field of scarlet hearts with a coy smile, while a dour king behind him held his sword high. Atreau folded the hand and returned the cards to the deck.
Then his attention returned to the Haldiim translation of his memoir and he fell into ruminating over the tall, dark young man who’d offered it to him. Atreau wondered if it had been his imagination or if the other man truly had held his gaze a moment too long to be a stranger. And then he remembered the silver ring that had adorned the man’s right hand.
They needed a physician, and now fortune favored them with one. Was that too much of a coincidence to trust or too perfect of an opportunity to miss? Atreau shuffled his deck of cards twice and then drew from the bottom. The page smiled at him and Atreau decided on his answer.
“What on earth are you so pleased about all of a sudden?” Sabella asked.
“Nothing yet.” Atreau drank a little more of his wine. He would need to charm the physician and get Fedeles’s imprimatur—but it could work. “Perhaps the beginning of something, soon.”
Chapter Three
The fountains at the south gate splashed and spit geysers into the twilight sky. Shadows leapt and danced, giving form to the moonlight’s play over the water. Ariz Plunado waited, dull and motionless as a stone. Two city guards, just off duty but still in uniform, strode within arm’s length of where he crouched in the shadow of the stone stallions.
The guards shared a joke and laughed harder than it merited. But Ariz let them have that happiness. Then they each tossed a penny into the fountain for luck. Ariz allowed the first guard’s coin to drop into the water. But the captain’s he caught.
As the guards started down Market Street, Ariz rose and followed. People passed him but took no note, for there was nothing about him to notice. He cultivated plainness, from his lank, walnut-stained brown hair and dull gray gaze to his shapeless clothes and dusty brown boots. He forced his right arm to hang slack while he carefully held his left as if hooking his thumb absently on the leather of his sword belt.
He plodded behind the guards wearing the vaguely bored expression of a man untouched by any inspiration or imagination beyond the contemplation of his evening meal.
Another group of two men and three women passed him—revelers, these five, and already flushed and merry from wine. They sang together, missing notes and confusing lyrics and laughing all the more for it.
Ariz neither met their gazes nor darted his glances away guiltily. He bowed his head as if contemplating the road beneath his feet. All the while he rolled his eyes beneath the shadow of his lashes, tracking the guardsmen. Mastering such an averted gaze had required years of practice, but then so had nearly every aspect of his unremarkable air.
Most men could not have trailed Captain Ciceron of the south gate guards home night after night without once being noticed. Certainly not while carrying an unsheathed blade. But the long dagger Ariz gripped in his left hand appeared as sheathed as his short sword. The flat of the blade had been etched and browned to appear dull as leather and Ariz held it against his sword belt as if resting his hand there. Only a glint of moonlight along the dagger’s razor edge might have betrayed the naked blade, but no one looked long or closely at Ariz, much less at the silhouette of his hip.
Captain Ciceron and his lieutenant slowed, then stopped beneath the painted sign of their preferred alehouse and Ariz continued walking with a feeling of relief. As he closed in, he willed the captain to enter the light and boisterous company of the crowd already gathered inside the tavern. Ariz would not follow him in among witnesses. The captain could live another day.
But as Ariz neared, the captain shook his head at his companion’s invitation and set off in the direction of his home, where his pretty wife and their three young children waited. Ariz swore silently, resisting what he knew must be done. The old scar that disfigured the flesh over Ariz’s heart flared, sending burning warnings across Ariz’s chest. He clenched his jaw against the pain but didn’t resist further.
He stopped thinking of ways in which the captain might elude him for another night and crossed the street. While the captain hummed the melody from a popular opera to himself, Ariz outpaced him and turned into the narrow lane that the captain always took on his way home. Two raised walkways arched over the lane like miniature bridges. Night-blooming jasmine cascaded from flower boxes lining the walkways and lent a perfume of elegance and romance to the place.
For an instant Ariz held out a hope that a prostitute might be working her trade in the shadows. Twice the presence of such women had won Captain Ciceron reprieves. Tonight only a cat occupied the lane and she fled with the body of a dead rat clamped between her jaws the moment Ariz neared.
He could find no further excuses and contemplating them set the brand searing into him as if it were once again a white-hot iron burning into his chest.
A cold sweat rose at the back of Ariz’s neck and he shuddered with the waves of remembered shock. He’d nearly died that morning, kneeling on the chapel floor; he wasn’t sure if he considered himself fortunate or unfortunate to have survived.
Certainly it was to the captain’s bad luck that Ariz hadn’t died.
Ciceron paced along the lane, and beams of moonlight illuminated him as he grinned at the white jasmine blossoms and pulled a few free to carry home with him. Then he stepped into the shadow where Ariz awaited him.
Ariz lunged forward and rammed his dagger to the hilt into the captain’s chest. The captain started to cry out and his right hand went to his sword hilt, but Ariz caught the captain’s throat in his own right hand and slammed the man’s head hard against the stone support of the walkway. The captain lurched but Ariz held him like a spider punching poison into a dying fly. Three more times he smashed the captain’s skull up against the stone. By the third blow the man was already dead. In truth he had been doomed the moment Ariz shoved a dagger into his heart, but Ariz paid him the respect of letting him fight hard and go down like a soldier. Assassination afforded Ariz little honor, but at least he hadn’t simply landed the fatal strike and then darted away to watch the man bleed out like a slaughtered sow.
Ariz lowered the body to the ground, easing the captain so that his lolling head and chest lay in the moonlight. Had it been his choice Ariz would have taken his dagger and been done with all of this. But his orders were not so simple. He drew his sword, took careful aim and sliced through the captain’s muscular neck in a single blow. A sluggish wash of blood spilled out from the gaping wound. The cloying smell of it coiled around Ariz, like a cologne. That too-familiar musk of iron and allspice blossoms.
Ariz gripped the captain’s forelock and, as cleanly as he could, rolled the severed head into an oilskin sack. Then he jerked his dagger free of the decapitated corpse and wiped both his blades clean across the captain’s dun jacket.
He sheathed his sword and his dagger and then hefted the sack up under his right arm. It felt warm and slack. For the first time in weeks the brand over Ariz’s heart ceased to burn.
Two hours later, as night bells sounded through the darkness, Ariz arrived at another fountain and again waited. The noise of the river and the gurgle of the fountain created a haze of sound that made Ariz uneasy. He could just pick out the whisper of robes and soft footsteps, but the noise echoed and distorted through the long corridors of the towering chapel behind him. He narrowed his eyes, trying to pick out a man’s figure through the gloom. Veils of perfumed smoke drifted across the grounds, further hindering Ariz’s senses.
For all the beauty of its sky-blue stone and seams of gold, Ariz hated stepping foot upon the Shard of Heaven. Tonight the way the moonlight lit the stone to sapphire blue seemed sinister: the royal color shining up at him like an omen. Priests inside the white walls of the holiest of chapels intoned the last of their evening prayers, singing the souls of the Hallowed Kings of Cadeleon to their nightly rest. This was a place too near the next world. Here the dead could not be depended upon to remain silent.
Ariz shifted the weight of the oilskin sack.
Hierro knew that he hated this place; no doubt that was why he wanted him here. It certainly wasn’t subtle. Even before he could briefly savor a spiteful fantasy of gouging Hierro’s eyes out, Ariz’s brand seared to life. The pain brought tears to his eyes. He forced himself to contemplate the ground and listen to the splashing water—distancing himself from his anger—until the pain relented.
Best not to even think of Hierro at all, for rebellion and rage inevitably followed and those only brought him suffering.
Instead he let his mind drift. He remembered the spark of pride he’d felt last afternoon when Prince Sevanyo had visited the Quemanor household and the duke’s five-year-old son, Sparanzo, danced for the prince’s entertainment just as Ariz had taught him. The boy had moved with a grace that had been far harder won than anyone but Ariz had known. He’d wanted to crow with joy for Sparanzo when the prince had applauded him and gifted him with a jewel-studded toy horse. But of course he hadn’t made a sound, just slunk quickly away before anyone noticed him spying.
And then he focused on this morning and the strange thrill of at last winning a laugh from Lord Quemanor during his fencing session. Not that the duke was a reticent man—between his exuberant displays of emotion, lean build and often tousled black hair he presented an almost boyish figure of disarming frankness. Rather it was painfully rare for Ariz to amuse anyone, much less such a vibrant fellow as Fedeles Quemanor. Normally only affable, eloquent men like Captain Ciceron captured the duke’s attention.
Ariz scowled down at the sack in his hand. He hadn’t noticed before, but at some point Captain Ciceron had raked three deep gouges across his right forearm. He should have felt them earlier but the agonizing pain of the brand had become so constant that he often failed to notice lesser hurts.
Still, it wasn’t like him to allow a target to touch him, much less do him harm. He should have punched the dagger in and then leapt out of reach, waiting for the few minutes it took for the captain’s heart to stop. But he hadn’t wanted to, and thinking on that, Ariz felt that familiar chill. A part of him had wanted to be hurt, had even hoped that the captain would kill him.
All at once he remembered the first time that desire had risen up. He’d been sixteen, still at school and still a recognized nobleman, but he’d already been worn down by two years of bearing a Brand of Obedience. He’d thought himself Hierro Fueres’s creature completely—as broken as the man’s horse. Then at the yearly sword tournament Hierro had ordered him to humiliate and bleed the one Haldiim boy who had dared to school at the Sagrada Academy. But Ariz had felt deeply moved, seeing the Haldiim youth battling with all his heart despite the jeers of his opponents and classmates. He recognized and understood the pride and anguish in the slim Haldiim’s struggles all too well. Something in Ariz cracked just enough to free a splinter of rebellion.
He’d not outrightly disobeyed Hierro—the pain would have been far too much for him—but he’d made mistakes inside the dueling ring. He’d not struck with all his strength and he’d allowed the duel to drag on long enough for the Haldiim youth to recognize and exploit his attacks.
