“Gods damn it,” whispered Jean.
“The question is no longer if but when,” said Zodesti. “Look, you ugly bastard, despite the way you brought me into this mess, I’ve given him my full and fair attention.”
“I see.” Jean slowly walked over to the linen table, took up a clay cup, and filled it with water from the jug. “Do you have anything with you that can bring about a strong sleep? In case his pain should worsen?”
“Of course.” Zodesti removed a small paper pouch from his bag. “Have him take this in water or wine and he won’t be able to keep his eyes open.”
“Now wait just a damn minute,” said Locke.
“Give it here,” said Jean. He took the packet, poured its contents into the water, and shook the cup several times. “How long will it last?”
“Hours.”
“Good.” Jean passed the cup to Zodesti and gestured at it with a dagger. “Drink up.”
“What?”
“I don’t want you running off to the first constable you can find as soon as I dump you on the street.”
“Don’t think I would be so foolish as to try and run from you—”
“Don’t think I give a damn. Drink the whole thing or I’ll break your arms.”
Zodesti quickly gulped the contents of the cup. “How I’m going to laugh when they catch you, you son of a bitch.” He tossed the cup down carelessly on Locke’s bed and sat with his back against the wall. “All the justices of Lashain are my patients. Your friend’s too sick to run. If he’s still alive when they catch you, they’ll draw and quarter him just to give you something to watch while you wait for your own exe … execution.…”
A few seconds later his head rolled forward and he began snoring.
“Think he’s pretending?” said Locke.
Jean shoved the tip of his dagger into the calf of Zodesti’s outstretched right leg. The physiker didn’t stir.
“I hate to say that I told you so,” said Locke, settling back against his cushions and folding his hands in front of him. “Wait, no I don’t. I could use a bottle of wine, and don’t add any water this—”
“I’ll get Malcor,” said Jean. “I’ll have him stay the night. Constant attention.”
“Damn it, Jean, wake up.” Locke coughed and pounded on his chest. “What a reversal this is, eh? I wanted to die in Vel Virazzo and you pulled me back to my senses. Now I really am dying and you’re bereft of yours.”
“There’s—”
“No more physikers, Jean. No more alchemists, no more dog-leeches. No more rocks to pry up looking for miracles.”
“How can you just lie there like a fish washed up on shore, with no fight at all?”
“I suppose I could flop around a bit, if you thought it would help.”
“The Gray King sliced you like a veal cutlet and you came back from that, twice as aggravating as ever.”
“Sword cuts. If they don’t turn green, you can expect to heal. It’s the nature of things. With black alchemy, who the hell knows?”
“I’ll give you wine, but I want you to take it with two parts water, like Malcor said. And I want you to eat tonight, everything you can. Keep your strength up—”
“I’ll eat, but only to give the wine some ballast. There’s no other point to it, Jean. There’s no cure forthcoming.”
“If you can’t be cured, you’ll have to endure. Outlast it, until it breaks like a fever.”
“The poison’s more likely to last than I am.” Locke coughed and dabbed at his mouth with one of his sheets. “Jean, you’ve called down some trouble by stealing this little weasel out of his house. Surely you can see that.”
“I was very careful.”
“You know better! He’ll remember your face, and Lashain’s not so very big. Look, take the money that’s left. Take it and get out of town tonight. You can slip into a dozen trades at will, you speak four languages, you’ll be wealthy again in—”
“Incomprehensible babble.” Jean sat on the edge of the bed and gently pushed Locke’s sweat-slick hair out of his eyes. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“Jean, I know you. You’ll kill half a city block when your blood’s up, but you’ll never slit the throat of a sleeping man who’s done us no real harm. That means constables will kick our doors down sooner or later. Please don’t be here when they do.”
“You brought this upon yourself when you cheated that antidote into my glass. The consequences are yours to—”
“Like hell. You would have robbed me of that choice, too! Gods, all this maneuvering for moral advantage! You’d think we were married.” Locke coughed and arched his back. “The gods must truly have it in for you, to make you my nurse,” he said quietly. “Not once but twice, now.”
“Hell, they made me your nurse when I was ten years old. You can knock down kingdoms on a whim. What you need is someone to make sure you don’t get hit by a carriage when you cross the street.”
“That’s all over now, though. And it might have been kinder for you if I had been hit by a carriage—”
“You see this?” Jean took the tightly bound lock of dark, curly hair out of his coat pocket and held it up. “You see this, you bloody bastard? You know where it came from. I’m done losing. Do you fucking hear me? I am done losing. Spare me your precious self-pity, because this isn’t a stage and I didn’t pay two coppers to cry my eyes out over anyone’s death speech. You don’t fucking get one, understand? I don’t care if you cough up buckets of blood. Buckets I can carry. I don’t care if you howl like a dog for months. You’re going to eat and drink and keep fighting.”
“Well,” said Locke after a few moments had passed in silence. He smiled wryly. “If you are going to be an intractable son of a bitch, why don’t you uncork that wine so we can start with the part about drinking?”
9
JEAN LEFT Zodesti in an alley about three blocks west of the Villa Suvela, taking care to conceal him well and cover his bag with trash. He wouldn’t be at all pleased when he awoke, but at least he’d be alive.
Locke’s condition changed little that night; he slept in fits and starts, sipped wine, grudgingly chewed cold beef and soft bread, and continued bleeding. Jean fell asleep sitting up and managed to spill ale over a useless treatise on poisons. Most of their nights had been like this, recently.
The rain kept up well into the next night, enfolding the city in murk. Just before the unseen sundown Jean went out to fetch fresh supplies. There was a merchants’ inn not ten minutes from the Villa Suvela that was used to dealing in necessities at odd hours.
When Jean came back, the front door was completely unmarked. He had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss, until he glanced down in the entry and saw the great mess of water that had recently been brought across the threshold.
Movement on both sides—too many attackers, too prepared. A basket of food and wine was no weapon at all. Jean went down under a press of bodies. With desperate strength he smashed a nose, kicked a foot, tried to claw out the space he needed to pull and use his hatchets—
“Enough,” said a commanding voice. Jean looked up. The door to the inner apartment was open, and there were men standing over Locke’s bed.
“No!” Jean yelled, ceasing his fight. Four men seized him and dragged him into the inner room, where he counted at least five more visible opponents. One of them grabbed a towel from the linens table and held it up to his bleeding nose.
“I’m sorry,” said Locke, hoarsely. “They came right after you left—”
“Quiet.” The speaker was a rugged man about Locke and Jean’s age, with a brawler’s scarred jaw and a nose that looked like it had been used to break a hard fall. His hair was scraped down to stubble, and he wore quality fighting leathers under a long black coat. Had Jean been thinking straight, he would have realized that the consequences of Zodesti’s abduction might come back to them from directions other than the Lashani constabulary. “How’s your head, Leone?”
“Broge my fuggin node,” said the man holding a towel to his face.
“Builds character.” The man in the black coat picked up a chair, set it down in front of Jean, then kicked him in the stomach, good and fast, barely giving him time to flinch before the pain hit. Jean groaned, and the four men holding him bore down on him with all of their weight, lest he try anything stupid.
“Wait,” coughed Locke. “Please—”
“If I have to say ‘quiet’ again,” said the black-coated man, “I’ll cut your fucking tongue out and pin it to the wall. Now shut up.” He sat down in the chair and smiled. “My name is Cortessa.”
“Whispers,” said Jean. This was much worse than the constabulary. Whispers Cortessa was a top power in the Lashani underworld.
“So they call me. I presume you’re Andolini.”
That was the name Jean had given when renting their rooms, and he nodded.
“If it’s real I’m the king of the Seven Marrows,” said Cortessa. “But nobody cares. Can you tell me why I’m here?”
“You ran out of sheep to fuck and went looking for some action?”
“Gods, I love Camorri. Constitutionally incapable of doing things the easy way.” Cortessa slapped Jean hard enough to make his eyes water. “Try again. Why am I here?”
“You heard,” Jean gasped, “that we’d finally discovered the cure for being born with a face like a stray dog’s ass.”
“No. If that were true you would have used it.” Cortessa’s next blow was no slap, but a backhanded bruise-maker. Jean blinked as the room swam around him.
“Now, I would love to sit here and paint the floor with your blood. Leone would probably love it even more. But I think I can save us all a lot of time.” Cortessa beckoned, and one of the men standing over Locke’s bed lifted a club. “What does your friend lose first? A knee? A few toes? I can be creative.”
“No. Please.” Jean would have bent his head to Cortessa’s feet if he hadn’t been restrained. “I’m the one you want. I won’t waste any more of your time. Please.”
“You’re the one I want, suddenly? Why would I want you?”
“Something about a physiker, I’d guess.”
“There we are. That wasn’t so hard after all.” Cortessa cracked his knuckles. “What did you think might happen when someone like Zodesti came home from the shit you pulled yesterday?”
“Certainly would have been nice if he’d never said anything at all.”
“Don’t be simple. Now, I know you’re a friend of the friends. I hear things. When you first came to Lashain you knew your business. Kept the peace, made your gifts, behaved. You clearly understand how things work in our world. So do you think Zodesti ran up and down the streets, screaming that he’d been stolen away like a child? Or do you think he sent a few private messages to people who know people?”
“Shit,” said Jean.
“Yeah. So, I got the job and I thought to myself … wasn’t there a big man looking for alchemists and dog-leeches just last week? What might they have to say about him? Oh? A bad poisoning? A man bleeding to death in bed at the Villa Suvela?” Cortessa spread his arms and smiled beatifically. “Some problems just solve themselves.”
“How can I make amends?” said Jean.
“You can’t.” Cortessa stood up, laughing.
“Please don’t do anything to my friend. He had nothing to do with the physiker. Do whatever you like with me. I’ll cooperate. Just—”
“My, you’ve gone from hard to soft, big man. You’ll cooperate? Of course you’ll fucking cooperate, you’ve got four of my men sitting on you.”
“There’s money,” said Jean. “Money, or I could work for you—”
“You’ve got nothing I want,” said Cortessa. “And that’s your problem. But I have a serious problem of my own.”
“Oh?”
“Ordinarily, this is the part where we’d make soup out of your balls and watch you drink it. Ordinarily. But we have what you might call a conflict of interest. On the one hand, you’re an outlander and you touched a Lashani with all the right friends. That says we fucking kill you.
“On the other hand, it’s plain you are or were some sort of connected man in Camorr. Big Barsavi might not be with us anymore, gods rest his crooked soul, but nobody in their right mind wants to fuck with the capas. You could be somebody’s cousin. Who knows? A year or two from now, maybe someone comes looking for you. Asks around town. Whoops! Someone tells them to look on the bottom of the lake. And who gets sent back to Camorr in a box to pay the debt? Yours truly. That says we don’t fucking kill you.”
“Like I said, I have some money,” said Jean. “If that can help.”
“It’s not your money anymore. But what does help is that your friend here is already dying … and from the looks of it, he’ll be pretty damn glad to go.”
“Look, if you’ll just let him stay, he needs rest—”
“I know. That’s why I’m kicking your asses out of Lashain.” Cortessa waved his hands at his people. “Strip the place. All the food, all the wine. Blankets, bandages, money. Take the wood out of the fireplace. Throw the water out of the jug. Pass word to the innkeeper that these two fucks are under the interdict.”
“Please,” said Jean. “Please—”
“Shut up. You can keep your clothes and your weapons. I won’t send you out completely naked. But I want you gone. By sunrise, you’re out of the city or Zodesti gets to cut your ears off himself. Your friend can find somewhere else to die.” Cortessa gave Locke a pat on the leg. “Think fondly of me in hell, you poor bastard.”
“You might not be long in getting there yourself,” said Locke. “I’ll have a big hug waiting for you.”
Cortessa’s people ransacked the suite. They carefully piled Jean’s weapons on the floor; everything else was taken or smashed. Locke was left on the empty bed in his bloodstained breeches and tunic. Jean’s private purse and the one that had contained their general funds were both emptied. A few moments later, one of Cortessa’s men stuffed the empty purses into his pockets as well.
“Oh,” said Cortessa to Jean as the tumult was winding down, “one thing more. Leone gets a minute alone with you in the corner. For his nose.”
“Bleth you, bothss,” muttered Leone, gingerly poking at the swollen bruises that had spread to his lips.
“And you get to take it, outlander. Lift so much as a finger and I’ll have your friend gutted.” Cortessa patted Jean on the cheek and turned to leave. “Sunrise. Get the fuck out of Lashain. Or our next conversation takes place in Scholar Zodesti’s cellar.”
10
“JEAN,” WHISPERED Locke as soon as the last of Cortessa’s bruisers had left. “Jean! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Jean was huddled where the linens table had been before Cortessa’s men removed it. Leone had been straightforward but enthusiastic, and Jean felt as though he’d been thrown down a rocky hillside. “I’m just … enjoying the floor. It was kind enough to catch me when I fell.”
“Jean, listen. I took some of the money when we got here on the boat.… I hid it. Loosened a floorboard under the bed.”
“I know you did. I unloosened it. Took it back.”
“You eel! I wanted you to have something to get away with when you—”
“I knew you’d try it, Locke. There weren’t many hiding places available within stumbling distance of the bed.”
“Argh!”
“Argh, yourself.” Jean heaved himself over on his back and stared at the ceiling, breathing shallowly. Nothing felt broken, but his ribs and everything attached to them were lined up to file complaints. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll go out and find some blankets for you. I can get a cart. Maybe a boat. Get you out of here somehow, before the dawn. We’ve got a lot of darkness to use.”
“Jean, you’ll be watched until you leave. They’re not going to let you”—Locke coughed several times—“steal anything big. And I’m not going to let you carry me.”
“Not let me carry you? What are you going to fend me off with, sarcasm?”
“You should have had a few thousand solari to work with, Jean. Could have gone anywhere … done anything with it.”
“I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. Now, you go with me. Or I stay here to die with you.”
“There’s no reasoning with you.”
“You’re such a paragon of compromise yourself. Pig-brained gods-damned egotist.”
“This isn’t a fair contest. You have more energy for big words than I do.” Locke laughed. “Gods, look at us. Can you believe they even took our firewood?”
“Very little surprises me these days.” Jean slowly stood up, wincing all the way. “So, inventory. No money. Clothes on our backs. Mostly my back. Some weapons. No firewood. Since I doubt we’ll be allowed to lift anything in the city, looks like I’ll have to do some highway work.”
“How do you plan on halting carriages?”
“I’ll throw you in the road and hope they stop.”
“Criminal genius. Will they be stopping out of heartfelt sympathy?”
“Revulsion, more likely.”
There was a knock at the front door.
Locke and Jean glanced at one another uneasily, and Jean picked up a dagger from the small pile of weapons that had been left to him.
“Maybe they’re back for the bed,” said Locke.
“Why would they bother knocking?”
Jean kept most of his body behind the door as he opened it, and he tucked the dagger just out of sight behind his back.
It wasn’t Cortessa, or a dog-leech, or even the master of the Villa Suvela, as Jean had expected. It was a woman, dressed in a richly embroidered oilcloak streaming with water. She held an alchemical globe in her hands, and by its pale light Jean could see that she was not young.
Jean scanned the curb behind her. No carriage, no litter, no escort of any sort—just misty darkness and the patter of the rain. A local? A fellow guest of the Villa Suvela?