An Illusion of Thieves Read online

  “You were drunk. Didn’t want you wandering off and falling in the river. Or stealing my silver.”

  I hammered the iron staple to the foundation stones that divided our house from the tenement behind it and left the wire rope coiled beside it.

  Neri stared at it, but must have thought better of asking. Certain, he was thinking of the stories. A shiver ran through him.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you, and I’ll not do it again. I swear. But I’m not going to apologize for keeping you safe. You can’t run away, Neri. Not if you want to stay living.”

  “Can’t just sit idle,” he said. “Makes me think about things I … don’t want to think on. It’s just, I don’t—”

  He chewed on some idea along with his bread. “All right. Maybe I could go out today, look again for work so’s you won’t have to do all this.”

  My surprise at his civility was unfeigned. This was not the tack I’d have guessed he’d try next.

  “That’s a fine notion. And if you’re going to act responsibly, you can bring home supplies for tonight and tomorrow. You’re likely better at bargaining than I am.”

  I gave him twenty coppers. My blackened fingers twinged at the thought of the hours I’d spent to earn them. But I owed him another chance.

  When he’d finished off his breakfast, he donned his leather jerkin, swiped a hand through his shaggy black curls, and left.

  Concentrating on copying an elderly tinker’s will for each of his five brothers, two sisters, and six nieces and nephews as well as a copy for the city archives occupied the day. But always at the back of my mind worry nagged. Night fell. I lit the lamp. I made tea with the last of the herbs, but could not eat.

  What if Sandro’s spies were watching Neri after all? There had been a night when wine and lovemaking had emboldened me to ask if he had truly ordered his boyhood friend Maso, the embezzler, killed as rumor had whispered. He had drawn his finger down my cheek, jaw, and shoulder in his delicious, dangerous way, devouring me with a smoldering gaze.

  “When I was very small,” he said, “my grandfather would take me walking through Cantagna’s streets every morning, showing me his favorite places—the prospect from the Ucelli Gardens, the vineyard where our oldest grapevine yet blooms, the sweet, crumbling courtyard off the Via Rosa where a group of twenty-one men and women argued Cantagna’s charter as a citizen-ruled independency into existence.

  “‘Inhale this dust, Alessandro,’ he would say, “inhale the stink of Cantagna’s stews, the fragrance of its lemon blossoms, the hungers of its beggars, the golden gleam of its stone, the extraordinary energies of life that stir behind its walls every dawn. I shall gift you the means to shape this city into something sublime, as Vandini the sculptor does with Portian marble. Honor, will, and the rule of law are the proper tools for your sculpting. Your father, the son I cherish, holds his honor dear, but his will fails when difficult choices must be made. Your uncle Lodovico, the son I mourn, has will enough to rival Dragonis itself, but he sells his honor for corrupt pleasures. Neither of them comprehends the beauty of the law. You, though, Alessandro, the grandson of my mind and heart, shall create a light to awaken the soul of the world.’”

  Sandro had returned to his own bedchamber, then, leaving me with only a kiss on the top of my head and a few parting words. Whether it was a warning or a reprimand I’d never decided. “That you need ask about Maso tells me you don’t know me as well as you think.”

  Which was no answer at all, save that pearlescent Portian marble is one of the most precious substances in the world, yet our visits to the sculptors’ workshops had taught me that one must chip away bits of it, grind some of it to dust, and risk mistakes that ruin large pieces in order to create something sublime. Sandro was the Shadow Lord, who would do what he believed had to be done. Even to me.

  Not long after the half-even anthem had rung, marking three hours until midnight, Neri burst through our rug door, dropped two loaves, one half-eaten sausage, and a packet of herbs on his pallet, and then hurried back to the alley to heave.

  Twenty coppers. Ten hours of writing. When he staggered back inside, I held out my hand. “Where’s the rest of my money? Even a novice like me could have spent no more than five for this lot.”

  “I owed Fesci down to the Duck’s Bone,” he slurred. “The she-wolf wouldn’t give me nothing more to wet my mouth less’n I paid her.”

  “Naturally, you’d not earned a copper on your own through a whole day.”

  “Tried. Those I asked wouldn’t even talk to me. Called me poison and thief’s spawn and maligner.”

  The parole list accusing Neri of slandering the name of a prominent citizen had been posted all over the Beggars Ring. Everyone knew who prominent citizen meant, and who would hire an unskilled boy who was crossways with the Shadow Lord?

  Furious, I snatched up the pitiful foodstuffs before he collapsed on his bed. “So you hurried back to the Duck’s Bone and the taverner let you go back into debt?”

  “She din’t need to. I din’t need to use magic neither.” He rolled onto his back and burst out in drunken hilarity. “Fesci’s partial to girls, so I offered her a go with my sister. Listed all the things you was good at—all those things that lawyer said you could do to him. Fesci said no, but five fellows give me a copper each to ‘tell Romy’ their names. I din’t have to magic me the night’s refreshment after that.”

  “Idiot child! I trusted you.”

  I snatched up the wire rope, and before he could get his sagging lids open to see what I was doing, his wrists were bound.

  “Don’t use that, Romy,” he said through clenched teeth as I tied off the wrist binding to the staple. “It’s too stiff. It hurts. Demonfire can’t get me out of plain rope neither, nor even cotton cord. I have to walk to wherever I want the cursed magic to take me, and I have to know exactly what the thing’s like that’s waiting there, like that book with the rubies. I have to want it so bad, it spins my head. You don’t under—”

  “Things like a biscuit? Spirits, Neri! Magic blights the soul and corrupts your mind until you don’t know right from wrong, until you go mad and do dreadful things.”

  For generations no burnt town, poisoned well, or building collapse had tormented the Costa Drago, but that sorcerers were proved to have caused it. It didn’t matter if there was truly a monster under the earth, when the devastation sorcerers wrought was so terrible.

  Neri tried to kick my hand away as I started wrapping his ankles. “Daren’t try nothing anyways. Not if your devil cocksman’s got sniffers about and you won’t let me wear rat’s hide—”

  I boxed his ears and shoved him to the dirt.

  “Plague it all, Romy, how’s a whore learn to fight like you do? Never saw an ordinary person so quick with a knife.”

  “I don’t want to hear your excuses. Close your mouth and think about what it means to be a man—a person who takes responsibility for what he does. Think about Da, and Dolce, and Cino, and the others, and what their life must be like now, because you didn’t think before you thieved. Think about how you and I are to stay alive.”

  * * *

  I took no chances. For a sevenday, I kept Neri bound from the moment he fell asleep until dawn. For the other hours I never let him out of my sight. When I released him on the eighth morning, he didn’t start whining or babbling excuses. I considered that a victory. But I gave him fair warning: “You go nowhere without telling me. Let me catch the slightest whisper of drunkenness or magic, loose talk or thieving, and you’ll be back in the wire ropes the whole day around if necessary.”

  All those years, Sandro’s men could have slit Neri’s throat and dropped him in the river and I’d never have known. I had to believe he’d kept Neri alive thinking I might care about him. But I couldn’t count on that forbearance anymore, and to my eternal astonishment, I did care.

  Neri was rash and foolish like any ignorant, frustrated human person who had been forbidden to use the single incredible skill Lady Fort
une had given him. But of my myriad siblings, he was the only one who’d thrown his arms around me on that first stolen visit from the Moon House and begged me not to leave again. He had given me the bronze luck charm to keep me safe. On my most recent visit, three years previous, we had wept together when he told me how Guero, Leni, and Primo, the three good-hearted brothers born between the two of us, had died in a riot when the Shadow Lord burned an entire quarter of the Asylum Ring to open up a new marble works for the coliseum. Perhaps Neri had laid Da’s terrible dilemma in my lap, not because he was stupid, but because he knew his own recklessness could kill me, too.

  “Just want a breath of air that isn’t this house,” he spat as I coiled the wire rope and laid it aside.

  “I don’t blame you for that. But you must learn to think.”

  He glared at me, but said nothing and turned away, rubbing his wrists—red and raw from the ropes.

  * * *

  Over the next days, Neri behaved himself, but rarely spoke. He moved his stool into the alley in front of the house to do useful tasks like whittling us new spoons and a piercing fork, or grinding the herbs I liked to keep for cleaning my teeth and combating chills or fevers. I allowed him to make trips to the market; they were quick and efficient. He agreed to fetch or deliver documents for Renzo and Garibaldi, so I gave him twenty coppers and sent him to Ghita the sewing woman to get himself a better shirt, as his was ragged from wear, and to get me a wrapping cloth to keep the documents clean, as his fingers were forever greasy. He came home with a decent brick-red tunic and a bag made of cloth scraps. He also, very pointedly, laid two coppers on the table.

  Some might have rejoiced in his behavior, but I couldn’t. His resentment had hardened into a silent barricade between us, and I’d no idea how to breach it.

  One afternoon, as the two of us hurried past the Duck’s Bone on the way to leave another application, a pock-faced boy with a slack lip called after us, “Hey, Neri, is that the witch? Looks awful pinchy for a high-class doxy.”

  The boy’s brawny companion snorted with piggish laughter. “Ripe and tasty though. Very tasty. Likely she just needs a roll with a real Beggars Ring man.”

  Neri’s color deepened and his feet slowed. “I’ll speak to them.”

  “Leave it,” I said. “Words are nothing. I can defend myself.”

  After that I piled my hair into a frowsy knot, bought a decent but ugly russet overgown to wear instead of the blue mantle, and scowled a great deal. Life no longer required me to display myself as beautiful, open, available, and ready at all times.

  That afternoon a third client, Lawyer Aventia, legal advisor to an orphaned shipping heiress, gave me work—only two pages, but she promised better as she established trust with her young client. Aventia struck me as a sensible, intelligent person, and bold to pursue a profession where few women had ventured.

  As I rose to leave, I pointed to a distinctive blue stone jar that sat on her writing table. “Dama Ciosa’s teriaca,” I said. “Do you find it helpful? I’ve heard many opinions.”

  Dama Ciosa claimed her very expensive physic, if ingested every day, could protect a person from every poison known, head off terrible diseases such as falling sickness and consumption, and improve the complexion. Tiny amounts of the poisons themselves were supposedly used to formulate the secret mixture, along with enough detestable ingredients to make dipping a cup in a Ring Road mud puddle seem a desirable alternative.

  Aventia looked up, surprised. “I can say, unequivocally, that I have neither fallen ill nor died from poisoning in the years since my aunt persuaded me to take a daily dose of teriaca. Considering the many threats, warnings, promises, and ill wishes thrown at me from every side as I read law and served as a magistrate’s aide, I would offer that as a strong recommendation.”

  The spark in her eye permitted my laughter. She joined in.

  “Fortune’s benefice, segna,” I said, “and may Dama Ciosa’s miraculous physic maintain its efficacy.”

  “Virtue’s grace, Damizella Romy.”

  * * *

  Despite my certainties, I kept an eye out for Sandro’s spies over the next days, peering around corners or darting into alleys or shadows to expose any follower, frequenting little-used byways, and familiarizing myself with the other residents of our district. Never did I see a face from Sandro’s household nor catch even a suspicion of observation. Just as I’d thought. I professed myself pleased.

  A halfmonth of the silent war between Neri and me brought us to Summer Quarter Day and our first required visit to the parole administrator. We climbed all the way to the Palazzo Segnori in the Heights at noonday, so that we could wait four tedious hours in the afternoon heat for the sweating clerk to make two small checkmarks on his roster. Though I recognized a few men and women who’d come to the bustling center of Cantagna’s governance on this day of transfers and settlements—legal, contractual, office-taking, marriage registration, and the like—no one looked twice at me. Well and good. I did not die of shame or regret when walking a district where I had once wielded influence of a kind. Neri simmered, but controlled himself.

  As we left the parole office and descended to the Beggars Ring, a certain satisfaction settled my mind. My brother and I could make a decent life. He wouldn’t maintain this coldness forever; we shared much more than blood. When we got home, I sent him out with fifty coppers to fetch new supplies of wine, ink, and cheese from evening market, while I wrote and copied the pages for Lawyer Aventia.

  Whenever I visited Aventia, one or the other of us commented on the fact that she had still not succumbed to poison or consumption, thus proving the virtue of Dama Ciosa’s teriaca. It was pleasant to laugh with another person, to speak of something that was not dire or secret. I nurtured a hope that we might share tea sometime … have a conversation about the news of the world … about history or what new artists had joined Cantagna’s flourishing community of talent. My mind craved nourishment beyond wills and contracts; my spirit craved an acquaintance who was not my brother.

  When I next looked up, night had fallen and Neri had not returned.

  My dagger felt solid in my thigh sheath. Sandro’s sorely depleted purse sat in its hole and tallied exactly. Neri’s leather jerkin hung on its nail. A brief panicked search led me to the Duck’s Bone, where Neri hunched over a corner table with the slack-lipped boy and the piggish one, all three of them awash in ale. Neri was spewing some foul-mouthed diatribe about his “she-devil trull of a sister” who was afraid of his “slippery fingers.”

  Alarmed beyond my fury, I paused behind the roof post nearest them.

  “But the she-devil won’t know about this job. And Scandi’s so cranked on mysenthe, he’ll never notice a few of his silvers missing come morning. Maybe I’ll buy a cask of my own and share it with you two. If Scandi says anything, I’ll tell him the man what owned my whore sister will gut him. You can’t rat me about this job, nor blab about neither of them ever, cause the devil lord’s got spies. Got assassins. ’Tis a danger even to mention, as he’s the—”

  “Enough.” I kicked the stool out from under the damnable fool. He fell on his backside and I dragged him home by his hair. Slobbering drunk, he wriggled and swore as I tightened the wire rope around his waist.

  “It was just talk. They was ragging me, cause you tie me up. Wasn’t truly gonna do magic. Wasn’t truly gonna say his name. I’m not daft.”

  I gripped his hair, forcing him to look at me. “You think my master wouldn’t gut you? Let me tell you about the time I accompanied him to Andalussi to oversee the questioning of a suspected sorcerer. The local alchemist had drunk a single cup of mead and got into an alehouse fight, bragging that the Unseeable Gods themselves had given him skills that made his brews and tonics more efficacious than any other throughout the Costa Drago. The nullifier started with his cods…”

  The memory was one I had banished for years. Sandro’s face had been as bleak as the windswept barrens outside the Invidian tribute town.
An earthquake had collapsed one of the Gallanos quarries, burying a hundred and twenty workers. The people of Andalussi believed that the arrogant alchemist had waked Dragonis to kill their husbands, fathers, and sons, and after hours of torment, the man had confessed to the act. Half dead already, he was dispatched in chains to join the death ship that would deliver him to the Executioner of the Demon Tainted, who would throw him into the sea.

  Whether Sandro truly believed the alchemist was a sorcerer or that he had actually caused the earth to tremble, I never knew and did not ask. It was the first year after his uncle’s assassination and the whispers had already started that the new young segnoré of the Gallanos family had taken up the mantle of the Shadow Lord as well as that of il Padroné. I, his besotted courtesan, heeded those whispers and buried all thought of magic and fiery monsters very deep indeed.

  Once Neri had emptied his stomach in a bucket, I stretched his time of restriction another month and tethered him every night and every daylight hour I had to be out. His wall of silence had shattered into untamable rage. Not once did he submit voluntarily. The constant arguing, the repeated wrestling, and the need to watch him every moment drove me near out of my mind.

  Two days before his restriction was to end, I caught him sawing at his tether in the middle of the night with my own pearl-handled knife. Anger near shattered my skull. I heated the blade in a candle flame, put it in Neri’s hand, and bared my wrist. The law drowned sorcerers, but Mam had said the only sure way for one sorcerer to slay another was with fire—a conflagration or boiling oil or a heated blade.

  “This is the end, Neri,” I whispered, hoarse from yelling. “If you want me dead, just do it. Once I’m a corpse, you’re free. Go out and work your magic. Steal, get drunk, and curse il Padroné and your hard life. Let the Executioner of the Demon Tainted throw you from a cliff into the sea. But I’ll not watch it happen, and I’ll not drown with you. You are my brother and I dearly want you alive. Yes, we are damned. It isn’t fair and will never be fair. But I’m tired and I want to sleep a whole night and not worry that I’ll wake dressed in chains designed to sink me to the bottom of Night’s Ocean. So do it.”