Maledicte (15 page)

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Maledicte asked. “It makes so much sense to let the unarmed man go first into danger. Are you sure you’re as clever as you think?” The rasp of his voice was leavened by a breathy amusement. They headed into the alley, their boots sliding on fog-slick cobbles and unseen effluvia.

“You’re going to lose that tongue of yours yet,” Gilly warned. The light ahead grew marginally brighter, coated the dark walls with blushed contours.

Maledicte opened his mouth, and Gilly said, “I think you want us to be attacked. Just hush now, I can’t hear if we’re being followed if you keep talking.”

“Someone
is
following you,” Maledicte said, in a carrying mutter. “Me. How you expect to hear anything but my boots stumbling around in this muck…”

Gilly turned in laughing exasperation, ready to put Maledicte before him, just to shut his mouth, and the startled inhalation of breath was all the warning he could manage to give.

I
T WAS ALL
M
ALEDICTE HAD
been waiting for. He stepped aside, pivoted, drew the sword. There was barely room for its length in the narrow alley; the tip scraped, unseen, against the opposite wall, and Kritos’s cane impacted on the sheltering steel of the blade rather than on Maledicte’s vulnerable nape.

“Not very good with that thing,” Maledicte said. “You couldn’t hit old man Last; what makes you think you can touch me?”

The cane slid along the flat of the blade. Beyond words, Kritos continued to grind his cane against the unseen blade. In the shadows, the blade was only an extension of darkness; frustration knotted Kritos’s jaw, bared his teeth as he fought what must have seemed like invisible forces bent on his failure.

Maledicte’s wrist trembled with effort, but he succeeded in turning his hand, and with it, the angle of the blade. The wooden cane gave against the sword edge, splitting, and Kritos stumbled forward, roaring.

Maledicte skipped back, nearly falling over Gilly as he attempted to get between the combatants. “Don’t be a fool,” Maledicte spared the breath to say.

Concentrating on the weight at the end of his wrist, Maledicte thrust at Kritos, backing him away, cursing because he, too, was hampered by this dim light. Kritos avoided a lunge with a desperate effort. Maledicte, overextended, felt the rush of warm air on his throat, saw Kritos stretching one hand out for his neck. It ghosted toward him, pale and indistinct, then clear, the fingers clenching as if Maledicte’s neck were already within their grip.

“Mal, watch out,” Gilly cried.

“Hush, hush,” Maledicte said, recovering his balance, raising the sword and batting Kritos’s outreaching arm into the wall. Quickly, Maledicte threw his weight onto the blade, the wall, and the arm pinned between.

A solid slap of flash against flesh exploded by his head. Gilly had reached over Maledicte’s shoulder and caught Kritos’s other fist in his own.

“I can do this without your help,” Maledicte gritted out, though a small part of him sang at the comfort of Gilly’s help, reminding him of days long gone. Thinking of them, Maledicte stepped forward and brought his knee up with brutal force into the man’s belly; when Kritos curled forward, Maledicte slammed his left fist into his throat.

Gagging, Kritos folded to his hands and knees, blood splashing where the blade had ripped at his escaping arm. He scrabbled back and Maledicte thrust the blade at the pale target of his good eye. Kritos cried out, hurling himself backward, overbalancing, landing on his back, still struggling for air. Maledicte grinned, raised the sword, heard Ani moaning Her pleasure inside him, and drove it downward. Beside him, Gilly flinched.

But Maledicte only used the sword to pin the man to the cobbles and the earth below, through one ornate and now-ruined sleeve. “I suppose I should let you up, fight you like a gentleman. But then, the first gentleman I ever met didn’t fight fair either.”

“Mal,” Gilly said, reaching outward.

Maledicte evaded his grip, dropping to put both his knees into Kritos’s belly. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a small purse.

Kritos’s struggle increased. He shoved at Maledicte with his free arm, ripping at Maledicte’s hair, reddening his jawline. “You—” Kritos said, on a stifled breath.

“None of that,” Maledicte said, dodging another blow, clamping his hand over Kritos’s mouth lest anything secret slip out. But he had wanted Kritos to know him, and that the man did, at the last, when it was too late, made both him and Ani purr with delight. The loose hand tore at his face again, scrabbling. “Gilly, get that arm, would you?”

The feeble blows stopped. Maledicte upended the purse of wooden coins over Kritos’s heaving chest. Faint glimmers of silvering still lingered on them. “I saved them for you,” Maledicte said.

“No—” Kritos said, true fear reaching his face, past the outrage, the bluster, and the desperation. He tried to surge upward, and Maledicte ground his weight downward, stabilizing himself by gripping the sword’s hilt.

Done with words, Maledicte yanked at the sword hilt, not bothering to pull the tip of the blade from its earthen sheath, but rather slanting the entire blade sideways like the closing blade of a scissors. Kritos yelled but the blade silenced him in a rush of wheezy air and blood. Maledicte put his thinly gloved hand down on the blade edge and pushed, in a step that should have seen him lose fingers, but only made the sword edge sink deeper until it ground against bone.

Kritos convulsed; his hands, freed by Gilly’s repulsed recoil, clutched at Maledicte’s forearms. Maledicte rode the spasms until they ceased, until Kritos’s grip fell slack. Blood ran down the sword, pooling in the feathered hilt. Maledicte pulled his gloves off, ran his finger down the same path, chasing the blood. The dim alleyway robbed some of his satisfaction; in the darkness, the blood looked black rather than crimson, but the tang of it in the air…He stood, feeling as unsteady on his feet as a newborn creature.

Gilly bent and picked his gloves up when Maledicte turned away from the corpse. “Careless,” he said. His voice cracked.

Maledicte recovered his sword and wiped it off with the muddy remains of Kritos’s cloak, humming tunelessly. He broke off to laugh, giddy with satisfaction. “That will teach him to interfere in my life. Or would, if he weren’t past any lessoning now.”

Gilly’s face whitened until he seemed a ghost in the dark alley; he bent over the cobbles, retching. Maledicte rose hastily, took him down the alley away from the body. “What is it, Gilly? What’s the matter?”

“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Gilly said, swallowing audibly.

“You haven’t yet. Don’t get greedy. Kritos was all mine, and I could have done it without you,” Maledicte said.

“You’d have had your brains dashed out on the alley wall without me,” Gilly said.

“No,” Maledicte said, “But your aid was timely all the same.” He reached up to touch Gilly’s face. Gilly flinched, and Maledicte let his hand drop, scowling. “Wallow in your conscience if you will. But remember, I told you when we set out that I meant to see him dead tonight. I am a man of my word and will after all—”

G
ILLY CLOSED HIS EYES
and ears to Maledicte’s contented ramblings; he felt as if he had strayed into one of his nightmares. Behind his closed eyes, the alley felt overfull of presences and scents: the acid smell of his own sickness, the smell of turned earth and blood that lingered, and something else, something out of place in this dark world of cobbles and stone—the scent of musty feathers. Opening his eyes, he saw Maledicte had returned to the body, admiring his work, saw the doubled shadow clinging to him in the low, fevered light, rough-edged like wings.

Gilly rubbed his face, the bridge of his nose between his eyes, and pulled his hand away, repelled. His fingers were damp and sticky, splashed with Kritos’s blood. Ani’s compact sealed in blood. He leaned against the wall and retched in dry miserable heaves.

Maledicte came back and took Gilly’s sleeve. Gilly shuddered, imagining something new within Maledicte, something hungry. But Maledicte’s voice, raspy and cool, was his own. “There’s a rain barrel up ahead. Come on.”

The shock of the cold water cleared Gilly’s senses, and he washed his hands with steady fingers. Maledicte splashed happily about in it, rinsing his hands, the blade.

Gilly found a smile himself, a brittle thing, but Maledicte, delighted, was a charming companion, and Kritos—Gilly managed to lose the iron weight that had settled in his chest, at least until the hack they found disgorged them into Dove Street Square.

Gilly felt the eyes on him as soon as he stepped out of the carriage. Looking around, he saw no one at first, then made out the dusty gray coat of the homeless intercessor, huddled up against the central fountain. The man nodded his head in greeting, but when Maledicte stepped out onto the cobbles, smiling, the intercessor’s eyes widened and he sketched a symbol in the air.

With sudden dismay, Gilly recognized it, the inverted blessing of Baxit, the
avert
against the god-possessed. As Maledicte passed the fountain, the intercessor disappeared into the deeper shadows with an alacrity that spoke of fear.

· 13 ·

G
ILLY WOKE WITH
V
ORNATTI’S BELL
ringing in his ears, and the nagging sense that there had been earlier bells still, not only Vornatti’s summoning bell, but deep, resonating tones. Perhaps it was only guilt; Kritos’s body could not have been found soon enough for the palace bells to bemoan the loss of one of their own. The sunlight, though, streamed dark gold across the floor, the color of midmorning. Swearing, Gilly staggered to his feet, cursing himself for staying up past the time of their return, brooding over the murder, the intercessor’s fear, and dulling those thoughts with drinking. A glance at the clock in the hall warned him it was nearer noon than morning, and again he was late with Vornatti’s shot.

Vornatti hunched, still abed, sleep-bleared and roaring at Livia. She held the loaded syringe in trembling hands.

“Give it here,” Gilly said, taking it from her. She passed it over with a gasp of relief, and Gilly bent to find an unbruised vein in Vornatti’s arm. His guilt, malleable, shifted from Kritos to a miserable wondering of how dreadful it must be for Vornatti to wake to pain while Gilly slept, babying an aching head.

Vornatti’s teeth gritted as the Elysia slid into his vein, and then, slowly, his body started to relax.

“Late again, Gilly—” Vornatti growled, seizing Gilly’s collar as if to shake him.

Livia, busying herself near the door, returned with a cup of tea, hot and steaming. “Here, sir.”

Vornatti wrapped his knotted hands around the teacup, distracted by Livia’s skirts, inches shorter than propriety suggested, and damped besides, Gilly thought. Livia shot a quick conspiratorial smile at him as he backed away.

“Did you hear the news, sir? Such goings-on as the milkman brought us this morning. Kritos found stripped and gutted in the alleys near the wharves.”

Vornatti set his tea down, untouched. “Last night?”

“Yes, sir.”

In the distant recesses of the house, the butler could be heard opening the door, and a clear, cool voice rising upward. “Livia,” Vornatti said. “Go downstairs and bring the Lady Mirabile to my chamber.”

“Here, sir?” she repeated.

“Give me time to get him dressed,” Gilly added.

He bent over Vornatti, undid the sash of the man’s robe. “Do you want the—”

Vornatti slapped him. “I should give your job to Livia. Do you forget who pays you?”

“No,” Gilly said, kneeling beside the bed, head throbbing.

Vornatti put his hand into Gilly’s hair, turned his face upward to meet his. “Worse for drink, Gilly? My drink? While I held my dinner party, my faithful servant and my ward were where? Where was Maledicte?”

“Lady Mirabile is impatient,” Gilly said, slipping Vornatti’s robe off. “You wouldn’t want her to find you still in bedclothes.”

“Did he do it, Gilly?” Vornatti said, voice low, maddened. “Did he kill Kritos?”

Gilly found a loose vest and coat that could cover Vornatti’s nightshirt and settled him in his wheeled chair, hoping that the Elysia would erase Vornatti’s temper, his inquisitiveness. His hands trembled as he continued dressing Vornatti, imagining what Vornatti might do to punish them.

Livia scratched once on the door and ushered Mirabile in; Vornatti caught Gilly’s hand and muttered, “I’ll have words for you, later.”

Gilly bowed his head to Mirabile, avoiding the eager, wild light in her eyes, and fled.

Her voice carried into the hallway. “—dead and by such vile means as one can scarcely comprehend—”

Gilly leaned against the wall, felt the silk wallpaper smooth and slick under his hot cheek, remembered the blood on his hands, and Kritos’s death throes. But he also remembered Kritos coming after them, in the dark and from behind.

Livia put a hand on his arm, startling him with her presence. “He’s in a right mood today, isn’t he? And his party went so well last night, I’d’ve thought he’d be sleeping all the day.”

Gilly shrugged, still irritated at the gossip she had chosen to bring. “He’s contrary. Have you seen Maledicte?”

Livia made a face at the abruptness of his tone, but answered readily enough. “He’s in the parlor with Lord Echo. Is it true Maledicte gamed with Kritos last night?”

“Go back to your duties,” Gilly said. He wouldn’t be responsible for any more information slipping from Livia’s tongue to Mirabile’s ear. Livia sighed, but disappeared obediently.

Gilly hurried toward the parlor. Echo was not a foolish man, and Maledicte’s temperament led too often to incautious words for him to feel sanguine about the two of them closeted away together. A sudden wash of guilt stopped him as he reached for the door, and he slumped against the wall instead, weakened by a pounding heart, and a face that he knew would betray him instantly.

Through the door, he heard Echo speaking. “…realized you were acquainted enough with Kritos to play cards with him.”

“How acquainted must one be to take another’s coin?” Maledicte said, in full court archness.

“True enough,” Echo said, “Still, to gamble with Kritos showed a distinct lack of caution. The man was a well-known scoundrel.”

“You came to lecture me? Or did you have a higher purpose?” Maledicte said.

After a silent second where Gilly imagined Echo biting back his temper, he heard him say, “Did you see anyone who might have wished Kritos ill?”

“Have you been to the Fiery Hell?” Maledicte asked. “Even
I
found it a veritable snake pit.”

“You have nothing more useful to say?”

“I so rarely do,” Maledicte agreed, and Echo’s quick-moving footsteps were the only warning Gilly had to back away from being an obvious eavesdropper. Still, the quickness of it insured that the guilt he felt written on his skin was overlaid with startlement. Echo’s own temper did the rest for him; he left without further word.

Gilly tapped at the door and went in. Maledicte looked up from his seat, his boots propped on the hearthstone, and smiled. He set something small down on the chair arm beside him.

“Did you hear the bells this morning?” Maledicte asked. “A lovely way to wake.”

“I missed them,” Gilly said. “Mal—”

“Vornatti?” Maledicte asked.

“He knows now, whether he heard the bells or not. Livia brought the news, and Mirabile has brought the gossip. He’s furious.” Gilly paced, unable to settle, and picked up the miniature from beside Maledicte, holding it up toward the lamplight. “He wants to see you immediately.”

“And interrupt Mirabile’s visit?” Maledicte said, rising and claiming the portrait, tucking it away in his vest. “Or worse, give her the pleasure of seeing me dressed down before her? No, Gilly. Vornatti can wait.”

“They found Kritos in the Relicts,” Gilly said. He lowered himself into Maledicte’s vacated seat.

“Not surprising,” Maledicte said. He picked up the blade and began stalking shadows with impatient stabs and thrusts. “You don’t think Kritos walked the streets unnoticed, do you? The scavengers would have started to work with their little knives, making sure they found all he had to hide. After the scavengers had at him, they would have discarded him as far from their territory as they could, unwilling to find Echo on their doorsteps. Probably the Relicts. The rats would have finished the job then, taking his laces and boots and hair, the pieces the scavengers left. If he’d near rotted before he was found, perhaps one of your rough sailor friends would have seen him chopped for chum—”

“Shut up,” Gilly said, the nausea swirling in his belly, churning, mingling with his dread of Vornatti’s punishment.

Maledicte paused, blade inscribing an uplift in the air, a stroke like a wingbeat. “That is where I was born, Gilly.”

They were sitting in near silence when footsteps paused in the hall outside. Maledicte rose to drop the latch on the door, but it opened before he could do so. Mirabile came in, smiling.

“Maledicte—” she said, holding her hands out. Gilly, making himself unobtrusive, watched Maledicte’s muscles shift, as if he couldn’t decide between flight or fight.

“Lady,” he said, his voice neutral.

“So formal?” she asked, her tone arch. “When we are to be family soon?”

Maledicte stiffened like an affronted cat.

Mirabile trilled laughter, and held out her wrist again, showing the bright band of gemstones circling it. Emeralds, Gilly thought numbly. The old bastard’s given her emeralds to match her eyes.

“From your so-generous guardian,” Mirabile said. She leaned closer to let Maledicte admire the bracelet. “I expect the rest of the set when I return from the country. The necklace, the earrings, the ring…”

“You’re deluded,” Maledicte said, “a woman who cannot discern the difference between a bridal gift and a whore’s trinket.”

Mirabile’s green eyes darkened, but before she could speak, Maledicte continued, his voice as delicately acid as it had been the night he faced DeGuerre. “Or are you telling me he offered for your hand? That Vornatti propelled himself from his chair and to his knees before you? I think not.”

Her smile held with effort. “You had best watch yourself, Maledicte. He is most displeased with you, and I am as elegant and as lovely as you.”

“But so much older,” Maledicte murmured, and Gilly winced.

“I see you’re in no civil mood,” she said. “Perhaps your guardian’s lecture will teach you to mind your manners.” She dropped a tiny curtsy toward Maledicte and turned, flirting her skirts as she left.

Looking after her, Gilly missed Maledicte’s first words, but the sullen rage in them reclaimed his attention. “Did you buy that bracelet for Vornatti and not tell me?”

“No,” Gilly said, hastily. “No, Mal.” At the black anger in Maledicte’s eyes, Gilly stifled his next words—that likely Livia had done it, and pocketed herself a few coppers as well.

“Think you that he favors her enough for marriage?” Despite the rage cording his throat, tightening the silken lines of his cravat, Maledicte’s voice was quiet.

“You said it yourself—it’s a whore’s gift, a trinket he can use to keep her dancing to his tune. And a small price to pay for raising your doubts, I’d lay wager. He’s angry, Maledicte. Not an idiot.”

“If he wanted to wed Mirabile, he’d have to be, wouldn’t he?” Maledicte said, the flush leaving his cheeks, the tension slackening from his hands. “A woman who’s murdered one husband already and who plots to cuckold her second before the marriage lines are even written.”

“Still,” Gilly said, “Best go to him now, and take your punishment. Soothe him if you can.”

“Soothe him?” Maledicte said. “He gave her jewelry.”

“He’s so angry, Mal, please. Last time, I ended in the stables, while you only had to serve him as I do. He’s angrier this time, and I always pay for it….” He trailed off, unsure where the bitterness in his voice had come from.

Maledicte’s eyes widened and then he said, “I’ll go to him at once.”

V
ORNATTI’S CHAMBER SEEMED SUBDUED, AS
if the death bells had shocked it to stillness. Maledicte looked at the room with new eyes, eyes that were looking into the uncertain future. Vornatti was a scarecrow of a man, hunched in a wing chair, drawn up before an unlit fire, dozing, but Maledicte knew better than to presume helplessness. Maledicte looked at the bed, plush heaps of featherdown and velvet and linen, followed the line of the posts up to the ceiling and its obscene fresco of fornicating cupids.

He found himself amused at Vornatti’s unflagging concupiscence, at the determination that filled the man’s hours. The smile was fragile, though. Though Maledicte flouted Vornatti’s strictures, gave in to his own whims, still he dreaded displeasing Vornatti too greatly, wary of the man’s vindictiveness and temper.

Vornatti woke, coughed, then said, “Boy, come here.”

Maledicte turned. Surely he had done this already, the slender youth, the sword, an old man’s lures. He dropped the sword on the cluttered bed chest, beside the potions and formulas, the shaving soap and scent. A bottle tipped with a crystalline ring, but kept its stopper. Maledicte crouched beside Vornatti. “What do you want, Vornatti?”

The baron’s dark eyes fixed on Maledicte’s upturned face. “You killed Kritos.”

“I did,” Maledicte said. A denial would only feed Vornatti’s anger.
Soothe him,
Gilly had pled.

To that end, Maledicte stood, slipping off his coat, his boots, the stiff, brocaded vest, undressing piece by piece.

The baron’s eyes softened a little, anger tempered by a more familiar appreciation.

Maledicte settled gently in Vornatti’s lap, resting his head against his shoulder, as falsely obedient as a young wife, allowing Vornatti’s hand to slip along his thigh. “Echo seems unsuspecting.”

“Kritos was a fool and a bad gambler; such men come to bad ends routinely,” Vornatti said, absently. His knotted fingers slid upward, traced circles over Maledicte’s hipbones.

“See there, no harm done. Don’t begrudge me Kritos’s death. In turn, I’ll—”

Vornatti put a gnarled hand to Maledicte’s lips. “A bargain, my boy.”

“We struck one already. In the library of your country home.”

“I am not doddering, Maledicte. I remember our agreement.” Vornatti laid his hand on Maledicte’s head, holding it to his shoulder. “I was wrong.”

Maledicte waited, heart pounding, wondering whether Vornatti intended to be rid of him. Despite Gilly’s words, Vornatti didn’t seem angry, and that raised nervous hackles on Maledicte’s neck. The old man plotted.

“You can only lose in this quest of yours. You will always be the outsider, always an object of suspicion, and they will turn on you without hesitation. Better I had let you stab Last in the back than teach you to think of honor and nobility. Antyre is not Itarus to admire the cunning of those trained like assassin princes.”

Maledicte nipped the fingers so near his mouth, and Vornatti pulled his hand away. “Is that what you have taught me? And here I called your lessons vice.”

Vornatti chuckled. “Ah lad, your wicked, disrespectful tongue.” The humor faded from his face, draining to melancholy. “I am an old man, Maledicte, and I find myself prey to an old man’s most insidious and foolish disease. I would keep you, your wicked mouth, your liquid eyes, your tempers and tempests, only for myself. Keep you mine alone.”