An Illusion of Thieves Read online

  “Except attack him with a kill move.”

  “He would have said something. Given a sign. He thinks I’m a dullwit.”

  “We’ll see if he shows up tomorrow. Maybe he runs away when anyone finds out…”

  That’s what I wanted us to do—run. But Placidio might be no threat at all, whereas violating Sandro’s parole was certain danger.

  “… or then again, maybe he kills us tonight.”

  “I’m for sleep.” Neri’s grin turned to a grimace as he stretched his shoulders.

  “Wash first,” I said. “You stink like he does.”

  Despite my anxieties, Neri’s eagerness pleased me, as did his discomfort from his lesson.

  As Neri slept, though, worries crept back. Surely our own danger was multiplied if Placidio di Vasil was a sorcerer. Was it even possible a person could use magic so often as Neri thought the swordsman could? He didn’t seem on the verge of madness.

  Neri needed tools and discipline to stay alive, and where better to learn what was necessary than with a man who had to live with the same risks? If Neri behaved himself, his parole would not last forever; the law said an underage parole would expire at age twenty. Once free of it, we could leave Cantagna forever, and instead of mere survival, we could turn our minds to living.

  7

  My wakeful night went for naught. Placidio did not arrive for Neri’s lesson as promised.

  “Maybe we should go find him.” Neri poked his head out the door for the tenth time since the city bells had rung half-morn.

  “Maybe we should find a different swordmaster.” I forced my eyes to focus on the page of cramped writing in front of me.

  The long night had left me bleary-eyed, nervous, and irritable. Not even the wine that sat beside my ink bottle had improved my state.

  How foolish was I to allow a sot of a swordsman to know where we lived or to let Neri show off knife moves an uneducated Beggars Ring boy wouldn’t know.

  For so many years, I’d considered myself a woman of the world, educated, sophisticated, experienced in intrigue. Ambassadors, aristocrats, and the wealthiest merchants had paid court to il Padroné’s mistress, knowing she had his ear. But all that had been illusion. Indeed my opinions had swayed Sandro’s judgments and my questions illuminated his thinking, but I had never had to face the consequences of my choices. Shielded by the Shadow Lord’s power, I had been playing games, not living. Living was dirty, scary, and complicated.

  I’d no idea what to do about Placidio, and misjudgment could cost us our lives.

  “He took your silver, Romy. A listed duelist can’t afford to be known as a cheat.”

  “A youth and a whore born with a price on their heads daren’t challenge anyone.”

  “But he’s one of us. I’m sure of it.”

  “There is no us, Neri. No guild of demon-born sorcerers. No anyone. You can’t expect benevolence or fraternity. Of all people, you should recognize that. Likely Placidio ran after all—thinking you discovered his secret.”

  Neri yanked open the door yet again as the city bells rang midday. “Well, you can hide here forever and mourn your fine life with the devil lord. I’m going to the Duck’s Bone and find the man who owes us either service or silver.”

  I drained the wine flask and threw it after him, which did naught but splatter our new wooden door and stain the oily water in the sleugh. What a stupid custom—the threshold sleugh. Demons had roosted inside this house for very long time.

  It was impossible to work. I stoppered my ink and took out down the alley after Neri. Lady Fortune’s macabre humor likely had a sniffer lurking at the Duck’s Bone waiting for him.

  By the time I arrived, Neri had found Placidio facedown in the horse yard, just as I’d seen him the first time. Fesci the taverner was washing her hands at her rain barrel. “He lost a duel last night. Always makes for a bad morning.”

  “Is he wounded?”

  “’Taint bleeding, if that’s your question.”

  “Then tell him he shows up at our house tomorrow half-morn or we pass the word he’s a cheat as well as a drunkard.”

  Clients would hire duelists who were drunkards, as the referees wouldn’t allow them to fight if they were besotted. But no one would hire a duelist who cheated his employers. The matters involved in duels were too serious to entrust to someone without honor.

  On the next morning Placidio stood in our doorway promptly as the bells rang half-morn. He was neither clean nor humble.

  “Forgot to mention my regular business must come first,” he said, stomping his boots as he entered, ensuring muck fouled the sleugh, not my new floor. “Whether the event itself, the preparation, or the aftermath.”

  “So a month’s lessons are not quite the number I believed.” The pinch of the purse had become an ever-present worry. I’d need to double my client list to support the swordmaster’s fee without emptying our purse.

  Placidio shook his shaggy head. “We’ll do extra hours most days. Certain, you’ll get your full month’s tally.”

  Though he did not carry his armaments bag, the green flask with the frog stopper hung from his belt.

  “I’ll have him back by noontide,” he said, as Neri swallowed the last of the stale bread I’d soaked in wine and oil. “Likely won’t be worth much. But after a rest, he’ll still have work to do, so if he sits idle, you’ll know he’s not serious as to what you want of our arrangement.”

  “You’ll be at the wool house?” I was not entirely reconciled to letting Neri go off with him alone.

  “Aye, there. And maybe up and down the river for today. Maybe a climb up the Boar’s Teeth. Come along if you’re feared I’ll bruise the laddie.”

  Neri’s resentment billowed like steam from a kettle. “Don’t need a wet nurse.”

  “I’ll stay behind,” I said before Neri blurted anything stupid. “I’ve work to do.”

  Placidio motioned Neri into the alley. As he pulled the door closed, the duelist stuck his head back inside. “Won’t kill him.”

  The door slammed shut.

  * * *

  And so it went almost every day. Placidio arrived at half-morn and led Neri away with a promise not to kill him. From time to time, I tagged along to watch—from a discreet distance. He had Neri running up and down the riverbank, picking his footing through rocks, ruins, mud, and sand. He chased him up the steep rocks of the scarp known as the Boar’s Teeth, slapping a whip on the track behind him. One day he threw my brother in the Demon’s Washtub, a bottomless spring in the hills east of the city. He had to jump in after him. Neri had never bothered to learn to swim.

  Never did the duelist reveal a hint of magic. Never did he ask where Neri had learned Santorini’s Thrust or the other moves I’d taught him. From what Neri said, he never spoke of anything but their work. And whenever Neri swore to quit, Placidio invited him to wrestle or fight him with his dagger—telling him to use any move he wanted, taunting him until he could not possibly walk away.

  One day as I watched, Placidio bound his own left hand to his belt. I was proud when Neri refused to attack him until Placidio unbound himself, though I reminded him later how stupid it would be to give advantage to an enemy. Inevitably, Neri received a drubbing with a full measure of taunts. But each time I saw him beaten, he had improved.

  The rest of the time Neri was too tired to give me any trouble, and he learned quickly that Placidio could tell whether or not he had done the running, swimming, or other exercise he assigned for evenings. Evidently, the consequences for slacking were awful enough that he did what he was told. After a while, he didn’t have to be told. Discipline. I approved.

  At the end of our month, I had put aside enough to renew Placidio’s services without emptying the purse. By the end of the second month, my brother ran, jumped, swam, and did acrobatics as if he were a jongleur in a wedding processional. My greatest difficulty was keeping him fed.

  Every few days Fesci at the Duck’s Bone would send a message that Placidi
o’s regular business must take priority for the morning. Neri would groan in pleasure and go back to bed. And then, early in their third month, we received no message and Placidio still didn’t arrive.

  YEAR 987: AUTUMN

  “Maybe a match cropped up unexpectedly,” I said, as Neri glared down the alley. The hour was already near noontide. A chill drizzle warned that winter would soon be on us.

  “I’m going to ask after him,” said Neri. “We were going to start real blade work today.”

  “I’ll come along,” I said. “I told Fesci I’d write a letter for her mam.” Few in the Beggars Ring could read or write, and it was often more worth my while to charge a small amount to fill a poor man’s need, than more for a lawyer’s work. Finer law required finer parchment, better inks, and hours of walking and waiting for clarifications.

  Neri didn’t wait for me to assemble my writing case. By the time I arrived at the Duck’s Bone, he had searched the tavern and the horse yard behind it.

  “He’s not in the yard nor the alley. Fesci says he staggered in just after dawn to warm up, saying he’d fought a duel early, but he didn’t intend to cancel my lesson. Already drunk, though. Fesci says if he’s not wallowing out the back, maybe he’s gone to The Pipes to get the blood off him. Guess it’s bad for dueling business if he wears too much.”

  Placidio wasn’t at The Pipes. The poor citizen’s laundry and bathing pool flowed cleaner than usual today, thanks to the rain. A toothless codger washing his shirt told us where the duelist slept.

  The dim, damp, rat-infested stair beside a butcher’s stall brewed a primal urge to bathe. No sound came from inside the unpainted door at the top of the stair, but my knock swung it inward a little. “Segno Placidio? Are you in?”

  I nudged the door fully open. Though no one would call the low-ceilinged chamber clean or pleasant, not with the stench of rotting meat from the butchery below, it was reasonably tidy. A rolled pallet filled the corner, soiled linen heaped beside it. A carved chest sat under a grimy window, and a battered, plainer chest, long, flat, and bound with leather straps, hugged the end wall. Two shields hung on the wall, one a very old round war shield of leather, wood, and iron, the other a beautifully tooled and lacquered leather buckler of deep red, such as men carried in processionals and ceremonials. A dueling prize perhaps? A spear and a poleax hung beside them, amid various empty hooks and nails. There was no sign of the duelist’s leather bag.

  “You said he never took two challenges in a day, so it wasn’t that another job interfered,” I said, as we descended to the street. “And it certainly sounds as if he was planning to fetch you. Elsewise, he would have told Fesci. So maybe he was drunker than he thought. Collapsed on the way to Lizard’s Alley.”

  “We would have seen him on the Ring Road,” said Neri.

  The matter had become a puzzle I wanted solved. For those who live condemned, an abrupt change in settled routine could not but rouse anxiety.

  “So perhaps he comes to Lizard’s Alley by some back way instead of the Ring Road,” I said. A mediocre duelist could have many reasons to stay out of the common eye. Especially a duelist who was demon tainted.

  Neri knew every alley and byway in the Beggars Ring. It was on our third try, a circuitous route along the riverside, through the stinking vats and colorful, soggy, flapping pennons of a dyer’s yard, and into a deserted alley behind it, that we found him. Placidio’s big body was slumped under the stair that led to the rooms above the dye shop. Had the torch by the shop’s back door not been lit against the gloomy afternoon, we’d never have spotted him. A pool of vomit helped as well.

  “Segno di Vasil, it’s Romy and Neri of Lizard’s Alley.”

  I touched his shoulder. He slumped sideways.

  “So drunk, he can’t breathe.” Disgusted, Neri squatted beside him and shoved the duelist’s chest. “Segno Placidio, wake up. You could have sent us a message. Guess you lied: you said you never picked up a blade while you were drunk.”

  “I don’t think he’s drunk,” I said. The man reeked of sweat, blood, and vomit, not wine. His complexion was gray, his skin dripping with sweat, not just rain.

  “Placidio,” I spoke directly into the man’s face, “are you ill? Or wounded?”

  He shuddered an agonized breath. His trembling hand pawed weakly at his left arm, then dropped back to his lap.

  I tugged the duelist’s sodden cloak aside. His ripped left sleeve exposed only a short, bloody gash on his upper arm. Pressing the clammy flesh beside the wound yielded little new blood, but his hands were cold and the beat of life in his wrist near undetectable. His heart …

  I laid my cheek on his breast. Had I been impatient, I’d have thought that shuddering breath his last. But his heart spasmed weakly.

  “Have you other wounds?” I said, eyes and hands searching for more blood. “Sisters, what’s wrong with you?”

  Shivering and struggling for breath, Placidio grimaced and pressed the heel of his hand onto his forehead. “Woolfffs—bn”—harsh, forced gasps punctuated his syllables—“bag—need blue—and fiiiiiire.…” The last word dissolved into a labored exhalation.

  “Wolfsbane?” whispered Neri, appalled. “He’s a dead man.”

  Poison lore had been a part of my education, just as knife skills were. Wealthy citizens of the Costa Drago used poisons and potions as freely as they used spices and lace. But my dismay echoed Neri’s. Wolfsbane had no proven antidote.

  “Have you nightshade?” Though my tutors had been skeptical, some of the herbals we studied claimed the wicked belladonna—itself a poison—could combat the horrors of wolfsbane.

  “Bag. Blue. Packet.”

  A quick survey showed no sign of the leather armaments bag. “Spirits! Where’s his bag? Neri…”

  Neri’s magic could surely find the thing. We couldn’t let a man die.

  But a quick search had Neri hauling a dark mass out of the deepest shadow of the stair.

  Relief flooded my skin. “A packet, he says, but it’s more likely a vial or flask. Careful with it.”

  I put my face in Placidio’s; his vision would be blurred, but his mind clear. “Open your eyes, segno. Look at me. Is it nightshade you have? Must I heat it? How much should I give you?” Even mixed in wine not more than a droplet or two else the remedy would kill him.

  His only answer was a labored, “Blue. Fire. Please.”

  Neri scrabbled through the armaments bag, scattering sharpening stones, oil flasks, the green drinking flask, and an oilskin pouch containing several paper packets. He examined them all. “There’s only this that’s blue.”

  I held the packet of bluish dust in front of the duelist’s nose. “This powder? In wine? Then…?”

  “On wound. Then flame. Hur—” Placidio choked, halting both words and breath. He slumped further sidewise in the wavering light.

  I shook him, pounded his chest. Yelled at him. When I detected a hiccup that might have been a breath, I sprinkled a little powder on the innocent-looking slash, and then sat back helpless as the blood soaked it up. That couldn’t possibly be enough to do anything.

  “He said flame.” Neri had fetched the torch from the dye-shop door. “Maybe that’s why he stopped here.”

  “But what do we do with it?” I said.

  “Srrrr”—it sounded like another exhalation—“it.”

  “Sear it? You can’t mean that.” The memory of the lopsman cauterizing my father’s bleeding stump raised bile in my throat.

  Divine graces … I couldn’t use the torch. It would mutilate, if not kill him. So I emptied the rest of the powder on the wound, twisted the thin paper into a palm-length taper, and stuck it in the torch flame.

  It smoked. Charred. Curse it, take fire! A gleeful flame singed my knuckle then winked out.

  I was likely wrong about what he intended, but knew nothing else to do. He had spewed prodigiously, but if the poison had come directly through the wound, emptying his belly wasn’t likely to eliminate it.


  Hand shaking, I tried again. This time the twisted paper caught fire. Cupping my fingers about the weakling flame, I moved it close to the wound. Orange light streaked Placidio’s dying eyes. A slow racking breath, then he exhaled, “Now.”

  I gripped the duelist’s hand so he couldn’t flail. Neri sat on Placidio’s legs, clamping his knees tight, and grabbed his other arm.

  The wound gaped at me like a red mouth. Cleanse this foulness, I said with all my will, keep him alive. I touched the tiny yellow flame to the wound.

  “Aaagh!” Placidio bit off a scream. Blood and blue powder boiled in the gash.

  “More,” he gasped, when my hand yanked the blazing twist away.

  Again I touched the blue flame to the smoking center of the wound.

  My fingers stung with the heat, yet not so much as I expected, for the blaze did not consume the paper. It should have been ash in moments. His skin should be blistered, scorched, cracked, but was not. Magic …

  “Spirits, Romy, do you feel that?” A thunder in my head almost drowned out Neri’s murmur.

  The flame flared brilliant blue—or was it Placidio’s eyes that blazed sapphire, tinting the twisted paper? Scorching heat raced up my arm, as if the burning taper stretched itself and wrapped around my limb, infusing vein and sinew with a power that cleared rain and fear and fog from my head.

  A deep breath calmed my racing heart. Surely the heat in my veins flowed from both hands—from the blue flame and from Placidio himself. Incomprehensibly, as the moments passed, my fingers that gripped his wrist told me when his heart picked up a normal pace, when the writhing agony in his gut eased, when the torturous labor of his lungs smoothed.

  The blue flame faded to yellow.

  I dropped the flaring taper as it disintegrated into ash.

  “He did it.” Neri, his face pale and suffused with awe that must surely reflect my own, scrambled off Placidio’s legs.

  “Scribe Romy … you should go. Get out of the rain.” The whisper drew my gaze back to the duelist’s unshaven visage, which was screwed into a grimy knotwork of pain, exhaustion, and wary questioning.